Location of physical residence? The “tough guys” all live in one place, and the “principled guys” all live somewhere else? This doesn’t fit anyone’s experience of reality. Again, do you limit your opinions to regions where you actually physically live?
(I hear it a lot in discussions of military subjects. “Were you ever really in the Army? If not, then you don’t have the right to an opinion.” Not so. Another variant of this is in gun control discussions: “Have you ever actually shot a gun?” A lot of people haven’t, but this doesn’t disqualify them from having a valid personal opinion.)
Anyway, minor quibble, and I won’t follow up on it.
The Wikipedia article on the phrase lists several people who’ve used the phrase or who defend it. I don’t know if this quite fits the bill, but it is a very easy phrase to search, and apparently has a lot of defenders.
I’d never known it was sensitive; I always thought that it was like “The Jewish State,” a phrase that, while perhaps a bit indelicate, is also essentially valid. Now I know better, and the board is doing its job.
Few of those people were Americans, several of the references are decades if not generations old, only a few of those references were to AIPAC.
That’s hardly evidence that it’s a common term in the US.
One might as argue that nobody should get upset if Chuck Hagel referred to Barack Obama as “colored” because “colored” is a common term for black people.
Anyone who refers to AIPAC as “the Jewish lobby” is either ignorant, anti-Semitic, or both.
It’s moronic because AIPAC is hardly an exclusively Jewish organization, has huge numbers of gentile members, isn’t devoted to any Jewish causes or furthering the goals of the Jewish community in the US or anywhere in the world except Israel.
One could legitimately argue for calling for the American Jewish Congress or the ADL “the Jewish lobby” but AIPAC is a different story.
You’ll notice that most of Hagel’s defenders have actually rapped his knuckles for referring to AIPAC as “the Jewish Lobby”.
For example, James Fallows, whom Red quoted, in part of the article that Red chose not to quote took Hagel to task for doing so.
ElvisL1ves is hardly my favorite poster, but saying that someone would post cites from a neo-Nazi site is, indeed, an insinuation that he is a neo-Nazi. There is really no other reasonable interpretation.
Which is unfortunate. There was some discussion, either earlier in this thread, or in another, of how people cannot criticize Israel without being accused of being anti-Semitic. Here we see a pretty clear example of that.
He was being snarked at for claiming a senator calling AIPAC the “the Jewish lobby” was no biggie because everyone did it. The response was that citing Stormfront wouldn’t help that argument.
No-one is claiming he’d post cites from Stormfront, or that he is a Nazi.
No-one has called him an anti-Semite for criticizing Israel, or indeed at all. He, on the other hand, has unleashed a torrent of bile on posters supporting Israel, without a peep from anyone (other than being modded for calling others “yahoos”), in this very thread.
Really, the claims of persecution are just plain pathetic.
Elvis, comparing Israelis to Nazis is extremely ignorant and shows little understanding of either the policy of Nazi Germany or the Israeli government occupation of the West Bank.
One might suspect you deliberately did it to try and provoke the Jewish board members you regard as “yahoos” into accusing you of anti-Semitism, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that weren’t trolling but merely didn’t understand the situation.
Anyway, I’ll try to explain it, though I suspect many on both sides will strongly disagree with my beliefs.
The Nazis were explicitly aggressive and seized the land from people who weren’t threatening them and then engaged in widespread genocide and ethnic cleansing against the various groups they viewed as inferior.
Now, the Israelis certainly did engage in ethnic cleansing in 1948 and for that they can be criticized though, like Turkey in 1915, they were fighting in a bloody Civil War, were fighting for their very survival, and were facing a group that was attempting to engage in worse ethnic cleansing.
However, 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank is a completely different story and anyone who attempts to compare it to Germany’s conquest of Eastern Europe and treatment of those they regarded as inferiors either doesn’t know what they are talking about or is making statements for shock value.
Israel occupied the West Bank because Jordan invaded them and they struck back. Furthermore, they offered and expected to negotiate a return of the land but King Hussein refused. They did not engaged in widespread ethnic cleansing though they certainly were occupiers and did years later violate international law by flooding the area with settlers the way the Soviet Union flooded the Baltic republics.
