1/ Remember last year's letter fiasco in the Guardian? Well, here we go again. Let's take a look at who signed a recent letter in the paper that attacks the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
2/ The letter in question, published by a prominent newspaper, seeks to redefine antisemitism. It is signed by people who:
* Openly charge Jews with disloyalty to their countries
* Say Jews manipulate the world through a “Jewish media machine”
3/ * Accuse Jews with “whining” and “lying” about the Holocaust while behaving worse than the Nazis
* Describe a 1929 anti-Jewish massacre that killed over a hundred Jews as “resistance” by "martyrs"
* And the murderer of a four-year-old Jewish girl as a “martyr”
4/
* Defend Hezbollah's Al Manar, which propagates the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the blood libel, against charges of antisemitism
* Insist Holocaust revisionism is NOT antisemitic
* Exculpates Amin al-Husseini, a vicious antisemite and well-known ally of the Nazis
1/ I'd like to see those defending "river to the sea" as if it means nothing more than "one democratic state" be more forthright in acknowledging what it really means. To both proponents and critics.
2/ Both "river to sea" and "one democratic state" are slogans. The former is chanted more often by people who shake their fist, and latter by those who seek a more refined look, but both describe the same broader idea: Disempowering a historically oppressed people, the Jews.
3/ How is it that "one democratic state" amounts to disempowerment? It sounds so nice!
Because democracy isn't the end being demanded. When you understand that "one democratic state" is a euphemism for "one democratic Jewish-minority state" is the demand, the debate more sense.
1/ Peter, who now embraces the "river/sea/free" rhyme, KNOWS it's tied to, dependent on, and entirely about Palestinians being a majority in the new state he demands.
It's a rhyme about making Jews a minority in a Palestinian state. Period.
2/ And of course, he knows that in the current existent state, Arabs and Jews do have the same rights under the same laws. He knows that by pretending the West Bank and Israel are one state, he can mislead the average reader.
3/ No. Jews don't like the slogan because, whether out of the mouth of Hamas or Tlaib, it means ending Israel, and ending it because a Jewish majority country is unacceptable to them.
Q: In what world does saying "kill the Jews wherever you find them" make you "against Zionism"… and demanding the ethnic cleansing of Jews in a "Palestine from the river to the sea" amount to a "dispute over land and maritime borders"?
1/ A thread on *framing* in NY Times coverage of Israel.
Let's look at yesterday's story on the UAE deal and Arab Israelis, to see how the words "many," "some," etc are funny — capable of rerouting a story into a narrow, preferred frame.
Here's the top of the story:
2/ It's already clear from the hed and dek how the piece is meant to come across.
We have at its heart a story about how Israel's growing relationship with the Arab opens opportunities for Israeli Arabs. But it's clearly framed as, mostly, a story about the "Palestinian cause."
3/ Note that subhead again: "MANY say they are loath to undercut the Palestinian cause."
But when you get to the actual story, "many" quickly becomes "SOME." Here's paragraph 2:
1) In line with its recently stated policy, @TwitterSafety did at least, in this case, delete the tweet mentioned below. It had said supporters of Israel deserve to die.
1/ I have to say, "don't worry so much about celebrities with millions of followers spewing and spreading rank antisemitism, because white nationalists elsewhere are a big problem" — as if we didn't know that — strikes me as a bad take.
2/ Identity politics at its worst treats certain antisemitism as a problem on its face and more as an inconvenient distraction from another cause, and sometimes sympathizes more with those antisemites than with their victims.
3/ Here's the thing: we have enough room in our minds to fear and oppose antisemitism from Farrakhan supporters with giant megaphones AND antisemitism from white supremacists, and maybe even hold other unrelated thoughts about politics, the environment, etc, all at the same time.