In a recent, now locked, thread, a certain now banned poster made statements that were from word go clearly hate speech. Idiotic hate speech borne of stupidity. Not subtle.
It reminded me of when I was a teen-ager and the Nazis wanted to march in Skokie. believe my Dad was serious in his consideration of buying a rifle and picking them off … he had been one of the first American GIs at the gates of the concentration camp Dachau. Others gave these attention craving dipwads all the press they longed for with protests and behaving as if these twerps were something worthy of fear.
Me? I advocated for a counter rally but of a certain kind: a circus. Jugglers and clowns cause that’s what these wombats were. Something to be laughed at.
I am concerned about the Jew-haters, but the Jew-haters that worry me are too smart to be calling for Jews to “be identified.” They are neferious. They often don’t even think of themselves as Jew-haters. They just believe that stereotypes have a basis in fact. They “understand” why temples are bombed as a reaction to the Israel/Arab conflict. They think that the Holocaust is played up and/or exaggerated by the Jewish media. And so on. These ones worry me. But not the idiotic clowns who are one goosestep away from shouting Heil Hitler. they are merely comic relief.
So the debate: why engage with these fools at all? Why not exert some self-control and step away from the keyboard?
If a Mod feels this belongs in The Pit, then please feel free to move it. I do not think that I cross any insult lines by stating clear facts and am interested in a real debate on the proper response to idiotic blatant hate speech. If you are of a diffeerent thought, well it is your show and I defer.
DSeid: You read my mind, as I was thinking of openning a thread just like this for the same reason. I’m amazed at how patient some posters can be when dealing with a person using such obviously hateful and erroneous tactics. He never responded to my post, but my plan in this case was to give him one chance to actually back up his posts with something substantial, and if he failed to do so, ignore him from then on.
One chance, and then ignore. That’s my formula.
Notice that those type of people do not come here to learn, but to preach. You never see them ask questions, only make statements. I think that is the clear way to distinguish between someone who might be swayed and a hopeless case.
My apologies for responding to him. I sometimes forget the modus operandi of NeoNazis, and somehow expect to find one that’s deluded, not deliberately lying.
The best response to a racist rally I’ve ever heard of was called a Lemonade Rally – as in what you do when life hands you lemons. They got people to pledge to the NAACP for every minute that the racist rally continued – if you pledged a quarter a minute and the rally went on for two hours, you’d send $50 to the NAACP. They turned the Klan rally into an NAACP fundraiser :D.
“They “understand” why temples are bombed as a reaction to the Israel/Arab conflict. They think that the Holocaust is played up and/or exaggerated by the Jewish media. And so on. These ones worry me.”
Does Norman Finkelstein (“The Holocaust Industry”) worry you?
It’s safe to say that were there greater “understanding” of why an occupied and abused people historically and contemporaneously resist the occupiers – as opposed to diverting attention from the rather obvious issues via trivializing overuse of the term “anti-semitism” – would do much to create the conditions for peaceful conflict resolution in the middle east.
I disagree with the OP. Watching Franklin unravel like frayed yarn in the face of coherent responses to his rants was a pleasure as well as a learning experience, although the Stormfronters would clearly prefer your approach.
Because ignoring them, gives them a stronger pull on the fence-sitters and lurkers. Allowing these guys to spew them vemon unchallenged, gives them a free pass and that’s something they get way with to often.
This is one of the few mediums, that allows the fence-sitters the ability to weigh the points made by both sides and with a search engine actually verify the facts.
These guys can’t shout down opposing thoughts of veiws on a message board, like they do on tv or a rallies. They can lie, but those lies are easily exposed with a link. Something that doesn’t happen on TV ( which is a “white” genetic characteristic, you know…)
This is the perfect forum for such subjects and even if the poster gets his fifteen mintues, the damage his illogic does to his cause is forever.
i just wish they wouldn’t self destruct so quickly…
I agree with holmes, these guys will claim victory regardless if you Ignore them or react to them. Now that may not bother most of us directly, but the silent fence-sitters (if I may borrow that term) are watching too.
So I say, present an argument and let them speak, it is usually the quickest way to their own discrediting.
Depends on the context. I don’t think there are any “fence sitters” on this Board. Folks like our recently banned poster won’t get a single person here to agree with them. Ignore them and they will go away. Debate with them and they’ll get banned and go away. I guess one could say six of one half a dozen of the other. Ignore them is easier.
Well, I guess I don’t think of someone who needs convincing that the statement that Jews need to be identified and caused WWI and control the media are false as “a fence sitter.”
