i have very mixed feelings about the middle east and i don't often discuss them, but the only thing i want to say in THIS thread about the middle east is that what is happening there is not an excuse for antisemitism. it just isn't.

oh and the planet's iq cannot jump up until the white house stops being the orange house.

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@genessa Agreed.

You would not shed a tear for all of the innocent people, so many children, who don't give a damn about political discourse or the delusion of hate-filled people, many of whom have crawled out from under their slimy rocks with the rise of the moron in the white house??

omg nani, you said it. you got it, you likely got it before my post anyway, and you said it. i wish more people got it (and said it)! thank you!

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@genessa It is not that hard to understand. We can talk about Israel another time. It is not connected to this. The white supremacists in this country are home grown terrorists and why is that hard to comprehend? People are just ignorant and this is what Trump wants. He wants us fighting amongst ourselves so we don't pay attention to what is happening. Peace my friend!

@GreatNani peace back atcha, my friend!

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so? did you actually understand the point of my post? or are you attempting to justify antisemitism by saying religion is bad?

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@genessa Love you - but religion is unfortunately a bad thing...

@Stig and what has that got to do with hating jews, even jews who do not follow a religion? and don't say you love me. that's really... ugh, don't say that. you don't even KNOW me.

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@genessa My friendliness and positive sentiment have been rejected. I will respect that and not repeat it....

@genessa Where I am it is the middle of the night and I've just completed my second bottle of wine -so don't take anything I write seriously...

@Stig i can dig that. no wine here, but it's morning, not a time of day i like much, and today makes four weeks i've been fairly ill, so i won't take it personally )

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@genessa I see you writing good posts. Wish you a good and speedy recovery........This you can take seriously

@Stig i shall do so and thank you )

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expressed to whom? the land was held by the british and two parcels were set aside, a huge one for arabs and a tiny one for jews. the tiny one, at the behest of the arabs, was cut up a little more to make the larger parcel for the arabs even larger. zionism means belief that israel should continue to exist. that is ALL it means. the guardian may say something else. it's wrong. it distorts history and even if it was right in its history, which it is not, being anti-zionist means saying israel should cease to exist. there is every bit as much reason why only native americans should exist in north america as their is that israel should not longer exist. solutions are found by looking forward. be that as it MAY, whatever israel is or isn't, and whatever it is or isn't doing, has NOTHING to do with american antisemitism, except to the extent that it is being used as an excuse to hate jews.

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@genessa Well then provide specific reference(s) the same way I did, assertions don't get us anywhere

@cava no, and i'll tell you why: because it's irrelevant to my point, which is that antisemitism is bad and cannot be justified. you cannot come up with a good reason to hate jews. you can't. israel may be a horrible country (at the moment it is). it's a DIFFERENT PROBLEM. i made a post about people trying to justify antisemitism and i am saying it's wrong. the end. it is not my job to teach history, though more and more i am being obligated to do so.

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@genessa I don't think anyone can come up with a good reason to hate any ethnic group.

@cava well there ya go! i can't think why that seems like such a difficult concept for so many people!

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Yes, the key word is 'reason'. Any people who have seen their fathers, mothers, son & daughters slaughtered for no good reason, are likely to hate whom ever is responsible.
Of course such hatred may make awful sense in some places in the world, thankfully this is not the case for most of the world.

@PalacinkyPDX There is a conflation of being a Jew with actions by the state of Israel. That conflation is ignorant and it is rampant. Just read the UK Press's smears of Jeremy Corbyn.

It enabled Hitler to impose the fear of the Jews as aliens living in and infecting the German people, It is enabling Trump's to spread fear to his constituency by conflating villains with immigrants and then saying they are sponsored by the Jews.

@TheMiddleWay no. i am an atheist and a jew. i am ethnically a jew. i am not a person with a jewish background. i'm a jew.

catholicism is a religion. islam is a religion. judaism is a religion. jewishness is an ethnicity. if you're stuck on judaism and don't recognize jewishness, than i understand your confusion and your comparison to other religions. but i do not follow the religion of judaism, though sometimes i participate in bits of it, because i like it (no, i don't think there is a god who wants me to light candles; i LIKE lighting candles!) i am a godless person, an atheist, and i am jewish.

