[/QUOTE]
I rest my point.
BTW, is might be synonyms you want, but euphemisms you got. Why soften the language?
It’s not a euphemism, it’s a neologism. And, I’d note, I was the first to use it on this board. 
Still, I don’t think it really provides any advantages over any other term “Jew-hating”, “anti-Semitism”, “racism”, whatever. It’s just a nice bit to have in a toolbox to avoid stylistic rigidity.
There is a certain irony in not’s attachment to “antisemitism” over “Judeopathy” because the latter seems pseudoscientific and we should “reclaim” the former:
“Antisemitism” was coined by a German Jew hater, Wilhelm Marr, specifically to come up with a scientific sounding word to use instead of the then commonly used and more to the point “Judenhass” … Jew hating.
It’s both.
It is a new and nice way to something ugly in poltie company.
Well, he didn’t do a very good job of making it sound scientific, at least not in English
Still, I don’t think Dershowitz would say “we need to reclaim the pseudo-scientific arena from a German Jew hater”. Or maybe he would, I don’t know. He did coin it in a book called Chutzpah after all. I might have that book, I will look and see.
Anyway, if he can get his term used and understood as widely as “anti-semitism”, then fine. But I don’t think the nuance is the same., or to the extent it is, it is just a euphemism.
In any case, I am still very intrigued what our correspondents here would say is the “right” amount of anti-Semitism, aren’t you?
‘Go directly to Nuremburg. Do not pass Auschwitz, do not collect $200’? 
/Runs away …
Sorry to resurrect a dead thread but I just had to share this Helen Thomas statement in context of this statement:
Others have already explained about the “Judeopathy”.
Beyond that, you clearly misunderstood what I was talking about when I explained about the rise of virulent anti-Jewish hatred in the Middle East and possibly have some dramatic misunderstanding of the relationship between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.
Muslim Arabs in Palestine weren’t “humiliated” for having to treat Jews as peers or “work for a Jewish boss”. They were hostile towards the Zionists because the Zionists wanted to take their land and create they own state. For that matter, the Zionists had no real desire to have the Arabs as their peers, but would much rather pretend they didn’t exist or have them in a completely separate society and the leaders of the Yishuv pressured those setting up businesses to employ Jews not Arabs.
Eventually, things fell apart and the hatred got out of control when the Zionists wound up taking the land and, with the blessing of the UN, setting up their own state and booting 700,000 Arabs(including both Muslims and Christians) from their midst.
Now perhaps, your comparison to the way some Whites feel towards immigrants would make sense if say Chinese immigrants to San Francisco were demanding that San Francisco were to be made into an independent Chinese State run by the Chinese, but despite the paranoia of some on the right, immigrants to the US aren’t doing this.
My point was that while the Zionists and later the Israelis certainly committed atrocities against Muslims, the fact that they were Jews made those atrocities sting even more than considerably worse and more disruptive actions taken by the British, the Americans and the Russians.
That’s why the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip caused so much more anger than the killing of hundreds of thousands of Muslims at the hands of Russians in Afghanistan or Serbs in Bosnia.
Ah Helen.
I wonder if she was always been like that it’s just that she now no longer bothers to hide it, or if she’s completely lost it with age.
I suspect the former since Taqiyya is a well known practice of the Maronites.
Things are much, much more complicated than that. There were protests against Jewish ownership of land while the Ottoman Empire still stood, and certainly it wasn’t a poplar view among the Zionists of the time that they’d overthrow the OE. There’s also the fact that the Zionists of the time didn’t want to take anybody’s land, but were involved in an aggressive campaign to purchase land. That much of the land was held by absentee landlords is a separate issue, but the growth of Jewish communities during the initial waves of aliyah were not due to taking land by force. The ‘conquest of labor’ movement was also somewhat controversial, especially in socialist circles within the Zionist movement, but its goal was not to keep Arabs separate but to provide work and to root new aliyah to the land.
Nor was opposition due simply to a mistaken view that the Jews aimed to drive the Arab population out of the area. Husseini, the major of Jerusalem who’d been removed from his post after his role in the Arab Riots, apparently bought into traditional Western style anti-semtism and told Churchill: “The Jews have been amongst the most active advocates of destruction in many lands… It is well known that the disintegration of Russia was wholly or in great part brought about by the Jews, and a large proportion of the defeat of Germany and Austria must also be put at their door.”
