American Dream wrote:This label can and does encompass a diverse swathe of humanity- everyone from little kids to the boss hog Israelis, including also people living exterior of Palestine who are politically inactive.
So my concern is how we can be completely honest about the hardcore perpetrators and planners and yet distinguish them from those who are somehow complicit but not as much, from those who are pretty much innocents- young children, for example.
Although people might sometimes paint in very broad brush strokes with regards to "Nazis", "Republicans" "Americans" and et cetera, the same kind of principle would apply to all these groups also. In this particular case it would have to encompass also "Christian Zionists" many of whom are a kind of sheeple guilty only of believing what some tele-evangelist told them, but having done little to actually hurt any Palestinians.
So- and this is a more than rhetorical point, I really don't have a quick and easy answer- how then can we talk about "the Zionists" as a group and still hold individual people responsible, to the degree that they really are responsible?
I don't know the answer to your question, first of all because to me it's self-evident that any reference to, "zionist crimes" or "American crimes" is short-hand for the actions of responsible adults who commit or incite atrocities, usually as a consequence of decisions taken by political authorities. The idea of "collective" guilt is, to me, itself a thinly-veiled racist concept, regardless of whether the advocate for this idea is referring to the collective guilt of "his own kind" or that of others; "collective guilt" is to the war crime of "collective punishment" what "misogyny" is to "rape".
Actually, I can easily document the fact that it is Arab and Muslim children, rather than American, Jewish or Christian children whose demonization is so normalized that it doesn't raise a blip on most people's radar, particularly in America. Racist agitprop like
this article, and
this massively-circulated power-point presentation abounds, so full of outright lies and malicious distortions that it rivals the most odious Nazi propaganda from WWII, and for what? Clearly, its purpose is to inoculate readers against any outrage at Israel's well-documented targeting of children.
Similarly, in "Rules of Engagement", starring Samuel L. Jackson (who used to be one of my favorite actors, but now I want to spit at him), the entire film seems to be designed not only to vindicate, but promote the indiscriminate mass killing of Arab civilians, including women and children. The film has been described by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee as "probably the most vicious anti-Arab racist film ever made by a major Hollywood Studio," which is saying a hell of a lot. It stoops so low as to portray a crippled little girl, maybe 8 or 9 years old, whom the audience is first led to pity, before she's revealed as a crazed fanatic killer during the climax of the film, when the American hero is forced to shoot and kill her in self-defense (to the audience's cheers and applause).
Pentagon participation in the film led the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to urge Secretary of Defense William Cohen to rectify his department’s policy to prevent the Pentagon from being associated with any future anti-Muslim stereotyping on screen.
But last week, at the Pentagon’s regular briefing session, spokesman Kenneth Bacon explained that his department’s primary consideration is to make sure that "movies provide a fair and, hopefully accurate, portrayal of the military." He also said that studios "have a right to make the movies any way they want to make them. We pay attention to how they portray the military, when we decide whether to support the movie or not."
http://www.alhewar.com/RulesEngage.htm
Try to imagine the Pentagon making such a response to the ADL, if the character of the little girl in question had been Jewish. I can't, either.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of similar examples. In contrast, within the anti-zionist repertoire, I'm not aware of any analogous organized incitement to murder against even small children and other innocent people. As for the infamous "suicide bomber", there is a huge difference between describing the unbearable conditions that can and do cause certain individuals to commit such acts, and defending the murder of innocent people, including children. Condemning the suicide-bomber's crime without also recognizing and trying to change the relentlessly grim context in which he or she acted, and/or "punishing" the innocent family or neighborhood or the entire Arab population and making their lives even more unbearable, is yet another example of zionist hypocrisy and sham morality that is received sympathetically by many people in the West who consider themselves civilized and virtuous.
Seriously, I don't mean to belabor the point, I was just thinking about your question and your claim that "
this label [Zionists] can and does encompass a diverse swathe of humanity- everyone from little kids to the boss hog Israelis, including also people living exterior of Palestine who are politically inactive." I just don't see this as an issue. On the contrary, it is the targeted victims and opponents of zionism who are normally subjected to such blanket character assassinations, with the consequences we know.
PS: Michael Hoffman is an vicious idiot -- I've actually read some of his stuff on the net, and he indiscriminately mixes fact, fiction and outrageous distortions in service of what is unambiguously a racist agenda. Ironically, other than the fact that he substitutes "Jews" for "Arabs" or "Muslims", his tactics are indistinguishable from those of the zionists. His message is, however, usually delivered in a deceptively scholarly tone that could easily fool those who lack sufficient knowledge or experience with that sort of thing. I'm sure he catches far more naive "inquiring minds" (just as zionist propaganda does) than rabid, hate-driven ones, with his net.
c2w: You're right. But Stephen T. Jones, I believe, is in a much better place, having delivered the message encoded in his life and death, like each and every human being. He doesn't need anything from any of us now. The onus is on us wretches who are still here, to figure out what all those messages mean, and use them to evolve ourselves out of the stinking swamp we've made, instead of digging ourselves further in.
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
