Here are some good ways to be a schmuck.
Dance in the Valley of the Shadow.
The guys who wrote Protocols went around saying, "The international Jewish menace has taken over our government, media, and banking structure in a centrally coordinated plot to subjugate the gentile."
That's why you should think twice before posting that international Zionist organizations control our government, media, and international financial structures in a centrally coordinated campaign to subjugate the Palestinians (or the American taxpayers, or whomever). Because an awful lot of people are going to hear it as heavily historically resonant, and not in a good way, either. Your message will be all screwed up by historical echoes you cannot ignore once they start to echo.
Yes, folks, there are powerful Jewish organizations out there, and there are powerful Zionist organizations too. But they don't run the US, they don't run the media, they don't run the EU, they don't run the World Bank, they don't run US elections, and so on. And they don't run DKos.
You can insist otherwise -- you can insist that the Zionist Powers That Be are the true force driving American politics, for example -- but when the dance you're dancing turns out to have many, many of the same steps as one that's usually danced in jackboots, maybe it's time to examine those steps in the light of the well-established, well-documented history of antisemitic rhetoric.
If you think "I'm talking about Zionists, not Jews" is a sufficient prophylactic to make variations on old antisemitic memes nice and sanitary, just remember that Lee Atwater said that the infamous Willie Horton ad was about criminals, not blacks.
If you're wandering anywhere near the valley of the shadow of Protocols, even if you're talking about Zionists, get the hell out. Don't be like Lee Atwater defending the racist Willie Horton ad. Don't be a schmuck.
Pull the Nazi Analogy.
The one thing that you can count on when the demonization of Israel gets flowing is that some irate soul is going to whip out the Nazi analogy.
Sure, every comparison in the world is fair game. You can compare a piano to Isabella Rosellini: they both have legs. It's a perfectly valid analogy. What you can't do is pretend that saying doing so, you've said anything close to useful or enlightening about either pianos, Rosellini, or legs.
But the Nazi analogy isn't just dumb and vacuous to the point of uselessness. It's also poisonous. Why? Because it has an emotional impact on Jewish readers that it won't have on other readers. It's designed to twist the knife in a deep historical wound for Jewish readers in a way that it doesn't for most other readers. It's ethnically selective. This one has that extra nasty component, the implication that "you're all just as bad as the guys who killed your grandma." Needless to say, that's a very different impact than "you're all just as bad as the guy who killed someone else's grandma." It's much more visceral. Which is why some folks love using it so much: it wounds Jewish Zionists in a particularized way.
So here's the balance. It's an unilluminating and inapt analogy that conveys nothing except your hatred of Israel and does nothing but make Jews hate you for very personal reasons. Not much of a balance, is it.
Don't do it. Don't be a schmuck.
Quote a Holocaust denier.
Such a thing could never happen here, right?
Only a few days ago, the banned polemicist schmuck Ben Heine came back under an elaborate new zombie disguise -- an Italian architect with a Spanish website (!?) -- and gave us a big dose of glop from a paranoid "investigative journalist" named Greg Felton. The Felton piece was full of rage and demonization, trying to "prove" that Israel is essentially a Nazi state. (Yeah, very tasteful stuff. See above.)
Since no demonization of Israel is too demonic for some people, Zombie Ben Heine rushed that magnificent material to us without bothering to check out who Greg Felton actually was. Turns out he's one of those gee-ee-eniuses who goes, "Well, I'm not saying there was no gas chamber at Auschwitz, just that the Auschwitz gas chamber isn't, you know, proven not to be Zionist propaganda, wink wink."
In a hurry to post your latest slab-o-cut'n'paste grey box of death about how ee-ee-eevil Israel is? At least have the courtesy to find out whether or not it's coming from some guy who thinks Adolf Hitler's gotten a bad rap.
And if it transpires that you point us to your blog, and it transpires that a comment on your blog contains the URL of a well-known Holocaust denier, don't be surprised when your credibility makes a massive collapse. You can leave the link up -- after all, it's your blog -- but to willingly link yourself to people like Michael Hoffman is to willingly destroy your own credibility, and to say "so what" once you know what it is, is to forfeit any claims of good faith. (This is also not a made-up example.)
Don't be a Ben Heine, folks. Don't be a schmuck.
Call the other guys robots.
Every now and then, we hear on DKos that some great and secret organization named GIYUS or Megaphone or the Jesuit Telegraph (okay, the last one is a Pynchon reference) is secretly conducting a blog-warfare campaign by feeding pro-Israel people talking points. What we don't hear, of course, is any form of actual evidence that such a thing has led to any posts on DKos.
Here's the thing. Let me let you in on a secret. All my posts written by Richard Nixon, whose death was faked and is now currently in a space capsule somewhere in the asteroid belt, where he is being sustained by alien technology from the planet Mongo, which he tells me had actually been named "Trenton New Jersoid" until the guy who drew Buck Rogers decided to paint his fear of the yellow invasion all over it with his ethnically selective name.
Prove it's not true. What, you can't?
The accusation that some unspecific posts you can't actually point to by unspecific posters you can't actually name are somehow -- but unprovably, natch -- produced and directed by The Great Zionist Machine is simply a way to tar the entire pro-Israel side with a blanket FUD attack accusation that can't be disproven. As such, it's obnoxious and infantile. Don't do it, folks. Don't be a schmuck.
Consider Troll Rating a Massively Multi-Player Game.
