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Berkley Law School's Jewish free zones is causing some stir. The student group also wants to ban Zionist speakers. I wonder how this will sit with progressive Jews, who themselves are quite often found heading pro-Palestine activism in the US. Now these bans are trotted out by progressives, not alt-righters. Accusations of anti-semitism likely won't find any purchase in the vogue that's disillusioned with Israel. And I'm not seeing any sign of American Jews tilting rightward anytime soon.
While I find "Jew free zones" to be exceedingly disingenuous, I do think people who rush to point out that they didn't ban Jews, just "Jews who support Israel" to be parsing finely in a way that doesn't apply in other circumstances.
Israel/Jews have always been a fault line among progressives. "Opposing Israel is antisemitic" is a motte-bailey used by both sides. I've seen lots of Zionists claim it's a bailey: "of course you can" in theory, oppose (some of) Israel's policies without being antisemitic. And yet there is no actual opposition to any actual Israeli action that they will not claim is motivated by antisemitism. On the flip side, a lot of leftists will claim "Oh, you're just labeling any disagreement with Israel as antisemitism" when a lot of opposition to Israel (especially on the left) is in fact motivated by antisemitism.
Look at it as shorthand. The full argument should involve the hyper-focus on Israel specifically, the framing in media, the barrage of propaganda and not-even-wrong takes that are levied against any Zionist in a left-aligned space etc. all originating from actual anti-Semites. It's not so much that the person objecting to whatever hates Jews, it's that his entire view is influenced by people who do.
As I said, motte/bailey. There are legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy, and there are people who are hyperfocused on Israeli wrongdoing, to the exclusion of wrongdoing by any of their neighbors. Yes, a lot of it comes from people who just plain don't like Jews. But some of it comes from sincere political opposition. If someone calls Israel an "apartheid state," is that coming from a place of informed criticism of Israeli policy, is it coming from the kneejerk leftist impulse to defend oppressed POC against a country receiving billions in foreign aid from the US, or is it coming from the influence of genuine antisemites?
I don't trust people who harp on Israel's sins, but I also don't trust people who try to shut down anyone who harps on Israel's sins.
This is only one poll, but it finds that 25 pct of American Jews agree that Israel is an "apartheid state."
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That's not a motte and bailey, it's one argument. It's just longer than a sentence. The very reason we're having this discussion in the first place is anti-Semitism - but I'm not accusing you of being an anti-Semite, I'm accusing whoever is pumping out the anti-Israeli propaganda at the source - e.g. Al-Jazeera, BDS. The disinformation is so rife that it makes its way into the cultural "common knowledge" and extends the inferential distance between Zionists and anti-Zionists, until casual discussion is almost impossible. When every other sentence is either so incorrect that it can't be dismissed (not-even-wrong), or alternatively has enough truth in it that it's not literally wrong (motte and bailey), the discussion becomes like wading through quicksand.
Take the example you provided: "a country receiving billions in foreign aid from the US". Is that true? Well, there's an item in the Israeli budget for "bonds and grants from the US", and it's on the order of a few to some tens of millions of NIS. Here's the full budget, in Hebrew of course, and it's on pages 20, 60, 276. Those are Israel Bonds, so that's not from the US government. So where is all that American foreign aid? It's almost 4 billion in Military Aid. See here, from the US Congressional Research Service, table 2. This money goes back to the US, either in direct purchasing or in technology, such as Iron Dome tech which was recently moved to Raytheon's site for manufacturing.
Is this what is commonly referred to as "Foreign Aid"? Well, the US Congressional Research Service uses the term, so it's not wrong! But I also don't think that's what is implied by "a country receiving billions in foreign aid from the US". Just like "Rittenhouse killed people in Kenosha", "trans activists are influencing kids in schools", "reality is socially constructed" (a classic!), they're not wrong, but they're wrong. It takes immensely more effort to refute the claim than to make it, and even still anyone can keep claiming that Israel receives billions in foreign aid.
So it goes for every drive-by comment, backed by countless headlines, memes, tweets, all implying the same thing and creating a shared understanding that something is not right in Israel - wherever the hell that is, since most people can't point to it on a map, or realize how small the scale is. They're... something something oppression, something genocide, something US aid. Those poor Palestinians. Whatever, on to the next issue - I heard Lizzo twerked with some old guy's flute.
Track it back to the source and yes, you'll usually find actual, honest-to-god, Jews-hide-behind-the-bush-on-judgement-day, protocols-of-the-elders-of-Zion-believing anti-Semites. I don't call the people propagating the same info anti-Semites, but I do label the info itself an anti-Semitic attack. The people who believe they're informed, they're just the attack vector.
