Publish to Newswire
Add an EventFrom the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature
Is anti-Zionism the same thing as antisemitism? Is an anti-Zionist also an antisemite?
Quotes about anti-semitism
Is anti-Zionism the same thing as antisemitism? Is an anti-Zionist also an antisemite?
When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, You are talking anti-Semitism".
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a speech at Harvard University shortly before his assassination in 1968, from "The Socialism of Fools" The Left, the Jews and Israel by Seymour Martin Lipset; in Encounter, (December 1969), p. 24.
The older type of anti-Semitism, based on outright racial prejudice, is unfashionable today, and the modern anti-Zionist, whether by calculation or because he is a product of his times, tends to avoid it. He has therefore invented a neo-anti-Semitism, the logical inconsistencies of which are to some extent masked by ambiguity.
- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"
Today the boundary between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is often indistinct. It is clear, too, that the anti-Semitism proclaimed by a good many Arab governments is a veil designed to hide the negligence and corruption of the governing classes, and to divert attention from poverty and unemployment by focusing it on an external foe.
- G. Chaliand, The Palestinian Resistance, Penguin, London, 1972
Zionism, even as a code word, is the litmus test with respect to anti-Semitism throughout the world, even in America. The facile rhetorical linkage of Zionism with imperialism and racism is little more than an admission that Jews are uniquely not entitled to be like everyone else and live as citizens as part of a majority in a nation, for better or for worse. Zionism, as mirrored in the State of Israel, has proven the point that Jews are in fact just human. Israel has displayed a full range of human achievement and weakness and of decency and its absence common to all nations. Comparatively speaking, one can make the case that Israel has behaved better, given its circumstances. The anti-Zionist, like the anti-Semite a century ago, does not allow the Jew the privilege of normalcy.
- Leon Botstein, The New Republic, September 8, 1997
Looking back now over nearly 50 years, I have to say - regretfully - that I believe history has proved me right. The establishment of the State of Israel has merely provided a more "politically correct" name "Anti-Zionism" in place of "Anti-Semitism." If anything,the virulence has increased.
- Derek Prince, Canadian Friends of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem
In short, "anti-Israeli" sentiment at the UN is often a surrogate for two other predilections: anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.
- John R. Bolton, Senior Vice President, American Enterprise Institute, July 14, 1999
The unprovoked attacks launched against Israel, whether against the State itself or its subjects, all derive from the same deliberate attempt at repression - repression of any aspiration towards emancipation of the Jewish people, in the Diaspora or in the resurrected homeland; repression which, alternating with periods of paternalism and condescension, has been a constant feature of the policy of many countries towards the Jews.
- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"
During the 1970's, an especially blatant and vulgar brand of anti-Semitism became a unifying global ideology of the totalitarian Left. Couched in the language of opposition to Zionism, this anti-Semitism became the preferred vehicle of the Soviet Union and its clients in international forums for political assaults against democratic nations - most obviously Israel, but ultimately all the West, and especially the United States.
- Ambassador/Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in the introduction to "The Anti-Zionist Complex", by Jacques Givet
"The responsiveness of post-Shoah Europe to anti-Zionism has many geo-strategic and economic reasons, but it also derives from the easy channeling of traditional judeophobia into anti-Zionism. Thus, it is not surprising that the PLO's official Christian representatives were much appreciated by politicians, intellectuals, and the European media. In antisemitic circles, they were endowed with a holy mission, embodied in the historic role of the Palestinian clergy..."
"...Among the multitude of events from the 20th century, historians in the next millennium may well be intrigued be two particularities: the first concerns the relentlessness shown by many European politicians in exterminating and pillaging European Jewry, the second concerns post-Shoah Europe, which is linked to the first by a similar desire of many to demonize Israel. Yet, this 20th century has witnessed important Western strategic defeats in the Middle East. Armenian independence, promised at the end of World War I (Treaty of Sevres) was never implemented; the same applies to the Kurds. Lebanon, considered as a paragon for the realization of an Islamic-Christian symbiosis, finally collapsed in a bloody tragedy. Massacres and slavery continue to ravage the Christian and Animist populations of southern Sudan; the war in the Philippines fueled be a secessionist Muslim minority group has claimed 120,000 lives over the past 20 years. Genocidal massacres have been perpetrated in numerous countries, but for 30 years the main target-constantly highlighted in the media remained Israel."
- Bat Ye'or in Dhimmitude: Jews and Christians Under Islam, published in MIDSTREAM. Born in Egypt, Bat Ye'or is the author of The Dhimma: Jews & Christians Under Islam (French, 1980; English 1985; fourth reprint, AUP, 1996).
There is no difference whatever between anti-Semitism and the denial of Israel's statehood. Classical anti-Semitism denies the equal right of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination
- Abba Eban, New York Times, November 3, 1975
Jew-hatred and its latest incarnation, Israel-hatred, are the price Jews pay for their role in history. They pay it often unwillingly and they live the role, for the most part unwittingly. But as the great French Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain noted: "Israel...is to be found at the very heart of the world's structure, stimulating it, exasperating it, moving it. Like an alien body, like an activating ferment injected into the mass, it gives the world no peace, it bars slumber, it teaches the world to be discontented and restless as long as the world has not God, it stimulates the movement of history...It is the vocation of Israel which the world hates".
- Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, in their book, "Why the Jews? : the Reasons for Antisemitism",
A hundred years after Basel, fifty years after the founding of the state, no self-respecting Jew should have to defend Zionism. The argument from history was made a hundred years ago: Israel was our sovereign land from which we were exiled and the claim to which we never renounced; unlike the colonizers of, say, Australia, South Africa and North America, we are returning to--not creating--our patrimony. And the argument from necessity--that a people savagely persecuted and denied refuge in every corner of the globe needs at least one place of its own--was made fifty years ago, tragically and definitively, in the wake of the Holocaust. Moreover, the last fifty years of rebuilding the land with Jewish labor and genius, and of defending it with Jewish blood, have made denials of the Jewish claim unworthy even of reply. No one asks Australia to justify its right to breathe. The time for justifying Israel's is long past.
This is not to say that the deniers are not there. Entire nations deny. Entire leagues of nations deny. Why, the United Nations, speaking for the mass of mankind, would still be denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state were it not so beholden to the United States. The war against Zion is, of course, the leitmotif of Arab international life. And not just of the Iraqs and Syrias. It infuses the discourse of post-Camp David Egypt and of the post-Oslo Palestinians. "We know only one word: jihad, jihad, jihad.... We are in a conflict with the Zionist movement and the Balfour Declaration and all imperialist activities." That was Yasir Arafat in Bethlehem three years after Oslo. (Balfour, no less.)
Arguing with anti-Zionists is not just pointless. It is demeaning. The intellectual battle to be fought today is not with the anti-Zionists, those who maintain that the Jewish state should never have existed, but with the post-Zionists, those who maintain that the Jewish national idea has outlived its usefulness, that it is obsolete, an impediment now both to individual self-expression and to entry into the post-sovereign world of the coming century.
- Charles Krauthammer, The New Republic, September 8, 1997
Our disappointment is not in Zionism, but in anti-Zionism, the adjustment that anti-Semitism made when the Jews moved into modern statehood.
- Ruth R. Wisse, The New Republic, September 8, 1997
The anti-Zionist becomes an overt anti-Semite as soon as he goes beyond criticism of the policies of the Jerusalem government (a favorite activity of the Israelis themselves) and challenges the very existence of the State of Israel. For to refuse the Jews their right to nationhood is to perpetuate their bondage. To "de-Zionize" Israel would be like trying to "de-Helvetize" Switzerland. The fact that Israel has an Arab minority is shocking only to those for whom the idea of a Jewish majority in any country is intolerable.
- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"
Although Stalin said that anti-Semitism was the most dangerous sequel of cannibalism, his name will remain associated with an absurd variety of anti-Semitism born in certain socialist countries under the new name of anti-Zionism ...a sad, ridiculous, reactionary, and very dangerous phenomenon.
- Reporter, Prague, March 1969. Note the date; this publication, the official organ of the Union of Czechoslovak Journalists, was still (to its cost) faithful to the milder line inaugurated in January 1968, before the Soviet invasion. (from Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex")
In the 1990s, many of the Islamic social and political movements in the Arab world joined the resurgent trend of Holocaust denial among European anti-Semites. This was mainly the result and influence of the persistent activity in this field by Roger Gauroudi, a French scholar and leading European anti-Semite. Gauroudi, a former Christian Marxist and French Communist Party member of the French parliament, converted to Islam following the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. He soon became a prominent figure in promoting anti-Semitism among Islamic movements. But since he was known for his anti-Jewish writings as a Marxist too, he gained the support of many Arab circles beyond the Islamic movements. When he was put on trial and convicted in France for Holocaust denial several years ago, his popularity in Arab and Islamic countries increased. Even the Islamic official establishments in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) supported him. For instance, in 1997, Al-Azhar, the official monthly of the highest Islamic religious authority in Egypt, published sympathetic articles supporting both Gauroudi and his ideas on Jews and Judaism.
- Reuven Paz is a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute and a Counter-Terrorism expert
Did even the fiercest enemies of United States policies in Vietnam ever open fire at random, with submachine guns, in Kennedy Airport or within the precincts of a New York nursery school? Has there ever been an incident in which some ferociously anti-communist group has gunned down Soviet tourists (denounced as "Stalinists")? No, and had such things occurred, those responsible would have been denounced as mad and bad. Not so when Israel is concerned.
Anti-Zionism carried to such a pitch is in fact madness. Israeli Jews are killed because they proclaim themselves as such. Israel is to be destroyed because it is a Jewish State. Incidentally, the hostage-taking is never designed to improve the lot of the Palestinian masses, but rather to obtain the release of other killers, previously detained, for further feats. At Munich (5-6 September 1972) and Entebbe (4-5 July 1976), the aim was to secure the release of the Japanese terrorist who had survived the Lod massacre (30 May 1972).
...So, at Munich and Entebbe, the Jews as such were not the target? Fair enough; the victims were not the ordinary kind of Jew, citizens of States liable to persecute or protect them as circumstances or political convenience might dictate. Although weaponless, they represented something to be feared - Jews with a country of their own, Jews disinclined to accept a "democratic, secular State of Palestine" which they know would not hesitate a moment in reducing them to stateless ciphers. Dub a Jew "Zionist" and any crime can be committed against him with the clearest of consciences.
This convenient confusion between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is nothing new. A similar cynicism, and similar sneers, were in order during the great Stalinist show-trials, conducted in Prague, among other places. The survivors have described how, arrested as Jews, they were addressed as "Zionists" so that the interrogators could feign to be anti-Zionist rather than anti-Jewish, while insulting their victims with taunts traditionally reserved for Jews, thus giving brutal bad manners a Marxist dimension hitherto lacking.
