No major Jewish sect belives Israel is the kingdom of god? They do believe that they’re god’s chosen people though, right?
Yep, you just continue to claim that Desmond Tutu is sntisemitic. That’s good enough for me.
Readers should note that, in this thread of all places, the fact has repeatedly been pointed out that this phrase is routinely misinterpreted, often deliberately, and is a classic anti-Semitic trope when it is misinterpreted in such a manner. What Dick intends to imply by its use is up to the reader to determine.
Readers should also note that a list of Tutu’s anti-Semitic comments have already been provided… by Dick. In a piece he provided which he claimed would support his accusation that Dershowitz had slandered Tutu simply because Tutu criticized Israel, what it actually showed was that Tutu is an anti-Semite. Choice quotes included but were not limited to:
As always, readers can determine for themselves why Dick condones Tutu’s blatant anti-Semitism, why his response is to attack those who criticize Tutu’s anti-Semitism, and why he still has not retracted his absurd claim that Dershowitz called Tutu out for simply criticizing Israel, rather than for being an anti-Semite.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Who can know but the man himself if Tutu is anti-semitic, but I think it’s not at all a stretch to characterize the statements he made as anti-semitic.
Eh, I’m perfectly happy defining “racist” as “someone who says racist things” and “anti-Semite” as “someone who says anti-Semitic things” and “homophobe” as “someone who says bigoted things about gays and lesbians” and “Islamaphobe” as “someone who says bigoted things against Muslims” and…
There’s always that bit of doubt, and a favorite tactic of racists themselves is to claim “you can’t know what’s in my heart!”, but that’s okay. We don’t have to. And it’s a standard we don’t hold people to for anything else, really. If you say bigoted things, you’re a bigot. If you say racist things, you’re a racist. We really don’t need to be able to scan someone’s brain and read their thoughts in order to know that David Duke is a racist, even though he claims that he’s got nothing against Jews and is just trying to warn us about the evils of Jewish Supremacism.
If we see someone punch someone else in the face, we can assume with a great deal of certainty that he’s angry at the other guy.
If we see someone kiss someone else passionately on the mouth, we can assume with a great deal of certainty that he’s attracted to the other person.
If we see someone spewing racist bullshit, we can assume with a great deal of certainty that he’s a racist.
And if, while we’re looking at someone spewing racist bullshit someone else comes along and claims that anybody who objects to that kind of racism is a “deadender” or alleges that people aren’t objecting to racism but are really trying to persecute someone simply for having differing political ideas? Well… we can assume certain things about the quality and type of that argument, too.
Correct - no major Jewish sect believes Israel is the Kingdom of God (indeed, all major sects believe that any such attribution is positively blasphemous).
Religious Jews believe that Jews are the “Chosen People”, but of course that term means nothing like what Mr. Gaarder evidently believes; and the term has no application to the state of Israel (which was not founded by religious Jews, but by Zionists, who were largely ethno-nationalist Jews and atheist socialists who regarded the “Chosen People” thing as part of the religious claptrap they were abandoning).
In short, Mr. Gaarder misses his target every which way: he is using a religious tropes which Zionists largely do not believe in in the first place to criticize Israel, and he is using them totally incorrectly. Moreover, in doing so, he is replicating anti-Semitic slurs and Christian triumphalism.
All the while complaining about how he is misunderstood and suppressed and can’t we have a calm rational dialogue? It is to laugh.
He’s saying the late-jewish and christian-Zionist idea of israel as a kingdo0m of God. well Christian Zionists, yeah, no argument there, the fundies in the US are down that way. In Israel you have the settlers at least who believe that they’re on God-given land in the settlements. You’ve definitely got an extreme Israeli element who believe that the West bank and Gaza are given to them by God. So what’s the problem with the article?
