jacobmg

>> I have never claimed that whole of Israel has systemized racism, you are putting words into my mouth. I would have more respect for you if you said for instance yes we have these well documented problems but not everyone in Israel is like that.

Legal discrimination is systematized discrimination, it does not imply that every law in the country is racist, but since you're accusing the country of legal discrimination I just referred to what you said it as "systematized racism" instead of "legal [race based] discrimination." I may have misquoted the degree of your criticism but you are still arguing that relatively small issues are in fact serious racial discrimination issues (small in the sense that they don't contribute to racial discrimination, not that the issues themselves aren't serious.) I don't even deny that there is racial discrimination from a small portion of individuals but to say that there is strong legal action taken to discriminate in the country is just flatly wrong.

>> Regardless of your efforts at justifying it with excuses, it stands up to the definition of discrimination, whatever the excuse or the path to that may be. No racist person or entity in history has ever suffered from lack of excuses.

No, the country isn't perfect or entirely fair but each of these criticisms has plausible non racist explanations. For example the building permits there are issued just like in the US: you have to pass many different rigorous legal and technical tests before you can build, and it is not entirely impossible that the legwork isn't being done by these Arab communities in the first place. The building-permit process in Israel is widely criticized as unusually slow for any country even in Jewish communities and I believe the OECD just released an evaluation that it takes 3 times as long in Israel as other OECD countries to issue building permits.

And another example: the criticism of education funding is no different than what happens in the US, where some people argue that a community's funding for education should be directly from what that community can extract from taxes. It's not automatically a racist policy.

Right, you want it to be easy to just assume that an entire country has rampant racism because of some general perception of the middle east whereas I'm asking for evidence that any belief regarding racism in Israel is true. I don't have to prove there isn't racism in Israel to say "don't jump to hasty conclusions about a country being racist that can dilute accusation of racism and cause prejudice in itself."

You are just reciting the typical myths about racism/Israel. For example you mentioned road use discrimination, instead of that being any sort of discrimination based on race/religion, it is separation based on citizenship of PA or Israel. Arabs and anyone else who are Israeli can use these roads. To say that restriction from use based on different citizenship is discrimination is just laughable. As far as "marriage discrimination", there is no direct legal discrimination, and the arguments that there are indirect discrimination hinge on a law that doesn't grant citizenship to those who marry an Israeli automatically. Grasping at straws.

>No, I would rather trust the first person accounts from people whom I have zero reasons to disbelieve.

This is just a recipe for bias. You don't just trust people you know because one, there experience isn't anything better than anecdotal either, and two, it is difficult for any person to avoid distrust of someone they know and like personally. You should be more responsible than this when you are accusing a whole country of systematized racism.

You are implying that Israelis vote based strongly on race. This is entirely untrue. There are Jews of many different races in the Israeli government. I suppose every country that hasn't yet had a minority president is racist?

>> I think there is a double standard that is being applied and it is rationalized and back-propagated from a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived criticism of Israel.

>> All of the sudden statistical significance and probability distribution come in to play.

You've got it completely backwards of course. Asking for statistical proof of racism should be the standard, and the criticism should be of those who don't have that proof, not of those who deviate and begin asking for it. It's pretty alarming and telling that those arguing that Israel is racist are blatantly complaining that too much proof is being asked of their accusations of racism. Any decent humanitarian should not want the accusation of racism to be thrown around so easily by the media, otherwise its potency as an accusation is diluted. As it has been by exactly the type articles like on Al Jazeera, and as evidenced by the number of people even in this thread who so casually accuse a country of racism by nothing more than HN posts and Wikipedia articles.

You really are mistaken. The hearsay of some hackernews posts amounts to zero evidence, while you can verify the legal equality of races in Israel in any decent book. Unless of course, you want to grasp at straws like another poster here and argue that semantically a Law of Return is racist (even though many acknowledged non-racist countries have the same laws) or Arabs having the option to opt out of the draft is racist (which should speak for itself.)

