The Poop Swastika: Clearly “Cultural Appropriation”

Sorry readers, I’m just feeling backed up getting the whole Missouri “poop swastika” incident behind me, though when you think about it, the poop swastika is the perfect symbol of the constipated thinking of the campus left. (And perhaps a great name for a punk rock bar band.) Anyway, I wondered the same thing John did in his comment to my post yesterday: Isn’t this an anti-Semitic hate crime? Which would make it rather odd, since anti-Semitism is officially sanctioned on so many college campuses today and is an accepted faction on the left. Did Jewish students at Missouri join the protests?

Lo and behold, Neo-Neocon has the answer:

I located this article in the school paper written very shortly after the incident occurred, and amazingly enough, the appearance of the excremental swastika was indeed initially treated as being anti-Semitic in intent. But the Jews on campus and their spokespeople were relatively low-key about it. And here I thought Jews were supposed to be so emotional:

Jeanne Snodgrass, executive director of Mizzou Hillel, a nonprofit organization and Jewish campus center, said she was contacted by Residential Life about the incident.

“Unfortunately sometimes things happen, and I think that the university is responding appropriately and dealing with it very seriously,” Snodgrass said.

Snodgrass apparently successfully resisted the urge to instead say “unfortunately sometimes shit happens,” for which I salute her.

More:

Jordan Kodner is an executive for both Zeta Beta Tau and Chabad, a Jewish student organization on campus. He said he found out about the incident when he was at Hillel and someone brought it up right after it happened.

“A lot of people are very confused, especially with this particular one — using feces,” he said. “I know that kind of confused a lot of people. It just seems very odd — were they trying to send a certain message with it?”

He said he hopes the incident will be a wake-up call about anti-Semitism on campus. He said he is upset that it is usually downplayed.

Kodner doesn’t feel threatened because nothing violent has happened yet.

I believe that Kodner may be referring to people’s confusion about whether the poop swastika was meant to be expressive of support for Nazi beliefs, or whether it was meant as a negative commentary on the value of those beliefs.

Thalia Sass, president of the Jewish Student Organization, was more emotional about the entire incident:

“I still think that when something like this happens, Jewish students feel threatened,” Sass said. “I was actually really mad about this because I heard about it from a Maneater* [student newspaper] reporter. It happened on the 24th, and we’re only talking about it now? Why wasn’t JSO contacted earlier by Residential Life?”

The group plans on speaking to the residents of Gateway Hall during a mandatory residential meeting on Monday evening. They said they plan on talking about the history of the swastika and how it relates to Jewish people and the Holocaust.

Let us pause here and say: college students don’t already know this history? I realize that’s a rhetorical question, because at this point it’s actually very possible that many college students don’t know this history. However, we can be pretty sure that anyone drawing a swastika in fecal matter on a bathroom wall actually was among those students who were aware of it.

STEVE again: Seems like we’re in solid Mel Brooks territory now. But more to the point, isn’t the campus left clearly guilty of cultural appropriation for seizing on the poop swastika as one of their grievances—especially since for the left, Jews are part of the patriarchal oppressive establishment?

And speaking of Mel Brooks, I think it’s high time a fraternity at Missouri host a screening of Blazing Saddles (a movie that couldn’t be made today), just to watch the idiocy that would follow, even though the movie is in large part a satire on racial stereotypes. Wouldn’t matter: just the fact that Mel Brooks uses the n-word would enough for a full “safe space” meltdown. Failing that, how about Mel’s “Hitler Rap”:

Yeah—this’ll do the trick.

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