[WatchDog]

Wow these are incredibly broad, in particular:

> Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

There are plenty of dual citizens that would proudly admit that their first loyalty is to Israel.

Other examples from the document use the term "Jews as a people", whereas this example seems to apply to accusing any individual.

Although perhaps a generous interpretation of the example, is that it excludes Israeli dual citizens, because Israel would be one of "their own nations"

[Aloisius]

The preface to the list of examples is rather important:

> Contemporary examples of antisemitism ... could, taking into account the overall context, include...:

Context is important. The examples are not true in all cases, but rather context dependent.

Accusing Jewish citizens of your country of being more loyal to Israel than their country simply because they're Jewish? Antisemitic.

Accusing a specific Jewish citizen that has said they are more loyal to Israel? Not antisemitic.

[mjlee]

The vast majority of American Jewish citizens are not dual US/Israeli citizens. Very roughly, there are about 1,000,000 Israelis living abroad worldwide and the US Jewish population is around 7,000,000.

[plextoria]

> There are plenty of dual citizens that would proudly admit that their first loyalty is to Israel.

Plenty of dual citizens that are not Israeli citizens and would admit the same thing, but we don't go around throwing such accusations at them.

> this example seems to apply to accusing any individual.

Does it? It would be accusing the individual just because they are part of a certain group.

[cherryteastain]

> but we don't go around throwing such accusations at them

Simply not true. There is plenty of rhetoric about immigrants (even 2nd gen+) in Western countries being accused of being disloyal to their Western citizenship in favor of their ethnic origin countries. Chinese, Indians, Middle Easterners, Latin Americans etc are all accused of this; see the recent riots in LA for a very recent example. Yet this insinuation is made illegal only with respect to one country only for whatever reason.

[tdeck]

> Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

I'm sure this definition is going to be applied to Zionist organizations that do this on a regular basis.

[notjulianjaynes]

Yeah this one is funny because it's literally the stated mission of several U.S. based Zionist/anti-antisemetic organizations.

[dgellow]

> Although perhaps a generous interpretation of the example

Absolutely zero reasons to give the current US government the benefit of the doubt

[bsoles]

I find it ironic that the current administration wants to filter out students based on their negative views of Israel when the same administration has literal Nazis in their ranks. I think that the quoted definition/criteria is just a ploy to ban students from undesirable countries from entering the country.

[wolfcola]

Donald Trump has done this multiple times, saying that Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats are disloyal or traitors because he treats Israel better.

[nailer]

> whereas this example seems to apply to accusing any individual

I think citizens is meant to mean “American citizens” as opposed to Jewish people that are citizens of other countries. It seems intended to prevent people saying Jewish people cannot be loyal to America, though I agree the wording is clumsy.

[lazyeye]

It's all so confusing. Defending Jewish people is very unexpected behaviour for someone, who we've been told for years now, is a nazi...

[viraptor]

It's just convenient right now, not a part of ideology of protecting minorities. Consider how this is effectively a type of targeted affirmative action just a short time after all dei was the devil and had to be erased. If Israel does something the gov doesn't support, I expect all of this to go away.

[lazyeye]

Not sure how much value your "expectations" have but thanks for sharing...

[sofixa]

That's because people confuse generic fascism with nazism. A big part of the difference is the virulent antisemitism.

Trump and his friends are fascists (corporatism, corruption, strongman rule, us vs them with human rights abuses vs the "them", etc).

[lazyeye]

I dunno...the Dems campaign funds were 3 times the Republicans at the last election so the corporate donors were very much on their side.

And the corruption within USAID was off the charts..billions of dollars shovelled out the door to Democrat friends.

The bypassing of the first amendment by pressuring social media companies to self-censor.

And the weaponisation of the legal system to take out a political opponent.

I think your description far more accurately describes the Democrats than the Republicans.

[sorcerer-mar]

> And the corruption within USAID was off the charts..billions of dollars shovelled out the door to Democrat friends.

Please share evidence. Links to X of people simply stating the same thing does not count as evidence.

> The bypassing of the first amendment by pressuring social media companies to self-censor.

The platforms never claimed to be coerced, the platforms themselves said in court filings they were not coerced, SCOTUS determined they were not coerced.

