The lie of racism
What is probably the biggest lie that is spread around the West about Israelis is that we're racists. Labeling someone a racist is a way of knocking them out of a game without giving them a chance to play, and that's why it's used against us. It's a charge that Israelis find offensive and for good reason (for those who missed it earlier, go back and read Michael Totten's conversation with Benjamin Kerstein and see what Kerstein says about why we find people who call us Nazis so offensive - the racism charge is just as blatantly wrong). Barry Rubin picks the racism libel apart (Hat Tip: Instapundit). One of the most basic lessons in looking at foreign or international affairs is to understand that countries just don’t think alike about issues. America, and in a different way Europe, has been obsessed with race. That doesn’t mean everyone else is racially oriented. Israelis don’t think about skin color as such, and are well aware that Jews, while having a common ancestry, have been affected by many cultures and societies.And in the White House.
With intermarriage rates between Jews whose ancestors came from Europe and those who came from the Middle East approaching half in Israel today, there is no way to classify people. In fact, Israelis are far less interested than other countries about people’s ancestral travels.
Moreover, what does one say about such “darker-skinned” Israelis as my Hungarian-Yemenite colleague or my Syrian-origin pianist neighbor (whose wife is from Poland by way of Argentina)? There is absolutely no issue involved here. And many Israelis of European origin are not exactly “white” in their appearance.
Indeed, Israel has more “blacks” among its Jews (from Ethiopia) than do the Palestinians by far. Israeli media never use racial stereotypes or epithets while Arab and Palestinian media have had numerous racist remarks and cartoons about such American leaders as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and now even Barack Obama. In a recent radio interview, one of the leaders of the Islamist movement in Israel — in other words, from the Arab minority here — said that it was a disgrace that a black Israeli soldier could ask for the identity document of an Arab Muslim.
Yet such racism from the Arab/Palestinian side is ignored in the Western media.
Read it all.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:15 AM
2 Comments:
I see the range of people I saw in Israel (assuming that 80+% are Jews) as a support to make the argument that intermarriage (U.S. style) can't be a new phenomenon, considering that immigrants to Israel seem to look like the local populations in the places they are coming from. It is an enhancement, not a "spiritual holocaust". It does, however, require warm ingathering to pass on the knowledge.
I do not agree Sunlight, and I doubt any real Jew would agree that marrying out of the religion is a good thing. It is fine for Jews to marry other Jews regardless of their origins, but only if they have gone through a proper conversion. This is not racist in the least, it is simple Jewish survival. I do not believe that Jews intermarried with non-Jews in the past. Do not try to twist what was said concerning racism into a free-pass to intermarry with non-Jews...
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