>Segregation is a real fact in every day Israeli life

Are you referring to the fact that Jewish and Arab populations live mostly separate towns and cities? This isn't segregation, since this is by choice of what communities people there want to live in. Unless you want to argue semantics and say something like "well technically they are segregated even if it's by choice so therefore it's racist."

Evidence of this communal separation and anecdotes of individuals with prejudice does not amount to systematized racism in Israel.

I said all races are equal under law, the Law of Return applies to ones religious status, and anyone can convert to Judaism. Besides immigration criteria does not effect discrimination of individuals as citizens since it's merely a selection criteria for citizenship in the first place.

Anyone can volunteer for the military. To argue that not being forced into military service is some sort of prejudicial discrimination is ludicrous.

> From that I can conclude that you are either ignorant or a liar. Because races are NOT equal in Israeli law. Either in theory OR practice. In theory they are equal

Silly conclusion to jump to. You have no examples of legal discrimination as pointed out above and undoubtedly you have even less "practical" evidence. For example the Or report you mention isn't even on the same subject.

No, everything claimed is easy to verify. Races aren't segregated, racism isn't taught (as in, it's not part of the curriculum.) All races are equal under Israeli law. Your education on this subject had to have been seriously skewed to think otherwise.

It is easy to draw intuitive statistical conclusions in a small town; you bet if there weren't usually race based violence in a small town, that if you saw 4-5 incidents in a short period of time, there would be very few non-racism based explanations that were plausible.

Israel is 7.5 million people with 75% Jews. That provides a large enough pool of incidents of Jews attacking Muslims to draw from just because there are a given number of violent people in any country. Now they can easily misrepresent these stories because you can cram an article with them. You can't do intuitive statistics with a country of 7.5 million, or even 500,000. You need to do statistics, period. Anything less is irresponsible, and any article from any organization that tries to interpret anecdotes into patterns when you're drawing from such large sample pools is not practicing professional journalism. And with Al Jazeera's "In Depth" page basically dedicating it's Israeli/Palestinian focus on these types of articles, there is little room to interpret there ME coverage as objective.

> If it happens in Israel all of the sudden there is a lot of defense and touchiness about the issue. Why is that? Why is it so hard to believe that a country in the Middle East would have a problem with racism.

Because there's never any evidence except these anecdote based articles. At a certain point, if you want to make such a serious accusation that deviates from the assumptions that people operate on, the burden is on you to prove it, with some sort of comprehensive proof.

PBS is a better fit to be compared to BBC. You can find low-brow entertainment based news in the UK and every other country with a free media. It's not like you can't access quality news in the US and Al Jazeera has to swoop in and save the day.

>Do you think Americans are that stupid that they won't see antisemitism? Do you think we're little children who can't think for ourselves?

Well that's the thing, perhaps those who have had the opportunity to carry Al Jazeera decided not to on the prediction that it would not be watched, and decided to avoid any financial loss by not taking the risk.

>Plus: when Al Jazeera started, the staff was almost entirely made up of BBC MiddleEast service people. So while they worked for BBC, they were unbiased; but the moment they started working for AJ, they became biased and completely untrustworthy!!

No one ever said the BBC was immune from being biased. You're right, it's unlikely that the same people automatically went from being non-biased to biased, so if Al-Jazeera is biased, that just means the BBC had been biased all along.

Not all criticism of Israel is anti-Jewish, but some can be. Just because someone claims an anti-Israel group is anti-Jewish, don't assume that they would whitewash all Israel critics as anti-Jewish.

Just an American here, but there is no racial segregation or systematized racism of any kind in Israel. 'Racism' and 'Apartheid' are just thrown around carelessly at Israel by some critics.

> Are you implying that anyone criticizing Israel should be automatically discarded on the basis of intolerance?

