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Another day, another controversy about what is antisemitism and what is legitimate criticism of Israel.
This time, a German architecture prize was rescinded over the recipient signing a letter condemning Israel.
Of course, the Guardian is not quite sure how the founder of the prize is called, oscillating between Schelling and Schilling:
The letter in question is here. Key passages:
We still have 3/4 of that century to go, but good job being optimistic!
This would at least be debatable.
Fair enough.
That would be the the general right self-determination of peoples, as mentioned in the UN charter? Does this also apply to the Uighur, the Kurds, the Basques, the Catalans and so on?
Or is the relevant law the limited recognition of Palestine, or the Oslo Accords?
Was the Hamas rule before the Oct 7 a shining example of self-determination?
Personally, I am somewhat sympathetic to calls to stop the IDF from bombing the hell out of Gaza. I am also fine with demanding that Israel should stick to the Oslo accords in the West Bank and dismantle their illegal settlements.
But to demand political autonomy in the context of Gaza is where I get off the train. The force of political autonomy in Gaza is called Hamas. Their primary objective is to sabotage any peace process by murdering random residents of Israel. Asking for political autonomy for Gaza is like asking for political autonomy for Germany in 1946.
Overall, I don't think that the letter is plainly antisemitic. If the author had signed a similar pledge against Chinese institutions for the Uighur genocide, and also demanded self-determination for the Kurds, I would tend to call them a general advocate for oppressed people. If their only political topic is Israel, then that would be a bit dubious.
If, as the right (persuasively) argues, it is racist towards Anglos / French / Germans to flood these countries with migrants, ending their former status as (de facto) ethnostates, then opposition to Israel as a Jewish state is likewise antisemitic. The destruction of Japan by the arrival of a hundred million of the kind of tribesmen who lived there before the ancestors of the Yamato immigrated would be likewise transparently anti-Japanese behavior. I have no opinions on German policy in this area or the awarding of the prize. Nevertheless, advocating a people should no longer be a majority in their sole ethnostate is damning them in a way, whether it’s done to Gauls or Greeks, to Swedes or Serbs, and so on. The Arabs still have many homelands and there was no distinct Palestinian identity before Israeli independence.
I agree that anti-Zionism is fundamentally anti-Semitism, sorry to say to so many "anti-Zionists" who want to make the distinction, but you also need to decide if not supporting the Jewish state is the same as opposition. Does Israel give huge amounts of military aid to the US and England to preserve its ethnostate? Don't make me laugh. The thrust of Zionist influence in the West has been vehemently pro-mass third world immigration with organizations like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, of which our DHS Secretary was on the board...
There's also the argument that it's not "racist" to oppose a state that opposes me. Israel doesn't support my right to live among other White people, and Jews are likely, especially in the face of this election, the demographic and political force that is the most pro-mass third world immigration to the West in the entire world. Why is it racist for me to oppose them when they oppose me?
You just want us on the Right to be suckers, to support Zionism with no expectation of reciprocity. You want us to support them even as they throw all of their own economic and political and cultural influence on opposing us in the West.
If Zionists oppose keeping the US and Europe White the Right should not be suckered into political support for keeping Israel Jewish.
That comparison might make more sense if white people had been a minority in every country for c. 2,000 years, been treated as second-class citizens when tolerated, expelled whenever the majority needed a scapegoat, and then subjected to attempted extermination with everyone prescient enough to try to escape refused entry by every country they tried to flee to.
Unless and until that happens, I see no contradiction in asserting that Jewish people are entitled to a state in which they are a majority, while white people are not.
Personally I am very tired of powerful interest groups saying it’s okay to be hypocritical because of how oppressed they’ve been. If you’re not being oppressed now I don’t give a damn.
On the subject of Israel, I am happy to support the Jewish ethnic homeland exactly to the extent that they support mine. To the best of my knowledge, this is no support at best, but who knows? That could change.
It's not 'how oppressed they've been', per se, so much as 'how likely are they to be oppressed in the future'.
The former is largely relevant as evidence of the latter.
This would be reasonable if there were a danger, supported by historical precedent, of your ethnic group, if a minority in every country, being declared unwelcome in your country of residence, denied admission to other countries, and then targeted for mass murder. (I don't know what ethnicity you are, so I cannot say for certain that that is not the case. If it is, than your group would also be justified in wanting its own country in which it is the majority. 'White people', on the other hand, do not fit this criterion; if that were to change, then you would have an argument for wanting to live in a white-majority country.)
I mean, do you really think there’s going to be another Holocaust? Antisemitism is a joke among westerners who matter; you’d be surprised how quickly attendees at E Michael Jones lectures drop it at the slightest excuse.
Iran officially calling for another Holocaust is an irrelevancy. Jews will be safe in the west for the foreseeable future, at least as much as ‘white people’(and BTW I agree with you that ‘white people’ are not a group that has a solid argument in favor of needing an ethnostate, although I suppose some white ethnic groups probably do, but not whites as a whole).
In 1900, would anyone have thought the Shoah would have been started by Germany?
If you brought someone forward from that era, told them that there would be a persecution and mass murder of Jews on an un-precedented scale, and asked them to guess what country it would come from, I suspect most people' first guess would be Russia, possibly followed by France.
I would’ve guessed Russia or the Ottoman Empire was fairly likely to do mass killings of Jews in 1900 and that Jews living in the pale of settlement would be at risk due to a continental war between Russia and Germany, which is predicting that Jewish genocide might be a thing. I wouldn’t have guessed ‘camps run by Germany’ but it’s kind of irrelevant whether totenkopf or Cossack does the mass murder; the point is ‘Jews in Eastern Europe having near to mid term future genocide risk’ was foreseeable at the time.
On the contrary, there is not a major jewish population with a foreseeable near or mid future genocide risk today(you can, I’m sure, name one that not-delusionally-histrionic-about-antisemitism people can agree is in danger or genocide or ethnic cleansing if you disagree).
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