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Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism

There have been some back and forth edits over my initial removal of the following passage from the section on Israeli Arabs:

"In Israel, a country with a Jewish majority, and which defines itself as a Jewish nation-state in its Basic Laws, many Arab citizens of Israel are unwilling to accept it as a Jewish state. Most Israeli-Arabs are exempt from conscription into the Israel Defense Forces, or any other form of national service. A major exception is the Druze Arab community in Israel. Most Druze serve in the Army, and Druze politicians are generally supportive of the Jewish state. Arab-Israeli parliamentarians are often notorious for openly supporting Israel's enemies, harsh criticism of Israeli actions, and de-legitimization of the Jewish state."

First of all, this statement does not cite any sources. Secondly, I would like to point out that Anti-Semitism is not the same thing as Anti-Zionism. Somebody can disagree with a government without advocating racial or religious hatred towards its citizens. For example, I don't recognize the Chinese annexation of Tibet. It doesn't imply hatred of Chinese people. Regardless of wether the political positions in the above text are warranted, they do not belong in an article on anti-Semitism. An article on zionism or anti-zionism would be a more adequate forum for this debate. 85.154.169.140 (talk) 11:30, 4 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you but doubt that your logic would change anything since what you are asking for goes against the propagated Israeli narrative of victimhood and the means by which they silence any opposition to their atrocities in Palestine and surrounding states. This article seriously confuses opposition to Israel and its appalling actions with racism towards Jews per se. This equation between Israel and Jews or between Zionism and Judaism is false and is harmful to Jews themselves, as we see from the objections to such equation by many intellectual and/or religious Jews who do not feel that Zionism or Israel represent them or their religion. Among Israel’s so called enemies, it is the Zionist usurpation of Palestine from its native people and Israel’s actions as a state afterwards which make Israel an enemy, not the coincidence that they are Jews. If they were Martians the Palestinians and the Arabs would oppose them equally. When the English and the French occupied Arab lands, the Arabs fought them too but no sane person would claim Arab Anti-Arianism or Anti-Christianism based on that confrontation. It was simply a national resistance against a foreign power which wanted to control their land and resources against their will, and did not matter the identity of the occupier/colonizer. However, if the foreign power came with a self-proclaimed identity as the drive behind their aggression, then they have only themselves to blame for any rise in antagonism against this identity. Thus, if Jews do have a real concern about the rise of anti-Jewish feelings, as opposed to anti-Zionist feeling, then they should disassociate themselves from Zionist circles and publically oppose the atrocities of the Zionist state, Israel. Otherwise, and to be the devil's advocate, if you tell group X that because of your IDENTITY you are justified in taking their land and property, expelling them from their homeland and ethnically cleansing their cities, towns and villages, subjecting them to apartheid and humiliation, etc., then you should not be surprised if members of this group would say that they hate your IDENTITY, no matter what it is.Biraqleet (talk) 22:29, 9 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
This is quite openly a political rant, not a valid Wikipedia comment. It presents a justification for hate-incitement and even excuses Palestinian terrorism. It is also altogether mythological in substance. E.g., where in the real world is the alleged silencing by Israel of "any opposition to their atrocities in Palestine and surrounding states"? Obviously, the terminology is highly prejudicial ("atrocities," "appalling actions," "Zionist usurpation," etc.), but in any case anyone wishing to make such statements in Israel is perfectly free to do so, since it is in fact a liberal democracy that accepts the rule of law and freedom of speech, press, etc. Arab Israeli politicians can say such things in the Knesset anytime they like. Some Arab Knesset members openly call for the defeat of Israel and appear on Lebanese TV on the same platform as Hezbollah, something treasonous in any understanding of the term, and nevertheless take up their Knesset seats upon return with no repercussions. The newspapers are similarly open to vigorous debate and as in all democracies attacks on government policy are taken for granted as a right for all. I might also point out that nothing like such freedoms to criticise and even to slander government leaders and policies exists even now in the "Arab Spring" anywhere else in the Middle East, including in the Palestinian Authority territories, whether on the West Bank or Gaza.
As for the substance of the issue itself, while anti-Zionism is not antisemitism per se, it often expresses itself in such terms, and in fact in Muslim countries it generally does. There is plenty of evidence on this provided by MEMRI (see especially their Lantos Archive on antisemitism at http://www.thememriblog.org/antisemitism), including TV video-clips and translated newspaper articles. Quite a few sermons by the religious leaders in the West Bank and Gaza exhibit strongly antisemitic sentiments. But it is not restricted to Palestinians. Iranian Holocaust Denial is only the most globally publicised instance of a widespread phenomenon. On this, it is relevant to cite in this Wikipedia article the Pew Global Attitudes Project Survey 2011 that surveyed Muslims world-wide to determine their attitudes to non-Muslims (at: http://pewglobal.org/2011/07/21/muslim-western-tensions-persist). It indicates that almost all Muslims in the Middle East and even beyond have antisemitic attitudes, not just anti-Zionist ones: this reflects the way Jews and Israel are presented in the Muslim world through the pulpit, the media and the schools. In most Middle Eastern states 98% of their population do not have favorable views of Jews as such, radically contrasting with almost all Western countries where most people have favorable views. It is also relevant to mention in this connection that antisemitism is the only possible explanation for the official Palestinian policy not to allow any Jews to live in their proposed "Palestine," once it is established, so ethnic cleansing will be necessary from all "occupied Palestine" territories, and, just as blatant is the official P.A. policy, enunciated by Yasser Arafat in the futile Camp David peace talks of 2000, that there are no Jewish holy sites anywhere in Jerusalem, including on the Temple Mount, nor in Hebron, nor anywhere else in the Holy Land. This obviously goes beyond anti-Zionism: it rewrites the Bible itself as part of an explicit and official campaign to erase Judaism as such from the Jewish Holy Land and the entire Middle East. It suggests that the real problem is actually not with the actual Jews -- as the above anti-Zionist commentator put it, it would even apply to Martians -- but the problem is due, as the Hamas Covenant frankly states, to the fact that Israel is the only non-Muslim state in the Middle East (the Palestinian way of phrasing this is to speak of a "dagger" in the heart of the Muslim and Arab world, playing on tiny Israel's shape), and is therefore as such an offense and reproach to Muslim and Arab honor and God-ordained rule. It is therefore the frontline of jihad. Secularists insist they feel the same offense but as a stain on Arab honor as such. See Wistrich's books cited in the bibliography for details on this. Another extensive discussion of this is Bernard Lewis, Semites and Antisemites, also in the bibliography.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.107.228.214 (talk) 11:40, 13 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It saddens me to see that Wikipedia, while such a boon to my studies in biological science and medicine, clearly has no checks and balances against heavily biased political propaganda. Make no mistake: Arabs, among others, are Semites. "Anti-Semitism" is a word that, by its etymology, may in fact be applied to those peoples. The article written here is in large part a fiction, incorporating an overwhelming extent of pro-Zionist propaganda without citation of credible sources, drafted with the seeming purpose to suggest that racism against Jews is far more widespread than can be substantiated by factual sources. Where the article does include historical fact, the presentation is overwhelmingly incomplete, a half-truth with aims to create bias in support of policies of the 1948 state. For one, the article references its definition of "Anti-Semitism" to another Wikipedia article written in much the same style as this one. The author(s) of this piece have clearly established multiple pages under different headings from which to "cite" to create the illusion of authority. One cannot reference his own works as objective citation. Furthermore, the use of hateful language against Arabs even within this Talk page is an excellent demonstration of Anti-Semitism as it describes racial hatred toward peoples of Arab descent, most notably toward the Palestinians. (GG2014MD (talk) 08:31, 31 August 2012 (UTC))[reply]

