I am too ignorant about the history to have a strong view on “was,” but agree with you on “is.” I just think that people who disagree with me aren’t necessarily anti-Semites. They may well be wrong, but it’s clear to me how they can reach that wrong place without having any anti-Semitic views.
No, he means one who prays daily or goes to synagogue every week or observes the Sabbath. IMHO, Barak Obama is a far more religious man than any Israeli PM ever was.
In the 2002 elections, someone asked the candidates (Ariel Sharon and Amram Mitzna) whether they believed in God. Their answers were “That’s private” and “None of your business”. I don’t remember the question ever being asked again.
You really don’t get that most Israelis define their Jewishness as having nothing to do with religion. Take my wife and her family - all proudly Jewish left-wing Zionist atheists. It may seem like a contradiction to you, but it isn’t to them.
We all have our little cognitive dissonances ;).
Glad you brought that up! We at the Mother’s March Against Cognitive Dissonance recognize CD as the number one threat to the Republic, and are hard at work to stem its corrosive and destructive effects! We will be hosting a web meeting this Thursday night in connection with a gathering of many of the most prominent victims.
(Though the irony is not lost on us, it is a Fox News hosted event, which is a bit like Pablo Escobar hosting a DARE meeting.)
We have every confidence that when you see the horror, the dismal derangement of victims of Cognitive Dissonance, you will give, and give generously! when your Mother’s March volunteer comes calling!
I’m in the same place. We can argue about whether or not it wasn’t such a great idea at the time, but it’s established, functioning and recognized. Any attempt to nullify the state of Israel is a non-starter.
Is that relevant to whether criticism of the legitimacy of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic?
Hell, there are lefties who think California is illegitimate for not-entirely-dissimilar reasons. I don’t think that makes them anti-John Mace.
I don’t think criticism of the legitimacy of Israel is necessarily anti-Semitic. I certain can be, and it might even more often be, but it needn’t be. And let’s not forget the ultra-Orthodix Jews who do question the legitimacy of the state of Israel (as it exists today). Are they anti-Semitic?
You’re responding to something I didn’t say. Do you know what an ulterior motive is? Hint: It’s not synonymous with “making it up”. I didn’t say anything about them “making it up”, and I didn’t say anything at all about you.
Why would I dismiss your cite and why do you assume that? I don’t require a cite because I never said I don’t believe there is antisemitism on the left. Just because I choose to not associate myself with it doesn’t mean I’m not aware of it.
Why do you see arguments where there is none? Could it be that your perception is biased in other areas as well? I said I don’t know how prevalent it is and could not estimate it based on my personal experience alone. You however have no problem extrapolating based on the people you speak to in person and random internet sites you’ve seen. What percentage of leftists do they comprise?
Grin! The operative clauses, not the preambulatory clauses.
Agreed. It makes me sick to my stomach to agree with anything Terr says, because (this is still the Pit, right?) he’s a nasty, ugly, vicious, right-wing, hate-filled troll. But I am forced to state my beliefs, and they overlap with his – to my intense disgust – in some of the details this subject.
(I was going to give an example, but realized it would just lead to a highjack. Let’s just say I think Terr is a turd, but I am compelled to agree with some of what he has said here.)
(Hey, it happens. Bricker has really beautiful taste in music.)
Sure. That’s why I specifically excluded Europeans in my request for data about the anti-semitism of the American Left. I believe the words I used were, “they crazy.” We Yanks have long been uncomfortable with their predilection for taking an idea and taking it far beyond what is reasonable. See: the French Revolution :eek:
:smack: No, that’s not it. What’s the emoticon that has a guy pointing at the tip of his nose, like when you are playing Charades? I mean you nailed it, right on the nose.
You keep bringing him up as if he were a guiding light for the American Left, and we keep telling you that we’ve never heard of him. What the fuck is your point supposed to be?
Well, he does bow toward Mecca five times a day, so I guess you have a point.
Once again, the tall people seek to diminish the importance of the Marmite-&-bocce little person gayservative community, by acting as if they are too obscure to take seriously. This insult will not stand!
Yeah, I would have liked to support Zionism, but I just don’t think it’s going to work out in a good way. Too many people, too little land, too much of a long-term trend for fanaticism and racism.
