Taking a tip from the "indignados [2]" who occupied downtown Madrid for several weeks over the summer, hundreds of protesters on Sept. 17 established an encampment in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park—now renamed "Liberty Square"—just three blocks north of Wall Street, where they have remained since, despite rain and an intimidating round-the clock police presence. Wall Street itself, of course, is inaccessible behind police barricades. When protesters marched down to Wall on the morning of Monday the 19th to greet the arriving traders and office workers, police quickly moved in, arresting six and dispersing the rest. (NYT [3], Sept. 19)
The Occupy Wall Street [4] action is organized by a decentralized network calling itself the General Assembly, refreshingly independent of the usual sectarian factions that traditionally dominate left-wing protests in New York City [5]. However, a report on New York's Indypendent [6] informs us that the original call was put out by Adbusters [7] magazine. We truly hate to say it, but Adbusters has got problems of its own. As the Jewish lefty Zeek magazine noted in its attack on "Hipster Anti-Semitism [8]" a few years back:
Adbusters, a magazine popular amongst anti-capitalists, ran a list of prominent neo-conservatives with asterisks next to the names of the Jews. Why, oh why, the article asked, was it wrong to point out that the architects of the Bush administration's Middle East policies were disproportionately Jewish? Of course, one might ask: Was there an accompanying list of anti-war leaders with asterisks next to the disproportionately high number of Jewish names? Nope.
Ugly stuff. If you want to read it yourself, the original Adbusters screed is preserved as a PDF [9] on PinteleYid, another lefty Jewish website.
We understand that the econo-protesters in Madrid and Greece have refused to openly express solidarity with the similar protests in Tel Aviv [10], because the Israeli protesters have not explicitly repudiated the occupation of the Palestinians. OK, we support this decision. But will any of the Wall Street protesters now express any dissent from the anti-Semitic ugliness displayed by the entity that called their protest?
Just asking.
See our last posts on the global econo-protests [11] and the politics of anti-Semitism [12].
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