It is true that a literal use of the word "anti-Semite" suggests that hatred of Arabs and other racial Semites is included in the term. This is misleading (see the notice at the top of the Talk page linking readers to a discussion of this term, explaining why actual Semites are not implicated in it). The term was not understood to extend to Arabs from the very beginning of the usage, back in the nineteenth century. That is why, according to many scholars of the subject (e.g., Robert Wistrich, Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, London: Methuen, 1991, p. xvi), the better usage is "antisemite" as an adherent to "antisemitism," an ideology like "Communism" or "fascism" or "Nazism," because what is involved was actually from the start and is still today not a racial term at all but a "pseudo-scientific" ideology of unfocussed hatred. Hitler obviously was antisemitic and so was Nazism as such, his program. But he was very friendly with and funded authoritarian and fascist-tending Arab leaders of all sorts, such as Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the leaders of the Ba'athist parties of Syria and Iraq, and even Anwar Sadat and other anti-British Egyptian radicals. He warmly hosted the Grand Mufti Haji Amin el-Husayni in Berlin throughout the Second World War. el-Husayni was just as deeply antisemitic as was Hitler, cooperated and furthered the genocide against the Jews and even issued fatwas and radio broadcasts urging Muslims to join the Nazi army (he created two Muslim SS units). Hitler promised him rule of a Jew-free Iraq-Syria-Jordan-Palestine after the war, that is, an Arab dictatorship allied with the Nazis. So Arab Semites were no problem. Jews, besides, are of all races, not just the Semitic one, as Hitler himself wrote in Mein Kampf: he damned them there as the archetypal "mischling" people, mixed racial types who were therefore presumably hostile to all "pure racial blood." So antisemitism is the more appropriate term. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.107.228.214 (talk) 11:58, 13 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]

One group versus another group?

