Discrimination by any other name

There is a new breed of racism afoot in the land, and it emanates from the most unexpected of quarters.

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There are plenty of other examples. Administrative detention without trial disturbs the Left when those imprisoned are Palestinian Arabs, but not when a Jewish settler from Hebron is detained. Incitement to violence by Israeli Jews is treated differently from incitement by Arabs, as are unruly protests and dissent.

To be fair, not all of the Left is plagued by such two-faced beliefs. (Note: just like we of the left who are also pro-Israel posters on this very forum!) There are plenty of thoughtful and reasonable people who lean to the left and still believe in maintaining one standard for all. Unfortunately, though, their voices seem to have been drowned out, as the more extreme fringes of the Left have come to the fore.

Indeed, across the board, the far Left speaks of equality for Arabs and Jews even as it practices inequity and discrimination. For, implicit in the double standard applied to Arabs is the paternalistic belief that one cannot expect very much from "such people," as though Arabs were somehow innately inferior. This, of course, is racism in its purest and ugliest of forms, the type of thinking that is incapable of looking beyond a person's origins and judging him or her as an individual.

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http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1072844152587&p=1006953079865

One of the standard rhetorical flourishes of any colonial power is to attempt to silence its opponents by turning their arguments upside down, which demonstrates a lack of originality as well the moral and intellectual bankruptcy required to maintain a colonial presence based on racist assumptions that are not mere thoughts or attitudes, but structures of power and exploitation such as anyone with a grain of integrity can see in the occupied territories.

Thus, Israel, which has maintained a brutual military occupation over millions of stateless and powerless arabs for the past 36 years, tries to cast itself as the "victim" rather than the aggressor.

And Israel, which is permeated with systematically racist laws and institutions (like the newly enacted racist immigration law barring the spouses of non-jews to enter Israel in order to ensure an ethnically defined majority) tries to characterize its critics as "racists."

Such rhetoric in fact expresses weakness: recognizing that military superiority cannot translate into moral superiority, the colonial power tries to adopt the moral vocabulary of its victims to deprive them of the ground it cannot and never will share without self-scrutiny and minimal honesty.

in the midst of such a sad situation.

is called israel.
let's just call it palestine and bring every body home.
or is that just too democratic a solution?

read some history rather than simply follow current fashion in order to help you make a reasoned response.

reasonable post.
you suggest there is only one side to the story -- and that is simply mindless and bizarre.

While you are at it.

Not likely.

UGRR
DU Moderator
I/P, N/S Affairs