I think the hard left’s position is that criticism of Israel isn’t anti-semitism. I’m pretty sure they still think that the white supremecists are anti-semetic.
I don’t see how that follows. How exactly do you think the Jews saved themselves from the holocaust? The fact that saving the Jews was not the purpose and intennt behind why people fought Hitler doesn’t mean that they didn’t have anything to do with stopping the holocaust. Its not entirely clear that everyone knew the holocaust was going on.
Shmendrik’s observation correctly notes the intent of the Allies, not their actions.
Knowledge of the death camps had been brought to the attention of Allied intelligence within months of their opening. There may be some question as to how far up the chain of command that information got or at what stage it was believed, but the death camps were not a surprise to the Allied leadership when they were liberated. (They were a surprise to the soldiers who actually liberated them, but that was a different situation.)
There have been various arguments on this board as to who knew how much and when did they know it, but there is no question that Shmendrik is correct that no country took action against the Nazis because of the massacres and, further, that some proposed actions were set aside as not being worth the cost and effort as judged by the Allied command.
Really, because there was an almost religious reverence for holocaust survivors on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where my mother had a store a couple of doors down from a store called Sabra. The grandafather was a holocaust survivor and the mother went to Israel to give birth to her children (it made little sense to me and now that I know that Jews are automatically given israeli citizenship, this makes even less sense).
But that was a response to a prior post by monstro saying “But the Jews did not free themselves from the Holocaust.”
I agree we didn’t leap into the war to save Jews nor did we plan our strategy around saving jews.
Very well, however I think her observation that “Jew-hating” in the Islamic world being virtually unheard of is completely correct.
Now, does that meant that “anti-Semitism”, the belief that Jews should face discrimination or unequal treatment was unheard of? No.
However, according to Norman Stillman, Bernard Lewis, and Mark Cohen, who are arguably the three most recognized experts on the state of Jews in the Islamic lands, while Jews were certainly discriminated against and undoubtedly faced a certain amount of “tolerant contempt”(Lewis’ words) they were not hated, with extremely rare exceptions. In fact, it was common for Jews in the Middle Ages who lived in the Islamic World to specifically live away from Christians, surrounded by Muslims for protection.
Now things for both Jews and Christians in the Islamic world started getting tough in the 19th Century because the Ottoman Empire at that point started crumbling and for the first time started being threatened by the West, though even then Jews were treated better than Christians, as anyone familiar with the Armenians can testify.
It was during the 20th Century that “Jew-hatred” exploded as a result of Zionism.
Even that has to be understood as not so much because of atrocities committed by Jews against Muslims(of which there are many) but because the Jews managed to do something that no one else ever did.
The Russsians, the Serbs, the British, the Americans and many others all managed to kill or persecute Muslims to far, far greater extent than Jews ever managed to, but they never humiliated Muslims the way the Jews did.
Islamic views of European colonialism have always been different than those of people in say Sub-Saharran Africa. Muslims know that until very recently It was the Islamic world that threatened the West and was technologically superior to the West, not the other way around.
Muslims having their empires ripped apart by the West and being routed by the West is the world turned upside down.
Having several Arab armies smacked around and spanked by a bunch of Jews in 1948 who didn’t even have enough rifles was the ultimate insult.
It’s one thing to get the crap kicked out of you by the mighty British Empire or the Russians, but to be beaten by people who used to be your servants, who used to depend on you for protection, whom you always saw as artists, artisans, intellectuals, or bureaucrats, but never as soldiers was intolerable.
To make a comparison, which do you think would be more humiliating for the average boy in fifth grade? Getting seriously beaten up and put in the hospital by a group of boys much older than him, or getting knocked to the ground, given a wedgie and then had his arm twisted behind him till he screamed uncle by a fourth grade girl while his classmates watched.
That’s why “Yehudi”(Jew) is almost never uttered in Arabic without dripping with contempt while terms like “Russian”, “Serb”, “Brit” or “American” don’t have nearly the weight despite having racked up much higher body counts.
I’d compare it to the way views of blacks in the American South changed after the Civil War. Prior to the Civil War, lynchings were almost unheard of, and while Southern whites viewed them as inferiors and with contempt, blacks weren’t hated. After the Civil War, when blacks rose up, fought against them, and revealed that the idea that they like being slaves was clear fiction, drove many Southerners wild.
