Will antisemitism ever be looked at and dealt with in the same way as Islamophobia is?

[LucyWestenra]

AIBU for thinking it won’t? Because it doesn’t seem to be the case in this country or my home country (Germany).

(I just googled because it didn’t seem right to have antisemitism in lower capitals, but apparently that is correct, as I thought)

Much love to the Jewish community, wherever they are.

❤️

Give me a list of atrocities perpetrated by Jewish people.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/3/15/we-killed-dogs-israeli-troops-kill-two-children-parents-in-west-bank

Does shooting a blind seven year old with special needs count as an atrocity? Does beating a 12 year old that survived the shooting count?

That's just last week. It would be very easy to compile a list going back over a year, but I bet that won't count for you.

IMO the problem is that the term “Islamophobia” is also used as an allegation against anyone criticising (or “disrespecting”) Islam as a religion and I have a massive issue with making Islam into a special case. It’s fine to criticise ( or indeed parody) Catholicism or the C of E etc but a Muslim Labour MP seriously proposed a blasphemy law only last year - and wasn’t told by Starmer that that was totally inappropriate, which IMO he should have been. A catholic MP doing the same would have been told where to get off - and rightly so.

Racist comments about people are wrong - but why does the religion of Islam need its own specific protection that other religions don’t have? Was nurse Jennifer Melle any less a victim when a patient called her a n…. than if she’d been wearing a hijab?

In my view no religion should be immune to criticism. The issue is discrimination against people practicing it.

but I am not sure what you describe is unique to Islam. On this very post people who do not agree with the principles of Zionism have been called antisemitic.

Lord John Mann is the UK Government’s Independent Adviser on Antisemitism since 2019 I think. Is that not an equivalent?

Exactly this!!!!!

This thread is Islamophobic and i’m surprised it hasn’t been taken down.

Zionism isn’t a religion - the only way you can be against Zionism is that you don’t want the state of Israel to exist, and I don’t think anyone would say that about the USA, Australia or Canada, much less Pakistan or Turkey - all countries that were invented and entailed mass displacements of populations and in some cases actual genocide.

So the different, more negative, treatment that Israel gets compared to any other country is, if not antisemitic, certainly evidence of a troubling double standard.

I know Zionism isn’t a religion. That was pretty much my point.

i am against the principle of Zionism much the same way I am against colonialism. It’s the same thing, just justified by an old book. Israel is committing genocide, apartheid and war crimes in the name of Zionism, which is the reason they get “negative treatment”.

i have Jewish heritage my fathers grandparents were Jewish. I used to be proud of my Jewish heritage now I am actually embarrassed and ashamed to mention it because of Netanyahu and his disgusting actions..a disgrace if you ask me .

I agree that there is a double-standard, which is problematic. But all the other countries you've mentioned have fixed borders. Israel doesn't. It's trying to expand. We have issues with Putin trying to annex Ukraine. We resisted Trump trying to take over Greenland.

It's incredibly complex because of the history, and because of the atrocities commited by both Hamas and the Israeli government. And because it's some kind of proxy conflict for half the world (don't ask me which half - it's hyperbole. But there seem to be so many conflicts which relqte to this - so it's not just this, it's everything else)

But they’re not. They were attacked the day after the country was legally established and they’ve been attacked multiple times since. Defending yourself from people who attack your country is absolutely allowed - and what Israel has done is no worse than Pakistan’s massacres in Bangladesh, or than the fate of the millions who had to flee Pakistan when it was created - but nobody now says their grandchildren are entitled to fire rockets over from India, or launch attacks of rapes and kidnappings on the grounds that Pakistan shouldn’t exist and that their grandparents still have the keys to houses there.

Why do so many people seem to genuinely believe that only Israel did any of that, and that only Israel’s existence is “invalid”? There’s no such thing as a country with no right to exist - legally if it fulfils the criteria under international law (and Israel does) then that’s that. Just like South Korea, Eritrean, East Timor or Serbia.

Only Israel is expected to fulfill some extra purity test that no other country is. Why is that?

What?! At what point did I say anyone was entitled to fire rockets or rape anyone.

jeez, this is exactly what I mean, you say on thing and all of a sudden you are apparently antisemitcally encouraging rape and kidnapping.

I don’t mean I think Israel shouldn’t be allowed to exist. I do however not agree either it’s government committing genocide in the name of Zionism nor that Jewish people have some kind of devine right to take land by force from others because the bible says.

Their idea of legal establishment involved killing and displacing thousands or people. Why do you think Israel is so special that it shouldn’t face any form of resistance? Like you said, defending yourself against people who attack your country is allowed, and that is all the people of Palestine and Lebanon have ever done, but they called terrorists for it.

If there is no such thing as a country that doesn’t have the right to exist, tell that to the Israeli government about Palestine, because they seem to have forgotten that memo.

Israel isn’t expected to perform a purity test, but the behave so barbarically that the UK shouldn’t call them an ally. It’s shameful.

