# Smapti is Pitted **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [May 21, 2014, 8:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907 "2014-05-21T08:14:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 99
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2025, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1961 "2025-12-21T01:30:57Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > The evidence provided is insufficient to determine what happened. Based on your previous posts, you don’t care what happened, right? Could be an avoidable error hushed up by the IDF, could be a malicious act by a rogue soldier, could be orders from the top, hell, could be a Hamas bomb, right? Doesn’t matter to you, war zone and all. The IDF has no obligation at all to explain, right? The deaths of kids don’t matter in war zones, right? ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2025, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1962 "2025-12-21T01:33:25Z")
If IDF soldiers were murdering civilians unprovoked for fun as you seem to believe, that would be cause for concern. You haven’t given me a reason to believe that’s the case. ---
**Author:** ![iiandyiiii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/iiandyiiii/32/7924_2.png) [@iiandyiiii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iiandyiiii)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2025, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1963 "2025-12-21T01:37:48Z")
For fun? Who says for fun? It could be mistakes from incompetence. It could be jumpy bigots, like cops who are more scared around Black suspects and shoot them out of fear. It could be orders from the Israeli version of Pete Hegseth. Who knows? I just know that IDF members have reported witnessing shootings of unarmed civilians who pose no threat, and the IDF is notorious for failing to prosecute wrongdoing, or release details of potential wrongdoing. Add that to the countless eyewitness reports from Gazans, the barring of independent journalists in Gaza, and to me that adds up to good reason to suspect that, like Trump and Hegseth damaging the decency of the US military in less than a year, Netanyahu and his disgusting allies have likely similarly damaged the IDF with more than a decade of corrupt leadership. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2025, 9:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1964 "2025-12-30T09:00:22Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > If IDF soldiers were murdering civilians unprovoked for fun as you seem to believe You don’t seem to do so well when it comes to claiming what others believe. Maybe you could try responding to what they actually say, instead? ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2025, 10:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1965 "2025-12-30T10:01:08Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > > [@Chronos](#): > > > > are you seriously claiming that the Holocaust was the only genocide ever in human history? > > No, I’m claiming it was the worst and that it’s what the word was coined to describe. There have obviously been others. The word ‘holocaust’ was not coined in the WWII era. It was used long before Nazis existed. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2025, 10:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1966 "2025-12-30T10:35:20Z")
Right there in Wiki it says " The term _holocaust_ , derived from a Greek word meaning '[burnt offering), was an ordinary English word for centuries also meaning ‘destruction or sacrifice by fire’ or, figuratively, ‘massacre’." ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2025, 11:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1967 "2025-12-30T11:01:28Z")
> [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](#): > > The word ‘holocaust’ was not coined in the WWII era Good thing that isn’t what I said, then. > [@Smapti](#): > > to compare the war in Gaza to the industrialized mass murder of an entire civilization cheapens that loss and stretches the definition of the word “genocide”, which was coined specifically to describe the Holocaust because _no evil of such a scale had ever been committed before nor has it since_, to the point of being so meaningless that every single war in human history could be described as a “genocide” by that standard. ---
**Author:** ![I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/i_love_me_vol.i/32/521_2.png) [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2025, 11:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1968 "2025-12-30T11:17:57Z")
Yeah. Looks like I took the wrong meaning from your post. My bad. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2025, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1969 "2025-12-30T16:22:07Z")
Although as I showed, he was wrong about that, too. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2025, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1970 "2025-12-30T16:56:31Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > As promised, I have now reviewed your links. Did you ever review your own links? Because I did (look at my posts above), and citing them in support of your position was, at best, a reckless disregard for the truth. ---
