Philosophy Discussion Forums

Consul wrote: ↑January 28th, 2024, 7:41 am

Belindi wrote: ↑January 28th, 2024, 6:37 am To call anyone "woke" is a simple insult with no substance in it.

It depends, but in the descriptive sense it's like calling someone Catholic.

Belindi wrote: ↑January 28th, 2024, 6:37 amYou might like to improve your vocabulary.

I already did so by writing "the Woke Left (aka the Radical Cultural Left)" in a previous post. I use the term "the Woke Left" broadly (and partly anachronistically, since "woke" in the current political sense didn't gain currency before the 2010s) to refer to the post-70s, post-New-Left Cultural Left, the identitarian-minoritarian Left, which is informed by multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism, and aims at a radical transformation of (the Marxian superstructure of) society.

As an aside, thanks or providing the orthodox definition of 'anti-semitism'.

Regarding your present post and the word 'Woke' ;, words are both denotative and connotative, and 'Woke' is usually transmitted and received to qualify Left so as to ridicule the political and liberal Left without adding any qualifying information, but adding the connotation that 'The Left' holds for the transmitter of the message.

You could easily have chosen to qualify 'Left' by way of the word 'cultural'.
I don't feel personally offended but rather sorry that an efficient writer like you would stoop to using emotive language.

Belindi wrote: ↑January 28th, 2024, 8:28 am Regarding your present post and the word 'Woke' ;, words are both denotative and connotative, and 'Woke' is usually transmitted and received to qualify Left so as to ridicule the political and liberal Left without adding any qualifying information, but adding the connotation that 'The Left' holds for the transmitter of the message.

You could easily have chosen to qualify 'Left' by way of the word 'cultural'.
I don't feel personally offended but rather sorry that an efficient writer like you would stoop to using emotive language.

When I use the term "the Woke Left", I use it descriptively to refer to the successor of the New Left, viz. the "New New Left", which has been around for more than 40 years. In his book The Rise and Fall of the American Left (1992) the historian John Diggins distinguishes four stages of the American Left in the 20th century, which are applicable to the development of the Left in other countries as well:

1. "the Lyrical Left" (1910s-20s)
2. "the Old Left" (1930s-50s)
3. "the New Left" (1960s-70s)
4. "the Academic Left" (1980s-?)

(4 corresponds to what others call the Cultural Left.)

"By 1982 the leftists who knew what they believed belonged to an ascending cultural left that privileged race, gender, and sexuality, building on the social movements of the sixties. Meanwhile a long-departed Italian Communist leader, Antonio Gramsci, won a tremendous vogue for contending that the left wrongly cedes the entire cultural realm to the right.

Gramsci died in a Fascist prison cell in 1937. He argued that capitalism exercises hegemony over the lives of people where they live, in schools, civic organizations, religious communities, newspapers, media, and political parties. Hegemony is the cultural process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural. Gramsci contended that if the left had any serious intention of winning power, it had to contest the right on the cultural level. This argument swept much of the Socialist left in the 1980s, giving Marxists a sort-of-Marxian basis for appropriating the cultural leftism of identity politics, difference feminism, and other forms of cultural recognition.

The idea that socialism is compatible with liberal democracy and the related idea that socialism is compatible with capitalist markets have long histories in cooperative, ethical, and religious traditions of socialism. Both ideas, however, were anathema to orthodox Marxists."

(Dorrien, Gary. American Democratic Socialism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. p. 7)
——————
"There is little point in debating further whether anything has changed in the shape of the American Left since the New Left, as a social movement, died. Clearly a momentous change has occurred, yet the question of exactly how to characterize this change remains contested. Was Duberman correct in saying that there is no American Left? Duberman himself seemed to be of two minds even on this point. In the same review, he referred to “the multicultural left,” what Henry Louis Gates in 1990 dubbed “the cultural left.” Duberman made clear that, in his view, this cultural Left ought to be viewed as the New Left’s legatee. John Patrick Diggins, in the recently updated and expanded version of his 1973 book The American Left in the Twentieth Century, also argued that out of the “shards” of the New Left there had taken shape by the 1980s the fourth American Left of the twentieth century, primarily within American universities. Unlike Duberman, Diggins tends to think that this academic Left had abandoned the beliefs and goals historically attributed to the Left. Whichever of these contrary views one holds, it is clear that if there indeed has been a cohesive Left in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century, it is the fourth American Left of the century—not simply a continuation of the New Left of the 1960s."

