CounterPunch
Weekend Edition
May 7 / 8, 2005
Lawyer: "Any Criticism of Israel is a Form of Anti-Semitism"
The Peculiar State
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
A lawyer gave a brief opinion piece on Canada's public radio, the CBC, in which he flatly said that criticism of Israel is a form of anti-Semitism. Calling people names because you dislike their views is not logic and is not any form of argument. It is not even decent. I can't see how this lawyer's words differ from American Senator McCarthy using the dangerously-loaded slur, Communist, applied to anyone he didn't want working in the State Department or in Hollywood.
This lawyer's fantasy argument is that the very selectivity of Israel's critics ipso facto proves their anti-Semitism. Why aren't these same people out criticizing China about Tibet he demanded? Apart from the fact that many of them do criticize other injustices in the world - a fact which makes the lawyer's words into the cheap trick of a straw-man argument - one has to ask just whom he includes in his indictment?
Does he include decent, honorable people like Uri Avnery, former member of the Knesset, a citizen of Israel who writes regularly of the injustices committed by the country he loves? Does he include the great pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim who grew up partly in Israel and has many times criticized its policies? Does he include the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom who expressed his rejection of Sharon's brutality? Does he include Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela who both have described what they see in Israel as the apartheid with which they are intimately familiar?
Is Israel the only country somehow magically immune to Lord Acton's dictum about power? I think not, but in saying that I risk being classified an anti-Semite.
http://www.counterpunch.org/chuckman05072005.html