Well, technically, only Blumenthal is an ugly American bigot. Dana’s Israeli. But the video is pretty silly.
No, it is too easy to dismiss it as just silly. It is an interesting insight into (someone about something). Drunken kids? Drunken American Jews? Still, it would be wrong to say the film is without value.
Question: Who is Max Blumenthal bigoted against?
What possible value can some cherry picked drunken hate spewing have? By this measure, Borat is insightful social commentary.
Let this be your introduction to the mind of the “self-hating Jew”.
Well I guess that would depend on just how cherry picked the attitudes were, how much he influenced / slanted the attitudes and also what is being done about it.
Borat IS insightful social commentary. Max Blumenthal’s video is not.
The video has shown me what seems to be the true beliefs of a number of drunken American kids. They represent at least a minority of thought. That is interesting.
Did you hear anything you hadn’t heard before? Because I’ve heard that kind of rambling before too.
You know what else “represent[s] at least a minority of thought”?
In no particular order, consider the following:
People who think David Duke hates miscegenetic porn and has a big penis (See “Conduct Unbecoming a Racist”, Spy, Sept. 1991, Volume 5 Number 10)
People who believe that humans who eat the Purina Dog Chow that is “formulated to produce more smaller, firmer stools” will also see the same benefit
People who thought that Jeffrey Rogers’ (a son of a former U.S. Secretary of State) and Kristine Olson’s marriage in 1971 would end in divorce or separation within 20 years.
People who believe that there were once large, open bodies of water on the Moon’s surface because so many areas possess names such as the "Sea of Tranquility"
People who think Paul in Qatar is actually the still-living first Christian philosopher (perhaps the Wandering Jew himself) and is also a secret chupacabra bent on exploiting a hate-mongering video featuring a despicably cherry-picked “sample” of non-Israelis in Israel spewing hateful racist epithets in order to smear Israelis and Jews in general.
I have a feeling that I could probably extend that list with equally important and valuable sociological information as “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem”. Just ask if you’d like more…
No, please do go on. Do not let me stop you.
Would you say these people are telling us what they really think, without PC filters? I do. What percentage of Americans feel that way is a mystery, but an interesting one.
It’s incredibly common for pro-Israeli American Jews to be absolutely rabid in their love of Israel. I have encountered it quite a lot in my personal life.
One need look no further than the internet for such “information”. Personally, I like that Time Cube guy. What percentage of Americans believe in whatever Time Cube Guy believes is a mystery, but as you say an interesting one.
That would be the difference. I have never encountered such a thing.
My ex-wife who was Israeli posited that it was overcompensating for the fact that they didn’t live in Israel. She wished that they’d either move to Israel or STFU.
To explicate my last post, what I tried to get across is that if you find the fact that a group of anti-scientifically selected people are, in fact, a group of anti-scientifically selected people to be “interesting”, it’s hard to imagine something that you would not be equally interested in. Thus, the list.
Do you imagine that it would also be interesting to anti-scientifically select a group of Arabs on the streets of a large city in Qatar who would express hateful racist epithets towards President Obama? If not, why not?
We only got one large city, eighty percent of the population and they were all in my lane during the evening rush hour.
Yes, a Qatari expressing a racial slur of any sort would interest me to no end. I have not seen a lick of that here.
Well there’s a few things to be found interesting, firstly that they would be willing to be filmed expressing such sentiments. Secondly that they were (apparently) not that difficult to find. Thirdly that they were American but still expressing such sentiments.
Would I base any serious arguement on the videos? Aboslutely not. However, do I think that it merits greater investigation to see how this affects policy making,? Abolsutely.
Just because the methods aren’t scientific, and the maker had his own agenda it doesn’t mean that what we are seeing should be dismissed out of hand.
If you want to buy me a camera and fund my travels I’ll go to cities around the world and interview people about what they think. You give me what agenda you want to suit and I guarantee you I can cut a video that suits any agenda you want to highlight with 15 different people saying precisely the same thing.
In my experience real Israelis give you a sophisticated analysis of politics and when they don’t they are being evasive. It’s rare that they get up and try to highlight an ignorant opinion. But then I am dealing with Israeli expats in New York most of the time, and they are usually here for personal reasons, they want to become rich and famous in New York, or they want to escape Israel for some reason.
bengangmo Max Blumenthal does this all the time. He highlights a particular agenda that he has. He is actively seeking to confirm his bias. Yes, it tells us SOMETHING that he is able to find 15-25 people to confirm his bias, but what does it tell us? The spot we are not seeing is pregnant with information that we are missing. So what does it mean? I don’t really know, do you?
Nope, and neither do I claim to.
One thing though - the expats that I have run across tend to be smarter, better educated and more cosomopolitan than a particular population at large. So this could explain at least part of your experience.
I have had little (actually no) interaction with Israelis, except for on this message board.
The interaction that I have had on this message board does not leave me particularly surprised with what Max found. There is a tendancy towards nationalism and agression that I don’t find particularly pleasant.
Although the protagonists I am referring to do know their history very well, are erudite and have well thought through positions.
Yes I suspect you could well take your camera and validate whatever agenda you had. I also know that speaking of areas I know well, such an obvious and offensive agenda would not find much support in public, you would really need to spend some effort to seek it out. Which is the question that we come back to I guess.
Putting it into perspective - I would not expect it hard to find racist attitudes at a klan meeting, but to find people willing to spout them on the street I would think would be harder - which brings you back to the idea of just how much effort was made to seek them out.