Israel and views

Miscellaneous General
1

Why is it that whenever the subject of Isreal appears, at least in libertarian circles, are always loathe to criticize Israel. I don’t have an objection to criticizing Israel, since I do it all the time particulary on economic and government matters, but they criticize Isreal in such a way that it suggests anti-semitism. It goes something like this:

“Israel is commiting genocide against the palestineans”. Last time I checked, it was the their own governments that are causing misery and Israel just wants to be left alone. the other arguement goes “the Israeli’s are an aprtheid nation”. I at best feel unconvinced unless there is forced religious favoritism, which is immoral.

So how can anyone be a libertarian, when you harbor anti-semitic thoughts? The libertarians who criticize Israe, do they hate jewish people. If so, then they are not libertarians. Yet the criticism they level against Israel is not used against other nations that really do commit serious human rights abuses, such as China, Saudi Arabia etc

Any thoughts?

2

I’m not sure every criticism of Israel is about Jewish people or stems from anti-semetism.

3

What blueline said. I oppose the state of Israel, but I’m no anti-Semite. I know for sure that there are a lot of Israelis that don’t like Israel either. Particularly the ones who have been jailed for not serving in their military.

Every country has the right to defend itself, but Israel’s military carries its “defense” way too far.

4

‘Every country has the right to defend itself, but Israel’s military carries its “defense” way too far.’

Governments don’t have rights.

5

What’s Jewish about the government of the state of Israel?

Clayton -

6

Every single state is founded on violence, Israel founding is very recent, therefore the violence necesary to stablish that state is fresh on the eyes and minds of people.

We just saw the founding of a state in front of our eyes and saw the brute military force it is based on.

7

I’ve pointed out on other threads how Rothbard had a blind spot about Israel, citing examples and proofs. My guess is that it was related to some kind of struggle with his Jewish identity. So if the head of the group is anti Israel, it will rub off on his followers who trust him.

Also, the Arabs are very wealthy and pay off plenty of people to bang the drums. Jimmy Carter comes to mind. After decades of this, it has become part of the accepted obvious that Israel is the very embodiment of evil.

Player, by your logic, Israel should have taken a back seat by now to many newer states, like Bangladesh and Serbia and Croatia and many African states and all the -stans that popped up with the breakup of the USSR.

Should we not be hearing about these people a bit more? http://www.cracked.com/article_18850_7-modern-dictators-way-crazier-than-you-thought-possible.html

8

No, because Israel is different, it’s a whole completely new foreign country of foreign people created inside another by military means pushing the inhabitants away and expanding since then (and I bet it will continue to the “Great Israel”, check any maps of how the land under Israeli control has grown).

It also used, as all the states, deceit, like manipulating christians against muslims so that in that weakness it will get benefits.

It’s a fact that all the anti-muslim hysteria is Jewish created, why is so weird that before Israel was created there was no anti-muslim hysteria? And why are the recent wars benefiting Israel and approved by their massive control of the US Government?

And Israel is not hated because of Rothbard, it is hated because it is one of the worse states of the world, more violent, war-mongering, anti-human rights, torturing, racist, religious-fanatic and parasitic living on tax-payers and subsidies of foreign sucked puppet nations (like Germany and US).

It is the definition of rogue and terrorist state, that has nuclear weapon without signing the treaty, it attacks all the countries it want, even the US as in the USS Liberty and gets away with it, and murders american soldiers with their israeli made explosive traps and israeli special forces snipers, that they disguise as muslim.

They had been caught time and time again planting bombs disguised as muslims. They are hated because they are evil.

After the Soviet Union, the worst threat to peace right now is Israel, ironically, a lot of high ranking soviet generals and intelligence officers moved to Israel when it was created!

So stop playing naive, one can distinguish between individuals, jews, but one can rightly state that MOSAD and Israel are the worst and most dangerous organizations currently active. And that they are bringing the world to nuclear annihilation and creating hated in half the world for their political game. So, don’t claim that racist, anti-immigration, subsided state of lying hypocrites living on the backs of germans and americans are nothing but manipulative cowards protected in their own GHETO.

Israel is their own GHETO, the jews never had a country and had been playing with utopias all history, they were responsible for the genocidal utopia that was the Soviet Union, that was 90% jewish, and any, any check on the high ranking members and commissars proved it. East Europeans know that and rebelled and launched progroms against the jews the moment they run afraid of the coming German offensive. They later rebelled in Hungary and were crushed, under their tanks, but that isn’t told in the media because it was a revolution against jewish domination.

Now they are trying to create another Utopia, Israel, and one can easily see the results.

You can close your eyes, but the facts are there. And if you talk about Serbia and Croatia you could talk about the NATO crimes and their slave trade and sex trafficking. I bet you even believed NATO were the good guys there. And in other artificial states there is trouble too, like in the artificial frontiers created by the British Empire and the Soviet Union, check latest Georgia/NorthOssetia, or troubles in Kyrgyzstan, or Kashmir, or the weakness of artificial Pakistan and India, or Africa…

9

TY for your convincing and passionate reply. It certainly convinced me about your character and intellect.

