Jewish Settler Attacks = Terrorism

Byrnzie

So what do you think about East Jerusalem? Does that belong to the Palestinians, as it does under international law? Or should it be appropriated by Israel, like most of the rest of the area allocated to the Palestinians by the Partition plan under which Israel was founded?

rgambs

i think team america should hold the west bank in good faith until the canaanites come to take it back!

yosi

Yes, there are racists in Israel. It's an unexceptional country.

Next question: Are some of the anti-Semites in the world also anti-Zionist/anti-Israel?

yosi

Byrnzie said:

So what do you think about East Jerusalem? Does that belong to the Palestinians, as it does under international law? Or should it be appropriated by Israel, like most of the rest of the area allocated to the Palestinians by the Partition plan under which Israel was founded?

I think that East Jerusalem should be ceded to an eventual Palestinian state. I would point out, however, that your history, as per usual, is shoddy. The partition plan didn't allocate Jerusalem to the Palestinians. It called for the city to be held as an international trust.

Byrnzie

yosi said:

Next question: Are some of the anti-Semites in the world also anti-Zionist/anti-Israel?

Yes. Why?

What's your point?

This thread is about settler attacks against Palestinians. Terrorist incidents. Why do you keep repeatedly trying to change the subject?

yosi

So the discussion can't evolve? That seems rather dull.

Next question: Given that there are anti-Zionist and anti-Israel individuals who are also anti-Semites, is it possible that their anti-Zionist or anti-Israel statements can also be anti-Semitic?

Drowned Out

Lovely. The great hate debate has devolved into a third grade word problem.
If all Sniggles are Snogs, and some Snogs are Snoots, is it not fair to say that some Snoots are Sniggles?

Really not sure what the point of this exercise is, if not to conflate.

Thirty Bills Unpaid

Drowned Out said:

Lovely. The great hate debate has devolved into a third grade word problem.
If all Sniggles are Snogs, and some Snogs are Snoots, is it not fair to say that some Snoots are Sniggles?

Really not sure what the point of this exercise is, if not to conflate.

Classic post!

They were going great for a while. Let's give them that.

yosi

It's childish, I know. If simple points could simply be acknowledged I wouldn't find it necessary.

Drowned Out

yosi said:

"Hasbara" is a Hebrew term which means roughly public relations or propaganda. The term is often used to refer to Israel's efforts to explain itself to the rest of the world. For a few years now people on this forum have claimed that Israel, as part of its hasbara effort, pays a cadre of young adults to spread propaganda online. I have repeatedly been accused on this forum of being one such paid propagandist by people who disagree with my positions. I took Gimme's reference to "hasbara" to be another such accusation.

Yosi said:

the fact that you seem to actually believe that the Israeli government cares at all about what is said on a pearl jam fan forum and would actually organize a secret conspiracy to counter what is said here just confirms the fact (at least for me) that you're not seeing this issue straight.

Gimme has already addressed some of this, but I also want to say that your deliberate whitewashing of hasbara as official policy deserves more attention, as does your dismissal of paid online propagandists...the constant use of language like 'claims' and 'conspiracy' is telling...These are neither; they're fact.
Whether paid or not, by your own definition; 'explaining Israel to the world', you are engaged in hasbara in virtually every post you've ever made on this board.

Israel Cranks Up the PR Machine

It’s deploying all its resources to fight the growing world movement against the occupation.
(truncated)
http://www.thenation.com/article/176703/israel-cranks-pr-machine#

(...)
Under the leadership of Netanyahu—a professional explainer himself, who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime-time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class—the Israeli government has invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara now falls on a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, led until 2013 by Yuli Edelstein, a right-wing settler and government minister who has called Arabs a “despicable nation.” (Edelstein is now speaker of the Knesset.)