...Anti-Zionists, like traditional anti-Semites, see only the reverse side of the coin in Jewish history - the reaction not the act, the accident not the cause, the wastage not the process of creation. In this they display a lack of human understanding and also an inability to think dialectically - shortcomings from which they are the first to suffer. The way in which, to salve their consciences and in the interest of their policies, they picture the Jew as a sordid, guilty "Zionist" freezes their ability to think and feel. The freedom to exist which they refuse me prevents them from seeing the world as it is. Their reasoning is infantile, their information inadequate, their scale of values absurd in that one Palestinian equals 1,000 Kurds or 10,000 Balts or Armenians - and how many Nagas or Tibetans? (A scale in which an Afghan, incidentally, counts for nothing.) The anti-Zionist is not interested in the sufferings of these other peoples and takes no trouble to find out about them, or about many others in revolt against the imperialisms he is all too ready to praise. The free Jew, the Israeli, he is completely unable to understand.
- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"
Anti-Semitism is not dead. Although anti-Semitic incidents have declined and a multi-cultural acceptance has produced wider tolerance in many states including the US, a 2000-year-old virus has mutated, and lives on, often in a disguised form. And the existence and achievements of the Jewish state in an area of relative backwardness stimulate anti-Semitism and furnish a respectable cover.
...Hitler exploited anti-Semitism with deadly consequences for Jews and the world. But racial anti-Semitism has been tabooed after the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials. Now the existence of the state of Israel permits anti-Semitism to assume a political form, safe from challenge as intolerance or racism. How many times one hears: "I like Jews but I can't stand Zionism," or "I have nothing against Jews, but I don't like Israel." The existence and achievements of Israel offer a visible and irresistible target for dormant anti-Semitic feelings aroused by a focus on Israel's mistakes and misdeeds, which are characteristic of every state including the US.
- UN Watch, December 1997
"This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
- Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League [Israel came into being on May 14, 1948. The five Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq immediately invaded the new microstate. Their combined intention, expressed as above, blurs the distinction with what had just happened in Europe 5 years prior.]
"The Palestine tragedy is unequaled in history. The Zionist imperialistic plot against Palestine was most inhumane and base. World Judaism plans to take over most of the Arab countries to fulfill its so-called historical dream of a homeland between the Nile and Euphrates. The Imperialist Jewish plot is not aimed at Palestine only...-,,
- Haj Amin el-Husseini, former Mufti of Jerusalem, Grand Mufti of Palestine, Hitler's Middle Eastern propaganda specialist during the WWII and head of the "Arab Republic of Palestine" in Baghdad, 1964. The similarity to 'Protocols' is probably not coincidental.
Anti-Zionism is the hatred of the Jews (antisemitism) as expressed through (or masquerading as) hatred of, or bias against, the Jewish homeland, Israel.
- The Society for Rational Peace
When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, You are talking anti-Semitism".
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a speech at Harvard University shortly before his assassination in 1968, from "The Socialism of Fools" The Left, the Jews and Israel by Seymour Martin Lipset; in Encounter, (December 1969), p. 24.
The older type of anti-Semitism, based on outright racial prejudice, is unfashionable today, and the modern anti-Zionist, whether by calculation or because he is a product of his times, tends to avoid it. He has therefore invented a neo-anti-Semitism, the logical inconsistencies of which are to some extent masked by ambiguity.
- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"
Today the boundary between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is often indistinct. It is clear, too, that the anti-Semitism proclaimed by a good many Arab governments is a veil designed to hide the negligence and corruption of the governing classes, and to divert attention from poverty and unemployment by focusing it on an external foe.
- G. Chaliand, The Palestinian Resistance, Penguin, London, 1972
Zionism, even as a code word, is the litmus test with respect to anti-Semitism throughout the world, even in America. The facile rhetorical linkage of Zionism with imperialism and racism is little more than an admission that Jews are uniquely not entitled to be like everyone else and live as citizens as part of a majority in a nation, for better or for worse. Zionism, as mirrored in the State of Israel, has proven the point that Jews are in fact just human. Israel has displayed a full range of human achievement and weakness and of decency and its absence common to all nations. Comparatively speaking, one can make the case that Israel has behaved better, given its circumstances. The anti-Zionist, like the anti-Semite a century ago, does not allow the Jew the privilege of normalcy.
- Leon Botstein, The New Republic, September 8, 1997
Looking back now over nearly 50 years, I have to say - regretfully - that I believe history has proved me right. The establishment of the State of Israel has merely provided a more "politically correct" name "Anti-Zionism" in place of "Anti-Semitism." If anything,the virulence has increased.
- Derek Prince, Canadian Friends of the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem
In short, "anti-Israeli" sentiment at the UN is often a surrogate for two other predilections: anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.
- John R. Bolton, Senior Vice President, American Enterprise Institute, July 14, 1999
The unprovoked attacks launched against Israel, whether against the State itself or its subjects, all derive from the same deliberate attempt at repression - repression of any aspiration towards emancipation of the Jewish people, in the Diaspora or in the resurrected homeland; repression which, alternating with periods of paternalism and condescension, has been a constant feature of the policy of many countries towards the Jews.
- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"
During the 1970's, an especially blatant and vulgar brand of anti-Semitism became a unifying global ideology of the totalitarian Left. Couched in the language of opposition to Zionism, this anti-Semitism became the preferred vehicle of the Soviet Union and its clients in international forums for political assaults against democratic nations - most obviously Israel, but ultimately all the West, and especially the United States.
- Ambassador/Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in the introduction to "The Anti-Zionist Complex", by Jacques Givet
"The responsiveness of post-Shoah Europe to anti-Zionism has many geo-strategic and economic reasons, but it also derives from the easy channeling of traditional judeophobia into anti-Zionism. Thus, it is not surprising that the PLO's official Christian representatives were much appreciated by politicians, intellectuals, and the European media. In antisemitic circles, they were endowed with a holy mission, embodied in the historic role of the Palestinian clergy..."
