Correction: seven bad movies.
So genocide of Jewa is okay.
How about genocide of blacks?
Or genocide of gays?
Suppose a group of tiki-torch carrying rednecks marched on campus and shouted " send them back to Africa.From sea to shining sea, America will be free and white."
Suppose the westboro baptist chuch shouted “God hates homos. Kill them all.From the sea to sea, America will be free for Christians to live as they wish.”
That’s hate speech, and no president of any university would say “no, that’s not harrassment, it depends on context.”
That’s…ridiculous.
As I understand this argument: bullying and harassment. Are terms applied to indivduals. I don’t know exactly what this sort of protest would be referred to, but somehow bullying or harassment doesn’t seem to cover it. Terroristic threats perhaps? Yet no physical injury took place.
This. I came here to say this. The students marching aren’t “the left”. They are largely Muslim students from Arab countries near Israel. They aren’t “left” or “right”. An awful lot of them aren’t Americans and are largely indifferent to our local political divides. MIT was going to suspend a lot of their protesters, and backed off when they realized that meant they lost their visas and would be deported.
Yes, there is some antisemitism on the left in America. Mixed up with a strong anti-Israel stance. There’s more and more virulent antisemitism on the right. They happen to side with Israel right now because they hate Arabs even more than they hate Jews.
Perhaps I misread, but I thought @Spice_Weasel was referring to the administrators who have recently come under fire, not the students. That is, these administrators and their policies are not, in SW’s estimation, “liberal.”
If I have interpreted that correctly, then I disagree: free speech absolutism is a painfully liberal ideal. Like, to a fault.
Tell that to Elon Musk. He’s a free speech absolutist and he’s no liberal.
I’m not sure I buy that either. Again, I don’t have nearly as high an opinion of liberalism as an ideology as many of you apparently do. But of course liberals aren’t the only (self-proclaimed) free speech absolutists, so it’s hardly a litmus test. My main thrust is that not all things liberal are good, and not all things good are liberal. Perhaps more important, just because something is not conservative doesn’t mean it’s liberal.
But then that’s all just granting Musk really is a free speech absolutist. Frankly, I don’t think he’s that, either. So, to the extent Musk is arguably a free speech absolutist, being a billionaire is hardly inconsistent with liberalism. To the extent he isn’t really a free speech absolutist, just claims to be one because he thinks that only governments can oppress… well, that’s libertarians for you.
More than a little. From a recent poll:
Twice as many Democrats as Independents/Republicans think the Holocaust is a myth. 20% of people 18-29 who, it might be surmised, lean left. Urban areas are >3x the rate of suburban/rural.
Something is seriously wrong with left-leaning youth. Related questions don’t look much better. Twice as many Biden than Trump supporters think “Jews have too much power in America.”
Considering Biden and the Democratic Party are pretty middle of the road liberal, I’m not sure how you can draw any conclusions from those numbers about what people on the left think. Seems to provide no information at all on that point, actually.
Again, liberals != “the left.”
This is some real No True Scotsman territory. If you don’t think Biden and the Democratic party represent the American left, we aren’t speaking the same language.
Obviously, there are further extremes for both the left and right. But wherever you choose to draw the line, it looks like Holocaust denial is weighted to the left. If the True Left Wing (by your standard) isn’t antisemitic, it has no relevance since they have no political power, either.
I know they don’t.
Not at all what I’m trying to say. Only that you can’t get “what the left thinks” from “what democrats think.”
Well, the claim that advocating “intifada” is equivalent to “calling for genocide of Jews” is the debatable part.
There are a whole lot of Palestinian-rights advocates who don’t equate the concept of intifada with any kind of endorsement of genocide of Jews. And that’s been true throughout the decades that many Palestinians have been espousing, and at various times engaging in, movements and uprisings universally known as intifada.
Personally, I find it a trifle sus that while the word “intifada” has been ubiquitous for 30+ years as a well-known signifier of pro-Palestinian militancy in media discussions of Israel/Palestine, all of a sudden in the past few weeks it’s been “discovered” that the word “actually” means “calling for genocide of Jews”. Hmmm.