Edelstein’s ministry boasts an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claims to include thousands of bloggers, tweeters and Facebook commenters who are fed the latest talking points and then flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who express skepticism about official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians. These efforts have been complemented by the office of the prime minister, the IDF spokesperson’s unit, and the ministry of tourism and culture, each of which hosts newly created hasbara units. Even the Jewish Agency, a state-funded para-governmental organization primarily engaged in absorbing and settling new Jewish immigrants, employs a full-time social media operative named Avi Mayer, who spends his days on Twitter attacking Palestine solidarity activists with usually baseless claims of anti-Semitism and deception.

(..)While Tel Aviv University sends hasbara delegations to campuses across Europe and the United States, the National Union of Israeli Students offers Israeli college students $2,000 to spread propaganda “from the comfort of home.” El Al Airlines deploys its flight attendants in American cities to make the case for Israel during specially allotted paid vacation days. Meanwhile, back at Ben Gurion International Airport, large billboards posted by the Ministry of Public Diplomacy instruct Israelis to “be good diplomats” when they travel abroad. By corralling an entire population into promoting Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” the state strengthens a culture that treats dissent and critical inquiry with instinctive hostility.

In 2005, the American reality TV program The Apprentice reappeared in Israel as The Ambassador, a hit show featuring hundreds of Israeli citizens engaging in heated hasbara competitions before a national audience and a panel of judges that included top army generals and journalists. At stake were cash prizes, a chance to speak in international parliaments and the adulation of their fellow citizens(..)

With $90 million from the municipality of Tel Aviv to promote the city as a gay paradise, and with free trips provided by the tourism ministry for gay Israelis willing to “conduct public diplomacy activities abroad,” the Brand Israel campaign has increasingly centered on what many international gay activists call “pinkwashing,” or using the country’s relatively progressive gay rights record to conceal its human rights abuses. (..)

In June 2011, when activists around the world convened in Greece for the attempted launch of the second Gaza Freedom Flotilla—one year after the Israeli military attack on the Mavi Marmara that killed nine activists—the Israeli government released a YouTube video designed to tar the flotilla organizers as homophobes. The video depicted a gay activist who called himself “Marc3Pax” talking about how the organizers had refused to allow him on board because of concerns expressed by their supposed partners among the anti-gay Hamas. Marc3Pax closed the video by warning gay viewers that joining the Palestine solidarity movement meant “getting in bed” with bearded jihadis who hate homosexuals.

Sensing that the video was a hoax, US-based writers Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty of the Palestinian news and opinion website Electronic Intifada quickly unmasked the star of the video as an Israeli actor and nightclub promoter named Omer Gershon. When I investigated the video’s origins, I learned that the first person to promote it on Twitter was a character named “Guy Seemann.” At first, I could not believe that an actual person named Guy Seemann was disseminating a gay hoax video. I soon discovered that Seemann was not only real, but that he was a low-level operative working in the office of Prime Minister Netanyahu. (..)

The lurid hasbara of Brand Israel was directly inspired by corporate PR, and no single figure has devoted more energy at refining its techniques of damage control than Frank Luntz. Luntz earned acclaim—and notoriety—in 1996 when he crafted a memo for Newt Gingrich, the Republican speaker of the House, called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” The memo advised Gingrich to promote the GOP agenda with positive words like “moral,” “lead” and “prosperity,” while hammering Democrats with terms like “abuse of power,” “corrupt” and “intolerant.” Luntz went on to garner lucrative contracts from Enron, ExxonMobil and, most recently, the financial industry, which hired him to help undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement. Luntz’s bestselling vocabulary guide, Words That Work, was originally titled Killer Words.

Given his history of helping corporate crooks talk their way out of crises, perhaps it was appropriate that Luntz was contracted by the Israel Project, an international pro-Israel activism outfit with ties to the country’s foreign ministry, to craft its official hasbara handbook. In the 116-page guide, fine-tuned for the sensibilities of an audience high on passion and low on information, Luntz outlines strategies for promoting Israel in the media and on campus. Throughout the document, Luntz urges pro-Israel activists to lead attacks on adversaries by “start[ing] with empathy for both sides first.” He advises Israel advocates to feign humility and concern for Palestinian children before opening up a relentless focus on the “Iran-backed Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.”