(Rossinow, Doug. "Letting Go: Revisiting the New Left’s Demise." In The New Left Revisited, edited by John McMillian & Paul Buhle, 241-254. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. pp. 246-7)
——————
"…That ideological vacuum was gradually filled by the cultural (or identitarian) left who later became the progressive mainstream. The New Left, who exorcised the industrial working class from Marxism in the 1960s and the 1970s, prepared a ground for the cultural turn. Historically, the New Left “cultural Marxists” served as an intellectual bridge between the old Marxian socialists and the current woke progressives. The “scorched earth” tactics of post-modernism that demolished and fragmented the omnipotent castle of Marxism and positivism further cleared an intellectual space for the gradual rise of the cultural left in the 1990s. The latter embraced race, gender, and environmentalism at the expense of class. Overall, identity politics became the popular exit for the mainstream left from the earlier ideological conundrum. The old economic categories of Marxism were refilled with the new cultural content."

(Znamenski, Andrei. Socialism as a Secular Creed: A Modern Global History. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2021. p. 385)
——————
"Many ideas of the early and late New Left ended up in the academic Left of the past quarter of a century. This impulse, a post-New Left that we could simply call the Cultural Left, brought to its scholarly work the cultural radicalism of the late 1960s. Consequently, its inquiries have revolved around such cultural issues as subcultural and ethnic identities, matters of gender power, race, the influence of popular culture, the hidden motives behind language and texts, and the desirability of a multicultural ethic (a post-New Left conception arising from the liberationist and separatist commitments of the late-1960s New Left) instead of a liberal pluralist society (an Old Left design)."

(Jumonville, Neil. Henry Steele Commager: Midcentury Liberalism and the History of the Present. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. p. 227)
——————
"Essentially the post-modern radical left has shifted from the traditional radical left’s Marxist focus on economic relations as the source of oppression and class struggle to cultural hierarchy as the source of oppression."

(Hamilton, Neil W. "Zealotry and the Fundamentalist Academic Left." In Mistaken Identities: The Second Wave of Controversy over "Political Correctness", edited by Cyril Levitt, Scott Davies, & Neil McLaughlin, 54-83. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. p. 56)
——————
"…the cultural left—which I am defining here loosely and generously, as that uneasy, shifting set of alliances formed by feminist critics, critics of so-called minority discourse, and Marxist and poststructuralist critics generally, the Rainbow Coalition of contemporary critical theory."

(Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. p. 17)
——————
"In the course of our conference, Henry Gates defined the "American Cultural Left" as a "Rainbow Coalition of feminists, deconstructionists, Althusserians, Foucauldians, people working in ethnic or gay studies, etc." The emergence of this left in the course of the last ten years or so is an important event in American academic life. The humanities, and particularly, the departments of literature, are where the action is in the American academy."

(Rorty, Richard. "Two Cheers for the Cultural Left." 1990. Reprinted in The Politics of Liberal Education, edited by Darryl J. Gless & Barbara Herrnstein Smith, 233-240. Durham: Duke University Press, 1992. pp 233-4)
——————
"The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the "politics of difference" or "of identity" or "of recognition." This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.

This shift of attention came at the same time that intellectuals began to lose interest in the labor unions, partly as a result of resentment over the union members' failure to back George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972. Simultaneously , the leftist ferment which had been centered, before the Sixties, in the social science departments of the colleges and the universities moved into the literature departments. The study of philosophy—mostly apocalyptic French and German philosophy—replaced that of political economy as an essential preparation for participation in leftist initiatives."

(Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. pp. 76-7)
——————
"When the Right proclaims that socialism has failed, and that capitalism is the only alternative, the cultural Left has little to say in reply. For it prefers not to talk about money. Its principal enemy is a mind-set rather than a set of economic arrangements—a way of thinking which is, supposedly, at the root of both selfishness and sadism. This way of thinking is sometimes called "Cold War ideology," sometimes "technocratic
rationality," and sometimes "phallogocentrism" (the cultural Left comes up with fresh sobriquets every year). It is a mind-set nurtured by the patriarchal and capitalist institutions of the industrial West, and its bad effects are most clearly visible in the United States.