I suspect that, for example, the Jewish Israeli author of this October 6 Ha’aretz article, entitled “It’s Not Yet an Intifada, but the West Bank Is Heading Towards an Eruption”, would also be a bit surprised to be told that the word he used meant “advocacy of Jewish genocide”. I bet that the way he—and pretty much all the other Jewish Israeli political analysts who’ve used the word over the past several decades—intended the term was in its generally accepted meaning: namely, a militant movement of protest and/or violence against Israeli occupation, which doesn’t necessarily carry any specific implications of genocidal destruction of Jews qua Jews.
I’ve always read the word "intifada"in the same sense the expression “The Struggle” is used with reference to the fight against Apartheid. Yes, that encompassed some violent and terrorist acts, but also mass protest, civil disobedience and calls for sanctions. “Globalize the intifada” covers the BDS movement just as much as it does actual antisemitic violence outside Israel.
And to address that “3D” rubric mentioned in another thread - it’s poppycock. Support for BDS, for instance, isn’t automatically a double standard. Many who don’t buy Israeli also don’t buy or support products from Saudi or Chinese or other oppressive states. I know I’ve personally changed flights to Europe and paid more to not go via Dubai, for instance.
I’d begrudgingly agree with @Kimtsu that defining “intifada” as “calling for the genocide of Jews” is inaccurate (although I struggle to imagine a scenario in which ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews would not be an immediate consequence of a “successful” intifada in the eyes of most of those calling for it). But do you have a source for the word encompassing nonviolent protest? If it had such a component, why would there need to be a distinction between the first intifada and the second one?
The very first Intifada (in Iraq) included worker strikes. The First Intifada in Palestine included " Palestinian demonstrations, nonviolent actions like mass boycotts and Palestinians refusing to work jobs in Israel, and attacks (using rocks, Molotov cocktails, and occasionally firearms) on Israelis"
Because they were two separate periods of activity? I don’t understand the question.
One other thing:
Your failure of imagination should not be the Palestinians’ problem. Much the same rhetoric was (and still is) used in reference to the South African situation. The much-anticipated (including on these boards) White genocide has stubbornly failed to happen here.
I didn’t realize the First Intifada included workers’ strikes. Consider me educated on that point.
My observation is that the Palestinian struggle for sovereignty never ended and had no interlude, and the two intifadas were delineated by peaks of violence, hence defining them by the violence. Again, I was not aware that organized strikes were a component.
My failure of imagination is not the Palestinians’ problem; it’s the Israelis they need to convince. On that note, despite my concessions above, the predominant association of the word “Intifada” in my mind, and in the minds of most Jews that I know, is with bus and pizzeria bombings. According to your own Wikipedia links, acts of terrorism were a significant component. Therefore, if pro-Palestinian protestors want to convince people across the ideological divide on this issue, rather than preaching to the choir, they may want to consider alternate slogans.
BDS is an alternative slogan, but that just gets equated with antisemitism too.
That is, to borrow a term from recent discourse, context-dependent. Despite my overall pro-Israel stance, I don’t think the recent visa ban on violent settlers goes far enough to exert pressure on Bibi’s administration w.r.t. reigning in settler aggression and expansion. I’m fully supportive of targeted efforts, including BDS, with that aim. That being said, when I see calls for BDS from my acquaintances on social media, they are almost always accompanied by blatant hyperbole regarding Israeli cruelty and intent, repudiation of any Jewish connection to the Levant, and minimization of Israeli suffering (e.g. “Look at the released hostages waving to the crowd”). In that context, it’s hard to see those specific calls to BDS as anything other than antisemitism masquerading as legitimate protest.
Fair enough, I’m not saying BDS never means antisemitism.
It doesn’t for me, though. I’m just not buying Israeli fruit and veg because I have no clue what’s grown in settlements and I don’t want to support those. But I’m not boycotting Puma just because they sponsor the Israeli soccer team (well, I’m not buying Puma stuff anyway, but if I needed to, I would).