Re: Schwarzenegger admits Hitler remarks

[Jurriaan Bendien <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Max wrote:

Anti-semitism nears complete redefinition as opposition
to Israeli policies.  Anything you say otherwise has been
redefined as inconsequential.  But if you're a critic of
Zionism, the slightest thing is grounds for opprobrium.
It's really remarkable.  Not good for the Jews, I would say.

My response:

In which case, perhaps we ought to highlight the progressive or socialist
policies of the progressive Israeli's, and not treat Israeli's as one
underdifferentiated mass (I personally don't usually talk about this issue
much).

Beyond being a form of racism, anti-semitism never made any sense to me
personally, because I have seen so many different Jews in so many different
areas of endeavour, that I find it incredibly difficult to detect any common
denominator, and I suspect the whole notion of semites itself is ultimately
a convoluted racism. Can anybody uncontroversially define and specify what a
semite is anyway ?

Personally, I confess that, when I consider Israel, I honestly don't give a
f**k about who is the Jew and who is the Palestinian or who is the Arab and
so on (and we rarely hear of all sorts of other ethnicities also living in
Israel). This utterance may seem crazy, weird, heretical and unbelievable,
but what I mean by it is that I just like to look at what these people
actually do, how they actually live, what their real history is, never mind
the incredible subtlety of ideological differences, which goes way beyond my
ken. That's the priority.  They're all human beings, and they're just caught
up in an extremely convoluted conflict which thrives on racism, nationalist
oppression, class warfare, religious fanaticism and fundamentalism,
money-making and imperialism, and general human pathology, which means
ethnic difference is accentuated in a very horrible way. As I am a
socialist, I think that if I have any job in that regard, it is to support
or sympathise with the socialists in Israel/Palestine, but then, there are
Israeli socialists, Palestinian socialists, Arab socialists, and all sorts
of socialists.

And that is one of the reasons actually that I personally prefer usually not
to discuss it a lot, and leave it to people better able than me to do that.
Because before you know it, I become embroiled again into a kind of
esotericism which draws me away from everything I believe in and stand for,
in terms of how human problems as such could be resolved.

Jurriaan