East Blepia wrote:This is a very cheap joke but it is not funny. 'Antisemite' nowadays is just a cheap attack against any opponent of Israel. Consider this: If somebody opposed China, as many here do and for legitimate reasons (occupation of East Turkestan and Tibet, authoritarianism, censorship, nine dash line, etc.), would your first assumption be that his real motive was hatred of Chinese people? No; that would be ridiculous. Just as the current Chinese government is not synonymous with Chinese people as a whole, Israel is not synonymous with Jews as a whole. (Both have only existed for about 70 years.) Many Orthodox Jews oppose Israel as a whole, believing that it ought to have been restored by God and not men. So anti-Zionism is not necessarily inseparable from, or even caused by, anti-Semitism.
Bruh, I think you're an Antisemite because believing that Israel is responsible for all American entanglements in the Middle East is horribly misinformed and because it parrots older Antisemitc tropes about Jews being responsible for all the world's wars. You're also grasping at straws to dismiss Israeli accomplishments when American support for Israel is explained in terms of concrete geopolitical, humanitarian, and technological advantages. We've also glossed over the fact that Arab nations receive
even more foreign aid than Israel despite providing comparatively less. If your criticisms of Israel were more rooted in geopolitical realities or in the morality of, say, Israel's settlement policy, I'd likely be far more inclined to take your arguments seriously.
In any case, you responded with this tirade when I pointed out that the old Voltaire quote has some pretty strange implications. I did accuse you of not perhaps bringing this subject up in good faith for the reasons elaborated on above, but wew.