We all know that the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn does not really have anything to do with anti-Semitism at all. But since here it goes again, here goes.
Academic and cultural boycotts are contrary to the fundamental character of scholarship, art and science.
Sporting boycotts, like wars, tend to have a disproportionate impact on very young people with no public policy-making role.
It is wrong to tell Israelis to “go home” when the State of Israel was founded in the year that the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury.
But the definition of anti-Semitism in the Oxford English Dictionary is perfectly sufficient: “Hostility to or prejudice against Jews.”
Every critique of the divisive and anti-democratic role of the “community leaders” is applicable to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, to the Jewish Leadership Council, and to the Chief Rabbinate.
The Liberal Establishment has imported the New York practice of smearing as “anti-Semitic” any uppity black or other criticism of its hegemony and of its hypocrisy, be that its hypocrisy towards integration at home, or its hypocrisy towards white settler colonialism abroad.
Israel was founded by anti-British terrorists of exceptional viciousness. The expulsion of 700,000 people from Palestine on ethnic grounds in 1948 was a much a racist endeavour as any of the several other mass expulsions of the same period.
By its enactment of the Nation-State Law, Israel has declared itself to be an apartheid state, while that Law remains in place. Yet anyone may convert to Judaism, so that Jews are no more a “race” than Christians or Muslims are.
Therefore, anti-Semitism is a form of religious bigotry, and not, in itself, a form of racism. The fact that Hitler thought otherwise is not an argument.
No comments:
Post a Comment