Drowned Out

yosi said:

If you want a concrete example of how criticism of Israel can easily and unknowingly slip into blatant anti-Semitism, a few years ago a regular contributor on this forum (who I won't name) posted an article that claimed that Israel was murdering Palestinian children so that it could harvest their internal organs. That is essentially a blood libel claim, which is one of the oldest and most notorious anti-Semitic myths. And yet it got posted on this forum because someone was so blinded by anger at Israel that they were willing to uncritically accept the truth of whatever claims of Israeli brutality they came across. So you'll forgive me if I think that the anti-Zionist rhetoric on this forum sometimes crosses lines that shouldn't be crossed.

And now I have to address this...

Here is an exchange I found:

Pepe Silvia said:

yosi" said:

Do you guys get off on this echo chamber thing?

"I hate Israel!"

"Yeah! Me too!"

"Israel is the worstest place on earth!"

"Palestinians are little angels on clouds with harpsichords, and the Israeli ogres just want to kill them and eat them and piss in their eye sockets!"

"I heard that Israelis have horns and tails and murder Palestinian babies and use their blood in Jew rituals!"

"Yeah, and everyone else would realize how right we are if they weren't so brainwashed by reality!"

"Yeah, I hate reality! It's so complicated!"

This makes me think of a conversation I just had over dinner with a pretty eminent journalist who is teaching at the Columbia journalism school. He said he is tired of interviewing extremists because they are all the same regardless of their politics. He said that their psychology is essentially juvenile, that they all think like 15 year olds. They've just discovered abstract ideas and are using them to explain everything in the world. And when something doesn't fit with their explanation they simply ignore it. Except with a 15 year old it's kind of cute, but with a 50 year old it's really scary. Basically I'm saying that this board has the tone of a high-school cafeteria.

silly, yosi, they don't want to eat them, just harvest their organs without consent!

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=120801&p=2723697
............................................................................



As we can see, the thread linked has been deleted (I'm sure someone alerted Kat to the alleged anti-semitism). I don't know what the article contained, so I can't say for sure if it was in reference to blood libel. Same goes for other posts I found regarding Israeli organ harvesting. But lets clear a couple things up:
1. Correct me if I'm wrong...but does blood libel not refer to a libelous accusation of jewish ritual involving blood sacrifice....? Or is this another accusation that has broadened in scope as the occupation has endured? If the above exchange is what you're talking about, there was no reference to jews, ritual, sacrifice, or children....except for yours - projecting blood libel onto those who disagreed with you in satire.
2. The comments quoted above were made in 2010. Not long after the Yehuda Hiss story gained prominence. You know...the head of the Israeli forensics institute who admitted to harvesting organs (not only from Palestinians) without consent throughout the 90's...something the Israeli government also admitted to:
The Israeli military confirmed to the programme that the practice took place, but added: "This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer." (...) Israel's health ministry said all harvesting was now done with permission. "The guidelines at that time were not clear," it said in a statement to Channel 2. "For the last 10 years, Abu Kabir has been working according to ethics and Jewish law." http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/21/israeli-pathologists-harvested-organs)....
This was the official line from this story. The anti-semetic claims over this controversy derive from the publishing of unproven Palestinian claims of murder in order to perform these harvests. Quite the leap from 'blood libel' to 'harvesting organs without consent', is it not? Does your blood libel claim have merit, or have you just evoked another hasbara talking point - the same ones echoed by your government throughout the controversy? There were all kinds of wild stories flying around the net at the time this story broke. Was the inent of the board member who posted the original article you referenced truly anti-semitic, or simply a case of someone not vetting their sources carefully enough? I think you're reaching. Combine this with the distortions and lack of context you've used to build your 'anti-semitism on a moving train' case, and this is a hardly concrete evidence of anything but another attempt to portay critics of Israel as anti-semites.