Abraham Foxman, chief wallah at the ADL, isn’t known for being shy to play the antisemitism card. If somebody is being smeared for attacking Israeli government policies then it’s a good bet he’s going to be part of the bandwagon. But even Abraham Foxman doesn’t think Desmond Tutu is antisemitic :
NEW YORK (JTA) – The Anti-Defamation League is urging the president of a Minnesota university to invite Archbishop Desmond Tutu to speak just days after it was revealed that he had been disinvited because of fears he might offend Jews.
Tutu had been slated to visit the University of St. Thomas next spring as part of a program that brings Nobel laureates to teach youth about peace and justice. But university administrators, after consulting with Minnesota Jewish leaders, concluded that Tutu has made hurtful comments about Israel and the Jewish people that rendered him inappropriate as a speaker.
“Tutu has certainly been an outspoken, sometimes very harsh critic of Israel and Israeli policies, and has sometimes also used examples which may cross the line,” said Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director. But, he added, Tutu “certainly is not an anti-Semite and should not be so characterized and therefore refused a platform.”
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2007/10/09/104556/adltutu
So even among people you’d expect to be attacking tutu there are people like Foxman who realise that it just makes you look like an extremist nutjob to be claiming that tutu is a bigot, that it hurts your cause in the eyes of moderate people.
You and i are not going to convince the other that we’re wrong about the israeli-Palestine thing. You’re going to believe your stuff and argue your points, me the same. As far as this argument goes I’m going to go as far to your side of the srgument by agreeing with Zionist people like Abraham Foxman that tutu isn’t an extremist. That leaves you standing with the fringiest of the fringe, the real out-there guys claiming otherwise. For the vast majority of people, I’m guessing they agree with me, Abraham and desmond, peace be upon them.
Ok, if you think that it’s wrong to classify Tutu’s statements as anti-Semitic then please explain why you think they’re not.
Specifically:
Please explain why attacking Israel for acting “in an unChristian manner” is not anti-Semitic.
Explain why it’s not anti-Semitic to accuse Jews of being “a peculiar people”.
Explain why it’s not anti-Semitic to say “the Jews thought they had a monopoly of God: Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings”?
Explain why it’s not anti-Semitic to claim that “the Jews” “fight against God”?
Just saying, “Well the ADL doesn’t call him anti-Semitic” so he can’t be an anti-Semite.
Besides, you’ve already stated you don’t think that Jews can be trusted.
Finally, since you’re such an advocate against anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, how come you earlier made such moronic statements claiming that Arabs and Muslims are treated so well in Europe, going so far as to claim they were treated far better than American minorities.
I have a hard time believing that any true advocate for Arabs and Muslims would make such a foolish, demonstrably false argument.
Why did you make it?
Do you only care about the oppression of Muslims at the hands of Jews, but when it’s done by Europeans you don’t care about them?
Gaarder is an author, not a political analyst or historian, and this was a clumsy piece of unnecessarily inflaming rhetoric, mainly because of differences in connotation and because it’s a piece written in passion during the latest Israeli-Lebanese war. But I find it unlikely he’s motivated by antisemitism. Finer points of Jewish theology and the “real” definition of the term chosen people were totally unknown to me before reading this thread, what I knew, a perspective I can confidently guess Gaarder shares, was that Jewish settlers on the west bank claim a mandate from god to expand (or maintain from their point of view) the bounds of Israel and that this view is to a great extent accommodated by the Israeli government and applauded by right wing Christians in Norway.
That’s not to say anti-semitism isn’t a serious problem in Norway, but there are three somewhat separate issues here.
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Are Norwegians in general and their government anti-semitic? I’d say a definite no. That’s not to say there aren’t Norwegians and politicians who’re knee jerk in their response in any Israel-Palestine question or who’re actual anti-semites, but they’re a small minority with the latter being close to non-existent outside of Muslim immigrant society. Extremist minorities are of course often noticed more than is merited and this along with the fact that issue two and three definitely exists makes Norway in general seem more anti-semitic than it actually is.
