Zionuts

[Loki]

So that's what was going wrong...

[Flixy]

The funny thing is, does anyone think blood would actually work for making bread dough? I mean, it's got plenty of water but also plenty of other stuff in it. Also, the matzah laced with oxidized iron would almost certainly make the matzah red instead of eerily white.

Trust me, I tried when I lived in Gaza.

That's what I thought, too. Of all the things you can make with blood, matzah seems the weirdest thing to claim it's in. Maybe it tastes less bad with it, though.

If you're interested in recipes, I know one for a pig's blood chocolate mousse, surely that world with baby blood as well it's from a heavy metal cook book

[Aimless]

Though I am shocked--shocked!--to learn that the world's most moral and civilised state is held to a higher standard than uncivilised bloodthirsty Arabs and Flixy's racist great-grandparents, I don't think it's all that unsurprising. Sure, everyone hates the Jews, but, in addition to that, there's the fact that Israel's occupation and many/most of its actions have come to be viewed as being illegitimate to begin with, and many of its subsequent actions are therefore more easily cast as increasingly illegitimate aggression.

It's kinda like what you saw with the Trayvon Martin case. Sure, Z-dog may have been acting in self-defense when he killed that thug, but perhaps he shouldn't have been following him in the first place. When you cast it like that--you shouldn't have been there to begin with, you started it, etc--then it's not difficult to see why the narrative may play out a certain way and I can't imagine there have been a shortage of such unpopular actions.

If you want a less biased treatment from the non-Arab media then I don't think complaining about Jew-hate is the way to go about it. Striving to be as far above reproach as possible is a good start, and not shooting yourselves in the foot with ill-advised and poorly timed decisions like snatching up more land right after another war may be helpful, but ultimately your success will rest on your ability to persuade the world to view those actions that are related to the occupation as being legitimate. I suspect you will never accomplish that, because the world hates the Jews.

[Loki]

What have Ahmadis, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, and freemasons done to (Sunni) Muslims to justify being hated?

[Aimless]

What? You're going to have to spell that out for me a little more clearly because I can't tell what you're trying to get at

[Loki]

The idea that the only reason that Jews are viewed negatively in the Middle East is because of Israel's action has no validity; all you have to do is look at how Middle Eastern minority groups who aren't Jews are treated (by the media, the public, and their governments).

And sure, the nice Europeans would view Israel in a more positive light if Israelis were being exterminated. Not really a good reason to change one's foreign policy though.

[Aimless]

The idea that the only reason that Jews are viewed negatively in the Middle East is because of Israel's action has no validity; all you have to do is look at how Middle Eastern minority groups who aren't Jews are treated (by the media, the public, and their governments).

And sure, the nice Europeans would view Israel in a more positive light if Israelis were being exterminated. Not really a good reason to change one's foreign policy though.

I was talking about media coverage and opinion globally, not just in the ME. I also specifically said "non-Arab media". The rest of your post is what they call a "false dilemma" but I expect you'll stick to your guns on that one

[wiggin]

The idea that the only reason that Jews are viewed negatively in the Middle East is because of Israel's action has no validity; all you have to do is look at how Middle Eastern minority groups who aren't Jews are treated (by the media, the public, and their governments).

And sure, the nice Europeans would view Israel in a more positive light if Israelis were being exterminated. Not really a good reason to change one's foreign policy though.

Loki, an even simpler argument is that so much of the vitriol (including blood libels and attacks against museums in Brussels, though more tame versions abound more broadly) is directed at Jews, not at Israel or Israelis. That is what makes it very hard to argue that this systematic rhetoric is somehow motivated by Israel's actions. Sure, Israel's actions are a good excuse - and there's plenty of valid criticism to level at Israel's past and current actions. But far too much of the attention and vitriol directed at Israel and Jews in general is motivated by antisemitism, not principled objection to Israeli policies. You don't need to go to openly racist Arab sources to find it, either.

[Dreadnaught]

Though I am shocked--shocked!--to learn that the world's most moral and civilised state is held to a higher standard than uncivilised bloodthirsty Arabs and Flixy's racist great-grandparents, I don't think it's all that unsurprising. Sure, everyone hates the Jews, but, in addition to that, there's the fact that Israel's occupation and many/most of its actions have come to be viewed as being illegitimate to begin with, and many of its subsequent actions are therefore more easily cast as increasingly illegitimate aggression.