The actual way this played out was that random crybabies on the Internet were sad their posts were moderated, so they complained to the courts that the government pressured the platforms. The platforms responded "no, we did that because you broke our ToS."

Here's Twitter's own lawyer in their legal filing on the matter:

> Such requests to do more to stop the spread of false or misleading COVID-19 information, untethered to any specific threat or requirement to take any specific action against plaintiffs is permissible persuasion, and not state action... as [SCOTUS] previously held, government actors are free to urge private parties to take certain actions or criticize others without giving rise to state action. The evidence provided does not support a plausible inference of state action because they suggest neither the degree of deep public, private entwinement necessary for joint action, nor the kind of threatened sanction necessary for coercion.

And here are Zuckerberg's own words:

> Ultimately it was our decision whether or not to take content down and we own our decisions.

Both platforms receive millions of government requests per year, the vast majority of which (from the US government) they are free to decline and frequently do decline.

> And the weaponisation of the legal system to take out a political opponent.

The entire purpose of a legal system is to "take out" criminals. Do you think running for office somehow gives someone criminal immunity? That has to be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard in my life, and I've heard some astoundingly stupid ones!

[sofixa]

> the Dems campaign funds were 3 times the Republicans at the last election so the corporate donors were very much on their side.

I'm not going to fact check that because it's probably wrong, but regardless, it doesn't matter.

Trump literally appointed a billionaire to be a minister of his, after said billionaire spent hundreds of millions on his campaign. Same billionaire also has government contracts, was in charge of "optimising" government spending. Oh and he runs a social media with blatant censorship. Trump had a coronation event where billionaires had to donate big sums of money to be able to attend. He launched shitcoins and collectibles and a fucking mobile phone.

Nothing any recent politician in any western country has done comes even close to this level of brazen corruption. Hell, well known corrupt autocrats like Putin are more delicate in public about their corruption.

> And the corruption within USAID was off the charts..billions of dollars shovelled out the door to Democrat friends

Like preventing HIV from being transmitted to babies in Africa? Darn Democratic HIV infected babies!

[_pigpen__]

It's pretty simple, Trump hates Muslims more than he hates Jews ("Fine people on both sides", Kanye & Feuntes, cancelling funding for domestic anti-semitism programs...). This is the Muslim ban under a different guise.

[lazyeye]

Yes I guess it is pretty simple in your mind.

[const_cast]

When people say that Trump is a Nazi, they mean in the fascist "enemy from within" type of way. As in they're using Nazi as a drop-in for fascist because Nazi Germany was the most popular fascist nation that everyone knows.

They probably shouldn't do that and should just say fascist.

[lazyeye]

Yes I guess nazis were the "most popular fascist nation". Interestingly there were alot of themes in nazi ideology that could almost be considered left-wing. They believed in the dignity of the German working class man for example and that the Jewish people represented big business and were a corruption on society etc.

[shadowgovt]

Indeed. Their socialist program was left-wing... But it was socialism only for the people they considered actually people. That'd be the key difference between Nazi beliefs and any modern democratic socialism.

[lazyeye]

So both different forms of socialism then....

[shadowgovt]

In the sense that salmon and rat poison are both different sources of vitamin D3, sure.

[corimaith]

New-Left/Progressives are influenced by Carl Schmitt and his views on power that the Right also draws from. It's one of the key distinctions from Liberals who reject him entirely.

[const_cast]

Okay, whatever.

[lazyeye]

Yep exactly, whatever....

[immibis]

A common misconception. Hitler was a big supporter of creating Israel (which didn't exist at the time) too. Why? Because the point of Israel was to make the Jews go far away from Europe, where Hitler didn't want them to be.

[lazyeye]

So ummm..are you saying Trump is defending the Jewish state so that eventually all the Jewish people in the US can be moved there? Trying to understand your logic here...

[assbuttbuttass]

I don't think Trump personally is anti-semetic. But it's pretty common for right-wingers, even neo-Nazis, to support Israel because of the argument "The Jews get to have a state to call their home, why not Whites?"

[FirmwareBurner]

>But it's pretty common for right-wingers, even neo-Nazis, to support Israel because of the argument "The Jews get to have a state to call their home, why not Whites?"