Now false statements should be calmly pointed out lest it turn into a “Big Lie” … thus I responded to correct the falsehood about the origins of the term “antisemitism” and to point out that its original meaning was Jew-hater, as it is today. Otherwise intelligent people may be ignorant of the history of that term and think themselves wise for knowing that “Semite” in isolation includes Arabs as well as Jews. But to do more is akin to feeding the trolls.
Lout, yes, you are more scary to me. You who with apparent good intentions defend the bombing of targets solely based upon their being Jewish as an understandable means of “resistance.” You who take it upon yourselves to tell me that concern that some mullahs call for the deaths of Jews everywhere and of the broadcast of grossly antisemitic tripe on state run Arab media, is “trivializing” the term “antisemitism.” You who would happily go to a rally that demeaned the memory of all who died in the Holocaust (Jew, Romani or other) by comparing the current situation in the MidEast as Israel acting like Nazis and compare the current situation to genocide as if the PA was the Rebel Alliance against an Israeli Death Star. Yes, those who react to Jewish concerns about antisemitism with “You Jews are always crying antisemitism for no reason” scare me. Those people, who do not see themselves as Jew-haters, (heck, some of my freinds are Jewish!), or who may even occassionally be of Jewish heritage themselves … they scare me. But that has been the subject of many a past thread. And they often deserve debate. For the sake of the fence sitters if no one else.
But the idiotic blatherers … there are no fence sitters there.
But sometime, calmly pointing out why they’re completely and utterly wrong is a lot more fun.
I do not consider this to be automatically equivalent to “feeding the trolls”. Responding in anger, or dropping to their level of namecalling and hatred: yes, that is troll-feeding. But quietly and calmly cutting their so-called arguments to ribbons is not the kind of attention that I imagine they’re looking for.
Dseid, I remember the Skokie incident very, very well; I was in grade school in Evanston (a neighboring suburb) at the time. In our class, it became a “teachable moment;” we had a big class discussion about it, with class responses (I forget what grade I was in then, but it was a mixed 4th- and 5th-grade class) ranging from “don’t let them have the rally” to “ignore them” to “go, but throw tomatoes at them” to “feel free to go and pick them off with shotguns.”
(To those who didn’t grow up next door to Skokie and/or remember the incident, it should be noted that it was rally scheduled for Yom Kippur, in a suburb which was the largely Jewish and inhabited by a significant number of Holocaust survivors.)
I can’t remember what our teacher said, or what we decided, but the discussion itself is still engraved on my brain. I thought it was a truly kickass response to a very ugly situation.
I also remember the summer of 1995, when I had one of the more surreal moments of my life: I spent the morning at the Novosibirsk regional meeting of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (a misnomer if ever there was one; the LDPR is Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s party. He is a racist, anti-Semitic wack job, not so different from Hitler, except that so far he is taken less seriously.)
It didn’t take long for the party’s ideology director to start going on about how Jews control the world financial system, Russia is in danger of being overrun by “blacks” [Russian derogatory term for Caucasians and Central Asians], and the like. As one of three Americans and definitely the only Jew in a room of maybe 1,000 people, I was very creeped out. It was like listening to Hitler in 1935 or something. I was even more creeped out when a Party official came up to my group (we had been specially invited as part of a summer program in Russian for social sciences) and asked us to leave, as the afternoon was their campaign strategy planning session, and well, “you never know who the KGB officials are.”
On the bus ride back to campus, the Russian teacher in our group saw how unsettled I was, and tried to reassure me by saying that he was obviously a loony. Perhaps so, but a lot of people were taking him seriously; supposedly regional Party membership was up by 800% in the previous year. (Novosibirsk is a military heavy industry town, and had been hit disproportionately by the economic downturn. Easy enough to blame the Jews, no?)
It would be nice to be able to ignore people like that, but it’s still too dangerous to let them go unchallenged, no matter how crazy they may seem to rational people.
For those of us who live in CA, there is a need to conserve water. I think it’s environmnetally insensitive to force onesself to have to take too many showers in one day.
As for the topic, why MUST we respond to hate speech? Because by not responding the haters get the mistaken impression they are right or that they are so tough that we are afraid to stand up to them. These are bullies whose only real weapon is fear and if we show them that we are not afraid of them they slink back to their rat holes. They still believe what they believed when they first came but they learn there is one place where they can’t spew it.
I dunno. If you debate them, they invaribaly get banned and end up thinking they are victims and they got banned because we’re afraid of them. If you ignore them, they slink back to their rat holes with a nagging feeling of being a punk.
But I would make a distinction between someone who really comes here to learn (ie, asks questions about other’s positions), and those who come here simply to spout their crap without debating. I think these guys get their jollies by baiting and trolling. The more you argue with them, the more they are sure they are right.
You can’t hope to change their attitude; they are subject to self-reinforcing delusions.
