Bittersweet Symphony
2004-03-14 at 1:04 a.m.
the Crass governor and anti-arabism
I watched a little CNN tonight, and it said on it's ticker that Arnold Schwarzenegger told a group of national guard troops leaving for Iraq that they were "true terminators." Yeah. That's what you get California, that's what you get. That's the kind of thing, that, while I was in the Army, would have made me say really really angry curses under my breath. That's why me and the Army didn't work out so well. And other things.So I joined a mailing list for an anti-Arab discrimination group after our whole greencard interview/interrogation incident (I'll tell you about it later). And anyway, I got my first note from them today, and, already, shocking. Merriam-Webster published a dictionary with the following two definitions for anti-semitism (and, it's not clear from the article whether this is an old edition or if it has just been printed. I think the latter), anyway:
1.hostility toward Jews as a religious or racial minority group, often accompanied by social, political or economic discrimination
OK, and
2. opposition to Zionism: sympathy with opponents of the state of Israel
!
The really horrible thing is that kids who may have to look that up will have the mindset that opposing Zionism is totally illegitimate because they've equated it with racism. You know, although I was a Mormon Republican in high school, I still think I was pretty well-informed for my age, and I had no idea whatsoever about the history of Israel. I thought it had always been there! I even went to this summer school for high school juniors at Ricks (BYU-Idaho) and we had a whole lecture about the Israli/Palestinian "situation," and even then I didn't pick it up, and I'm not sure, but I think it was because HE DIDN'T TELL US. It wasn't until I was studying Arabic in Monterey, and I had some Arab teachers, that I started to understand the story. I'm still trying to learn about it, and also Lebanon's civil war, which is closely related and deeply important to my son's Lebanese heritage. Very confusing though. Anyway, whether or not Israel should have existed in the first place is not a really productive question anymore, although it is interesting, but Zionism, as I see it, is still a movement that seeks to push the Palestinians off the land that they NOW own. I like to watch documentaries about Israel/Palestine, and I've seen a lot of good Israelis interviewed, most of them children in the big, non-settler cities, but I've also been sickened. I remember when I saw this woman, showing the camera around her house, saying how wonderful her life was and how she had everything, and then they showed the view out of her window, and it was of an Arab town. And she said, "It's a beautiful view. The only problem is that it's full of Arabs." Well, I tend to think that the problem with the occupied Palestinian territories is that they're full of militant settlers.
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