jews on hc for duff646
Duff646, interesting that you have picked me out for special mention in your post. I seem to have gotten (horrible word) under the skin of a number of the Israeli lobby on this forum.
I have to ask myself why that is. Is it because though I have jewish ancestry on my mothers side myself, I have chosen to take an opposing view to the zionists on this site? Snooker called my claim to being Jewish a lie and, of, course that's something I can't prove over the internet but from my point of view it really doesn't matter whether or not I'm Jewish. Surely my view point is just as valid either way. I told Snooker about my background to avoid being called antisemitic, to show I had no axe to grind but it was futile. Of course, in Snooker's sense of the word, I am antisemitic but I'll come back to that later.
Recently, I've thought about this a good deal. Do I think of myself as a Jew? The answer is not really. My Polish grandmother was gassed by Hitler. My parents themselves were not practising Jews even though they were forced to emigrate from Europe and arrived in Australia in 1938. I went to a Church of England Sunday School until I was old enough to say to my parents this is bulls*it and from that time on, I've had no time for religion of any sort. To put it glibly, "religion is the root of all evil..." Nevertheless, all that said, my friends are aware of by background and there are the Jewish jokes that come my way often enough for me to remember that background.
Others can correct me but If my memory is right there was little enough discussion of Israel and Jewish matters before the advent of Snooker to this forum. His arrival seemed to crystalise out and polarise several groups. On the one side there were the zionists themselves, Snooker and Yak and there were also the Christian fundamentalists such as B&B, dave R etc who supported the zionists because of the scriptural prophesies. On the other side there was a small group of what I would call true antisemitics. In addition you had by far the largest group of people who simply disagreed with the viewpoint Snooker was trying to promulgate.
Are these people antisemitic? Am I antisemitic? I read just recently an a definition of antisemite as anyone a jew says is an antisemite. On this basis then, the answer is yes.
I think however that what I and many other posters were trying to say was that they took issue with Israel's underlying philosophy (as represented in microcosm by Snooker) in attempting to deal with its problems. We looked at the many years of escalating hard line approach by Israel and its failure to make any progress and said "this will never work, there must be a political solution".
So Duff646, I did feel galvanised to respond to snooker because I felt the material he posted was slanted, filled with hate and not positive in the sense that was needed to solve the problems at hand. I would like to see an equitable solution to the problem just as much as you but I think the snooker approach made more enemies for the Jews than friends and I felt the need to say so. I make no apology for that.
