Mere Rhetoric: Logic, Anti-Semitism On Display In UC Irvine Newspaper. Except For the Logic Part.

Sulaiman Arain is a fifth year UC Irvine engineering student, and he just had a letter published in UCI's student newspaper. In this letter, he attempts to do his best impression of what political argumentation looks like:

“The state of Israel will be wiped off the face of the earth.” Is this statement anti-Semitic? Let’s forget for a moment that the term itself has been grossly redefined by Zionists to mean “anti-Jewish” - does the statement imply that all the Jews living in Israel need to be exterminated? Or even that all Jews must forcibly be ousted from the Holy Land? Of course not. The words used are “The state of Israel,” not “Jews” or even “Israelis.” The statement is a less-than-diplomatic way of saying that the state of Israel will cease to exist on the map. That’s all.

Now, to the extent that the Muslim students he's defending were wearing pro-Intifada shirts (read: not peaceful), this is a little bit dishonest. Also a reason it's dishonest: the UCI Muslim Student Union regularly brings in speakers who celebrate Hezbollah's violent attacks on Israelis. One more reason it's dishonest: having Israel get overrun by the so-called refugees - as he clarifies later, all 10 million of them, up to the fifth generation - would result in an anti-Jewish bloodbath. We're talking about the darkest pits of global anti-Semitism, where resentment and hate have served as the basis for what passes for ideology for half a century.

But let's pretend he's telling the truth, and he's only advocating wiping out the Jewish state - and not any particular Jew (because that's exactly how it would happen). It's still anti-Semitic.

(1) When placed in the context of leftist human rights activism, it often coexists with the claim that just about every ethnic group, no matter how trivially distinct from other ethnic groups, deserves their own state. Except the Jews, who don't. So Palestinians, despite being very close to Egyptians or Jordanians, deserve their own state. But Jews, who have been hounded throughout history, do not. That, it seems to us, is anti-Semitic.

(2) Let's assume that all the lies about Israel are true: it is a genocide-implementing, apartheid-enforcing state. By these measures, it's at worst as bad as Serbia or South Africa. And yet - and this is crucial - no one has ever advocated wiping those states off the map. Both the policy of destroying Israel and the viciousness with which it is advocated point to something particularly illogical and ugly - in a word, anti-Semitism.

Oh, and one more thing:

What must happen for the state of Israel to cease to exist on the map is really quite simple: The right of return must be granted to the Palestinians, a people who were forcibly removed from their land, a people whose properties were seized at gunpoint so that the state of Israel... To rightfully allow all 9.5 million Palestinian-Arab refugees and their descendants to return home would mean that Israel, with a population of roughly 6.2 million Jews, would cease to exist as a Jewish state, giving way to a new system under which people can form a government that guarantees basic human rights and dignity to all humans.

The thing about Palestinians guaranteeing basic human rights to Jews as they're overrunning them with 10 million of the most anti-Semitic people on the planet - stupid. The thing about the right of returning meaning the destruction of Israel - unusually honest. Or at least more honest than the Saudis and the Europeans.

References:
* Calling for Israel’s Destruction Not Anti-Semitic [New University Online]

Previously:
* UC Irvine Course Description: American Unilateralism Responsible For Islamist Barbarism
* FrontPage Writeup On UC Irvine: Jihadism Deeply Entrenched. Nice That UCI Hillel Is Finally Noticing.
* UC Irvine Muslims React to Anti-Terrorism Memorial