Godwin's Ironclad Law

Since I keep talking about this, I'll drop this into the conversation.  It's from an opinion column at Haaretz (though it's behind a paywall, so I'm using the quote from Raw Story's reprint of a Salon column):

What, after all, has Omar said? That pro-Israel activists demand “allegiance to a foreign country”; that U.S. politicians support Israel because of money they receive from the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, and that “Israel hypnotized the world.” What is incorrect in these statements? Why is describing reality considered anti-Semitic?

Because, as Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much reality?  You notice if you leave certain facts out of what Ilhan Omar said, it's rather easy to make it offensive, and also to use the 407-23 vote yesterday to continue the narrative "Dems in disarray."

I have to challenge my source, if only to clarify my point.  Paul Rosenberg quotes that language, and then explains the problem in America is "sensitivity to language."  That fits the Breathed cartoon I used before; but it's not the issue.  "Sensitivity to language" is a smokescreen, just as "political correctness" was for so long a time.  It's a canard, a sword and shield, to ward off real discussion of the issues in favor of a discussion that keeps us away from addressing the issues.  Rosenberg, without irony, opens his argument quoting Jeremy Ben-Ami:

If you’re going to have a serious discussion about hate and intolerance in this country, let’s start at the top. Let’s start by having a House discussion about the president’s intolerance and his racism. Let’s have a discussion about the xenophobia and the racism that’s coming from the other side of the aisle. And let’s stop using the discussion of anti-Semitism as a way of avoiding a real discussion about policy towards Israel and Palestine, and the issues that are actually on the table about occupation and the treatment of Palestinians. (emphasis added)

Is that going to happen now?  Not soon.  NPR described this clash on Capitol Hill as a generational one; the younger generation of Representatives v. the older generation of the House leadership.  Well, the times they are a-changin', again. It's about time, too.  And I'm not interested in the variant "both-siderism" of arguments about Trump's xenophobia or the racism of birtherism.  This isn't about tu quoque, it's about shutting down the discussion, about not letting the issues be aired and considered

Thought Criminal, in another context on the same mushrooming controversy (inside the Beltway it mushrooms, anyway; how many of us are actually affected by it?), notes this:

 It plays into some of the worst sterotyping of Jews holding themselves to be "chosen" as if that choice was an assignment of superiority, it also diminishes the protection that holding it as part of the universal crime of genocide gives by enhancing its meaning to those who are not Jewish. 

That sense of being superior is one attributed to Judaism by Gentiles, not one inherent to being the children of Abraham or Isaiah's vision of the holy mountain to which the nations will want to come.  If anything the law and the prophets are a burden on Jews, a duty; not a mark of special favor and superior position among the nations.  There is a point when anything that can be said to insult Jews, especially if AIPAC doesn't approve of it (or the JDL, in the issue TC brings up) is itself a form of anti-semitism, because it establishes Jews and Israel as untouchable and beyond reproach or critique.  And perhaps that is why Gideon Levy wrote about Omar's comments:

“Maybe, for the first time in history, someone will dare tell the truth to the American people, absorbing scathing accusations of anti-Semitism, without bowing her head.”

It is, after all, and ironically enough, an issue of free speech; except this is not a case of bad speech which needs to be drowned out by better speech; this is a case of speech that should be heard first, and adjudged later, after due deliberation.  We can't listen, if we refuse to hear.