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Comment by huevosabio | Hacker News Reader

> Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.

> Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor

> Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

> Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

...

Many of the examples make sense, but these four above are absurd.

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> Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

I draw comparisons to Roman Empire, would that please them better? Because Roman Empire also had racist expansionist state policies.

You can call the Roman Empire many things but to call them racist is very anachronistic

Romans called barbarians anyone who is not from the Roman Empire, I don't think Israel thinks any better of its Muslim neighbors. And Jews had pretty bad experience under the Roman Empire in then called Judaea and now Palestinians have pretty bad experience under Israel. Palestinians are Jews of the Islamic world as well as Kurds.

The Romans never referred to the Greeks, Jews or Egyptians as barbarian. If they did it certainly wasn't with great frequency.

It almost always targeted at the tribal Anglo, Celtic or Germanic peoples. And in these circumstances it was really an insult at their style of government rather than their ethnic identity.

Wasn't the insult to the way their languages sounded, i.e. a onomatopoetic word?

Genocide is human beings at their worst. Suppressing the condemnation of genocide means any speech can be suppressed.

How so? Double standards for the only Jewish state seems like a pretty clear example of antisemitism, at least.

(It's usually difficult to decisively prove that someone is applying a double standard, but I think here we're assuming that was somehow firmly established.)

On that one (and many of the Israel-related ones) I think the problem is that it implicitly assumes that because you do, you do it because of antisemitism.

But I could have double standards for all type of countries! I tend to hold the US at a higher standard than most countries for almost anything, and I think everyone holds Germany to a much higher standards with respect to minority rights (particularly, Jews) than other countries.

I think people overindex on Israel as "the only Jewish state", and less as "just another country". I wish we could entirely separate the identity of the Jewish people and the state of Israel at least in the discourse. It would make everything healthier.

All of the mentioned bullet points could be applied to other countries.

While I think there's quite a lot of antisemitism out there, I find it questionable trying to deduce antisemitism. Explicitly expressed antisemitism itself is something else. I also find it very questionable to redefine the term that it includes deductions.

If there's some universal principle underlying your treatment of the US, I wouldn't really call that a double standard, assuming the principle is based on things like economic or military capabilities and not race, national identity, etc.

Why is criticism of the only Jewish state antisemitism but then whites can’t even think of having their own state?

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