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I dunno, but there’s a clear and unsupportable bias to a phrase like “Israel’s defensive military operation to protect the lives of its men, women and children who are being continuously bombarded by Hamas rocket attacks has been turned on its head to show the victims as heartless, headless aggressors.”

Exactly, JamesE. There are obviously other interpretations of the situation than that of the Anti-Defamation League.

And as for “The implication is of an Israeli policy without a head or a heart…”

Maybe… that was the intent…?

The cartoon is a comment on what is actually going on–if that makes people uncomfortable, maybe it’s not the cartoon they should be complaining about.

Strange that misrepresentation of Allah is not racist, but representation of Israel’s policies in Gaza is racist. Someone define bias, please!!

The difference is that Israel won’t call for the cartoonist’s death for insulting the Jewish religion, as opposed to Muslim calls for a Danish cartoonist’s death who supposedly insulted the Muslim religion.

But I guess when you’re a small democracy in a sea of backwards nations bent on your destruction for over 60 years, with a lawless anarchic terrorist “state” on your border lobbing missiles aimed at civilians, these kinds of things tend to get lost in the liberal mind-muddle.

this shows the truth in terms of Anti-Zionism is not Anti Semitism. A favourite lefty line to avoid the ugliness in its ranks.

Fact: Israelis voluntarily left Gaza
Fact: After that action they were bombarded month after month with bombs/
Fact: Gaza is run by a group of religious extremeists who are misogynistic, homophobic and believe the world should be Islamic,

But that won’t matter…..they’re not evil Christians who protest abortion clinics.

Anyone else notice how the people who support Palestinians are often their worst enemies?

In words, in deeds, the people who claim to stand up for Palestinians are almost always wretched.

Strange, that a group can terrorize a Democracy with rockets and when the Democracy fights back the Democracy is the agressor. In Iraq, the US has all these rules of engagement, while the Iraqis have no rules. Whatever happened to the convention that a soldier out of uniform, attacking an opposing army, was shot on sight?

As an ethnic Jew raised as an observant Jew and as a direct descendant of a Nazi concentration camp victim, let me say this:

Abe Foxman and his Anti-Defamation League can rot in hell.

The ADL is pretty much an Israel lobbying group disguised as a pro-tolerance/anti-predjudice group. Their primarily function is to conflate legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies with anti-semitism.

To be blunt, the ADL is a fraud. It is an organization designed to allow Israel to murder Palestinians with impunity.

It should be viewed with the same contempt as the KKK and other hate groups.

If this is Anti-Semitic than “Waltz With Bashir” is anti-semitic too.

Steve,

The cartoon is not directed at – nor an insult to- Judaism…

>>Steve, The cartoon is not directed at – nor an insult to- Judaism…

Uh, OK, so then if it were an image of a star with sharp teeth inside a crescent mood, then you would not see that image as maligning the Muslim religion?

You know, I actually agree that Israel’s response in Gaza was not proportionate to the Palestinian provocation.

A truly proportionate response would have been for Israel to randomly fire rockets and missiles into Gaza, aimed at residential areas, in order to purposefully terrorize and muder the civilian population.

Actually, it seems that the cartoon is DIRECTLY attacking Judaism.

Look at it, it’s the Star of David that has teeth, it’s LEADING the headless goosestepping soldier, intoning that it is the RELIGION leading the war.

And look at the eyes on the star, they are looking directly at the figure in front of it, not just ahead, but downcast at the small huddled figure.

If that ain’t an attack on Judaism, I don’t know what is, if it were a crucifix with a rabid Christ upon it leading a headless soldier, or an anthropomorphic crescent moon and star with sharp teeth doing the same this would not even be in question.

And I find it silly that anyone can see Israel as the ‘bully’ in this, the Palestinians and their allies have done everything they can to destroy that country for over 50 years. Yet, somehow the Israelis are the bad guys.

Bias? You betcha!

>anti-semitic
The comic can’t be anti-semitic. Palestinians are a semitic people as well, and the cartoon clearly sympathizes their blight.. Similarly, a black man calling another “nigger” can’t be racist.

>Look at it, it’s the Star of David that has teeth, it’s LEADING the headless goosestepping soldier, intoning that it is the RELIGION leading the war.
And what not? Can’t there be crazy Israelis who think religion makes everything right? That killing people for their religion is ok? I mean, Osama killed for his religion; you should be able to handle religions-as-bad news/options while at the same time supposing that the same religion might have peaceful practitioners.