Drowned Out

Also yosi - your article regarding dovish hawks and comments re people not understanding the complexity of Isaeli politics etc are just more examples of why the international community must act if Israel can't get it's house in order to end the occupation - the Palestinians fate cannot be left in the hands of 'liberal zionists'. Israel has had 50 years to figure this shit out. All the in-fighting and hand wringing done over how best to handle their prisoners, has done nothing but buy time for further land grabs and entrenchment in Palestinian territory.
If the world can't act politically due to US involvement, then it's up to the people to act - social activism is what remains. Enter the steadily growing BDS movement.

yosi

The exchange you quoted was not what I was referencing. I do want to point out one thing you said. You asked "Was the inent of the board member who posted the original article you referenced truly anti-semitic, or simply a case of someone not vetting their sources carefully enough?" What's the difference? Does an anti-Semitic comment become less anti-Semitic if it wasn't intended to be bigoted? I think we're long past the point of assuming that racism (of any sort) cannot be unintentional. I actually think your focus on intent gets straight at the point I keep trying to make. I'm not saying that anyone on this board is an anti-Semite. I do think that at times statements are made here that are unintentionally anti-Semitic.

Something else you said also caught my eye: "Does your blood libel claim have merit, or have you just evoked another hasbara talking point - the same ones echoed by your government throughout the controversy?" Your question seems to assume that if the Israeli government pointed out the anti-Semitic blood libel motif then it must be a propaganda point and therefore not actually a meritorious claim of anti-Semitism. Has it occurred to you that the Israeli government could have simply picked up on exactly the same anti-Semitism that I did? You write as if anything that the Israeli government says self-evidently cannot be true. Which gets to the other point I've been trying to make. You assume that any claim of anti-Semitism is made in bad faith as a way of defending Israel. In doing so you are helping to carve out a safe-harbor for bigotry. You are helping to make it so that anti-Semitism can be freely expressed so long as it presents itself as "criticism" of Israel, and anyone who points out the bigotry will be dismissed as making bad-faith claims of anti-Semitism. I would have hoped that people who claim to be anti-racists would be a little more self-critical and concerned with examining their own discourse. I guess I hoped wrong.

Drowned Out

yosi said:

The exchange you quoted was not what I was referencing. I do want to point out one thing you said. You asked "Was the inent of the board member who posted the original article you referenced truly anti-semitic, or simply a case of someone not vetting their sources carefully enough?" What's the difference? Does an anti-Semitic comment become less anti-Semitic if it wasn't intended to be bigoted? I think we're long past the point of assuming that racism (of any sort) cannot be unintentional. I actually think your focus on intent gets straight at the point I keep trying to make. I'm not saying that anyone on this board is an anti-Semite. I do think that at times statements are made here that are unintentionally anti-Semitic.

I pretty much explained the difference in my previous post. I am working on the assumption that the article posted was the Swedish Hiss interview in which he admitted organ harvesting, and the author mentioned claims of murder of Palestinians to harvest them. There is a big difference between non-consensual organ harvesting, for transplants and medical research, and organ harvesting for supposed religious blood rituals. I pointed out that unless this article made reference to ritual blood sacrifice, then the blood libel accusation is a stretch to begin with...which makes the 'anti-semitic comment' claim a stretch as well. In this case the person who posted the article may have overlooked verifying the murder claim - something most of us would be guilty of if the article was published from at least a semi-reputable source. If I'm wrong and the article in question was sourced from a fringe site, and did mention ritual blood sacrifice as the motive behind the harvesting, then you would have grounds to make this accusation.

yosi said:

Something else you said also caught my eye: "Does your blood libel claim have merit, or have you just evoked another hasbara talking point - the same ones echoed by your government throughout the controversy?" Your question seems to assume that if the Israeli government pointed out the anti-Semitic blood libel motif then it must be a propaganda point and therefore not actually a meritorious claim of anti-Semitism. Has it occurred to you that the Israeli government could have simply picked up on exactly the same anti-Semitism that I did? You write as if anything that the Israeli government says self-evidently cannot be true. Which gets to the other point I've been trying to make. You assume that any claim of anti-Semitism is made in bad faith as a way of defending Israel. In doing so you are helping to carve out a safe-harbor for bigotry. You are helping to make it so that anti-Semitism can be freely expressed so long as it presents itself as "criticism" of Israel, and anyone who points out the bigotry will be dismissed as making bad-faith claims of anti-Semitism. I would have hoped that people who claim to be anti-racists would be a little more self-critical and concerned with examining their own discourse. I guess I hoped wrong.