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p.s. i was raised quite secularly (i just reread your post and realized i had not addressed the "religion in your past" part. i really don't have a whole lot of religion in my past.

@TheMiddleWay i didn't state that i don't have a jewish background. i said something LIKE that but that means something different: i said (by comparison) that i am not a person with a jewish background but (rather) a jew. there's a missing "only" in there (sort of like "black lives matter" includes a "too" at the end that shouldn't be necessary). i also said i don't have much religion in my background. i still always knew i was jewish. it's not about rituals and practices. it's about cultural identity. i really don't know how else to explain it! other people have tried and failed; i was hoping to have succeeded lol

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amen! (we need a nice secular version of that lol!)

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Whatever people believe because of religion, even if they believe that they should hate others, they are still victims of religion and are to be shown pity not hatred back. It is good to oppose ideology but not the people who are its prisoners.

@Fernapple I think it's a really fine line. Resentment of religion is appropriate. Saying its OK those people were murdered because they were Jewish, or being freely racist using religion as an excuse isn't.

I'm not a fan of Nuttiyahu but I can certainly agree with your comment. Jews are people just like other people. Is there any proof that a group or a race is responsible for anything? I think that would be in manipulated political jargon.

@DenoPenno i can't stand bibi. at BEST he is trump in the middle east. saying israel shouldn't exist as a nation because it has a bad leader right now... oh, hmm, lemme think who else has a bad leader right now, right?

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@genessa It is America who has a bad leader right now. Trump is the worst.

@DenoPenno yeah that's the one! i knew it was someone )

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actually that history lessons is only partly correct. the land was not held by the palestinians; it was held by the british. its residents already included arabs and jews. it was a very large parcel of land. the british divided it up into two bits, one huge bit, most of which was then called transjorda, and set it aside for arabs, and one tiny bit, and set it aside for jews. the arabs complained so the brits took a ltitle more away from the tiny bit and added it to the large bit. when the state of israel was formed, the jews told the arabs living there they could stay and be part of the new land and have full civil rights, but the surrounding arab nations told the israeli arabs that they were about to be murdered by the jews, that they should flee immediately. many did, and they fled into the larger bit of land set aside for them, now called jordan. the jordanians REJECTED the fleeing arabs, who now found themselves homeless. meanwhile, the ones who stayed behind became israeli citizens. some even serve in the knesset.

what the current israeli administration is doing is awful. it does not in any way justify the concept that israel should cease to exist and the jews therein be driven into the sea.

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@genessa Your history is rather shaky. The British never 'held' Palestine - they were mandated to administer it under the auspices of the League of Nations. It was then handed over to the UN (The LoN's successor) after WWII and it was the UN that partitioned the land to create the state of Israel.

@Gareth semantics, since my history, far from shaky, is correct in that the jews didn't steal the land from the palestinians. but my whole POINT is that REGARDLESS of that, using israel as an excuse to hate jews is pathetic, among other adjectives i could use.

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@genessa Facts are not semantics. You say the British divided Palestine along ethnic lines, They did no such thing. I know it's secondary to your main point but then it would have been better to have said nothing than to make a mis-statement of fact.

@Gareth my uncle Albert was one of those who stayed there in that role as he was too young to have fought in the war so was sent there as a peacekeeping exercise

@Gareth, @genessa I don't think so I have seen maps of how the country was divided and I rather form ed in my own mind from the actions of the jewish people (not the chassidic Jews who in this d day are being beaten up for not serving in the military by their own countrymen) Just how poorly they have treated the people on the same land we have borders here, England Wales Scotland ireland and Northern Island ,The Isle of Wight etc.they may not like each other at times but have settled down to not trying to invade each others boundaries so why cannot the jewsh peope cosider the plight of the Palestinians whose land is constantly being taken from them .

@jacpod why can't you understand that it is the israeli government, headed by the evil bibi, that is doing this, NOT the jewish people? i'm part of the jewish people. israeli citizens are sick of bibi. they're not doing it. some are... well gosh, if some people do it, and they're jews, obviously it's the fault of THE JEWS. this is EXACTLY the kind of idiocy i was posting about! call things what they are. the israeli government is doing something. "the jews" are worldwide doing whatever, mostly having nothing to do with shooting children. many are protesting israel's policies. but it's THE JEWS. right? right. WRONG.