"...Among the multitude of events from the 20th century, historians in the next millennium may well be intrigued be two particularities: the first concerns the relentlessness shown by many European politicians in exterminating and pillaging European Jewry, the second concerns post-Shoah Europe, which is linked to the first by a similar desire of many to demonize Israel. Yet, this 20th century has witnessed important Western strategic defeats in the Middle East. Armenian independence, promised at the end of World War I (Treaty of Sevres) was never implemented; the same applies to the Kurds. Lebanon, considered as a paragon for the realization of an Islamic-Christian symbiosis, finally collapsed in a bloody tragedy. Massacres and slavery continue to ravage the Christian and Animist populations of southern Sudan; the war in the Philippines fueled be a secessionist Muslim minority group has claimed 120,000 lives over the past 20 years. Genocidal massacres have been perpetrated in numerous countries, but for 30 years the main target-constantly highlighted in the media remained Israel."
- Bat Ye'or in Dhimmitude: Jews and Christians Under Islam, published in MIDSTREAM. Born in Egypt, Bat Ye'or is the author of The Dhimma: Jews & Christians Under Islam (French, 1980; English 1985; fourth reprint, AUP, 1996).
There is no difference whatever between anti-Semitism and the denial of Israel's statehood. Classical anti-Semitism denies the equal right of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people its lawful sovereignty within the community of nations. The common principle in the two cases is discrimination
- Abba Eban, New York Times, November 3, 1975
Jew-hatred and its latest incarnation, Israel-hatred, are the price Jews pay for their role in history. They pay it often unwillingly and they live the role, for the most part unwittingly. But as the great French Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain noted: "Israel...is to be found at the very heart of the world's structure, stimulating it, exasperating it, moving it. Like an alien body, like an activating ferment injected into the mass, it gives the world no peace, it bars slumber, it teaches the world to be discontented and restless as long as the world has not God, it stimulates the movement of history...It is the vocation of Israel which the world hates".
- Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, in their book, "Why the Jews? : the Reasons for Antisemitism",
A hundred years after Basel, fifty years after the founding of the state, no self-respecting Jew should have to defend Zionism. The argument from history was made a hundred years ago: Israel was our sovereign land from which we were exiled and the claim to which we never renounced; unlike the colonizers of, say, Australia, South Africa and North America, we are returning to--not creating--our patrimony. And the argument from necessity--that a people savagely persecuted and denied refuge in every corner of the globe needs at least one place of its own--was made fifty years ago, tragically and definitively, in the wake of the Holocaust. Moreover, the last fifty years of rebuilding the land with Jewish labor and genius, and of defending it with Jewish blood, have made denials of the Jewish claim unworthy even of reply. No one asks Australia to justify its right to breathe. The time for justifying Israel's is long past.
This is not to say that the deniers are not there. Entire nations deny. Entire leagues of nations deny. Why, the United Nations, speaking for the mass of mankind, would still be denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state were it not so beholden to the United States. The war against Zion is, of course, the leitmotif of Arab international life. And not just of the Iraqs and Syrias. It infuses the discourse of post-Camp David Egypt and of the post-Oslo Palestinians. "We know only one word: jihad, jihad, jihad.... We are in a conflict with the Zionist movement and the Balfour Declaration and all imperialist activities." That was Yasir Arafat in Bethlehem three years after Oslo. (Balfour, no less.)
Arguing with anti-Zionists is not just pointless. It is demeaning. The intellectual battle to be fought today is not with the anti-Zionists, those who maintain that the Jewish state should never have existed, but with the post-Zionists, those who maintain that the Jewish national idea has outlived its usefulness, that it is obsolete, an impediment now both to individual self-expression and to entry into the post-sovereign world of the coming century.
- Charles Krauthammer, The New Republic, September 8, 1997
Our disappointment is not in Zionism, but in anti-Zionism, the adjustment that anti-Semitism made when the Jews moved into modern statehood.
- Ruth R. Wisse, The New Republic, September 8, 1997
The anti-Zionist becomes an overt anti-Semite as soon as he goes beyond criticism of the policies of the Jerusalem government (a favorite activity of the Israelis themselves) and challenges the very existence of the State of Israel. For to refuse the Jews their right to nationhood is to perpetuate their bondage. To "de-Zionize" Israel would be like trying to "de-Helvetize" Switzerland. The fact that Israel has an Arab minority is shocking only to those for whom the idea of a Jewish majority in any country is intolerable.
- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"
Although Stalin said that anti-Semitism was the most dangerous sequel of cannibalism, his name will remain associated with an absurd variety of anti-Semitism born in certain socialist countries under the new name of anti-Zionism ...a sad, ridiculous, reactionary, and very dangerous phenomenon.
- Reporter, Prague, March 1969. Note the date; this publication, the official organ of the Union of Czechoslovak Journalists, was still (to its cost) faithful to the milder line inaugurated in January 1968, before the Soviet invasion. (from Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex")
In the 1990s, many of the Islamic social and political movements in the Arab world joined the resurgent trend of Holocaust denial among European anti-Semites. This was mainly the result and influence of the persistent activity in this field by Roger Gauroudi, a French scholar and leading European anti-Semite. Gauroudi, a former Christian Marxist and French Communist Party member of the French parliament, converted to Islam following the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. He soon became a prominent figure in promoting anti-Semitism among Islamic movements. But since he was known for his anti-Jewish writings as a Marxist too, he gained the support of many Arab circles beyond the Islamic movements. When he was put on trial and convicted in France for Holocaust denial several years ago, his popularity in Arab and Islamic countries increased. Even the Islamic official establishments in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority (PA) supported him. For instance, in 1997, Al-Azhar, the official monthly of the highest Islamic religious authority in Egypt, published sympathetic articles supporting both Gauroudi and his ideas on Jews and Judaism.
