And of course, Ghadhi’s advice to the Jews of Germany during the 30s and 40s was non-violent resistance. That is, let them haul you off to the camps and exterminate you.
The thing you have to remember about Ghandhi is that he was a hundred times more concerned with the spiritual result of an action than the material result. He counseled the Jews that extermination was preferable to violence. I’m sure Hitler would have agreed.
That was an amazing reply, although I didn’t show the letter to condemn Zionism but to show that opinions vary.
I have such a hard time trying to convice people that non-violent resistance doesn’t mean, “cart me off to die”.
You are still able to resist, just not by hurting/killing anyone. That is the only rule, no violence.
Renman, a reply to you first and then hopefully I’ll get to the others, including Fenris’s objections.
As I said, I’m right with you on that one. But it’s a question of evaluating exactly what is explicitly anti-Jewish and what may look like it, but isn’t necessarily (it could be the product of something else entirely). This is a field where cries of “anti-Semitic” are used routinely to impugn opposing points of view, sometimes regardless of anti-Jewish content. “Anti-Semitic” is a word I detest, since its component words have a clear meaning (anti Semite) but its ascribed meaning is not the same (anti Jew), not to mention that it was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, an anti-Jew German journalist of all people. I never really understood why the word stuck so tightly when there is already a perfectly good (and more accurate) word to describe the phenomenon without disenfranchising the overwhelming majority of Semitic peoples. Anyway, that discussion has been waged already, not too long ago and here in the Pit if I remember.
I know the Anti-Defamation League, in fact I have browsed their Web site before, but for some reason I could get nothing when I wrote my post, and I am find myself unable to access the site quite a lot these days. I managed to browse it briefly after reading your post and my opinion of it remains the same: it’s a reasonably good indicator, but they are not known for being moderate, level-headed, or objective. ADL is a watchdog, and therefore latches on to every single perceived anti-Jewish sentiment, sometimes making more of a big deal about it than it deserves. I have never seen the ADL report on a suspected case of defamation and warn that it could be due to causes other than “anti-Semitism”. ADL is a good place to visit if you want fast information or an extreme view in my opinion, but that is not to say that all its contents are accurate portrayals of situations.
For example: ADL Outraged at Anti-Semitic Blood Libel Skits on Arab Television. Well, looking at this press release all I can do is laugh at the ADL, and I’m not being callous or anti-Jewish. I laugh because I see a cartoon (an animated character on TV) of a short and squat Ariel Sharon with a big shiny red nose, a cape, a barbed tail, and horns on his forehead. He is holding up what looks like a can of Coca-Cola and the caption reads: “The original drink from Arabic blood. Main distributor Ariel Sharon and partners”
ADL’s press release bitches about the depiction of Ariel Sharon drinking blood, because it supposedly refers to the “infamous blood libel”. ADL says nothing more in the following paragraphs, all we are given is that this is atrocious, it must stop, it is a defamatory act against Jewish peoples, everyone ought to speak out against it, etc.
Not a single mention is made of the fact that the depiction of Sharon is rather comical, and that he looks like an inept vampire or devil (notice the bulbous red nose of this particular depiction–it signals “inept” and possibly “drunkard”). He does not look like a serious drinker of Arab blood. The blood of course symbolizes the plight of Arabs under Sharon (think Prince Vlad the Impaler for related metaphors). Now, apart from ADL deliberately (apparently) misconstruing the context of this little joke, why is it that they assume that this valid political cartoon, which is clearly humorous, must necessarily be a reincarnation of the blood libel? Apart from the common topic of blood, this seems to have little to do with the libelous myth that Christian or Arab blood was used to make Passover bread.