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The Nazis were certainly unkind to the Jews and the Russians and the Gypsies and Homosexuals, etc. etc. also quite unpleasant to the point of being not very nice.

oh okay, i am sorry i didn't go on about that for a couple paragraphs. it wasn't the point of my post. but it's not a pain contest, you know.

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@PalacinkyPDX amen!

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@David_Cooper using that comparison in order to dismiss antisemitism is inappropriate. every damned time someone says "there is antisemitism" (referring NOT to israel but to something like pittsburgh, or the outcry against george soros, or anything steve bannon or stephen miller ever said) and someone ELSE says "what about israel" it's inappropriate, because it's changing the damned subject and making false conflations. i mentioned israel because of this, NOT because of anything to do with israel itself, or that situation. i wasn't defending israel's policies, which are awful, although i did go so far as to defend israel's right to exist.

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@Surfpirate as many Poles were murderd in that war as Jews

to whom do you refer? i wasn't expecting anything from anyone, just presenting my experience and observation here. yes, of course i expected responses. i was hoping i wasn't going to get quite so many that seem to be justifying antisemitism on the very bases i was decrying, but i'm not horribly surprised.

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@genessa Well that's what I meant--if you're calling out the idiots you can't expect rational, coherent responses from them

exactly! if someone is going to hate me, let them hate me because of ME!

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this is all true. i will just iterate that one of my points above is that people use the israeli-palestinian situation to justify antisemitism and i think there is no justification for antisemitism, which in the end really has nothing to do with israel at all. but everything you said is true.

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@genessa

There is no justification for hate of any kind.

@Betty If someone killed my puppy or my mother, I would probably hate them. How is there no justification for hate? It is a very common, natural, human feeling.

@Betty i was about to say this is true but i have to confess to a hatred. i feel hatred for nazis.

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@genessa I agree completely. Perhaps I didn't explain that well.

@Amisja lol no, you were fine )

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@genessa

I don't hate, not even Nazis. What I do believe in, is justice for the crimes they have committed as I would for anyone who has committed a violent crime.

@genessa Also, people will use antisemitism as a label for people who express sympathy for the Palestinian's plight. It works it more than one way.

@sadistic

Under those circumstances, I would be angry and want justice but I would not hate. The word is so loosely used these days to describe a variety of negative emotions but true hate motivates violence and I refuse to go there.

@Betty i'm human. i am not immune to human emotions. unlike nazis and kkkers and others of their ilk, i do not project my hatred beyond its correct target and i also do not act on it, at least not with hatred. i do vote )

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@genessa

Good to know. The word "hate" has so many descriptors now that it has lost some of its power in conversations, from I "hate this color to invoking extreme violence. I was taught at an early age that "hate" can lead me down a dangerous path so I try to use different words to express my emotions.

I understand that many use the word casually but it always gives me a pang in the gut when they do.

I apologize if you felt judged, it was not my intention.

lolol that is a good way! i have been blocking people left and right myself. um, not left and right. just right rofl! i think only one got a chance to block me first (i do try to give them a chance but many of them just like to fight, and their modus operandi is usually of a gaslighting nature, which does then impel me to block them).

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@genessa antisemetism, xenophobia of all kinds, mysogynists n MRAs with more loyalty to their guns than their women/daughters, excuses for sex and war criminals... These are just a few of the fine symptoms of fascism that you too can eliminate by encouraging hardline conservatives to block you en masse! Despite being a gun owner thats banned from all related groups, I highly recommend it. The average quality of intellectual discussion goes way up.

@Wurlitzer you are a gun owner who understands that common sense gun legislation is not the same as confiscating everyone's guns (ar-15s notwithstanding) and that the words "well regulated" are actually IN the second amendment. no wonder they block you! you can't go around being reasonable and knowing facts and stuff and expect people to like you rofl

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@Wurlitzer, my women and daughters all have guns. Problem solved.

@genessa, you should go to that or any synagogue and ask the holocaust survivors what they think of "common sense gun legislation," which we already have in place and would not have stopped this or any alleged shooting in the past six years, and what happened when Hitler implemented it in his country. Or you could just look up the holocaust.