What is the difference between a gentile middle eastern group fighting another gentile middle eastern group and a gentile middle eastern group fighting a jewish group? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.103.156.62 (talk) 00:15, 9 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Changes to archive settings

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I have changed them to: 

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Wikipedia provides some reasonably clear Talk page guidelines. One of the sections within the guidelines concerns: When to condense pages. It says: "It is recommended to archive or refactor a page either when it exceeds 16 KB, or has more than 10 main sections". At the point of this edit the page contained 11.9 KB The time setting remain at a very healthy 90 days. Gregkaye (talk) 15:32, 5 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • I just want to add that I appreciate that some admin type Wikipedia pages have low level settings in "minthreadsleft" and, in this context, I can understand how a low level setting might have been installed here.
In my pov, talk pages like this connect to subjects to which a wide variety of views may be ascribed. It seems to me that adequate space should be given for the address of relevant issues and by a variety of editors. Gregkaye (talk) 10:01, 6 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Move discussion in progress

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Blog

Jonney2000, rather than edit warring, please explain how on earth a blog under a pseudonym can be WP:RS. Not to mention one that includes such absurd statements such as:

  • "mostly by Arabs but also by some anti-Israel and anti-Zionist intellectuals in the West" => obvious well-poisoning
  • "close to 1 million Jews who lived in Arab lands prior to the establishment of Israel, after which they left or were expelled" => scholarly sources do not focus on expulsion given there was only one known case, it was small scale, and it was not focused on Jews
  • "But it’s also true that, in the course of these centuries, no Middle Eastern Jew, if asked whether he was an Arab, would have said yes, no matter how at home he felt in his environment." => A patently false statement that he disproves without acknowledgement later in the same paragraph. And the reference to "course of the centuries" is absurd given the paucity of research on this subject prior to the 20th century, a point which he acknowledges in the laziest possible fashion in the next paragraph.

These are obvious red flags of low quality pseudo-journalism.