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Are Jews in Norway exposed to anti-semitism? Yes. They’re a tiny minority and happen to be concentrated in the same areas, or at least next door to the anti-semitic minorities, mainly Muslim immigrants. The Muslim immigrants are also the source, or so I suspect, of the use of Jew as a general pejorative among young people, but the widespread use in the mono-cultural environment I’ve got experience with is undoubtedly due to the thoughtlessness of teenagers rather than anti-semitism. Like me they’ve probably never met a Jew, at least not to their knowledge, and unlike me they’re immature, inconsiderate and thoughtless.
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Just as some onlookers conflate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, many Norwegians conflate Jews with Israeli policy on the occupied territories, because the Israeli-Arab conflict is what they’re used to hearing about and discussing.
Outside of Norway, Gaarder is famous for one book - Sophie’s World - which is an in-depth history of religion and philosophy (told in fictional format).
It may indeed be the case that the average Norwegian does not know what terms like “the Chosen People” and “the Kingdom of God” mean in Jewish thought. Fair enough.
But it absolutely strains credulity that Gaarder, whose specialty is writing about the history of philosophy and religion, doesn’t know them - especially at the time of his supposed “apology”, when no doubt he’d got a bit of a history of comparative religions lesson from the controversy he’d just kicked up.
To assume that he ‘just happened’ to replicate the traditional anti-semitic tropes in his screeds is I think giving him too much the benefit of the doubt.
Readers will note that Dick still has not addressed let alone debunked a single person’s analysis of Tutu’s anti-Semitic quotes, and is instead still trying to handwave them away.
Readers will note that, despite the fact that his own cite shows that Dershowitz criticized Tutu for making anti-Semitic statements and not for criticizing Israel as Dick claimed, Dick only doubled down on that claim once his own cite refuted his claim that Tutu was being persecuted.
Readers will note that, after making a fictional claim that Dershowitz ‘smeared’ Tutu as an anti-Semite simply because Tutu criticized Israel, and having his own cite prove that claim was a blatant absurdity, Dick has now claimed that Abe Foxman is generally “part of the bandwagon” for calling people anti-Semites simply for criticizing Israel. This after Dick tried to handwave away a cite from the ADL because it was carried out by “Jewish” people and because it was carried out by “Likudniks” (still no cite on that count). We still have no cite from Dick, either, that Abe Foxman has even once called someone an anti-Semite, let alone routinely jumps on any “bandwagon” to call someone an anti-Semite, because they criticized Israel.
Readers will also note that, despite Tutu’s own words being pointed out repeatedly, cited and quoted, Dick not only refuses to actually address them but now has chosen to engage in flaming in GD instead of even attempting to argue for why it’s wrong to interpret them as anti-Semitic. I would suggest that this is because his position is indefensible.
Oh, and, called it:
I don’t know Dirk from Adam (and am not particularly fond of the argumentation he’s making so far, but as I do like Tutu, so taking the phrases as given and at their face value (i.e. out of context):
What pray tell is anti-Semetic about the phrase? He’s an Anglican Bishop ‘of a certain age’, and UnChristian manner is a common enough and ordinary phrase in South African English for “acting beastly.” There is no particular reason I can think of to read this as Anti-Semitic if one is not looking to willy nilly smear.
That one is a bit on the edge. Nevertheless it is not on its face anti-Semitic. It’s problematic on its own but could be a poor turn of phrase (in the context of SA English).
Now that is not a happy phrase at all. At best it’s simple archaic Christian theological bigotry, worst it is proper anti-Semitism. Granted this one doesn’t reflect well, whatever the context.
Same as prior comment.
I don’t often use smileys.. indeed this is a first: :rolleyes:
Really…
Criticizing Jews for not following Christianity, thereby suggesting that the problem is that they’re following Judaism instead? “Why, that’s mighty white of you to grant him the benefit of the doubt.”