@genessa I know right, what was I thinkin? silly me ?

@genessa the main reason I knew the NRA nuts were losin it before they started laundering russian money was if you say the point of owning all these military weapons is so you can protect your freedoms from the government but you say nothing when unlawful search and seizure becomes weaponized, then youve already given up your other freedoms, you aint protectin shit with your toy. See how you do against a drone with that though good luck.

@Wurlitzer yes, use old betsy against the black helicopters rofl

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@sadistic well here's a suggestion for you: stop being patronizing and making false assumptions about what people know. your history is incorrect and your assumption about me about holocaust survivors, with some of whom i am personally acquainted, is incorrect. but get, reality is harder to deal with than your own idiocy, isn't it? ass. i don't need to hear from YOU anymore.

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@sadistic yeah thatll help them a lot when sex criminals are making their laws. But only if theyre willing to do something about it.

@Wurlitzer i think you tagged me in something i can't see because i blocked the ass. i trust it was pithy lol you, i like!

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wisdom i see in your words! i share your hope for a two-state solution (wiping out israel would be as horrible as wiping out the united states because europeans stole the land from indigenous peoples) and i share the views you have just expressed. i HOPE you are right that more people will stand for what's right than not. it's one thing when people are just haters; they must be in the minority. it's another when people really are misinformed and think that if you're jewish you must be a horrible person, whether it's because they think the jews are a race of evildoers (they've been taught this) or because they think every jew in the world stands behind bibi and wants to eliminate palestinians from the face of the earth, or because they think jews own everything in the world, or... well i've heard some wild ones, too, and yes, some of the folks who believe all that are haters, but some are believing what their parents and communities have told them. and there are an awful LOT of them.

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i would be making a mistake equating them. however, i am not equating them. please read my post again. as for moral blinders, you have SOME kind of blinders on, because you 1. apparently think i like bibi and i hate him, and have SAID so (elsewhere including in comments here). even if i didn't say "i hate bibi" above i did not indicate in any way, shape or form my approval of him or his policies, and i did indicate without naming him that i do NOT approve. 2. apparently think i am equating not liking bibi and being antisemitic. i don't even know where you get this. what i am saying is antisemitic is "bibi is bad and israel is misbehaving and therefore jews are evil and i hate jews." THAT is antisemitism, it's not the only example, but it's one i've been seeing. i can't help wondering if you really read what i said. your response indicates that you think i said the OPPOSITE of what i said.

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So what? It did not matter to the Nazis, Russians, Spanish, Turks or anyone else that have persecuted Jews that it was (allegedly) a made up race.

@273kelvin That's my point, that the justification for what the Nazis, Russians, Spanish, Turks etc. did/does not exist. Nor does the justification for what takes place in America now exist.

@Fernapple The justification is irrelevant. The act is. If you were a jew, you would be crazy not to want somewhere in the world you could go to to be safe.

I ma not sure that I do accept the idea of race I accept an idea that we are all human whatever colour we are (and people termed 'white ' are also people of colour as we have many hues ) I accept that we be often behave very badly to each other and haven't found the way to acceptance yet that we are all the same cut us we all bleed shoot us we all die make love we mostly get children- I would say nowhere in the world is safe.

@273kelvin You still do not seem to realize that I am not disagreeing with you, please try to read more carefully. When I said what is happening in America I was talking about the shootings, (topical) not about the Jewish community.

@jacpod The chimps have another lesson for us, since most chimps, who are our closest relatives, are born white and turn black at maturity. Some things are very superficial.

@jacpod, @Fernapple Race may seem irrelevant, superficial or bogus but tribes are not. Whether you subscribe to the ideology or dont? You must accept that it is the motivation behind many actions.

@273kelvin I do indeed, that is why I am on a site for people who reject tribal and ideological claims, especially those made with no evidence.

there is a jewish ethnicity. race doesn't exist; ethnicity is a thing. my point is not that jews are or are not a race. my point is that there is antisemitism here and elsewhere, and it's being expressed here in pretty dreadful terms, and various excuses are being made for it, and the excuses are bogus.

