Arrest Israel's New Defence Attache Eden Attias as a Gaza War Criminal

Dostoyevsky wrote:

alan smithee wrote:

Dostoyevsky wrote:

alan smithee wrote:

Zionism is not exclusively related with Judaism...Far from it.

I think those who believe the adding of the word 'Dirty' to the word 'Zionist' are just trying to put words in other people's mouths and babble has a nasty habit of smearing those with libelous labels when they disagree with a comment.

The PC train has left the rails.

why not just end this thread drift by admitting that adding the adjective dirty doesn't add anything useful to the conversation except to remind people of the history of using that adjective to describe people.  It's not necessary and a total distraction from the real issues  - land theft, unlawful imprisonment, murder.    

 

Thank you for proving my point.

You made a point ?  What was it exactly ?

You tried to finish my statement..You're confrontational...Conversation is over.

alan smithee wrote:

alan smithee wrote:

Dostoyevsky wrote:

alan smithee wrote:

Dostoyevsky wrote:

alan smithee wrote:

Zionism is not exclusively related with Judaism...Far from it.

I think those who believe the adding of the word 'Dirty' to the word 'Zionist' are just trying to put words in other people's mouths and babble has a nasty habit of smearing those with libelous labels when they disagree with a comment.

The PC train has left the rails.

why not just end this thread drift by admitting that adding the adjective dirty doesn't add anything useful to the conversation except to remind people of the history of using that adjective to describe people.  It's not necessary and a total distraction from the real issues  - land theft, unlawful imprisonment, murder.    

 

Thank you for proving my point.

You made a point ?  What was it exactly ?

You tried to finish my statement..You're confrontational... I don't find 'dirty zionist' offensive at all...Conversation is over.

OK it's over. Sorry if you felt I was rude, I really didn't understand your point.  My point was not to say the phrase was offensive to me personally but that it added nothing except to antagonize Babble allies.

Dostoyevsky wrote:

My point was not to say the phrase was offensive to me personally but that it added nothing except to antagonize Babble allies.

I find your posts in this thread add nothing to the conversation and antagonize me and perhaps others.

So using the same criterion, should I be able to demand that a moderator delete your posts?

I didn't think so.

Well, if you want to be effective on this issue, you NEED to get past it, because fighting for the right to use the term "Dirty Zionist" isn't worth your time OR the time of any other anti-Zionist. 

The problem with that phrase is that it, even if that isn't the intent of the person using it, "Dirty Zionist" sounds way too much like "Dirty Jew".  I really didn't want to say that directly in the thread, but that's what this is about. 

And believing the two phrases sound alike that does NOT equate to believing that the terms "Zionist" and "Jewish" are interchangeable. It simply means calling on anti-Zionists not to sabotage themselves by using phraseology that their opponents can turn into a weapon against them.

Insisting on using the phrase "Dirty Zionist" gives Israel apologists an easy, way to discredit anti-Zionists.

It gives Jewish people who are moving towards an anti-Zionist position good cause to wonder if they should go there...if they shuold trust gentile anti-Zionists at all(and this is a crucial point,since getting Jewish people to embrace anti-Zionism means convincing them that they can, for once, trust gentiles, even progressive gentiles, to protect them in the crunch(as we didn't in the 1930's).

And it's not even as if the phrase itself carries any special rhetorical power.  Fighting for the right to say "dirty Zionist" is not revolutionary...it's really, at the root, a defense of revolutionary indiscipline and indulgence.

And as to your question, I wouldn't object to calling an scumbag a scumbag.  It's just that the use of "dirty" in this context that I and the other progressives have objected to.  Nothing we've said is any threat to the growth of anti-Zionism.

M. Spector wrote:

Catchfire wrote:

It was established in the other thread that many babblers consider the phrase "dirty Zionist" to be offensive. That's enough for me to change the thread title.

It's been established in this thread and elsewhere that many babblers [b]don't[/b] consider it offensive. What's offensive is the implication that Col. Attias doesn't belong on the [url=http://rabble.ca/babble/international-news-and-politics/arrest-israels-n... Cast Lead Dirty 200 list[/url] — that he is in fact a clean Zionist.

