Of course – it’s the fault and responsibility of the Jews. Thanks for letting this slip out.
[quote=“The_Second_Stone, post:60, topic:695760”]
[/quote]Not watching your movie.
Not a Jew.
[QUOTE=The Second Stone]
I’m not blaming Jews here, I’m blaming Israelis. There is a clear difference. But nice try to conflate the two.
[/quote]
:dubious:
I’ve actually been thinking about this all day. I’ve been sort of thinking about it for years and probably even decades. You think YOU are frustrated? Ha. I assure you, you have nothing on me.
Do Jews have a specific responsibility to stand up and speak out against Israeli actions? Is that even a fair question to ask? Would you ask Muslims to denounce the ISIS? Protestants to denounce the WBC? Catholics to denounce the church scandals?
And the answer to all those questions is yes, I personally would ask people to denounce all those situations. Because it is reasonable to demand that people denounce shit that happens in the name of their religion or their tribe. I, along with many other Jews, am completely comfortable saying that I think certain Israeli actions suck. I am completely comfortable denouncing the settlers as world class assholes and the Israelis often far too inclined to let the crazy Haredim have far too much of a say in their society.
But you don’t seem to understand that the flip side of that is that I’m not going to say a damned thing to anyone who can’t tell the difference between Israel and Nazi Germany. I will not stand on the side of protesters who carry anti-Semitic signs or show no evidence of understanding that Hamas and many Palestinian leaders don’t exactly sound Thomas Jefferson, let alone Barak Obama.
I also expect Palestinians to denounce Hamas, state that Jews have the right to live in Israel and that any society created by Palestinians must be one where women and non-Muslims are not second class citizens. I expect Muslims not to fill their newspapers and media with often overt anti-Semitism and holocaust denial nonsense. I expect permission to look around the ME and make criticisms of other societies there as well. And I damned well expect that someone who expects all the Jews of the world to denounce every last living and dead Jew or Israeli who does something less than ideal to join me in making such demands.
Does that make sense to you? Because there a lousy rotten thirteen million Jews in this world. That’s not a lot of people by world religious or national standards. Insisting that somehow we and we alone are responsible for much of the world’s problems . . .
This is excellently said. I’m not sure I agree that Jews have a special burden to denounce Israel’s sometimes-awful behavior, because even that smacks a little too much of collective guilt to me; but if Jews were to have such an obligation, of course it’d be vital that folks also insist on all those other obligations as well. Second Stone, pay attention to this post.
Thank you. I would also like to know what his reaction is to this article in the New York Times today.
Am I supposed to join in with people who call Jews pigs? Bomb Jewish community centers? Hamas leaders who accuse people like me of literally making bread from non-Jewish babies?
Is this acceptable discourse?
Well, hold up. Of course it’s not acceptable discourse. The assholes saying that shit are assholes. But there’s not a real equivalence between a military of an allied country that engages in a military campaign that results in hundreds of civilian deaths, and the spokesperson of an identified terrorist organization saying something pernicious. The “European elites” who speak out against the first but not the second are engaging in rational and defensible behavior, because the first is both the greater injustice and also the injustice more susceptible to being spoken against.
If you speak against specific Israeli military tactics, that doesn’t mean you’re “joining in” with the horrible assholes who object to Jews existentially, any more than my objection to Walmart’s worst excesses places me alongside Pol Pot.
Thoughtful people have been thinking about this for their whole lives and the better part of a century. “Ha” you may think it is funny, but it isn’t.
Do Muslims fund the ISIS? Americans and American Jews certainly fund Israel. And most Muslims do in fact denounce ISIS. Protestants do denounce the WBC. Many Catholics denounce the pedophilia scandal, but not nearly enough. Israel asks for and receives special pleading in international law and logic for its charter, defense and existence.
So do we have a special responsibility for making sure we do not advocate genocide? Fund genocide? Make sure that the people disenfranchised by the six plus decades of land grabs have homes and safe communities when we fund them and sponsor them in international affairs. I’d say yes.
On that we have much agreement. But the message isn’t getting through.
Yet here you are saying a thing to me, whom you’ve accused of these things. And you won’t stop. No one here is carrying anti-Semitic signs. Thomas Jefferson doesn’t sound like Thomas Jefferson when he said things like “the tree of liberty must be watered in blood” every twenty years.