Aref Dajani told the King- Crane Commission that “It is impossible for us to make an understanding with them or or even to live with them… Their history and all their past proves that it is impossible to live with them. In all the countries where they are at present they are not wanted… because they always arrive to suck the blood of everybody.”
Things were quite out of control during the Arab Riots of the 1920’s, for example.
And during the Nazis’ communication and later alliance with the Grand Mufti in the 30’s and 40’s in which the Mufti negotiated the ‘rights’ to conduct the genocide of the Jews in the region should the Nazis win, rather than having the Germans do it. Even Plan D wasn’t quite as simple as all that. The plan wasn’t to kick out non-Jews if the transition went smoothly.
The partition plan itself was drawn along rough ethnic majority lines, with a huge chunk of the land being granted to a Jewish state consisting of the Negev. And before that even began, Azam Pasha declared that the war against the nascent state would be “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” While others declared that it would be a war to push the Jews into the sea.
The situation is hardly cut and dried. Elements in both factions didn’t want to divide sovereignty pre '48, and multiple groups committed atrocities both before, during and after '48. In '47, the Jewish Agency accepted UNGAR 181. That included, among other bits, the conditions that:
[
](http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/un/res181.htm)
Hardly a plan to kick a people out with UN approval. And land ownership does not equate to sovereignty, in any case. There is nothing inherent in an Arab, or a Jewish state (as long as it follows the rule of law) whereby private property rights are abrogated simply because the sovereign is of a different ethnicity than the property holder.
At least, not unless you’d also view the creation of an Arab state in Palestine that had sovereignty over Jews to be an example of a plan to kick the Jews out.
It is true, as well, that there is nothing inherent in the concept of self determination that made it essential for a Jewish state to not follow the rule of law regarding its gentile population, let alone expel them.
Um … actually Ibn, this time it is you who have some misunderstandings. It is understandable since the myth you present has been repeated so often that it has taken on axiomatic status, but it is still not completely true.
Once again, many Arabs moved into Palestine (legally and illegally) and moved within Palestine specifically to be near the economic growth centers that Jewish immigration created. The first decades of Zionism included no displacement and created, both directly and indirectly, many Arab jobs and much Arab immigration: the immigration of relatively few Jews created local economies that catalyzed the immigration of many more Arabs. The idea that Zionists came in and displaced Arabs is as false as the myth that Palestine was a “a land without a people”.
Finn recaps a fair amount of the history but I would remind you of the utility of the demonized other in building a populist political base; that was a very major dynamic, to some degree on both sides. There was a battle for power between Arab groups and portraying the uppity Jews as British colonialist tools and … Jews (!) to boot … played very well, especially as Arab nationalism was a newly ascendant movement at that time. And some Zionists were indeed colonialist in their attitudes and subscribed to the Western image of an empty land populated by desert nomads. Add in that the land purchased legally from its owners had still been farmed by Arab tenant farmers who were indeed evicted to create the newer farms run by Jewish former city dwellers with naive visions of utopia … It was easy for populists to exploit distrust and to fan it into hate in service of their political goals and personal power bases.
I found this comment quite interesting coming from a black person.
Did you find Israeli holocaust victimhood more steeped than say present day African-American slavery/Jim Crow victimhood ?
And, of course, " the major of Jerusalem" should be “the mayor of Jerusalem”
There was a GQ thread about the tendency for some to express more racist comments as they age and asking if it was an early sign of dementia.
The point being that the possibilities you suggest are not mutually exclusive: she has probably always thought that way and had enough self-control to inhibit saying it, but she, like some others with aging, may have had some frontal lobe strokes or have some early dementia that has knocked out the executive function that previously inhibited their expression.
I’m not aware of any major campaigns amongst the Arabs against the original Aliyahs of the late 19th Century, certainly nothing like the later campaigns when it became clear that the Zionist dream of creating a Jewish State in Palestine had a strong chance of becoming a reality.
That said, if millions of Chinese immigrants started pouring into Washington State and demanding that Washington State be given to them to be turned into a Chinese State, there would quite obviously be a massive amount of resentment directed at them.
I never said they wanted to take the land by force, but wanted to take the land. Also while it’s true that the land purchases they made were quite legal, after the British took over, a number of other factors cropped up.
For starters, most of the absentee landlords suddenly found themselves to be “foreigners” who couldn’t come to the land they owned to collect rents and were essentially forced to sell it. Remember most of the landlords lived in Beirut or Damascus, which thanks to the British, suddenly became foreign capitals in foreign states.