Oh, no! Somebody on your side said something monumentally trollrate-baitly, and he's gathering donuts! Quick, Batman, to the uprate button! We must save the post at all costs! We must not allow trollworthy comments to be hidden, because that would be a victory for the other side!
Folks, if I say something utterly stooopid (and, being human, that's "when," not "if"), toss me a donut. Folks on my side, if I deserve the donut, let me enjoy it in peace in a nice little corner of Hidden Comments. At the moment, I have no hidden comments at all, which surprises me, because I know how stupid I can get when the moon lines up with Stultus Geminorum, the Star of Stupid.
If you have a philosophical problem with the whole idea of troll rating and comments being hidden and make a practice of "rescuing" hidden comments as if they were simply lost at sea, then found your own site and set your own self-policing mechanism instead of trying to put a stick through the spokes of the self-policing mechanism here. Don't be a schmuck. The system being set up like it is isn't an accident.
Say I'm calling for censorship.
There's a big difference, incompletely observed, between the following two statements:
"You are forbidden from saying X."
"You're a schmuck for saying X. You would be less of a schmuck if you stopped saying X."
If someone tells you the latter, don't react as if you've been told the former. A whole lot of the meta discussion here pivots on the distinction, or lack of same, between the two. If you want to howl "censorship" because you're being attacked for brainlessly using the Nazi analogy, go ahead; you'll be wrong, though. When I tell you not to use the Nazi analogy or other schmuckisms I've listed here, I'm not saying "don't do it or you'll be kicked out of DKos," or "Don't do it or face the wrath of the Elders," I'm saying, "don't do it unless you like convincing a wide swath of your readers that you're one of the two guys they named Play-Doh after, and you're not named Play."
You have the same right to utter clueless statements about Israel and Jewish history as you do about everything else in the world, Beowulf to Bee Gees. But when you're told you're being a schmuck, don't start cursing the International Zionist Conspiracy To Shut You Down Solely For Your Daring Criticism of Israel Because You Couldn't Possibly Be a Schmuck. Don't be a schmuck about being a schmuck.
Remind us that the other side is eee-ee-ee-eevil.
The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is about as knotty as it gets. It ties together history (recent and ancient), theology, sociology, politics, technology, and hummus. Fortunately, there's a simple solution: declare one side to be evil and the unique source of the entire conflict.
A simple solution, and a wrong one.
But the same solution is sometimes offered here. "Oh, this discussion would be just great if only those Other Folks would get past adolescence and vindicate our superior wisdom as all intelligent people ultimately must."
Well, you can wait for that day if you want, but it's about as likely to happen as Steven Spielberg winning the Kentucky Derby riding Francis Ford Coppola. Neither side of this discussion is demonic. There are serious errors of judgement on both sides. I happen to think more of those errors are made by the Palestinian leadership than the Israeli leadership, including a genuinely tragic series of bobbles that have repeatedly cost them the statehood pennant, but believing that doesn't make me eee-ee-eevil, any more than believing the opposite would make me eee-ee-eevil.
Is there anyone here who doesn't believe that the Palestinians have deep and legitimate grievances against the Israelis? On the other hand, is there anyone here who believes that the flood of "Zionists Ate My Baby" posts that appear here, from a very small collection of posters, reflects anything like the proportionality of Israel's bad side, either in the I/P conflict or the world at large? Is there anybody out there who thinks what DKos really needs is more-than-daily one-sided "Look at how eeevil Israel is" diaries? If pro-Israel posters did the same thing -- "Here's my Palestinians are Demons Post for Tuesday, a big slab of cut-and-paste from www.demonize.org" -- it would be just as pointless, just as counterproductive.
Don't be pointless and counterproductive. Don't be a schmuck.
Call for censorship.
The call for censorship, among those who are calling for it, is based on a simple idea: it's simply not possible to act like adults when talking about Israel and Palestine. This is, to quote that deep thinker and military geeeenius George Bush, the soft bigotry of low expectations.
The whole issue that led to this wave of meta meta meta is the recognition -- spurred by the egregious example of Shergald -- that although this site hosts many fascinating and productive discussions, the one on Israel and Palestine isn't currently one of them.
The problem lies not in the topic but in ourselves. Too many people being schmucks.
The solution isn't censorship. The solution is: don't be a schmuck.
Edit -- And now, a Bonus Schmuckism: Say it's Springtime For Hitler!
How many true antisemites are there on DKos? I can only think of one. (Chances are, you're thinking of the same one.) There are a few who skirt the margins, but not more than half a dozen. It's not Springtime for Hitler.
It's okay to be sensitive to the historical precedent, and it's okay to be concerned when someone starts dancing the Protocols Polka, except with the word "Jew" scratched out and the word "Zionist" put in its place. But it's far more likely, when someone starts saying stuff that's reminiscent of the Bad Old Days, that the correspondence is not intentional. Most people -- stand by for a telegram from the No Sh*t Sherlock Agency -- just aren't as familiar with the history of antisemitic rhetoric as Jews are, and are probably not going out of their way to phrase things in Protocol-esque format just to trip your tripwire.
I try to reply to those who have wandered into stuff heavily resonant with traditional antisemitic rhetorical forms by educating them -- explaining a little bit about why saying "Those Zionists control the news" gets my hackles up. Of course it gets my hackles up -- not only because it ain't true, but because it's a canard with a capital "C" and that rhymes with "P" and that stands for Protocols. Don't make your reader duck canards, so to speak, even if you mean Zionists and not Jews. But don't assume that every time it happens, the poster is a cryptonazi either. Don't be a schmuck.
