What he said.
I have rarely met a polite Israeli, and rarely met a rude Palestinian.
Israelis say what they think, not what the listener wants to hear. Some Westerners find that offensive.
Heh, that’s one way of looking at it. Israelis are used to being rude to one another so do not even see it as rude. Yes, it’s offensive to westerners but the trained eye/ear understands.
Israeli expats tend to be rude and Palestinian expats tend to be polite. But at the same time Yasser Arafat was a crook and Palestinians don’t want to hear that. They don’t want to hear about his holding of a trendy bowling alley in New York bought with Palestinian funds. It’s complex.
Israelis and Palestinians both are interesting. My experience with both has been welcome and I would associate with both again.
Sometime, when passions are less, we ought to start a thread about rude foreigners. Israelis are infamous for being brusk. (A buddy of mine reported being yelled at for answering the phone when it was a wrong number.)
Israeli society is generally egalitarian, and egalitarianism was a specific ideological goal of the founders of Israel. Generally, the more egalitarian a society, the more informal it is, and the less “politeness” is valued and the more directness is. Israel is also very much a first name society, even more so than the US.
Yea apparently in Israel they jostle for position in line at the grocery store too
That’s a bit of an outdated stereotype, although it was accurate in its day; there’s been noticeable improvement (at least, noticeable to me) in that area over the past couple of decades. Israelis have, generally speaking, figured out lines. I think things started to change when the Post Office began handing out numbers. There’s probably a sociology paper in here somewhere - anyone interested?
The thing is, the change may not be obvious to the outside observer, who often sees a bunch of people milling around a counter in apparent chaos. Don’t be misled - even though they aren’t actually *standing *in line, everyone there knows exactly who’s ahead of them and who isn’t.
Yea, this was from my ex-wife in about 2001.
Yeah, I know how that goes, I live in New York.
Why are you still talking about Israelis and “what Max found”? There were none in that film clip.
Seems to me that this sort of confusion was exactly what the film-makers were after.
I completely disagree that they sought to attack and humiliate most or all Jews and especially Israelis. That’s absurd. It’s obvious to everyone that they were interviewing young people, many of them Americans, who were enjoying a spring break type of atmosphere with lots of alcohol.
If this were the first man-on-the-street interview video ever, maybe I could concede your point.
The interviewer didn’t have to prod anybody to say what they said. Some of them were grabbing the mic from him so they could have their say.
So…this video means that if liberals rightly criticize overly agressive policies of the Israeli right, those liberals will be mocked? I don’t see how your logic follows.
It’s a little hard to judge when the video isn’t available. What a shame that it’s so hard to find on the internet. I thought we prided ourselves on free speech, and made fun of countries that don’t honor it. Has YouTube mentioned yet why they took it down? Was it because of the hate speech directed at people of African descent?
I hope there’s a transcript out there.
I’ll tell you what it reminds me of, though. It reminds of MEMRI television, whose mission is to disseminate the most outlandish news and videos hand-cherry-picked from the Arab world. Sometimes with titles like “An Alarming Video Every Westerner Must See!!!”
What they sought was to prove that Zionist youth groups foster uncritical, reactionary support for Israel. As he put it here:
Again he does the double-shift: American Jews = possible future Israelis = Israeli attitudes via the “Zionist project”; finally, he assumes this is the “Israeli view of Obama”.
What nonsense. Isn’t the “real” story the fact he couldn’t find any real, live Israelis in Israel to parrot the views he so evidently wants to attribute to them?
It is surely a significant difference that MEMRI merely translates news and video stories actually broadcast in the ME.
I looked an the MEMRI TV website and did not see any titles such as you suggest, and while certainly some of the clips portray Arabs and Muslims in a bad light, they certainly do not all do so.
This was the very first story on the site:
Most often on state-sponsored media.
My apologies, that might be a bit ambiguous.
I should said “state run and controlled media”
I have some comments regarding the following quoted replies…
There is an even stronger tendency towards nationalism and aggression in and among Americans, so your and Paul’s suggestion and/or argument concerning Israelis is pretty much invalid. Why? Because Blumenthal and Dana only showed us hate-spewing Americans! And drunk ones, at that! No Israelis! (At least none that said anything even approaching what the Americans said).
Yet – and this point cannot be overstressed – they emphasized that these (cherry-picked) Americans were in Jerusalem! In Israel! That’s the core of my arguments in this thread: Why show us Americans in Israel? Emphasizing in the very title that the film is about and from Jerusalem? There is only one psychologically and intellectually honest answer: They wanted – nay, needed – people to mistakenly confuse and associate drunk American bigots = Jewish and Israeli bigots in order to lead them to believe the worst about Israelis and Jews! Finagle’s balls! How much more blatantly obvious can anti-Semitic propaganda get!
Paul and bengangmo and those who think they see something of genuine interest in that anti-scientific propaganda video are trying desperately to cross and blur their own eyes so that they won’t see this vicious, anti-Semitic propaganda as vicious, anti-Semitic propaganda. I do not ascribe to them any knowing, deliberate anti-Semitism, but there’s no good reason to try and defend the video even only as “interesting”. (At least “interesting” as anything other than bogus anti-Semitic propaganda.)