When looking into the Hiss interview, I found reference to the Israeli government complaining to the Swedish government about anti-semitism and blood libel. As stated, based on what I know about this situation, I think the blood libel claim is a stretch. You've made the same stretch as your government in your concrete evidence of anti-semetic comments. Sure, you could have made the same stretch on your own (and likely did)...but all this tells me is that you are reading from the same hasbara playbook.
As for the rest...this is exactly how this conversation started...you are trying to link criticism of Israel to anti-semetism. I don't assume that any claim of anti-semetism is in bad faith. You are making that link, not me. I am not carving out a safe harbor for bigotry, thanks. You speak of crossing the line...and therein lies the rub. Zionists and Israel's supporters feel they are the sole arbiters of said line, and anyone who they judge to have crossed it can be dismissed as anti-semetic, or having made an anti-semetic comment...which conveniently and effectively ends the conversation to the casual observer, thereby sheltering Israel from criticism. In this thread you've accused Byrnzie of linking the actions of extremist settlers to the state of israel...but here you are making broad generalizations about my 'support for bigotry', based on my analysis of your 'concrete evidence'.

catefrances

all i can say is they better get their shit together cause im planning on going to jerusalem next year.

yosi

If I remember correctly the article was from PressTV, which I would not consider a reputable news source, and it explicitly made the claim that the IDF was murdering people for the purpose of harvesting their organs. As for whether it's a stretch to call this a blood libel accusation, I don't think it is. Obviously it isn't the same as the classic blood libel, which accused Jews of murdering Christian boys to use their blood to make Matzah for Passover, but no one claims that it is. The claim is that it plays off the same underlying motif. You may disagree, but I don't think it's at all a stretch.

Ok, answer me this. If there are anti-Semites who express their anti-Semitism as criticism of Israel, and if those pointing out that anti-Semitism are routinely dismissed as simply trying to defend Israel by making bad-faith accusations of racism, is there a problem?

catefrances

yosi said:

If I remember correctly the article was from PressTV, which I would not consider a reputable news source, and it explicitly made the claim that the IDF was murdering people for the purpose of harvesting their organs. As for whether it's a stretch to call this a blood libel accusation, I don't think it is. Obviously it isn't the same as the classic blood libel, which accused Jews of murdering Christian boys to use their blood to make Matzah for Passover, but no one claims that it is. The claim is that it plays off the same underlying motif. You may disagree, but I don't think it's at all a stretch.

Ok, answer me this. If there are anti-Semites who express their anti-Semitism as criticism of Israel, and if those pointing out that anti-Semitism are routinely dismissed as simply trying to defend Israel by making bad-faith accusations of racism, is there a problem?

i dont think its all that much of a stretch either yosi.

badbrains

Anyway you look at, stealing land that's NOT YOURS and attacking people for living on THEIR land is complete bullshit. Imagine just for a fucking second if that shit happened here in the good old USA, what would we do???? I'm pretty sure we all know what we'd do.......

catefrances

badbrains said:

Anyway you look at, stealing land that's NOT YOURS and attacking people for living on THEIR land is complete bullshit. Imagine just for a fucking second if that shit happened here in the good old USA, what would we do???? I'm pretty sure we all know what we'd do.......

isreal arent acting on their own.. there are other countries, so called democracies and flag wavers of freedom and other assorted supposed democratioc bullshit who are complicit in israels actions every step of the way. i know we all say we wouldnt allow it in our own countries(i know ive said it before) but when the force stealing the land has the backing of other powerful countries, then what would we really do???? what would we be capable of doing aside from dying?

yosi

I think Native Americans might have an interesting perspective for you Badbrains.