**Author:** ![Thing.Fish](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thing.fish/32/9168_2.png) [@Thing.Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing.Fish)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2025, 7:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1971 "2025-12-30T19:08:58Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > Support for Israel is a _human_ duty. The people of Israel have been a role model for human civilization for 3,000 years. They have advanced the ideals of rule of law, supporting the poor as a moral obligation, equal rights and respect for all people of all nations, the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom for its own sake, mercy for those who deserve worse than what they get, opposition to those who hoard wealth and refuse to help the needy, and the pursuit of a better world in which all will be free and safe and prosperous. They have maintained these ideals despite countless attempts to exterminate them because they refused to assimilate into base societies that did not respect these values. They survived the most evil act in human history and finally achieved that which millions of Jews had prayed for every day for 2,000 years - the restoration of the people to their ancestral homeland. > > You would deny them this respite. Because you are an antisemite. You appear to be conflating Judaism, which indeed was the basis of a civilization that has been a role model for humanity for 3000 years, with Zionism, a modern ideology invented by atheists, which is profoundly anti-Jewish and wants the Jewish people to abandon Judaism in favor of a secular ethnic nationalism. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2025, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1972 "2025-12-30T19:28:04Z")
The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was definitely pro-Jewish, and I don’t know where you got the Idea that this Jewish person was atheist. ---
**Author:** ![Procrustus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/procrustus/32/2994_2.png) [@Procrustus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Procrustus)\ **Post date:** [December 30, 2025, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1973 "2025-12-30T19:55:14Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > Support for Israel is a _human_ duty. I disagree completely. I reject the idea of a religious or even ethnic “homeland.” I like the American model, at least in theory (hasn’t been working so well of late) ---
**Author:** ![ASL\_v2.0](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asl_v2.0/32/3525_2.png) [@ASL\_v2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ASL_v2.0)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2025, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1974 "2025-12-31T01:34:08Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was definitely pro-Jewish, and I don’t know where you got the Idea that this Jewish person was atheist. Plus, whatever its origins, I think the more relevant point of concern is that it is now championed most prominently, in the US at least, by genuine anti-smites who love the idea of (1) sending all the people who are Jewish or of Jewish descent “home” (kind of like “go back to Africa” getting shouted at people who are black) and (2) bringing about the biblical apocalypse according to their peculiar (but no less valid, because it’s all bullshit anyway) reading of the bible. Bonus points because (2) also entails the eternal damnation of all Jews, zionist or not, who do not accept some guy—who may or may not have existed at all, much less as a miraculous/supernatural being—whom they call Christ as their person lord and savior. Again, according to their own peculiar but no less valid reading of the Christian bible, which is itself just a kind of fan fiction on the Hebrew bible. ---
**Author:** ![Thing.Fish](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thing.fish/32/9168_2.png) [@Thing.Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing.Fish)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2025, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1975 "2025-12-31T04:44:20Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > The founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was definitely pro-Jewish, and I don’t know where you got the Idea that this Jewish person was atheist. Well, in searching for a cite, I found something rather disturbing. DuckDuckGo’s AI summary quoted Herzl as saying in his diaries that “I am completely irreligious and do not feel compelled to hold on to religion for its own sake.” It cites [this blog](https://casacarlini.com/herzls-hoax-how-an-atheist-invented-a-divine-claim-to-palestine/?srsltid=AfmBOopgOOt-5-IFF9pWwEQW402Py9xxxFABhW-eeU8vP8ukm4ej134J) as its source, but the blog itself offers no citation for the quote. ChatGPT, however, reports that this phrase does not appear in his diaries. So either through carelessness or deliberate distortion, it appears the internet may exaggerate the extent of Herzl’s atheism. I can’t find a cite of him explicitly denying religious belief, which is actually not surprising given that he was a shrewd politician, but all biographers agree that he was entirely secular, never attended synagogue, couldn’t speak Hebrew, and didn’t even have his son circumcised. He was technically a Jew, but he wasn’t any good at it. ---
**Author:** ![ASL\_v2.0](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asl_v2.0/32/3525_2.png) [@ASL\_v2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ASL_v2.0)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2025, 4:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1976 "2025-12-31T04:47:18Z")
> [@Thing.Fish](#): > > …and didn’t even have his son circumcised. The horror. ---
