It was an… odd film. The film marker went to Fink to get a perspective on things, and it was Vintage Fink, but the guy kept rolling and didn’t edit out a bit where Fink compared ADL leadership to the Nazis and offered up a Nazi salute to drive his point him. Fink got a bit… bonkers… when the guy implied that he wouldn’t be editing it out and that some people might find it offensive.
It was also odd that rather than the clear and obvious anti-semitism in the media of many Arab countries, he went to the US, and then pretty much only the ADL. And yes sure some aren’t violence-based, but there are publicly available statistics that speak to the rate of hate crimes against Jews.
The film marker was also somewhat perturbed at continuing Holocaust education in Israel, among other things.
It wasn’t exactly a bad piece (I’m relying on memory, saw it months ago), but it wasn’t very good either. The point seemed to be that we shouldn’t teach children about the Holocaust or look for anti-Semitism. Essentially the message seemed to be that Israelis are pretty safe from anti-Semitism in their own country, and Jews in other countries should go to Israel if they’re actually worried about things.
A counter-terrorism operation won’t be nixed because of inadequate troops. What will happen is that in order to save troops, Israel will attack using an air raid. Air raids are unfortunately less discriminating than ground troops.
It takes a large number of troops to defeat an insurgency. One of the reasons all hell broke loose a few days after Saddam was defeated in Iraq was because we didn’t have enough troops to fight an insurgency. Rumsfeld didn’t think there would be one. We went in with 75,000 when we needed close to 400,000.
Israel has the same problem. It doesn’t have enough troops to clear insurgents and hold down the area so that they don’t come back. They have to rely on air raids and hope the terrorists get the message. It’s less effective, but they don’t have much of a choice.
Oh, come on! What does “strong” have to do with it?
That’s not a great example. How many civilian deaths have the Spanish caused lately in pursuit of ETA? Or the Greeks with their terrorists?
If more governments did the *smart *thing and treated terrorism as a policing matter, civilian deaths would be greatly reduced. One Jew’s definition of insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Advocating for a more military approach is an insane suggestion.
Because a more powerful military worked so well for the US?
They’re not “lies”. Israel’s response is what works for Israel, but that’s the result of politics and cost-benefit calculations on Israel’s part, not any issue of willpower (or lack). Stating that Israel doesn’t want to spend the money and/or blood to combat terrorism “nicely” isn’t a lie. It’s an *interpretation *of the observable situation.
I haven’t watched the whole movie yet (bandwidth in the third world, yadda yadda) but it strikes me as being more about the League and Europe/America/Israel relations than general worldwide anti-Semitism. But it looks like the whole will be interesting.
Yeah, you say “dramatically” and the article heading says “five-fold increase”, but the meat of the article says it rose to a staggering 113 incidents nationwide “including threats, insults, graffiti signs and slogans and demonstrations highlighting anti-Jewish* messages”, and also notes the Canada-based B’nai Brith only records an 11% increase in all incidents overall.
It’s hard to dig up their methodology - are all demonstrations against Israeli occupations counted as incidents? Or “Israel Apartheid Week”?
I would plead with you to watch the movie. As FinnAgain says, he doesn’t “treat” Finklestein in any way…he doesn’t portray him to be particularly rational or, for that matter, irrational. He lets his own words speak for themselves. They in fact get into a heated argument (one that I found kind of funny, but YMMV).
I appreciate you weighing in since you’ve seen the film, but that’s not the message I got (and I saw it yesterday). It seemed me that the filmmaker was saying that perhaps Israelis are too steeped in the Holocaust tragedy and present-day anti-Semitism (real or perceived), not that they should not be taught these things at all.
It would be like having a society populated by diaspora black Africans (ie., the decendants of slaves) where they are constantly told to “never forget, never forget, NEVER FORGET!” And then they are taught that wherever they go in the world, they will be hated and the victims of violence, even in places where blacks are doing well. If Dopers learned that that was how black people were being raised, there would be eye-rolling and cries of “hypersensitivity” and “playing the blame game.” For a change, I got to see how another group could be accused of the very same thing. Of course, as I’ve said, I’ve never been to Israel so I don’t know if the filmmaker was exaggerating or actually showing reality. It certainly seemed real, based on what the teenagers were saying to the camera.
