Reply to Turns out the Falls Church school board guy from the Koch thinktank, Ilya Shapiro, really is toxic

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Bizarrely xenophobic vibe to many comments in this thread . . . .[/quote]

Agree.  Seriously.

Ilya was born in Russia as a Jew.

Do most of you have any clue what that was like back then?

[b]Along with the rest of his family, they were required to carry their “internal passport” whenever they set foot outside their apartment.  The police/military could, and often did, demand:  “your papers please!” (yeah, Nazi-style).[/b]

Only Ilya’s internal passport didn’t list him as “Russian;” only as a “Jew.”

Here:  I’m posting this link in light of the obvious ignorance of many of you when it comes to anti-Semitism:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union[/quote]

This was a requirement for all in the Soviet Union, and a way for suppressing the rural areas. It was almost impossible for anyone from the rural areas to obtain internal passport or travel papers, and as a result they were effectively prevented from moving outside of the rural poverty.  . . [/quote]

Anti-Semitism in Russia was (and still is) atrocious and commonplace.

When I first met my old friend Vlad, he informed me he was half-Russian.  The other half, he explained, was “Jew.”  He was not kidding.

His family was banished from Moscow to Novosibirsk.  His father was expelled from the university and assigned a mortuary job washing bodies.  Vlad’s father was a refusnik and he made Aaliyah the moment he could in late 1989.

You people trying to minimize Russian antiSemitism are deplorable and awful! [/quote]

We just don’t see how it’s relevant to the discussion. A Russian Jewish male can be a racist against someone he perceived as inferior, like a black woman. Oppression in one context does not make you an ally for the oppressed in another. As PPs have stated, it may even make you more likely to be an oppressor and to revel in the power it gives you. [/quote]

Not every comment raised this, but there were several comments stating something to the effect of "immigrants from former communist countries are the worst" or insulting Shapiro because, heaven forbid, he really wanted to immigrate to America.  This sort of xenophobia is just really bizarre given the supposedly pro-inclusive viewpoint of those attacking Shapiro.[/quote]

One reason I brought it up (being as I am the one who first did) was precisely to twist you into this Gordian knot: where you have to be outraged about racism. At least, the "wrong" kind of racism. It's racism when it's about me, but not about thee, apparently.

I had a friend Vladimir in high school. (I went to a magnet school in the 80s with lots of immigrants from Russia and Ukraine, btw. Most Jewish.) When Vlad was ten and his family left the Soviet Union, his school held an assembly on his last day denouncing him and his family for being traitors. He had to walk out of the auditorium with his classmates screaming at him.

Despite all that, Vlad isn't actually a Federalist shill. Not everyone is.

Nonetheless, some people are. Like Ilya. I started to notice the trend when I looked at all the Trump appointees. And several of my former co-workers... But that is a tale for another time. [/quote]

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