Analysis : Who is anti-Semitic?

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http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2007/12/analysis_who_is.php

  Analysis : Who is anti-Semitic?

  Sunday, 2 December, 2007 @ 1:59 AM

  By: Yael Lotan

  It's become almost impossible to say anything about Jews, even as a 
mild joke. An African-American actress jokes about a photo showing 
her with a big nose ("That's my Jewish cousin"), and all hell breaks 
loose. She apologizes for the "antisemitic" remark and eats humble 
pie.

  What if a Jewish actress quipped about a photo showing her looking 
bronzed, that it was her "African-American cousin", would she have 
had to to apologize? - Unlikely,  nor should she have. But the 
general public has been warned never to refer to Jews at all, except 
in a flattering way. It goes much further than that, of course. The 
mildest criticism of Israel provokes a vicious response. Any other 
country may be criticized and some more than most - compare how 
events in Georgia and Venezuela are reported in the mainstream 
Western press - but Israel must never be described as anything other 
than a decent, brave, clever, generous little democracy, constantly 
threatened with annihilation by its bloodthirsty Muslim Arab 
neighbors.

  In many countries it is illegal to deny the Holocaust, and in some 
countries you can go to jail for doing so. On the other hand, it's 
all right to deny the catastrophe that the State of Israel has 
wreaked in the Middle East. It is legal to persecute and hound 
critics of Israel and the Zionist lobby, or anyone who presumes to 
mention the suffering of the Palestinians. And of course it's open 
season on Islam - unlike any other religion, you are free to vilify 
it in the ugliest terms.

  But it is not antisemitism to criticize Israel. It is not 
"self-hate" to do so if you're a Jew. On the contrary - blind support 
for Israel equals anti-Arabism, anti-Islam, racism pure and simple. 
Those who blindly support Zionism, and its political creation Israel, 
are guilty of racism which is really anti-Semitic - the Arab people 
are as Semitic as the Jews and far more numerous.

  How else is it possible to justify what is actually going on in the 
Middle East? - A nation of five or six million dominating five to six 
million others, expropriating their lands and homes, denying them all 
rights - human, civil or national - subjecting them to constant 
violence, killing them with impunity, holding thousands of them in 
prison without trial; intimidating the neighboring countries with 
overflights and periodic military attacks; building up an immense 
arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, yet forcibly preventing any 
other state in the region from even beginning to approach the 
possibility of developing them; running a state as a quasi-theocracy 
- religion being the one qualifier for citizenship and full civil 
rights, and rabbis holding parliamentary and government positions - 
while decrying the neighboring Muslim states as "fundamentalist".

  I, an Israeli born and bred (born, I should add, in Palestine well 
before the establishment of the State of Israel, to which my parents 
devoted their lives), refuse to be tagged as a "self-hating Jew", 
refuse to accept the sacrosanct status of the people I was born into 
and the government which claims to represent me. I cannot close my 
eyes to the evils of Zionist colonialism, the non-democratic 
practices of the Israeli social system, which gives full rights to 
some citizens and denies them to others on an "ethnic"/religious 
basis, the role it plays in destabilizing the region and keeping it 
always on the verge of war - which it always wins, being militarily 
far stronger than all its neighbors combined.

  I refuse to endorse the use of the Holocaust as a propaganda weapon 
by a regime that has exploited it in the form of reparations (from 
post-war Germany) and guilt-offerings from the Allied governments - 
yet has never allowed Holocaust survivors to hold senior positions in 
its government and marginalized them socially.

  It should be perfectly legitimate to criticize Israel. Giving it 
uncritical, unqualified support in all its actions, its violations of 
dozens of UN Security Council resolutions, its policy of 
assassination and destruction - that is a racist position, a position 
that says "Arabs don't count, Arabs have no rights, Arabs are vermin 
and whatever is done to them - in Palestine, Syria, Iraq or Lebanon - 
is legitimate. And Islam is the same as Fascism."

  Now that is real anti-Semitism.

  Sources: hagada.org