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Ethan Heitner On Linking Anti-Israelism With Anti-Semitism
posted September 2, 2010
 

What do you mean by " I do like the turn-around from the traditional survey of anti-Israel, potentially anti-Semitic cartoons in Arab media organs"?

The piece you linked to clearly states that it equates "anti-Israelism" with "anti-Semitism" which is the sort of absurd obnoxiousness that I thought we had in general evolved past at this point in the debate. I don't think any of the cartoons displayed are remotely anti-semitic and I think when you link to such stuff you are giving a platform to a sort of McCarthyite attack on criticisms of Israel.

Tom Spurgeon Responds: What I meant the by the sentence you quote is that I liked the fact that it was targeting progressive media criticisms as opposed to criticism in the Arabic media, which seems to me a more typical article that gets written.

As to the rest of it, I made it abundantly clear I wasn't endorsing the piece or any view within it other than the seriousness of the work and the potential interest of the subject matter. I'm sure there are many people who find your views as strident and idiotic as you seem to think the viewpoint of the writer.

If you don't like my strategy to defer to individual readers' smarts in processing articles like that, you'll probably have to find another comics-related blog to read -- thank you for your patronage. On particularly sticky and super-loaded issues with hundreds of years of history involved that would require a small book for me to unpack just my own set of views, which even then may not be that well-informed, I'm confident that when asked to and clearly warned ahead of time my readers can make their own judgments, just as you have. You may prefer that I not qualify my links in this way, or admit that I'm operating from limited information on other posts, or making a guess on a third, but please at least grant me the consideration allowed by that approach.