The Antisemitism Thread

Any and every concept ever conceived that has any power to persuade minds has been used by people of bad faith.

The issue with the term Zionism is that it could mean different things to different people. To some, being anti-Zionist means anti-Israel colonialism. To others, being anti-Zionist means wanting the state of Israel to be wiped out of existence and leave Jews homeless or worse, being killed by antisemitic neighbors.

The double meaning will inevitably cause two sides to talk past each other because they believe their definition is correct. And failure to recognize that easily allows the antisemitic parties to pretty much hijack the terms as dogwhistles for violence and genocide.

Edited by Shadao on Nov 3rd 2023 at 7:15:50 AM

At least in France it has been a joint effort from both Antisemites and Zionists to make things murkier regarding the meaning of antizionism.

The former to get an easy get out of jail card to spout antisemitic rhetoric without being fined or jailed, and the latter to shut down any criticism of Israeli policies with "it's just an antisemite speaking".

Then the goal should be to isolate antisemites who try hijacking protests and shit. I compared them to the Boogaloo Boys trying to hijack BLM for a reason.

and how do you go about doing that exactly?

Re: Bibi^* please be gone already, Bibi engaging in antisemitism — this just further strengthens the point that being Jewish doesn't mean you can't be antisemitic. Which, if you think of antisemitism as holding certain opinions or doing certain things, makes a lot of sense: being Jewish doesn't immunise you from doing antisemitic things (Holocaust revisionism) or holding antisemitic opinions.

@Shadao: most concepts have fuzzy edges, and Zionism isn't exempt from this. That being said, for the Venn diagram argument to have decent force there's no need to have an accepted meaning of "Zionism"; you just need to have enough anti-Zionists who are also antisemites.

It should also be noted that being "anti-Israel colonialism" suffers from the same problem: some of those people think that the West Bank and Gaza don't belong to Israel (and thus Israelis living there is colonialism), but many others (including, you should know, a majority of Palestinians) think that all of Eretz Yisrael is occupied and that Jews living anywhere there is colonialism.

@Diana 1969: sometimes it's not antisemites hijacking the protest, but the protest being antisemitic to begin with: when you have people chanting genocidal chants or harassing random Jews because of Israel it's not hijacking.

Edited by desdendelle on Nov 4th 2023 at 5:15:02 PM

Can we not?

It is hard enough to discuss in this thread without bringing the banned topic into view and, frankly, I'm not keen on getting into an argument about that particular phrase and what it even means.

I don't think you can disentangle those topics. Trying to discuss antisemitism without allowing discussion of cries to genocide Jews is like trying to discuss racism against black people in the USA without allowing discussion of police brutality there.

I don't want to (and obviously can't) force you to discuss anything. But I don't think you can have an honest discussion about antisemitism without addressing things like "From the river to the sea".

It's a banned topic. It'd be easier to avoid having another thread locked.

The message banning the topic says:

(Emphasis mine.)

Since "Jews should be genocided" is antisemitic, I believe that discussion of "from the river to the sea" falls under the part I bolded.

Just push them out of protests. It's what BLM was doing with the Boogaloo morons. Neo-Nazi idiots are gonna hijack whatever they can to boost their message, just force them out and isolate them.

I don't think it's that simple. Especially when dealing with antisemitism in the Free Palestine movement. A lot of Jews on the progressive left are afraid of being called Zionists or "Genocide" supporters just because they want to explain why they feel uncomfortable in the post-Oct 7 world.

And the fact that a progressive Jew like Bernie Sanders is called a traitor and con-man by his former "supporters" for supporting Israel's right to exist, even though he has always been critical about Israeli government and has been calling for humanitarian pauses several times. If he is not safe from antisemitism coming from his followers, we have a real problem here.

Edited by Shadao on Nov 4th 2023 at 8:52:52 AM

The criticisms I've seen of Sanders go far beyond just that, and this topic can be discussed without bringing in the question of Israel and the right of existence.

I am begging, please, I do not want this thread locked.

I think it’s good that you want to call out bad faith agent provacateurs at pro-Palestinian/ anti-Zionist protests and in those movements. But those aren’t the only people who are antisemitic. It’s also the case with some genuine supporters and you should be critical of that too.

Also I’m not sure how to best phrase this, but I thought that the purpose of this thread (similar to LGBTQ right’s threads) was to identify and criticize antisemitism, not to debate what’s antisemitic.

It is downright hard to dissociate Anti-Zionism from antisemitism. Even with the Anti-Zionism Jews and people who want Israel to stop the colonization of West Bank and stop discriminating Palestinians. You still have to deal with a lot of groups that downright want Israel gone and Antisemitism acting as a motivation for that.

Arab/Muslim antisemitism is hardly just because Israel exists, specially since Jews have been treated as second class citizens and pariahs and subjected to pogroms before Israel was founded, along with right wing and left wing European Anti-Zionism using a lot of antisemitism rhetoric against Jews as a whole, not just the ones in Israel.

And it is this roots in downright antisemitism is what makes the "we aren't against Jews or Israel we don't want colonizing policies from Israel against Palestine" a drop in the bucket compared to all the Anti-Zionist movements that have antisemitic motivations behind them.

Movements like the DBS have antisemitic founders that draw people who aren't familiar with its antisemitism in the guise of Anti-Zionism, and the whole goal behind DBS is to harm Jews by getting rid of Israel.