I wasn't taking a position on the "billions in foreign aid" line, any more than I am taking a position on the "apartheid state" line. (I'll talk about my own personal thoughts about Israel if you think they matter, but I don't think they do.) I've been more or less neutral because my entire point is that both sides tend to use a motte-and-bailey. Amusingly, you went right for the motte of your side while accusing the other side of standing in the bailey.
(To clarify, when I said "is it coming from the kneejerk leftist impulse to defend oppressed POC against a country receiving billions in foreign aid from the US," although I did not use quote marks, I was referring to said impulse and the line that typically accompanies it, not asserting myself that this is an accurate description.)
Yes, and I didn't mean to imply that you are taking the position. It's a very illustrative example that you provided, and I was working off it. (perhaps too passionately, though)
Was it "The very reason we're having this discussion in the first place is anti-Semitism"? Because I'm talking about the exceptional focus on Israel coming directly from anti-Semites, leading to this very discussion.
I don't see it. I'd love for you to expand on that, because it seems to me like my argument is pretty clear and bailey-less, as it were.
Your motte is pretty much as I stated initially, that there are "reasonable" criticisms of Israel allowed (just none that will actually be accepted as reasonable when expressed), while the bailey is where you fell back to arguing that the ultimate source of all such arguments is Protocols-spouting ZOG believers.
I’m not arguing the supposed motte at all. I’m only arguing what you labeled the bailey. I also don’t understand how one can fall back to the bailey, that’s the opposite direction from retreat.
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Wait, really?
I could see that opposition to Israel is motivated by anti semitism among Arabs or something like this. But since when is the left anti-Semitic, I’ve never seen that?
I didn't say "the left" is antisemitic. I said a lot of opposition to Israel (especially on the left) is motivated by antisemitism.
I don't think most leftists are antisemitic, but a lot of the folks who spew vitriol about Israel being an "apartheid state" seem to have a lot of problems with Jews in general. Not for the reasons rightists normally dislike Jews, but because the association in their minds is Jews = Israel = colonialist white oppressors. But it amounts to the same thing, whether you distrust Jews because they are Zionist oppressors of brown people or you distrust Jews because they are rootless cosmopolitan bankers undermining Western civilization.
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This seems very familiar to the left now. It’s not that GOP is extremists it’s maga (though all gop are basically maga). It’s not that Catholics are bad just those who actually are against abortion. As long as your identity isn’t real and it’s just superficial then your not actually a witch we can burn.
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Allan Bloom said that true open-mindedness is when one both (a) is willing to view different cultures as possible alternatives and (b) recognises that cultures are not, deep down, all the same.
People are familiar with the closed-mindedness that happens when people fail at (a) - the classic dogmatist who refuses to read about other religions or who dismisses other civilizations as savages. Yet there is also a closed-mindedness that comes from (b) - I have even known well-read professors who have been very reluctant to accept that Islamic or Confucian ethics meaningfully differs from contemporary left-wing liberal woke ethics in any respects. As Bloom pointed out, (b) is often driven by the combination of relativism and multiculturalism: a way of "resolving" moral conflicts in a multicultural society by denying their existence.
When I have taught philosophy and world religions, I have often found that the best students have strong beliefs/disbeliefs (including fundamentalist Christians or Catholics, and also New Atheist types) combined with a courage to think seriously about alternatives. So, while they are not Muslims or Ancient Greeks, they are willing to face a radically different culture, take seriously the possibility of adopting ideas from it, and thus they are motivated to apply reason to the intellectual problems that result, e.g. "How to live? What do I know? What can I know?" The students who start with a bland relativism and multiculturalism rarely developed a taste for such serious thinking.
Is this meant to be "fundamentalist (Christians or Catholics)" or "(fundamentalist Christians) or (Catholics)"?
The first. Though, given how intellectualist fundamentalist Catholics tend to be, it's perhaps less surprising when they show an aptitude for thinking seriously about philosophical or religious issues.
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This was my biggest problem with Scott's 'archipelago,' really. At first, it sounds pretty wonderful to me - a free and pluralistic place where all kinds of people and cultures can pursue their own ways in peace, which is differentiated from "the whole world we now live in" through this central authority which keeps them from trying to conquer or exterminate each other-
-But it doesn't just do that: it also exists to save the people from themselves. To make sure that is properly exposed to the Objective Perspective and hasn't just been Indoctrinated into living in their own culture, so that every child can choose for themselves how and where they want to live, rather than being kept in a place that's not really best for them.
