Just because you are relatively benign and kind comparing with others commiting antisemitism doesn't mean you are not racist.

I don't understand this sentence.

It isn't your comprehension that is broken.

Dan is a racist against Jews even though unlike other more serious offender he didn't call Jews pigs.

(as an example.)

What he says is: Antisemitism =  racism

Btw, FYI "Semitic" isn't just related to Jew or Hebrew people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people

Anti-semitism is a form of racism. However, while the Semitic peoples include Arabs, etc., in popular usage it just means anti-Jewish people.

I don't really know a better word that's more precise.

Could you be antizionist without being antisemitic?

Israelis and palestinians alike are so ignorant and prejudiced that they can't simply live as neighbors and have a mixed community like almost all of the rest of humanity. I suppose they deserve one another.

"Could you be anti-zionist without being antisemitic?"

Yes, you can.

I can definitely understand the "pox on both houses" viewpoint of people not in the middle.

"have a mixed community like almost all of the rest of humanity."

Really?

Yeah, I mean, we have jews, protestants, catholics, all sorts. We have pretty much every race, religion, and ethnic group imaginable and not much of any major ongoing conflict between them. At least, we aren't blowing our damned neighborhoods to hell every other week.

Sure, there are little conflicts and even some not-so-small ones here and there all over the world but nothing approaching the everyday hatred and violence to ones neighbors as what goes on over there.

After so many years of that crap and not having worked it out yet, I have to think people's genetics are materially flawed and that those people are dysfunctional and defective creatures. Maybe it's something in the water.

Neither has gotten what they wanted, nor made any real progress toward that end.

Neither has recognized that their methods are ultimately ineffective and only serve to exhaust and oppress themselves.

If efforts were ever focused in ANY direction other than hating/killing things could only ever be better. But that is consistently ignored.

Yeah, but we are not kicked out of our homeland for years, nor are we killed by millions just because some fact of ours we can't change.

If "the rest of humanity" are really nice, we wouldn't have the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda.

Or the thirty years war for that matters.

There are other conflicts, but there is nowhere on earth where blood has flowed more freely. It isn't just about conflict over the holy land though. That region of the world just seems fraught with barbarism. Even in the same ethnic and religious groups it would seem they kill each other much more often than any of the rest of us.

I don't know, between the Thirdy Years' War and World War II, we have about 300 years. How many people of the civilied world died in between?

So, I wouldn't be surprised if the conflict there would last for several hundred years.

first it was geography: as the bridge betwixt 3 continents for the out-Africa dispersal (Neanderthals were prolly crying that they were being displaced).

then it was ecology: the Fertile Crescent and domestication of the wheat.

then it was geography again: trade routes between India/China and western caliphate/Europe.

then it was geology: oil (except of course in Palestine).

Rick, that's fascinating.

Explain this to us:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion

-----"There are other conflicts, but there is nowhere on earth where blood has flowed more freely."-------

That is such a farcicalstatement, it is not even worth asking for evidence.

Think of wherever you're living and then think of all the blood that has flowed there.

If it's less than in the Middle East over the last 2000 years then
a) people have been lucky
b) you've missed rather a lot of the bloodshed out.

My bets would be on b) in nearly every case.

Rick lives in Canada.  He comes from China, but he lives in Canada.

> I don't really know a better word that's more precise.

Jew-hatred?

It became unfashionable in Germany in the late 1800s to hate people because of their religion, but it was still cool (scientific, even) to hate people of "inferior races."  The german word Judenhass (literally, Jew-hatred) started to become unpopular, so Wilhelm Marrih invented the term "antisemitic" in 1879 to take its place.

There is nothing I can add about the "taiping rebellion"

Other than the fact that the General who defeated the rebellion had the same last name as I do.

There's been more blood spilt in the US and Canada and China over the last 500 years than there has in the Middle East.