It really isn't. Where did you get that information?

[const_cast]

From right-wingers and neo-nazis. There's a big overlap between Zionism and right-wing ideology.

[JumpCrisscross]

> There are plenty of dual citizens that would proudly admit that their first loyalty is to Israel

This is legitimately debatable. If your allegiance is first to a foreign state, in my view, you should have to relinquish your American citizenship.

[mathieuh]

> How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

[strogonoff]

Allegiance is not love. Allegiance is recognising yourself as part of some whole. It’s not impossible to feel that and also dislike or even hate the whole, though it probably would not come without psychological issues unless you channel that into political activity to effect what you think is a positive change to the whole. It’s complicated.

In terms of what dictates your action, true allegiance is more significant: it is possible to really love somebody and not do something for their sake, but if you really are a part of something then it’s not much of a choice.

Some people, culturally or temperamentally, have an allegiance to their family and do not care beyond that. Some feel allegiance to a community (whether defined religiously or geographically or elsewise). Some people feel allegiance to nothing. In the US specifically feeling belonging to one’s state I presume could be more powerful than belonging to the country. It is not always or not everywhere that people feel a strong allegiance to a country, even if they always lived in one and never thought of moving.

Among people who do feel country allegiance, I would imagine it is rare to feel belonging to two different countries with a similar force. Perhaps those people do exist (e.g., someone who mostly lived in country A but was born to immigrants from country B and also spent a lot of time in country B), and then it would be mighty unfair if they had to pick one, but people I know can usually classify one citizenship as “convenience” and another one as “true”.

Comprehensively assessing true allegiances (or lack thereof) of a prospective citizen is fraught, but as phrased the question does not actually require that. For 99.9% of people, “do you feel allegiance first to a foreign state?” is pretty unobtrusive and has a clear answer. The main caveat is, of course, that those for whom the answer is positive will almost certainly just lie.

In case using tangentially related quotes is considered smarter than original thought, I looked one up too and I raise you Orson Scott Card:

“Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to and the ones she doesn’t belong to… a person who really believes she doesn’t belong to any community at all invariably kills herself, either by killing her body or by giving up her identity and going mad.”

[jaoane]

I love when people come here with quotes from books like this is the ultimate argument or something.

[pelagicAustral]

https://youtu.be/cHoVtHyqOu4?si=3SsGBo2ORB7eWWJV

[Mashimo]

> If your allegiance is first to a foreign state, in my view, you should have to relinquish your American citizenship.

I have one or two friends in that situations, and they want to do that. But it also cost a $2,350 fee to give up your US of A citizenship.

[llsf]

And exit tax...

[rietta]

And being permanently barred from possessing firearms in the USA.

[ben_w]

I doubt that will matter to them, even if they like guns. How many dual nationals give up the citizenship of a nation they still live in?

[ses1984]

If that's your view then the only logical conclusion is to not allow dual citizenship at all.

[FirmwareBurner]

Many country don't allow dual citizenship precisely for these issues.

[GrantMoyer]

Any law that allows a government to renounce people's citizenship for broad, vague reasons is a very, very bad law. Regardless of its intentions, it will be used as a tool to subvert the rights of citizens even outside the target group.

[larrled]

Amazed to see such a take after what happened in LA. Obviously the median immigrant has strong feelings of loyalty to their mother soil as can be witnessed by the huge Mexican flags and the direct testimony of many individuals. Should we deport all those people who swear loyalty to “La Rasa”? If we want immigrants, and we should because we need them to lead us into the future, we need to be realistic about their loyalties. People are proud of their race/nationality, and immigrants often even moreso.

[alephnerd]

The Chicano movement made their own flag back in the Cesar Chavez era. 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Gen Los Angeleños of Mexican origin could have used (and plenty did) and a sign finger portion of protestors made sure to incorporate the US flag as well, but a significant portion simply did not realize that the Mexican flag is not viewed as an ethnic marker outside of CA.

[_pigpen__]

The US State of California WAS Mexico in 1848. Much of California still is Mexico. The personal notion of "mother soil" may have nothing to do with current political boundaries.

