So why didn’t they have their own country?
What about the Jews that lived there? They weren’t allowed? 
Anyone who claims that the land was “stolen by the UN” is either grossly ignorant of the facts or deliberately lying. I get the impression that it’s the former not the latter.
You really need to learn about the situation before making such foolish statements.
The land was controlled not by “Palestinian Arabs”(who didn’t even think of themselves as such) but by the Ottomans who lost it to the British after WWI.
At the time most of the landowners weren’t “Palestinian Arabs” but people who dwelled in Beirut or Damascus and during the time period, massive numbers of Jews, who’d been trickling in during the Ottoman Empire started to flood in due to the Balfour Declaration(which ironically enough was motivated by anti-Semitism not philo-semitism) though the British turned against the idea of the creation of a Jewish state by the early 1920s.
Finally, the British turned the area over to the UN who decided to divide it between the Arab and Jewish populations after the Arab political leadership, led by El Hajj Amin Al-Husseini an avowed Nazi, made it clear they saw the Jews as aliens who needed to be slaughtered like cattle.
It should be noted that the decision to divide it was made after the unanimous recommendation of a 12 representative committee which had three Muslims and no Jews.
The really sad thing about this debacle was had the Palestinian Arab political leadership not decided to go to war and try and exterminate the Palestinian Jews the Palestinians of today would have a much larger state than just the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem would be an international city.
Anyway, this is all completely off-topic.
We’re discussing anti-Semitism amongst the Left in America and Europe and when vast numbers of people blame Jews for the current economic crisis and believe in the dual loyalty canard it’s clearly not something that should simply be ignored.
IMHO One can not say that the antisemitism is 100% right wing or left wing, I have seen people from the left criticize Israel, but to say that the left does blame Jews for the economic crisis is wrong, it is not one of the main reasons the left would criticize Israel. That economic angle is a staple of many extreme right wing groups.
I actually intended it to be sardonic, but I can see how it could be reinterpreted the way you say. That was certainly not my intent, however.
A better way to state it is that Israel has good reason to distrust the Palestinians. It also has good reason to engage with them. That’s hard to do when the people you want to negotiate with won’t even recognize your right to exist.
No, not at all. I was pointing out that the left has historical reasons for disliking the Jews, but I didn’t mean to suggest that the other side had none. There are right-wing antisemites, and plenty of them. However, it is a peculiarity of today’s politics that there really is a large apparent divide between the attitude towards Jewish people today and where you sit on the left-right axis. Maybe that’s just a side-effect of a larger political struggle, and five years from now it will be the right taking an anti-Israel stance.
Sorry, but you’re demonstrably wrong.
As I posted earlier.
When self-identified Democrats are nearly twice as likely as self-identified Republicans to blame Jews for the current economic crisis it’s absurd to claim it’s merely a “right-wing phenomenon”.
Nor, should it be surprising to anyone familiar with the history of anti-Semitism. There’s a reason it was once referred to as “the socialism of fools.”
Hostility towards those viewed as “middlemen minorities” whether they be Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Ethnic Chinese in South East Asia, “Asians” in Africa, Korean-Americans in American ghettos, and of course the Jews in Europe amongst people who would be natural constituencies of the left have always been and always will be quite common.
Even with these caveats, don’t suggest other posters are lying.
Except you’re ignoring the far worse anti-Semitism originating from left-wing governments in both the Middle East as well as the Soviet Union which was extremely anti-Semitic.
Left-wingers have been very capable of bigotry as the Kurds in Iraq and the ethnic Chinese of Vietnam can testify to.
Why assume that the Jews will somehow get treated differently?
Could not even the National Socialists be argued to be leftists considering they called themselves socialist? Even on the Political Compass Hitler is on the border between the blue and red fields while at the top on the authoritarian scale.
And another useless thread…
If Al Qaeda called themselves “The Cleaners,” would you say their views represented the opinions of janitors? Anyway this argument has been made in the past, and even if you felt you could make it successfully, it doesn’t have much to do with anything being seen in the current political world.
Not ignoring that, I was referring to recent times and I do not think many left wingers would consider those “left-wing” middle east governments to be representative of liberal ideologies. (Soviet Russia would not be considered liberal)
Sorry but many liberals are against communists if you have not noticed yet.
Because I have seen that examples in South America fail the attempt at pigeonholing you are attempting here, Just recently a Jew in Venezuela, even with all the problems, was in a better situation than a Jew in Colombia.
