This site is, at this writing, linked on Little Green Footballs with a diary titled The Protocols of the Daily Kos. I submit this with hesitation, but I believe the community needs to know, and see, what some posters here feel is appropriate for this site.
That's right, someone felt comfortable posting an image that merges Hitler's with a Jewish face (and is presently gloating over the resultant media attention). These pictures are now posted on a rightwing hate site as a representation of our community. This also made Israeli National Television, as an example in a report on a spike in Anti-Semitism around Passover.
Let me suggest that this is a problem, and one that didn't just happen out of the blue. In fact, I pointed out the possibility of something like this happening earlier on the day it did happen.
Daily Kos has a dark and ignored corner that nobody really pays much attention to, a place that is welcoming to hate speech about Israel. This is not about legitimate criticism of the Jewish state; it has become an (almost) daily baying for its blood, a howl that it be stripped of all legitimacy. And unsurprisingly, since Israel is the Jewish state, this discussion often enough bleeds into outright anti-Semitism.
I have seen a diary in which the author tried to somehow contextualize the recent assault on Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor, by a Holocaust denier; diaries - and I stress the plural - that say Hamas and Hezbollah are not only not terrorist organizations, but benign and reputable actors that this country needs to embrace as partners for peace; diaries that characterize Israel as racist, an Apartheid state; diaries that declare Israel so criminal, so uniquely a perversion, that it has no right to exist as a state.
The diaries, however, are pure Jane Austen compared to some of the commentary they inspire.
It is a given trope in comment threads on the Israel-Palestine conflict that someone will compare Israel, Israelis, or Jews generally, in some form, to Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. Is it really necessary to explain why that's a uniquely repulsive thing to say, let alone argue over, which happens regularly? Are some people so ignorant of history that they don't know that The Jews control the media and are trying to silence this discussion comes directly from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Is it really too much to ask that a distinction be made between Auschwitz, Treblinka and the Warsaw Ghetto on the one hand and the Israeli occupation of Palestine on the other, or to state that making that distinction doesn't imply approval of the occupation? What is it about a suicide bombing in a packed civilian Israeli pizzeria that anyone finds justifiable?
Make no mistake: this is bad. It's bad for Jewish Kossacks, of which there are many, and it's bad for the community as a whole. It is an ongoing, revolting spectacle of hate. Now, unsurprisingly, that spectacle has been front-paged on Little Green Footballs. We, as a community, are being tarred with the sickening extremism of a few.
I have no beef with criticisms of Israel or Israeli policy. They need to be made, frankly. But when they become a ceaseless, mindless scream of hatred - and they have - men and women of good will need to stand up and say that enough is enough. We, as a community, can't allow the legitimate concern with the policies of the Jewish state to degenerate into seething hate of either that state or its people. We can't give a cover to anti-Semites or holocaust deniers. Because if we do, it will attract more of them. As Kossack Another American points out, they're already interested. Hate attracts more hate.
We are so much better than that. We need to be so much better than that.
Consider a theoretical scenario in which a smallish clique of users posted, day in and day out, diaries about the gay community. Say, just to make up some viciousness, a random succession of "Crystal meth epidemic in gay community spreads", "The gay domestic violence epidemic", "Muscles: the gay male SS/Riefenstahl aesthetic", "Nazi Capital Berlin's gay mayor - it figures", "Ernst Röhm, the gay SA mass murderer", "Matthew Shepard deserved what he got", "Jeffrey Dahmer: gay prototype", that kind of stuff. Who in their right mind would treat that sequence and most of its components as anything other than a clear manifestation of homophobic hate and a snarling distortion of what my community actually looks like? To be sure, we do have our problems, including a meth epidemic; but we are not a grotesque, loathsome bundling of pathologies for which the worst among us can provide the general example. Neither is Israel, neither are the Israelis, neither are Jewish people in this country and abroad.
Complicating that comparison is that there is a clear distinction, and one that needs to be made, between criticism of Israel on the one hand and anti-Semitism on the other. They are not, in many cases, the same thing. However, I would note to the critics that they are not arguing in a historical vacuum, and that the burden imposed on them, fairly or not, is to ensure that their arguments don't drift off into territory clearly marked as anti-Semitic, or provide cover for those who are anti-Semites. A similar standard applies to any discussion of, say, African-Americans, as the clean and articulate Joe Biden recently learned. To point this out isn't censorship - it is the price of being an adult and taking part in an adult conversation.
In the same vein, it's necessary to point out that, like all state actors, Israel takes positive and negative actions. It is a broadly secular democracy with an independent media, independent courts, an elected government. It is, in many ways, a much more Progressive country than ours. I could get married in Tel Aviv; I can't do so in New York. At the same time, it is currently, and has been for forty years, occupying a patch of land that it is not entitled to. It has acted with an often too-heavy hand towards the inhabitants of those territories, who have equally often and in turn responded with acts of savageness. It also gives a special place to Jewish observance - much as does the United Kingdom with its Church of England, the state-appointed bishops of which sit ex officio in the upper chamber of Parliament, and where no Catholic can ever sit on the British Throne. It receives U.S. government aid every year, exclusively to buy American weaponry, in the amount of roughly $3 billion per annum, or 0.167% of the Federal budget, a piece of change which our defense contractors are very much interested in. It's also currently building a wall, a physical barrier to stop angry, despairing young men and women from ending their own disconsolate lives by detonating nail bombs in buses and cafés. In that, it's been successful. Then, of course, there's AIPAC, a lobbying group in this country that seems to think it's somehow beneficial to Israel, and that's roundly detested by American Jews even as its enemies ascribe to it, literally, the boundless powers and influence of the mythical Elders of Zion.
But none of this is unprecedented in scope or kind. Other countries occupy patches of territory where they're clearly not wanted, and do so with a stunning brutality - Morocco in Western Sahara, China in Tibet, Russia in Chechnya, Indonesia until recently in East Timor. Other countries receive U.S. aid while doing things we deeply dislike; maybe not as much as Israel, but I'd suggest that moral outrage over anything shouldn't be correlated to the size of disbursements by the U.S. Treasury. And as noted, when it comes to the prominence of religious observance in the mechanics of the state, Israel is, if anything, not the worst offender. Meanwhile, our so-called "President" swaps spit with the king of Saudi Arabia, and the parliament of our staunch ally Poland considers a resolution to make Jesus Christ symbolically king of that country.
In short, Israel is a normal country, neither the best nor the worst. If it doesn't have your sympathy, that's fine. But it does not deserve your unbounded hatred.
Daily Kos is a self-policing community. All of us occasionally make a stupid comment. Broadly, the system works; the diary that resulted in the LGF posting sparked a breathtaking firestorm of outrage, and the poster was banned. I would go further and suggest that Little Green Footballs isn't in any position to accuse others of much of anything; it's that old glass houses, throwing stones thing. But that doesn't mean that Kossacks can or should ignore or shrug off this incident. This site is too important for it to be seen by anyone as welcoming hate. Hate speech goes against our core values as Progressives, and it shouldn't matter if the target is an individual, a group, or an entire state. The Progressive movement itself is too important for it to become associated with hate speech. Unfortunately, some here engage in it, diary it, uprate it. The community needs to be aware of that, and treat it exactly as we do any kind of hate speech, by making clear that we will not tolerate it. The person who posted the image that wound up on LGF, and others like him, can't be given any pretext or reason, by anyone, to expect that they'd be welcome here. Otherwise, more like him will come, and further injure the reputation and the integrity of this community. It's that simple.
Original tags: Israel, Palestine, anti-Semitism, Meta, Hate Speech