One thing that’s got me thinking though–and making me suspect bad things about the filmmaker–is that he went to the ADL and asked for recent acts of anti-Semitism and perhaps limiting it to the NYC area. Of course you’re not going to find a whole lot of violence when you restrict the query like that. But I don’t know if this is indeed what happened, only that it is a possible hypothesis.
That’s not a message that the continued education on and analysis of the past is important and should be maintained. The concept of putting “emphasis on the past” (illustrated by the film cutting to school children visiting one of the camps and Foxman talking about how having Israeli support now gives him hope) is said to be holding [Jews and/or Israelis] back and is contrasted with “living in the present and looking to the future.” But they’re not mutually exclusive, and the editing was done in such a way to deliberately show the worst bits. You referred to it as ‘over-the-top paranoia’, but it’s not. The closest that a the film showed was one girl who either misheard or misinterpreted an old guy’s comments (if the film maker’s translation was correct). And this happened in Poland, one of the few places on the planet that kept murdering Jews after the Third Reich fell and their nation was liberated… hardly over-the-top paranoia.
No, it wouldn’t. Blacks aren’t Jews, and you can’t replace one group with another group, and expect the analogy to hold.
The Holocaust is relevant and should be taught in sufficient depth because it was very recent, occurring in the modern age; it occurred in a supposedly enlightened European nation, it occurred with methodical precision and deliberate intent; the nations of the world largely stood by and let the runup to the Holocaust happen; even the United States refused to let the St. Louis into the country;l and nations like the UK continued to capture and imprison Jews for years after the war and forced them to remain imprisoned or return to the countries (like Poland) which they’d fled from and in fact kept thousands of people imprisoned, who wanted to immigrate to Israel, even after Israel had been established as a sovereign state. To say nothing of the fact that the Holocaust was one of the reasons why so many Jews went to and/or helped establish the nascent state of Israel.
As for being hated even while doing well, that’s something of a non sequitor. They’re not mutually exclusive, at all. Jews who obtain political power are often accused of Dual Loyalty if their politics aren’t the “correct” type. We just had a thread where someone alleged that the prevalence of Jews in Hollywood was a good basis for bringing a lawsuit against Hollywood and forcing Jews to reveal whether or not they’ve formed a cabal in order to keep non-Jews out of positions of power. And so on, and so on and so on.
Being successful is not protection, at all, against being hated. In point of fact it can often serve as the justification for that hatred.
Please clarify, what exactly do you believe was real, and what exactly were the children evincing?
My apologies for commenting on the subject without seeing the film.
Worldwide there is still the old school Protocols of the Elders antisemitism around - and Arab media has help promulgate it. But in America antisemitism is now mostly more subtle and mild. It was of note that Giffords Jewishness was not even suspected as a motivation for a crazy to shoot her.
Historically, well that is another matter, and Jewish educational programs are full of driving in that there have been multiple times of acceptance and assimilation before followed by horrible periods. We are taught that it would be a mistake to believe that our guard should be let down and I would agree with that. Although I do begrudge that Jewish children are taught that sometimes to the exclusion of other Jewish history and philosophy.
Given that part of Israel’s justification as a Jewish state is to help prevent another repetition of that historic cycle, it is easy to see the message pounded into Israeli consciousness far beyond that in American Jewish consciousness. And to understand a pushback against it.
There are obviously going to be differences in methodology leading to different methods of counting the total number of 'incidents".
Whether 113 is staggering or not is obviously a matter of opinion, and depends on exactly what they consist of.
However, one thing is certain - however you count them, they aren’t non-existant, and a film claiming that they are (or at least that an organization dedicated to recording them cannot find even a single one) reeks of bull.
In my own lifetime, I haven’t personally seen much actual evidence of Jew-hatred: only two incidents stick in my mind, minor property damage, one in which someone vandalized the cemetary next door, and another where someone scratched swastikas on all of the cars in the neighbourhood synagogue parking lot - but of course, those may well be the work of idiot schoolkids.