**Author:** ![Thing.Fish](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thing.fish/32/9168_2.png) [@Thing.Fish](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thing.Fish)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2025, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1977 "2025-12-31T05:14:11Z")
Rabbinic Judaism as we know it today emerged around the 2nd century BCE, in the wake of the Roman destruction of the Temple and the disastrous Bar Kochba revolt. Our Rabbis clearly really wanted to discourage any further attempts to violently seize Palestine; they didn’t even want to recognize Chanukah as a holiday. Judaism moves the return to Zion and the rebuilding of the Temple into the indefinable future, into the realm of allegory and myth. The Talmud tells us that when Messiah comes, the Jews will magically be transported back to Israel and the Temple will descend fully built from Heaven. In the meantime, we should focus on glorifying God by holding ourselves to the highest possible moral and ethical standards. Which brings me back to the point, that Smapti is being highly inaccurate in his claim that Herzl’s secular, settler-colonialist, non-animal sacrificing, project had anything to do with “what Jews had been praying for for 2000 years”. As everyone on both sides of the argument clearly recognized at the time, Zionism was not a logical extension of Jewish tradition, but rather a radical break with it. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2025, 10:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1978 "2025-12-31T10:30:07Z")
> [@Thing.Fish](#): > > I can’t find a cite of him explicitly denying religious belief, which is actually not surprising given that he was a shrewd politician, but all biographers agree that he was entirely secular, never attended synagogue, couldn’t speak Hebrew, and didn’t even have his son circumcised. He was technically a Jew, but he wasn’t any good at it. Yes, he was secular and assimilationist; and then he realized that _this does not matter in the least_ to antisemites, and this led him to the conclusion that the Jewish people will always be second class citizens who have to look over their shoulder until we have our own state. You’re sharing basic facts that are well known to anyone who looks up to Herzl as if they are meant to be some conspiracy that’s meant to discredit him. It’s laughable, the sort of thing someone who learns their history from biased TikTok reels would do. Next you will tell me that George Washington was considered a traitor by the a British Crown and Americans who praise him should actually remember he was a disloyal bad guy. 🙄 > [@Thing.Fish](#): > > with Zionism, a modern ideology invented by atheists, which is profoundly anti-Jewish and wants the Jewish people to abandon Judaism in favor of a secular ethnic nationalism. Nearly every part of that sentence is wrong. It’s honestly pretty impressive how much misinformation you squeezed in there. > [@Thing.Fish](#): > > Which brings me back to the point, that Smapti is being highly inaccurate in his claim that Herzl’s secular, settler-colonialist, non-animal sacrificing, project had anything to do with “what Jews had been praying for for 2000 years”. As everyone on both sides of the argument clearly recognized at the time, Zionism was not a logical extension of Jewish tradition, but rather a radical break with it. You do realize that the entire Rabbinical tradition for all of its existence post-Temple had also given up animal sacrifice, right? What does Herzl’s lack of animal sacrifice have to do with anything? Also, you do realize that when Herzl arrived on the scene, Zionism already existed as a project, Hebrew was already being restored, and there was already Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine? Herzl was one of many early Zionists who independently arrived at the idea of a Jewish homeland, because of _course_ people arrived at that idea - it makes perfect sense, unless like Hitler you believe that Jews are inherently stateless subhuman scum. Which is why as soon as nationalism as an idea evolved, people applied it to the Jewish people as well. Smapti is hardly alone in the idea that Jewish people have indeed been waiting 2,000 years to return to our homeland. The words to “Tikvatenu”, the song that was later adapted into the Israeli national anthem “Hatikvah”, already included the line about the 2,000 year old hope in 1887, when Herzl was a 17 year old boy who’d never even thought that his Jewishness prevented him from being a German (until the Dreyfus affair showed him that his willingness to identify as European didn’t mean that Europeans would agree). But who cares what the Jewish people have been saying about ourselves for over 100 years, a 19 year old TikToker claims that Zionism is actually a hypocritical settler colonialist buzzword bingo state. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2025, 11:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1979 "2025-12-31T11:23:47Z")
> [@Thing.Fish](#): > > He was technically a Jew, but he wasn’t any good at it. As a non-Jew, I find this sentence pretty gross. ---
**Author:** ![ASL\_v2.0](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asl_v2.0/32/3525_2.png) [@ASL\_v2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ASL_v2.0)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2025, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907/1980 "2025-12-31T15:27:44Z")
> [@Thing.Fish](#): > > Rabbinic Judaism as we know it today emerged around the 2nd century BCE, in the wake of the Roman destruction of the Temple and the disastrous Bar Kochba revolt. Slight nit-pick: CE, right? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907.md?page=98) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/smapti-is-pitted/688907.md?page=100)