And I have understood from my friends in Israel, that the country really has a very vocal religious minority who thinks that as “the chosen people” their actions can never be wrong and being of the Chosen Ones justifies killing pagans. You should be able to call these people crazy lunatics without being branded “anti-semitic”. Also, as mentioned, the term is clearly without meaning on this context. The only way you can be anti-semitic in the Israel/Palestine question is to advocate killing everyone in the area, while concurrently making references to mudmonkeys or whatever is the hip-term these days.

Further, Star of David is a symbol of Israel that is well known; after all, Israel did put it into their flag. Fair game. Similarly, many European countries feature crosses (Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries come to mind), and many muslim countries crescent moons. Particularly the latter has been used in many political cartoons, and people always get that it’s against one certain country or group, not the religion as a whole.

>And I find it silly that anyone can see Israel as the ‘bully’ in this, the Palestinians and their allies have done everything they can to destroy that country for over 50 years. Yet, somehow the Israelis are the bad guys.

If Britain would decide that my country was big enough for two nations and would divide it into two, and these foreigners who have had nothing to do with the country for 2000 years started flooding in*, sure as hell I would be pissed.

You can also think this is akin to Europeans taking the lands from Indians; it’s a big country, surely there’s space for everyone? And the next thing you know, your people are living on reservations that are only few percentages of all the lands their tribes used to posess. And 50 years is a very short time; after all, we are talking about time-spans of millenia. Half a century is like fifteen minutes. There are still people alive who remember time before Israel, and how much better they had it before they lost it all while protecting what ought to have been theirs.

* the amount of Jews in Palestine went from few thousand to half a million in few years after the declaration of supporting Israeli nation.

>>And I have understood from my friends in Israel, that the country really has a very vocal religious minority who thinks that as “the chosen people” their actions can never be wrong and being of the Chosen Ones justifies killing pagans.

And that’s the difference: in Israel, the religious fanatics are a minority (albeit a very powerful that seems to have influence disproportionate to their numbers) while in most of the surrounding Arab/Muslim nations, religious fanatics are the majority.

>>You should be able to call these people crazy lunatics without being branded “anti-semitic”.

What’s anti-Semitic is the tendency to single out Israel – and only Israel – for criticism in the conflict without mentioning the far more heinous acts of violence committed by the Palestinians who are inevitably portrayed by liberal apologists as completely innocent victims in the circumstances.

If I wanted to talk about the problem of crime in the United States, and I only singled out African-Americans for criticism for why crime rates are so high, wouldn’t you suspect that I had a not-so-hidden racist agenda? So then why is it some people only single out Israel for criticsm but then act shocked when they’re accused of anti-Semitism? Maybe they don’t realize how anti-Semitic they are. Then again, the radical left has had a problem with anti-Semitism going as far back as Karl Marx who wrote an essay called “The Jewish Question”, examining how Jews and the Jewish religion posed a particularly thorny problem in destroying capitalism.

If the terriorists can use suicide bombers on busses or in shopping malls, I guess they can have their Gaza Strip messed with.

>What’s anti-Semitic is the tendency to single out Israel – and only Israel – for criticism in the conflict without mentioning the far more heinous acts of violence committed by the Palestinians who are inevitably portrayed by liberal apologists as completely innocent victims in the circumstances.

What we are discussing is a cartoon. A BLOODY CARTOON. It isn’t supposed to be “fair and balanced”. It’s supposed to show an opinion (that being that Palestinians are in the worse lot and in this specific instance they are getting killed). If you think that Palestinians are wholly without fault in development, then you aren’t reading the papers anyway!

>So then why is it some people only single out Israel for criticsm but then act shocked when they’re accused of anti-Semitism?
Because calling a person anti-semitic on those grounds shows that you know even less about the situation than the other guy, and is a clear indication that you should have kept your mouth shut.

The word you are looking for is anti-Israeli. Or anti-zionist. They’re good words. Use them.

Anti-semitism infers that you hate semitic tribes (like the Palestinians and other people on the area) which clearly isn’t the case, or that (if you disregard the other tribes) that you hate Jews in general. As I have nothing against, synagogas or Jews in my neighbourhood, this is clearly not the case. Anti-Israeli is a good word. It implies that, under different circumstances, I might be pro-Israeli. (eg. South Africa pre- and post-apartheid,)
If you really want to go for the gold, use anti-Zionist; a person against Israeli nation.

Insisting on using the wrong words even after being corrected implies that a bigger conversation about politics would largely be impossible due to lack of deeper knowledge (or curiosity to correct this problem) on the subject.

Good night.

One cannot take over a Palestininan country, because it never existed. The area known as Palestine was always part of Jordan.

So when Israel was created many seem to forget(by accident of course) that Palestine would be officially recognized. And what happenned?

This is like saying Greenwich Village is its own country. No..its part of New York.