(Perhaps I should add at this point that I’m an atheist and United States native citizen, with no Jewish or Israeli relatives or personal social connections to either group.)
What ridiculous tripe. “Invest” enough money in a film crew, liquor and/or drugs, and I’ll deliver you a tape with 15 intoxicated people praising or even bragging about pedophilia in public!
All it takes is anti-scientific cherry-picking and a population to select from. And, if you allow me some coaching (and who says Blumenthal and Dana didn’t coach their “subjects”?), I’ll do it in one night. Watch some episodes of The Colbert Report “Better Know a District” segments, and you’ll find high-profile elected politicians saying pretty much anything you want, including one who said on camera that he’d “have to look into” the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA, a pro-pedophilia group (no longer extant)) before voting against it! Also said on camera is a U.S. Representative who stated: “I enjoy cocaine because it gives me joy” and “I enjoy the company of prostitutes for the following reasons: It represses women, it’s generally illegal… and it gives me joy”. (exact quotes).
So? This is relevant how? I’ve only met a couple of Israeli civilians that I know of, and they were very polite. I’ve only met three Palestinian civilians, and they were all impolitely arguing that Israel should be “swept into the sea” and the “stolen land” should be returned to themselves and their families after all Israelis have been killed. Now, I have no idea what any of these individuals were actually thinking or what they actually believe (the Israelis could have been Mossad assassins and the Palestinians could have been role-playing), but what makes your experience more valid and relevant than mine? Let’s drop that whole line of argument, shall we?
What he (Malthus) said (if I may echo Paul’s words).
Learning this last does not surprise me. Allow me to explain my logic. First, let me describe the essential background steps: The creation of the video in the first place.
(1): Hire a film crew and record a great many drunken, angry people at night in Jerusalem, taking as many nights as you need to to capture enough people to serve your agenda. Go ahead and buy them booze and/or drugs to get them in the mood to be publicly belligerent. Telling them that Obama secretly called them kikes or other vile anti-Semitic epithet is a great strategy, since that lie will play into the ignorant prejudice of ignorant people that African Americans and Jews hate each other. If you want or need to, go ahead and coach them in what you want them to say, or even pay them outright to say what you want them to; nobody will ever know because you will not provide any evidence of any attempt to interview a genuine, scientifically representative sample. After all, that would ruin your agenda.
(2): If it takes ten thousand people to find 15 who will say what you want said, maintain your patience and you will eventually be “rewarded”.
(3): Edit down how ever many hours of videotape you need to leave the 15 who said what you needed them to say to fit your agenda, which is: "Israelis and most, if not all, Jews hate Barack Obama and other African Americans so much that they’ll openly display their hatred by spewing ugly, vicious, racist epithets! The United States must not continue providing military support for Israel because… [fill in specious “reasoning” here; for example, you might try to intuit that “they’ll turn right around and attack the United States, the vicious, scheming, nigger-hating kikes will – see if they don’t!”]
(4): Post the anti-scientifically cherry-picked propaganda video under the title “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem” and watch the anti-Semites in the U.S. and elsewhere demonize Israel and the Jews as evil, vicious hate-mongers! (Insert Jon Stewart’s Cheney or Bush laughter imitation here…)
Now: We finally get to your question:
It’s really quite simple. When American liberals criticize various overly aggressive Israeli policies (such as the settlements), our political and polemical opponents will simply point to Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem, remind people that the creator, Blumenthal, is an American liberal, then correctly note the plain, blatantly obvious fact that the video is a ludicrously anti-scientific, cherry-picked, hate-mongering, anti-Semitic propaganda hit piece, and by the spurious transitive property almost universally employed by our opponents, they claim or imply the following equation: Blumenthal = American liberal anti-Semitic hate-monger = all American liberals.
That’s what I meant by “low-hanging fruit”.
And you know they were not prodded how, exactly? But even that’s irrelevant in this case. To remind yourself why, please re-read my explanation of the steps, above.
Perhaps I should explain that last: It’s “low-hanging fruit” because it’s particularly easy for mental-dwarfs to pick and hurl against the also-mental-dwarfs who find such arguments “convincing”. Alas, the membership in that club are legion…
Inaccurate. To put it with precision, they merely publicly claimed that they sought to prove that Zionist youth groups foster uncritical, reactionary support for Israel.
But we know for certain that they actually did nothing of the kind, because in order to prove such a thing, they would have to have utilized valid, peer-reviewed scientific methodology and have provided their raw data for independent analysis – rather than merely assert as fact what they allegedly “sought to prove”. A statement is not proof of it’s own truth.
Yes.
Dammit, I forgot to add this: liberal web sites like The Huffington Post took down Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem only in part because (I suspect) a great many liberals (Jewish, Israeli, or other) balked at the racist epithets. But I’ve been told by an occasional contributor there that Huffington also saw the severe damage such a video would do to the American liberal cause concerning Israeli right-wing policies.