“The Fellowship” was started in 2015 and is based out of Miamisburg, Ohio and it seems like their membership is at best only a couple dozen.
By “non-denominational”, I mean it accepts Josephite scripture, Brighamite scripture, Whitmerite scripture, Strangite scripture, etc. Additionally essentially each leader of their church gets to create their own book of scripture if they want to.
They also do an endowment ceremony over zoom, which is interesting.
I was looking into these folks back when I was doing the Universal Mormon Church, but was very quickly turned off by them because of this apostle’s zealotry, which also seems out of place based on their other resources.
I commented on his post and told him it was an anti-Semitic depiction that was reminiscent of Nazi propaganda. He ended up recognizing that it is, but the post remains up over a month later.
This is the sort of stuff that shows true colors. This sort of post divides humanity, not unites it. This sort of bigotry should be pushed back against and called out
How is this anti-semetic?
Large noses and patchy and/or unkept hair and facial hair are physical stereotypes for Jewish people. Depicting them as greedy, thieves, in control of financial systems, or defending the greedy/thieves is a social stereotype. These things were leaned into hard by the nazis to justify violence and eventually extermination and now are present in this meme.
Some context for this meme may help. I’ll do my best, but take the financial stuff with a grain of salt. Hedgefunds handled (“shorted”) their stock in an unethical way in order to try to drive GameStop out of business. At a certain point these hedgefunds would have to buy back the stock regardless of the price. If they did it successfully GameStop’s stock would have stayed cheap, they would have made a bunch of money, and GameStop would be worse off. However, reddit users realized they could buy GameStop stock for cheap and hold the stock until the hedgefunds were willing to practically go bankrupt to buy it back (because they legally have to buy it back). Hedgefunds took a blow because GameStop’s stock went from under a dollar to over $300 in some cases. As of me writing this the stock is worth $119. Hedge funds are often seen as responsible for the 2008 market crash and all of the suffering that followed it and many have seen the GameStop stock fiasco as payback. This depiction essentially shows a caricaturized Jewish man distraught that the hedgefunds are losing money and defending their greed. In other words its anti-Semitism with both physical and social stereotypes,
The depiction in the center is a modified version of a meme referred to as “Happy Merchant“. The original version of this depiction expressed how a world without Jewish and black people would be like a world without rats and cockroaches. Over time it became distorted to meet the qualifications of a rage comic reaction image, such as this image.
This image is often used when discussing anti-Semitic ideas, such as a Jewish conspiracy to control the world economy and media; Holocaust denial; and blaming the Jewish conspiracy for promoting feminism, homosexuality, “racemixing”, or causing any current calamity. It is featured on many nazi websites such as stormfront (link is to an image search; not a link to a nazi website)
The fact that an apostle of a church is reblogging anti-Semitic depictions that literal nazis have also used, even after having it pointed out to him, is worrying.