Is this anti-semitism?

Didn't most of ILX pretty much reach this viewpoint after a day or so of argument about the Gaza invasion?

Talking about the crimes of Hamas is a smoke and mirror comment as the Palestinians are an occupied and embattled people. The original sin is being committed against them. We will address their crimes once Israel has cleaned up its act.

I see a continuum between lunacies at either end of the spectrum, admittedly with far more at the anti-Israel end. But we still have charming lines like "If Israel messes up the hair on an arab's head a million people scream and riot in the streets", the guy who says there's no such thing as a Palestinian, and the guy who basically asked why they all can't just go to Egypt.

xpost it's a travesty of mainstream arguments about criticism of israel, not the real thing

I more or less agree with the rest of your post, but this is awfully reductive. "The real thing"?

I mean, one elephant in the room with all these discussions -- or at least one clear demarcator -- is whether questioning Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state = anti-Semitism. There are a lot of people who would say an emphatic "yes" to that, a lot of people who would do the opposite, and a lot of people who aren't sure.

(This is a totally separate/different issue than asking whether it's pragmatic, reasonable, or appropriate to open up that question. I think Nabisco or Hurting summed that one up nicely, some time ago.)

questioning's Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state may not be anti-semitism, but it's stupid and pointless because Israel's realistically not gonna stop being a Jewish state. Israelis would have their country go down in flames before that happened.

it's a solution to the middle east crisis about as much as "what if everyone there became atheists?" is a solution.

so, like the nazi thing, its only use in political discussion is to get jews angry and paranoid. it might not be philosophically anti-semitic, but it has a similar end result.

Didn't most of ILX pretty much reach this viewpoint after a day or so of argument about the Gaza invasion?

Talking about the crimes of Hamas is a smoke and mirror comment as the Palestinians are an occupied and embattled people. The original sin is being committed against them. We will address their crimes once Israel has cleaned up its act.

― How can there be male ladybugs? (Laurel), Wednesday, February 18, 2009 7:12 PM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no because thats a retarded viewpoint

iatee, what do you think of the argument in this article?

(And by "what do you think" I mean "do you think it accurately reflects the perspectives of the parties involved", rather than "do you endorse it".)

^ article makes a very good point. question being put to palestinians/hamas is in some ways comparable to a (hypothetical) c. 1900's demand for native americans to issue a blanket statement honoring the US's "right to exist"

There is an enormous difference between "recognizing Israel's existence" and "recognizing Israel's right to exist." From a Palestinian perspective, the difference is in the same league as the difference between asking a Jew to acknowledge that the Holocaust happened and asking him to concede that the Holocaust was morally justified. For Palestinians to acknowledge the occurrence of the Nakba – the expulsion of the great majority of Palestinians from their homeland between 1947 and 1949 – is one thing. For them to publicly concede that it was "right" for the Nakba to have happened would be something else entirely.

Slight of hand with two very different uses of the word 'right' here. And then on top of that, there's the translation issue. What does 'recognizing Israel's right to exist' imply in the Arabic language vs. what he's reading into it in English? Overall, I'm not buying that sorta philosophical depth from an organization that quotes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their charter.

so iatee are you refusing to recognize palestinians' right to refuse to recognize israel's right to exist?

I think I have the right to

which by his logic, makes it 'right'

Israel has a right to exist --> Israel did not exist prior to the Nakba --> the Nakba was morally justified, or, in other words, "right"

but apparently this is "sleight of hand" which only works because it uses the word "right" twice

Israel has a right to exist = Israel is a state that exists right (argh) now and will continue to have the right to do so

if we buy his logic, doesn't that make Palestinian moderates who *are* willing to say 'Israel has a right to exist' a horribly self-hating group?

or do Palestinian moderates merely lack the philsophical subtlety of Hamas

well I think our debate basically just proves the author's point, which is that "right to exist" rhetoric is, at best, confusing and vague; and, at worst, a bunch of disingenuous bullshit.

like, if I find a homeless dude squatting in my house, and I shoot and kill him, are you going to charge me with crimes against humanity and say that I don't acknowledge his "right to exist"? because then I would probably just say "man I got no problem with that dude but I don't acknowledge his right to exist in my house", and then we could have a huge unproductive semantic debate and completely lose sight of the real issue, which is that I probably committed a crime, but am not a subhuman monster.

I dunno how much I like that analogy

I don't have time to chase a link right now, but wasn't there a recent poll of Israelis and Palestinians which showed dramatic changes in response when things like "an apology from Israel for the Nakba" (for Palestinians) or "acknowledging Israel's right to exist" (for Israelis) were included as possibilities? It seems like some of these semantic issues are genuinely crucial to some of the principals involved -- even though, at the same time, they seem disingenuous or counterproductive to others.

Part of it is rhetoric, I agree. But to a certain exist, it just comes down to the absurdity of it all - how is Israel supposed to have any sort of realistic peace/whatever talks with a group that refuses to accept its right to exist as a state? On a very, very basic level that undermines any legitimacy of what goes on.

and yeah I remember reading that and liking it too charlie. I think it was nyt?

I dunno, I just think that "Palestinians don't recognize our right to exist!" and "Israelis are forgetting about the Holocaust!" are both basically shorthand for "rather than attempt to engage in a meaningful discussion during the course of which we may discover that we are both guilty of mistakes, I am going to call you a subhuman being of pure evil who lacks the capability for rational discourse, and therefore I win by default".

