Anti-Zionism = Anti-Semitism

Israel & Palestine Forum

So says the pope.

Catholic Church Equates Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism - Shlomo Shamir

The Catholic Church condemned anti-Zionism as a cover for anti-Semitism in a joint statement issued by a forum of Catholic-Jewish intellectuals this week in Buenos Aires. "We oppose anti-Semitism in any way and form, including anti-Zionism that has become of late a manifestation of anti-Semitism," the statement said. Ilan Steinberg, director of the World Jewish Congress, noted, "For the first time, the Catholic Church recognizes in anti-Zionism an attack not only against Jews, but against the whole Jewish people." (Ha'aretz)

www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/449357.html


If you have a problem with this, take it to the Catholic Church.

Blah blah anti-semitism = anti-zionism

Wow you found a stupid article saying that...

If you want I could post lots of articles found on the internet saying the complete opposite..if I did would that mean anything to you??

but what if a Jewish person is an anti-Zionist?

I disagree, at one time I believed that were true, just like opponents of any civil rights program were racists. But we've come a long way, Zionism and Judaism are not the same thing. And don't start pulling Hitler into the conversation.

Who mentioned Hitler and what does he have to do with it?

Are you Jewish Inner City Blue? If not your opinions on who's anti-semitic and who isn't doesn't really matter.

what if ummmm say...... all the descendants of the people who came over on the Mayflower decided to gather to Massachussetts and form their own nation?

would opposing this be anti-American?

That is a bogus analogy. That would be more in line with the southern states forming a new country like they did in the 1800's. As you remember we went to war because of that.

If you denied Americans the right to have their own country that would be anti-American. If you held America to a different standard than other countries or Americans to other people that would be anti-American.

Ok here is a much better analogy then.

If a bunch of surviving Iroquois decided to gather to the Great Lakes area and form a new Iroquois League, a sovereign Nation, would opposition to this idea=racist against Native Americans?

You are picking and choosing phrases out of what I am trying to say. The double standard is not necessarily anti-Semitic. Just like the double standard against the United States is not necessarily anti-American. Because you couldn't completely ignored that point, I think this discussion may become fruitless, but I still wish to continue.

how the heck is opposing the policies of Ariel Sharon anti-Semetic?

That's like saying opposing Bush's policies is anti-American

(heh, a thing that has been said many times)

well if you strap bombs to yourself and blow up a busload of innocent Israelis that's obviously pretty anti-Semetic

if you say Sharon is too heavy-handed and detrimental to the peace process in Israel/Palestine that is not anti-Semetic.

Did someone call you anti-semitic?

just trying to make things clear.

I think the idea that anti-Zionism=anti-Semitism is absurd.

(for the record I am not an anti-Zionist, however I feel the need to argue with absurdity. It's a weakness of mine)

when you have Jewish anti-Zionists....... you cannot call it anti-Semitism.

make a Venn diagram...

all anti-Semites are anti-Zionists
but not all anti-Zionists are anti-Semites.

Well I think the idea that anti-Zionism=anti-Semitism is true.

Criticizing Israeli policy is not anti-Semitic. Holding Israel to a different standard then other countries is. Singling out Israel for criticism is anti-semitic.

I'm not against people who criticize Israel. I am against people who use absurdly hide their anti-semitism behind the phrase anti-zionist.

I most certainly can call a Jew anti-semtic. There are Jews who are anti-semitic and just because they are Jews don't mean they can't be labeled as one.

I want to add a couple of comments here. First of all, I don't agree that Isreal4ver's definition of anti-Zionism is too narrow. Definitionally, anti-Zionism does not simply refer to criticism of the policies of the Israeli government. It refers to opposition to an idea: that of a Jewish homeland. The fact that some people now use the term in a overbroad manner does not change its fundamental definition. It's important to agree on a definition of anti-Zionism before answering the question of whether it is synonymous with anti-semitism. Otherwise, answering the question becomes an exercise in futility.

I have written on this subject before in another thread, and below I am quoting a portion of my post. In short, my opinion is that in theory the two are not necessarily synonymous. However, I believe that in practice often they are. I also tend to agree with Israel4ever that employing a double standard in evaluating the conduct of Israel versus that of other nations is anti-semitic in many cases. In some cases, I have to think that critics of Israel who employ a double standard are simply repeating the double standards they hear from others, and therefore they may not be anti-semitic. I do, however, believe that anti-semitism is the root cause of any double standard. And if it isn't anti-semitism, then there must be another reason for it, and the burden is on the one employing to double standard to explain what that reason is. As a reminder, a double standard is by definition an illogical argument, one that unfairly criticizes the conduct of the one while ignoring or rationalizing the conduct of the other. When that kind of illogic is employed, it must be explained. If it isn't anti-semitism, then what it is?

