Reply #19: It's a word game, I think. [View All]

[Igel]

Play along, it makes life easier.

You see, it's quite simple to be anti-Israeli without being anti-Semitic. That's not sarcastic, it's merely making a difference between being opposed to a country for its policies, real or imagined, and being opposed to a people affiliated by ethnicity and religious affiliation.

But then it's crucial to commit to a classic fallacy: Having distinguished between anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, mess with the definition of 'anti-Israeli' such that there are no attacks on Jews that are not actually attacks on Israel. Suddenly the set of specifically 'anti-Semitic' incidents drops to zero--they've been defined away--and so the Jew-bashers aren't labelled by the horrible word 'anti-Semitic'. But having established that 'anti-Israeli' is ok, well ... as long as you don't think, it's simple.

:think: