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i think Ken emailed it to you. If he didn't give me your email

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thanks for sharing it

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thanks

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Mr Winters, I beg your pardon: I am not confused, my statement was perfectly clear (I am a writer and I do know how to express ideas) and, not least, I did address key points in what you had said.

I did, for instance, give you a list of countries that commit serious human rights abuses, in which I included the Arab countries. Perhaps I should have stated explicitly that these human rights abuses are frequently in connection with privileging one group over another but I assumed that you knew I was referencing this. Even amongst the Arab countries, however, they are not all equally evil in this respect. For example, Jordan is better than Saudi Arabia, Iran or Iraq. And no that is not a meaningless distinction: I could have an actual life in Jordan but not in Saudi, Iran or Iraq.

Other countries that fall into the category of discriminatory in terms of their actual policies toward minorities include: Myanmar, Hungary, Brazil, India, and Israel (in the latter, the citizenship law makes it official). Then there are the countries where discrimination against minority groups is not official policy, built into the legal structure, but just the way the country runs. Some examples: the US, the UK, France (and of course many more). The key point where we disagree, I think, is that you see such "privileging" as inherent to the nation-state and universal amongst them whereas I do not see it as inherent or equally the case in all. I can tell you from my own lived experience that New Zealand and Germany are far better to their minorities than, for instance, the US or Israel (not to mention, of course, egregious violators of human rights of minorities such as Myanmar and China and Russia). So.... big conclusion: if not all states are equally bad in treating members of minority groups, then this is not an inevitable condition. In fact, preventing such discrimination is a major point in the "rule of law" in countries that are supposed to be both democratic and civilised. The whole point of the US is to be such a country, though it consistently fails to live up to those ideals. So, yes, to come back to your question: do I "have anything to say about the existence of the dozens of nation-states which privilege one group of people over another?" Hell, yes, I do: I think it stinks and it should be fought by every means of public pressure that exists, both within those nations and in international forums. and by all thoughtful citizens in those countries.

One other point: I have no idea why you assumed that I feel that "minority rights in the West are secure". The above paragraphs shows that I don't but I never ever said that or believed it. So why did you assume that I believed such nonsense? (There is a less polite 8 letter word that starts with "b" but let us stick with "nonsense".) And Peter is far too intelligent and knowledgeable to believe it either in my view though of course I have not read everything he has written but I would be amazed if he ever said or believed it.

Final point: I also never said that "nation states like Israel aren't needed". In the world we have, nation states exist and can be a good thing. But they should and can be civilised and decent to their citizens, all of them -- and should be. Or do you think that is too big an ask?

PS. Great news about Harvard changing its mind about Kenneth Roth! Oops, you don't think so? so sorry.

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The double-standards matter is the heart of the issue: you object, and quite rightly in my view, to a Palestinian state in which the Muslim religion and the rights of Muslims would be privileged at the expense of other people, including of course Jews (and Christians). That state of course does not yet exist so it is a hypothetical. Yet, you evidently quite approve that kind of bias and preference in the existing state of Israel favouring Jews at the expense of their minorities, principally Palestinians. You seem to argue that that is fully justified because only within the borders of such a discriminatory state would Jews be guaranteed protection. (This is pretty dubious morality even if it were true.) Yet you also claim that in the states of the "West" the rights of the minorities (including Jews) are "secure". So, which is it: are Jews safe or unsafe in countries other than Israel? My view of history, based on reading over 65 years and many, many conversations is that as soon as one privileges one group at the expense of others, you create a poisonous society. And that is what has been happening in Israel since the start of the Occupation in 1967. My strongest objection to your comment is its largely complete evasion of the main point that Peter was making: that historically, many anti-Semites have been Zionists, and for a variety of reasons. This has been true, from Balfour to Orban and it should make Jews plenty uncomfortable when people like Netanyahu seek the support of such people as Orban or Trump to support Israel. You also seem to misunderstand the basic point that one can criticise many things in Israel from the perspective of human rights violations without damning the country as a whole or wanting it to disappear or calling it "bad". Bringing in the bigotry of other groups, e.g. some black student unions, some Palestinian groups, is just pure "both sides-ism" and is an evasion of the question of whether human rights are being violated, and increasingly, in the state of Israel. My Israeli friends, incidentally, currently see Israel as heading down the path of Hungary, Turkey, and even Russia, towards becoming an ethno-nationalist state. Does this possibility not bother you at all or is everything that is done by the Jewish majority in Israel today justified on the basis of past atrocities against Jews?