And that just destroys the whole thing. That's not an archipelago of many cultures and many values: that is one culture doing a lot of pretending and play-acting. You can profess anything you want, so long as you don't actually believe it. You can say anything you want, so long as you don't actually mean it. The whole benefit of such an archipelago - that even if some great evil is choking out all the world, you can make for yourself some little island of refuge from it - is gone, provided you aren't limitlessly confident in the incorruptibility of the central authority. And if you're limitlessly confident in the incorruptibility of any institution, what reason (beyond matters of taste and cosmetics) do you have for bothering with this 'archipelago' thing at all?
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Add it here. Maybe someone will have the link.
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It’s a careful parsing similar to pointing out that Trump didn’t call Mexicans criminals or support anti-Mexican racism, he called Mexican criminals criminals and supported a wall to keep foreign nationals from crossing the Mexican/American border.
In the interests of charity, I’ll concede the “I’m not anti-semitic, I just hate the state” point if that person concedes I indeed wish to protect Americans from the narco-state to our south without hating any of the races of Mexico: the descendants of the Mesoamerican indigenous peoples and the Spanish, German, or Jewish colonials.
I'm pretty sure that the percentage of people of Mexican descent in the US who are illegal immigrants is nowhere near as large as the percentage of Jews who support Israel. I'm also pretty sure that people of Mexican descent, in general, don't consider their immigration status to be part of their cultural identity.
If Trump just said that all people who celebrate Cinco de Mayo are criminals (and assuming for the sake of argument that its importance was not invented by Americans), it would be closer.
Probably. My comparison was solely on the conflation of state nationality and ethnic nationality, with the accusation of hidden racism being unfalsifiable.
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I haven't noticed this, though. Maybe its a rather thin line while discussing certain aspects of Israeli lobbying efforts that sometimes do overlap with conventional antisemitic tropes trotted out by the alt right. But motivations are difficult to 'prove' when someone doesn't publicly espouse them. Are there any examples of this in leftist pundits though?
I don't think any notable leftist pundits come out and say "I don't like Jews." Hardly anyone does. You're right that motivations are difficult to prove when not explicitly stated, so there's always plausible deniability. But I've seen these interactions pretty frequently, where you've got on the one side, leftists who really don't like Jews much (often not so much because of "traditional" antisemitism but because they don't like Israel and assume Jews are all pro-Israel or at least anti-Israel-being-wiped-off-the-map), and Jews who really do throw the "antisemitism" card as soon as someone criticizes Israel, and like I said, it's a fault line that pops up in leftist spaces over and over again. E.g. the ongoing jockeying over whether or not Jews count as "white" (answer: yes or no depending on who's making the argument and which strategy it serves).
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Except that they didn't ban Jews who support Israel. They banned everyone (actually, just all speakers ) who supports Israel: The organization "will not invite speakers that have expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine." See here. So, "Jew-free zones" is even more disengenuous than you thought.
Sure, but there is no good left of center reason to not support Zionism. "the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine." Is just a pair of easily debunked mottos.
Thus, it is reasonable to suspect different, real, motives.
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"I didn't ban Catholics, I just banned people who go to Mass." Would it be fair to call that a Catholic-free zone? I'm pretty sure that many Catholics don't go to Mass, after all. What if you just banned people for agreing with the Pope? I'm pretty sure many Catholics don't do that either.
Banning pro-life speakers regardless of topic would be closer and, well, that is a thing that has happened, is happening, and will likely continue to happen. The usual suspects cry about it, sure, but unless you're specifically reading a pro-life magazine, it's not actually newsworthy and even most of those don't consider it discrimination against Catholics.
I occasionally gripe at left wingers here that try to make silly hypotheticals about right wing policies with actual real world examples of what the costs and benefits would be; in the interests of consistency I'm now doing the same thing to right wingers making silly hypotheticals about left wing ideas(which, to be clear, I see as much stupider than the right wing policies I have defended in the past by reference to real life).
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"I didn't ban Catholics, I just banned people who agree with the Pope on [topic]" would be closer. There are a lot of Zionist non-Jews; similarly, on any given topic, you can find a lot of non-Catholics who agree with the Pope on any given topic (exactly who varies by topic).
Now, you could claim that "the central example of a Zionist is a Jewish Zionist," or that "the central example of someone who agrees with the Pope on [topic] is a Catholic person," but in both cases, I'm not sure that's actually the case. I'm pretty confident that the set of "Zionists in the US" has a large majority of non-Jews (mostly Evangelical Christians in the Republican Party).
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???? supporting Israel is the position of the Republican Party, very few members of which are Jewish, as well as the position of many evangelical Christian groups. And note the quote in the latter argument:
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