Arguing with them identifies you as one of the enemy, or a sympathiser (in which case, your arguments can be ignored, because they are false- plenty of logical fallacy there, but hey).
Failing (or refusing) to engage them in debate with them makes them think their arguments are superior and irrefutible.
-Banning them vindicates their delusion that there is a big clique or conspiracy.
In all cases, they go away with strengthened delusion.
The best you can hope for is that the undecided will see the sensible side of a debate, in which case an attempt to refute any unsound arguments they make is the least worst option.
I am very glad that I am “scary” to you. People like you – who insist on characterizing every legitimate criticism of Israel’s neo-colonial race war to dispossess the inferior brown people of their homes and their land and their resources (principally water) for the second time in 50 years as “anti-semitic” – don’t scare me, despite your absurd attempts to bludgeon me into submission by using the term “anti-semitism” like a blunt object, thereby trivializing every victim of real anti-semitism throughout history and degrading him/her to the status of a political tool --just disgust me. You aren’t scary, you are just pathetic.
“Antisemitism”, properly and narrowly speaking, doesn’t mean hatred of semites; that is to confuse etymology with definition. It means hatred of Jews. But here, immediately, we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: “Look! We’re a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry–a religion!” When we tire of this game, we get suckered into another: "anti-Zionism is antisemitism! " quickly alternates with: “Don’t confuse Zionism with Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!”
Well, let’s be good sports. Let’s try defining antisemitism as broadly as any supporter of Israel would ever want: antisemitism can be hatred of the Jewish race, or culture, or religion, or hatred of Zionism. Hatred, or dislike, or opposition, or slight unfriendliness.
But supporters of Israel won’t find this game as much fun as they expect. Inflating the meaning of ‘antisemitism’ to include anything politically damaging to Israel is a double-edged sword. It may be handy for smiting your enemies, but the problem is that definitional inflation, like any inflation, cheapens the currency. The more things get to count as antisemitic, the less awful antisemitism is going to sound. This happens because, while no one can stop you from inflating definitions, you still don’t control the facts. In particular, no definition of ‘antisemitism’ is going to eradicate the substantially pro-Palestinian version of the facts which I espouse, as do most people in Europe, a great many Israelis, and a growing number of North Americans.
What difference does that make? Suppose, for example, an Israeli rightist says that the settlements represent the pursuit of aspirations fundamental to the Jewish people, and to oppose the settlements is antisemitism. We might have to accept this claim; certainly it is difficult to refute. But we also cannot abandon the well-founded belief that the settlements strangle the Palestinian people and extinguish any hope of peace. So definitional acrobatics are all for nothing: we can only say, screw the fundamental aspirations of the Jewish people; the settlements are wrong. We must add that, since we are obliged to oppose the settlements, we are obliged to be antisemitic. Through definitional inflation, some form of ‘antisemitism’ has become morally obligatory.
It gets worse if anti-Zionism is labeled antisemitic, because the settlements, even if they do not represent fundamental aspirations of the Jewish people, are an entirely plausible extension of Zionism. To oppose them is indeed to be anti-Zionist, and therefore, by the stretched definition, antisemitic. The more antisemitism expands to include opposition to Israeli policies, the better it looks. Given the crimes to be laid at the feet of Zionism, there is another simple syllogism: anti-Zionism is a moral obligation, so, if anti-Zionism is antisemitism, antisemitism is a moral obligation.
What crimes? Even most apologists for Israel have given up denying them, and merely hint that noticing them is a bit antisemitic. After all, Israel ‘is no worse than anyone else’. First, so what? At age six we knew that “everyone’s doing it” is no excuse; have we forgotten? Second, the crimes are no worse only when divorced from their purpose. Yes, other people have killed civilians, watched them die for want of medical care, destroyed their homes, ruined their crops, and used them as human shields. But Israel does these things to correct the inaccuracy of Israel Zangwill’s 1901 assertion that “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews are a people without a country”. It hopes to create a land entirely empty of gentiles, an Arabia deserta in which Jewish children can laugh and play throughout a wasteland called peace.
Well before the Hitler era, Zionists came thousands of miles to dispossess people who had never done them the slightest harm, and whose very existence they contrived to ignore. Zionist atrocities were not part of the initial plan. They emerged as the racist obliviousness of a persecuted people blossomed into the racial supremacist ideology of a persecuting one. That is why the commanders who directed the rapes, mulilations and child-killings of Deir Yassin went on to become prime ministers of Israel.(*) But these murders were not enough. Today, when Israel could have peace for the taking, it conducts another round of dispossession, slowly, deliberately making Palestine unliveable for Palestinians, and liveable for Jews. Its purpose is not defense or public order, but the extinction of a people. True, Israel has enough PR-savvy to eliminate them with an American rather than a Hitlerian level of violence. This is a kinder, gentler genocide that portrays its perpetrators as victims.