It is definitely not a flattering cartoon for Sharon or perhaps even for Jews (since Sharon is the leader of Israel and is sporting a star of David) but then again there are plenty of other cartoons that could be considered deeply offensive along the same lines, but that are generally considered harmless. I remember having a debate on these boards on the topic of humour in political cartoons, and someone was deeply offended that a cartoonist had drawn herself having a dream and getting assassinated by Bush lackeys in the dream because she had criticized Arctic oil drilling. Then the cartoonist’s dream ended and she got on with her day, also having to do with Bush. Some people couldn’t see the humour in the piece, although it was actually quite funny (I posted a panel by panel deconstruction of that cartoon: I remain convinced it was funny, nor did anyone contradict my analysis. Unfortunately I think the thread was deleted). Or consider any episode at all of Spitting Image!
I don’t know enough to state with finality that ADL is over-reacting (as it is known to do from time to time), but it looks that way to me. I certainly would not base my judgment on that press release, which presents almost no facts and nothing in the way of context. ADL outraged about this, ADL condemns that, ADL lambastes UN for being anti-Israel, ADL warns Europe to clean up their act, etc., frankly I am tired of hearing ADL’s often biased proclamations on every aspect of life. Leaving aside their propaganda efforts, I think (as I said) that ADL is a good source for quick information that can be checked later, but their very angle precludes objectivity. In a sense they are similar to Amnesty International, whose job is to get alarmed over all sorts of things even though there may not be sufficient cause to do so. Quite an annoying alarmist approach, but it serves its purpose; that doesn’t mean it’s always a reliable source.
My point is that, based on what I know so far just from ADL, the cartoon may be questionable but it hardly look like blood libel; it’s actually fairly good humour, and the Middle East is known to have quite a fierce sense of humour. Do I read this and come away thinking that Ariel Sharon or even Jews really drink the blood of Arabs, or of anyone at all? Of course not! It’s humour, so it’s not meant literally (and the blood strikes me as a clear metaphor in this case, particularly since Sharon is made to look like Dracula). Likewise, I don’t believe that all Arabs wear headscarves, have big noses, and hang around in oil fields plotting terrorist attacks; or that Americans are all from Texas, overweight, speak funny, and hang out on ranches wearing cowboy hats. Or that Italians-- but you get the idea.
That ought to clarify my comment about “excessive sensitivity and the human drive to form patterns and connections” RenMan. I was talking generically and more about the watchdog mentality than about you, so please don’t take all such comments as criticisms of your good self. But those people or organizations constantly on the look-out for anti-Jewish elements in life, as ADL is, may end up finding anti-Jewish this and that where none exist or are intended (like Star Wars).
The Guardian story you posted is informative and also explains the harsh treatment meted out to the Saudi Arabian perpetrator of what does indeed look like an instance of blood libel (as opposed to depictions of Sharon as a vampire). The Guardian also mentioned the example of idiot Rich Lowry who, writing in the previously-mentioned execrable National Review, proposed a nuclear strike on Mecca. Rich Lowry, unlike his Saudi counterpart, was not fired for his words, and got away with saying that it was only a “literary fantasy”. That sounds like a pretty weak excuse for overt anti-Arab or anti-Muslim revenge fantasy bigotry.
I’ll take the Egyptian cartoon of Sharon-Nosferatu drinking Coca-blood over the two examples (one American, one Saudi Arabian) above, no matter what the ADL has to yap about the depiction being “deeply anti-semitic” etc., etc. ad nauseam.
So caution is required when making such assessments, or you may end up missing the real issues (on whichever side, which is why I mentioned the spike in prejudice against Arabs in the US). That’s something that happens frequently if you’re concentrating on someone else’s confirmation bias. I wanted to check what, if anything, ADL had to say about Star Wars and similar works, but the site is once again not working for me.
You are right of course, but my objections to Zionism are not concerned with the “good aspects” of Zionism such as the Jewish Renaissance, but rather with the modern perspective (or appearance to non-Jews) of Zionist nationalist thinking since the 19th century. Nationalism is always a shady influence, and Zionism is a nationalist movement. Also Zionism (to my knowledge) did not make provisions or concessions for the people already living on Eretz Yisra’el, and many of its leading exponents saw little difficulty with ideas such as ethnic cleansing, a concept that did not have a name back then but that was seriously considered and, on sub-national level over an arc of time, sometimes implemented. Since Zionism is essentially a political movement it is defined by its exponents, many of whom held rather questionable ideas (such as expelling Arabs out of Israel).