To subvert this way of thinking, the academic Left believes, we must teach Americans to recognize otherness. To this end, leftists have helped to put together such academic disciplines as women's history, black history, gay studies, Hispanic-American studies, and migrant studies. This has led Stefan Collini to remark that in the United States, though not in Britain, the term "cultural studies" means "victim studies." Collini's choice of phrase has been resented, but he was making a good point: namely, that such programs were created not out of the sort of curiosity about diverse forms of human life which gave rise to cultural anthropology, but rather from a sense of what America needed in order to make itself a better place. The principal motive behind the new directions taken in scholarship in the United States since the Sixties has been the urge to do something for people who have been humiliated—to help victims of socially acceptable forms of sadism by making such sadism no longer acceptable.

Whereas the top-down initiatives of the Old Left had tried to help people who were humiliated by poverty and unemployment, or by what Richard Sennett has called the "hidden injuries of class," the top-down initiatives of the post-Sixties left have been directed toward people who are humiliated for reasons other than economic status."

(Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. pp. 79-80)

Sy Borg wrote: ↑January 27th, 2024, 9:00 pm Now, it's been found that the UN group that was supposed to monitor Israel and Hamas ended up joining Hamas in their attacks on Israel.

No, it hasn't been "found". It has been suggested that this was the case, and investigations are underway. If the claim turns out to be true, it will be more than embarrassing for the UN, if its workers were found to have aided Hamas in their attack on Israel.

Sy Borg wrote: ↑January 27th, 2024, 9:00 pm That's anti-Semitism.

No. If confirmed, it would be anti-Israeli.

Sy Borg wrote: ↑January 27th, 2024, 9:00 pm Now, it's been found that the UN group that was supposed to monitor Israel and Hamas ended up joining Hamas in their attacks on Israel.

Complete rubbish.
I've no idea what social media bubble you are in, but this is cloud cuckoo stuff.
Exacly like the now refusted claims of baby beheadings,
I would suggest this is just another lie from the Isreali propoganda machine.

Sculptor1 wrote: ↑January 28th, 2024, 11:40 am

Sy Borg wrote: ↑January 27th, 2024, 9:00 pm Now, it's been found that the UN group that was supposed to monitor Israel and Hamas ended up joining Hamas in their attacks on Israel.

Complete rubbish.
I've no idea what social media bubble you are in, but this is cloud cuckoo stuff.
Exacly like the now refusted claims of baby beheadings,
I would suggest this is just another lie from the Isreali propoganda machine.

Not only did some of the UNRWA staff contribute to the attack, they were sacked for it. It seems that UNRWA management is in the same social media bubble as me. That is, there is no bubble, that's just your fevered imagination. It's also well documented that UNRWA staff celebrated Hamas's attacks. The teachers are providing hate material about Jews and Israel.

Ultimately, Arabs can commit any level of atrocity and it will be treated as far lesser than anything equivalent that Israel does.

I look forward to a heated thread about the Yemen wars. About 150,000 killed, over 200,000 died of starvation and disease.

No one cares about that. At all.

I don't judge people for not caring. The world is full of disasters, both natural and man-made, and no one can empathise on behalf of all who suffer. The scale if too great. However, I do judge people for hopping onto a trendy hobby horse while ignoring far worse problems, especially when infused with a hatred of the west and all it stands for.

The left antisemitism/antizionism we're currently seeing is not a new phenomenon:

"During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American far left repeatedly denounced Israel as a criminal regime resembling Nazi Germany and enthusiastically endorsed the Arab guerilla movement’s terrorist campaign to eradicate the Jewish state. This was a period, bounded by two wars that threatened Israel with destruction, in which the far left devoted particular attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Leading far left publications joined the Arab guerillas in charging that Israel was aggressively racist and expansionist."
(p. 1)

