The attack brigade springs into action on technicalities, misinterpretations and semantic vagaries that always, in the course of a debate (or a media campaign), leads to an “upgrade” of an accusation thus creating an image of a person that falls beyond the point of no return – the point of “anti-Semite” label. If enough people buy into this image that is created of a person, it starts to persist beyond truths and lies and pretty soon he or she becomes dead in the water as far as his or hers societal standing is concerned.
What’s curious about Hagel is that a particular group attempted to stick that label to a person selected by no less than effin’ POTUS.
How would you know what should he say or not?
I’d be very interested to determine within what mindset you can make that advisory? I mean, the guy is as solid as rock when it comes to typically whiny Senate community, is respected in the circles that matter and has a track record that you cant find anything that would lead you to believe that he does not know what he’s talking about.
My take is that you are simply a “victim” of a media campaign and the current perception what US official can or cannot say as defined by a foreign agent and the groups that staunchly support a position of another country.
The bigger question is why is it that you – and many others, mind you - chose to believe a specific lobby and influence group than your effin POTUS who just got elected to a 2nd term?
This wasn’t a technicality or a misinterpretation, nor did he speak vaguely. He specifically said the wrong thing. It sounds like his words don’t reflect what he actually thinks, but that’s his own fault.
I know I’d prefer he didn’t say stupid things.
My mindset is that politicians should be reasonably well informed and diplomats should be diplomatic. They shouldn’t give needless offense to countries or religions or groups of people based on sloppy language or plain old stupidity. And I realize that there probably aren’t that many Jews in Nebraska, but if you can’t tell the difference between Israel and Jews, that’s really stupid. It doesn’t make you an anti-Semite, but it does make you sound like one. And we’re talking about a senator who was respected for his foreign policy expertise.
I think it’s interesting that you’ve decided I was saying Hagel shouldn’t have criticized Israel. Those words and that sentiment appear nowhere in my posts. I think you kind of gave away the game there.
But here you go insisting again on a misinterpretation based on a technicality of language. It has been long established that what he said was not stupid but rather slip of tongue and in the whole context of what he was saying that slip is absolutely and utterly irrelevant.
What you are doing is keep bringing that technicality of language to do two things (1) to steer away from what he was really saying and, if history is of any use, it shows that NOBODY ever addressed the gist of what he was saying and (2) you keep trying to use this issue to paint the man your POTUS chose to run one of the most important departments as stupid and incompetent.
And, you still keep harping on …
Even as you acknowledge
So, what is it - he knows hsi stuff or he’s stupid? Or, is he only stupid when it comes to Jew… pardon me, Israel lobby?
So much mental spinning my eyes will roll for the rest of the day.
And the game is … ta-da… “anti-Semite”
With such a lovely, pathetic personal insult your contribution to a debate is akin of that AIPAC pawn would construe in a heartbeat.
Where did you come up with this distinction between slip of the tongue and stupid? This is a good example of both.
I’m not steering anybody anywhere.
I’ve said nothing about Hagel’s competence. I’ve said he said several dumb things. In the interest of full disclosure I did say he was a bad choice for this job based on his intolerant comments about a gay ambassador in 1998, but we’ve crossed that bridge already.
Why are you having so much trouble with simple statements here? I never called him stupid. I said his comment was stupid. And I was emphasizing his foreign policy reputation to illustrate the fact that he should have known better.
I cannot figure out what this tortured sentence is supposed to mean. But you are confirming my impression by doing deliberately the same thing you’re saying Hagel did by accident.
Cue your arguments about ‘subverting democracy’, and such, yes? Have you ever posted on the Dope, ever in your entire history posting here, objecting to the treatment a presidential appointee has received? Are are you now selectively finding a source to boost your outrage so you can now posit, well…
You’ve hinted at a connection between the Mossad and 9/11 in the past, and now this conspiracy. Can you explain how the two are connected?
No question Hagel has not been a loved figure by the hawkish AIPAC crowd (which does not represent all or even a majority of American Jews btw, at least IMHO, including those like me who strongly support Israel but who believe that being a good friend means setting limits too) long before that stupid slip of the tongue was made. But when a slip “confirms” a narrative already out there, well, not surprising it will get some traction and those who don’t like you already (including in this case many many Hawks, not only the AIPAC crowd) will jump all over it. Shocking that.
“Slips of the tongue” are meaningful, perhaps more meaningful than mere stupid moments: “slips” are times what you really think slips out because you were not pre-editing enough. If that was a “slip” than it means that Hagel has a hard time differentiating between “Jewish-American” and “Hawkish Israel supporting American.” That is not anti-Semitic but it is a mindset that will impede his ability to function as someone who can be the kind of good friend to Israel that Jews like me think is in the best interest of all involved" Israel; America; the Palestinians; and other regional players.
Also it is of some note that making stupid slips of the tongue, be they slips that reveal some midsets that those referenced will likely find offensive, or ones that reveal plans before they were meant to go public, is generally not something you want a Sec of Defense to be prone to.
He’s claiming that you have accused him of anti-Semitism and that you are acting like unto an AIPAC pawn/agent. (To be fair, I figured it out from context clues and its frequency as the go-to insult among a few posters here.)
I figured that was the gist of it. newcomer, you are shoving a very large volume of words into my mouth, and you’re mostly reacting to things you assume I said or assume I think instead of what I’ve posted.
A Jew myself, I don’t see anything anti-semitic in the first statement. I live in Turkey and I can, without hesitation say that I feel more bound to Israel than Turkey due to the simple fact that there are many “pro-Palestinian” (in our context, the Turkish context this means anti-semitic) rallies and many Neo-Nazi youth organisations as well as other anti-semitic factions. Adding to that, IMHO, the Catholic American-Pope-America analogy isn’t a very accurate one due to the fact that what binding Jews are not just a symbolic religion (Judaism) but racial construct. This me to feel closer than a Jew to a Gentile automatically as we are the ones of the same “people”.
As for the second one, it’s blatantly anti-semitic. Like a propaganda piece which would be read before the manifest. Or maybe a part of the manifest itself.
The French were notoriously anti-semitic. But what they really didn’t like was Germans. In the Dreyfus affair, the evidence against him was that he was Jewish, but the crime he was accused of was being German. And that was even before WWI.
The French wound up deporting a lot of Jewish refuges (German and other foreigners), and many French Jews, but in the end the French Jewish survival rate was better than that of the Dutch: The Dutch didn’t hate Jews, but they didn’t hate Germans either.
Notably, the Frenchman who was put in charge of collating the population data for exporting Jewish people from occupied France in WWII, instead used the resources identifying people to work for the French resistance. And he was executed for that.
