Hate Speech
Imagine that a leading American Muslim called a rally in New York and said the following:
“We have an anti-Islamic president. His premise is false. The narrative is false. The Judaization of the narrative must stop. It must stop with the truth. And truth is the new hate speech.
“I ask you, what is a terrorist? I reject that term. I don’t want anyone ever to use it again. It’s a Muslim living in the Palestinian homeland. There are no terrorists in Palestine. What is Israel? It is not Israel. It is Palestine – for the Muslims. There is no occupation except the Jewish occupation of Palestine.”
I have a funny feeling that this person would be widely denounced, in the strongest possible terms, from across the political spectrum. Now, let’s flip things. The speaker is not a Muslim, but Pamela Geller, a fierce critic of Islam. She is the one calling the rally. And here is what she said in the past:
“We have an anti-Israel president. His premise is false. The narrative is false. The Islamization of the narrative must stop. It must stop with the truth. And truth is the new hate speech.
“I ask you, what is a settler? I reject that term. I don’t want anyone ever to use it again. It’s a Jew living in the Jewish homeland. There are no settlers in Israel. What is the West Bank? It is not the West Bank. It is Judea – Jew-dea – and Samaria. There is no occupation except the Muslim occupation of Israel.”
Funny, I dont’ recall the outrage over this one. As always, there are double standards of epic proportions when it comes to Israel and Palestine.
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I know you’re all about moral equivocation and stuff, but I don’t know that you can call Pam Geller a leader of anything. This just seems like reaching to me.
Oh Pammy… she has been going on and on with hate for years. It went from mildly annoying to truly incendiary and scary now.
Double standard is to put it mildly…
Pamela Geller is the co-founder of “Stop Islamization in America.” I think one would have to classify it as a “fringe group.”
One form of “Islamization” they have tried to stop is the interest free credit card. There once was a time when Christianity rejected usury. Not such a bad thing, rejecting usury, in my opinion.
I do however note a tendency to get exercised whenever someone paints Islam with broad and ungenerous brush strokes, yet very similarly broad and ungenerous brush strokes are used to paint Protestantism. Different strokes for different folks.
Honestly, I don’t think that hypothetical statement would get any reaction at all. People say just about the same thing all the time. That second paragraph reads like something I’d expect to see on this site.
You’re just being worse than goofy, Morning’s Minion. Your attempt to equivocate “settler” with “terrorist” is pure ugliness. Evil, too.
Geller might not have a significant presence, but if a Muslim of her stature made similar comments, I believe the reaction would have been different.
Ugliness? In fact, a great many Israeli settlers are terrrorists, as that is what they are precisely trying to do – terrorize the Palestinian population with the support of the Israeli military. It is the settler mentality that is thoroughly evil.
Geller might not have a significant presence, but if a Muslim of her stature made similar comments, I believe the reaction would have been different.
Maybe, but who knows? Why is the paster in Florida getting press? He’s a nobody. The press picks and chooses which stories to obsess over on no other basis than selling advertisements; it’s hard to gather much ideological information merely on the obscure nutjobs that the media cover or don’t cover.
On why Zionism is in an aberrant relation to true Judaism:
http://www.isreview.org/issues/38/zionism_antisemitism.shtml
On the “settlers”:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/17/israelandthepalestinians
On the Zionist terrorists:
http://publius-aelius.livejournal.com/583385.html
The World Zionist Youth Movement, a revanchist and colonialist movement:
http://www.betar.org.il/en/content/blogsection/3/6/
Zionist attempt to push America into war with Iran:
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/09/17/the-worms-in-the-apple/
The ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem by the Netanyahu regime:
http://www.juancole.com/2010/04/netanyahu-commits-to-colonizing-east-jerusalem-first-palestinian-expelled-under-new-policy.html
On the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that the United States is enabling:
The calculated destruction of a whole people in the Gaza:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/world/middleeast/14gaza.html?hp
Here you can actually WATCH the Zionists behaving like Nazis:
How about that? I did a little searching and found this comment on VN, written by MM:
Blackadder, you’ve stepped over the line. As much as Williamson repulses me, I would not want hm to face the kind of collective punishment meted out by the Israeli state against Gaza. Besides, as Anscombe noted in her famous essay, for a state to punish it must be legitimate. The Israeli pseudo-occupation of Palestine is wholly illegimate. One final point: I assume you are away of differences in culpability in moral theology. For a rich comfortable Brit to deny the Holocaust is a different thing entirely than an oppressed Gazan, who sees a Israeli army that abuses the symbols of the Jewish religion.
That’s awfully close to the hypothetical statement in MM’s article.