Regarding your mention of Martin Luther King Jr.’s defence of Zionism, well, good orators and activists are not necessarily good thinkers or logicians, and Jr’s logic is weak to say the least (likewise, others in this thread have pointed out shortcomings in Ghandi’s arguments on this same topic). I don’t see why I ought to take Jr.’s view that “When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews” when Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing (Taleban and Islam are not the same at all either). That is a silly point, and it’s laced with such lavish rhetoric as “they [Jews] were expelled [from a flourishing commonwealth] by the Roman tyrant, the same Romans who cruelly murdered Our Lord”. I don’t think this emotionally laden letter’s interpretation is accurate—the Jews were temporarily expelled hundreds of years before the Romans during the Diaspora, which was a Babylonian affair. Under the Romans didn’t they actually concentrate in Galilee? The Romans in fact brought numerous advantages and benefits to the region, turning it into a “flourishing commonwealth”, although they can definitely be criticized for many of their actions (such as brutally crushing one Jewish revolt after another for hundreds of years; but then again crushing revolts is part of the job if you’re an ancient empire).
Martin Luther King Jr.’s poor reasoning in his arguments is quite extensive; in fact, rather than call it reasoning I would refer to it as “persuasion”.
I can agree with you that not all things Zionist are despicable, I was indeed too hasty in making my comment, but I also disagree that Zionism may be viewed solely as a religious or spiritual movement; it is at least partially political, and political parties are defined by their exponents, not by scripture. So, I may disagree with Zionism, but that does not mean I disagree with Judaism as King Jr. suggests, or with modern Israel in general even. But mixing religion with political movements in the modern age generally does not yield positive results, which is something else that saps my confidence in Zionism (Serbia’s approach in the 1980s and ‘90s to retain crumbling Yugoslav territories involved something vaguely similar: they encouraged migration of Christian Orthodox Serbs to areas of, e.g., Albanian or Bosnian Muslim populations, hoping to supplant them and create a post-Tito unified Yugoslavia—an attempt was thus made to use religion and ethnicity to establish political territorial claims).
Never suggested it was, Fenris, although the big nose is a stereotype sometimes applied to Italians. But it’s important to realize that hook-noses are not the sole domain of Jews. And, with the most famous hook-nose in history belonging to an Italian, why must one automatically assume that hook-nose always equals Jewish stereotype? Alternate explanations for the hook-nose that make more sense than the catch-all evil Jew device have been suggested, including making Sharon look hawkish (Kuroashi), to making him look frightening or evil (Tee and myself).
Automatically assuming that a hook-nose must be a negative Jewish stereotype (without even having seen the work in question) perpetuates the stereotype if indeed it is one, or just results in a waste of energy if it is not.
Not what I said in the least.
Only if you absolutely insist on ignoring the salient points of this discussion. My dictionary defines “hook-nose” simply as an aquiline nose, or one that is curved like an eagle’s beak. Note that “hawk-nosed” and “hook-nosed” have the same meaning. Don’t forget that Sharon is a hawk! And, as showed in the pictures I linked earlier, Sharon does seem to have an aquiline cast to his nose, in the sense that it seems to curve slightly down and inwards in a beak-like manner. Not anything as dramatic as Dante, to be sure, but nonetheless it looks like Sharon has a case of hook-nose. I spent several hundred words discussing how a hook-nose could be things other than a Jewish stereotype, so please don’t try to stick me with phrases like “a Jew that jes’ happens to have a big hooked nose”.