Babble has always been at best ambivalent towards anti-Zionism. Now it seems it just takes two or three self-appointed language police to get the moderators to censor condemnations of Zionism. And who benefits, objectively, from such censorship? We all know.

You can't have it both ways.  We get complaints about phrases that rankle.  We consider and respond.  Would you rather we ignore context?  Treat babble as some kind of tabula rasa that provides the freedom to crap upon each other?

You don't need to be Jewish, or Hebrew, to understand that "dirty Zionist" is equated with "dirty Jew".

How much does sensitivity cost? A pound of humility? An admission of bias?

There is no political loss if you choose to be sensitive to cultural and racial history.  It appalls me that such a phrase should be used with no acknowledgement to context.

The decontextualizing is all on your part.

It never occurred to me that "dirty Zionist war criminal" (to give the phrase its [b]proper context[/b]) was code for "dirty Jew war criminal" until someone here decided to superimpose on that phrase the wrong-headed and anti-semitic notion that Zionist = Jewish.

In addition, Zionist is an adjective in the impugned phrase, whereas Jew is a noun. So the imagined equivalence to the words "dirty Jew" is grammatically false, besides being wrong-headed and anti-semitic.

If the original phrase had been "dirty imperialist war criminal" (which is essentially the same thing) nobody would have any pretext to object. Why? for the simple reason that nobody equates "imperialist" to "Jewish". But apparently we're supposed to accept that its perfectly reasonable to equate "Zionist" with "Jewish". The moderators' decision serves to validate and reinforce that wrong-headed and anti-semitic notion.

Who is being protected by this censorship? Who benefits from the wrongful acknowledgment that Zionism = Jewish? Answer: Not the Jews, but the Zionists.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

To get back on the topic of why Attias should be arrested.

And so on.

Ken Burch wrote:

No it isn't.  I don't make any such equation. Anti-Zionism has nothing in common with anti-semtism.

Left anti-Zionism is a respectable position and I admire the convictions of those tho take it.

What I reject is the idea that absolute anti-Zionism(which I'm defining as settling for nothing short of calling for a unitary state)is the ONLY progressive position.

To make that equation is to say that people like Uri Avnery, Michael Lerner, and most of the Israeli human rights community are reactionaries.

It doesn't have to be absolute anti-Zionism or nothing.

Why insist on a position that will ALWAYS be opposed by the majority of the Israeli population and that will always permanently marginalize any Israeli that embraces it?  You do realize that it will be necessary to get the acquiescence of such people in resolution to the crisis for that resolution to work(just as it will be necessary to get the acquiescence of the majority of the Palestinians), right?

And no, I don't absolve the Israeli government of anything it's done to Palestinians.

I'd love to see this addressed to Derrick O'Grief.

Hahaha.

(on edit)just so that you know, NDPP, the post of mine that you just quoted was actually in response to a post from M. Spector.  It wasn't addressed to you at all.  My apologies if it sounded like that post was aimed at you...I should have found a way to specify that it wasn't.

It was never my intent to imply that you meant "dirty Jew" when you wrote "dirty Zionist"-only that the phraseology inadvertently sounded similar and that, without meaning to, you might be giving your opponents the means to attack and discredit what you are calling for. 

This is particularly important in the Israel/Palestine discussion, where apologists for Israel have become experts at using innocent, yet ambiguously worded, rhetoric from anti-Zionists to imply that anti-Zionists believe things that they DON'T believe. 

I was trying to say that you need to be careful not to give Israel apologists anything they can EASILY distort into the service of a false victimhood narrative, or to create doubts about the motivations of anti-Zionists among those that might otherwise be potential allies.

It's the idea of not giving your enemies the rope to hang you with, that's all.

I fully expect you to do the same if you ever feel that I have strayed into the area of objectionable or offensive rhetoric.

