Jewish Group
Related: About this forumIs singling out Israel for boycotts anti-Semitic?
A paradigmatic characteristic of all bigotry is to take a fault that is widespread among all cultures, races, religions and nationalities and to attribute it singularly to one group.
For example: Blacks are violent. Jews are cheap. Asians are sly. Gays are pedophiles. Women are irrational. Romanies (gypsies) cheat.
The truth, of course, is that all groups have some among them with these negative characteristics.
The bigots who make these claims correctly point to the fact that some members of these groups display the negative characteristics attributed to the groups as a whole.
But the bigotry consists of singling out any such group for unique condemnation on the basis of these widespread faults without acknowledging that members of other groups have them as well, sometimes in greater proportion than the group that is singled out.
http://www.ejpress.org/article/69482
meti57b
(3,584 posts)Behind the Aegis
(53,973 posts)question everything
(47,518 posts)about Pollard.
I have exchanged several posts there and in the last I said something like that:
There are hundreds of nations around the world. Most of them are not democratic; they kill and torture their own citizens. They certainly do not have free press. And yet, any news from Israel is magnified on these pages, especially on LBN, to give all the Israeli haters a platform.
And one has to wonder whether the Israeli hatred is a convenient cover to anti-semitism.
Why are there not threads about the atrocities in Chad, the Congo, Darfur, Sudan, and other places? China, certainly, is not known for its human rights protections.
Christians have been systematically attacked and butchered in countries in the Middle East in the name of Islam. Many have fled.
Many on DU "object" to having a "Jewish" state but none expressed objection to Lebanon that was indeed, torn from Syria to establish an Arab country with a Christian majority - no longer, of course.
And sometimes when I do visit I/P, where each thread has to start with a sourced material, most is from Israeli source. From Israeli journalists criticizing the Israeli government.
I have yet to find anyplace on DU an article from Egypt, or from Lebanon, from Saudi Arabia or Yemen, criticizing the ruling party. And, of course, one does not hear about boycotting any of them.
King_David
(14,851 posts)question everything
(47,518 posts)From an Op-ed at ynet
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4470818,00.html
I recently returned from a brief trip to Israel, where I was somewhat put off by how outspoken everyone is. And by everyone, I mean everyone. One Arab taxi driver called me a stupid donkey, then lectured me, in broken English, about world events. But thats just surface stuff: One has the sense, when walking down just about any Israeli street, that people are going to say exactly what they mean, giving rise to the commonly held belief that Israelis are not the worlds most mannerly people.
But so what?
(snip)
Still, American Studies Association has voted to endorse the academic boycott of Israel, joining the Association for Asian American Studies in its condemnation. Mazel tov! Both of these organizations have targeted what may be the worlds most open, democratic, opinionated, and yes, loud-mouthed, academic system - and country - in the world.
(snip)
But getting back to the boycott, lets just call it what it is: Nothing but old-fashioned Jew hatred dressed up with fancy words, a remnant of the conviction that some people have that Jews are inherently bad.
It reminds me of an argument I had some years ago with a British law professor, who explained in a posh British accent that the then-recent IDF incursion in the Palestinian city of Jenin was "another Holocaust." Except that in the case of Jenin, 37 known terrorists were killed in hand-to-hand combat, whereas in the Holocaust six million civilians were murdered. When I asked him why he wasnt equally incensed by non-citizenship of old Korean families in Japan, or the so-called Gujarat pogrom, in which hundreds of Indian Muslims were slaughtered, or Tiananmen Square, or repression and torture in Korea, he went back to his original thesis.
In my own view, Israels policies like those of the UK, the US, France, and other members of the democratic west are deeply flawed, sometimes even immoral. But to single it out for condemnation as the American Studies professors have done is not only shameful, but proof as if the world needs it that the existence of Israel as a nation in which Jews refuse to be victimized is as urgent as its ever been.