- Reuven Paz is a visiting fellow at The Washington Institute and a Counter-Terrorism expert
Did even the fiercest enemies of United States policies in Vietnam ever open fire at random, with submachine guns, in Kennedy Airport or within the precincts of a New York nursery school? Has there ever been an incident in which some ferociously anti-communist group has gunned down Soviet tourists (denounced as "Stalinists")? No, and had such things occurred, those responsible would have been denounced as mad and bad. Not so when Israel is concerned.
Anti-Zionism carried to such a pitch is in fact madness. Israeli Jews are killed because they proclaim themselves as such. Israel is to be destroyed because it is a Jewish State. Incidentally, the hostage-taking is never designed to improve the lot of the Palestinian masses, but rather to obtain the release of other killers, previously detained, for further feats. At Munich (5-6 September 1972) and Entebbe (4-5 July 1976), the aim was to secure the release of the Japanese terrorist who had survived the Lod massacre (30 May 1972).
...So, at Munich and Entebbe, the Jews as such were not the target? Fair enough; the victims were not the ordinary kind of Jew, citizens of States liable to persecute or protect them as circumstances or political convenience might dictate. Although weaponless, they represented something to be feared - Jews with a country of their own, Jews disinclined to accept a "democratic, secular State of Palestine" which they know would not hesitate a moment in reducing them to stateless ciphers. Dub a Jew "Zionist" and any crime can be committed against him with the clearest of consciences.
This convenient confusion between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is nothing new. A similar cynicism, and similar sneers, were in order during the great Stalinist show-trials, conducted in Prague, among other places. The survivors have described how, arrested as Jews, they were addressed as "Zionists" so that the interrogators could feign to be anti-Zionist rather than anti-Jewish, while insulting their victims with taunts traditionally reserved for Jews, thus giving brutal bad manners a Marxist dimension hitherto lacking.
...Anti-Zionists, like traditional anti-Semites, see only the reverse side of the coin in Jewish history - the reaction not the act, the accident not the cause, the wastage not the process of creation. In this they display a lack of human understanding and also an inability to think dialectically - shortcomings from which they are the first to suffer. The way in which, to salve their consciences and in the interest of their policies, they picture the Jew as a sordid, guilty "Zionist" freezes their ability to think and feel. The freedom to exist which they refuse me prevents them from seeing the world as it is. Their reasoning is infantile, their information inadequate, their scale of values absurd in that one Palestinian equals 1,000 Kurds or 10,000 Balts or Armenians - and how many Nagas or Tibetans? (A scale in which an Afghan, incidentally, counts for nothing.) The anti-Zionist is not interested in the sufferings of these other peoples and takes no trouble to find out about them, or about many others in revolt against the imperialisms he is all too ready to praise. The free Jew, the Israeli, he is completely unable to understand.
- Jacques Givet, "The Anti-Zionist Complex"
Anti-Semitism is not dead. Although anti-Semitic incidents have declined and a multi-cultural acceptance has produced wider tolerance in many states including the US, a 2000-year-old virus has mutated, and lives on, often in a disguised form. And the existence and achievements of the Jewish state in an area of relative backwardness stimulate anti-Semitism and furnish a respectable cover.
...Hitler exploited anti-Semitism with deadly consequences for Jews and the world. But racial anti-Semitism has been tabooed after the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials. Now the existence of the state of Israel permits anti-Semitism to assume a political form, safe from challenge as intolerance or racism. How many times one hears: "I like Jews but I can't stand Zionism," or "I have nothing against Jews, but I don't like Israel." The existence and achievements of Israel offer a visible and irresistible target for dormant anti-Semitic feelings aroused by a focus on Israel's mistakes and misdeeds, which are characteristic of every state including the US.
- UN Watch, December 1997
"This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
- Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League [Israel came into being on May 14, 1948. The five Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq immediately invaded the new microstate. Their combined intention, expressed as above, blurs the distinction with what had just happened in Europe 5 years prior.]
"The Palestine tragedy is unequaled in history. The Zionist imperialistic plot against Palestine was most inhumane and base. World Judaism plans to take over most of the Arab countries to fulfill its so-called historical dream of a homeland between the Nile and Euphrates. The Imperialist Jewish plot is not aimed at Palestine only...-,,
- Haj Amin el-Husseini, former Mufti of Jerusalem, Grand Mufti of Palestine, Hitler's Middle Eastern propaganda specialist during the WWII and head of the "Arab Republic of Palestine" in Baghdad, 1964. The similarity to 'Protocols' is probably not coincidental.
Anti-Zionism is the hatred of the Jews (antisemitism) as expressed through (or masquerading as) hatred of, or bias against, the Jewish homeland, Israel.
- The Society for Rational Peace
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!
Donate
$115.00 donated
in the past month
Get Involved
If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.
Publish
Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.
Topics
More
Search Indybay's Archives
Advanced Search
►
▼
IMC Network
Fuck colonialism, no matter who is colonizing. Fuck oppression, no matter who is oppressing. Fuck the Israelis, the true anti semites, the victims who become the victimizers.
