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Notes -
Texas Governor Abbott signs law attempting to ban free speech at universities whenever the speech criticizes Israel in certain ways (described below).
The Executive Order requires all universities to —
Review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the institution.
Ensure that these policies are being enforced on campuses and that groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine are disciplined for violating these policies.
Include the definition of antisemitism, adopted by the State of Texas in Section 448.001 of the Texas Government Code, in university free speech policies to guide university personnel and students on what constitutes antisemitic speech.
Section 448.001 reads
And this definition includes (among other things) —
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
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.
These examples are intentionally ambiguous and can be weaponized by politicians or the judiciary against critics. The first example simply bans anyone from criticizing Israel in the same way that Israel routinely criticize others, by comparing them to Nazis. This cuts off a whole spectrum of political comparisons from ever applying to Israel. The second example could imply that you are antisemitic if you criticize Israel for things without also criticizing other nations in the same breath, however culturally and politically distant the nation. The third implies that an ethnostate cannot be considered racist if it is Jewish. The fourth implies that no one — not a single politician who is Jewish — can be accused of being more loyal to his self-defined homeland than America.
IMO this is a clear affront to freedom of speech. I find it embarrassing that any conservative in America would sign a law like this. The ambiguity is dangerous because it could be used by biased politicians or judges in its broadest application. While I don’t think it’s good public rhetoric to compare Israel to Nazis, that should be legal because (1) Nazis are everyone’s go-to villains, (2) Israel was recently the subject of an ICJ inquiry regarding genocide, (3) ethnonations should be extra scrutinized for genocide, (4) ethnonations with a history of genocide (Kitos War) and who fondly remember their nation previously committing genocide in their Holy Text should be super extra scrutinized for potential genocidal acts. The holocaust, like it or not, has no actual relevance to the current conduct of the Israeli regime. In real life, multigenerational ethnic groups do not swear off the same violence that their grandparents were victims of. So comparisons are fair game, if usually in bad taste.
I agree wholeheartedly with most of the points in this post, but this one in particular seems like a bit of a reach. We routinely criticise woke people for holding white people personally accountable for crimes that their great-great-great-grandparents were maybe involved in. There has to be some kind of statute of limitations.
If it were merely that the ancient Israelites committed genocide, I would agree with you; basically all ancient peoples did at one point or another, and indeed a statute of limitations is in order. But as OP mentioned, Judaism today teaches Jews to delight in the genocidal slaughter perpetrated by their forebears. That is, to say the least, unusual among modern ethnoreligious memes.
Plenty of Christians will defend the same. (Of course, there are relevant differences that might affect how we should treat the two.)
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I mean, the Arabs do the same thing. Irish rebel songs are also a thing. It doesn't seem like it's that unusual.
Your Irish counterexample doesn’t really apply. Songs celebrating resistance to oppressors and occasional genociders is a far different matter than celebrating genocides themselves.
Sure, but we're talking about historical oppressors and colonisers here. I would completely understand an English person feeling uncomfortable if they walked into an Irish bar in 2024 and the band started singing "Come Out ye Black and Tans". And I say that as an Irish person who's lived in Ireland his whole life and retains a certain residual sympathy for the Irish republican cause.
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Seems to me the Kitos War, a rebellion against the occupying Romans, counts as that too.
If the ancient Roman historians who wrote about the war are to be believed, the Jews went far beyond just rebelling, they outright slaughtered the Greeks and Romans wherever they could.
Dio Cassius also records that they gruesomely murdered 220,000 Greeks and Romans in the area, while Synesius writes in one of his letters that the Jews were “fully convinced of the piety of sending to Hades as many Greeks as possible.”
This is something akin to the Haitian genocide, not a mere rebellion.
All that said, I’m not sure that most modern Jews know much at all about that particular rebellion, let alone celebrate it.
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Looking at Wiki's examples of ethnic fusion ethnoreligions, other than Jews, I'm seeing 10 Christian sects (i.e. other people who believe Moses was a prophet of God), 4 Islamic (likewise), 1 Jewish-but-distinct (ditto). That still leaves a few Sikhs, Mandaeans, and Zoroastrian sects, but they seem to be outnumbered about 3 to 1 (by sect count) or 1.5 to 1 (by population). Ethnoreligions which don't treat the Book of Numbers as scripture are the unusual ones.
Although... why should we limit our numbers here to ethnoreligions? If I meet an Asian guy who thinks Jeffrey Dahmer had some great menu ideas, I'm not going to think "well, at least they're not the same ethnicity!", I'm going to smile non-confrontationally and back away slowly. Most religions with murderous scriptural lessons tend to downplay or backpedal from them a bit, but that goes for most Jewish believers as well. The "Genocide is good when He orders it" message is in the Bible and the Quran, with billions of followers. The killer is calling from inside the house!
Fair enough, I should have said “unusual among the founding principles/origin myths/civic religions of modern nation-states”, and I think it’s accurate to characterize Judaism as the founding principle and raison d’etre of modern Israel.
I would completely agree with the assessment that a rational observer should be extra vigilant re: genocidal intent or actions from explicitly Islamic nation-states; indeed 20th and 21st century history provides us with examples of such. As for explicitly Christian nation-states, I would say less so, both because they are almost invariably Christian-in-name-only (cf. regular attendance rates at any of the established churches in Europe), and because modern Western Christianity has memetically shed its attachments to the wanton bloodlust of the Old Testament.
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