Monday, April 02, 2018

Anti-Semitism and opposition to Israel among Arabs: the logic of the Washington Post

Look at this statement: "One pilot study, by Günther Jikeli of Indiana University, found that anti-Semitism often accompanies opposition to Israel in Arab countries."  You press on the link to the pilot study and you don't find what the Post maintains it contains.  But let us look at this: So almost all Arabs are opposed to Israel.  So someone then tests anti-Semitism among Arabs (I would like to see how they tested that and whether they used current Zionist definitions which conflates anti-Semitism with opposition to Israel) and they found out that anti-Semitism is accompanied by opposition to Israel.  But let us say that they in fact used an actual legitimate definition of anti-Semitism (like hatred of Jewish people, insults to Judaism (but not to other religions), belief in bogus Jewish conspiracies, or denial of the Holocaust, belief in the grotesque Protocols of the Elders of Zionism--all those would qualify in my book as ingredients of anti-Semitism), and they found out a certain percentage of Arabs who exhibited signs of anti-Semitism. But what is the relationship between that and the widespread opposition to Israel?  This is not a causal relationship.  This is like testing how many people die from pulmonary diseases in Arizona.  If you see the percentage it is rather high and then you can link that to living in Arizona, thereby concluding that living in Arizona would increase the risk of death from pulmonary diseases, which is the reverse actually because Arizona due to its dry weather attracts a large number of people who have pulmonary diseases.  Same thing for trying to find a relationship between cases of anti-Semitism and opposition to Israel.  So most Arabs like Falafel, and if you run a study of signs of anti-Semitism, you can then say that the study found that anti-Semitism accompanies love of Falafel in Arab countries. This is how dumb this statement in the Post is.