America's State Department Cooperates in Israel's Nasty Game of Calling its Critics Names

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY LAWRENCE DAVIDSON IN CONSORTIUMNEWS

“It is anti-Semitic to “deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor)”

A definition written in Tel Aviv. Completely meaningless since no one on the planet denies Jews their democratic rights. No one.

That is a strawman argument, and it is so clearly intended to fog up the genuine issue of Israel’s denying millions of their every right – democratic rights, human rights, rights to peaceful lives, and even the right of secure home ownership.

It is so patently false and twisted that I think such lobby-induced efforts serve only to offend fair-minded people.

Most of us know when people are being seriously disingenuous with us or attempting to manipulate us, as with cheap scam artists or Bible-thumping tent preachers.

This kind of nonsense from Israel initiates exactly the same kind of reaction in any informed and reasonable person.

I do not even understand what Israel thinks it achieves with such clearly manipulative and dishonest stuff. It is as effective as Don Quixote tilting at windmills, and the truth is it seems a one-way trip to nowhere.

I do know that, try as desperately as you will for years, long term, you can’t keep a badly leaking boat afloat with mumbo-jumbo.

All Israel has to do is clean up its stinking human-rights mess, stop imposing on and abusing others, stop stealing homes and farms and gas fields and water, and return to its accepted 1967 borders.

There is nothing unreasonable in those expectations, and absolutely nothing anti-Semitic either, since anti-Semitism, as with all extreme prejudices, is just unreasonable superstition. We are talking about hard facts here, not superstition.

Most criticism would end immediately. But Israel deliberately chooses not to do so. It won’t even seriously discus doing so.

All such measures as those imposed on America’s State Department only scream growing desperation in the campaign to defend what cannot be defended.

Short of creating a Stalinist set of institutions in America, you cannot stop people from criticizing what richly deserves being criticized.

In the end, criticism of Israel is not, and can never be, anti-Semitism.

Israel is a state, and if it wants to be viewed as a legitimate state and not some kind of Crusader Fortress Enclave, it must meet the international standards and laws set for all states.

But it does not do so. It does not follow the most basic rule of law, it abuses millions, it wages aggressive war, seemingly without end, always safely protected by an American government which creates such bizarre institutions as the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.

It only answers critics by calling them names and working to entrench nonsense like this, as though it were in any way the business of America’s government to influence how anyone regards a foreign state.