It's kinda like what you saw with the Trayvon Martin case. Sure, Z-dog may have been acting in self-defense when he killed that thug, but perhaps he shouldn't have been following him in the first place. When you cast it like that--you shouldn't have been there to begin with, you started it, etc--then it's not difficult to see why the narrative may play out a certain way and I can't imagine there have been a shortage of such unpopular actions.

If you want a less biased treatment from the non-Arab media then I don't think complaining about Jew-hate is the way to go about it. Striving to be as far above reproach as possible is a good start, and not shooting yourselves in the foot with ill-advised and poorly timed decisions like snatching up more land right after another war may be helpful, but ultimately your success will rest on your ability to persuade the world to view those actions that are related to the occupation as being legitimate. I suspect you will never accomplish that, because the world hates the Jews.

I agree with you. But. I think a big issue here is about how actions/institutions/people not related to the occupation are viewed.

And the general concern with how Jews are always seen as avatars of dangerous global movements, particularly by European intellectual classes. For the European anti-Bolsheviks, Jews were seen as Bolsheviks. Among anti-Bolsheviks, Jews were seen as heralds of bourgeois capitalism. Among European nationalists, Jews were seen as stateless interlopers. And now, in an age of European intellectual pique at colonialism and/or nationalism, Jews are seen as "vestiges" of racist tribalism.

[Nessus]

I agree with you. But. I think a big issue here is about how actions/institutions/people not related to the occupation are viewed.

And the general concern with how Jews are always seen as avatars of dangerous global movements, particularly by European intellectual classes. For the European anti-Bolsheviks, Jews were seen as Bolsheviks. Among anti-Bolsheviks, Jews were seen as heralds of bourgeois capitalism. Among European nationalists, Jews were seen as stateless interlopers. And now, in an age of European intellectual pique at colonialism and/or nationalism, Jews are seen as "vestiges" of racist tribalism.

I think you've got one too many "anti-" in there, and what does all this mean überhaupt? The futurists, for instance, didn't really have any defined stance on the Jews, anti-Semitism didn't really become a "thing" within Bolshevism (an Asiatic ideology, by the by, not European) until Stalin went really kooky, etc.

[Dreadnaught]

That second "anti-Bolsheviks" was supposed to say just Bolsheviks. Though I probably should have just used Communists.

[Dreadnaught]

FYI, this is Amira Hass, who is beyond sympathetic to Palestinian violence.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.618007

When a Haaretz journalist was asked to leave a Palestinian university
An isolated incident snowballed into a wide debate whether Birzeit students' right to a safe space where Israelis are not allowed should apply to leftists, as well.
By Amira Hass | Sep. 28, 2014 | 8:44 AM

The German Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and The Center for Development Studies (CDS) at Birzeit University organized a conference entitled, "Alternatives to Neo-Liberal Development in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – Critical Perspectives."

During the first presentation on Tuesday, two lecturers from the CDS approached me within ten minutes of each other, asking me to step outside, saying that they needed to talk to me. I asked them to wait until the break, but after they asked me a third time, I stepped out of the conference hall. "Am I not allowed to be here?" I asked, half-kidding, but one of the lecturers answered that there was a problem.

When I registered at the entrance of the conference I wrote next to my name the institution I belong to, Haaretz. For the past two decades, the lecturer said, there has been a law at Birzeit stipulating that Israelis (Jewish Israelis, that is) are not allowed on the university grounds. The students manning the conference registration desk saw that I had written "Haaretz," realized I was an Israeli, and ran to tell the university authorities. The security department in turn went to the conference organizers, the lecturer said. She and her colleagues were afraid, she told me, that students would break into the conference hall in protest over my presence.

From where we were standing in the entrance hall, I didn't see a throng of students approaching in order to oust me, the representative of the 'Zionist entity.' But when friends and acquaintances (including lecturers) telephoned afterward to find out what had happened, I then understood that the rumor going around was that students had attacked me. And so, for the sake of truth, this is not what happened. What did happen was that two lecturers demanded that I leave. So I left.

One of the lecturers explained that it is important for students to have a safe space where (Jewish) Israelis are not entitled to enter; that while the law is problematic, this was not the time or place to discuss amending it; and that, just as she could ask to treat me differently as an exception to the rule, another lecturer might ask for the same preferential treatment for Yossi Beilin, Israel's former justice minister who is known as one of the architects of both the Oslo Accords and Geneva Initiative and the initiator of the Taglit Zionist project. She also told me that Professor Ilan Pappe, author of the book 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,' among others, had been invited to deliver a lecture at Birzeit, but owing to the law, gave the talk off campus. The other lecturer told me that if I didn't write "Haaretz" in the registration form, I would have been able to stay. Still, another faculty member who I have known for 40 years walked past and said: "This is for your own protection [from the students]." And I was at that moment reminded of the image that Israelis commonly have of Palestinians: irrational hotheads. A Palestinian citizen of Israel who came to the conference left out of disgust, in her words, at my ouster.