Dr. Martin Luther King Junior: November 17, 1957
Loving Your Enemies
History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors. And there are three ways that individuals who are oppressed can deal with their oppression. One of them is to rise up against their oppressors with physical violence and corroding hatred. But oh this isn’t the way. For the danger and the weakness of this method is its futility. Violence creates many more social problems than it solves. And I’ve said, in so many instances, that as the Negro, in particular, and colored peoples all over the world struggle for freedom, if they succumb to the temptation of using violence in their struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence isn’t the way.
Another way is to acquiesce and to give in, to resign yourself to the oppression. Some people do that. They discover the difficulties of the wilderness moving into the promised land, and they would rather go back to the despots of Egypt because it’s difficult to get in the promised land.
And so they resign themselves to the fate of oppression; they somehow acquiesce to this thing. But that too isn’t the way because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is the only way as our eyes look to the future. As we look out across the years and across the generations, let us develop and move right here. We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only way. Jesus discovered that.
Not only did Jesus discover it, even great military leaders discover that. One day as Napoleon came toward the end of his career and looked back across the years—the great Napoleon that at a very early age had all but conquered the world. He was not stopped until he became, till he moved out to the battle of Leipzig and then to Waterloo. But that same Napoleon one day stood back and looked across the years, and said: "Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have built great empires. But upon what did they depend? They depended upon force. But long ago Jesus started an empire that depended on love, and even to this day millions will die for him."
Yes, I can see Jesus walking around the hills and the valleys of Palestine. And I can see him looking out at the Roman Empire with all of her fascinating and intricate military machinery. But in the midst of that, I can hear him saying: "I will not use this method. Neither will I hate the Roman Empire." [Radio Announcer:] (WRMA, Montgomery, Alabama. Due to the fact of the delay this morning, we are going over with the sermon.) [several words inaudible] . . . and just start marching.
And I’m proud to stand here in Dexter this morning and say that that army is still marching. It grew up from a group of eleven or twelve men to more than seven hundred million today. Because of the power and influence of the personality of this Christ, he was able to split history into a.d. and b.c. Because of his power, he was able to shake the hinges from the gates of the Roman Empire. And all around the world this morning, we can hear the glad echo of heaven ring:
Jesus shall reign wherever sun,
Does his successive journeys run;
His kingdom spreads from shore to shore,
Till moon shall wane and wax no more.
We can hear another chorus singing: "All hail the power of Jesus name!"
We can hear another chorus singing: "Hallelujah, hallelujah! He’s King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Hallelujah, hallelujah!"
We can hear another choir singing:
In Christ there is no East or West.
In Him no North or South,
But one great Fellowship of Love
Throughout the whole wide world.
This is the only way.
And our civilization must discover that. Individuals must discover that as they deal with other individuals. There is a little tree planted on a little hill and on that tree hangs the most influential character that ever came in this world. But never feel that that tree is a meaningless drama that took place on the stages of history. Oh no, it is a telescope through which we look out into the long vista of eternity, and see the love of God breaking forth into time. It is an eternal reminder to a power-drunk generation that love is the only way. It is an eternal reminder to a generation depending on nuclear and atomic energy, a generation depending on physical violence, that love is the only creative, redemptive, transforming power in the universe.
So this morning, as I look into your eyes, and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you, "I love you. I would rather die than hate you." And I’m foolish enough to believe that through the power of this love somewhere, men of the most recalcitrant bent will be transformed. And then we will be in God’s kingdom. We will be able to matriculate into the university of eternal life because we had the power to love our enemies, to bless those persons that cursed us, to even decide to be good to those persons who hated us, and we even prayed for those persons who despitefully used us.
Oh God, help us in our lives and in all of our attitudes, to work out this controlling force of love, this controlling power that can solve every problem that we confront in all areas. Oh, we talk about politics; we talk about the problems facing our atomic civilization. Grant that all men will come together and discover that as we solve the crisis and solve these problems—the international problems, the problems of atomic energy, the problems of nuclear energy, and yes, even the race problem—let us join together in a great fellowship of love and bow down at the feet of Jesus. Give us this strong determination. In the name and spirit of this Christ, we pray. Amen.
http://netureikarta.org/activities%20palesteine%202ndintifada%20main.htm
While most ultraOrthodox are not openly against the state of Israel many do not serve in the IDF due to their religous convictions.
Most of their arguments are circular -- Israel is bad because it does a thing I say is bad, and I also say everyone who believes differently is bad and not a True Jew. The arguments really only convince people who are already convinced.
That is not to detract from their opinion. After all, I could tell you that carrots are tasty, but if we don't agree based on our backgrounds and tastes, there's not a lot we're going to be able to say to one another to change our opinions. Yes, that's a trivialisation. :-)
"...anti-semitism was originally coined in 1879 by the german agitator Wilhalm Marr to designate anti-jewish campaigns in central europe at that time.", Britannica.
keep your hateful word games to yourselves, debate roach et al.
by Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl ZT"L
Dean of Nitra Yeshiva
1. IS IT TRUE that in 1941 and again in 1942, the German Gestapo offered all European Jews transit to Spain, if they would relinquish all their property in Germany and Occupied France; on condition that:
a) none of the deportees travel from Spain to Palestine; and
b) all the deportees be transported from Spain to the USA or British colonies, and there to remain; with entry visas to be arranged by the Jews living there; and
c) $1000.00 ransom for each family to be furnished by the Agency, payable upon the arrival of the family at the Spanish border at the rate of 1000 families daily.
2. IS IT TRUE that the Zionist leaders in Switzerland and Turkey received this offer with the clear understanding that the exclusion of Palestine as a destination for the deportees was based on an agreement between the Gestapo and the Mufti.
