Taking Extremist Views as Representative

Generalising the extremist views of a few individuals to all Zionists perpetuates harmful stereotypes and fuels antisemitism, undermining the diversity within Jewish identities.

What is being claimed or implied

Taking the extremist views of individual Zionist Jews as representative of Zionists generally:

It is always wrong to blame an entire people for the actions or words of one person, and it is far from being a new phenomenon. One past example is the atrocities carried out in the 1970s in Uganda by the country's then dictator, Idi Amin; at the time, the National Front attempted to use these atrocities to insinuate that they were somehow typical of Black people worldwide, and to justify the party's racism against Black people. Of course, every ethnic group includes people with evil and discriminatory views, and the Jewish people is no exception. Such views need to be denounced in the strongest possible terms, but any attempt to extrapolate them to the entire ethnic group concerned is racist both in motivation and in effect.

Here Eddie Leonard strongly implies that the โ€˜true face of Zionismโ€™ โ€“ and by extension of all Jewish Zionists โ€“ is to be deeply exceptionalist and racist. This is of course tremendously offensive to the majority of Jews who identify as Zionist. It is at minimum facilitating antisemitism, since it is only a small further step to thinking or even saying โ€˜All Jews are exceptionalist racistsโ€™, a step which many reading this post will have made. Perhaps it does not need to be said, but the racist remarks made by Ben-Dahan were extensively criticised within Israel, see for example https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-the-human-hierarchy-1.5305946.

Gallery of Antisemitism - illustrative example image

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