A final point. I believe that anti-Zionists, be they anti-semitic or not, have a tendency to appropriate traditional anti-semitic ideas - for example, the myth of Jewish "power" which is now described disengenuously as "Zionist power" - for political ends. For the anti-Zionist, anti-semitism, properly cloaked of its most explicit rhetorical edge, is a handy tool that provides many convenient arguments to further their cause.

Here are my comments from the other thread:

"When is anti-Zionism anti-Semitism? Well criticism of Israel, even harsh criticism, clearly is not. Pure anti-Zionism is a special case that deserves some attention. The pure anti-Zionist does not believe in the moral case for Jews having a state where they are the majority. The moral case is of course based upon historical persecution, which by general agreement of almost any rational person, including many anti-Zionists, has been unusually extreme. The moral case for Zionism rests on the notion of preserving the Jewish religion and culture by creating a state where Jews are a majority rather than the persecuted minority that they have been for two millenia. The pure anti-Zionist rejects that claim, often re-characterizing Zionism in left wing code as a form of "racism" whereby the objective is turned on its head: it is now based on feelings of racial superiority rather than motives of racial self-preservation. They will often cite statements made by certain Jews at particular times and places to support these contentions.

Some pure anti-Zionists actually don't reject the notion in word, but argue that such a state should never have been in Palestine because it was made "on the backs of Palestinians." However, these semi-pure anti-Zionists well understand that the Jewish state was originally proposed elsewhere, and that in fact there was no other possibility for a Jewish state anywhere else. So the distinction itself is trivial.

But all these forms of pure anti-Zionism have something in common: a lack of sympathy, or a sympathy that is qualified to degrees, for historical persecution of world Jewry. Some may simply find the Palestinian case *more* sympathetic to degrees, perhaps because it's more recent. But sympathy for the Palestinians doesn't have to be incompatible with acceptance of the moral case for a Jewish state. One can find Israeli treatment of the Palestinians "abhorrant" even, and advocate a two-state solution where the Palestinians have their state and the Jews have theres. But the pure anti-Zionist does not accept this. The latest view, advocated by such anti-Zionists as Noam Chomsky, is this "secular bi-national state," nothing more than a code for re-diasporization of the Jews in the middle east. Anyone with two eyes and ears should well understand that the Jews will not prosper in a state with an Islamic Arab majority, particularly one with a more recent motive of vengeance toward them, and will in fact just leave. Does the anti-Zionist care? Well maybe a little, but not TOO much afterall. The Jews, it is believed, are powerful, wealthy and resourceful. They don't need help like the Palestinians do. They can help themselves.

So the pure anti-Zionist may not be anti-semitic. They may in fact simply be ambivalent toward Jewry. They may think that historical persecution is terrible, but after all, the Jews are powerful and have done some bad things, the State of Israel a recent example. The anti-Zionist may not approve of anti-semtism, but he may not have strong negative feelings about it either. He may believe that anti-semitism is now confined to an endangered species of swastika waving intellectual primitives. He may even believe, as Chomsky does, that the holocaust denier is not anti-semitic. Instead, he is just honestly mistaken. He may see Zionist bias as a hidden motivating factor in everything, but believe that anti-semitism is absolutely irrelevant to any questions pertaining to Israel and has nothing to do with anyone's views on the subject. Corollary to that, he may believe that anti-semtism and deeply historic xenophobia play no role in Arab attitudes and behavior toward Jews in the Middle East: instead, it is all about specific grievances over particular land. He will reinforce this disjunction of anti-semitism and anti-zionism by always being careful to say "Zionist" and not "Jew," in referring to Jews in places of power. The only thing the anti-Zionist knows about modern day anti-semites is that he isn't one of them. Otherwise, for all intents and purposes, it may as well not exist anymore.

I overgeneralize, of course. Different anti-Zionists have a variety of different views of Jewry. Some may have no ambivalence at all. Others may hate Jewry outright, as do many anti-Zionists on the far right. I am simply making a case for what I think motivates many anti-Zionists."

- woolfe

Of course, there're people who are Anti-Semitic but they don't have guts to admit it. Because of this they call themselves Anti-Zionists. It can't make Anti-Zionism equal to Anti-Semitism. Zionism is a certain policy, Anti-Zionists are simply people who oppose the policy.

I'm afraid they lost their chance to setup their own state. They spent their 2 or so years of independence in civil war and huge criminal uprise. Too bad neighbors.
As for the former Soviet republics, they're quite independent.

