I invaded Israel straight out of my mother’s womb? I mean, I’m badass, but I’m not THAT badass.
Again: define an ethnic group. Please.
Let me put it this way: I’ve lived outside of Israel. But even when I was living on the U.S., I was still an Israeli, and never an American Jew. No offense, but I never had much in common with those people. Being Israeli is not a matter of politics, it’s my essential nature; hating me for being Israeli is hating me for being who I am, not what I do.
Puh-leeze. A man with a video camera and a microphone walked up to her on the street and asked her to take part in a video. You know what that’s called in journalism? AN INTERVIEW. Not an ambush. INTERVIEW. An ambush is reporters waiting in front of someone’s house to ask ‘is it true you’re cheating on your wife?’ or Bill O’Reilly’s producer trying to trap someone on a bus to ask him some leading questions about the scandal of the day. It’s a situation where you are deliberately catching someone off guard or making them uncomfortable with the hope of getting an unexpected answer or making them look bad. That’s an ambush.
And it’s worth claiming that Thomas hasn’t put forth any of these preposterous excuses either. And I wouldn’t expect her to, either.
If this is true it’s only because you mentioned racial and ethnic groups and left off religious ones. She indicates repeatedly that she’s talking about Jews.
I think you have answered your own question. You think that it is fair to badger someone with a bait and switch that assumes facts not in evidence. I don’t. I don’t like her answer, and you “can’t un-ring the bell”, but that doesn’t mean that the question was fair, it wasn’t. If you take out the emotional content and replace it with “q” and “p” and take it to any logic professor, you will get a ruling of a fallacy. In a court, if you object before the question is answered, it will be sustained. But my sense of fairness and even-handedness is different from your sense of fairness and even-handedness. The factual context does matter a great deal, but proper professional conduct does to.
It’s an ambush if someone misquotes me in a question back to me. Remove the emotional content and subject matter and try this in a logic class or a courtroom. See what happens. Or do it with someone you know on a different subject matter. The end does not justify the means. That you think it does and that the misconduct of the reporter doesn’t bother you at all speaks poorly of you.
That’s true enough.
Yes.
That would be stupid and unjust as well.
Today’s black and white South Africans share the same right to live in peace, security and justice, as do today’s Palestinians and Israelis. All of them are right to feel the land is theirs.
Now that I read it again I don’t even think there is a bait and switch. She says ‘They’ should move back home. So the reporter asks her to clarify ‘The jews [in Israel] should go back to Poland and Germany?’ Since she isn’t being clear, I see no problem with t he reporter’s question.
Did you read the last line?
Yes, which makes her remarks stupid and ill-informed but probably not intentionally anti-Semitic.
Well no. You asserted that Israeli’s were an ethnic group. As far as I know, they aren’t.
I would strongly consider that if there are peer reviewed journal articles in anthropological studies made by those outside of of an ethnic group for scientific purposes (not political purposes) that would be evidence of an ethnic group. The more such articles in more journals by more authors reviewed by a wider peer group, the better the evidence.
No, that is parsing it and editing it. Repeat the entire exchange. If it is on video or audio, link to the whole thing. Her remarks were insensitive with respect to Poland and Germany, but not as insensitive as the editing, which leaves out US would have it. And the way it is presented in GO’s quote leaves it vague as to who switched from Israelis to Jews. It is not a long exchange, and she does not come off smelling like a rose, there is no need to edit it to make it more damnable than it actually is.
The word ethnic group has absolutely nothing to do with science. It’s the sociological conceit: if they consider themselves an ethnic group, they are. Just like everyone who self-identifies as Christian is Christian.
But she keeps saying ‘They’ Who is the 'they she is referring to? Israeli Jews, presumably. So he asks the “The Jews…” How is it a bait and switch, what is he saying that she is not agreeing to. Its not like she meant sojjething else but he got her by switching to Jews…she meant the Jews. How is that a bait-and-switch? He was actually asking her to clarify. They should move back to Poland and Germany. They? The Jews. Yes, the Jews. Is anyone seriously arguing that is not what she meant…the Jews in Israel should move back to Poland and Germand…and America?
And you think loaded words like “ambush,” “badger” and “bait and switch” are a substitute for a coherent argument, which they are not. She was asked, repeatedly, to clarify what she meant. If she’d just said “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” it would be a different story. I would have thought she was talking about the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank and I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
But there’s no replacement. He asked her a question and then asked follow up questions to clarify the meaning of her answer. That’s not substituting one term for another.
I think I see the problem here: not only do you use loaded words, you don’t know what they mean. He did not misquote her. His question was actually longer than her answer. This is called asking for clarification. And what really screws up your argument that he’s pulling a bait and switch is the fact that she provides the clarification and doesn’t dispute what he says.
So you think a misquote is asking “When you said X, did you mean XYZ?” . Badgering them, then, is using this tactic several times in a row, which most other people would call doing an interview. An ambush is badgering someone with misquotes while on camera. And baiting and switching would be moving from one topic to another.
Yes. I missed it the first time and saw it when I re-read the post.
“Wasn’t I wearing a hat?”
As John Stewart once said “I’m not talking about those ‘hey, let me help you with your taxes’ Jews. I’m talking about the ‘hey, hold my machine gun while I take a piss’ kind of Jews.”
http://folk.uio.no/geirthe/Ethnicity.html
I think this is an interesting, albeit long, article about ethnicity. I don’t really have a problem thinking of Israeli people as being an ethnic group that is separate and distinctive from the Palestinians or other people living in the region. I have no problem thinking of the Palestinians as a group that are separate and distinctive from other Arabs. Ethnic identity can often be complicated and is more fluid than we might think.
Odesio
The idea that she was talking about anything other than Israeli Jews is absurd. “Germany” and “Poland” didn’t provide Israel with immigrants of any other stripe.
But the thing that is amazing is that someone as well informed as she should be about geopolitics doesn’t understand that a good chunk of Israeli Jews came from places they can’t go back to-- ie, Arab countries that wouldn’t have them. Not to mention we’re talking about the parents and grandparents, in many cases, of Israeli-born Jews.
And coming from an American, whose own country’s history is not too different, it’s just ignorant. It reminds me of religious people who deride the Mormons, simply because their story book is 150 years old instead of 2000 years old.
That’s a good point. Syria and Yemen expelled the Jews whose families had been living there for generations.
Exactly.
I’m perfectly willing to accept the Palestinians as an ethnic group. But answer me this: if I were to declare myself to be anti-Palestinian, would people here call me racist?
Only Israeli Jews and only because they’re in Israel, She was making no statement about either ethnicity or religion in themselves.