You expect Palestinians to denounce people who would kill them for denouncing them. I think that is a bit much. You expect Palestinians to state that Jews have a right to live in Israel before they state that they themselves have a right to live where they were born and put the rights of people you admit are their oppressors, before their own. You demand loyalty from them while taking their land and their lives and imprison them and starve them. Even the Nazis didn’t demand that the Jews state that the Nazis had right to exist, properly took the property seized. You demand justice from the oppressed before you will consider giving them justice. You attribute to these uneducated people an understanding and willful Holocaust denial when their own history has nothing at all to do with the Holocaust of which they are entirely ignorant and innocent. You accuse all of them of anti-Semitism for what some newspapers ignorantly punish, and will withhold your blessing of justice until they swear non-violence and ratify the criminal actions to the people who are killing them and their children, imprisoning them and are now living on the land they were born on and their grandparents for two thousand years back lived on.
What did these Palestinians do to deserve this treatment at the hands of the Israelis? Nothing. The Germans did it. But the Palestinians pay with their land, their culture, their lives and their future.
Jews are not “lousy rotten” and that is a disgusting thing to say. Israel, being a subset of Jews, and using the Holocaust as a justification for genocide can possibly be influenced by Jews who take up the cause of some kind of just solution and impress on Israeli leaders that another course needs to be taken. Nobody else is going to be listened to.
I said nothing of the sort. You invent quotes and positions of people you disagree with because you lack the intelligence and intellectual honesty to quote correctly and address valid quotes.
Not my movie. It is a link (I’ve linked to a short talk and a longer talk) by Dr. Hajo Meyer, an Auschwitz survivor who compares the atrocities of the Nazis against the Jews to the atrocities of the Israelis against the Palestinians. I think it is persuasive, you are too cowardly to look at it because you are afraid it might open your mind to something obvious that you have firmly closed your mind to, and that is your right. A majority of Germans did the same thing with Hitler.
The OP refers to a man whose family members were killed by Israel, and he returned a medal to the Israeli embassy without comment.
Am I the only one wondering exactly what six relatives of his were killed by Israel? In-laws? Kids, grandkids?
You said “This isn’t going to stop, and it is going to continue to get worse until Jews speak up and demand it be stopped and reversed.”
I take back and apologize for the “fault” part.
But you certainly said that it’s the responsibility of the Jews for the problem to be “stopped and reversed”. Jews have no more or less responsibility for this problem than any other group. It’s wrong and, further, bigoted in an (unfortunately) very common way, historically speaking, to say that Jews (or any other religious/racial/ethnic/etc. group) are more responsible for any particular world problem than anyone else. And you certainly implied this, by saying that it will continue until Jews speak up.
No, Jews don’t have any special responsibility for any particular world problem. Someone doesn’t inherit some racial/religious/ethnic responsibility because of the coincidence of their birth.
There are many Holocaust survivors whose opinions are totally different. Why is this man’s opinion more valid than theirs?
In case anyone else was curious it his grand-niece’s inlaws that were killed.
This has gotten way off-track for an MPSIMS thread, thanks mostly to the posts by Second Stone. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the thread till just now.
I’m going to move the whole shebang over to GD.
It would be a good idea to make sure one’s charitable donations do not go to organizations that support terrorist activities, and to act because of opposition to terrorism - not just because you don’t want to run afoul of the law.
Second Stone, While it’s charming that you think it’s cowardice and not laziness that keeps me from watching your video (“your” in this context meaning “the one you posted”–sorry that possessive pronouns are so horribly confusing), I’m still not watching it. If your argument cannot be made in print, I’m not going to engage it. I trust you’ll thank the mods for their patience with you as you call folks who disagree with you stupid dishonest cowards; meanwhile you’ll find yourself getting the last word, as your words don’t actually have enough substance to debate.
GD or wherever, this sort of insult isn’t allowed on the SDMB. TSS, you may not directly insult another poster outside the BBQ Pit. This is a warning. Please don’t do it again.
On reflection, I think you have an excellent point. Refusing to acknowledge the existence of facts, a point of view, or a whole people is an entirely legitimate way to go through the world. You have swept away all photographic evidence, all scientific readings, all fossil records and all eyewitness testimony.
Here is an interview, in print, with an Auschwitz survivor by the name of Dr. Hajo Meyer making the same points.
Do tell us that you have clicked on it and read it when you have done so.
I think that debates is a better place for it, so thank you. And thank you for reviewing the thread.