This is a new low of hypocrisy. If they "lost their right" to statehood because they spent 2 years of independence in civil war and criminal enterprise, then when do the Palestinians lose theres?

1. When they rejected statehood in 1937;

2. When they rejected statehood in 1948;

3. When they rejected statehood in 2000.

4. When the Arabs invaded Israel in 1948;

5. When the Arabs attacked Israel in 1967;

5. When the Arabs attacked Israel in 1973;

6. When the Palestinians began using terrorism first in the 1920's continuing up through the 1948 war, continuing through the 1950's with Fedayeen raid, contining through the 1960's1980's with the PLO and its airline hi-jackings and kidnapping of Olympic athletes, and continuing to now through 2 Intifadas.

7. With their current instability (which verges on civil war) and total government corruption displaying that they cannot govern themselves.

Wow.

- woolfe

I believe Barbed posted this in another forum

You are an anti-semite AntiJew. Lets look at that other anti-semitic Jew Israel Shahak for a second. Then I'll take on your other favorite anti-Semitic Jew Israel Shamir

The Jews are Bad !

by Werner Cohn

A review of Jewish History, Jewish Religion. The Weight of Three Thousand Years. by Israel Shahak, Foreword by Gore Vidal. Pluto Press, London and Boulder, Colorado. 1994

Israel Horizons, vol. 42, no. 3 of 4 (sic), Autumn 1994, pp. 28-9. copyright 1994 by Werner Cohn



Israel Shahak is a retired Israeli teacher of chemistry who travels the world to lecture on the evils of Zionism and the Jewish religion. His claims and opinions are so bizarre that, by themselves, they could not justify paying any attention to this book. But the work comes to us with an urgent recommendation from Noam Chomsky on its cover and with an essay by Gore Vidal as a foreword. Bearing this double cachet, the book will undoubtedly find its way to the shelves of bookstores and, at least in some limited way, to the attention of people on the Left.

Dr. Shahak says that he wants Jews to change their ways and to stop the atrocities associated with Zionism and Orthodox Jewish religion. As a first step, he wants us to face the terrible crimes that were committed by of our ancestors. One way of doing this, he says (pp. 72-3), is to develop a positive attitude toward "popular [his emphasis] anti-Jewish manifestations of the past." His prime example are the Chmielnicki massacres of 17th century Ukraine, which he wants us to celebrate as a progressive uprising:

Do decent English historians, even when noting the massacres of Englishmen by rebellious Irish peasant rising against their enslavement, condemn the latter as 'anti-English racists' ? What is the attitude of progressive French historians towards the great slave revolution in Santo Domingo, where many French women and children were butchered ? To ask the question is to answer it.

It is indeed.

Dr. Shahak is full of startling revelations, if that is the word, about Jewish history and the Jewish religion. None of those I was able to check had any foundation.

Some are just funny. He says (pp. 23-4) that "Jewish children are actually taught" to utter a ritual curse when passing a non-Jewish cemetery. He also tells us (p. 34) that "both before and after a meal, a pious Jew ritually washes his hands....On one of these two occasions he is worshiping God... but on the other he is worshiping Satan..."

I did take the trouble to question my orthodox rabbi nephew to find what might be behind such tall tales. He had no clue. If orthodox Jews were actually taught such hateful things, surely someone would have heard. Whom is Dr. Shahak kidding ?

Orthodox Jews, according to Shahak, frequently kill those whose views they do not like. "For example, in the late 1830's a 'Holy Rabbi' (Tzadik) in a small Jewish town in the Ukraine ordered the murder of a heretic by throwing him into the boiling water of the town baths..." Shahak gives neither the name of the town nor the year of this alleged killing. We are asked to take this tale on his say-so alone (p. 17).

In another story he gives enough detail to find a reference to the incident in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. It seems that a liberal rabbi and his family were poisoned in Lemberg (now Lvov) in 1848. According to the EJ, some orthodox fanatics were suspected of the crime. Where the EJ reports an unsolved case, which may indeed have been due to food poisoning, Shahak knows precisely who the murderers were: "the leaders of the Jewish community." How does he know this ? He won't say. This is the very stuff of the paranoid approach to historiography. (P. 17)

One of Shahak's charges has been taken very seriously. Some thirty years ago Shahak reported to the press that he had personally witnessed the following incident: an orthodox Jew saw an injured non-Jew on the Sabbath. To save the man's life, it was necessary to call an ambulance. The Jew had the phone handy but would not allow a violation of the sabbath, i.e. use of the phone, because the injured was a non-Jew. In Shahak's version, with which he begins this book, the Jew here followed the ruling the of orthodox rabbinate. The story was taken up by Ha-Arets in Israel, then by the Jewish Chronicle in London and other publications, all joining in a clamor against the barbaric orthodox. (Dr. Shahak does not seem to notice that this clamor, which he duly notes, is in itself a refutation of his charge that current Jewish life is dominated by orthodox inhumanity).

