Hurmanetar
New
From my point of view I'll relate what happened to me in a discussion around a pub table not long ago. I was talking to some people who were very active in a campaign to highlight Israeli misdeeds against the Palestinians and beyond. I thought they were making good arguments, supported by apparently solid evidence. Another person at the table started to take the anti-Israeli argument into a new dimension which, I have no doubt, crossed the line (and left it miles behind) into anti-semitism territory. He didn't talk about Israelis, he spat out the word Jews with venom. He went on to rant about the global Jewish conspiracy stretching back hundreds of years.
The people at the pub table who made the original points in support of the mistreated Palestinians were left dumfounded and embarrassed. After that evening I started getting emails and Facebook posts from this guy, linking to holocaust denial sites and other sites dripping with poisonous rhetoric and dubious history. I had to unfriend him from Facebook and block his emails.
So my point is that, if the debate is stifled (and I mean generally, not specifically on this forum), it may be because those who might be concerned fear they might also be drawn into, and identified with, that culture of hatred which is all too accessible out there.
I agree with your last paragraph here and I would not even begin to discuss my thoughts and questions about Judaism with someone I didn't think was mature enough to discuss it dispassionately. The search for objectivity in an issue like this is very difficult.
Part of the issue is that it is difficult for outsiders to pin down what Judaism / Zionism really is. Is it a race? Is it a religion? An ideology?
There is a social stigma (and rightly so) around discussing the pluses and minuses of various races because the potential and tendency towards racism and bigotry is in everyone. Almost everyone deep down wants to have a feeling of superiority and if they identify with (in their minds at least) a superior race, then they can get their pride fulfilled that way without demonstrating any merit of their own. It is a very positive development for human consciousness that a stigma has been placed on racial pride and most people now judge one another based on actions and ideas rather than race, and it would be a tragedy to undo all this progress. Since most people are not intellectually mature enough to have a discussion about qualities of race without ressurecting racist tendencies, I think that public figures and most people in general should probably avoid it altogether. Many have criticized Alex Jones, the premier American conspiracy theorist, for ignoring the Zionist aspect of globalism, but I think he is wise to do so as this would certainly be counterproductive and stir up needless divisions along race.
But there ought to be a way for intellectual thinkers such as those of us here, to examine these things dispassionately. The man at the pub who began spewing venom, why did he do so? Is it okay to spew venom at Nazis and Marxists for their actions? They tortured, starved, and murdered millions. But it is socially acceptable to spew venom at Nazis and Marxists for their misdeeds because they are not a race (well Nazis sort of were) but an ideology.
It is fair game to openly critique a person's ideology or religious doctrines, but not their race.
But the ideology and religious doctrines of Judaism and its subset of Zionism cannot be crtiqued because Judaism is also seen as a race. Islam is not a race. Christianity is not a race. Only Judaism is seen as a race because Judaism contains divine promises passed down through birthright and contains commands to maintain racial purity and to wipe out or enslave lesser races. Jews see themselves as a race even though ancestory is mixed and muddied now.
So how can we have an unemotional objective investigation and critique of Judaism and Zionism? We have to treat it as an ideology and a religion and not as a race.