In the meantime, Katja Hermann, director of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation's Regional Office in the Occupied Territories, was told about the complication. Despite her appreciation of the importance of preserving a safe space for Palestinian students, much like feminists have created women-only spaces, she failed to understand why it is impossible to explain to protesting students ("who I don't even see," she noted) that this puritanism misses the mark. I am regularly invited to events organized by "Rosa," as the foundation is fondly nicknamed. The shocked Hermann then said that had she known about the law at Birzeit, and the decision to exclude me from the conference's audience, she wouldn't have agreed to hold the event within the university walls.

In the past twenty years, I have entered Birzeit University dozens of times, and have been an audience member at various academic conferences there. I have also interviewed faculty members both on and off campus. A year ago, an economics lecturer refused an interview, telling me, "It's not personal. But you know what the rules are." I didn't know there was a rule against being interviewed by Haaretz.

It is well known that the university doesn't employ Israeli Jews as academic staff, even from anti-Zionist left-wing circles. In 1998, my application to an Arabic course for foreigners was rejected. (A sarcastic friend, Iyad from Gaza, said back then: "With your Gazan accent, how can they accept you?") But I was never told that there was a university law against my very presence, as an Israeli Jew, on Birzeit's campus. The claim that the law applies to me because I am representing an Israeli institution is a shaky one: Palestinian citizens of Israel who teach at Israeli universities are not subject to the same policy. If I had known about the existence of such a law, I wouldn't have come to the conference. I have other places to invest my subversive energies.

I am writing about this incident precisely because I did not take it personally. I do not take personally the fact that some faculty members were hiding behind hypothesized angry students and a law that many others seem to be unaware of. In my opinion, it would have been more dignified to tell me explicitly: We do not differentiate between those who support the occupation and those who are against it, between those who report on policies to forcibly evict the Bedouin or those who carry out that policy; for us, there is only one place for every Israeli Jew - outside.

At the final session of the conference on Wednesday, a lecturer from another department asked to discuss the fact that I had been kicked out, and the issue of banning left-wing Israeli Jews in general. The lecturer and others, who weren't present at the time of the incident, were shocked and expressed their protest, I was told. When it was announced that I was asked to leave, "for my own protection," a number of people left the hall in anger. Meanwhile, a storm erupted on Facebook. Acquaintances have since called me to apologize. The owner of my local grocery store apologized "in the name of the Palestinian people."

Meanwhile, the university published a statement Saturday saying: "The administration has nothing against the presence of the journalist Hass. The university as a national institution differentiates between friends and enemies of the Palestinian people… and works with every person or institution that is against the occupation."

I understand the emotional need of Palestinians to create a safe space that is off limits to citizens of the state that denies them their rights and has been robbing them of their land. As a leftist, however, I question the anti-colonialist logic of boycotting left-wing Israeli Jewish activists. In any case, such leftists do not seek kosher certificates while opposing the occupation and striving to put an end to the Jewish regime of privileges.

[GGT]

Hoped there might be some posts regarding Netanyahu's UN speech....

[wiggin]

Doesn't fit the definition of Zionuts. This does, however:

http://www.timesofisrael.com/controv...ious-eu-award/


Of course, at least in this case the guys in the EP realized it was Zionuttery and retracted:

http://www.guengl.eu/news/article/gu...sakharov-prize


Apparently people being nominated for an award for combating intolerance shouldn't call for the wholesale murder of Israelis. Perhaps they should have vetted their candidate before putting him up, but that's Zionuts for you! You can be a cause celebre on the left and still be a raging antisemite.

[Flixy]

Is this zionutty enough?

http://www.timesofisrael.com/fugitiv...utch-campsite/

http://www.nltimes.nl/2014/10/09/sex...dam-residents/

Dutch news sources add complaints about begging, trash everywhere, kids can't use the playground anymore, bushes being used as toilet, and young kids who call passerby nazis for fun.

[wiggin]

I think it's just nutty.