While nobody, other than some apologists for the Soviets, defended the occupation or flooding the Baltic republics with settlers, I don’t recall anyone comparing them to Nazis for placing settlers in the area.
Furthermore, it is exceptionally stupid to use the term “Lebensraum” when talking about the occupation since the Palestinian population has skyrocketed under Israel rule. The whole point of Lebensraum was not just to take the resources from the area but to engage in ethnic cleansing and/or genocide and if the Israelis had done so, the Palestinian population would be vastly smaller if not non-existant, than it is now.
It’s also worth noting that several of even the most vile of Israel’s leaders, most notably Ariel Sharon called for abandoning the West Bank and having it “federated” with the Kingdom of Jordan which was hardly the kind of thing they’d have done if they were the Nazis you imply they are.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I nearly pissed myself laughing at this.
Please tell me exactly “when” Israel and “its people” were “different” and “better”.
Were they better in the late 1940s when they were engaging in large scale ethnic cleansing?
Were they better when they were butchering dozens of Arab Israeli citizens for coming home from working in the fields at 5:30 instead of 5:00?
Were they better when Arab Israelis were under military rule until the late 1960s?
Were they better between 1977-1995 when every Israeli PM was either a former terrorist or a war criminal(with the exception of 1 year when Shimon Peres was in charge)?
Were they better they were forcing all Arab Israelis to carry IDs identifying them as Arabs until about seven years ago, or when they were forbidding Arab Israelis from building on, leasing or owning virtually all the land in Israel?
Were they better when, prior to 1992, they refused to even recognized the existence of the Palestinians insisting instead they were “the Arabs of Palestine”?
Please, tell me, when were they better?
No one who actually cared for the Palestinians, knew about their cause, or had even a barely adequate knowledge of the situation would make such a statement.
Obviously, it’s subject to interpretation, and only Tom can answer, but I don’t think that’s what happened.
Let’s follow the sequence of events.
A. Elvis claims it’s fine for a US Senator to refer to an organization that has both Jews and gentiles and doesn’t stand for or claim to stand for the American Jewish community “the Jewish lobby” because that was “common”.
B. I challenge Elvis to produce evidence to back up his claim.
C. Elvis refuses but claims that doing so would be easy to prove.
D. Tom then snarks that the only cites that Elvis would have found would have been from Stormfront.
I think the most obvious interpretation of Tom’s statement was that the only place in the US where it’s “common” to refer to AIPAC as “the Jewish Lobby” is on Stormfront.
So far, I’ve seen no evidence to show that it’s common anywhere in the US, except among kooky anti-Semites that AIPAC is referred to as “the Jewish lobby”.
FWIW, I read it the same. When caught in his error Elvis doubled down with a dose of “my post is my cite!”, Ibn pressed him, and Tom pointed out that the real reason Elvis couldn’t cite anything to back up his claim about “The Jewish Lobby” was that there are almost no such cites from any group that isn’t anti-semitic. But I don’t read that as Tom accusing Elvis of being a racist, just uncritically and ignorantly parroting racists’ terminology. And let’s be clear, just in this thread Red has claimed that the Doper moderation is set up to support the Israeli / American relationship, and Elvis has imagined accusations of anti-semitism coming from me, despite his utter inability to cite even one single such example.
There is no need for Tom’s snark to push anybody over the edge; preemptively claiming (imaginary) persecution by Jews/Zionist is evidently a deliberate and widespread tactic. It’s kinda like “Now, this may sound racist, but…” : “Now, the Zionists/Jews are probably going to call me a racist, but…”
It’s also especially interesting, as it serves as a very useful cloak for actual anti-semites as they, of course, loudly beat their breasts and bemoan how very much they are persecuted by those Jews… ya know, working in the clannish structure to advance the interests of The Jewish State and Global Jewry, of course at the cost of their “host countries”, to which they have a lesser portion of Dual Loyalty, the lion’s share of which is loyalty to a foreign power to the point that even elected officials will betray their entire nations due to the nefarious Jewish Lobby. Why, even those who actually planned, executed and administrated wars, like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld? They too were just pawns to The Jewish Lobby. And nobody can criticize Israel without being called anti-semitic, didn’tcha know? Look at those Zionists who’ve Occupied our Government! And now they want to claim that exposing the Jewish Cabal that aims at dominating and subverting the United States is somehow, ya know, racist. Am that just proves how evil Zionism is, and especially how dishonest and cunning The Jewish Lobby is.