You don't seem to have listened. It wasn't about that one article, it was about their coverage of the issue, which is skewed in one obvious direction. And by the way, the article is nothing more than a bunch of anecdotes misrepresented as an accurate representation of the issue (the article itself even acknowledges this but ignores the implications.) When you take instances of violence by individuals and try to assert it's a general pattern, that is hate mongering, plain and simple. Quote from the article:

'Bayu says: "It's obvious that [things] can go to another level. This is what happened in Germany and many other places."'

Look, it even comes with allusions to the comparison of Israel and the Nazis!

>Why do you say that? They do seem to have a better and broader news coverage.

"They do seem" as a claim on it's own has no persuasive power.

Here's why: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/

"Israel: The ugly truth", "A week of racism in Israel", "An education in inequality"

Notice something out of proportion here?

I know many people are keen to jump on the "Al Jazeera is great" bandwagon, but this level of intolerance is simply not appealing to Americans. Yes, there is anti-Islamic sentiment to a degree among a small portion of Americans, but it doesn't reach the levels on display here. This is a pattern of Al Jazeera's, which makes sense because news organizations do tend to slant their views to fit general trends among the populations of the countries they serve in.

It makes a lot more sense that Al Jazeera is so well spoken of here just because it is a significant shift from what were used to in the feeble mainstream US media, rather than Al Jazeera actually putting a much deeper level of intellectual effort into their news. In reality it's just an illusion that it's something objectively better. As far as the sometimes thorough reports Al Jazeera puts out, people must realize that PBS and NPR are also American news organizations.

The latter or incompetence or they just don't care enough about it to really investigate a viable solution (most probable.) Their technical reasons are invalid after all, so something is wrong, how much is the question.

Perhaps this explains one of the most ridiculous posts I've seen from a corporate blog in a long time?

http://blog.netflix.com/2009/06/closed-captions-and-subtitle...

Essentially them complaining it will take a year to implement closed-captioning because silverlight can't process SAMI files automatically (basically glorified text bolding/syncing)

After I read that I guessed there was something wholly wrong with their corporate culture and management.

> blockades are stifling, putting fences through people's land is stifling. Are you really prepared to argue otherwise?

I never argued otherwise. It can be argued that Israel doesn't have a choice, for the reasons of self defense, but to implement security measures which happen to be harmful to the Palestinian economy, effectively absolving Israel of any responsibility of the economic effects and placing it on groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. The point is, talbina put the blame on Israel (implicitly), even though that's just typical one-sided analysis that adds nothing to the discussion.

Because you side against the blockade because you either don't believe the Israeli reasons why the risk of not blockading are serious enough to warrant something as harsh as a blockade, or you just don't care about the consequences for the Israelis either way. The former is far more complicated than a casual observer could know offhand and the latter is obvious one-sidedness which speaks for itself. Take you're pick.

FYI: The food restrictions were never of a nature that would cause malnutrition, that is propaganda. If you know even a bit about the issue you know the Israelis have reasons for blockading construction material, so the question is if you are neutral, why you don't believe them.

He didn't say the word evil, but he characterized Israel as evil, which is just as bad.

>he stated that Israel has taken actions to stifle Palestine. That is an objective fact...

False, saying Israel takes actions to stifle the Palestinians implies the intent is to stifle, when the intent could just as easily be defensive and as minimally stifling as possible. Those are both opinions. endtime merely pointed out what is there for everyone to see: the Palestinian territories dedicated an uncommonly high percentage of their economic output to terrorist activities, regardless of if you think "they had to do it."

In short, the logic is clear, the amount of man hours dedicated to terrorist activities is objective, saying the Israelis intend to stifle the Palestinians is analysis.

That is trolling. All you're doing is reciting your standard "Israel is evil occupier" routine typical of someone of a certain political bias. No sources or added incite. It is however a fact, that since a high percentage of suicide bombers came out of Palestinian territories when compared to other countries, it is accurate to imply that a different economic course could diminish the terrorist aspect of the Palestinian economy. endtime's comment may seem inflammatory to you, but it is only objective recognition of economic factors. Your's is analysis of far more complex issues and simplifying of the moral choices in the conflict.