Reply #7: Crying wolf?

[MrPrax]

I agree...this is dangerous.

Racism is an issue that transcends these geo-political conflicts, but there seems to be NO shortage of people who will employ the 'R' card to manipulate support for the conflict.

The result will be that the term 'anti-semitism' will lose it's power and people will just become de-sensitized and ignore it. If the term is simply used by the most strident rightwing supporters of Israel to demonize people, then it becomes a political term...just like it's always been.

It seems to me that most of the propaganda being flung out by the Israel side is simply done to create moral equivalency. It's Arabs and Muslims that have been getting gears for the last 5 years, especially in the Netherlands where a prominent director was assassinated by a crazed Muslim idiot.

But they want you to know that there is anti-semitism and it is directly involved in the process. How exactly one can promote this one, when one can plainly see every signal western government has tacitly supported Israel, would suggest otherwise. But its done as an attack on the public; A drive-by character assassination and 'anti-semitism' is a strong weapon against some liberals.


So when Mamet writes like he did on the weekend, about how everyone is 'anti-semitic' because they are not unconditionally supporting Israel -- this is not new.

This is what Mamet wrote two years ago -- no difference inspite of what is occurring on the ground:

Here, in Israel, are actual Jews, fighting for their country, against both terror and misthought public opinion, as well as disgracefully biased and, indeed, fraudulent reporting. Here are people courageously going about their lives, in that which, sad to say, were it not a Jewish state, would, in its steadfastness, in its reserve, in its courage, rightly be the pride of the Western world. This Western world is, I think, deeply confused between the real and the imaginary. All of us moviegoers, who awarded ourselves the mantle of humanity for our tears at "The Diary of Anne Frank" — we owe a debt to the Jews. We do not owe this debt out of any "Unwritten Ordinance of Humanitarianism" but from a personal accountability. Having eaten the dessert, cheap sentiment, it is time to eat the broccoli. If you love the Jews as victims, but detest our right to statehood, might you not ask yourself "why?" That is your debt to the Jews. Here is your debt to the Jewish state. Had Israel not in 1981 bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor, some scant weeks away from production of nuclear bomb material, all New York (God forbid) might have been Ground Zero.

I had two Tom Clancy books to while away the eons on the plane. One, as I say, was "The Sum of All Fears," which I discarded on the trip out. Alone, in my Jerusalem hotel room, I turn to my second Clancy novel, "The Bear and the Dragon." A subplot deals with the Chinese custom (reported by Clancy) of female infanticide. An American operative falls in love with a Chinese young woman and is informed of this crime and is, rightfully, horrified, as is Clancy. How can these little children be murdered? He writes, "If it were the Jews, the world would be Up in Arms." What can he mean? As the world was in 1941, when they rushed to the defense of 6 million innocents? Or as the world is today, in its staunch support of Israel's right to existence, and in opposition to the murder of its children? What can Clancy mean? Is there no beach novel to rest my overburdened sensibilities? Where do I belong? What will bring peace to the Middle East? Why has the Western press embraced antisemitism as the new black? Well, Jerusalem has been notorious, since antiquity, for inculcating in the visitor a sense not only of the immediacy but of the solubility of the large questions. I recommend it.
Forward

I mean Mamet finds anti-semitism everywhere...including characters in Tom Clancy novels. This is piece is strindently racist, chauvanistic and deranged -- but nobody would have seen it two years ago. It's just like the piece from the weekend -- rabid racist nonsense that is regularly published in western publication, but Mamet seems to think that the West is out to get him.

Who else in our society is allowed the license to make publish such stunning indictments without showing a hint of proof or correction?