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Free speech, anyone?
liberalhistorian
(20,818 posts)you cannot criticize Israeli governmental policies without being shut down or labeled "anti-Semitic", SICK OF IT. I cannot for the life of me understand why people cannot see the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the vast numbers of civilian deaths, civilians who had nothing to do with Hamas. Hamas is not "the Palestinians" and I don't understand why it seems as if Israel can do whatever it wants in the region, with OUR TAX MONEY, and never be called on it. THOUSANDS of innocent Palestinian deaths and injuries, nearly half of Gaza completely destroyed, and no one gives a shit.
malaise
(269,054 posts)and will have no part of it
snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)for instance criticism of Islam let alone it's extremists is denounced as hate speech. Russia and China have also adopted the tactic of dismissing criticism as hate speech.
Douglas Carpenter
(20,226 posts)Spider Jerusalem
(21,786 posts)The labelling of criticism of Israel, or of Zionism, as "anti-Semitic" is deeply problematic and stifles discourse. The phenomenon is well-described by the late Tony Judt:
In short: Israel, in the world's eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.
The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.
In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary - if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush to Israel's defense - no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.
http://www.haaretz.com/general/the-country-that-wouldn-t-grow-up-1.186721
(NB that Judt himself was the target of accusations of "anti-Semitism" and of a campaign by groups such as the Anti-Defamation League to make him persona non grata at academic events following an article in which he called for a binational state in Israel as the only equitable solution to the apparently intractable problem of Israel/Palestine.)