The whole concept of anti-oppression language is that intent isn't necessarily the point.  And because of that, all of us, when we speak on any issue, have to constantly be conscious of how our words can be read and interpreted.  Such consciousness is also just part of the discipline needed in any work for radical political change.  A number of years ago, I was involved in a far more lengthy exchange with another poster(now banned)who insisted on using the image of a swastika superimposed on a Star of David to make his points about the occupation.  Unlike that poster, you have responded thoughtfully to the points some of us have made and I respect the fact that you've been willing to examine all of this.

I TRULY don't believe you're an antisemite...all I was trying to do was to make sure that you didn't use terminology that would have the effect of self-sabotaging your objective. You are right to call for General Attias' arrest AND to hold Zionism as a project accountable for what he did.  Sorry if anything I posted in this exchange sounded like I was either opposing the call to arrest this butcher OR to let Zionism as an ideology avoid responsibility for what occured in Gaza and what continues to be done in the Territories.

And you're right...the others you mentioned are responsible for a huge amount of suffering and deserve whatever terms you might hurl at them.  No one here, I suspect, would have objected if you had just called Attias a "Zionist war criminal"-and calling him that would have been saying everything you actually meant to say. 

But you're right, it's time we let this exchange end.  Good night and be well.

http://rabble.ca/babble/rabble-reactions/input-thread-title-appropriateness-rabble-2

M.Spector, what progressive cause is being forwarded through your advocacy of the right to use the phrase "Dirty Zionist" on Babble? I'm listening.

I'm listening.

I must be slow because I still don't understand what progressive cause this is forwarding when some here have stated the phrase is a trigger for them.

This is fukkin hilarious. 

I'm not laughing.

This is a serious issue: Does "progressive" discourse exclude anything that offends? Caissa seems to think so.

As for me, I think if your progressive discourse offends no one, then you're not doing it right.

Dostoyevsky wrote:

serious question

What person or agency in Canada would be able to hold Eden Attias and/or arrest him for war crimes?

Any peace officer. In theory, at least, even a citizen's arrest would be legal.

M. Spector, your hectoring of Caissa and Rebecca West has to stop. And your mocking of "triggering" is despicable. Absolutely disgusting.

I don't see anything wrong with the cartoon. I stand to be corrected, however. But please send me a PM if you'd like to continue that discussion.

Clearly my attempts to channel this "dirty" conversation toward the thread in which it is directly addressed have failed, so I'll address it here, since even those who are worried that this conversation is "blunting" criticism of Zionism seem most interested in its perpetuation and flourishing.

First, I have no doubt that NDPP is in earnest in his description of using "dirty" at post 68. But every utterance has a listener, so the belief that you can just ben words to your desired meaning by will alone is a false one. Many babblers, including those with about as strong a stance against Zionism as can be found on babble, felt offended by the usage because it was too closely associated with a common anti-Semitic epithet. This association was easily understood by all, even if you disagreed with its validity in this case.

Indeed, NDPP's deliberate and pronounced non-discriminiatory usage of "dirty" with "Zionist" is itself political, since it performs a refusal of the wide-spread equation in the MSM of Judaism and Zionism. So the claim that the usage of the phrase is innocuous, or has no connection with Judaism, is demonstrably false.

No moderator has censured the usage of the phrase, or drawn up a list of nouns or adjectives "dirty" can be used in conjunction with. The main issue here is one of respecting a group of allies who have communicated unease, even offence, at a usage that the speaker did not see. It doesn't matter what the intent was, because communication isn't about intent; it's about practice. You can either respect the requests of your allies and friends on babble, or you cannot. But you can't continue to mock and hector and bully those who have asked for a discourse which includes and respects them.

M. Spector wrote:

I'm not laughing.

This is a serious issue: Does "progressive" discourse exclude anything that offends? Caissa seems to think so.

As for me, I think if your progressive discourse offends no one, then you're not doing it right.

 

Dostoyevsky wrote:

serious question

What person or agency in Canada would be able to hold Eden Attias and/or arrest him for war crimes?

Any peace officer. In theory, at least, even a citizen's arrest would be legal.