Behind the Aegis
(53,973 posts)About five years ago, I participated in a head-to-head debate about contemporary anti-Semitism that was published in the Congressional Quarterly. Facing off against a particularly tiresome Jewish anti-Zionist, I tried to shed some light on the issue by drawing a distinction between what I called Bierkeller and Bistro anti-Semitism.
Bierkeller anti-Semitismnamed for the drinking establishments in Germany where the Nazis chugged down beer while shouting themselves hoarse about the Jewish menaceis, I said, pretty transparent. You wear a uniform, you yell about Jews (not Zionists, mind you, but Jews), and you burn down a synagogue. By contrast, Bistro anti-Semitismnamed for the trendy eateries adored by bien-pensant metropolitan leftistsis an altogether more refined affair. It does not demonize Jews as Jews. It regards any talk of anti-Semitism as a reprehensible technique to divert attention away from Israels crimes. And it insists that there is no common ground between todays calls to destroy the Jewish state and Hitlers obsession with destroying the Jewish people; the former is grounded upon principles of justice, while the latter refers to a regrettable historical event that is, whatever the paranoid fantasies conjured up by Jewish leaders, over and done with.
As I observed the furor around two separate but related events in recent weeksthe mushrooming of a movement in American universities in favor of an academic boycott of Israel, and the disturbing trend in France for performing the quenelle, an inverted Nazi salute, in public spacesI thought once more of that distinction. What, I asked myself, connects the worldview of Dieudonné Mbala Mbalathe anti-Semitic French comedian who invented the quenelle, and who heads a party called the anti-Zionist List while admitting that the voice of a Jewish journalist makes him nostalgic for the gas chamberswith the worldview of the Israel-haters in the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and similar academic bodies? Put another way: Is there now an inviting bistro in some corner of the loud, intimidating bierkeller?
Its likely that many, though not all, American advocates of the academic boycott of Israel would be horrified by any association with Dieudonné. In their minds, a huge expanse separates their opposition to what they call Israels apartheid system of government from the young man who gave the quenelle while standing outside the Jewish school in Toulouse where, during a March 2012 terrorist atrocity, a rabbi and three small children were murdered. That fellow, they would say, is motivated by hatred of Jews; we, on the other hand, are motivated by justice for the Palestinians.
The truth is that its nowhere near that simple. Heres why: In the post-Holocaust era, there isnt a single example of something defined as anti-Zionism that hasnt been contaminated by anti-Semitism. When the Arab League launched its anti-Zionist boycott in 1945, three years before Israels creation, its target was the besieged Jewish community in British Mandate Palestine. When the Soviet Union threw in its lot with the Arab regimes during the Cold War in the name of anti-Zionism, the primary victims were Soviet Jews. When Polands ruling communists launched an anti-Zionist campaign in the late 1960s, the people whom they purged were Jewish. And when left-wing German terrorists hijacked an Air France plane in 1976, they demonstrated their anti-Zionism by separating the Jewish passengers from the non-Jewish ones.
more....
question everything
(47,518 posts)who came to Israel after crossing the Sinai and who now want to be treated better. Israel is faced with a hard task of absorbing about 70,000, I think, refugees.
And I was thinking: obviously, these refugees do not think that Israel is an apratheid state to avoid. For them, it is a beacon of hope.
Try to explain this to many on other forums here.
ismnotwasm
(41,998 posts)The situation is complex and to constantly target Israel as the 'bad guy' is unrealistic, as well as disingenuous by the people who do it
Behind the Aegis
(53,973 posts)For decades, the American Studies Association has labored in well-deserved obscurity. No longer. It's now made a name for itself by voting to boycott Israeli universities, accusing them of denying academic and human rights to Palestinians.
Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary, and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange.
Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel's neighborhood. As we speak, Syria's government is dropping "barrel bombs" filled with nails, shrapnel and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria?
And of Iran, which hangs political, religious and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter, massively repressive China and Russia?
more: http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Krauthammer-Poison-of-anti-Semitism-continues-to-5128807.php