As retarded as it may sound, this is big news in Germany

Imagine that there are people who actually take democracy seriously.

This is a frigging circus.

Deutsche Welle:

German politician Hubert Aiwanger was faced with new allegations on Wednesday of antisemitic behavior during his high school years.

Aiwanger is the deputy state premier of Bavaria and the head of the right-wing populist Free Voters (Freie Wähler) party, with the state set to head to the polls for a crucial election in October.

Over the weekend, the Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that he authored a distributed a leaflet that made which contained mocking references to the Holocaust when he was in high school in the 1980s.

Aiwanger’s brother later said he authored the pamphlet, but the deputy state premier admitted that copies were in his school backpack.

It’s not something I would have admitted, if I were him.

He’s not dealing with reasonable people here.

One former classmate told local public broadcaster Bayerische Rundfunk that Aiwanger made antisemitic jokes following a class trip to a former Nazi concentration camp. By the end of WWII, nearly 6 million Jews had been murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies.

The class trip took place in 1987, when students in the high school class visited areas of then-East Germany, including an unnamed death camp memorial.

“On one evening, I was very upset that he made a joke about Jews, which I remember as being very repulsive,” the classmate, who asked to remain unnamed, told Bayerische Rundfunk.

The antisemitic remarks Aiwanger allegedly made as a teen were so offensive, that the classmate asked the news outlet not to publish them.

Aiwanger “also made a joke about children in Africa with malnourished bellies that I can remember very clearly.”

“It seemed to me that Hubert found this type of humor to be very enjoyable,” the classmate added.

In separate accusations revealed on Wednesday, another former classmate said the Bavarian politician at times made the Hitler salute when entering classrooms in high school.

The classmate told public broadcaster ARD that Aiwanger “very often imitated these Hitler speeches in this Hitler slang” and that he had “definitely” made offensive, hateful jokes about Jewish people.

How has Aiwanger responded?The scandal has sparked considerable outrage in Germany, with sharp criticism coming from opposition parties in Bavaria.

Aiwanger denied the latest allegations against him on Wednesday, but appeared to acknowledge some poor behavior in his youth.

“It is certainly the case that in adolescence, one thing or another could be interpreted in such and such a way that is in line with the things that 15-year-old me is being accused of,” the politician told broadcaster Welt TV.

“But in any case, I can say that since I reached adulthood, over the past decades, [I am] not an antisemite, not an extremist — but rather, a humanitarian,” Aiwanger said.

Okay.

I believe you.

What I really want to know is: how has the Jewish community reacted?

The Central Council of Jews in Germany sharply criticized the antisemitic sentiments expressed in the reports and expressed disappointment in Aiwanger’s response to the scandal.

Josef Schuster, the president of the council, said the public conversation was no longer about whether the lawmaker learned from his past mistakes, but more about Aiwanger’s “response to the allegations, which is almost defiant.”

“If he belonged to certain groups in his youth where this type of rhetoric and these views were common, a willingness to address the situation should be especially important considering his current position,” Schuster told the daily mass-circulation Bild newspaper.

So the outrage is: someone is claiming that nearly 40 years ago, this man made jokes about something that is alleged to have happened 80 years ago.

We all grasp that the Holocaust is a religion.

But… whether it’s an Islamic or Catholic theocracy, no one is going to bring up stuff from decades ago, when you were 15-years-old.

So, this is not simply a matter of the Holocaust having become the new religion, it’s also the fact that this is an extremist religion, beyond anything we’ve ever seen before, where rumors of past blasphemy can result in a total destruction of your life.

A fake religion like the Holocaust is not sustainable, but no religion that is this oppressive is sustainable.

The struggle is real

The Jews are complaining that other Jews don’t get this Jew joke that Jerry Seinfeld told on the Norm MacDonald show. He said that the joke was funny because only Jewish people would get it. I am of course so infatuated with the Jews, that I get it, which might be a bad thing or might be a good thing. The joke here might actually be that Nazis get the joke.

You can watch the clip, or I will paraphrase it (rather than type the transcript directly, because that is how jokes work in real life) is:

One gentile businessman sees another gentile businessman on the street and asks him “how’s business” and the other gentile businessman replies “great!”

