Bigoted Islamophobes do exist.
Speaking of context, that is.
Ravenman, I’m still curious about the boundaries of “acceptability” in discussing Israel’s policies and actions, especially since its very identity is tied to religion and ethnicity and makes blurring of the boundaries (by either the speaker or the listener) somewhat inevitable even if unintentional. Do you have any further thoughts on the subject?
If a person states that NRA lobbyists are buying politicians to split their loyalties to gun manufacturers, is that person being offensive?
How they came to be? The same way as any sort of ethnic slur, racist phrase/allusion/association, etc., came to be – significant usage with bigoted intent.
IMO, criticize Likud and Bibi all you want – they really, really suck, and I think they’re doing very significant long-term damage to Israel’s security. I would recommend avoiding assigning collective blame for the entire state of Israel (any more than collective blame for Palestine or Palestinians as a whole is appropriate).
It’s really not that hard to be specific when making criticisms.
And it’s really not that hard to *deflect *criticisms by declaring them to be made out of bigotry, regardless of wording. That’s what we’re seeing here.
In many cases, yes. Much or even most of the criticism of Omar is bullshit. But some of it is reasonable and legitimate – and she seems to agree, based on the solid apology she made.
I’ve not read everything Omar said, and I don’t remember everything that I read, granted–but I don’t remember reading anything she said that assigned collective blame for the entire state of Israel. Am I forgetting/missing some specific thing?
Not any of her quotes from the past month, but a few years ago she did say “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.”
I doubt her sincerity, and that’s not a criticism. She did it so the crybabies on the right would shut up and stick their thumbs back in their mouths is all.
I don’t think so – this seems to have expanded into a broader discussion of appropriate vs inappropriate language to use when criticizing Israeli policies and actions.
Darn those rules anyway, they’re so hard to follow.
I’m reminded of a long-ago Dope thread in which a poster* was piteously moaning about how you just can’t criticize Israel without being called anti-Semitic, citing the uproar over this cartoon which appeared in The Independent and which some oversensitive types (no doubt with Agendas) saw as having grotesque anti-Semitic overtones.
And indeed, when trenchant, biting satire like that is condemned unfairly, we find ourselves sinking deeper into the morass of political correctness in which Dopers dare not allude to perfidious [del]Jewish-[/del] American divided loyalties over Israel, Little Black Sambo or other innocent remarks and symbols.
*that poster as I recall departed the SD in a huff not long after it was found that he’d listed a series of tropes in one of his commentaries that turned out to be lifted nearly verbatim from a Stormfront-style website. It was a sad day for free, unfettered speech. 
Why is anti-Semitic any worse than Israelis being anti-Palestinian?
Have you seen the way the Israelis treat the Palestinians?
Somebody says something bad about Palestinians and no one bats an eye.
Some of the criticism of her word choice is reasonable. She did apologize for her word choice.
The criticism of her is not. She did not apologize for who she is.
And, if any criticism is necessary, I think that she has already had more than she deserves.
The Vox website has a commentary written by Zack Beauchamp, who identifies as Jewish, that I found to be pretty measured and thoughtful.
The article actually contains the full text of what she said and it’s clear that she wasn’t coming from a place of anti-semitism when she made her remarks. It wasn’t another thoughtless tweet, but it did include the now-infamous reference, which appears at the end of the quote/cite.
The conclusion I come to after reading the quote is that Omar has the same problem that a lot of people who aren’t born and raised in the United States have, and that they’re not always fully acculturated. Omar reminds me of other foreign-born Americans in that she sometimes seems unaware of how to approach sensitive cultural topics like antisemitism. She, like many non-natives, doesn’t always know how to be PC. She sees Israel through her own cultural lens, which is understandable. Yet there are Jews in America today who are old enough to remember and even have experienced the Holocaust. And there are countless people who are children and grandchildren of those survivors who’ve heard those stories, which is probably a perspective she doesn’t appreciate. There’s also a long and complicated history of periodic antisemitism in the United States, which even predates the Nazi Germany era.
