"Dude", I'll again admit that that comment was out of line.
Nevertheless, I have a hard time understanding what you hope to gain by your approach here. While you may be quite right that stating "i am only criticizing israel, not jews" is common among people who hate Jews, did you ever consider that this does not imply the inverse? It does not mean that everyone criticizing Israel hates Jews. As a programmer, you must understand this.
IMHO, the fastest way Israel support organisations can lose popular support in countries outside Israel is by calling people who criticize them (no matter how tastelessly) antisemites. I never understood why commenters like you and pro-Israel organisations appear to be so trigger happy with the term. It moves the entire discussion from the sphere of fact and opinion to the sphere of taboos.
I'll happily discuss fact and opinion with you. So whether or not Israel did right or wrong things - that's an HN-worthy discussion. But playing the antisemite card on a criticism of a government, even if this criticism is exceptionally harsh and inappropriate, that just doesn't work. I called a bunch of politicians something horrible. You called me something comparably horrible.
- criticizes israel in public, in ways anti-semites like to criticize israel
- is not anti-semitic
- does not include any clarifications in his criticism to differentiate himself from anti-semites
I think all good people know such clarifications are needed when you sound like you might be an anti-semite but actually aren't. If you leave them out, you're giving aid and comfort to anti-semitism and misleading people about your character, at best.
Note that any old clarifications won't work. Many anti-semites try to clarify how they aren't anti-semitic. A decent person would have to figure out how to say something that objectively differentiates himself. And he would care to do it if he wanted to publicly agree with the anti-semitic position on some specific point.
Nevertheless, I have a hard time understanding what you hope to gain by your approach here. While you may be quite right that stating "i am only criticizing israel, not jews" is common among people who hate Jews, did you ever consider that this does not imply the inverse? It does not mean that everyone criticizing Israel hates Jews. As a programmer, you must understand this.
IMHO, the fastest way Israel support organisations can lose popular support in countries outside Israel is by calling people who criticize them (no matter how tastelessly) antisemites. I never understood why commenters like you and pro-Israel organisations appear to be so trigger happy with the term. It moves the entire discussion from the sphere of fact and opinion to the sphere of taboos.
I'll happily discuss fact and opinion with you. So whether or not Israel did right or wrong things - that's an HN-worthy discussion. But playing the antisemite card on a criticism of a government, even if this criticism is exceptionally harsh and inappropriate, that just doesn't work. I called a bunch of politicians something horrible. You called me something comparably horrible.