Standing barely 5 feet 3 inches and weighing 120 pounds, I am not in a position to risk making enemies. I have no martial arts skills and don't carry a gun, so trying to be a likable person is the only self-defense strategy I have.
You can imagine my horror when one fine day I wake up to find out that I had turned into a persona non grata for many who were once my friends. Since I didn't do anything to hurt them or cause them any harm, this sudden tide of hate puzzled me. So I did what I do best, googled myself and snooped around the blogosphere.
Search results showed that I am an anti-semite, anti-Israel, Hamas-loving guerrilla. Surprised? Me too. The reason behind so many adjectives bestowed to me, in my understanding, is my view on the Middle East crisis.
You see, I believe that the people of Palestine deserve to live in peace. They need to have a homeland they can call their own, their rights as human beings have to be respected, and the ongoing violence against them has to end. Does that mean I don't like Israel or the Israelis? Does that mean I am anti-semite? No.
Asking for fair treatment of the Palestinians does not make me an anti-semite. But sadly my friends chose to ignore logic and reasoning and tag me as enemy of Israel anyway.
While the world is busy debating about a peace solution to the Middle East problem, there is a growing trend around us which is largely ignored. It is the trend to label people with demeaning names and accuse them of acts they have not committed because they differ from the majority view.
For instance, a professor from Indiana University in Bloomington, in his recent essay discussed in The New York Times, has said that liberal Jews who criticize Israel's policies feed the growing anti-semitic feeling around the world. In that essay he has named those liberals, including figures like the famed playwright Tony Kushner, that he believes are betraying the Jewish cause. I don't know how Kushner is handling this accusation, if it were me I would be in court by now.
How can you accuse a Jewish person who is exercising his/her freedom of speech by expressing his/her views, which, God forbid, differ from the majority, of feeding anti-semitism? What right does the professor have to question their loyalty to their faith and their people?
Here is something even more intriguing, Jimmy Carter, former president of the U.S., recently published a book on the Middle East crisis titled Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. His motivation, as he has said, in writing the book was to spark a dialog about the issues in hopes of finding a workable solution. The marginalization of moderates as I have mentioned came into action, the tide of the witchhunt caught him too, Carter is now being accused of being an anti-semite, and anti-Israel, among many other things. Leading the charge against Carter is Alan Dershowitz.
Dershowitz, Harvard professor and author of several books on Israel, said in his six-part essay titled Ex-President for Sale: "Did Carter advise Arafat to walk away from a Palestinian state? Did he contribute to the new intifada, which claimed thousands of lives on both sides? That is an important question -- one I would have asked Carter had I been given the chance."
Carter contributed to the intifada? To suggest something so far fetched seems preposterous, but then Dershowitz does anyway because he can. He has the support of the majority, who feel obliged to label people and accuse them falsely if they dare to object to Israel's misguided policies.
There are many more incidents like ones mentioned, where the majority is trying to silence the dissenting minority. I hate to say, but this witchhunt will invariably lead to the marginalization of moderates, which in turn will fuel the radical agenda, thus making peace and understanding impossible.
Dershowitz is nuts on the retainer. Don't pay attention to him. And BTW, neither Israelis, nor other Jews and neither Palestinians need any 'love' or ' hate' . They just have to be treated the same. All of them.
by
Mark Sashine (53 articles, 19 quicklinks, 250 diaries, 3574 comments)
on Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 10:01:26 AM
I wrote an email to a peace group a few years, which I copy over below:
I'm an antisemite now -- and it's OK!
The powers that be have redefined antisemitism, and it's now acceptable to be antisemitic. We antisemites have strong and moral arguments to defend our position. I do oppose Zionism (definition 2), which some might find controversial, but surely no feeling and moral human being can complain that it's wrong to have sympathy for the Palestinians (who do oppose Israel, their occupiers, as in definition 3): one need merely peruse the news stories and photos, and note the large number of innocent men women and children who are oppressed, humiliated, malnourished, denied medical care, maimed, killed, homeless, and looted to have sympathy for them.
But that is now antisemitic. Very well, then, I am an antisemite, and proudly so (and am in the company of a great many Jews). But there is a lesson here for those who would reframe both politics and language: worry about the slippery slopes, be concerned about the theft of words and the blurring of meaning and perversion of semantics. Now that I must, by definition, accept I am antisemitic, it will be more difficult to draw distinctions within my primitive overgeneralizing brain any differences I once held between those "damned extreme right-wing Israelis", those "damned Zionists", those "damned Israelis", and those "damned Jews". But then, I suppose that's the point of it all: divide the world into the "good" and the "evil" ... the "true American patriots" and the "terrorists". Maybe next week I will also become a terrorist. I'll have to check the word out in the dictionary to know.