Israel is building a racial state, not a religious one. Like my parents, I have always been an atheist. I am entitled by the biology of my birth to Israeli citizenship; you, perhaps, are the most fervent believer in Judaism, but are not. Palestinians are being squeezed and killed for me, not for you. They are to be forced into Jordan, to perish in a civil war. So no, shooting Palestinian civilians is not like shooting Vietnamese or Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren’t ‘collateral damage’ in a war against well-armed communist or separatist forces. They are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one Jewish grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is not the bloody mistake of a blundering superpower but an emerging evil, the deliberate strategy of a state conceived in and dedicated to an increasingly vicious ethnic nationalism. It has relatively few corpses to its credit so far, but its nuclear weapons can kill perhaps 25 million people in a few hours.
Do we want to say it is antisemitic to accuse, not just the Israelis, but Jews generally of complicity in these crimes against humanity? Again, maybe not, because there is a quite reasonable case for such assertions. Compare them, for example, to the claim that Germans generally were complicit in such crimes. This never meant that every last German, man, woman, idiot and child, were guilty. It meant that most Germans were. Their guilt, of course, did not consist in shoving naked prisoners into gas chambers. It consisted in support for the people who planned such acts, or–as many overwrought, moralistic Jewish texts will tell you–for denying the horror unfolding around them, for failing to speak out and resist, for passive consent. Note that the extreme danger of any kind of active resistance is not supposed to be an excuse here.
One thing’s for damn sure: When somelike our recently departed guest shows up, it’s amazing how one finds how much one has in common with one’s usual debating adversaries! And that’s a good thing.
Sorry. I have condemned both the participants of Deir Yassan and the nation of Israel for not condemning (preferably in a trial, but at least in voice) the perpetrators of Deir Yassan. However, when you repeat the lies of “rape and mutilation” that were created by the Arab propagandists (and tacitly encouraged by Israeli propagandists to frighten Arab villages), then you are simply engaging in the sort of lies for which you wish to condemn Israel.
The Deir Yassan massacre is a stain on Israel that Israel has never addressed properly, but the cold-blooded murders that were committed are sufficient cause for condemnation without heaping on tales of things that never happened. (The denial that rapes or deliberate mutilations occurred are recorded in the testimony of surviving Deir Yassan villagers.)
What happens after the banning is that the troll visits elsewhere and crows a bit and send cronies over here to take a gander. Amongst those, there may well be those who’re swayable.
To see the discussion devolve into name-calling and/or emotionally laden diatribe serves the purposes of the troll.
Unemotional and sensible discussion pointing out holes in the logic and errors in fact etc are the way to mark the record of the troll’s incursion.
When he susbequently links to it, there’s not the “shocked reaction to the truth” that he portrays it as, rather just a boring systematic discrediting of the argument given.
Because its dirty boring work very few people take it up.
Definitely no need for emotional responses to off topic items that somehow inevitaby crop up.
Have you perhaps read any of the threads I’ve participated in before saying that? Or do you merely prejudge? Some people I guess know what positions other people will take by one fact about them. (BTW, I did a search of your posts before posting my comment.) I, for example, have been quite vocal in my belief that the policy of settlements in the West Bank has been wrong for both parties’ interests and is an obstacle to a comprehensive peace settlement. By your assessment I must consider myself an antisemite. :rolleyes: In fact however I have never heard even the most rightist Zionist take the position that you ascribe to them, that opposition to settlements is antisemitism. Or that any criticism of Israeli policies is antisemitism. Nor that Zionism requires support of the concept of Judea and Samaria.
But some antisemites do use Israel as cover for Jew-hating, much akin to Wilhelm Marr’s wanting to make a term that allowed him to express his Jew-hating with a less vulgar phrase. There are those who do not want to associate with the likes of the FP, who may be quite leftist, but who share similar leanings regarding Jews. Their Jew-hating is clothed in rightous indignation, but it doesn’t cover up the smell. Again, some of them may be of Jewish heritage even. That doesn’t change the nature of their hate. I rarely make an accusation of that because you never really know what motivates another. But I begin to privately suspect such when their POV is extremely one-sided and histrionic, when they persistently distort the facts, when they hold Israel as villianous by a standard that they apply to no one else, a standard that they never apply to those who attack Jews, and especially if they defend attacks on Jews everywhere as an understandable tactic. (Well, that last moves it out of “suspect.”) Still, even when I personally believe that someone’s positions are so motivated I’ll usually hold my tongue and I think that some do use that invective much too readily.
I usually do not need to make the accusation: their own posts are usually sufficient for the quiet fence-sitters to make up their own minds.