"Drawing a parallel between Israel and Nazi Germany was the most dramatic way to make the Jewish state appear demonic. In 1970 Mike Klonsky, leader of SDS’s Revolutionary Movement II faction, equated what he called Israel’s “continuous attacks on the Arab people” with the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jews. During the Yom Kippur War, the Maoist Progressive Labor Party published a lengthy statement in the UCLA student newspaper calling Israel “a Nazi state” and denouncing Zionism as a “racist atrocity.” The Weatherman newspaper Fire even claimed that Nazi antisemitic propaganda was directly modeled on “Zionist writings.” Far left groups repeatedly referred to Israel’s campaign to defend itself against fourteen Arab nations during the Six-Day War as a “blitzkrieg,” suggesting a parallel with the Wehrmacht’s conquest of Poland in 1939 and its Western offensive in the spring of 1940. The Black Panther Party called Israeli soldiers “fascist storm troopers” and charged that Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War resulted in Arab refugees being forced into “modern concentration camps.”"
(pp. 5-6)

"Portraying Israel as a racist, genocidal settler-state similar to Nazi Germany led far left groups to justify or excuse the most brutal acts of terrorism against its population. At its 1971 convention, the SWP [Socialist Workers Party] declared, “We unconditionally support the struggles of the Arab peoples against the state of Israel.” A 1973 column in the Militant called “By Any Means Necessary” implied that any act of violence the Palestinian terrorists committed in the effort to destroy Israel was excusable. The SWP might label certain terrorist acts counterproductive, but it invariably claimed that Israeli policies had driven the Arabs to commit them. Weatherman leader Eric Mann declared in 1970 that “Israeli embassies, tourist offices, airlines and Zionist fund-raising and social affairs are important targets for whatever action is decided to be appropriate.”

Such was the reasoning that shaped the far left’s reaction to the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics in 1972. The Militant expressed concern that the public outcry against the kidnapping and murder of the Olympic athletes made “the criminal [Israel] look like the victim.” The SWP’s candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in the California district that included Berkeley, Ken Miliner, a national Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) leader, denounced what he called “the anti-Arab campaign over the Munich killings.” Showing no sympathy for the slaughtered Israelis, Miliner condemned both President Nixon and Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern for labeling the Palestinian terrorists “international outlaws.” He accused the American press of deliberately inciting prejudice against Arabs by using headlines that referred to “murder” or “terror” at the Olympics. Miliner’s only objections to the murders were tactical. He worried that targeting Israeli civilians for killing or kidnapping generated sympathy for the “Zionist state,” allowing it to “pose as the innocent victim.” The only effective strategy for eradicating the Jewish state, Miliner argued, was the revolutionary mobilization of “the Arab masses.”

The Black Panther Party justified the Palestinian murder of the Israeli athletes, comparing it to the prison uprising at the Attica penitentiary in New York State: “The same events unfolded: desperate, disenfranchised men take other men as hostages in order to command the attention of the world to their plight.” It absolved the Palestinian terrorists of responsibility for the murders at Munich, blaming the authorities instead: “In Munich, asn in Attica . . . heads of state did not hesitate to condemn the athletes to death. . . to hide from the world the unbearable suffering of the Palestinians.” Many on the far left openly endorsed the hijacking of airplanes, which risked large numbers of civilian lives, as a legitimate way for the Palestinians to publicize their cause. In 1970, the Black Panther reprinted an article entitled “The Sky’s the Limit,” which glorified the hijacking by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine of a TWA passenger plane flying from Rome to Athens. The hijackers took hand grenades into the cockpit and ordered the pilots to fly to Damascus, Syria. The article was accompanied by a photograph of hijacker Leila Khaled, identified as a “Revolutionary Sister.” SDS’s New Left Notes also supported Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli airliners as one of the “requirements of total war, of resistance to the [Israeli] occupier.”"
(pp. 8-9)

(Norwood, Stephen H. Antisemitism and the American Far Left. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.)

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑January 26th, 2024, 4:22 am I did not know that the term "Woke' had migrated outside the US. Still, there's no need to bring German politics into it either. There are good people who vote right and good people who vote left in the US, in Europe and, indeed, in Israel itself. Why do we need to bring politics into a debate on the awful situation in the ME? Isn't it enough to discuss the different views on the conflict in the ME on their merits, without labelling people antisemites on the basis of their political views? I know people on the left and on the right who support Israel. I also know people on the left and on the right who support the Palestinians. And then there are people in the middle who don't know what the hell to make of the situation in the ME. Labelling people whose views we don't like as "antisemites" is unjustified and unhelpful.

I just wanted to mention the antisemitism among the contemporary Far Left (which I called the Woke Left), which has erupted again after Israel's reaction to the 10/7 massacre. For it is often forgotten that hatred of Jews isn't only a Far Right thing.