I will leave it to the peanut gallery to guess at how many times I was accused of anti-semitism when I argued that the US should completely cut off Israeli aid unless all settlement construction stops. I mean, certainly if it’s not a persecution fiction, and it actually is real, someone should be able to find quite a few examples of me being called an anti-semite. Or, ya know, one. Ever.
You made the odd claim that the AIPAC is frequently called the “Jewish lobby.” There are frequent references to the “Jewish lobby,” as opposed to the Israeli lobby, but those who use “Jewish” instead of “Israeli” tend to be those who “have problems” with Jews, rather than with Israel. You claimed that people using “Jewish lobby” were too numerous to bother citing; I provided a reason why you might choose to refrain from citing those people.
ETA: I would never believe that ElvisL1ves is a Nazi or that he holds anything resembling a Right wing position, but I doubt that his claims of common usage for “Jewish lobby” could be supported outside anti-semitic groups.
Here’s a link to a guy who may have actually read the book from which Hagel was selectively quoted. You should all be able to recognize what happened because it’s essentially what 90% of the people on the SDMB do: ignore context for that one sentence or phrase.
Here’s the quote from the article for those who don’t like to read whole opinion pieces:
So like pretty much anyone who makes the innocent mistake of saying Jewish Lobby when it would be more accurate and less cognitively biased to say Israeli Lobby, he corrected himself. On the other hand, people who attempt to build a claim of antisemitism out of such a minor, nothing mistake aren’t so innocent and they do our country a disservice. Hagel is awesome.
You seem to be implying that it’s common for Americans to make “the innocent mistake of saying Jewish Lobby” instead of “Israeli Lobby”.
Perhaps you can help us by listing some Americans have made this “innocent mistake” and then corrected themselves.
Beyond that, since Hagel has a record of making bigoted intemperate remarks, why is it hard to believe that he was making such remarks again.
I assume you’d agree that him opposing a man nominated to be Ambassador to Luxembourg on the basis that the man was “an openly aggressive gay” and claims:
is making bigoted comments, or would you still argue that gay rights groups shouldn’t protest this because Hagel is “awesome” and we should nominate him to stick it to “the neocons”?
Incidentally, for the record I don’t think Hagel is an anti-Semite, but I think it’s more accurate to say he makes extremely stupid comments about Jews, but we should assume he’s a homophobic bigot until he produces compelling evidence that he’s not.
I didn’t imply anything like that, but feel free to interpret what I type anyway you want to.
Unless you found some others, he made a single stupid comment about lobbyists with a particular cause they support. He then corrected himself in the same interview.
Hopefully he’s changed in the intervening 14 years since he made that comment. Unlike his other comments this might indicate a problem for his role as Secretary of Defense. Until he is nominated, until I hear more about how he’s changed in the intervening 14 years, I can only go on the awesomeness of his recent behavior and comments. He’s awesome.
I’m honestly surprised you did not run into obvious evidence of how awesome he is while reading about him. I think J Street captured a lot of it for me. I am sure there is plenty more evidence of how awesome he is, but it’s not like a I keep a scrapbook or anything.
Without going into each and every detail, I think a person who has succeeded in everything from being a soldier, to running a business, to serving in the senate means he definitely has the intellectual, managerial, and political capability to do well in the post.
Why might this be good for Secretary of Defense? These talents are embodied in a person who clearly loves his country and puts it first. He’s not so partisan that he does not accept a good idea, and clearly demonstrates the ability to see the error in his own decisions, whether they be about lobbyists or the Iraq War. I think his approach to the Middle East will carry through to a more careful handling of our military might throughout the world. Especially in contrast to the first 8 years of this century. In general, he’s a good complement to the Obama administration’s approach to the military and its use.
Even if he, in fact, turns out to be incompatible with the post, I think that list of accomplishments clearly shows how awesome he is. Maybe your list of accomplishments dwarfs his, but I am just a humble middle class American and I think he’s awesome.