That Dutchman saved a Jewish girl during WWII. Now he apparently thinks that that was a mistake on his part (otherwise returning the medal doesn’t make sense). Thanks for nothing, then.
They’d probably feel about the same as white people who’ve stood up against anti-Asian racism in the when asked about their opinion of the South Korean government’s treatment of mixed race children left over after the Korean War.
They’d probably be offended by your suggestion and then ask what it has to do with what’s being discussed. This particular Dutchmen seems to only be reacting that way because of the fact that his own family was killed.
I’m actually surprised you don’t hold his beliefs in extreme contempt since you’ve repeatedly insisted it’s not an emotional issue for you and you feel you’re better able to render judgement since you’re not “emotionally invested” in the issue.
So are you saying they would be disturbed by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or that they wouldn’t?
Why would I hold his beliefs in extreme contempt? I don’t even hold your views in extreme contempt.
If you don’t think it means anything that some guy that got a medal from Israel for saving Jews from nazis doesn’t want an Israeli medal anymore I suppose thats up to you.
But like I said. DAMN thats gotta sting. :eek:
I wonder how long it will be before the zionists try to paint him as an anti-semite.
The first link is to an article about holocaust survivors criticizing Israel in response to Elie Weisal’s characterization of Hamas as Nazis. “Never again” must mean NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE!
The second link is to what looks like Israelis posting things like they should go back to the death camps and that Hitler should have finished the job.
I wonder how long it will be before the terrorists try to paint him as an anti-Zionist.
i.e.: that kind of absurdity is pointless. How long before you try to paint him as either a hero or a jerk? It doesn’t matter. He can be both right and wrong! I can respect him for his beliefs and his heroism, and still disagree with him on the merits of the specific situation.
We don’t have to engage in manicheanism. People aren’t “all good” or “all bad.” Your own attempt to “paint” the zionists as manicheanists is, itself, a degraded form of oversimplification.
Shades of gray still exist in this world, no matter how hard you seek to deconstruct them.
My ‘take’ on such matters is that there is an extremely powerful narrative out there - among Jews and non-Jews alike - that views Jews as morally superior because they are (or rather have been) underdogs. The victims of persecution and abuse by the majority society, which (at best) tolerated their presence.
The epitomie of that is, of course, the Holocaust.
The conflation of Jews-as-suffering-victims and Jews-as-morally-superior is, of course, rudely broken in the case of modern Zionism. A state in which Jews are a majority, and whose army has crushed its enemies repeatedly, and who has ruled over others (often for the worse), is hardly an example of “moral superiority” in the above sense: it makes Jews nothing more than another ethnic group, a majority in another nation, no better and no worse than any other.
This rankles for those invested in the “Jews as morally superior” narrative. It seems, to them, as a total betrayal - assuming that they conflate Jews and Israelis.
Thing is, ask the average person what they would prefer: to be an example of persecuted moral superiority, or to live an ordinary life? The average person is apt to tell those invested in the “moral superiority” narrative that they can keep it. Who wants to die or be persecuted just so that others can feel good about how morally superior they, the victims, are?
I thought the narrative was “Once upon a time, a lot of people wanted to wipe out the Jews; many still do; over time, the Jews have gotten better at fighting back.”
That’s a different narrative - one in direct opposition to the first.
Israelis have (or had) yet a third narrative: that the Jews of Europe and the ME were losers with a ‘slave culture’, which the Israelis deliberately discarded as unworthy - hence, no longer speaking Yiddish (or Ladino, etc.) and adopting Hebrew. This is even more in opposition to the first narrative.
Reminds me of something I wrote here years ago. Basically, when most of the world says “never again” about the Holocaust, they mean “We will never allow something like the Holocaust to happen again”. When Israelis say “never again”, they mean, “Next time they come for us, we’ll be ready.”
The whole thing reminds me of this quote from someone: “The test of courage comes when we are in the minority and the test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority”. I and many others think that Israel and the Jews in general have plenty of the former but Israel itself is now lacking in the latter. I simply don’t agree with their overreaction and disproportionate response to the Palestinians.
Thankfully, the generation of hawks who oversaw the beginnings of Israel are old and soon there will not be any more of them left. As time marches on, there will be less and less people who believe every skirmish is a fight for Israel’s life and see it more as an isolated conflict that doesn’t require the lessons of the Holocaust to solve
It’s astonishing that we have four or five concurrent threads discussing whether Israel’s military action is “disproportionate” and not even one single thread discussing the Syrian government’s shelling of its own cities.
What? Aside from the problem pointed out by LHoD, bringing Matthew 7:3-5 into this is either a very confused reference, or one that necessarily implies that people on this board who criticize Israel are themselves somehow responsible for, or associated with, Syrian atrocities.
Not defending the reference, but I imagine it to be more a matter of perspective.
The ME is a very dangerous place - has been for a long time. The laser-like focus on the Israel-Palestine issue tends to obscure that, leads people (reasonably enough) to conclude that, if there is so much news about it, and so much talk about the human tragedy of it, it must actually be worse that what is going on elsewhere in the ME.
For example, if you were to tell people that more Palestinians have been killed in conflicts with other Arabs than in the conflict with Israel, most people would be I think genuinely surprised.
Sure. In fairness, I understood what **Trinopus **was getting at, so my criticism may have been a bit petty. For some reason the mis-used reference just bugged me is all.