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑January 26th, 2024, 4:22 amI am not an antisemite. I am not a racist generally.

I didn't say you are.

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑January 26th, 2024, 4:22 amThe Jews and the Palestinians are both semitic peoples.

Antisemitism is defined as hatred of Jews!

Lagayscienza wrote: ↑January 26th, 2024, 4:22 amRace has nothing to do with it.

It has, according to the Woke Left, which regards Jews as whites and Palestinians as people of color. And the white race is the oppressor race, according to them; so the alleged whiteness of Jews alone is a reason for them to side with the Palestinians.

Sy Borg wrote: ↑January 28th, 2024, 5:10 pm I don't judge people for not caring. The world is full of disasters, both natural and man-made, and no one can empathise on behalf of all who suffer. The scale if too great. However, I do judge people for hopping onto a trendy hobby horse while ignoring far worse problems, especially when infused with a hatred of the west and all it stands for.

"If the Palestinians stand, in the antizionist imagination, as symbolic of all the victims of ‘the west’ or ‘imperialism’, then Israel is thrust into the centre of the world as being symbolic of oppression everywhere. Like antisemitism, antizionism imagines Jews as being central to all that is bad in the world."

(Hirsh, David. Contemporary Left Antisemitism. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2018. p. xvi)

Sy Borg wrote: ↑January 28th, 2024, 5:10 pm

Sculptor1 wrote: ↑January 28th, 2024, 11:40 am

Sy Borg wrote: ↑January 27th, 2024, 9:00 pm Now, it's been found that the UN group that was supposed to monitor Israel and Hamas ended up joining Hamas in their attacks on Israel.

Complete rubbish.
I've no idea what social media bubble you are in, but this is cloud cuckoo stuff.
Exacly like the now refusted claims of baby beheadings,
I would suggest this is just another lie from the Isreali propoganda machine.

Not only did some of the UNRWA staff contribute to the attack,

Well since UN workers and journalists have been surgically targetted by Isreal it is no surpise that even the UN would want to defend themselves.

ZIONISM is genocide.

Imagine, if you will, that a radical Catholic Irish party took power in Northern Ireland, and voted for a "Right of Return policy", for all Catholics of Irish descent.
The law is then used to evict any Protestant, from rented or owned accomodation. They are thrown onto the street, whilst an American from New York who is a Catholic claiming Irish descent is offered their home rent free with a stipend to help them start a new life in Northern Ireland.

What would be your reaction?
But when you object the Irish who support the "Right of Return", scream justification for this on the basis of "Potato Famine", and the great hunger of the 19thC.

Yet this is exactly what is happening, daily, to Palestinians living in the West Bank.

Let us also imagine that the remianing Protestants are corralled into a small area of Ulster, whereby inports and exports are restricted by the Catholic Irish ,and periodically bombed by Eire levelling homes, blowing up hosptials, and universities. Periodically political goups of Protestants form and gather small bands of fighters from the orphan population -
(It being noted that in the October attack 80% of the fighters were orpans and none ofver the age of 24)
- To try to take revenge on their hopeless situation.
In response Catholic Irish systematically continue the destruction of the enclave, targetting refugee camps, UN workers, journalists, hospitals, and areas of land where they had previously told the Protestants to flee to.

But --- The Potato Famine!!! Remember that!

Sculptor1 wrote: ↑January 29th, 2024, 7:31 am ZIONISM is genocide.

Imagine, if you will, that a radical Catholic Irish party took power in Northern Ireland, and voted for a "Right of Return policy", for all Catholics of Irish descent.
The law is then used to evict any Protestant, from rented or owned accomodation. They are thrown onto the street, whilst an American from New York who is a Catholic claiming Irish descent is offered their home rent free with a stipend to help them start a new life in Northern Ireland.

What would be your reaction?
But when you object the Irish who support the "Right of Return", scream justification for this on the basis of "Potato Famine", and the great hunger of the 19thC.

Yet this is exactly what is happening, daily, to Palestinians living in the West Bank.

