People in pain so often lack logic in their arguments. The post/exchange you depicted is one such example of a logical fallacy: because a particular Jewish person is horrible this means all Jews are horrible. This is called a faulty generalization argument: A faulty generalization is an informal fallacy wherein a conclusion is drawn about all or many instances of a phenomenon on the basis of one or a few instances. Are all Christians murderers and rapists because many American Christian soldiers murdered and raped people in Vietnam or Germany during WWII? Are all Muslims murderers and rapists because Hamas terrorists acted as such in October? Are all Catholics Nazis because 80% of Germans under Hitler’s Germany were Catholic? Are all Christians in the Trump MAGA cult?
Black people in America have been on the receiving end of this sort of racist logical fallacy, as well as every other minority. Certainly there are terrible people who are Jews, but there are wonderful people who are Jews. And the same can be said for people in any minority or majority group.
I would also be quick to say that to ignore or overlook the crimes or racism of a particular group in order to claim that the group is superior or ideal is also an example of faulty generalization. People are people and they can be good, bad, or indifferent.
The argument against Zionism is old, but not that old. It seems to me that it really took root as a result of Arab propaganda to sway world opinion against the state of Israel. And it has since been used, also, as a conveniently invented semantic device to justify hating certain Jews while claiming that it’s not about Jews. We find ourselves repeatedly trying to explain exactly what Zionism is and how it came into existence, and this is because most people are too lazy or angry to find out the truth for themselves. (If you want to know, then find an unbiased source and discover its origins.) It can be argued that all Israelis are Zionists, because a Zionist believes that Jews should have a homeland, so when people cry out “from the river to the sea, let’s wipe all Zionists out,” they are really saying “let’s murder all the Jews.” No difference.
Perhaps we need to arrive at a stage in our psychological evolution as humans wherein we can stop our divisiveness and thereby our racism. It is quite understandable that people who have been abused and who suffer from hate and mistreatment want to find someone to blame for their woes. However, is it better to pay the hate forward or to stop it in its tracks?