My conclusion is that a group of mostly veteran and perhaps a few of the newly-elected Democrats in the House need to come to some kind of understanding about how they’re going to address Israel in public going forward. And they probably need to take Omar aside and explain that she might not be the best representative to talk so openly about the Israeli-American relationship – let someone else talk who can advocate for more accountability from Israel and its supporters but in a way that’s more sensitive and constructive than what we’ve seen.
See post 107, particularly the last paragraph in which I state that it is hard to know what’s really in her heart, versus her bungling something because she appears to have a lesser command of the Israeli-Palestinian issues than the average poster in this thread.
It’s English usage dates back to 1880, so not a “neologism” by any stretch. Also, there’s nothing “inaccurate” about it. There’s no requirement that a word maintain its specific meaning when it’s broken down into its root components.
I’m sure you realize that’s a silly question. But to answer it anyway:
a) I’m personally not fond of ad hominems, so to the extent that someone attacks anyone as doing something for the money, rather than attacking the substance of what they say, sure, to a degree such a statement is offensive.
b) Interchanging comments that can be interpreted as offensive to a racial group with comments that can be offensive to non-racial groups isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Of course comments that touch on centuries old tropes are more sensitive and ill-advised, as Rep. Omar herself has stated.
Oh, I strongly disagree. If anything, she apologized because of the blowback from her party, not because of blowback from Republicans. Which should be totally obvious.
Snipped the rest of your post, but I very strongly agree with those points. I think clumsiness is probably a pretty good explanation, as opposed to arguing that she never said anything wrong.
Congresscritters *must *be loyal to America. However, it’s perfectly Ok to be loyal to a local company based on 'what’s good for xxxx, is good for America". I would have any issue with a Congressman representing Detroit to support the automobile industry there. Jobs, you know.
Senator Scoop Jackson was known as “the senator from Boeing”, and no one thought that was all that bad.
And FYI, the NRA doesn’t really lobby that much on behalf of gun manufacturers. It’s gun owners, - maybe around a third of all Citizens.
Here’s an interview of African American former Congresswoman Cynthia Mckinney. It shines light on the current situation.
McKinney: Well, every candidate for Congress at that time had a pledge. They were given a pledge to sign and I was new on the scene and the pledge had Jerusalem as the capital city, the military superiority of Israel,…
Press TV: American Congress people have to sign this pledge?
McKinney: Yes, you sign the pledge. If you do not sign the pledge, you do not get money…
Press TV: I just want to get into this pledge a little bit more. So this is basically something that is mandatory, that every Congressperson has to sign saying that what Jerusalem as you said is the capital of Israel, and what else?
McKinney: You make a commitment that you would vote to support the military superiority of Israel that the economic assistant that Israel wants that you would vote to provide that.
Press TV: …they are supposed to be representing the people of the United States not a foreign country and yet they have to pledge allegiance to a foreign state? No one questions this? My bolding.
No, I do not think it’s a silly question. It is a question that I do not know the answer to, which is why I asked it.
I can agree that discounting someone’s statement solely due to them taking money from a lobby that may encourage them to make that statement can qualify as an ad hominem, and I can see how that is not that far from what she did.
However, it is a logical fallacy at worst, not offensive.
That’s why I asked when it becomes offensive.
Yes, it does shed light on it. This is typical anti-Semitic rhetoric that frequently makes its rounds on anti-Jewish websites. The fact that Omar believes it is exactly what makes her anti-Semitic.
Cynthia McKinney - while indeed a former Congresswoman - is also known for embracing conspiracy theories and particularly anti-Jewish ones such as believing that Israel initiated the Nice and Munich terror attacks and the ‘Dancing Israelis’ conspiracy theory that posited that Jews were behind 9/11. She has also blamed ‘Zionists’ for her failure to be reelected and has pushed the story that Jews own the ‘12 banks that control the world money supply.’
