Israel is run in some civil areas by religious authorities but its people are as secular probably as comparable to the US. Some areas are completely secular and others are more comparable to the South here.

Also the Muslim ‘religious’ states, and that includes even the ones that are supposedly ‘secular’ (ahem) like Egypt, are highly descriminatory and oppressive to the Christian minorities for example, the Coopts.

Also, as far as I know the Kurds nor Armenians also don’t ‘have a place to call home’.

The region hates not just the nation but all of its Jewish people, for several reasons.

They hate the nation, the “zionists” and Jews for every reason they can imagine and make up. Its a religion and ironically included in their religious learning, to hate the Jews, the Jews are responsible for every ill in the Middle East, they are “thiefs” and manipulators pulling the strings on everything, and its not just the dictators that use this meme and diatribe the people and papers utilize it too, which enables the leaders to continue using it. The other day MEMRI had a notice that a man admitted to blowing up the Cole and the MEMRI note stated that now “once and for all” the Arab/Muslim world could no longer insinuate that Mossad actually blew up the boat to blame the Arab/Muslim world… That’s the state of progress there, they “may”?? now admit that it was actually Arab/Muslims that blew up the Cole?

ARE YOU FIN KIDDING ME?

That’s the state of the sickness there…. Its basis in fiction and pure sickness is most of it, this pathetic attempt to insinuate by leftists and State Dept. that its basis is in reality on the ground that Israel can change is NUTS…. If Israel resolved most of the conflict the propaganda hatred would continue because the machinery/beast is there and is huge and would continue to need to be fed….

In my opinion State believes that although Israel is not the cause even minorly so for this, they believe they can quell or lessen this madness even so, by ‘taking Israel out of the equation for the most part’.

However, that’s rediculous because the Arab world, as long as Israel exists, will NEVER let Israel be and taken ‘out of the equation’.

To begin with, there is no such thing as a semite. There is a family of languages, including Hebrew and Arabic (as well as ancient Ugaritic and Akkadian if I recall correctly) , that are referred to as “semitic”. Though Jews and Arabs happen to be blood/genetic relatives, that isn’t the general rule for all nationalities that speak semitic languages.

The term anti-semtism was, in fact, created by a Jew hater name Wilhelm Marr, a 19th century German politician. Marr founded a political party based on denying Jews civil rights but recognized the public relations problem caused by called the party “The Jew Hater’s Party”, so he coined the term “anti-semitism” to describe their ideology.

Until Arabs and their sympathizers started appropriating the term, anti-semitism exclusively meant an anti-Jewish attitude.

I agree that hatred has no logic… or more accurately, it has a logic of its own. But it does use rationalization, and that is what I see. Or more often, the simple formulation you mentioned: Israel is our friend, we are evil – is probably the most accurate for many anti-Israeli leftists – even Jewish leftists.

Your construction of a hatred stew is in itself quite insightful. It explains a lot of Bush haters.

“Now maybe the rhinos and elephants will have a chance.” You consider that extreme? Practically every other person in Boulder believes passionately that wiping out mankind through some sort of plague would be a Good Thing. They don’t seem to be lining up to lead the way though….

I think jerry is quite right in that much of the the Jewish left consists of “me-too socialists” who are looking for some sort of social acceptance in a largely Christian society. Socialism is, after all, a secular Christianity. I believe it is this phenonmenon which motivated so many Eastern European Jews to become Communists in the early days. It’s not self-hatred but it’s definitely short-sightedly self-destructive.

John Moore–I think you’re ascribing a little too much rationality to hatred. Hatred tends to be like a forest fire in a drought stricken land which consumes all in front of it, whatever its origins. These people may start out hating Israel but, as the hatred builds, the nearest JCC becomes an ever more satisfying target.

Knucklehead–”The Left is today’s KKK.” Right on! That’s what Roger keeps trying to say. “Left in form but right in substance.” (But I prefer Roger’s model of the tetrahedron to describe today’s political situation. “Left” and “right” just don’t begin to describe it for me.)

Isn’t it interesting and strange how a lot of the Bush hatred is an unholy mixture of hatred of Southerners combined with anti-Semitism (“damned neocons”), all cooked up together into one fresh new stew for the consumption of a whole new generation of bigots? If only it could somehow be proven that Karl Rove is Jewish….

I would argue that the Marxist meme is very strong and leftists following it have shown themselves easily capable of ignoring all sorts of contradictory information in other areas. Read what the anti-war people were saying in the Vietnam era. I have certainly seen the most horrible behavior justified by this (including Palestinian suicide bombers). Some people I have encountered who support some of the really evil Palestinian tactics are not, in my opinion, motivated by anti-Semitism. Rather, they are morally obtuse, validating those killings of civilians with various complex rationalizations. These people disliked Israel because:

1) It was an ally of the US, and they hate Bush.

2) Israel “oppresses” Palestinians and stole their land.

The chilling fact is that those reasons were sufficient for them to justify the killing of civilians – especially the “revolutionary action” of the bombings.

Those reasons seem to be all it takes – no need to hate Jews… just Israelis. Most of these people, by the way, are European.

Knucklehead, you provide an interesting challenge. The issue would be to discern policies or actions where anti-Semitism isn’t the cause. Unfortunately, it is easy to infer anti-Semitic motives for lots of behavior, so the challenge is almost self-verifying.

lindanen

For anti-Zionists, the only people in the world for whom having their own state is illegitimate is Jewish people. Come on.

That still doesn’t require anti-Semitism. The reason is that Israel was created on somemone else’s land (or that’s how many anti-Zionists look at it). There is another group without its own land, by the way: gypsies.

In other words, it is the historical accident of the diaspora that made Jews a landless group, and it was the League of Nations and later UN that changed that. Now, in reality Jews have always been in Israel, and many moved there before WW-II. But in a way, Israel is seen by Europe as payoff for the debt incurred by the holocaust. Certainly many Jews feel similarly – avoid another holocaust by having a Jewish nation.

We have many cases in the world where old conflicts over land still exist. Israel/Palestine goes back to AD 70. Northern Ireland is another old one – where it is two cultures (not religions) which conflict over land theft (by my ancestors). This sort of thing is true all over the world.

Israel is special in a few ways:

1) It is an officially religious state. But so are a bunch of Muslim states.

2) It’s people have no other place which is combined with their identity. We have lots of Jews in the US (more than Israel, I think), but the US is not a Jewish place (although it is a very safe place for Jews). As far as I know, Gypsies have no place to call home at all.

3) It is extremely powerful and economically successful by the standards of the region.

4) The region hates not just the nation but all of its Jewish people, for several reasons.

EXCELLENT! Bigotry is bigotry and nonsense about who one’s “friends” are is just that, nosense.

One of Knucklehead’s Theorems, BTW, is that the Left is little more than today’s KKK. Idiots and Bigots! The whole lot of them. And dangerous bigots to boot. If they’d go away and isolate themselves in Moonbat Compounds in Montana or Idaho or wherever, they would not be a concern. But they are, instead, everywhere and evangelize their bigotries relentlessly. I listened to a moonbat just this AM who thinks he’s the most caring person in the world. What I heard was a non-stop, shallow diatribe about the people he hates.

It is possible, in a theoretic sense, to be anti-Israel (ostensibly anti-zionist) without being anti-semitic (anti-Jew).

The problem is connecting this theoretical possibility to some real-world example. Unfortunately the painful reality is that anti-Israel is indistinguishable from anti-semitism.