december fully deserves a :rolleyes: for starting the ball rolling on this trainwreck. He’ll have to share honors, though, with multiple posters who have difficulty with reading comprehension or who felt it necessary to drag misguided pet peeves into the discussion (my favorite being the claim that the term “anti-Semitic” is racist).
Molly Ivins’s column does not strike me as anti-Semitic (by the way, great little dodge there december, piously opining deep into the thread that while you think her column is anti-Semitic, she certainly isn’t an anti-Semite) :rolleyes:. On the other hand the column is sloppy to say the least. At first she refers to Garner’s “alleged Zionist sympathies”, then a few lines later is definitively labelling him as “Zionist”, without having provided any conclusive evidence in the interim. And as has been pointed out, she would have done well to make her basic point with a less loaded term and without calling the group that sponsored Garner’s trip to Israel a “Jewish lobby” - an umbrella term often used by the ignorant to promote the fantasy of a monolithic effort to get the government to serve a “Jewish agenda”. “Pro-Israeli lobby” would have been accurate.
This point, the one Ivins was trying to make, has considerable merit, regardless of what biases Garner may have. Appearances are important.
MC could have noted this without the following descent into the “sinister cabal” point of view: **
The sneaky little devils! Only they must be really really inefficient in their website cleansing, because I just found a bunch of references on the site to Garner, including this one.
It’s true that the term “Zionist” has legitimate, non-insulting uses. However, I believe it’s most frequently used as an insult.
This is the crux of our disagreement. As I said, I don’t think you would call me a “Zionist.” At least, you haven’t done so on this board. You would be concerned that it might be interpreted as an slur, so you would avoid it.
I’m afraid that’s the best I can do. Sorry I’ve let you down. Maybe some other poster can carry the ball.
Jackmannii, you are a wonderful writer. Despite giving me a :rolleyes:, you made my case better than I did.
Is that so now? My friend, don’t you worry about it. All well and dandy as long as you know that’s a slippery slope you’ve chosen, at the end of which there can be no meaningful communication.
I will call you a “zionist” on these boards if and when I know that you side with present day Israeli groups that call themselves “zionists”, share their views and support their political agenda and / or start working within them.
But you better do some research and find out if you really have those convictions before asking me to put the label on you, right?
I too appreciated Jackmannii’s post. Did you miss out on him finding the column not to be “anti-semitic”, or did you just ignore that part?
I didn’t write the dictionary. I abide by it mainly out of a love for my native language. If you want a term for “hatred of Jews and Arabs specifically,” you seem inventive enough to coin one of your own. May I suggest “Abrahamaiphobia?”
As I understand it here, the word “Zionist” has come to mean Jewish people and Israeli Jews who want to maintain and expand the settlements, who do not want a state of Palestine, and who want the whole area to be Israel.
This may be an inaccurate use of the term Zionist, compared to its original meaning. But I have heard it used frequently in this sense. It is thus used to distinguish between Jewish people and Israeli Jews who want a Palestinian homeland as well as a Jewish one, and those that don’t.
By this definition, there may be very few actual “Zionists”, as I imagine there are very few Jewish people/Israeli Jews that wish to deny the Palestinians a homeland.
Can’t check that from home - Emirates Internet denies access
(The proxy server here is totally anti-semitic, it bans many Israeli sites. Stupid really. I can understand blocking porn, but I can’t see what they hope to achieve by blocking sites like the above, which is presumably political Israeli stuff?)
Anyway I will try to check it from work later, as I work in a free zone with uncensored access.
Poly, you’ve never heard the word “Zionist” as an anti-Semite’s euphamism for “Jew”? “International Zionist conspiracy of bankers” and the like? I have. Neo-Nazis and the idiot conspiracy types on the extreme right regularly use the term to mean “Jew”. Hell, it’s one of the obvious early warning signs that you’re dealing with an anti-Semite when they don’t say “Jew”, they say “Zionist” (“So, did you Zionists your Passover dinner?”)*.
This new (to me) “Zionist means Israel uber alles” shit is something I’ve never heard before the last two or so years.
And for the record, I have always described myself as a Zionist and I will continue to do so, however much the word is co-opted by people with yours and Guin’s POV of the word. (and Guin, I call bullshit. That may be what YOU mean by Zionist, but it’s not what the vast majority of Zionists mean by the word. It’s also not what it’s defined as)
And back to the OP, It’s clear from her column that Ivins thinks (granted, it’s something of an oxymoron to use the terms “thinks” in conjunction with a cud-chewing moron like Ivans…her columns aren’t so much as written as extruded by the foot.) the two offenses (being a Zionist and being a “crook” are equally bad in her eyes. “So we’ve got a crook, a Zionist and an old spy who thinks this is the beginning of WW IV set to run Iraq. How lucky can the Iraqis get? Is this what we thought we were fighting for?”. She clearly equates the three as being equally bad.
Anyway, Ivans certainly isn’t an anti-Semite because of this column but she did make a moronic, extremely offensive statement.
Fenris
*Another early warning sign is “I’m not an anti-Semite. ARABS are Semites.” :rolleyes:
Wel, I don’t know where you heard that definition, but most Israelis would disagree with it. 'Round these parts, “Zionist” is simply the Hebrew term for “patriot.” Most Israeli Jews - left-wing, right-wint, centist - define themselves as Zionists, and the term “Zionism” basically means love of Israel (or at least, the will to ensure the nation’s existance) which for most of my countrymen is pretty much a given.
That’s why the use of the word in a perjurative sense is so hurtful; after all, it seems that they’re insulting us for merely doing what’s natural.
>Hell, it’s one of the obvious early warning signs that you’re
>dealing with an anti-Semite when they don’t say “Jew”, they
>say “Zionist” (“So, did you Zionists your Passover dinner?”)
Jackmanii, the information about them removing his name from the website (now I think of it could of been just the prominent references) was taken from an article several months from memory. I imagine t6hey removed prominent references at the request of Jay Garner himself who would’vew been aware of the problems it could cause with his new appointment. I am operating on a very dodgy 26 kbps modem as I am currently in the Middle-East (nothing to do with Iraq)and Straight Dope message board seems to be the only website that it doesn’t take hours to download each page (which is odd as it is usually the slowest page with by broadband connection in the UK), so I did not and could check out my assertation.
(this sounds rather like “the dog ate my homework”)
I said here - I am sure it would be a very different situation in Israel. As I pointed out, it’s not the original or necessarily correct meaning of the word, but that’s what it gets used for.
And among some of the the arab anti-semitic sentiment and rhetoric here, Zionist is just used perjoratively to mean Jew.
It’s funny how definitions change - according to some, I myself am a Palestinian. After all, I was born in what was once the British Mandate of Palestine. I don’t define myself that way, of course, but since when are people allowed to define themselves?
