Agreed - and that's a good thing. As I suggested earlier, its not the motivation I question in your writing, its the invocation of tradition-laden language that you use to do so. I find your reportage and ability to point out painful contradictions in my community's politics to be terrific.
Its the ideological surpluses of your interpretation of such events that elicits the kinds of responses Marc Cooper issued forth. There's no reason to give folks like that ammunition. If you can't figure out a better way to communicate these things aside from being a very good reporter, let the facts speak for themselves. They're revealing enough.
Joel
On May 4, 2006, at 8:46 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> On 5/4/06, Joel Schalit <managingeditor at tikkun.org> wrote:
>> Hey Yoshie -
>>
>> One good way to avoid charges of anti-Semitism when you write about
>> Jewish politics is to rethink using language like "not good for the
>> Jews," or "it does not help American Jews."
>>
>> Help us from what - the threat of persecution? You can see what I am
>> getting at. There is a history to this kind of discourse that's
>> loaded with prejudicial assumptions about Jews living under the
>> threat of punishment for what we do and what we say.
>
> What's fair and what's real are different, unless we live in an ideal
> world. It is not fair for Americans to be held responsible for the US
> power elite's actions overseas, especially considering that most of
> them aren't even aware of what's going on. It's not fair for Jews to
> be held responsible for Tel Aviv's actions, over which a majority of
> them -- including those who live in Israel -- have no control
> whatsoever and to which many of them are positively opposed. And yet,
> the reality is that US imperialism increases anti-American hatred, and
> the Israeli occupation increases anti-Jewish hatred. If I suspect
> that a Sudan intervention gone wrong would increase anti-Jewish
> hatred, I don't think that I'm being paranoid or anti-Semitic -- I'm
> being realistic.
>
> Taking leadership for something puts one in a position to take credit
> if it goes well and to take responsibility for it if it goes wrong.
> If Bush wants to do Sudan, let him own the issue, wholly.
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
>
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