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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

It's not really that complicated, people pretend they are boycotting Israel because of issues with Israel, while in reality it's just antisemitism.

The proof comes when you ask them who else are they boycotting, and it's no one. You get even more proof when you start asking them detailed questions about what's going on in Israel and they have no clue. Or they say things that aren't actually true.

The 1% who are intellectually honest about it are easily dwarfed by the 99% who are doing it out of hate.

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So what you are saying that it is okay to restrict freedoms based on guesses of people intentions?

> and it's no one

Which means they don't boycott other jews owned business, which invalidates your mental gymnastics.

> when you start asking them detailed questions about what's going on in Israel and they have no clue

So it is okay to outlaw boycotting if X country if some of the boycotters deny to share their intent?

Those claims would benefit from supporting details. Somehow you know the hearts of humans?

I'm Jewish, the amount of antisemitism online has skyrocketed, and virtually all of it pretends to be "legitimate criticism of Israel", because blatant antisemitism gets blocked, but if you pretend it's about Israel then you confuse people, and you don't get blocked.

In all of my time online I've encountered actual criticism of Israel only a handful of times. Under 1%.

One easy way to tell: Are they criticizing all of Israel, or a specific policy?

This has more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Ds_of_antisemitism

I don't know, I think you're being way too dismissive about many people's intentions.

I've had plenty of arguments here on HN about Israel, and it doesn't seem like most people are just antisemites. Many people have concrete, legitimate criticisms of Israel (and frankly, there's plenty to criticize.)

Sure, some could be motivated by antisemitism, but 99% of people? That doesn't seem right to me. At all.

(E.g. in most arguments, anyone even a little knowledgeable will argue specifically against settlements or against certain actions of the IDF, not just blanket "against Israel existing.")

While you may(or not) be right about rise in antisemitism, there also seems to be a lot more videos surfacing of stuff that doesn't reflect well on Israel. I consider myself pretty unbiased in this, I have absolutely no opinions about ethnicity etc and have often come to defense of Israel in some discussions but I can honestly say that my own view has soured a little bit. The killing(and denial) of that journalist, and that video of a funeral procession spring to mind. Starting to remind me of Northern Irish loyalists(who happen to revere Israel), which imo is a pretty ugly movement. Nothing about this is inherent to the people or country but (I think) like loyalism, comes from a degree of insecurity that can manifest as truculence

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