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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Not only did a single citizenship fail to eradicate cultural, ethnic, or non-German national identities of Poles, Bavarians, Saxons, Sorbs and other populations within the German Empire, but within a few decades German Jews were developing their own Zionist political and cultural identity.
For many and German Jews especially, the persistence of pre-unity identities could be an impediment to advancement in politics, business or the arts.
A Jewish politician in German Saxony might have had difficulty in proving his credentials as a Saxon leader, but if the political "market" could be segmented among conservatives, liberals and socialists, he might easily become a socialist leader.
This type of market segmentation also applies to the arts or to retailing. The late 19th cntury and post WW2 music industry even created identities based on the cult following of artists or performers like Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, or the Grateful Dead.
Just as modern society has created a supermarket of identities from which individuals may choose, other identities have become illegitimate in certain contexts.
Jews and other groups threatened by the power of organized religion have tended to demand the depoliticization of religion or separation of church and state.
Almost as if to fill a void left by religion, in the late 19th through early 20th and then again in the late 20th century, sexuality has become so politicized that it makes sense to refer to the integration of sex and politics.
Columbia Professor Joseph Massad uses the term Gay International to describe homosexual politics that is often used to other or to demonize Arabs, Muslims, and fundamentalist Christians.
An older German term for this type of gay mobilization is Umgeschlechtungsbewegung, which translates as "Regenderization Movement."
Not only is the Gay International often associated with Jews, but it really does seem to grow out of Yiddish sexual identity that became politicized after Jewish emancipation and that was a major topic of conversation in early 20th century Germany and Austria.
The Toronto National Post described the massive intertwining of Jewish Zionist and gay activism in two recent articles:
Here is a quote from the first article:
B'nai B'rith Canada is practically claiming ownership rights over gay politics.Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA), an anti-Zionist protest group that made corporate sponsors squirm by flying banners at last year’s Toronto Pride parade, has been banned this year, along with any other group that would advance a political agenda.
“We will be very much more careful this year. We will make sure that we have a presence to ensure that people don’t slip into the parade,” Pride Toronto executive director Tracey Sandilands said today.
UPDATE: here.
The number of volunteer marshals along the barricades is to be increased from 25 to 80 to prevent unauthorized people joining the parade, she said.
“What happened last year was ... people on the sidelines who pushed into the parade and put up banners. We were totally not expecting it,” she said.
Her announcement came with a warning to grand marshall El-Farouk Khaki not to use his ceremonial position as a pulpit to promote an anti-Israeli boycott.
Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada, today called for disciplinary action against Mr. Khaki, a founder of the national support group Salaam: Queer Muslim Community, because he spoke to a QuAIA event on the weekend.
A flier for the event said “Israel has now begun to frame itself as a tolerant, queer-positive democracy. This can never be reality under Occupation.”
Mr. Dimant said Mr. Khaki’s presence -- he made opening remarks and welcomed the main speakers -- “has already contravened Pride Toronto’s stated policy.”
The second article treats gay politics as so mainstream that it does not even bother to explain that LGBTTIQQ2S stands for "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgendered, Intersexual, Queer, Questioning, 2-Spirited."
Not only does this sort of gay activist discourse tend to put Western Arabs and Muslims at a disadvantage because they avoid public displays or discussion of sex or affection, whether heteroerotic or homoerotic, but such gay activism tends to legitimize a chauvinistic Western perception of Arab and Muslims societies as so savage that Western States have no choice but to invade and to occupy them in order to save Arabs and Muslims from their own barbarism.
(Yiddish Regenderization, Jüdische Umgeschlechtungsbewegung)
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