Additionally, there was often quite a bit of confusion during the transfer from the old Ottoman system to the new system with the requisite translations of all the necessary paperwork as to who owned the land and what the conditions were.
One thing that had been true under the Ottoman system was that while the tennant farmers rented the land, they owned the olive trees that were on them. When the Zionist settlers came in, they insisted they’d bought all the land and owned the olive trees as well, which would be the case in Europe and they would often saw down olive trees that were extremely important to the Arab fellaheen.
Now, you may object to the idea that the Jewish settlers were “taking” their land, but during the boom of urban renewal of the 60s when rich people purchased apartment buildings from slumlords and then booted the poor people living there from them, there from them, the poor people screamed about their homes being taken and most cities and states wound up passing a bunch of rent control laws giving tennants all sorts of rights.
So the view of the Arab residents is hardly that unique.
You’re certainly correct that the Arabs became quite hostile to the Jews in their lands, but lets not pretend the Jews of that time viewed the Arabs in any way that couldn’t be described as racist as well.
Obviously, the Zionists of that era were products of their time and viewed the Arabs the way all Europeans viewed most 3rd World residents. We should take that into account, just as we should understand why the Arabs of Palestine wouldn’t be happy with people coming there of whom, the nicest said things like, “Ok, we’re going to turn this place into a Jewish State and it’s going to be controlled by Jews for the benefits of Jews, but don’t you Arabs worry. We won’t treat you too badly as long as you know your place.”(not what was technically said, but certainly what was heard).
Moreover, as you seem to be conceding the Arabs actually had to import anti-Semitic imagery from the outside, because it previously hadn’t existed there.
I never said that the Jews threw out any Arabs until the Naqba. It’s also debatable just how much of the growth in the area was due to immigration. According to the most reliable demographer, Dr. Justin McCarthy, the overwhelming majority of Palestinian Arabs in 1948 were descendants of those who’d been living there for centuries despite what Joan Peters has tried to claim.
There undoubtedly was immigration to the area, but not that much, since the Zionists wouldn’t sell land to Arabs(and to the this day Arab citizens of Israel aren’t allowed to own most of the land in Israel) they wouldn’t allow Arabs to join their labor unions and they were extremely reluctant to offer jobs to Arabs and when they did, it was only menial labor.
If you want to credit the population growth amongst the Arabs with the Zionists, you’re better off pointing to the way European medicine caused a dramatic decline in the infant mortality rate.
I’m a bit surprised by the claim that “some Zionists were indeed colonialist in their attitudes”.
Which ones weren’t. If you read through the writings of the early Zionist leaders, all of them, even Chaim Weizman displayed colonialist attitudes. If you look through their papers and plans you’ll notice they regularly refer to their “colonization policies” and “colonization plans” and furthermore the Arabs are regularly described in those papers as “natives”. Remember, back then “native” was something of a pejorative with very negative connotations.
Frankly, Weizman, Ben Gurion and co. would be a bit surprised by such a claim made about them. They were products of their time and the people of their time didn’t think “colonialist” was a dirty word and happily described themselves as such.
You’re reminding me of the people who refer to the Arabs of the 20s and the 30s as “Palestinians”, a term which the Arabs of that time would have found confusing. Similarly, I’m reminded of Bernard Lewis ridiculing those who claimed that Christians and Jews of the medieval Islamic world were treated equally.
As he said, to the Muslims of that time period, claiming that the Jews and Christians were treated like Muslim would be seen not as a compliment, but as an insult because the idea that those who willfully rejected Allah’ final revelation should be treated the same as those who accepted it was a logical and theological absurdity.
The Zionists of that time period were certainly not nearly as racist as the Beiteinyu types of today, but at best, their attitudes towards the Arab inhabitants were extremely condescending and paternalistic and such attitudes would not be received well by the Arabs.
It’s not so much that as whenever you have large numbers of immigrants moving into a region and letting the Native population know that you want to turn it into a state controlled by the immigrants for the benefits of such people of the same nationality of the immigrants, then you’re going to have extreme hostility.
Theodore Herzl, the father of Zionism, who was extremely progressive for his time freely predicted that this would be the case when the Jewish immigrants went there. He just couldn’t come up with any realistic way to prevent tension, because there’s no nice way for Italians to immigrate to New York and announce they’re going to make New York into an Italian nation without pissing off the non-Italian New Yorkers.
You don’t need to go to a hypothetical scenario. You’ve already got the Mormon state. Only I’m no seeing any resentment.