Let us also imagine that the remianing Protestants are corralled into a small area of Ulster, whereby inports and exports are restricted by the Catholic Irish ,and periodically bombed by Eire levelling homes, blowing up hosptials, and universities. Periodically political goups of Protestants form and gather small bands of fighters from the orphan population -
(It being noted that in the October attack 80% of the fighters were orpans and none ofver the age of 24)
- To try to take revenge on their hopeless situation.
In response Catholic Irish systematically continue the destruction of the enclave, targetting refugee camps, UN workers, journalists, hospitals, and areas of land where they had previously told the Protestants to flee to.

But --- The Potato Famine!!! Remember that!

The above are such relevant parallels with the attacks on Gaza and the West Bank! I am sorry that the constraints on the length of posts are such that you don't write at length and in your passionate style about the Potato Famine in Ireland. I dare suggest the Potato Famine in Ireland merits a separate post.

Consul wrote: ↑January 29th, 2024, 12:55 am The left antisemitism/antizionism we're currently seeing is not a new phenomenon:

"During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American far left repeatedly denounced Israel as a criminal regime resembling Nazi Germany and enthusiastically endorsed the Arab guerilla movement’s terrorist campaign to eradicate the Jewish state.

[...]

SDS’s New Left Notes also supported Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli airliners as one of the “requirements of total war, of resistance to the [Israeli] occupier.”"
(pp. 8-9)

(Norwood, Stephen H. Antisemitism and the American Far Left. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.)

Is it fair to observe, d'you think, that this book was written by someone who had an established position on these matters, and that the book they wrote reflects that position? In other words, I'm suggesting that it isn't 'objective' just because it's in a published book.

N.B. I do not challenge a single specific word of what was written, I merely observe that it may reflect a partisan viewpoint.

Consul wrote: ↑January 29th, 2024, 1:21 am Antisemitism is defined as hatred of Jews!

According to the Israel-sponsored IHRA definition, it also includes the act of criticising the political state of Israel. It depends whose "definition" you choose to abide by. To avoid confusion, I always try to refer to "anti-Jewish", "anti-Israeli", or "anti-Palestinian". That way, everyone knows what I mean.

Consul wrote: ↑January 29th, 2024, 12:55 am The left antisemitism/antizionism we're currently seeing is not a new phenomenon:

"During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the American far left repeatedly denounced Israel as a criminal regime resembling Nazi Germany and enthusiastically endorsed the Arab guerilla movement’s terrorist campaign to eradicate the Jewish state. This was a period, bounded by two wars that threatened Israel with destruction, in which the far left devoted particular attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Leading far left publications joined the Arab guerillas in charging that Israel was aggressively racist and expansionist."
(p. 1)

"Drawing a parallel between Israel and Nazi Germany was the most dramatic way to make the Jewish state appear demonic. In 1970 Mike Klonsky, leader of SDS’s Revolutionary Movement II faction, equated what he called Israel’s “continuous attacks on the Arab people” with the Nazis’ annihilation of the Jews. During the Yom Kippur War, the Maoist Progressive Labor Party published a lengthy statement in the UCLA student newspaper calling Israel “a Nazi state” and denouncing Zionism as a “racist atrocity.” The Weatherman newspaper Fire even claimed that Nazi antisemitic propaganda was directly modeled on “Zionist writings.” Far left groups repeatedly referred to Israel’s campaign to defend itself against fourteen Arab nations during the Six-Day War as a “blitzkrieg,” suggesting a parallel with the Wehrmacht’s conquest of Poland in 1939 and its Western offensive in the spring of 1940. The Black Panther Party called Israeli soldiers “fascist storm troopers” and charged that Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War resulted in Arab refugees being forced into “modern concentration camps.”"
(pp. 5-6)

"Portraying Israel as a racist, genocidal settler-state similar to Nazi Germany led far left groups to justify or excuse the most brutal acts of terrorism against its population. At its 1971 convention, the SWP [Socialist Workers Party] declared, “We unconditionally support the struggles of the Arab peoples against the state of Israel.” A 1973 column in the Militant called “By Any Means Necessary” implied that any act of violence the Palestinian terrorists committed in the effort to destroy Israel was excusable. The SWP might label certain terrorist acts counterproductive, but it invariably claimed that Israeli policies had driven the Arabs to commit them. Weatherman leader Eric Mann declared in 1970 that “Israeli embassies, tourist offices, airlines and Zionist fund-raising and social affairs are important targets for whatever action is decided to be appropriate.”

