Friday, January 09, 2009

Italian Stallions

Italian officials strongly repudiated a call by a small, leftist union to boycott Jewish (not Israeli) shops in "protest" of the Gaza operation.
Rome's mayor and provincial president went shopping at Jewish-owned stores after a trade union called for a boycott to protest Israel's attacks on Gaza.

Politicians across the spectrum condemned the boycott appeal by the Flaica-CUB union, a small, independent leftist union in the retail services and food sector, saying it was reminiscent of the Fascist era. The boycott call was announced in a flier and Flaica-CUB chief Giancarlo Desiderati told newspapers that a list of shops was being drawn up.

"It's an idea that has an undeniable anti-Semitic flavor and that recalls the darkest pages of our history," Provincial President Nicola Zingaretti said after meeting Jewish shopkeepers Thursday in the historic Ghetto neighborhood.

Mayor Gianni Alemanno, joined by Rome's Jewish community president Riccardo Pacifici, bought two shirts and a tie from a Jewish-owned clothing store in another neighborhood and expressed "firm and intrasigent condemnation" for the boycott call. He recalled that such calls in the 1930s led to the imposition of Fascist-era anti-Semitic laws in 1938.

That's how you respond to such non-sense.

5 comments:

PG said...

This isn't just nonsense, this is really bad in a moral sense. It's not an anti-Semitic flavor, it's anti-Semitism, the genuine article. Perhaps I have been naive about the extent to which anti-Zionism has rotted into anti-Semitism among some of the left, but this certainly brings home the rank odor of bigotry.

Cycle Cyril said...

In 2007 my family and I spent Passover in Italy (I traveled all the way to Rome to have a Seder with a rabbi who I later learned was from Crown Heights Brooklyn and is a cousin of a good friend of mine from here in NJ - sometimes I wonder why I travel). The level of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic graffiti was distressing but unfortunately not unexpected.

But the level of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment on the left is not just significant but growing.

There is truly no distinction between anti-Israel/anti-Zionism beliefs and anti-Semitism. If someone wanted to wipe out the nation state of France from the history books it is only logically that they have something against the French people. And since Israel is a Jewish state, The Jewish state, it is only reasonable to assume there is anti-Semitism present.

Finally for many on the left there is a marked antipathy to the West. And Israel is a surrogate for the West for them.

PG said...

There is truly no distinction between anti-Israel/anti-Zionism beliefs and anti-Semitism. If someone wanted to wipe out the nation state of France from the history books it is only logically that they have something against the French people. And since Israel is a Jewish state, The Jewish state, it is only reasonable to assume there is anti-Semitism present.

One can't really wipe something from the history books unless one is Stalin or on a state textbook commission. If Palestinians were content with just having Israel go unmentioned in their history books, I'd say let 'em (ditto if they can't cope with evolution).

I assume you mean "If someone wanted to wipe out the nation state of France from the map," since that is a more relevant document for the current status of a nation-state. And if what someone wanted to do was simply get rid of France as a nation-state -- say, merge it into Switzerland -- rather than to commit genocide against the people inhabiting, then no, I don't think that makes the person anti-French people qua people, just anti-France qua nation-state. This too might be a bad sentiment (what's your problem with France as a nation-state? we should ask), but it is not at all comparable to the genocidal impulse you're trying to ascribe.

The comparison is also conceptually wretched. There aren't really "French people" anywhere except in France; people can be linguistically or even culturally French outside France, but if there were no France, there would nothing identifiable as French. In contrast, Jews were very much identifiable as Jews a couple millenia before the establishment of Israel as a nation-state, and they have lived and continue to live all over the world. Israel as a nation-state is a modern invention; Jews as a people, Judaism as a religion, Hebrew as a language, etc. predate modernity.

Finally for many on the left there is a marked antipathy to the West. And Israel is a surrogate for the West for them.

For Easterners on the left, perhaps. For Italians, Israel is an effective "surrogate for the West"? If you live in the West, why do you need a surrogate for your own location?

Cycle Cyril said...

There have been several instances in which a nation/people/empire/culture were essentially destroyed. Carthage is one example and another is Coptic Egypt, which was predominantly Christian in the 7th Century and is now less than 10% Christian with a virtual elimination of the Coptic language and culture.

In both of these instances, and I am not talking about a "merger" of any type, the desire was to eliminate a nation/empire and its culture either by genocide of its people or cultural genocide, either quickly or slowly.

The desire of the anti-Zionists is clearly the elimination not just the concept of a Jewish nation but of Jews. This is evident in the numerous anti-Semitic signs you can easily see in the anti-Israel rallies over the past several weeks.

Your implied expectation that Jews can continue to survive without Israel, unlike the French (why do you have such low expectations of them?), is nice to hear but the events requiring such survival would be too horrible to bear.

Anti-westerns don't need a surrogate which they have amply demonstrated in the past. Israel for many makes an additional target for them as a Western country directly fighting barbaric forces.

PG said...

Your implied expectation that Jews can continue to survive without Israel, unlike the French (why do you have such low expectations of them?), is nice to hear but the events requiring such survival would be too horrible to bear.

How did Jews survive before the creation of Israel as a nation-state? (They clearly managed it for rather a lot of centuries.) There are many more Jews outside Israel than inside it; 5.7 million in North America alone, compared to 5.5 million in Israel. There are not more people who identify as French outside France than inside it.

"The French" did not exist before France. I'm not sure why you think there was an identifiable group called "the French" before there was a nation-state called France.