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The Jews of Western Europe also did not want those Eastern European shtetl Jews increasingly fleeing progroms, to come to the West. They discouraged them to the point of paying them to go back. Many perished this way, up to and including the Holocaust. Another way was to finance their settling in Palestine, through buying land from absentee

landlords and underwriting the establishment of the “yshuv”, the settlement, see the extensive Rothschild involvement. The first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, who made an enormous effort to create the state, without him it would not exist, had a total disdain for its people and whenever he could, stayed in London. There was no thought given to whether the land could accommodate the people, 500 villages were destroyed and 700000 people were displaced in the Nakba, replaced by 700,000 Jews, to create a majority. In the long run, between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, Jews are no longer a majority, with all the implications.

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I agreed with your comments completely and am pretty appalled by "Winters" comments below in their blindness, double-standards and hypocrisy.

The one thing that I think you left out in your commentary was the evangelical Christian right's support of Israel because they hope that Israel will bring on Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (or something like that). It is all too loopy for words but totally against what honest and idealistic Zionists hope for and want, a viable and at least partially democratic state where Jewish people can live and thrive. For Zionists, this nutty Christian fringe is the strange bedfellows syndrome writ large.

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A bunch of things wrong with this line of thinking, Peter.

First of all, Zionism is necessary to secure the rights of Jews in the Middle East. Israel is surrounded by fascistic Muslim Arab countries that oppress and abuse all of their national minorities, including Jews when they had them. In the West, minority rights are secure and a state is not needed in order to protect minorities. The two situations are not the same. American Zionists are not contradicting themselves when they say the US should remain egalitarian and Israel should remain Jewish any more than American Palestinian nationalists are when they say the same thing about the US while remaining silent about Palestine's Arab Muslim character.

Your argument that because some anti-Semites use Israel as a model for what they want and therefore that makes Israel bad is specious. There have been Black student unions on college campuses for decades without an issue. Some bad faith alt right students in 2015 started going around calling for "White Student Unions" on multiple college campuses. They, like the anti-Semites you mentioned, used Black student unions as a model. But they were decried as racist but Black student unions still continue today because white people are a dominant majority and Black people, like Jews, are a marginalized minority. See the difference?

As always, your comments are totally hypocritical when applied to your beloved Palestine. Palestine gets a ton of support from anti-Semites and is also seeking to create a country owned by one dominant ethnic, racial and religious group. Can we see criticism from you about Palestinian nationalism specifically (none of your typical 'All Lives Matter' bullshit) and anti-Semitism going hand and hand? I won't hold my breath.

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Thank you for these comments. This is a true and unique understanding. Revealing. Where I feel caught is that, as a Jew and a "Child of Holocaust Survivors" and born as a displaced person in Munich -- I do feel deep inside of me that we Jews need a Jewish State. I don't want us to ever again be in the situation we were before, during and after WWII when we we had nowhere to go and we were slaughtered. At the same time, I feel for the Israeli Arabs/Palestinians. I do not want to be a second class citizen in the U.S. How to reconcile these intense knowings and feelings? Peter, your thoughts?

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Mr Winters, If you took what I wrote as a "diatribe" and reduce my comments to "whining and screaming", you either did not read what I said with any understanding or you simply dismiss my comments because you cannot answer them. If the former, I would urge you to take a remedial reading course so that you learn to read with better comprehension. In terms of helpful further advice, I would also urge you to try to become a more civilised person. You need to learn how to disagree about issues without going for the ad hominem attack, which is what you have now done several times with me. Please do not take that comment as an ad hominem attack itself: it is a straight up personal criticism of someone who is not a very nice person -- and who could do a lot better. Good-bye Mr Winters.

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Peter, I hope that in your conversation with Yair Rosenburg you will ask him to confront the evident reality that Israel’s expulsion and oppression of the Palestinian people in order privilege Jews and the constant defamation by the Zionist Jewish establishment of those who criticize Israel as being “antisemitic” are two of the main causes of growth of anti-Jewish sentiment (i.e. antisemitism) in the world, or at least in the United States, today. One only needs to think of Jewish Voice for Peace to know that this new kind of distaste for Jews as a group is not justified, but the mainstream Jewish organizations that remain Zionist and either defend Israel right or wrong, or wring their hands and oppose actions that could force Israel to change its behavior, share the blame for this new and appalling strain of antisemitism.

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Thanks to Peter for focusing on historical truths that we need to understand in order to combat the growth of antisemitism. Thanks also to Adam Wilkins and Robert Eno for correcting Mr. Winters’ mischaracterization of the points that Peter was making and Mr. Winters’ mischaracterization of Palestinian demands for humane treatment and equal rights as a call to create state that would that would subject Jews to a regime such that which Israel imposes on them.