Ibn, your last analogy seems to me to be pretty much on target, and even before 1948. So long as Jews knew their place as second class citizens they were tolerated just fine. When the uppity European Jews came in, not as second class citizens but as employers, not subservient but giving the orders and the paycheck and sometimes perhaps with a little arrogance of their own … that’s the conditions for hate groups to take hold.
Given that Jews were treated very differently according to countries, do you mean in the States ("When the uppity European Jews came in " would tend to lead to believe that)?
I dont get why you refer to 1948 though.
He means in Palestine/Israel, hence the 1948 reference.
Jews were second class citizens and subject to Jim Crowesque laws in pre-1948 Palestine? I doubt that’s what he meant.
Ibn was referencing the 1948 “smack around” by the Jews as the “ultimate insult”. I was pointing out that the earlier immigration of European Jews to Palestine had already triggered some Jew hatred as those European Jews did not behave like good dhimmis. Otherwise completely agreeing with the points made.
“Good dimmis”? Fuck it, when I read that kind of shit, I feel glad my parents never had that impulse to chisel their bias into my head as part of my education package.
Last time I ckecked African-Americans didnt oust neither Native Americans nor the whites out of the US. So going for another layer of martyrdom, I see. Even though it cant compare in any sense.
You sir have a problem.
No Arabs were ousted in the 20’s 30’s and early 40’s. There were Arabs there and there were Arabs who moved in. Arab population increased in the areas where Jews moved in. Which makes sense, the whole region was somewhat economically depressed and the European Jews were hiring and buying goods and services. But you can work for someone and sell things to someone and still resent that these people who should be, and historically always were, below you, are now the ones doing the hiring. In mindset the reaction is not too much different to how it may have felt to a poor Southern farmer when he saw the son of a former slave doing better than he was. Just like that farmer did not hate Blacks when they were slaves, in fact liked the fact that there was someone lower than him in the socio-economic pecking order, but did hate Blacks once some were his equal or more successful than he was, so some poor Arabs who tolerated Jews as second class before, began to resent and even hate Jews.
That resentment was helped into hate as was often the case, by leaders who saw hate as an easy way to build a power base. In this case the biggest factor was The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammad Amin al-Husayni.
Nothing builds a power base like getting people to unify against an “other”.
Again, he didn’t create the resentment and the hate. There were already tensions by then and Jewish paramilitary groups were not pure as the driven sand in response to attacks. But he galvanized them.
When it was part of the Ottoman Empire they most certainly were.
You make it sound like the bulk of hatred of jews in the Middle East was the result of successful Jews in the Middle East making the underachieving arabs look bad (which would make the anti-semitism thyere a lot closer to teh anti-semitism in Europe, wouldn’t it?). I thought the bulk of the anti-semitism in the middle east was the result of the creation of the state of Israel.
You also say that anti-semitism was the result of Israel kicking arab ass so decisively that they resnted them for this but this anti-semitism didn’t seem to dissapate after 1973 when the ass kicking wasn’t quite as decisive.
Are you sure you aren’t creating a rationale for anti-semitism that doesn’t implicate the existence of the state of Israel and the Palestinian issue? Because ISTM that these things play heavily into the mix.
Anti-Jewish hatred in the ME predates the actual formation of the state of Israel.
To my mind, the Israeli-Palestinian problem is an example of the more or less simulateous rise of ethno-nationalism among Jews and Arabs alike. Ethno-nationalism is an import of the modern age. Its rise in the ME among Arabs is not wholly unrelated to the simultaneous rise of Jewish ethno-nationalism - obviously, the one spurred on the other - but it is a much larger and more widespread phenom.
Prior to the rise of ethno-nationalism, both Jews and Arabs alike were subjects of the Ottoman empire. Jews, as non-Muslims, were obviously treated as unequal, with lesser rights, but were not usually actively hated - other than the occasional flare-up.
Ethno-nationalism gave the Ottomans the heebie-jeebies, and for good reason - thge same reason it gave the Austro-Hungarians the heebie-jeebies: it directly threatened to tear their multi-ethnic empires to shreds. And it did.
