[Sethomas]

Big Papa Goat: I probably should have made clear that the line of reasoning wasn't the only possible one in outlining why the Israeli state is absurd, it was just one of many and I found that one to be the most succinctly outrageous. I incidentally left out the weirdest, as opposed to most convoluted, explanation for its existence which is that it derived endorsement from fundamentalist Americans who otherwise bore an abject loathing of Jewish/Semitic culture. But, they ignored this and encouraged the (I think) Truman administration to be the first country to recognize Israeli diplomatically because of the way Israel fit into their eschatological notions of the New Testament.

Thus, the line of reasoning I went through was something similar or exact to things I've heard before, but it ideally wouldn't represent many people's thoughts and the whole convoluted thing was what I was going for. Reductio ad absurdum can be applied here in many ways with the spirit of the name fully intact. You are absolutely right: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Judaism, and so forth are all totally different subjects. Karl Marx was Jewish by birth but voraciously attacked the religion, making him Anti-Judaic but not Anti-Semitic (Anti-Zionism was a very obscure issue at this time). Up until roughly 1944, a healthy majority of conservative Jews including the Ashkenazim Hasidim and I believe also most Sephardi Jews vehemently opposed the creation of Israel because their post-Rabbinical theology had established such an idea as the worst of blasphemies. Thus, you had Anti-Zionist Jewish Semites.

So, I'll quote you: You'd think people who associate anti-zionism and anti-semitism would be people who think that Israel is a non-religious state of more or less secular jews and the people that are against it are against the culturally semitic population, but not neccesarily the jewish religion.

You expressed yourself as clearly as possible, but I'll admit that I had to re-read that several times to figure out what was going on. Yes, what you describe does happen, but so does every other permutation of anti-*'s and pro-*'s who support or reject Israel, often with totally bizarre results. Are there anti-Semitic Zionists? Yes. I've met people who would invent ethnic/religious slurs against Jews on the spot because they didn't know enough beforehand whenever they would see a Jewish person, yet they're pro-Israel because that's what Jesus would want.

I picked Israel to talk about among a huge list of political manifestations of racism/anti-whatever-culture-ism, because of the weird bizarre twists and turns that took it from a Jewish blasphemy to a political powderkeg that threatens the future of civilization. The movie Lawrence of Arabia could not have been made much later than it was. That was the period when the average American began to take his complete ignorance of Arab culture, which accommodated a Romanticized image, and juxtapose it with his hatred of the Jews whom he had ever-so-intimately known as the killers of Christ who spread the Black Death by running town to town and poisoning wells.