More fundamentally Mr. Winters seeks to justify Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, in taking their land, freedom and identity as a people from them in a settler colonialist enterprise by falsely equating the creation of the State of Israel and srael’s treatment of the Palestinians with the treatment of Jews in other Middle Eastern states, where Jews, Muslims and Christians often lived in harmony until the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine led Arab governments to expel their Jewish residents to Israel. One could add this to Peter’s list of antisemitic motivations for sending Jews to Israel, this one largely provoked by the creation of State of Israel itself.

It is a corruption of the language and an insult to intelligence to equate the creation of the state of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their country and their subsequent oppression with the practice of other states in “privileging one group of people over another.” A close case is the Chinese treatment of the Uyghers, which the world has rightly condemned, though even Mr. Adams rather mysteriously judges Israel to be lower down than China on the scale of barbarity.

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Peter, I wanted to share a Forward story with you and the group. https://forward.com/opinion/531286/cnn-producer-fired-antisemitic-tweets-teshuvah-kenya/

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WOW. Many of your weekly Topics have led me to think, question myself and want to share with others..Jews and Non Jews alike. However this one really blew me away. Reading Lord Montagu's memo was simply an earth shattering experience. His warnings about what will happen to the Christians and Mohammedans (?) Seems to have been brushed aside. It is quite obvious that this man saw himself as a Brit through and through yet recognized the very true existence of Anti Semitism. His suggestion that the British Armed forces should establish a Foreign Legion as opposed to a "Jewish Legion" made total sense.

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Mr Winters, You are clearly unreachable and so trying to have an exchange of ideas with you is pointless. But there may be other readers of "The Binary Notebook" who have followed our exchange and so this reply addresses your short comment but is really for their eyes.

In your comment of only 34 words, you make three mistakes. First, there is the error in your reading: I never said that there were any countries with a spotless human rights record. In fact, most of my two earlier messages dealt with just that fact; there is a wide spectrum of abuses across the globe and no country is perfect and many are in the range of bad-to-atrocious . But you can barely acknowledge that I said so, which reflects your second error, one of logic. You seem to imply that if all countries "privilege" one group at the expense of others, that somehow makes them all equivalent. Wrong! The extent of de-privileging, which correlates with the extent of human rights violations, does make a difference to the amount of evil performed and suffering inflicted. To be black or Jewish or Muslim in Iceland, New Zealand, Germany -- not the exclusive list, of course, of relatively non-problematical countries -- is in general far less fraught than to have any of those identities in the US, the UK and (yes) Israel (let alone China, North Korea, China for one or more of those ethnicities). Though you will not utter the phrase "human rights" (except to label it as "bullshit") you sort of in a backhanded way, admit, for example, that China and Russia are pretty bad that way and that that does make a difference. Your third mistake is moral: you want to excuse what Israel does to Palestinians within the country itself and on the West Bank and in Gaza because "all countries" do it ("privileging" one group against others.) Wrong again! That is the morality of the gutter not where civilised people should live or the standards they should uphold if they genuinely want to make the world a better place, where no one is punished for his religion, skin colour, ethnic group.

One last point: in his latest podcast, Peter uses the word "distraction" to characterise the discussion over the Kenneth Roth affair at Harvard when the real issue is human rights violations that HRW has called out, in Israel and many other countries. Your correspondence with me amounts to a similar distraction from that issue, cloaking your unwillingness to acknowledge that Israel is indeed an apartheid state, as classified by at least three major human rights organisations (even if is different in the details of its apartheid from the government and society of the old South Africa.)

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Indeed, you are exactly describing the tactics of Zionism and the colonial steed it rides in on, thank you. And yes, I do have a say in how Zionisms incredible distortion and appropriation of Judaism affects the Palestinian population that is currently materially imperiled (already 17 murdered, 3 of which were children, in 2023) rather than conceptually, (anti semitism has not murdered any Israelis or Jews thus far this year as far I am aware), as I, a Palestinian, am in mortal danger perpetually simply for the sake of Jewish supremacy. I don't care who you are or what beliefs you have that govern your own life, but once those beliefs bleed into fascism of any kind they become a problem. So yes, this actually is my business because unlike Hasbara trolls & Zionist keyboard warriors whose worldview comes from distorted media, brainwashing (just ask Gideon Levy, or wait... let me guess... he is a self hating Jew too?), and a lifetime of being told they are better and more important than everyone else...this is a matter of life or death for me and my family. I would honestly love more than anything for this NOT to be my business but sadly, it is.

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