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Notes -
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.
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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