Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on July 23, 2015

by Edward C. Corrigan / March 31st, 2012

One of the favourite tactics of supporters of Israel and Zionism is to accuse their opponents of anti-Semitism. This argument is advanced in an attempt to prevent criticism of Israel from being presented, or to attack the individual or group, that is defending Palestinian human rights.

Implicit in this criticism is the idea that all Jews, except a handful of self haters support the Israeli state. Such an argument is inherently anti-Semitic, based as it is on the notion of a collective ethnic adherence to a particular political position. It also ascribes guilt for Israels crimes upon Jewish people collectively.

As Tony Greenstein has written in The Guardian,

Like the boy who cried wolf, the charge of anti-semitism has been made so often against critics of Zionism and the Israeli state that people now have difficulty recognising the genuine article.

So absurd has the situation become that the allegation of anti-semitism is even made when Jews disagree among themselves. That is why the suggestion by Alvin Rosenfield that anti-Zionism is the form that much of todays anti-semitism takes needs to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

One of the consequences of this abuse of the term anti-semitism is to devalue the currency. It renders it almost meaningless because people assume that allegations of anti-semitism are merely the last-ditch resort of those who are incapable of defending the Apartheid Wall that separates the people of the West Bank from their land, the bulldozing of civilian houses, the wanton destruction of olive groves and crops, to say nothing of the theft of their land.

Anti-semitism today is not a mainstream form of racism. It is asylum seekers, Muslims and black people who face stop-and-search, control orders and racial profiling, not Jewish people.

Here is what another Jewish commentator writes on the use of the charge of anti-Semitism against a reporter that was assigned by the New York Times to cover Israel and before she had even written an article she was attacked by right-wing Zionists for being Anti-Semitic:

Yet the real danger in all this is that the rush to throw charges of antisemitism at people who criticise Israel will desensitise vigilance over the real thing. Such tactics are meant to intimidate and paralyse, choke and divert the discussion over Israels occupation and policies in the Middle East. But for every person silenced, there are growing numbers who, surveying the quality of the argument, will dismiss the pro-right Israel lobby solely on the basis of the bullying. It isnt just the nature of the bashing, but its compulsive frequency, especially when set against the paucity of actual arguments presented.

Link:
Zionism and Anti - Semitism | Dissident Voice

Category: Zionism
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