| Well, it's tax day, a non-event made more interesting each year by protesters or activists. This year, the big push is a Boston Tea Party-esque series of protests called, despite the sexual connotations, tea bagging. I won't get into how all of this got started; The Progress Report has a good summary. Their point is to protest Obama's future tax increases on the highest income earners and to generally bemoan the impending socialist state. For the most part, the protests are attracting the kinds of far-right wackos we haven't heard much from since the Clinton years. But the imagery and the rhetoric being used is pretty disgusting. For anyone with any knowledge of antisemitism, much is familiar here, starting with focus on bloodsucking elites. Dana Houle at DailyKos has an interesting post that connects the dots between Timothy McVeigh, far-right antisemitism, and Glenn Beck of Fox News. Glenn Beck has emerged as the lead provocateur and promoter of the tea bagging protests. He is also likes to compare the Obama administration with... you guessed it! The Nazis! This video is particularly creepy. So is this one. The former video include Nazis on the march, then a giant image of Ben Bernake as Big Brother. The latter, about bloodsucking, includes an image of Barney Frank (D-MA) with fangs. I am not the type to see antisemitism around every corner. But I'd say a few lines have been crossed here; at least enough to warrant some kind of statement. Although it has been in fashion among those who track antisemitism to point to the left, the folks who do the most damage - particularly in this country - are on the right. So, why has this story gotten no attention from either the ADL or the Jewish press? JTA has eight articles about antisemitism in April alone, yet nothing about tea-bagging, or Glenn Beck. It's been two years since the ADL even mentioned Glenn Beck, when he was criticized for another Nazi analogy. What is it exactly that makes Durban II so important and tea-bagging so unimportant? Update: Will this photo from the teabagging protests catch anyone's attention? |