[spwa4]

Wow ... this will suck. Islam, the ideology, either is a state, or meant to be a state (just ask a few muslims, they'll explain. Also historically islam was a state until 1918/1923, and died in WW1, with the leader of islam, the caliph, abandoning islam)

And, frankly, while this is most prominent with Islam, that religions describe their goal to be a single state and trying to be a single state is the norm, not the exception. Christianity is the exception here that does not want to have state power (even though that rule screams "compromise with the Roman emperor", and hasn't exactly been followed very well once Christians were well established)

So no more muslims allowed in the US then? In fact no religion allowed except Christianity or revering the US directly somehow?

[Propelloni]

Yes, this will suck. No argument from me.

However, I disagree with your conception of Islam as a state, even if it was explained to you by Muslims. The strongest argument I can build from your statements is that, according to the reference to the end of the Sunni Caliphate in 1923,

p1) only Sunnis are Muslims, and

p2) the Caliphate is unique, and

p3) the Sunni Caliphate of 1923 is the original one, thus

c) it was the state of Islam.

We can disprove all of these premises. p1) is obvious, there are more Muslim religions than just Sunnis. The earliest schism was the Sunni-Shiites split, happening immediately after the first prophet's death.

About p2), while I'm fuzzy on the details, I'm pretty sure that between the 900s and the 1900s there were at least 3 major, parallel Caliphates and also a bunch of smaller Caliphates. Geographically they were even sometimes overlapping. It might be interesting that the Caliphate of the Ottoman Empire (the one in question) was a Hanafist (a Sunni splinter group) Caliphate.

On p3), the Sunni caliphate of 1923 was reestablished after a 300 year "hiatus" by the Ottoman Emperor to lay claim on Crimea. It had no representation besides a leader, the Sultan. Before the dissolution of the major Sunni Caliphate in the 1500s it relocated several times, from today's Syria to today's Iraq, to then and now Egypt. Thus we can say that the Caliphate had no continuous existence. We can furthermore say that the time the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was the Caliph, it was because it was a diplomatic ploy of the secular power of the Ottoman Empire.

Therefore, c) must be wrong. There are more Muslims than Sunnis, the Sunni Caliphate wasn't unique, and the Caliphate that ended in 1923 was not the original one.

A less philosophical counter-argument could be the vigorous infighting between different Muslim groups we see today. I'm curious how the war on Iran changes that, if at all.

[spwa4]

You're applying logic to dogma. I hope you understand your error at this point, but as to exactly what's wrong:

... every group of every monotheistic religion says and believes they're the only "true" group, their group is the only valid group, and the entirety of that religion. Islamic dogma states very clearly, and every muslim will repeat it, that there is "only one islam".

This despite the fact that what you say is correct. There's 100s, minimum, of different versions of islam.

Your idea, that history is clear proof to the contrary ... well history is clear proof that there is no god and therefore no valid religion. In the case of islam, one might point out that the central promise of islam as a religion is that muslims will win militarily, because god will intervene directly (but "of course" what is currently happening in Iran proves they are wrong and every other group of muslims is right - this is the sort of argument you're up against). The fact that any caliphate fell at all is a pretty damn obvious contradiction to the entire religion.

Frankly, I must say, I like the "goal" of Christians and Jews a whole lot better.

[Propelloni]

I'm not going to argue, because I think you are right. It's still fun to think rigorously about some random statement ;)

[victorbjorklund]

Does that mean all Americans should be stripped of their other citizenship since they have allegiance to a foreign state? For example Barron Trump is a dual citizen.

[peterlada]

Totally disagree.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Totally disagree

Hence debatable.

Let me escalate: I think such a bill would find bipartisan support. Right now might be a good time to attempt it.

I hate the idea of revoking citizenship. But a question about swearing, on naturalisation, that your supreme allegiance is to America should be incredibly popular to secure.

[WastedCucumber]

Hate to break it to you, but you'd have to find support from the IRS / Ways and Means Committee first. For these institutions, the primary characteristic of US Citizenship is filing your taxes, no matter where to live or if you've ever even lived in the country. This puts the USA in the same odd category as Eritrea, Hungary, and I believe one other country.

