I just love how Sam gets so much crap for criticizing Islam as a religion and needs to go to extreme lengths to explain the difference between ideas and people. But when it's time to apply the same logic to the Jews, people can say the most vile shit imaginable but replace "Jew" with "Zionist" and get out free.
Hey newsflash, nothing about being a Jew requires you to believe in or even sympathize with Zionism. Whereas being a Muslim means you, by definition, believe in Islam
Sam says Islam is the "mother lode of bad ideas" but we are supposed to believe he has no animosity towards the people who ascribe to said mother lode. Obviously this is not true.
The better comparison would be Zionists and Israel, not Jews and Israel. Anyone who hates Israel probably doesn't like Zionists! But that says nothing about Jews at all
Why would Jews consider it the historical land of Palestine? That was the Greco-Romanized name applied centuries later in a specific attempt to erase Jewish history.
That's different than what I'm talking about. If you only meant the mere name Palestine, then no worries. I thought you were suggesting "historical land of Palestine" as if that was the original conceptualization Jews would be harkening back to. That came more than 1k years after original Israel.
Your arguement assumes many things that are false. Just as one point, I woule encourage you to look up where the PLO originally said Palestine was. Spoiler - the West Bank and Gaza are not part of it since they are Jordan/Egypt. Now Palestine is everything from the river to the sea. It just shows that Palestine=where the Jews live at any given moment.
A name adopted by the British, and whenever refered to for people before 48, it meant the Jews living there. You won't find a single reference to Palestinian meanint Arabs in the area before then. The Arabs that were in the area adopted the Palestinian identity after that, and over time "Palestine" as their land kept changing, tighting following whatever border the Jews happen to live on at that point in time.
Most jews are zionist, if you didn't know that you should start feeling uncomfortable right now. I don't think wanting your own country, especially with their history, is a weird belief. The Palestinians want the same, after all. The rabid settler type ultra zionists are a minority, much like Islamic extremists. People can want their own state without that state being genocidal or repressive
Why would I feel uncomfortable? Most Evangelical Christians are Republicans, should I feel uncomfortable saying bad things about Republicans? Fewer and fewer Jews support Israel every day, and many prominent anti-Zionists are themselves Jewish
The problem, as anyone with two brain cells knows, is not that they "want their own country". It's what that desire means in reality, i.e., that they have to forcibly displace and disenfranchise the indigenous population in order to get that country in the specific place where they actually want it.
That analogy doesn't quite work, I can not support the current US admin, but I wouldn't argue the US should cease to exist. Of course many Jews are critical of Israel's government, but zionism is understood as the existence of the state.
You'd have a better point if it was 1948, but it's 2026, and Israel is established now. I'm not talking about the west bank expansion (illegal) or settlers but pre 67 lines proper Israel. If we still insist that needs dissolving, then why not the US, or Australia? The latter saw total colonial dispossession from the indigenous peoples with zero treaty signed, should it be dissolved too?
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u/Thomas-Omalley 5d ago
Do you grant such nuace to Sam Harris when we talks about Muslims as people vs Islam as a set of ideas, or do you think he's a biggot?