It’s not hard to think of a ‘particular reason’ to see that as anti-Semitic, and you might be less ready to offer up pat defenses of someone who should certainly know better, being a bishop and such, because he is “of a certain age”. Especially be less quick on the ‘ZOMG smearing!’ draw. Unless of course you’d prefer to smear people with the claim that they’re smearing anybody, but that’s kinda meta, eh?
He stated, openly, that he held Jews to a totally different standard than other people in the world and justified collective punishment against Jews simply because they were Jews and a “peculiar people” who could never expect to be held to the same standard as regular people. It doesn’t matter what phrase he used to describe the double standard, the double standard is what’s at issue. And you’re willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt, again.
Even when someone claims that “the Jews thought they had a monopoly of God: Jesus was angry that they could shut out other human beings” and that “the Jews” are a people who “fight against God”, you’re still willing to describe that as perhaps “simple archaic Christian theological bigotry.” Except, of course, he didn’t discuss “Orthodox Jewish theology” or “Reconstructionist Jewish theology”. He discussed “Jews”.
And in any case, being bigoted against Jews ‘on theological grounds’ is hardly anything new. Torquemada would like to have a word with you.
It’s not criticising Jews for not following Christianity. It’s a common expression in the dialect, particularly for persons of his age. Like I say Jesus Christ without the slightest religious feeling at all. Get over yourself.
Glad to see you remain as rational as ever. It’s just dandy and not at all foaming at the mouth to compare Desmond Tutu to Torquemada…
Yep, that’s exactly what it’s doing. Saying that Jews are not following the preceptsn of Christianity, which would make them better people. Using the dodge that it just means ‘acting in a good way, like a Christian would’ is a weaksauce dodge. Try coming to the deep south and telling a black person that they’re acting “mighty white”. See how well it goes over. Then try your silly dodge about “dialect” and how yo had no way of knowing what its connotation was in that context.
One would expect a bishop to understand the implication of saying that Jews are acting badly because they’re not following Christian tenets.
Good to see that you’re flaming in GD instead of actually offering up a cogent argument.
Also good to see that you’re wildly distorting my actual argument and have invented any point, at all, at which I was comparing Tutu to Torquemada. When, of course, what actually happened was that I just refuted your silly nonsense that just because something is “simple archaic Christian theological bigotry”, as you put it, that there is some sort of dichotomy between that and anti-Semitic sentiments.
To make the point obvious, I cited Torquemada, notoriously less than fond of Jews, but who based his virulent bigotry in religious theology. Rather than accepting that you were wrong, and “simple archaic Christian theological bigotry” is no defense against charges of anti-Semitism, you instead decided to flame in GD and distort my argument with a funhouse-mirror of rhetoric to the point where you actually claim that I compared Torquemada to Tutu. It’s a good clue that your argument is utterly bankrupt, since you ignored the refutations of your apologia for Tutu and instead offered a dodge based on “dialect” and outright flaming instead of any cogent counter-argument.
Carry on, mate, carry on. Your rationality in all things Israel & Jewish is above reproach, impeccably rational and never ever blindly insane or through some bizarre fun house mirror.
Brilliant factual rebuttal.
If you want to address the actual argument, I’d suggest starting with one of the bits you ignored. Take, for instance, Tutu’s admission that he holds Jews to a double standard and supports collective punishment against Jews, but not Muslims or Christians, because Jews are a “peculiar” people and cannot expect to be treated like others.
ENOUGH with the personal remarks.
[ /Moderating ]
You know a hit job piece a mile off when all the quotes in it are a few words long. What both you and I need to see before we make any determination on anything relating to those quotes is all the quotes in context. I’m sure dershowitz has actual footnotes and links and what have you so that people can check the few qords he pulled out from wherever against the original contextual passage. So it should be easy for you to find them in context and then we can see whether Dershowitz is being fair or not. Until I see them i’m going to side with noted Zionist nutjob Abraham Foxman, peace be upon him, and say that Desmond Tutu isn’t antisemitic.