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Maybe you could be charitable and understand that when someone says the Germans did something, they don't mean every single individual German. Maybe you can understand that when someone says jews have won a lot of Nobel prizes, they don't mean every single individual jew. I mean, of course you understand that. Everyone does. 'Jews have won a lot of nobel prizes' is not a statement anyone has ever taken issue with. It's just that when the implication is negative the ingroup bias of some gets activated and they start demanding special status for their ingroup.
I don't accept that jews are more special than others and I don't accept that I should use extreme and autistic verbal rigor when talking about the ingroup bias of some whilst freely ignoring it for others. I think people should be able to be charitable, see past their bias, and recognize what is being said without dragging everything through the mud of tactical individualism. Like I said in my prior comment, you don't need to prove how every single individual German helped the Third Reich when justifying they pay war reparations to jews. You don't need their tax returns to see just how much they were paying. You just draw a blanket group based judgement. They were German, they now have to pay. I'm making a similar judgement call. If one is jewish and one sees all of the negative stuff specific jews have done, why doesn't one have to own that? The Germans had to own all of their actions. They couldn't say that it wasn't them, but rather individual soldiers, politicians and the 30% or so that voted for the NSDAP in the 30's. Why should jews be allowed to not just disown all responsibility, but ultimately claim that these things aren't even jewish. It's like saying the NSDAP wasn't actually German.
Why do they 'inherit' that whilst jews don't inherit that specific jews in powerful positions who identified themselves as jews and representatives of jews, who identified their organization as jewish and who declared economic war on Germans in the name of their explicitly jewish organizations due to actions taken by specific Germans against jews in Germany?
Seems like we've erected a very one sided standard. Individual Germans take responsibility for Germans as a group. Individual jews don't take responsibility for jews as a group. Even when jews are explicitly grouping up and expressing themselves as a group. It seems like, in a negative context, there are only individual jews and they can never reflect poorly on jews as a group. No matter how much ingroup bias jews display. Yet here I am pretending that this just doesn't exist. That jews don't have an ingroup bias that they routinely express every single time someone is critical of jews.
Here's a thought, if people don't see themselves as jewish, stop being jewish. Say you're Italian or Romanian. But no. Even on the internet, where no one knows you are a dog, jews and people who ingroup jews take time out of their day to reply to group generalizations in the context of negatives about jews but let actively rely on them in other contexts.
I'm not saying anything about all jews being X. I'm pointing out a double standard. Other individual people have to own their group and how other individual people of that group have made that group look, especially if those individuals did something bad to jews. I could understand how a fervent individualist would not want to participate in such a thing, but people who act on their group biases are obviously not that.
Because a government is elected to be a representative of all German citizens. The Israeli government is likewise a representative of all Israeli citizens. If they think the government should not do X they can elect politicians to do Y. This part of being a nation state. This is of a different category entirely. If politicians elected by the German people decide that Germany is financially responsible for reparations then this is a different thing than Germans being forced to be responsible. You are conflating something that DOES make decisions for all X with a group that has no body that makes all decisions for Y. You are making a category error.
The reason Germans are responsible in your example is because Germans elected politicians to make that decision for them. They chose to be (financially) responsible (or at least a majority of them did, which in a democracy is binding on the rest). If they didn't do that then they would not even be financially responsible. It's a voluntary choice and they are entirely free to choose the other way, if enough of them agree. Perhaps they even should, but it is up to them, not me.
The point is there is no Jewish government in the same way there is a German government. Israelis certainly are responsible for the politicians they elect and the decisions they make, and if the Israeli government decided to pay reparations to Palestinians, all Israeli tax payers would be on the hook, but not all jews are Israeli.
I am white, but I am not responsible for what John Smith or George Custer, of the USA did. I am responsible for what Ian Paisley did as I voted for him to be my representative and the decisions he made had an impact on what I was responsible for. Likewise those in America who contributed to NORAID are responsible for what the IRA did with that money, but other Americans who did not, are not. Since I chose to move to the US, however I am now financially responsible for all the things the American government decides it (and therefore its tax payers) are responsible for.
For there to be collective responsibility there must be an organized collective. You yourself pointed out this was not the case with all jews. So my point is treating them like there was a collective government is wrong by your own admission. You want to knock the ADL and anyone who funds it, sure go ahead. You want to knock the Israeli government, then sure go ahead. If Joe Schmoe contributed to "Jews against white people" and they declared war against the German economy then blame Joe Schmoe and anyone else in that organization (jewish or not!).
And just to be clear if someone says white people are responsible for Nazis or slavery in the US or the Enlightenment, or the invention of haggis or whatever then they are also incorrect. Some white people would have been, but not white people in general.
You are correct that many people make bad arguments like that! But here we are supposed to try and do better and use the best versions of our arguments, not the bad ones that are used everywhere else.
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