Oncenawhile (talk) 00:55, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

    • Hillel Halkin is fine he is well known and of some stature. Much of the literature on this topic is very one-sided and not really about what happened after 1948 especially on the lunatic anti-Zionist side. Why do you want to force this one-sided polemic? Ella Shohat is a very good polemicist but it’s just too much.
    • It boggles the mind and insults the intelligence to imply that practically 100% of this population suddenly emigrated willingly. Arabs stole everything from many Mizrahi Jews many of whom had never hear of Zionism and not all immigrated to Israel. Shifting the blame the way Ella Shohat does is disgusting I want to throw up.
    • If you knew anything thing about this population you would know that Mizrahi do not like Arab nationalist and its not a Zionist conspiracy linked to the one million plan! You want Mizrahi to say ok now we will be “honorary Arabs” not going to happen.
    • Mizrahi wrote the Talmud and more, I hope you realize what that means as far as identifying as Arab and the clear distinctions which are made between Jews and non-Jews. They are not some foreign other. Jonney2000 (talk) 05:25, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
1) What are Halkin's credentials on this topic? From the above, he appears to be an amateur
2) Of course they didn't "emigrate willingly". That is a straw man. Each country's emigration was complex but related to many things including decolonization and Zionist agitation. The expropriation of property came in most (if not all) cases after emigration deals were made between the original country and the Israeli government. These countries' governments did not want to lose the human capital, but with enough pressure they each unlocked their doors. Read Fischbach, who is a very balanced and reasoned scholar.
3) Yes I agree, but propaganda has a lot to do with this to. Most Mizrahi Jews of the younger generation have a poor understanding of their own history, and focused on the "neo lachrymose" version.
4) Too many people have no idea what an Arab is (and is not). Understand the history of Arab nationalism, and what being Arab means (and doesn't mean) today, and you will understand this.
Either way, your article is not WP:RS. Find a better source or remove it. Oncenawhile (talk) 15:44, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Oncenawhile. Hillel Halkin and his blog are not wp:rs. Pluto2012 (talk) 21:35, 7 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
To be clear, Oncenawhile, it's true that many factors, including poverty, political instability, and the desire to live in the newly created Jewish state, helped led to the exodus of Jews from Arab countries, However, you seem to almost completely dismisses the persecution and anti-Semitism that occurred at the time (while seemingly placing most of the blame on "Zionist agitation"). I suggest you read the article Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries.
But getting back on topic, Hillel Halkin is (according to Wikipedia) an American-born Israeli translator, biographer, literary critic, and novelist, who has lived in Israel since 1970. He certainly is Pro-Israel, but his articles have been published in Commentary, The New Republic, The Jerusalem Post, Mosaic Magazine and is on the editorial board of the Jewish Review of Books. I'd say that qualifies him as a reliable source. Of course, there's no doubt that his perspective is skewed heavily in favor of Israel, but that doesn't automatically mean that his views/opinions are inadmissible here. Finally, this particular article was not published in a blog but rather in the The Forward. In summary, Halkin's views should be considered RS as far as Wikipedia is concerned, although citing him as the source of the criticism of Ella Shohat (as I have done in a recent edit) is a necessity.(Hyperionsteel (talk) 07:11, 9 February 2016 (UTC))[reply]
@Hyperionsteel: you are wrong to say "almost completely dismisses" and "most of the blame". My view on this (and, I hope, most things) is much more evenly balanced than that. There is an issue here though, which Michael Fischbach summarizes well:
"there is no doubt that Arab hostility toward Jews in the Middle East and North Africa left them feeling increasingly uneasy about their futures by the 1930s and 1940s. This uneasiness certainly affected their decisions on whether or not to emigrate. But the very political post-1948 debate over the origins and nature of Arab anti-Semitism, and the degree to which it alone was responsible for the Jewish exodus from the Arab world, can potentially obfuscate more than enlighten."[1]
Oncenawhile (talk) 10:52, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Halkin is widely published as a literary critic and political commentator. For matters of historical fact we should cite historians. It's not like there aren't many to choose from. Zerotalk 08:21, 9 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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I find there is some ill-conceived language going on in this paragraph, let me quote it and explain:

By medieval standards, conditions for Jews under Islam were generally more formalized and better than those of Jews in Christian lands, in part due to the sharing of minority status with Christians in these lands. There is evidence for this claim in that the status of Jews in lands with no Christian minority was usually worse than their status in lands with one. For example, there were numerous incidents of massacres and ethnic cleansing of Jews in North Africa,[11] especially in Morocco, Libya and Algeria where eventually Jews were forced to live in ghettos.[12] Decrees ordering the destruction of synagogues were enacted in the Middle Ages in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.[13] At certain times in Yemen, Morocco and Baghdad, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death.[14]

The first two sentences speak of two distinct subjects, but the second one syntactically references the sub-sentence added by comma to the first, regarding the following examples as evidence for its thesis. Maybe it's just because I'm not a native speaker, but I was very much inclined to assume the second sentence, beginning with "there is evidence for this claim in that [...]", would refer to the thesis of the primary sentence, not to the proposed explanatory idea. Mainly because the first sentence raises the comparison of christian and muslim countries, but the further paragraph deals exclusively with the situation in muslim countries.

So here is what I would do: the first sentence lacks a citation, and should be ended before the comma. I'd then go on something like this: "A possible reason for this might be the sharing of minority status with Christians in predominantly muslim countries. There is evindence for this claim in that [...]" Then one might argue that this rewrite should have a citation for this claim not to be suspected original research, while the examples of course still hold. In case this was original research, I would just make it a paragraph about the atrocities and try to build one up for the comparative situation thingy of Jews in christian vs. Jews in muslim countries and the academic discourse on that.

I'd go ahead, but obviously the article is closed. Best wishes 

 --2A02:8108:8580:7736:C382:3BBC:1441:EC52 (talk) 18:01, 2 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Extended-confirmed-protected edit request on 20 November 2018

the following source no longer leads to any information: https://www.adl.org/main_Arab_World/default.htm Anti-Semitism in the Arab World – a collection of materials updated regularly Bcsejtey (talk) 16:00, 20 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

 Done RudolfRed (talk) 00:42, 21 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Why the insistence on using increasingly oxymoronic/archaic term "anti-semitism"?

Why not its functional & more accurate synonym, anti-Jewish? The insistence on using "anti-semitism" to describe conflict between two Semitic groups comes across as a deliberate attempt to provoke or flummox the reader. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:1C0:C801:9FA0:B9BA:D85E:9C25:1575 (talk) 02:09, 2 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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