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"I’m saying she hasn’t always been sufficiently disciplined in her
utterances"

Maybe you should whip her then.

Her "utterance" is fine unless someone like you is looking for a way to
purposefully distort it and reduce it to an ethnic stereotype. Talking
about government greed should not be seen as even remotely controversial,
let alone for a government that has takes in billions each year to steal
land.

- Amith

On Mon, Feb 9, 2015 at 12:29 AM, MM <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 08 Feb 2015, at 9:54 PM, A.R. G <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> "AW: I am a big supporter of BDS. I frankly think that it is the best,
> absolutely the best way, because the Israeli government and people really
> love commerce and making money and so anything that interferes with that
> will get their attention at least."
>
> It is problematic that "leftists" find this problematic. Any time Israel's
> greed and usurpation of resources is rightfully condemned it is immediately
> reduced to some kind of anti-Semitic canard.
>
> "The Israel Lobby is too powerful" -- this is the canard about Jews
> controlling the world!
> "The US media is biased toward Israel and employs Zionist lobbyists" --
> this is the canard about Jews controlling the media!
> "American financial establishments send billions to Israel in investment"
> -- this is the canard about Jews controlling the banks!
> "Jews in the United States are extroardinarily privileged and
> over-represented in all elite institutions" -- this is the canard about
> Jews controlling America!
> "Israel murdered over 500 children last summer" -- this is a blood libel
> against the Jews!
>
> Virtually every condemnation of Israel, the American Jewish community,
> Zionism, its lobby, etc can easily be reduced to some sort of chauvinistic
> anti-Jewish remark. Stop the witch-hunt. Alice said nothing wrong.
>
>
> Disagree. There is an obvious and important difference between saying,
> "the Israeli government and people really love commerce and making money”
> and saying, “as with any other country or people, the financial costs
> associated with BDS are more likely to have an impact than mere moral
> condemnation”.
>
> Each of your other examples is, in principle, subject to empirical
> verification; the fact that Zionist trolls would try to spin them is
> irrelevant. Walker’s remarks invoke an ethnic stereotype by suggesting that
> an essentially universal but distasteful human characteristic somehow
> applies uniquely to “the Israeli government and people”. If she’d spoken
> about resource grabs, that would be something else entirely; it invites
> specifics, and Israel clearly deserves aggressive condemnation in that
> regard. But it doesn’t fit the argument she was trying to make, so she fell
> back on an anti-Jewish trope that lurks in the nether regions of the minds
> of most of us, because we were socialised into it before we knew enough to
> resist. It was a lob-ball to the Zionist trolls, and we can’t afford to
> give them easy hits.
>
> I’m not suggesting Walker is a willful anti-Semite; I’m saying she hasn’t
> always been sufficiently disciplined in her utterances. It isn’t fair that
> we need to be, but it is the reality.
>
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