I can’t spend another thread arguing but just before you repeat this. I don’t think you’re talkIng about ‘Orthodox Jews’. I think you’re talking about a crazy fringe sect called Neturi Karta who are generally to be ignored in all things.

But that’s what Zionism is, nothing more: the idea that the Jewish people should have a homeland in the land of Israel. And anti Zionism is that they are not entitled to that.

I don’t know how you square the idea that Israel has a right to exist with that claim that Jewish people (don’t) have a “divine right to take land by force from others because the bible says”. That sounds like you’re saying it doesn’t. But I don’t think see how that’s relevant because it’s not the law by which Israel exists today, as I said above. No more than American historical belief in their Manifest Destiny is relevant to whether America is entitled to its existence now.

As for genocide - please. Israel didn’t attack Gaza for no reason on Oct 8th 2023 - right? And the idea they are trying to commit genocide and failing would be laughable IDF it weren’t taken so seriously by people who seem to be of normal intelligence.

If they wanted to commit genocide, wouldn’t they start with the two million Arabs who live in Israel who have Israeli citizenship? I mean, the Chinese didn’t start by attacking the Uyghurs in Mongolia or Kazakhstan while allowing their own Uighur to become doctors, pharmacists or even High Court judges, did they? They imprisoned the ones closest to them, in their own country.

And while I’m absolutely not defending everything Israel has done, and I think Netanyahu is terrible, fundamentally, what the country itself has done is respond to attacks. That the attacks were so asymmetric as to be almost suicidal is not Israel’s responsibility: there’s no law that says you can only fight back if the army attacking you is as powerful as you are.

Let me put this story to you:
I have a friend I have known for over 20 years. He is Jewish, his parents left Germany in the 1930s and his father fought for the UK in WW2. He is also "marketing" himself as an expert in a certain area and is regularly interviewed on Radio 4, for example.
However, he has never made a big thing about Jewishness.
I do remember him telling me, at least 20 years ago, that he was speaking to a German, female, colleague when it transpired that she had never met a Jew. I do not know what she expected, neither did my friend, but he said her face was a "picture".
Said colleague was a total bitch, I should add, but clearly this revelation floored her!
I have no idea about Islamophobia. All the people I have met have been charming and educated. However, my maternal grandfather, who had lived "abroad" between 1914 and 1945, did think that the next world war would be between Christians and Muslims.

I admit to not being an expert, but I think Zionism is more than wanting the state of Israel to exist. Does it not mean wanting it to exist over a very specific territory, much of which is also claimed by Palestine, and was previously considered Palestine?

And involves settling more and more
land by any means? Or perhaps some versions of Zionism do?

I’m genuinely asking at this point because as I say I’m not an expert.

I entirely think the state of Israel should exist. It’s right that Jewish people should have a state where their religion is the primary one. But I also think the Israeli govt needs to be more compromising about exactly how much land the state of Israel needs to cover and how they will work this out alongside the Palestinians, who also deserve their own country. And also the means they will
use to achieve their aims.

I don’t buy into the idea that Palestine is simply part of Jordan, or that Jordan is the land those people should be living on (as I’ve heard some people arguing). They clearly are a distinct people.

I would have thought that the above might make me anti Zionist, or at least not Zionist. But I’m really happy to hear people’s views.

Huh? I meant since unprecedented persecution

It sounds a lot like you are defending it. you are being deliberately obtuse. And you are inferring things that weren’t said. That’s boring, and it’s too late to engage with that. BollyMolly explained it well 👍

And the legal establishment of Pakistan a year later involved thousands - possibly hundreds of thousands - of deaths and the displacement of around a million people. Would that be a reason to justify their descendants who are now in India waging a decades-long war of attrition of bombing or stabbing Pakistani civilians in Lahore now? Or where they just expected to suck it up and make a new life for themselves?
What of the Greeks and Armenians who were expelled from Turkey when it was being established? If the same approach were taken as for Palestine, neither of those countries would exist because they would instead have chosen to spend the billions of dollars of international aid they’d been given in turning the border regions into training camps from which to launch raids on Turkey, and their own people would be living in squalor in places thwt were still called “refugee camps” 70 or 80 years later.

Because that’s what the Palestinians did - refused all attempts at making a country with the land they had (which initially was a lot more favourable to them than to the Jews), fighting the Jews, losing, getting more aid, using the aid to fight the Jews again, losing again, and so on.

At what point does the rest of the world tell them to do like the South Koreans, like the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis etc etc, and settle down to making their country work instead of trying to destroy their more powerful next door neighbour in a constant suicide attempt?

I completely agree OP. There’s no such thing as “hate speech” against Jewish people.
How quickly what Jews endured during WW2 is forgotten. A mere 80 years ago.

Thank you!!

I was starting to wonder if I was losing my marbles after all the hate I got on this thread!

Maybe at the point that they’ve been able to live for a few generations without continued violence, land grabs, occupation and apartheid, but we’ll never know because Israel has never stuck to it’s ‘legally established’ borders.

Disagreement with your point is not hate.