To me it was immediately obvious, but the Jewish Daily Forward is flipping out because Jews don’t get this joke (and that implies they are assimilating).

If Jews can’t understand a Jerry Seinfeld “Jew-joke,” what have these thousands of years of struggle been for?

During “Norm Macdonald Live!” this week, a segment that surely will be the topic of many a millennial Jew’s future dissertation featured Seinfeld telling what he calls “the greatest Jew joke I’ve ever heard” while insisting that non-Jews won’t get it — which he says is “part of the joke.”

Watch the clip without reading the comments. Pretend it’s Yom Kippur, take a good look inside yourself and be honest: Do you get it?

Seinfeld insists that if “you’re young… you might not get it.” We asked Forward staffers under the age of 30 if they “got it.” Here’s what they said:

Jenny (Me): I’m so Jewish that before I go through security at Ben Gurion I have to rehearse my list of prior trips to Israel so I don’t seem like a liar, and I still didn’t get this joke. I would say the real joke here is that this has caused me anxiety about my Jewish identity.

Erica (News Intern): So the joke assumes that no Jewish businessman would simply answer “Great!” when asked how’s business doing — they would launch into a full rant.

Steven (Opinion Fellow): Clearly, only gentile business owners would be like, “Oh, business is going great!” If they were Jewish there would be something to complain about. At least that was my interpretation.

Laura (Contributing Network Editor): Yes — the joke is, everyone in business is Jewish so you have to specify when they’re not (***Editor’s note: This is not the joke.)

Jeff (Social Media Editor): No entiendo.

Talya (Culture Fellow): The point of the joke is, of course, that no Jew would ever respond to the question “How’s business?” with the bland, impersonal term “great”; they would respond with a list of complaints that, if left uninterrupted, might continue into eternity. It’s a joke about Jewish humor, and it’s a joke about Jews.

Aiden (Swing Editor): The joke is that when asked, “How’s business?” the Christian says, “It’s great!” A Jew would never say, “Business is great!” He or she would complain instead.

Jesse (News Intern): It’s the perfect Jewish joke. My dad has been telling this one for years. Succinct, and just for us.

George (Social Media Intern): I didn’t get it.

Michael (Opinion Intern [not Jewish]): I didn’t get it, and it scared me.

Okay, sure, sure, but once you got it, did you think it was funny?

Aiden: Yes, I thought it was very funny. I literally laughed out loud. I mean, the joke itself is good-but-not-great, but Seinfeld really sold it.

George: Once I [understood,] it was funny, relying on old-school Jewish humor/dark humor that might not be so popular with Jews these days, which is why I missed it.

Laura: Like a solid 2.5/10. It’s a great joke for JINOs (Jews in Name Only) to feel great for understanding.

Jesse: It’s funny the way, like, “Orange you glad you didn’t say banana!” is funny. I’ve heard it so many times, it’s just funny for its familiarity at this point, I think.

Steven: I found it pretty weak.

Talya: This millennial Jew thinks Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner told 20 funnier Jewish jokes in the first 10 minutes of “The 2000 Year Old Man.”

Erica: The joke is threadbare and the video was so awkward! I honestly cringed at this video because it was so unfunny.

Michael: Eh, not really. But I don’t think Seinfeld is that funny anyway.

Jeff: Yes — my friend Michael here insulted Jerry Seinfeld, and I can’t stand for that.

The joke, as some of these Jews knew, is that a Jew would start whining about everything that is wrong with his life as soon as he was asked anything.

And it is kind of funny. Especially with Seinfeld’s long intro about how only Jews would get it, which was actually part of the joke.

I have always said that the only actually funny Jew comedians are Jerry Seinfeld, Seinfeld writer Larry David and Woody Allen because they are “Jew comedians” in the sense that they make explicitly Jew comedy. That is, they mock the neurotic nature of Jews. The obsessive nature of these people, that has developed over millenia of inbreeding and selectively outbreeding only for the most specific gross human traits.

But the fact that I get a joke that other Jews don’t get is disturbing to me.

I’ve been doing this for too long, and I’ve gone too deep.

And that might be the funniest part of all of this.

