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by newspaper1 581 days ago
The amount of unfair accusations dwarfs any real ones. For instance many in the VC world have accused Paul Graham of being antisemitic for simply showing concern about Palestinians. To be clear no critique of Israel including that you don't think it has a right to exist is "antisemitic". Israel is a state not an ethnicity and it was formed under what most consider to be illegal and unethical circumstances and it grew through ethnic cleansing. It's official religion is of no consequence when judging its actions.
1 comments
thomassmith65 581 days ago
One way to address that is to become cynical about 'antisemitism', but I hope that doesn't become prevalent. We've already entered an era in which majority groups resent minority grievances. Seems like that could lead to a lot of backwardness.

I alluded to this already, but it's so rare to hear public figures discuss Israel/Palestine without distorting and filtering what they say to promote one or the other side, it makes resolving things impossible.

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newspaper1 581 days ago
I think the only backwardness we're going to see is censorship and accusations of "antisemitism" to quiet criticism of Israel. The US House of Representatives literally passed a bill last night equating criticism of Israel with "antisemitism". If people want that word to mean something, the need to start using it for a purpose other than silencing critics.
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thomassmith65 581 days ago
The fact that people use 'think of the children' as justification to pass terrible bills doesn't mean we should take issues affecting children lightly, right?

A bad bill that weaponises 'antisemitism' is a good reason to oppose the bill's authors and supporters. It is a bad reason to minimise actual cases of antisemitism directed at people who had no involvement with the bill.

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newspaper1 581 days ago
No one is minimizing antisemitism though, we're saying that it's being used, often and illegitimately to censor people standing against apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. I'm genuinely curious if you think there's any antisemitism in this thread, because I don't think there is.
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thomassmith65 581 days ago
Apologies if I worded things poorly in my previous comment.

What I was driving at is that it's easy for a society, once there are widespread complaints about the weaponisation of some problem to slip into dismissing actual occurrences of the problem.

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