Such was the reasoning that shaped the far left’s reaction to the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the Munich Olympics in 1972. The Militant expressed concern that the public outcry against the kidnapping and murder of the Olympic athletes made “the criminal [Israel] look like the victim.” The SWP’s candidate for U.S. House of Representatives in the California district that included Berkeley, Ken Miliner, a national Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) leader, denounced what he called “the anti-Arab campaign over the Munich killings.” Showing no sympathy for the slaughtered Israelis, Miliner condemned both President Nixon and Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern for labeling the Palestinian terrorists “international outlaws.” He accused the American press of deliberately inciting prejudice against Arabs by using headlines that referred to “murder” or “terror” at the Olympics. Miliner’s only objections to the murders were tactical. He worried that targeting Israeli civilians for killing or kidnapping generated sympathy for the “Zionist state,” allowing it to “pose as the innocent victim.” The only effective strategy for eradicating the Jewish state, Miliner argued, was the revolutionary mobilization of “the Arab masses.”

The Black Panther Party justified the Palestinian murder of the Israeli athletes, comparing it to the prison uprising at the Attica penitentiary in New York State: “The same events unfolded: desperate, disenfranchised men take other men as hostages in order to command the attention of the world to their plight.” It absolved the Palestinian terrorists of responsibility for the murders at Munich, blaming the authorities instead: “In Munich, asn in Attica . . . heads of state did not hesitate to condemn the athletes to death. . . to hide from the world the unbearable suffering of the Palestinians.” Many on the far left openly endorsed the hijacking of airplanes, which risked large numbers of civilian lives, as a legitimate way for the Palestinians to publicize their cause. In 1970, the Black Panther reprinted an article entitled “The Sky’s the Limit,” which glorified the hijacking by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine of a TWA passenger plane flying from Rome to Athens. The hijackers took hand grenades into the cockpit and ordered the pilots to fly to Damascus, Syria. The article was accompanied by a photograph of hijacker Leila Khaled, identified as a “Revolutionary Sister.” SDS’s New Left Notes also supported Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli airliners as one of the “requirements of total war, of resistance to the [Israeli] occupier.”"
(pp. 8-9)

(Norwood, Stephen H. Antisemitism and the American Far Left. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.)

The state of Israel is not " demonic" ;that word connotes creepy old time belief in actual demons. Obviously there are o such entities.

The state of Israel is committing criminal acts.
What about other criminal acts committed against the state of Israel and against Israelis? you ask. Well, what about those? Do they in your view justify Israel's trying to kill all Palestinians?
That would be an uncivilised notion of Justice

Belindi wrote: ↑January 29th, 2024, 8:21 am

Sculptor1 wrote: ↑January 29th, 2024, 7:31 am ZIONISM is genocide.

Imagine, if you will, that a radical Catholic Irish party took power in Northern Ireland, and voted for a "Right of Return policy", for all Catholics of Irish descent.
The law is then used to evict any Protestant, from rented or owned accomodation. They are thrown onto the street, whilst an American from New York who is a Catholic claiming Irish descent is offered their home rent free with a stipend to help them start a new life in Northern Ireland.

What would be your reaction?
But when you object the Irish who support the "Right of Return", scream justification for this on the basis of "Potato Famine", and the great hunger of the 19thC.

Yet this is exactly what is happening, daily, to Palestinians living in the West Bank.

Let us also imagine that the remianing Protestants are corralled into a small area of Ulster, whereby inports and exports are restricted by the Catholic Irish ,and periodically bombed by Eire levelling homes, blowing up hosptials, and universities. Periodically political goups of Protestants form and gather small bands of fighters from the orphan population -
(It being noted that in the October attack 80% of the fighters were orpans and none ofver the age of 24)
- To try to take revenge on their hopeless situation.
In response Catholic Irish systematically continue the destruction of the enclave, targetting refugee camps, UN workers, journalists, hospitals, and areas of land where they had previously told the Protestants to flee to.

But --- The Potato Famine!!! Remember that!

The above are such relevant parallels with the attacks on Gaza and the West Bank! I am sorry that the constraints on the length of posts are such that you don't write at length and in your passionate style about the Potato Famine in Ireland. I dare suggest the Potato Famine in Ireland merits a separate post.

But would that be a justification for a policy of Right of Return, do you think.
No matter how devastating it was?