Anyway, the goy in the room, Norm, calling the other Jew a Holocaust denier was the funniest part of the clip. And making the two Jews laugh at that joke made it that much funnier.

It’s funny to see Norm back. He was a super-funny guy, and he got fired and blacklisted by the Jew Loren Michaels, showrunner of Saturday Night Live, because he wouldn’t quit talking about OJ Simpson and Bill Clinton being murderers.

New media has brought him back, and though I haven’t watched his video podcast that this clip is from, I imagine it’s probably sort of funny.

From the Washington Post:

Why we have to stop telling Jewish jokes

By Michelle Van Loon April 8

Sometimes it takes a while for a bad punchline to sink in. To wit, after a handful of comedian (to use the term loosely) Trevor Noah’s cringe-worthy anti-Semitic, misogynist tweets from 2009 surfaced about a week and a half ago.

Last night, “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart spoke out in support of Noah, who is slated to replace Stewart on the Comedy Central show later this year. But Noah still faces several comedy critiques.

On Wednesday, the American Jewish Congress launched an online campaign calling for Comedy Central to send Noah packing. And the Chicago Tribune’s Clarence Page wrote on Wednesday about the unwritten rules of comedy etiquette.

“It is funnier to punch up, as the old saying goes, than to punch down,” Page writes. “Deflating the pompous and powerful can be hilarious. Ridiculing the weak is just sad.”

Who? Whom?

The New Republic declared Jewish humor officially finis in light of the Internet tempest over Lena Dunham’s recent cringe-inducing New Yorker quiz entitled “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend: A Quiz.” Dunham’s piece had an odd, 1967-ish throwback tone to it, leaning hard on the stereotype of a spoiled hypochondriac Jewish-American Prince. Picture a young Woody Allen with an Instagram account and a case of gout.

TNR’s piece contends that at this point in history, most American Jews are basically assimilated white people. According to its author Phoebe Malz Bovy, the tug of war between assimilation and Jewish identity is over. America won.

But if that were true, Dunham and Noah wouldn’t have captured the attention they did. …

Whose attention?

If Jewish people were truly integrated into American culture, those trusty toxic stereotypes would be fading. Not long ago, I ran into a guy I hadn’t seen for more than two decades. He was a leader in his Israel-loving, conservative evangelical church, yet within 30 seconds of saying hello to me, he slung his arm around my neck like a noose and said, “Hey, I have a great Jewish joke for you.”

Maybe, like Bryan Cranston as Watley the Dentist, he converted, just for the jokes:

Before I could extricate myself from his grip, he proceeded to unload a mean-spirited, borderline anti-Semitic bomb on me. I thought I’d made it clear two decades ago I didn’t think his jokes were funny. His material hadn’t improved one bit since then.

The point made in TNR’s piece that Jews have been assimilated might be stretching the point a bit, as various corners of our culture use “You people are not us” language. It may come out of earnest innocence (“Some of my best friends are Jewish!”) or more nefarious old stereotypes (News flash! We Jews don’t have All The Money). …

The rise in anti-Semitism in Europe has shifted the context into which Dunham, Noah and my old friend are doing their lounge acts. While we Jews enjoy great freedom in this country, millennia of history in the marrow of our bones tells us that things could change for us at any time.

The first sign just might be when we become the punchline.

Michelle Van Loon is the author of three books, and a regular contributor to Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics blog. She maintains her own blog, Pilgrim’s Road Trip, at Patheos.com.

Like I’ve been saying, 2015′s Muslim massacres of Jews in Europe  have prodded a few of the smarter, funnier, more self-aware American Jews toward an agonizing reappraisal of their ancestral Diversity Uber Alles ideology. Has it hit diminishing returns?

But, mostly, as in this example, Muslims slaughtering Jews just encourages the dumber, more humorless, less self-aware American Jews to double down on the traditionally successful habit of guilt-tripping nice white Christian Americans about how at any minute they could start a new Holocaust, just like they did on June 6, 1944. (Oh, wait, maybe my historical analogy needs work … But my point is, basically, that I’m holding the Megaphone and you aren’t.)

How all this will deter homicidal Muslims is not obvious, but, hey, it’s fun.