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@genessa Yes that it quite true. But to many of the people attacking Jews their motive is racial, and saying that I do not approve of attacking people for reasons of race, does not mean that I approve of attacking them for other reasons either.

@Fernapple Isn't it ironic that the only people who try to define the Jews as a race are either Jewish or anti-semitic? The rest of us regard all of it as nonsense.

@GarethYes, and It is I think an error to make too much of the difference between racial, religious an ethnic hate, we may do so but people who hate often do not, it is all one to most of them.

@Gareth i have not defined the jews as a race. i define jewishness as an ethnicity (actually more than one, but we usually mean the ashkenazic cultues). there is no such physical thing as race.

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@genessa Yes that is my point, it is the people who hate who are unable to disentangle religious. racial and ethnic reasons for hating, you misread my post.

@Fernapple no, i did not misread your post.

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well, i AM an american. so....

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jews are? oh you mean me, or the jews of new york, or...? ISRAEL is. i am not always talking about the land issue. i am sometimes talking about antisemitism and inevitably someone brings up israel, as if the situation there justifies hating jews. yes, i am aware of mr chomsky; i do not have to look him up.

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yeah i see YOU didn't understand my post. i did not say, imply or otherwise intimate that disapproving of israel's actions is antisemitic. what i said was that people who say "what about israel?" to justify their irrational hatred of jews (not judaism,not israel, not politics, JEWS, actual people, some of whom, like me, are atheists) are morons and bad actors. try to get it. it's really easy.

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ha yes he is, rather. icky at any rate. just a reminder that my point is that whenever i bring up antisemitism, or anyone brings up antisemitism, someone always brings up israel in such a way as to imply that the situation in the middle east justifies antisemitism. i don't know -- maybe i should start mentioning that i am not related to bibi?

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hmm, it is an interesting take on it and i can't agree or disagree right off the bat, without giving it some thought. i tend to disagree because the idea that jews should be extinguished predates wagner, but that only means i tend to disagree with just that one bit. let me mull it over.

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@genessa -- Sorry, but the idea of extermination is post Wagner. Murder existed, yes, but not even Muslims entertained the annihilation of the Jews. If they had, we quite probably would not still be here. We actually played a rather important role in the Muslim expansion, particularly in Spain. The pogroms in the Pale were not aimed at wiping us out. Intimidate? Yes. Kill some? Yes. Eliminate? No. That came later and it is what came later that causes me to make the distinction between antisemitism and prejudice. It's a not too subtle distinction, either. However, it is difficult for most to see without investigating some.

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. That distinction is something that is important to me as I feel it unfair to accuse someone of antisemitism when they are only practicing blind, stupid prejudice, because the difference is important to me. I don't feel justified to do great bodily injury to someone who just hates me, whereas I have no compunction about nailing a Neo-Nazi who would be happy to see us disappear from the face of the Earth.

By the way, I know I'm splitting hairs here. It is merely my take on the subject.

Roman Palestine was comprised of more than Judea. The land of the Philistines was also incorporated. The word Palestine is Latin for Philistine. That's why the Romans chose that name. Palestinians are partially descended from the Philistines, Canaanites, and Jews who accepted Jesus and later Muhammad - among other origins.

@PalacinkyPDX -- Blood libel riots, pogroms of all times, the creation of ghettos and all of that I am well aware of. I am cognizant of all of it. As of the 15th of this month I will have been a Jew for 78 years -- I was born with the condition -- and much of my family were firsthand witnesses to the worst of the European hatred periods. You failed to understand the point of what I said. You also failed to notice that I said it was just my opinion that there is a distinction between the two. The distinction I draw is that the word antisemitism for me is restricted to and associated with the notion to destroy us utterly as a people, to specifically set out to drive us into extinction. To me, antisemitism was born in the mid 1800s and matured in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference.

In other words, my distinction between prejudice (even violent and deadly prejudice) and the move to remove us from the face of the Earth is not BS. I don't know about you, but my family here in the US fought in WWII and when my father and uncles returned, I was admonished in no uncertain terms in the following manner:

"Whatever you do, never say you are a Jew. Just remember, you are not a Jew." The family life changed radically in 1946.

@PalacinkyPDX -- As you wish.