FD, well the Native Americans who were displaced had plenty else to be resentful about and were massacred off anyway … so maybe not the best point to make. Really.
Anyway.
Ibn, I gave previously offered up this cite as a reasoned critical analysis of the data on how much of Arab growth was immigration and how much was “natural growth”. The data is really only good enough to say that there was both and that Arab populations grew most near Jewish settlements.
As to “colonialism”, no I think many did not think in those terms. They thought more in terms of return to a home. That was not in their minds “colonialism” and some were idealistic enough to think that the economic benefits they’d bring would be welcomed by the native population. Some were not so idealistic. And many thought of creating a homeland but not a state per se. There were lots of different concepts floating about in those decades, socialist utopian ones with Arab worker solidarity to racist colonialist ones and many points in between.
But you do seem to contradict yourself - indeed the “attitudes” of the immigrant Jews, paternalistic as they were, were not “received well” by those used to Jews being a subservient class. And soon European style anti-Semitism was imported in.
I’m sorry but that’s a ridiculous comparison.
For starters the Zionists both today and then when they used the term “state” weren’t thinking of the American concept of “state” but they were referring to an independent nation.
Now if you think that if large numbers of Mormons who don’t speak English moved into Illinois and declared that they wanted to make it into an independent Mormon nation that there wouldn’t be tensions then you’re being extremely foolish.
Secondly, gentiles in Utah are certainly not second-class citizens in Utah nor are they required to have the words “non-Mormon” stamped on their driver’s licenses the way Arab Israelis have the word “Arab” listed on their IDs.
Third, you’re ignoring the fact that the first US citizens to inhabit Utah were the Mormons and it was overwhelmingly Mormon when they petitioned to be made a part of the US.
Fourth, if you think that the Mormons of the 19th Century faced no resentment then you need to reread the history books because they went to Utah because they were kicked out of everywhere else and they were at least as hated by the Americans of that time as the Jews of the early 20th Century were by the Arabs of Palestine.
Well, I’m a bit leery of the article since it presents Joan Peters and Norman Finkelstein as if they’re both respected scholars whereas both are viewed as polemicists and cranks.
Nevertheless, you’ll note that it readily admits that “most demographers and historians including Zionists” reject the notion that the major reason for the increase in the Arab population was due to immigration.
Here’s an article from Dr. Justin McCarthy, a Professor at the University of Louisville who’s regarded as one of the most respected if not the most respected demographers of the Ottoman Empire.
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story559.html
Well, I’m sorry, but the leaders of the Yishuv and their lobbyists in Great Britain freely and proudly labeled themselves colonialists. To people like Theodore Herzl, David Ben Gurion, and Chaim Weizman it was not a dirty word.
Were we to go back in time and tell them how awful the concept of colonialism was they’d be as shocked as 19th Century Americans would be at us asserting that we believed that blacks and whites were equals.
Similarly, the idea that David Ben Gurion, who was regarded as one of the moderates wasn’t, by today’s standards, quite racist, is absurd. You freely admit that the concept of “a land without a people for a people without a land” was a complete myth but that was to Ben Gurion and his followers the reality and Ben Gurion was, if anything, even more representative of Palestinian Jewish opinion than Husseini was of Palestinian Arab opinion(though unlike Husseini he didn’t murder everyone who disagreed with him).
It was certainly clear to anyone with a brain that the Arabs living under this “Jewish state” would never be anything but second-class citizens. No, they might not be persecuted, but just as the Jews of the medieval era didn’t like the Dhimmi status they had forced on them, the Arabs of this time period didn’t like having second-class citizenship forced on them.
You’ll notice that Ben Gurion repeatedly told the the British the Jews deserved the land because it was “undeveloped” and “neglected” by the Arabs.
Those are colonialist attitudes.
Actually, the Arab Fellaheen of Palestine had few if any encounters with Jews prior to the arrival of Zionist. Yes, there was significant Jewish population in Jerusalem, but those were mostly heavily religious Jews weren’t a “subservient class”. They were also for the most part really hostile to the idea of Zionism because they believed that the Jewish state shouldn’t be founded until the Messiah revealed himself.
As to the “European style anti-Semitism” being “imported in” I was referred to the blood sucking comments that Finn alluded to. There’s a reason most of the anti-Semitic imagery used in the ME comes from Europe and why they have to spread around copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Because viscous, anti-Jewish hatred as opposed to tolerant contempt is a recent addition to the land.