However, more serious incidents there certainly have been - like the fire-bombing alluded to in the article concerning Montreal, or the stabbing of a Jewish fellow by a neo-nazi up the street from where my parents live.
The movie was made in 2009. The same year as an anti-Semitic gunman opened fire at the United States Holocaust Museum. Similar acts of violence weren’t all that far back in memory…
Well, the ADL and SPLC are, for better or worse, the go-to sources for race-based hate crime statistics. I’m not sure who the filmmaker’s primary audience is, but I suspect it may not be particularly receptive to figures provided by the US government (though by the same token I doubt they’d accept figures provided by the ADL).
This is certainly the case (creative editing). At least one Jewish community center or school gets shot up every year (seemingly always in California).
Look, when the ADL says, “one in eight Americans has hard-core anti-Semitic feelings”, you can take that number with a grain of salt. Their mission is to raise awareness about anti-Semitism (and, not incidentally, they do a very good job of raising awareness about racism in general).
On the other hand, when somebody says the ADL can’t point to an anti-Jewish violent crime, it means the footage has been doctored. Or that they interviewed the janitor, possibly.
To be fair about this, Montreal is a very special case within North America, both because of its different culture and because Jews are a substantial portion of the much-despised Anglophone elite. You really can’t generalize from Montreal to anywhere else.
ETA: I do see that the Star cite is about all of Canada, though. My comment’s application is a bit limited, then.
I can’t speak for monstro, but she may have been talking about the wild claims that some of the Israeli teens made about the local Poles in the town that they were visiting.
“They called up pigs and Jew bitches!”
“Last month at this hotel, the Neo-Nazis broke in and rounded up all the Jews that were staying here!”
“Much-despised” is much of an exaggeration. But I understand your hypothesis. I know I don’t consider Jews as any different from any other English Canadian, except for the fact that they can and do use accusations of anti-Semitism as a rhetorical weapon. But it is true that in my mind, they are automatically English Canadians, and likely not able to speak a word of French, so by necessity separate from this society. (I’ve heard that there are Sephardic Jews from North Africa who immigrated to Quebec, probably specifically Montreal, largely because it is a French-speaking society, but I’ve never met any.)
As well, say “Jew” around here and the image that will come to most people’s minds will be Hasidic Jews who made the news in the last few years because of their illegal schools, their refusal to deal with female police officers, and their attempts to force a YMCA in Montreal to put opaque glass in their gym room’s windows so they wouldn’t see the women inside. I know that ultra-Orthodox Jews everywhere try to stay apart of the rest of society as much as possible, and have some severe religious rules to follow, but for better or for worse they aren’t seen as a very positive contribution to this society.
But this said, it seems that when there is an anti-Semitic incident in Montreal, the perpetrator turns out to be someone of Arabic heritage. I assume the same is probably true in Toronto as well. So I don’t believe your hypothesis is true in this case, and think anti-Semitic incidents in Montreal and Toronto are quite comparable.
Then you haven’t read their book, because they specifically claim that “the Israeli lobby” was responsible for the Iraq War.
As to the rest, well, I’m not sure why I should have to explain why it’s wrong to blame American Jews for the Iraq War or go into detail explaining why their “scholarship” is lacking.
We don’t feel the need to do so with David Irving. Most of us recognize he’s an anti-Semite based strictly on what he says.
That said, I’ll give just one of many examples. They set out to write a book detailing how powerful the evil Israeli Lobby is and how it controls and manipulates Gentiles to do the bidding of Jews and yet they don’t interview any congressional staffers, the people best able to go into detail of the interactions between lobbies and politicians.
Those are home grown terrorists. The terrorists Israel has to deal with are not within Israel’s borders.
Advocating for a more military approach is not advocating for more of the same thing. If one police officer could not restrain a suspect by himself, would it be insane to suggest that more police officers would make a difference? Or would you cry out “hey we already tried a police solution! Adding more officers would be doing the same thing over again!”
It worked to suppress the insurgency in Iraq.
It’s a misguided interpretation based on stereotypes and prejudices against Jews. The misinterpretation is not regarding whether Israel is fighting terrorism “nicely” - it’s not - the misinterpretation is regarding the belief that Israel could combat terrorism “nicely” if it wanted too.