The Good Jewish Bloggers and the Bad Jewish Bloggers

The Forward has bought the Richard Silverstein tear-jerking saga, the one where he laments his poor treatment by other bloggers and particularly by some guy who created Little Dickie’s Diaper Droppings. Silverstein is apparently one of the good guys.

In the same article, Dan Sieradski, AKA Mobius from Jewschool, is also depicted as one of the good Jewish bloggers, the civil ones. In fact, he tells the world that it was debating some of us here at Jewlicious that made him put up the “Jewish Bloggers for Responsible Speech Online” tag which he then proceeded to violate on his own site.

Oops, that last part wasn’t in the article. Neither was mention of the time he changed the words of this poster, without cause, into insults related to bowel movements. Or the time he changed the words of this poster to read, “I am a contemptible person.” Or the time he came to our site and wrote, “TM sucks hard” because he gave a report about Shira Chadasha in Jerusalem with which several others disagreed. I can’t recall, was that just before or just after Mobi put up the Responsible Speech tag? There’s no mention in the Forward article, of course, of all of the insults he’s heaped on those who disagree with his views or his penchant for banning or sidelining those folks, including Jewschool’s own posters, with whose views he disagrees.

There was also no mention in the article about Silverstein’s heinous treatment of people who come to his site and don’t share his anti-Israel views. These are people who try to debate his views – not to insult him or the regulars who visit his site who spew all kinds of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist nonsense regularly – who present a differing viewpoint which he so strongly rejects, since it doesn’t vilify Israel and its history or actions as he would like.

It is hilarious to see two of the Jewish blogosphere’s biggest violators of the rules of decency and etiquette on the Internet pose as victims of the same infractions. Interestingly, Jewlicious comes across as one of the attacker blogs thanks to Mobius neglecting to mention that it were his own actions leading him to put up his meaningless tag for responsible speech. And we have our own ck explaining why he won’t put on the hypocritical tag, except that being ck, instead of taking a well-deserved potshot at his accuser, Mobius, he says, “There’s a lot of testosterone on the Internet, a lot of swagger,” [What makes] “the blogosphere interesting is the fact that it is dynamic and anything can happen.”

Well yeah, like the time Mobius was frustrated in a debate with me and threatened to kick me in the shins. Or when he got frustrated to the degree where he wrote me an email calling me names.

Or the time, last week, when Richard Silverstein threatened Jewlicious with a lawsuit because he claims this image to your right is a copyright violation. That’s correct, this image bothers him so much that he is threatening a lawsuit and seems to keep writing articles on his blog attacking ck or Jewlicious writers. I would check and link to these articles, but my IP was banned from his site without any cause. Yup, imagine a blogger threatening you with a lawsuit over a harmless, humorous image the way Silverstein has, and then ensuring that your IP is banned from his site so that you cannot even respond to his attacks.

So Rebecca Spence from The Forward, take a closer look at the archives of these two Good Jewish Bloggers and try to be more critical. You are also welcome to visit our archives, having been depicted as the Wild West of the Jewish blogosphere. I’m sure they will compare favorably, even with some of the harsh discussions we’ve had here.

Now seriously, the stuff above is fluff and not too important other than for its humor value. However, one issue brought up in the Forward’s article is serious. Dan Sieradski complains that he had been called a “Zionazi.” This is ironic. You see, Sieradski belongs to the stream of Left-wing, anti-Israel Jews who have made an unspoken (or sometimes spoken) pact with the anti-Israel Left and pro-Palestinians to attack Israel and its actions and its legitimacy. A couple of the key ways in which these attacks are made include comparing Israel to South Africa in the apartheid days and to Nazi Germany, including a comparison of the IDF to Nazi soldiers. That is where the term Zionazi originates, it’s a blatant parallel between Zionism and Nazism.

Now, ANYBODY who has actually seen one of these pro-Israel/anti-Israel debates knows that it’s virtually always the Israelis and their supporters, often Jewish, who are called Zionazis and racists and ethnic cleansers, etc. Almost always the attacks are made by the very people who share the same or a similar political outlook regarding Israel and the Arab-Israel conflict as Dan Sieradski. When I say almost always, I mean 99.87% of the time. If he has been called a Zionazi, it was an aberration, or perhaps somebody misread his luke-warm support of Israel and attacked him the way he attacks Israel very often. It’s ironic that a person who shares the very same views as so many who call us Zionazis actually claims to be a victim of the slur.