And despite the difficulty of revoking US citizenship, the rate of revocations has increased over the last decade or two. If there was such a simple way to toss out that old rag, I'm sure there would be many more (and a little less tax revenue).

So I'm afraid* the USA is much more transactional than you think, at least regarding citizenship.

*I must admit this is sarcasm. Thank god the US is transactional rather than so stubbornly patriotic about citizenship.

[birn559]

That would have the consequence that naturalized citizen would be second class. Because they have to watch out for what to say, otherwise somebody might denounce them and they have to fight against their live being destroyed.

[JumpCrisscross]

> would have the consequence that naturalized citizen would be second class

I know more born citizens with a second nationality than naturalised ones who gave up their first.

[exe34]

Could you say a few words on why you think the words you have written justify the words you have quoted?

[birn559]

The same argument still applies.

[adastra22]

You are conflating naturalization with born citizens.

[simondotau]

Revoking citizenship for any reason (other than for abject fraud) means that citizenship means nothing.

Also, to be pedantic, you don’t have to have citizenship of a foreign country in order to have a greater allegiance to it.

[lipowitz]

> Also, to be pedantic, you don’t have to have citizenship of a foreign country in order to have a greater allegiance to it.

The behavior of the christian conservative cult is a bit more than a pedantic detail at this point. Why is trying to get Israel into a conflict to get Jesus to come and accelerate the end of all jews on Earth not antisemitism? I don't see wanting to use the Jew for cockfighting making it to the State Department's summary of antisemitism.

[account42]

Letting some people have dual citizenship while others only have one is already making a mockery of the concept.

[tdeck]

I think it would take more than an act of Congress.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroyim_v._Rusk

[victorbjorklund]

You know Trumps own wife and son are dual citizens right? Is he going to strip them of their citizenship and deport them?

[slg]

That is a strange one to call out as too broad because it is literally an ancient form of antisemitism going back to the Romans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_loyalty#Jewish_Believers

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/us/politics/jews-disloyal...

[f33d5173]

The point is that is may be admitedly true on the part of the one accused.

In general, you should be wary of "forms of antisemitism" (or similar "forms of x-ism/x-phobia/etc"). Such things usually consists of the defensible but vacuous notion that "doing X in an antisemetic way is antisemetic", while attempting to imply that doing X is antisemetic in general, regardless how it's done, or at the least that doing X is suspect. But the only proof that has been provided in such cases is that X has ocassionally been done in an antisemetic way, which you could say for just about anything. Since X in these cases is not per se anti semetic, it is more helpful to identify what antisemetic thing has often been done alongside it, and be on the lookout for that, instead of for X.

[slg]

What is a context in which it is acceptable to say that an American's loyalty to this country can't be trusted because of their ethnicity/religion? Some of these definitions are too broad, but this is not the example to use in that argument. Accusations of dual loyalty are widely recognized as antisemitism.

[DangitBobby]

> because of their ethnicity/religion

You specified that. The excerpt did not.

[slg]

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you are calling attention to the phrasing of the excerpt rather than insinuating that Jews collectively are more loyal to Israel than the US.

I admit the phrasing of the excerpt does look vague out of context, but it is about the collective of Jewish people. That is suggested by the excerpt saying "Jewish citizens" rather than "a Jewish citizen". It should also become more clear if you click through to the original and see all the other examples are about the Jewish people as a collective too. So yes, this text is specifically about the "because of" even if the excerpt doesn't make that explicit. It is not saying that any accusation of disloyalty is inherently antisemitism. For example, if a Jewish American citizen was arrested with real evidence of them being an Israeli spy, there would not be a serious discussion of whether the arrest was an act of antisemitism.

[DangitBobby]

I am suspicious of the motivations behind the excerpt and thus critical of the wording. Jewish Citizens can be taken to mean generically as a group or multiple instances of single individuals. They could have been more precise in their usage of language if they meant the latter, but imprecision can be useful.

[Zaheer]

This isn't theoretical. There's literally cases of ICE kidnapping people off the streets for writing an innocuous op-ed in a magazine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_R%C3%BCmeysa_%C3%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Mahmoud_Khalil

[slg]

What did I say that made you think I support the ICE kidnappings? I was making a very specific point that you seemingly received as a much different general point.