[Dreadnaught]

Ultra-orthodox people on sukkot always surprise people...

[wiggin]

Ultra-orthodox people on sukkot always surprise people...

Yeah, but this is far beyond the usual nuttiness; it has a lot more to do with the cult leader and it being, well, a cult.

In an amusing side note, there was a funny picture in the paper on sukkot a few years back showing Jared Kushner holding a lulav while walking next to Ivanka Trump on sukkot. They identified what he was carrying as 'flowers'.

Ah, here it is: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz...#ixzz1b0G20VM5

[Dreadnaught]

JEWS DID CULTS

[wiggin]

http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/.premi...2588A4CCD6F112

I think this is a bridge too far for haaretz...

[Flixy]

http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-...or-10-plagues/

Not too nee, hope it hasn't been posted yet. I'm guessing it's satire, but you never know!

[wiggin]

http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-...or-10-plagues/

Not too nee, hope it hasn't been posted yet. I'm guessing it's satire, but you never know!

There's an old joke in this vein - after Egypt asks for compensation from the plagues, Israel responds with a bill for seceral centuries of slave labor.

[Dreadnaught]

http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/.premi...2588A4CCD6F112

I think this is a bridge too far for haaretz...

Wowsa...

[wiggin]

This is a bit different; I thought about posting some of the ridiculousness in the media coverage of the Har Nof synagogue attack last week (including some amusing photoshopping of CNN's other coverage), but it wasn't really Zionuts, just more of the same pervasive bias in some media outlets. The Telegraph, however, carried a really thoughtful dissection of the way people react to and justify Palestinian terror. I think this is a really critical point that really nails it - denying Palestinians moral agency infantilizes them and makes a future settlement far less likely. It's part of a post-colonial mindset in which the aggrieved party are always victims, where their actions are predetermined by the stronger party, and they lack any form of agency.

This is something that has really bothered me about the Economist's coverage of the tensions in Jerusalem lately. I have had two issues: first, they champion the status quo, where any non-Muslims are forbidden by statute from praying on the Temple Mount. This is a deeply illiberal idea at odds with the Economist's self-professed ethos, but they loudly declaim against those Israelis who would like to change those rules. Then the Economist falls into the same trap of denying Palestinians agency, where they argue that rhetoric by private individuals (notably and vocally NOT government policy) trying to allow greater freedom of worship on the Temple Mount is the cause of the deaths of some dozen Israelis at the hands of Palestinian murderers. Yes, rhetoric and incitement matter - but fundamentally those who perpetrate violent acts are responsible for themselves.

I personally support the rules restricting freedom of religion on the Temple Mount, if only because they're an unnecessary distraction and would make Israel look awful for no good policy reason - but I recognize that opinion is deeply problematic from a perspective of liberal democracy. When Shlomo Goren pressed to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock in 1967, IDF military authorities were entirely correct in threatening to imprison him if he even suggested the idea again. And I also think Israel's choice to hand day-to-day control (if not sovereignty) of the Mount to the Waqf was wise and widely underappreciated - especially given the subsequent destruction of priceless archaeological artifacts by the Waqf in recent years. Yet this does not mean that the decision to restrict prayer to Muslims only was in any way liberal or just, even if it was probably smart. To lambast people rightly protesting the unjust policy - without a shred of violence - and label it as the root cause of brutal murders - is beyond the pale and makes the Palestinian people into passive creatures incapable of independent thought or action.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...al-agents.html

[Loki]

I know I mentioned this before, but the Economist stopped being liberal years ago. As best as I can tell, it's written by and represents the views of upper-class Brits who just graduated from a masters program in Econ or IR. In that way, it's somewhat well-informed, doesn't entirely push left-wing issues, but has all but lost its liberal mission. You could see it in the Economics section; you could see it in the Economist's coverage of IR; and you could certainly see it in the magazine's coverage of elections.

[Dreadnaught]

[Hazir]

The banner is somewhat confusing. Is Ferguson occupied? If yes, by whom? And will boycotting Israel really end racism in the USA?

[Flixy]

Come on, it's obvious Ferguson wants to become an independent state! And boycotting Israel will end racism not just in the USA but everywhere, bring world peace, end starvation and cure Ebola.

[Flixy]

http://nypost.com/2015/01/18/israeli...tional-uproar/

"Lebanon, which forbids its citizens from fraternizing with Israelis "

[wiggin]

This isn't news, Flixy - almost all of the Muslim/Arab world has similar restrictions.