:rolleyes:
Besides being a minority of democrats, you are ignoring that not all democrats are liberals.
You said that Palestinians have a genetic “propensity for killling Jews.” That’s racist. pure and simple.
Dude, we’re talking about “anti-Semitism on the left” not "anti-Semitism amongst liberals.
Also, it’s absurd to simply discount how violently anti-Semitic many Middle Eastern governments were and still are by saying “that’s not representative of liberal ideologies.”
Right-wingers could play the same game by saying “well the Latin American governments you’re referring to are not representative of the views of most right-wingers.”
Ok, please compare being a Jew in Colombia to a being a Jew in the Soviet Union, a Jew in Syria, a Jew in Nasser’s Egypt, and a Jew in Saddam’s Iraq.
Again, we’re talking about left-wingers not “liberals”. Second, I notice how you decided to completely ignore the fact that a third of all self-identified democrats identified themselves as anti-Semites and how the poll revealed that self-identified democrats were far more likely to hold such anti-Semitic views than self-identified Republicans.
You seem to be deliberately ignoring facts that threaten your world view.
And therefore you acknowledge that bringing a poll that asked Democrats and Republicans is not really relevant? Ok. 
Nope, it is absurd to assume self described middle eastern governments are what they claim to be. As many noticed already, even in the past just because they choose a label it does not follow that they are liberal or leftist in the way Americans define the terms.
I don’t think Jacobo Timerman from Argentina would agree with you.
Not playing your pigeon hole game as I already mentioned.
And as usual you ignore something important, not all democrats are left wingers.
Nope, the reality is that I have stopped counting the many times some right wingers try to claim things like the National Socialists were left wingers just because they had “Socialists” in their name. History does not say that.
So then you’re saying that you don’t think Ba’athists were left-wingers?
Please explain why it’s inappropriate to label Assad, Nasser, Saddam Hussein and George Habash as left-wingers?
I assume you’re quite knowledgeable about all of them or wouldn’t have made such a statement about the Middle East.
If you wish to be taken seriously don’t link to wikipedia. It makes you look intellectually lazy.
Anyway your link does nothing to show why Latin American “right-wing” regimes are more legitimately “right-wing” than Middle Eastern “left-wing” organizations are “left-wing”.
Translation: You just destroyed my argument so I’m going to run away rather than answer your argument.
As for the OP, I do remember commenting this on a previous discussion on the treatment of Jews in Latin America, and I think the same applies for Spain.
It is more likely that it is the preponderance of Catholicism in the regions the reason why there is a good number of people with antisemitic ideas. (That poll still does not say that even that minority of Democrats and Republicans would resort to underhanded ways to deal with the issue). A Catholic can be a right winger or a left winger, I pointed out that when unrest comes antisemitic ideas come up to the forefront, and it does not matter much if you are a right winger or a left winger, in Colombia both sides did have it for the Jews, and many did flee the country when the drug war combined with the civil war.
The biggest common denominator with a history of antisemitism was their Catholicism.
Ed. - Lapsed Catholic for a reason…
Saddam had the Republican Guard, therefore they were right wingers… yes, your point is that ridiculous.
So then it follows that if there are other sources that report the same that then you were the lazy one by assuming wikipedia was the end of it all?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,950572,00.html
Meh, he don’t know me very well, do he folks? 
Which is why of course anti-Semitism is so much stronger among the overwhelmingly Catholic Italian Americans than it is amongst the overwhelming Protestant African-Americans and why anti-Semitism is vastly greater in Catholic France than predominantly Protestant Germany.
Similarly, it’s why Iranian Muslims are far less hostile to Jews than Catholic Armenians.
Since you haven’t presented any evidence that the third of all Democrats who blame Jews for the current economic crisis are disproportionately likely to be Catholic I don’t get your point.
Translation: I made myself look like a fool when I said it’s ridiculous to claim that the Ba’athists weren’t left-wingers so I’m going to try and cover my tracks by making flippant comments since I now realize that I know nothing of the governments or the political ideologies guiding that region.
Dude, in all seriousness please stop making stupid statements about the Middle East.
You obviously know little about the region, which in and of itself is hardly a crime since there are plenty of regions of the world I know nothing about.
However, when you make sweeping pronouncements about such regions that you clearly know nothing about you insult those of us who are from there and there are few things in the world that piss us off then when westerners make ignorant statements about our part of the world.