3. IS IT TRUE that the answer of the Zionist leaders was negative, with the following comments:
a) ONLY Palestine would be considered as a destination for the deportees.
b) The European Jews must accede to suffering and death greater in measure than the other nations, in order that the victorious allies agree to a "Jewish State" at the end of the war.
c) No ransom will be paid
4. IS IT TRUE that this response to the Gestapo's offer was made with the full knowledge that the alternative to this offer was the gas chamber.
5. IS IT TRUE that in 1944, at the time of the Hungarian deportations, a similar offer was made, whereby all Hungarian Jewry could be saved.
6. IS IT TRUE that the same Zionist hierarchy again refused this offer (after the gas chambers had already taken a toll of millions).
7. IS IT TRUE that during the height of the killings in the war, 270 Members of the British Parliament proposed to evacuate 500,000 Jews from Europe, and resettle them in British colonies, as a part of diplomatic negotiations with Germany.
8. IS IT TRUE that this offer was rejected by the Zionist leaders with the observation "Only to Palestine!"
9. IS IT TRUE that the British government granted visas to 300 rabbis and their families to the Colony of Mauritius, with passage for the evacuees through Turkey. The "Jewish Agency" leaders sabotaged this plan with the observation that the plan was disloyal to Palestine, and the 300 rabbis and their families should be gassed.
10. IS IT TRUE that during the course of the negotiations mentioned above, Chaim Weitzman, the first "Jewish statesman" stated: "The most valuable part of the Jewish nation is already in Palestine, and those Jews living outside Palestine are not too important". Weitzman's cohort, Greenbaum, amplified this statement with the observation "One cow in Palestine is worth more than all the Jews in Europe".
by the way the arabs are not really semites anymore. only their language is semitic. but some people want to pervert even the word anti-semitism, so that it becomes harder and harder to talk about anti jewish prejudice
by the way the arabs are not really semites anymore. only their language is semitic. but some people want to pervert even the word anti-semitism, so that it becomes harder and harder to talk about anti jewish prejudice
http://www.indybay.org/news/2004/01/1667981.php
It never ceases to amaze me that ostensibly "progressive" and left-wing activists will raise far right-wing ultra-religious Jews -- who oppose feminism, gay rights and abortion, etc., -- as "proof" that Israel is bad and that Jews who support Israel are not "true Jews" (whatever that means).
Neturei Karta (a tiny minority, and no, there are not 20,000 demonstrators in the picture above -- that's just another lie for the cause) opposes Israel on religious grounds. They do not believe that the state should exist prior to the arrival of the messiah. Unless you buy into this, who cares what they think?!
Perhaps these "Anti-Zionist" agitators are also not "progressive" and "leftist"? Perhaps they are against gay rights, freedom of choice and feminism?
You'll note how many of the same articles get posted on numerous IMC sites. Someone is making the rounds, sowing the seeds of hatred. Are they progressives who support diversity and human rights? No. Check out these links:
Manque - Anti-Zionist pays lip service to human rights:
http://www.vancouver.indymedia.org/news/2003/03/34820.php
AZ Not Progressive:
http://www.vancouver.indymedia.org/news/2003/12/90224_comment.php#91507
AZ against Diversity:
http://vancouver.indymedia.org/news/2003/02/32147_comment.php#89294
http://vancouver.indymedia.org/news/2003/11/87662_comment.php#89304
Anti-Zionist oppose Human Rights!
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2004/03/1681986_comment.php#1682009
The anti-Semitic world has developed a euphemism for the destruction of Jews in the modern era of tolerance.
By Lee Kaplan, DAFKA National Director
The term “politically correct” has emerged in the Western world where religious and racial tolerance as an idea has become common, mostly as an outcropping of the Holocaust, South Africa and the US Civil Rights Movement. But old ways die hard, and the remnants of the political movements of the totalitarian world still cling to Jew-hatred. The only dilemma for those movements is how to sell a “politically correct” version of that hatred. Hence, “anti-Semitism” is separated from “anti-Zionsim,” even though they are both one and the same. This “politically correct” form of anti-Semitism always revolves around the existence of Israel.
How so, you say, when there are even Jews who classify themselves as “anti-Zionist” or even “post-Zionist” who call for the destruction of Israel?
“Zionism” is the concept that the Zionist movement created to found the state of Israel and bring the Jews back to the Holy Land to enable Jews to not live under persecution in their own land. With the creation of Israel, "Zionism" was fulfilled. The Zionists piror to 1948 purchased all their land legally and emigration was legally done. Other Jews resided in the area for thousands of years. Today, “Post-Zionists” is as term used to connote Jews living in Israel and how they regard their future circumstances. Israel is a fact now, a fact that the “anti-Zionists” wish to negate. As such, “anti-Zionism” has become a euphemism for Jews whenever the professional propagandists of the old Soviet Union or the Arab Muslim world needed it (and still is) to mask their persecution of Jews.
Arab college professors, not only the ones in Arab universities who teach that Jews never lived in the Holy Land, nor the agents provacateurs sent to US universities by the Saudis and the PLO, began the intellectualization of anti-Semitism as a “politically correct” propaganda tool by denying their hatred of Jews simply by saying they only hate "Zionists." Martin Luther King understood the game plan when he told a student at one college lecture that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism pure and simple.
