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Comment by llimos | Hacker News Reader

I'm Jewish too.

I tend to think the last few thousand years have given us well-honed antisemitism detectors. I definitely see this as antisemitic.

Would anyone dare to say about literally any other group "If I were x I wouldn't be able to live with myself because..."?

I'm not saying everyone who says something like that 14 years ago should be fired. But a head of diversity?

Addendum: Unfortunately, and very sadly for me, my antenna is also beeping at the fact that every post related to this story is getting flagged to death here on HN.

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> Would anyone dare to say about literally any other group "If I were x I wouldn't be able to live with myself because..."?

Muslims. Since 9/11 the West has demanded that all Muslims publicly decry the actions of other supposed Muslims for actions they had no control or influence over. If they don't, they risk being labelled extremists themselves.

Externally, we monitor them because of their religion. They end up on watch- and no-fly-lists for sharing a name and skin colour with somebody else.

I'm not comparing, it's not a competition. It's all awful.

And yes, it's a crying shame HN can't face frank discussions on racism.

Yeah, definitely seen a lot of “If I were a Muslim, I would’ve ...” sort of nonsense in my pretty short life.

>>Would anyone dare to say about literally any other group "If I were x I wouldn't be able to live with myself because..."?

I see x=white everywhere these days. Still almost no one calls it anti-white sentiment

Had the same reaction, my spidey sense spiked reading this. Definitely full of anti-Semitic tropes and discourse.

I hate the 1. "let's stick our heads in the sand and not talk about something important because of what could happen" and the 2. "I'm going to flag this, dv, and silence you because I'm in a different group who's going to punish you collectively for you being you."

Is there unintentional antisemitism in the sense of conflating all Jews with the subset of Israel/Likud/Israeli military/extreme settlers vs. the intentional antisemitism of "all Jews are X"?

How should we distinguish, treat, and respond to this to make such instances teachable moments and interrupt the lack of nuance and/or the othering conspiracy theories/hate?

(I think hate is taught or memetically-acquired in the absence of sane reasonableness and the Golden Rule; and ignorance is the lack of experience, knowledge, or wisdom. The Nature of Prejudice by Allport and Anti-Semite and Jew by Sarte are good reads.)

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