I wonder if Terr has actually read any of Morris’ books. Or realizes that he’s not the “darling” of anyone, particularly not the American left - the other New Historians have criticized his political views quite extensively, and right-wing historians like Efraim Karsh (lead researcher for Daniel Pipes’ pet Muslim-hating thinktank) are furious about his upending of the old “official story” regarding why the Palestinian refugees became refugees in the first place and have doggedly attacked his scholarship.
Morris himself, despite his political differences with the New Historians, has never retracted his own scholarship about Israeli atrocities against and deliberate expulsions of the Palestinians in 1948 (which is why historians on Karsh’s side of the political spectrum still despise him, since they adhere to the old “official story”). He just thinks that those atrocities and expulsions were justified and supportable rather than worthy of condemnation, that’s all.
I think that’s all the more reason why Israel should not be a stickler on being recognized as Jewish. Just accept being a normal, secular state, then call yourself whatever you bloody want
You’re making yourself look even stupider than the time you argued the Germans, Slovakians, Lithuanians and every other ethnic group had a right to their own state except for the Jews who should not have their own.
Israel being recognized as “the Jewish State” is not a religious declaration it’s a declaration about ethnicity.
You are aware aren’t you that the Jews are a nation aren’t you?
Their insistence on being recognized as the Jewish state is no different than Germany being recognized as Deutschland(Land of the Germans). Similarly, it’s no different than Palestinians demanding that they get a nation recognized as “the homeland of the Palestinian people”. Personally I’m not a fan of ethnic states but Israel is hardly the first and it borders on Anti-Semitism to say the Jews and no one else can’t have one.
Are you now making this big deal about religion, because the last time you tried this argument it blew up in your face and wound up with people ridiculing your argument.
BTW, what moron told you that there were Palestinians who weren’t Arabs as you claimed in a previous post?
I think this is right, but I’m not sure I would test whether a given individual holds that proposition by comparison to Germany or Lithuania, since presumably the notion of ethnic nationalism alone is not the only objection. Right or wrong, the objections also involve the actual circumstances of the creation of the state of Israel.
Such objections (to state this again) may be ill-informed or unreasonable. But I don’t think that transforms them into being anti-Semitic. Obviously, one might refuse to examine poor assumptions because one likes the outcome for bigoted reasons. But there are lots of reasons for ignorance other than bigotry.
Heh. Well-played, well-played!
I guess the comment should be explained since I was being a bit snarky.
For those who don’t know him, Benny Morris is a historian/journalist who in the 1980s revolutionized way people saw the “birth of Israel” with a book he wrote called The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem where he destroyed the idea that the Palestinians voluntarily left. By his own estimates around 70% fled as a direct or indirect result of military action by the Jews of Palestine.
Terr’s claim that he’s “the darling” of Leftists is at least twenty years out of date since he tended to reverse his sympathies during the 90s and 00s when he wound up feeling betrayed by Arafat & Co.
McPherson of course is one of the more prominent historians on The Civil War who’s also successfully wrote several books on the subject for the general public.
My point was that anyone who was really familiar with the history of the region and who read up on it would know who Morris was, just as anyone really interested in and read up on the Civil War would know about the author of The Battle Cry of Freedom.
Sadly enough, huge numbers of people on both sides tend to pick sides for their own reasons that have more to do with domestic political beliefs and concerns than the people fighting one another.
I didn’t claim that “he’s the darling of Leftists”. I said he was, used to be, the darling of anti-Israel Leftists. That claim is absolutely correct.
No one really believes that every ethnic group ‘deserves’ a country, whatever deserve is supposed to mean. There are too many ethnic groups in the world for each of them to have a reasonably sized country.
It’s also irrelevant, since (as Ari Shavit pointed out), he may have changed his political tune, but his scholarship still documents “the sins of Zionism”, which is why he’s still hated by the right now matter HOW much he justifies and supports those sins.
What you’re doing, in short, is a stupid combination of the strawman and appeal to authority fallacies, and no one who knows anything about Benny Morris is going to be fooled by it.
That’s irrelevant because what I talked about has nothing to do with those “sins”. It has to do with Morris stating, (and he does have quite a bit of experience with watching this during his “darling of the anti-Israel left” years) that:
“The demonisation of Israel is largely based on lies - much as the demonisation of the Jews during the past 2,000 years has been based on lies. And there is a connection between the two.”