(this is the driving force of like 90% of political discourse though (and 99.99% of it on the internet) so it's not like anyone should really be surprised)

"Israelis are forgetting about the Holocaust!"

eh?

Part of it is rhetoric, I agree. But to a certain exist, it just comes down to the absurdity of it all - how is Israel supposed to have any sort of realistic peace/whatever talks with a group that refuses to accept its right to exist as a state? On a very, very basic level that undermines any legitimacy of what goes on.

― iatee, Wednesday, February 18, 2009 7:20 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Hamas acknowledges the existence of Israel as a reality but formal recognition will only be considered when a Palestinian state has been created, the movement’s exiled leader Khaled Meshaal said on Wednesday.

Softening a previous refusal to accept the Jewish state’s existence, Meshaal said Israel was a “matter of fact” and a reality that will persist.

“There will remain a state called Israel,” Meshaal said in an interview in the Syrian capital, in what appeared to be clearest statement yet by the Islamist group on its attitude toward the state it previously said had no right to exist.

“The problem is not that there is an entity called Israel,” said Meshaal, who survived an Israeli assassination attempt in 1997. “The problem is that the Palestinian state is non-existent.”

xpost the thing upthread where people were talking about the annoying tendency to say that Israel is perpetrating A SECOND HOLOCAUST and OH HOW SHORT OUR MEMORIES ARE etc etc

I think if Hamas were more vocal about the above POV it would probably suffice

I mean this really is all semantics right now, and it's esp difficult for us to analyze because he doesn't speak English (just checked)

one of my pet peeves in high school english was when people overanalyzed a single word in a translated book. the csm article needs to have been written by an arabic speaker.

I definitely agree with the above, but my point is that regardless of precisely what the term is supposed to mean, it's basically used to accuse the Palestinians of thoughtcrime.

and then say "look, we obviously acknowledge that there is a country called Israel and we are willing to talk to it and see if we convince it to get off our land, but you're kidding yourself if you think we're going to say that it SHOULD be there"

There's also the question -- ideally, mostly mooted by the two-state solution -- of whether Israel's "right to exist" = "right to exist as a Jewish state in perpetuity". In other words, the difference between "the people who are there should stay there, and shouldn't be fucked with" vs. "the people who are there should stay there, shouldn't be fucked with, and have a right to pursue policies to ensure that their demographic maintains a solid majority".

(But then we get into the whole quagmire: is Israel like South Africa? Like most countries, many of which take measures to preserve their particular demographic? Somewhere in between? Under what circumstances is government intervention in these matters acceptable? If the Han Chinese had organically overrun Tibet, as opposed to being spurred on by the gov't, would that be more OK? etc. etc. etc.)

I think I'm accusing them of doublethink

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/26/opinion/edatran.php?page=1

found the aforementioned article

the comments bit i thought was shocking was from the indie article btw

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/movies/02godard.html

But Mr. Ganis and others in the academy have fielded queries from members who question the propriety of an award that is drawing attention not just to Mr. Godard’s well-known disregard for Hollywood but also to positions and statements in which he has mingled his mistrust of the mainstream movie world with a wariness of traits he associates with Jews.

a "wariness of traits he associates with ________" is my new favorite euphemism and defense for racism.

which in this case seems bullshittish

In one of the more striking such statements, in a 1985 interview in Le Matin quoted in Richard Brody’s 2008 biography, Mr. Godard spoke of the film industry as being bound up in Jewish usury.

“What I find interesting in the cinema is that, from the beginning, there is the idea of debt,” he is quoted as saying. “The real producer is, all the same, the image of the Central European Jew.”

Between translation and lack of context, I'm not sure what's going on in this statement. But it seems strange to call out "debt" in filmmaking. Does he mean the idea that a film has investors who want to make money?

See Godard thread; Brody wrote in his New Yorker blog that NYT quotes were brief, w/out context and misleading.

whoa fuck one (1) godard

not reeeeaaaallly surprised that brody is standing up for his boy there

also not too surprised that a conservative-modernist euro intellectual is an anti-semite; more surprised that he gets shine on the left... oh no hang on that's not right is it?

http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs38/feat_krohn_brody.html

interestingly this long review bends over backwards to defend godard from the charges of anti-semitism (actually: documented instances of anti-semitism) in brody;s book. curiouser and curiouser.

DG, who are you, and have you ever seen a Godard film?

bulletin boards, fulla fucking rabble

Modish mid twentieth century anti-semitism, Ezra Pound style.

nice balance w/ Tarantino's racism and ILX's hatred of Christianity, anyhoo

doctor morbius, i'm the guy that created the board you are posting on, and yes i have - good films don't make people saints, cf roman 'i like drug raping children' polanski

no argument, i'm a fan of Jerry Lewis

per Brody, I really don't recall another filmmaker returning again and again to contemplation of the Holocaust in the way Godard has.

cf roman 'i like drug raping children' polanski

Oh, it's "children," huh. Your board is its father's child.

go fuck a 13 year old, see what the prosecutor thinks

I meant yr use of plural.

Now it aaallllllll makes sense.

I really don't recall another filmmaker returning again and again to contemplation of the Holocaust in the way Godard has.

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, November 3, 2010 2:54 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

ah, 'contemplation'. not really sure what to make of the strand in late godard, about the failure of hollywood bosses to 'film' and thereby prevent the holocaust. sounds like pretty typical godardian pseudo-intellectual bullshit to me. making 'night train to munich' and 'contraband' did not stop the battle of britain. but either way, godard is not much of an historian.