Enough With The Anti-Semitism (Heck, Pick Your Ism!)

I'll be the first to stand up and criticize Israel. I've done it numerous times on this forum alone and I'm hardly shy about my opinions in "meat space". In my opinion this latest act can only be understood as a violation of international law and the blockade those protestors sought to undermine is seen by most neutral parties as dubious indeed. I'll not be shy: Israel's state policy is arguably a slow, PR conscious genocide of the Palestinians. I say these things with no apology.

But you know what? It's not helping the level-headed who are trying to bring light to these controversial issues when people ride in on the coat tails of even-handed members posting serious criticism only to damage the thread itself with anti-semitic garbage. If you want to be taken seriously as a critic of Israel you should have no trouble telling the difference between a Jew, a Zionist, the Israeli government, and Israeli citizens. Of course there is overlap in some cases but you are doing no one any favors when you fail to acknowledge the critical differences. This same travesty occurs in discussing Muslims, Islamism, Muslims governments, and the citizens of those governments. Can we please leave this baggage at the door regardless of whichever population or ethnicity is being short-changed by the disingenuous and abusively reductionist line-blurring we are all prone to from time to time?

Seriously, I implore the community. Here are some honest to goodness quotes, names omitted to protect the innocent, the guilty, and/or the misinterpreted:

When Jews control the media, banks, hollywood, IMF, and on and on and on what do you expect.

I just don't get why Jews love pissing people off, haven't they learned from the bible or history itself.

It's times like this one cant help but wonder if Hitler knew about all of this years ago….

and Hitler was miss guide in killing the Jews... there are a lot of people in the world who will be quiet happy to see the genocide finished.

This is doing real harm on all sides of the debate. Thanks for taking a moment to read this.

with the way all the sides are acting then damn right i am anti semite, anti islamic, anti fundamentalist, anti socialist, the list goes on and on

course nobody gives a rat's arse anyhow so to be honest no matter what is written on this forum nobody really listens.

unless you got a picture of an alien humping a cow then perhaps you will get some listeners for 10-15 minutes at least.

-grin-

Yikes

Those quotes are from ATS? Geez. Well there are bad eggs everywhere I guess.

I am completely against much of what the Israeli government does.
I am NOT against the people of Israel themselves.

Just like for as long as I can remember I am against an majority of what our (USA) government does. But being a citizen here, I know it's not the people fault--we aren't saying let's attack this or that. We are not saying hey I'll take big corp lobby money.
It's the governments not the people that's the problem.