George S. Hishmeh: Confusing anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism | Special to Gulf News | 04/03/2004 |
Mel Gibson's blockbuster movie, The Passion of the Christ, which has just opened at movie theatres to overflowing crowds has resurrected the debate here on anti-Semitism. The term was first coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, a German writer who described the dominance of Jews in Germany.
Coincidentally, it has also added impetus to an emerging campaign over the conflation of the term anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.
The New Encyclopedia of Judaism (2002), says anti-Semitism "is a misnomer, since it is used with reference to Jews only rather than to all Semites (including Arabs)."
In fact, there's hardly agreement between many dictionaries or reference books on a clear-cut, unified definition of anti-Semitism. But none matches how Merriam-Webster, the American dictionary, explains it.
Three senses
Webster's Third New International Dictionary (Unabridged), re-printed in 2002, provides this unbelievable definition with three senses and which has not been updated since 1956: It reads: "Anti-Semitism: (1) hostility toward Jews as a religious or racial minority group, often accompanied by social, political or economic discrimination (2) opposition to Zionism (3) sympathy for the opponents of Israel."
Dan Walsh, founder and CEO of Liberation Graphics (www.liberationgraphics.com), a design and distribution firm that specialises in serving social activism, has personally encountered this three-layered definition in his work.
Over the past 25 years, soon after serving in the Peace Corps in Morocco, he has systematically acquired and conserved contemporary Palestinian poster art and his firm now houses the world's largest archives, over 3,000 originals, of Palestine-related posters.
His repeated attempts to exhibit the posters, mainly drawn by Palestinian artists and some by others, including Israelis, have been rejected because of fear that they were anti-Semitic.
"The Palestinian political poster genre cannot be considered anti-Semitic because the posters are by and about Palestinians," he told me, "but they are anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist."
Contemporary usage
In response to a letter from Walsh, Steve Perrault, the senior editor at Merriam-Webster, Inc., had this to say last January 29, quoting his editor-in-chief, Frederick Mish: "The very great majority of all our citations for 'anti-Semitism' show the word being used unmistakably in the sense numbered 1 in Webster's Third.
There is, however, a small group of citations, clustered in the years 1947-1952 in which 'anti-Semitism' is linked more or less strongly with opposition to Israel or to Zionism."
And Perrault had this eye-opening concluding paragraph: "In any case, unless there is a return of the 1950s use that is not in prospect at present, the second sense will most probably disappear from the next edition of the International. If it is a real sense at all, it is now a relic and not needed in a dictionary that records primarily the contemporary vocabulary of English."
But this response has not satisfied the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, ADC, which has now agreed to join ranks with Walsh in getting Merriam-Webster to correct its loaded definition of anti–Semitism.
"Given the gravity of the matter and the Third's status as a primary scholastic and academic reference resource," said the ADC letter that is being sent to the publishers and made available to me, "we cannot but lament that Merriam-Webster did not take advantage of the re-printing in 2002 to correct the term that (it) identifies as a 'relic' and even states for the record that may not ever have been a real definition."
It thus legitimises and promotes the definition that, among other things, "conflates the first, accurate definition with two inaccurate ones, thereby undermining and even trivialising the very concept of anti-Semitism and damaging efforts to combat prejudice and discrimination against Jewish groups and individuals."
It further "smears and impugns the motives of all those who support the human and political rights of Palestinians."
ADC was hoping the publishers would issue a press release announcing their intention to remove its second and third senses of its definition from all future editions as well as issuing a detailed "errata sheet" that would be sent to all local, state, regional and federal libraries.
The significance of this encounter-in-the-making is that Israel and its supporters have long insisted on labelling any criticism of its government as "anti-Semitic", thus stifling any serious debate about the country's practices and policies.
Hishmeh can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com
by
Blue Pilgrim (0 articles, 3 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 997 comments)
on Friday, May 18, 2007 at 4:52:58 AM
Dear Madam: Judaism is a religion, nothing more. If you were born in the United States or naturalized through the U.S. Department of Immigration, then you are an American. The U.S. Department of Justice should, with the consent of Congress, implement the following system: for the hyphenated American, Jew, Muslim, etc that chose to be classified other than an American citizen should be for this day forth be classified as a resident alien. I have no use for Israel. For the record, there was never a nation of Israel until 1949 when the United Nations recognized Israel because of pressure from Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin. For 1949 forward, the United States has known nothing but turmoil. Zionist control the government of the United States of America, not the people. Madam keep on writing.
by
Billy Ray Wilson (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 29 comments)
on Sunday, May 27, 2007 at 7:30:27 PM
4 comments
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