I will never understand why that’s so difficult for some people.
You’re assuming everyone is discussing this in good faith. They’re not. Some are weaponizing antisemitism so only unequivocal support for the Israeli government is welcome. I don’t know why anyone would think doing that is a good idea, it’s certainly not going to bring people around to the side of Netanyahu’s government.
People need to understand that when you do something like that, it waters down both sides of the equation. You can call something “antisemitic” to get people to think that action is evil without looking too closely because they want to distance themselves as much as possible from the evil label. But it also can make people lose the association between “antisemitic” and “evil” because they agree with whatever is being called “antisemitic” and think “if this is antisemitism, it must not be that bad”.
And then there’s the ones who think “if you’re going to call me evil, then I might as well just be evil”.
It’s an example of crying wolf and I guess we all know how that ended. Accusations of antisemitism have been used as a cudgel to silence critics for so long now that when I hear someone has been accused my first instinct is to dig into what they actually said because I’m automatically skeptical of the accusation.
This kind of thing happened when Jeremy Corbyn was running in the last UK election. To this day, I’ve yet to read a single comment he has ever made that could be construed as antisemitic.
Yeah, now that you mention it, it’s already happened with me, too. I’ll still make the assumptions if the news is associated with neo-nazis, but in any other context “antisemetism” needs more specifics before I can tell if it’s legit or if it’s just Israel (or their allies) trying to silence critics.
Like there was an article about a study just a few weeks back that said “antisemitism was rising among liberals”, but then you look into what it actually meant and it was really about liberals not supporting Israel. But even before I clicked it to have a look, I was looking to see how ridiculously they defined “antisemetic” rather than having any worry that hatred of Jewish people was on the rise with progressives.
