Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbilstein | Hacker News Reader

Frankly when us Jews call out anti-Semitism, the whole room stands up to tell us what is and is not anti-Semitism. Imagine doing that to LGBT folks or other minorities. I'm not even much of an Israel supporter but it is exhausting to hear a bunch of white progressives who have never set foot in the Middle East tell me I am wrong about the criticism I hear.

Recently, folks at Rutgers have been criticizing Campus Hillel as a Zionist organization. The place where your average secular Jewish college students gets Challah bread once a semester. Yet saying "that is anti-semitic" invites a whole bunch of people to whitesplain to you why it isn't.

View on HN

If people can't criticize Israel's actions as a country without being labeled anti-Semitic, then nothing is going to get solved.

When synagogues in the UK are being vandalized with swastikas, when residents of New York and US citizens are getting beaten on Fifth Avenue, and people lament these things on social media, that is not an appropriate time to criticize Israel's action as a country. Yet this is the norm.

This reasoning is great.

When black churches are being shot up, that is not an appropriate time to criticize Uganda's action as a country.

When South Americans are being detained in cages at the border, that is not an appropriate time to criticize Venezuela's action as a country.

When Muslims are experiencing intense Islamophobia, that is not an appropriate time to criticize Syria's action as a country.

I love this absolutely brilliant smokescreen. I'm going to use it. Thank you.

I think you missed the point of my message.

Of course plenty of criticism of Israel is valid and not anti-Semitic.

It is also true that plenty of anti-Semites love to criticize Israel.

Of course plenty of accusations of anti semitism are valid.

It's also true that a vast number of them are false accusations used by Israeli racists to quash criticism of the apartheid system within Israel.

Politicians who criticize Israel legitimately are always subjected to this.

As a low-middle class white person who struggles to be heard, I find the term 'whitesplain' to be offensive. For the same reason that I find the term 'mansplaining' offensive when applied to some shy guy trying to express their opinion for the first time.

A more appropriate term would be 'richsplaining'; when a rich person tries to explain to a poor person how the world is. It's not about race, it's about wealth. It's still not 100% correlation, but it's closer.

Race is not the root.

I have posted elsewhere in this thread about the reply of "anti-Zionism" which you will find whenever someone complains about anti-Semitic attacks and prejudice in places which are very much not Zion. If it's not anti-Semitic in intent, it's monomaniacal and inappropriate to the point where it's anti-Semitic in practice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28037722

Reply on news.ycombinator.com