Well certainly, and I've seen plenty of people call it out. Any talk of politicians being "bought and paid" by Zionists is inherently loaded and reminiscent of Protocols-type crap. Spray painting slogans on a synagogue is a no go. And I've seen way too many leftists overstating any relations between the Zionist movement and Nazi Germany. All of that needs to go.

At the same time, it gets thorny when, as has been mentioned before, allegations of antisemitism get weaponized for political purposes. I know that Sanders, for example, has been a victim of antisemitism by conservatives and liberals (the former because he's a "godless socialist", the latter because 2016). There's always been a brewing leftist backlash to him for years, it's just exploding now that he's taking a more moderate position on certain matters. I don't doubt some of that backlash is antisemitic (again, the "bought by Zionists" argument is right there in the thread), but acting like *all* of it is ignores how it'd been brewing for years for multiple reasons.

Edited by Diana1969 on Nov 4th 2023 at 12:04:57 PM

Isn't BDS's goals for a one state solution with equal rights for Palestinians and Jewish citizens in Israel and a right for exiled Palestinians to return to their homes and properties as per the wiki. What is antisemitic about them/ what antisemitic things they have done, as I understand the one state solution has gotten general support too (due to the belief that the two state solution is no longer viable) with even this forum talking about it before in other threads of I recall? Has their founder straight up said/ strongly implied they want Israel eradicated or engaged in any of the other antisemitic activities or peddled any antisemitic narratives elsewhere?

Edited by xyzt on Nov 4th 2023 at 11:17:32 PM

Aside from the fact that "boycott the Jews" has antisemitic undertones? A "secular one state" means a state without any sort of Jewish identity, which in turn means "Jews are not allowed self-determination in their own homeland" — which is antisemitic because it singles out Jews (as a people) for ill-treatment.

BDS's leaders have, at minimum engaged in purity-testing of Jews — which, again, is antisemitic.

I'm going to bow out of this thread for the time being.

I can't contribute to discussion right now. I'm too worked up over everything.

Please take care of yourself.

Does BDS call for boycotting of Jewish businesses as opposed to boycotting of Israeli ones? My understating was that they did the later, but if it’s the former that’s very different.

Does that not also make calls for a one Jewish state phobic towards other groups (atheists, Muslims and Christians as the main ones) by asserting that their self-determination in their homeland should not be allowed?

Edited by Silasw on Nov 4th 2023 at 6:47:48 PM

AFAIK BDS doesn't call for the boycott of Jews in general, hence me referring to it as undertones rather than outright antisemitism — it's more "this causes me to move in my chair in discomfort" than "this is bigoted".

As to your other point, you're confusing "Jewish" as in "the Jewish people" and "Jewish" as in "Judaism the religion". A state in which Jews (the people) have self-determination does not have to discriminate against people of other or no religion (and, at least in my view, the current state, where religion and state are not separate in Israel, is bad). Jews being able to have self-determination is no more and no less discriminatory than any other people (Palestinians, Basques, Scots, Japanese, Ukrainians and so on and so forth) having self-determination in their own country. This is, in fact, another argument against the "one-state solution" the BDS advocates, since not only does a (fair) "secular one state" deprive Jews of their self-determination, it does the same thing to Palestinians by prohibiting them from having any self-determination in that hypothetical state.^* A cynic would say that say that BDS advocating for both a "secular state with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians" and Israel leaving the WB and Gaza for the Palestinians means that they want the Palestinians to have a state and the Jews to have none, by the by.

From the main activist and founder of the BDS movement.

And with the one state solution downright admitting that Jews would become a minority in the territory.

Even with their own members, it is pretty clear that the BDS movement aims for the dissolution of Israel as a state.

And asking for the creating on a "secular state" in the Middle East where Jews would be a minority and somehow have their rights respected is a disingenuous goal.

Favouring the Palestinian right to vote for the government that rules them is not antisemitism, any more than supporting the right of the Black majority in South Africa to vote was anti-Dutch. That is what a one-state solution is, given that Israel has done its utmost to render a two-state solution impossible by annexing East Jerusalem and systematically building settlements throughout the West Bank and barring free movement within it, and given that Israel and not the P.A. holds authority over everything that meaningfully impacts Palestinians’ lives.

Boycotts, divestment and sanctions have been used against other nations in response to human rights violations, as with South Africa and the former Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). They are being used against Russia now, to general approval. To do the same to another nation that is systematically violating international law against the acquisition of territory by force is not in any way antisemitism.

And I have to say that I think closing the Israel-Palestine thread and then using the antisemitism thread to conflate support for Palestinian civic and human rights with antisemitism causes this forum to end up taking an incredibly biased stance on the conflict. It’s like if we locked the thread on the Ukrainian war and moved any discussion relating to it to a thread on Russophobia. (Pretty much exactly like that, since both Russia in 2021 and Israel in 1967 took over land by force and have since been committing deliberate ethnic cleansing with the goal of annexation.)

I'm not going to relitigate the I-P conflict here (that's exactly what the post banning I-P discussion said not to do), but I'd like to note that it's not obvious that the BDS movement is about "support for Palestinian rights". Evidence was posted that its leaders have other goals in mind, which are germane to the subject of this thread (antisemitism). Please engage with what I and others have said instead of accusing us of bad faith.

EDIT: And it should be said, I think, that nobody in this thread makes policy decisions for the forum, so your complaint about moderation decisions should probably go to ATT or the contact us form.

Edited by desdendelle on Nov 4th 2023 at 10:42:49 AM