What makes it extra-special tricky here is that there are some people who are super fucked-up and want to murder children for no good reason, and some of those people are Jewish, and the children that those particular Jewish people want to murder aren’t Jewish. None of that is in dispute, I believe. @Babale has rightly called out some of the worst of the extremist settlers, and some of those most appalling politicians, who’ve bought into a grotesque and murderous ideology.
Other super fucked-up people who want to murder children for no good reason aren’t Jewish, of course, and some of those monsters want to murder Jewish children, of course. And OF COURSE the vast majority of Jews don’t want to murder children, holy fuck. The Venn diagram of “People who want to murder children” and “Jews” has a very small intersection space; but it’s there. I don’t think anyone disputes that it’s there.
“Blood libel”, I think, refers to the idea that Jews, by virtue of being Jewish, engage in child-murder. It’s saying that the Venn diagram is one circle (Jews) inside of another circle (child-killers). It’s a horrifically bigoted lie, and telling someone they’re engaged in blood libel is telling them they’re part of that traditional of violent, bigoted lies against Jews.
It’s absolutely appropriate to discuss the blood libel tradition, and there are people who are engaging in it now; I think it’s appropriate to draw a link between anyone who says “Israel wants to kill Palestinian children” and blood libel.
But the charge is very serious. And people need to be able to defend themselves by emphasizing the veracity of a specific claim–that they’re referring to the actual intersection in the diagrams, not claiming that Jews in general are engaged in violence.
I don’t think the charge of “blood libel” necessarily is restricted to Jews literally killing babies to eat their blood. But I really don’t think it’s so broad that it covers the Israeli army killing masses of civilians who are too close to the army’s enemy, or bombing a hospital in violation of the Geneva conventions. Maybe some Israelis have taken to using the term broadly. But this is a US board, and this US Jew found the accusation of another poster “spreading blood libel” to be shocking and disproportionate to the posts, and really out of the realm of what’s appropriate in MPSIMS.
And the fact that we all acknowledge the existence of
makes the word “libel” dicey, when used to describe actions that a politically important group of people are actually espousing, at least in my eyes.
The idea that a (verbal) attack on Israel is an attack on Jews falls all to neatly into the very anti-Semitic trope that Jews can never be ‘’‘real’‘’ patriotic citizens because they are ‘’‘Jews’‘’ first.
Granted, this is all complicated by the motives of the folks doing the criticism and the intimacy between cultural identity and nationality, but it makes me queasy nonetheless.
Expand the definition at the risk of making it meaningless wharrgarbl,
No. What appears to be in dispute is whether such people make up all or nearly all of the IDF, including both the people giving the orders and the people who are boots on the ground.
As near as I could tell, the claim being made was that they’re killing masses of civilians who are not close to the enemy, and that they know that those civilians are not close to the enemy.
Scrutinize all you’d like, I welcome honest criticism of the IDF because it makes the IDF a more moral force as well as a more effective one that keeps Israel safer.
The posts I objected to alleged that the IDF is bombing civilians and hospitals not because the IDF is being indiscriminate in targeting Hamas positions but because the IDF is intentionally targeting civilians and hospitals in order to drive Palestinians out of Gaza.
Exactly. This, and only this, is the claim I was responding to so harshly.
This is the key point. If you want to say, “The IDF is so driven to destroy Hamas that it is causing unjustifiable damage to Palestinian civilians, and this is wrong” then I may not agree with you but I will supoort your right to say it.
If you claim without evidence that the IDF is attacking Palestinian civilians directly, in places where the IDF does not believe Hamas is hiding - as the posts I was responding to claimed - I will call that out, and I will point out the antisemitic history behind such statements.
Pointing out that a statement fits this mold is not the same as accusing the person who made that statement of antisemitism. It could be an accidental coincidence that their argument fits this mold; they could be echoing someone else who they did not realize was tapping into antisemitic tropes; etc.
That is exactly as antisemitic as the claims that Palestinians have a “warlike culture” are Islamophobic. Despite the difference between “Palestinian” and “Muslim”.
I see it as like noticing a comment that someone is making is echoing something Hitler said.
You’re not saying that the person is trying to be like Hitler. You’re not calling them a Nazi. But it’s worth pointing out for reflection, maybe the person wants to reevaluate their position.
(I know I’m Godwinning this thread, but there are times in political discussions when this actually does happen.)
The point is that an accusation of a depraved desire to kill children has a tendency to stick, and feel “truthy” when it is directed at Jews because there is a whole antisemitic through line in western culture supporting it. Making the accusation about any other group is not equivalent. The blood libel is libel. Do not compare it to Nazis who really did have a depraved desire to kill Jewish children, and who did so.
…if you want to bring up my alleged claims here, I request that you quote them rather than paraphrase them, because this paraphrase, like the others already posted in this thread, are not accurate and are missing the nuance and the full context of what I was arguing.
And again, I’m not going to debate this in this thread. If you want to debate the words I actually said, I’ll do that in the relevant thread when and if I’m allowed to because to do that here would be off-topic.
…the accusation that I’m making blood libel claims have a tendency to stick. Its probably the worst thing I’ve been accused of in my life. It makes me sick to the stomach. That further implications of anti-semitism against me have been allowed to stand here in this thread make me never want to post here again.
I’m posting in general. I’m not responding to you or your post.
I don’t think comparing a claim to blood libel is attacking the poster and I think shutting it down is a bad and unfair idea. And also that making that link doesn’t equate to an accusation of the poster being antisemitic – a person can, through unconscious bias, wind up using words and images that are a part of our culture, with no bad intentions.
…IMHO, “in general” posts don’t belong here unless you can point to examples that are relevant to ATMB. Nobody is actually making “accusations of a depraved desire to kill children.”
Many people have made that exact argument, and while I disagreed with them I did not describe their statements as “blood libel”.
There are lightyears between that sort of criticism, and this:
Emphasis mine. Note, nothing wrong with seeing things fromthe Palestinian perspective, it’s important we do that; but these posts identify that perspective as “Israel is ethically cleansing Palestinians through deliberate child murder” and then claims it’s the only way to make sense of IDF actions.
Except no one directed that criticism at Jews. It was directed at the IDF. That may feel like the same thing to Israelis because antisemites of the region try to conflate the two, but most of us in the rest of the world are quite aware of the difference and are capable of distinguishing them and debating appropriately. More people should.
…this thread is literally about what people think I should be allowed to post about.
And the reality is that blood libel claims have a tendency to stick. This thread is about claims I’ve made. I made a very specific, carefully written post that Babale has just quoted in full with the relevant context. It was a post that contextualised how things look through the Palestinian lens.
What it was not was a blood libel claim. I’m happy to debate the nuance of my statement in the relevant thread. But I stand by what I said.