Reckon so. The same can be said for wingnuts and the wingnut women who love them. I mean, sure Marie Jon’ would most likely not approve, but I’ve met lots of trailer park women throughout the south who would think that was a lovely sentiment…

mikey

It’s a joke. A very funny joke. I don’t blame you for being confused. In the country-music milieu, it is hard to tell sincere from satire.

No state has a right to exist. Nations are not people. Nations do not have rights.

Nations are not created or destroyed in the same way people are created or destroyed.

If one day the member nations of the European Union were to democratically decide to join together to become actually one big country, it would not mean that people living in Britain (or for that matter England or Scotland or Wales etc) would die, nor that Italians would die, or so forth.

Neither would there be a super-human being known as “Germany” which could stride into the United Nations and insist, against the wishes of its own citizens, that it had a “right” to exist beyond the desires of the citizenry.

Israelis, on the other hand, have as much right to form a nation as do other people on the planet.

This question of whether or not “Israel has a right to exist” is not a question about Israel, but a question about Israelis.

The right wing has averted important discussions for too long by making people think that legal beings such as nations exist in a literal sense, rather than being a legal creation of their own citizens.

Are the wingnuts worried that even if everything else they say about Islam is accepted by most people, in the absence of supposed Muslim genocidal intentions towards the West there’s still the “better dhimmi than génocidaire” obstacle to overcome?

Personally I’d think genociding over a billion people would be justifiable in order to avoid extermination or outright slavery, but not in order to avoid dhimmitude.

mikey

Since when are we like those jerks in Europe, this is America. Hey here’s a deal for Mark Noonan; if we can be anti-semitic like Europe why can’t we have universal health care too. How bout it conservatives? I would gladly start calling myself horrible slurs for some sweet, sweet colon cancer screenings.

Your father was Father Jack??!? Sweet.

I hope this comment doesn’t summon the Provos and the Loyalists from the Prussian Blue thread but this phenomena does not seem limited to Israelis and American Jews. Back in the 70s and 80s I used to play hurling and Gaelic football at a place called Gaelic Park in the Bronx. A lot of the parents of us players were sraight off the boat Irish but it was the American born attendees who were making speeches and passing the hat for the IRA, via NORAID. I remember my father railing against them (“bloody eedjits, fecking gobshites”) in the car on the way home.

I’m sure Martin will be reporting on a study of this any day now.

Well, yeah, we don’t know for sure but there’s a 99.999% chance it’s the latter.

It is what as known as “wingnutetics”, a special type of logic similar to dialectics.

First you take your head (thesis) and then your ass (antithesis) and you shove the former up the latter (synthesis).

And ta da, you can manufacture such stunning leaps of logic as featured above.

Marita:
Well, they do have the correlation that the higher the number of those statements you answer in an anti-Israel fashion, the more likely you were to also be anti-Semitic, but is that really a shock?

No, its not, and I’d say its a flawed study because its conclusion is based on a categorization error. Its like saying that having four limbs and a head is a predictor for being a giraffe.

In some ways it is strange, in some ways it is not. Though I’ve only met a handful of Israelis, most of them have lived along side of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. They see them as people and not as some abstract “problem” that needs to be dealt with.

Though I am not as wise or as well traveled as I would like, I know this truth: That a lot of the world’s problems come from when we stop seeing other people as people just like us and start seeing them as obstacles that need to be “resolved.”

I’ve actually had the same experience that you have, with the Israelis I know. They’re generally much more moderate and much more compassionate towards the Palestinians than the vehemently pro-Israel Americans I’ve talked to. It’s kind of a strange phenomenon.

I think the important thing to take from this is that a majority of the people who were critical of Israel in some fashion were not anti-Semites by these measures. Doesn’t really make a good argument for those who want to paint everyone critical of Israel’s policies as anti-Semites though, does it?

As a side note, this study seems a little fuzzy (I should say, with an apology to the social scientists here, that most social sciences studies I read seem a little fuzzy). One thing I was curious about was how well the statements surveyed, particularly the ones used to measure anti-Israel sentiment, were translated. If they did the survey in 10 countries, it was undoubtedly translated into at least a few languages. I would think that the fideltity of the translation could have a very significant effect on the answers you got.

Also, worth noting that their data was from a survey commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League. I don’t have any qualms with the ADL, and I don’t think that it invalidates the data, but it’s always worth considering where the money comes from. It can introduce both conscious and unconscious bias into data.