Dr. Shahak, whose nose is longer than Pinocchio's in any case, does not tell us the whole story of the incident. In the Summer 1966 issue of Tradition, an orthodox Jewish journal, we have the much more credible account by Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits (later the Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth). First of all, according to Rabbi Jakobovits, and contrary to Shahak's allegation, the rabbinate had ruled clearly that not only can the Sabbath be violated under such circumstances, but such violation would be a religious duty, to save a non-Jewish life no less than a Jewish life. Moreover, we also learn that Dr. Shahak, when challenged to produce his "orthodox Jew," was forced to admit that this Jew did not exist.

####

For the text of Lord Jakobovits's paper, please click on http://www.edah.org/backend/document/jakobovits1.html

####

Much of Shahak's book, and all of his Chapter 5, are given to the allegation that the Talmud requires or permits Jews to commit crimes, including murder, against non-Jews. Here Shahak follows an old anti-Semitic tradition that began with the 1700 work Entdecktes Judenthum (Judaism Revealed) by Johann Eisenmenger.

There are gravely offensive passages in the Talmud. (And there are, as we know from our most recent history, some Jewish fringe groups who interpret traditional Jewish writings in a hateful, xenophobic manner.) Eisenmenger did not distort the Talmud, but he interpreted it maliciously. There are many mutually contradictory passages in the Talmud, and a great deal depends on methods of interpretation. The rabbis have never allowed the immoral Talmudic interpretations which Eisenmenger and his followers attribute to Judaism. Moreover, the Talmud is not unique in containing offensive material. As many scholars have pointed out, a hostile commentator could easily produce a Christianity Revealed to provide a basis for a (similarly unjustified) anti-Christian campaign. The problem of hostile Talmud interpretation is very thoroughly discussed in the first chapter of the scholarly work by Jacob Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction. Anti-Semitism, 1700-1933. Those sufficiently interested in this area to read Shahak should also take a look at Katz.

I was recently curious to learn how Talmudic teachings concerning non-Jews are actually transmitted to our generation of Jews. The Encyclopedia Talmudica, founded by Rabbi Meyer Berlin (Bar-Ilan), has a full discussion (volume 1, pp. 274-5). This source teaches that non-Jews are to be loved in the same manner as Jews; in particular, robbing a non-Jew is the same as robbing a Jew; the non-Jewish sick are to be visited just as the Jewish sick; and so forth. All this is in very direct contradiction to the assertions by Dr. Shahak, who tells us, over and over, that all religious Jews teach hatred (and worse) of non-Jews.

With very little trouble, anyone can learn for himself that the wild accusations by Israel Shahak have no foundations whatever. And this brings us back to Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal. Chomsky's contribution to this work is confined to two sentences, which are worth citing: "Shahak is an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight and depth of knowledge. His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value."

For his part, Gore Vidal tells us that an (unnamed) "American Zionist" brought Harry Truman two million dollars in cash in 1948 and that as a result US recognition of Israel went through very fast. Nevertheless, says Vidal, he himself is not an anti-Semite. Somewhat later, he finds that Shahak is particularly "...a joy to read on the great Gentile-hating Dr. Maimonides."

The association of these men with this little booklet was meant to lend credence to Dr. Shahak. I think that, on the contrary, it brings dishonor -- further dishonor -- to Chomsky and Vidal.

N.B. The French edition of Shahak's book is published by the neo-Nazi publishing house La Vieille Taupe of Paris. This edition, like the English, carries Gore Vidal's introduction. But while it lacks the endorsement of Noam Chomsky, it features a particularly egregious "avant propos" by Edward Said of Columbia University. For details, see my webpage "What Edward Said Knows."

PS (June 2001): It appears that there is an English edition of the Shahak book that also contains the Said introduction. The edition of Shahak's book advertised by amazon.com says, on its cover, that it has a foreword by Said. WC

Another of AntiJews favorite anti-Semitic Jews is Israel Shamir. He quoted from him in another thread

Thanks for the meaningless post, I4E. For those on this forum who are genuinely looking for a good discussion, here's my post from before:

You would think exposing your anti-semitic sources is meaningless AntiJew.

Like usual, a one-line answer that doesn't address my post at all simply because you're unable to.

Yada yada yada. I proved two posts about two of the anti-semitic sources you use to slam Israel.

When you hold anti-semites up as an authority on Israel it is only fair to expose them for the anti-semites they are.