I guess I'm a bit suprised that you could take a non citizen into any police station in Canada and arrest them for international war crimes.

Those are all quite good points, Unionist.

Thanks for that patient explanation, Unionist. That's a fair point. I didn't get any private message, though. Or was that a joke?

I'll leave it to kropotkin to remove the cartoon if he wishes.

For the record, I never said it should be removed and still don't think it should. I just wasn't going to let it stand without commenting on it. Unionist did so more patiently and in more detail and I agree with him. The reason it's anti-Semitic is that the cartoonist made sure to emphasize the JEWISH features of the kid.

As to the question of NDPP's use of "dirty zionist"; I don't think that the combination of words on their own are necessarily anti-Semitic. And I don't judge people by a single action or inadvertent mistake. But this is a guy with a long history of linking to vicious anti-Semitic hate sites (such as those featuring Gilad Atmzon), a guy who after a right wing extremist committed an atrocity in Norway engaged in conspiracy theories that this was actually an Israeli plot and after Jewish schoolchidren were gunned down in the streets in Toulouse, France engaged in despicable conspiracy theorizing that THIS TOO was a Jewish plot. Taken as a whole, I think he has a weird creepy obsession with Jews and that the sum of his actions push him across the line into a category that I have no trouble recognizing as anti-Semitic.

Quote:

The cartoon properly portrays the Palestinian child, IMHO. But it portrays the Israeli child wearing a yarmulke and earlocks. Do you know of any Israeli Zionist war criminals and mass murderers that look like that? No, of course you don't. They look like Netanyahu and Peres and Barak and Ariel Sharon and all the others. We could add their allies and enablers: Bush, Harper, Blair, Obama... Secular, western, thugs. But the cartoonist wanted to make sure everyone knew that this kid is a JEW.

My ex father-in-law, a man who would go years without stepping foot in a synagogue, treated me like shit under his shoe because I wasn't Jewish (which caused a major rift between father and son and made family gatherings excrutiatingly tense). 

My then husband's grandfather, a deeply religious orthodox Russian Jew, was always kind to me.  He was a good man -- fair, open-minded and wanted nothing more than to see a just peace in the Middle East before he died.

It wasn't about religion.  My father-in-law was a domineering, racist (he referred to his stepson's girlfriend as a "kaffir" because she was from South America and had olive skin), controlling asshole. Had he been at all interested in politics he would've made an exemplary Zionist.

I don't have an opinion on whether the cartoon itself is anti-Semitic, but it was certainly an error on the cartoonist's part to equate religious orthodoxy with the kind of far right conservatism at the core of Zionism.

Sven wrote:

Rebecca West wrote:

I don't have an opinion on whether the cartoon itself is anti-Semitic, but it was certainly an error on the cartoonist's part to equate religious orthodoxy with the kind of far right conservatism at the core of Zionism.

But isn't anti-Semitic, almost be definition, "to equate religious orthodoxy with the kind of far right conservatism at the core of Zionism"?

I don't know.  Is it?

Rebecca West wrote:

I don't have an opinion on whether the cartoon itself is anti-Semitic, but it was certainly an error on the cartoonist's part to equate religious orthodoxy with the kind of far right conservatism at the core of Zionism.

The error was also to use a little kid as a stand-in for a government and for a state of millions of people. The message wasn't that Netanyahu or Sharon or Livni or Olmert are "murderers". It's that all Israelis are (the kid's father is un-named, just a generic Israeli and, apaprently, a murderer) (particularly Israelis with emphasized Jewish features?). Hell, even the TODDLERS are bloodthirsty killers. I will say, having been to Israel a few times, that I've never seen toddlers packing handguns.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

 However the settler movement in the occupied territories uses those religious symbols.  

And suicide bombers who murder Israelis as they sit in cafes or alQueda terrorists flying planes into buildings use Islamic religious symbols. And fanatics who bomb abortion clinics or gay bars use Christian symbols.

It doesn't mean that anyone with a cross, a crescent moon or a star of David around their neck (or a hijab or yarmulke on their head) is some sort of violent bloodthirsty extremist.