Reply #119: It's a bad flag because it pisses people off, but it's not anti-Semitic

[Recursion]

Anti-Semitism would be saying that all Jewish people are bad. Replacing the star of david on a flag with a swastika is not saying that, it's comparing the actions of the Israeli government to the actions of the Reich.

However, if people do not agree that replacing the symbol of Judaism and Israel (the Star of David) with the symbol of Nazi Germany could be construed as anti-semitic than I think there is just not going to be agreement on this issue.

Then come up with an argument to justify your claim. I have justified mine: anti-Semitism is the attribution of bad characteristics to all persons of Jewish origin. I don't see in any way how putting a swastika on the Israeli flag does that, any more than putting a swastika on a French flag would be saying something bad about all French people. It's clearly (to me) a statement that the Israeli government is practicing the very same policies that they themselves should by all rights most abhor. Now, I'll agree with you that it's over the top and probably counter-productive, but it's simply not anti-Semitic and you haven't presented any argument that it is other than "the Nazis killed a lot of Jews so any comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany is a priori anti-Semitic".

Does the Jewish-ness have nothing whatsoever to do with the choice of that particular analogy (Israel-Nazi Germany)? Is it just a coincidence that Nazi Germany killed six million Jews and Israel is the Jewish state? Does it just happen to be the most apt comparison to use?

*shrug* A lot of us have tried to compare it to Apartheid and get our heads bitten off just as quickly; I don't know of any particular anti-Semitism involved in South Africa. And in general I could care less about Jewish-ness or Arab-ness or Muslim-ness because I think they're all humbugs invented to dupe the gullible, but that's a topic for another thread: my real point is that if someone replacing the star of david with a swastika is hurtful it is not because it is some anti-Semitic invective aimed against all Jews but rather because at a fundamental level there is some validity in comparing the actions of Israel with the early pogroms of Nazi Germany -- confinement into ghettos, military and paramilitary actions killing many civilians, economic and political disenfranchisement, and social isolation.

In fact, let me turn your question around, if I may: does it not behoove a country founded in response to ethnic cleansing and genocide to be reminded when it is walking down the same path as the evildoers it was founded in response to? Is it wrong to remind Israelis when Palestinians are being sent into barbed-wire enclosed camps and told "women to the right, men to the left"? If you don't want to call Gaza and the Palestinian areas of the west bank "ghettos", what do you want to call them?