To begin with, your analogy is not parallel. But I would wonder what purpose the systematic replacement (as opposed to exaggeration) of so many of Powell’s facial features is intended to accomplish. If there isn’t a good candidate-reason to explain the depiction I may very well conclude that this is not a caricature but a series of slurs against Powell or perhaps even against blacks, although I think that case is somewhat weaker.
I think you may have a problem with caricatures in general, which exaggerate some features depending on the subject and not necessarily because of stereotypes (but sometimes in tandem with them).
I already mentioned the blood libel example so you ought to realize (especially after all I have written on the topic) that the issue is not as simple as a three-liner simplification. At any rate, determining whether a depiction of a living person is a stereotype involves as much context and intent as the qualities of the depiction itself, otherwise (as I argued) it is possible to detect slurs everywhere based on selective recognition. I already argued that Sharon’s vampire cartoon is very probably not blood libel as originally claimed by the ADL. On the other hand making matzoth with the blood of Christians, Muslims, or children is indeed an instance of blood libel and ought definitely to be considered offensive (same story for the stealing from Christians part, although see below).
I did not misspeak, although it is entirely possible that you have misread my words in an instance of what I alluded to earlier, the watchdog mentality that sometimes makes one suspect slurs where none are intended. Usury is the practice of lending money at an interest, and the purpose of charging interest is of course profit (materialism). Note that usury in the sense of exorbitant interest rates is a definition of law, not of language in general, and is therefore not applicable in this case.
Islam, one of the two world religions most involved with Judaism, explicitly forbids usury, that is lending money at interest for profit (this has led to quite a bit of head-scratching, apologetics, and rationalizations as concerns banking and such interest-reliant sectors). Christianity, although it doesn’t expressly forbid it, certainly has a long tradition of frowning upon usury, probably starting with Jesus’s alleged attitude toward money-lenders in the temple (and similar) and continuing with numerous Church-Fathers, the writings of anti-usurer extraordinaire Gregory of Nyssa, and so forth.
Usury was banned in places in Northern Europe until the 16th Century. The banking revolution started long before that in Italy, when authorities relaxed laws on usury, however it took hundreds of years for the reputation of usury to undergo a continental paradigm shift for the better. While usury was reviled as worse than commerce (another expression of materialism), nonetheless it was considered important throughout history to collect interest and taxes. Usurious materialism became historically associated with Jews for some reasons already discussed, but these points I would consider very important: 1) Christians did not permit Jews to own land or participate in many livelihoods but they could be merchants, 2) Christians did not allow themselves to lend money at interest but permitted Jews to do so, and 3) the practice of employing Jews as tax-collectors.
Associations of Jews with usurious materialism as implied by writers like Shakespeare and Dickens are therefore historically consistent, and are one of the reasons posited to account for the greedy grabbing Jew stereotype (of course, in today’s world everyone is involved with interest and materialism, so there is little left of the original usurer/non-usurer distinction unless we consider extreme cases such as loan-sharks or exorbitant interest charges like my credit card–HSBC is definitely charging me way too much interest).
Note that perceptions in the Islamic world would have been fairly similar to the Christian ones, since both religions decry usury (Islam more so than Christianity), therefore enlarging the effective area in which usurious materialism was considered the domain of Jews.
So, Fenris, I will assume that you accused me of bigotry as the result of an honest mistake and/or careless reading. There’s nothing I find as annoying as an accusation of bigotry.
On the topic of hook-noses again, I am quite interested in exploring the antiquity of this stereotype. I know Hitler’s tactics hinged on the hook-nosed, swarthy, stern looking and often in some way deformed depiction of the Jew, but can someone point me to materials containing earlier hook-nose stereotypes, or did Germany mass-popularize the hook-nosed Jew stereotype only in the early part of the 20th century?
Let’s not forget Gandhi’s ultimate suggestion: that the Jews of Europe, facing the Holocaust, should have committed mass suicide.
So let’s see… given a choice between killing themselves or fighting for their own homeland, which option do YOU think the Jews should have selected?
er… cite?