Maybe one of the Moderators will ask your permission to publish it in one of the scholarly journals here.

10

Hypocrisy. I can’t explain this inconsistency. It’s very statist in nature. I’ve commented about this before.

11

If you belive “the head of the group is anti Israel” is Rothbard then…

There are hundred ways to get into Libertarianism, there were great authors before Rothbard, from Etiene de la Boutie to Lysander Spooner. Maybe that is proof of “your intellect capabilities”. So is your claim that the hate around the atrocities of Israel is because of…Jimmy Carter!

If you want to talk about Israel, a Jewish state, what if you read the Jewish book first?

Here you got;

When you’ve finished maybe you can publish an scholarly paper!

12

How can a supposed bigot who dislikes Israeli people be anti-Semitic? People from Europe are not Semitic. Arabs and Palestinians are Semitic.

We can’t argue that “racially” those Israelis are Semitic; they look like white European people, so we can only assume they are white people. There is no easy way of proving they have a lineage that goes precisely back across thousands of years to any Semitic peoples.

China and Saudi Arabia? The governments in China and Saudi Arabia imprison a far smaller percentage of their population than the one in United States of America does, and don’t have a nearly as high frequency of incarceration for non-violent crimes as United States. But if we were supposed to be non-selective, why don’t we just go ahead and bash modern day democratic Germany for human rights abuses, since there were some serious cases of police using too much force against immigrant workers in the past? Virtually any criticism of any wrongful act anywhere will be too selective.

Israel receives its particular attention, because it is the biggest anamoly in the world; a gathering of Russian, Polish, Hungarian, German, French, and British people in what have been predominantly Muslim lands, who gave up their native language and decided to speak a scriptorial language in day-to-day life and live among alien foreigners instead of their own countrymen.

13

When you are “loathe” to criticise something it means that you dislike and avoid criticising that something.

False. It is perfectly possible to be a libertarian and to hate the Jewish, or any other, people.

Let’s at least get the basics right.

14

No that is not it. It is an anomaly because it is the last remaining Western colony in the third world. The 1945-1990 decolonialisation process meant the end of European rule in foreign lands and an independent state for the natives of the sub-saharan Africa, the Magreb, the Middle East, India and South East Asia. Everywhere except in Palestine where a colonial regime remains with the original landowners politically disenfranchised and kept in check by military means.

15

Anyone who doesn’t recognize the atrocities and oppression the Israeli state has committed, must be a statist. Either that or your a bigot. I can’t imagine someone being libertarian and not recognizing such destruction of freedom and life. You would have to be a hypocrite.

16

von Mises admired the British Empire; the very same Empire that shot down women and children in Punjab and used to do far worse things to suppress regular riots in all its colonies than Israel does. Gaza style blockades were a small drop in that ocean. He preferred British rule in the Third World anyway, because he thought it was the “greatest experiment in benevolent absolutism” ever undertaken. He also said, “Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization”.

Other than that, Rothbard was called a communist sympathiser, simply because he said that Stalin wanted nothing but peace. He obviously was not a communist sympathiser, but he believed he gave credit where it was due.

So I don’t know, there’s no such thing as a consistent libertarian. Actually, let’s be fair, libertarians are often people falling across other spectrums of thought who give or take ideas from or to that spectrum - hence you have pro-immigration and anti-immigration libertarians and whatnot. Paul Craig Roberts criticises police state measures, judical abuse, government interventions, income taxes, and all else, but he went from being a free trader to a protectionist on grounds that he felt it strengthened the wrong kind of interests (though I feel his age may have dimmed his sharpness). Ultimately, libertarian is just a word and words are meaningless.

EDIT: I do object to von Mises’ pro-Empire views, for the record, and I am still more sympathetic to Libertyandlife, but for different reasons,

17

Don’t use the word “always”. Apply methodological individualism to your analyses.

18

So what now, Rothbard’s speaking the truth disqualifies him from being a consistent libertarian?

19

I think a lot of it stems from the fact that Objectivists have always been obsessed with Israel. Mainly, because they produce a lot of technology and subjugate the ‘barbarian’ Arabs, in the eyes of Objectivists. There are also a disproportionate number from Jewish ethnicity, including Rand herself, in the leadership of this group. I suspect a lot of these people who grew up in Jewish households cannot either embrace Judaism or drop it completely; it is too deeply engrained in their psyche. So they settle for the mindfuck of supporting a completely dependent and socialist country that is in many ways Jewish and also the most secular.

It’s the same cognitive dissonance as thinking you can have police and minimal government while claiming that taxation is immoral. Or expecting police to be ‘rational’ and subjected to objective laws and never personal whim, even under a clear monopoly of force where there is no incentive or reason to do so.

20

Right, because singling out your favorite “atrocities” committed by States, and even arbitrarily ranking them, is just so… libertarian. Really anti-statist there by you to favor one criminal gang over another in a purely Statist conflict.