Monday, September 19, 2005

Racism of Israel?

This is all old stuff because the anti-Israel arguments have already been shot down, at least in my mind, but this is my personal cache of the best ones, perhaps reiterated for my own clarity, and for anyone that might have missed them.


Israel is a Racist Country

The first question I ask people that make this claim is if they have been to Israel. It's kind of hard to say that Israel is a racist country when it is full of people of different races. The majority of Israel's variant racial groups are Jews, meaning that there are Arab, Ethiopian, and various European Jews in Israel.

What they are really trying to say is that Israel is racism towards Arabs that are Muslim, but their cognitive abilities do not allow them to make such complicated arguments. Even then do Arab Muslims have state-protected rights in Israel, and there are several Supreme Court decisions concerning those rights. There are instances of discrimination, which necessitate Supreme Court decisions of that nature, but the ideology of the critics is that Israel is a racist country, in the same sense that apartheid South Africa was. Discrimination and racism are two entirely different things, and every country suffers from some degree of discrimination.

Taking it a step further, in case people don't know, there is a conflict between Arabs and Jews in that Arabs would like to see Israel dismantled. Having said that, Israel treats its Arab population extraordinarly well, granting them the rights of other citizens, such as voting, whereas if the situation were reversed, the Arab population would grant almost no civil rights to its Jewish population and probably persecute it.

If we go back to before the creation of the State of Israel, we can actually see this policy in action towards the Jews of Arab countries. For the nearly 1,400 years since Islam took sway in the Middle East, Jews (and Christians) were given the status of "dhimmi," protected peoples, which amounted to their having almost no civil rights. The Muslim state cannot be charged with being non-pluralistic, for that it definitely was, but it restricted non-Muslims severely, while the Jewish state, such as the first one under King David, did not, such as allowing non-Jews (polytheists) to sacrifice in the Temple (in Jerusalem).

And if racism is our concern, it should be noted that almost all of the Arab countries have a Jewish population of zero, with many of them, such as Saudi Arabia, barring both Jews and Christians from living there and Jews from even entering. I have seen the picture; there are two street signs on a street (perhaps on the way to the airport or to Mecca)with one saying "Muslims" and the other saying "non-Muslims." Kinda sounds like "white fountains" and "negro fountains." Those who charge Israel as being a racist state could find real racism by looking into the Arab countries that they ignore, and therefore whitewash.

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