So how do we affirm for certain that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism? We look at who says uses the term “anti-Zionist” and this salient analogy: Imagine if during the Second World War Adolf Hitler had developed a euphemism for the Jews-Juden in German- and called them “EuroJews.” He would then proceed to deny he was an anti-Semite. After all, he wasn't doing anything to the Jews in the USA. He was only righting the injustices done by Jews during the First World War whom he blamed Germany's loss on. Seminars would be held in American universities in their German Studies departments, organized by the German-American Bund to discuss the EuroJew world problem: the abuses of human rights abuses by the EuroJews for stealing German property and land. The superior attitude of Jews as the “Chosen People” could be discussed and how this impacted on the starving Germans after 1918 who the Jews left hungry. Of course, these people, the Jews, should be dispossessed in the name of “social justice.” And German soldiers killing them, well, that was naturally self-defense and "legitimate resistance" to occupation by these interlopers who really never came from Germany and should go back wherever they came from. They should be deported and attacked if they remain behind. German contributions to American universities would increase with this program in order to further “greater understanding” between the US and Nazi Germany.
The above is the current scenario when discussing anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionists who would claim they are not anti-Semitic simply because they do not advocate the murder, or dispossession of Jews in the Diaspora, but who support an Arab fascist movement that says the Jews now living in Israel must either flee their homes, be murdered, or submit to Arab Muslim domination and eventually live under Sharia Law, or at minimum strict Arab majority rule, mask their intentions from a world that remembers what the Germans actually did. This is done by using the euphemism "Zionists" instead of Jews. And like Goebbel's Big Lie, the incessant repetition of this theme, especially in our educational system in the classroom, libraries and at conferences over and over has made it seem acceptable.
But what about those Jews who call themselves “anti-Zionists”? Is it possible that Jews can be anti-Semites also? The answer is a resounding “yes.” The Germans had plenty of Jews who betrayed their own people for assorted reasons. At the start of the Holocaust, some German Jews also complained about the “less sophisticated” Bohemian Jews who the Germans first started their pogroms on. Some of secular Jewish ancestry even served early on in the German army. Germany later employed “Jew catchers,” Jews who would wander around in former Jewish neighborhoods, in the park, or the library, to root out Jews who were hiding their identities and not yet caught. The Warsaw Ghetto had the Jewish police—it was easier to control the Jews with their own kind—who carried out the deportation of the Jews until their usefulness ended and they too were murdered. And the death camps had kapos, Jews who supervised the other Jews for the Nazis in exchange for better treatment. Jews like these did these things usually for more food or better treatment than their peers. But many also considered themselves “different” or “better” than the other Jews and even claimed to understand why what was happening to Jews was their own fault, due to innate characteristics of Jews and their ideas, or their being too pushy, or their sense of intellectual superiority. Most perished with the rest.
Today’s “anti-Zionist” Jews are largely found on college campuses where the intellectualization of anti-Semitism fits in with the “anything goes” concept of allowing for new ideas and discourse in the academic paradigm. Like the Jews above, they usually claim intellectual superiority to their peers. Some like Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein draw attention to themselves and make a fortune writing books or on the lecture circuit when they would never be as recognized for their mainstream work and ideas. A Jew who will condemn other Jews for living in Israel is news and will always be embraced by the Arab money machine that works in “solidarity” with any organization or person who will support the goal of dismantling Israel. Some claim they are citizens of the world, and thus owe no allegiance to the Jewish people any more, and if the world wants the Jews of Israel dispossessed or killed, so be it. Some are ignorant of the concept that “the Chosen People” does not mean that Jews are superior to other people—they are not any better or worse—but that Jews have a covenant with God to set an example by behaving better than other people. And some Jews (and when I say “Jews,” I mean people of Jewish ancestry only, not people who recognize their being Jewish anymore) through the social obligations they were brought up with as young Jews to support the community of mankind, embrace radical socialist movements such as communism or anarchism that traditionally see Jews as the “capitalists” and “money grubbers” of the global world. They willingly unite with Muslims who are really just anti-Semites to help them in opposing the current world order by tearing down the world as they see it to create their perverted idea of a better one.
Yes, Jews can be anti-Semites too by mitigating their position as Jews in the world and being politically correct “anti-Zionists.”
The goal of “anti-Zionists” is to deconstruct via politically correct terms the real nature of anti-Semitism for their own perverted
ends. Hence, Palestine Solidarity activists who support “legitimate armed resistance as proscribed by international law” are not advocating the murder of Jews in Israel, but rather upholding “international law.” That they would cheer when a resolution put forth at a previous conference at Duke University to condemn suicide bombings was announced as being defeated becomes ignored under the cloud of their “politically correct” rhetoric as they call themselves “peace activists.” “Peace” will come when Israel is dismantled and “Palestine” is in its place to these people. What happens to the Jews living there now, and the end of the only real democracy for Jews and Arabs in the Middle East afterward, is irrelevant. “Peace workers” who would enable a suicide bomber to pass a checkpoint to kill Jews then can become the humanitarians, and the terrorists become “freedom fighters” when they are really just thugs who prey not only on Jews but on their own people.
Anti-Zionists cannot excuse their anti-Semitism by their support of the subjugation, expulsion or murder of only one part of the world Jewish community—the one in Israel. The constant dissembling and parsing of words by professional Arab propagandists and the radical Left must be perceived for what it is—deception. This deception has been steadily creeping into our university system in America and threatens the very social tolerance that system claims to support. That is the basis behind the Palestine conference to be held at Georgetown University in February where anti-Semites from across the US will gather to strategize and train in how to weaken and destroy the state of Israel.
So the next time you hear someone say they are an “anti-Zionist” and not an “anti-Semite,” rest assured they are referring to the Jews.
They just haven’t gotten around to all of them yet.
http://www.dafka.org/NewsGen.asp?S=4&PageID=1091