The other effect of ethno-nationalism was to create ethnic hatreds directed at potential competing ethnic nationals - the dark side of ethno-nationalism has always been the tendency to create folk enemies. In the case of the newly-rising ethno-nationalism of the Arabs, the folk devil was easy to spot - the simultaneous rise of Jewish ethno-nationalism.
The fact that the Jews were traditionally the second-class citizens of the Ottoman Empire, and a scattered and powerless minority to boot, made their growing power all the more irritating.
As stated, this occurred long before Israel became a nation (see the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as example).
I don’t think Zionism spurred on Arab nationalism at all and Zionism evolved among European Jews as a result of their treatment at the hands of European gentiles.
Michel Aflaq and the other founders of Arab Nationalism were not inspire or spurred on by Zionism, but were inspired by the rise of nationalism in Europe.
Moreover, most of the original intellectuals pushing for Arab nationalism, such as Aflaq were Christians who saw it as a way to end their second-class status by uniting them with Muslims.
I would largely agree with this, but I would add that up until the late 19th Century people didn’t consider themselves “Arabs” and Arab National Consciousness was not very widespread until after WWI.
Prior to that, people identified themselves by either where they were from(I’m from Damascus) or their religion(I’m a Christian, I’m a Muslim, I’m a Druze) etc. Arabic-speaking Christians and Arabic-speaking Muslims certainly didn’t see themselves as being part of the same group.
I think that there was some synergistic effect. Certainly it was, originally, an example of independent absorbtion of powerful European ideas. But as zionism came to be manifest in actual settlement, the example certainly helped to spur on acceptance of the spread of ethno-nationalsm among arabs as well.
Yeah, I was sloppy there. The notion of a specifically Arab self-conciousness is itself a product of ethno-nationalism - though one that in some senses predates ethno-nationalism in its modern form. Certainly, there was at least some notion that (say) persians were not like arabs, and more than just because the former were more likely to be Shi’ite.
Possibly related:
It looks likely a large swath of Arab states are likely to have successful populist uprisings in the present to near future. Might this provide an opportunity to redraw sovereign boundaries in their lands in a way that reflects more sense than present?
The second part first - no I am not saying that. I am actually disagreeing with that point. To me the major factor is indeed the same as it is for most hate groups: uniting people in hate against an “other” is always an expedient populist technique. Which in no way implies that the other side was without sin.
Now on to the first point - you’ve thought wrong. Honestly though you do better than most in that you allow your historical view to go back farther than 1967, which is when many start their historic understanding. But the history and the animosity does not start in 1948 either.
It began in the tens and twenties with the early waves of European immigration. As has been pointed out, before that Jews in Arab lands knew their place and were very clearly second class. Compared to most of the Christian world this was a pretty good place to me for most of those centuries. Tolerated inferiors is much better than being hated. Many fewer massacres that way. But the history is as I put it forth and I have in these threads provided many references for any one interested in learning that history. Jews from Europe brought investments which attracted Arabs both from within Palestine and from without to move to were they were, but this up ending of the SES order, and no doubt some European arrogance on the part of the new Jews, also created some hate groups, which a variety of Arab leaders capitalized on. Violence was perpetrated against Jews and Jews in turn formed self-defense paramilitary units that were not without their share of thuggish behaviors. It was in this several decades context that greater numbers of Jews snuck in illegally to escape from the Nazis. In that context the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem attempted to work with the Nazis as it jibed with the needs of his personal power base. And it was in that context that the Partition plan was proposed.
As for the back and forth between Malthus and Ibn, my two cents is that I think there was some pan-Arab nationalism in the late 1910s, support for which had been promised by the British, but that it was squashed when France and Britain instead divvied up the Ottoman empire between themselves, or at least tried to. It was really at that point, in the 20’s, that a Palestinian identity began to emerge and that Palestinian nationalism became a political entity. Pan-Arabism rises up again here and there as a rational for various leaders trying to unite groups (under their leadership, of course) and again after Israel is created, by Nasser of Egypt, that as a response to Zionism. His pan-Arab nationalism and Arab Socialism, probably helped cement the US siding with Israel and the USSR with the Arabs by the 60’s as the world was dichotomized into a US vs USSR dynamic.