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From: fsks@unc.UUCP (Frank Silbermann)
Newsgroups: net.politics,net.religion.jewish,net.nlang.africa,net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Apartheid on the West Bank (defining racism)
Message-ID: <673@unc.unc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 3-Dec-85 11:25:21 EST
Article-I.D.: unc.673
Posted: Tue Dec  3 11:25:21 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 4-Dec-85 19:04:15 EST
References: <4188@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> <360@ubvax.UUCP> <614@unc.unc.UUCP> <366@ubvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: fsks@unc.UUCP (Frank Silbermann)
Followup-To: net.religion.jewish
Organization: CS Dept, U. of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Summary: 


>>	Since the Jews are not a racially defined group, then what
>>	does this kind of discrimination have to do with _RACISM_?

Tony Wuersch writes:
>But I also don't restrict racism to color differences.
>To my sense (ignoring the corrupted rhetoric), racism is a pathological
>relationship between members of a powerful ethnic (or religious) group
>and members of a less powerful group, such that all the powerful ethnic group
>needs to know about a member of that minority group is that he or she
>is a member of that group, AND the member of the powerful ethnic group
>assumes that the member of the less powerful group is an inferior.

What you describe is NOT RACISM, but a rather ETHNOCENTRISM,
a more general catagory containing racism as merely one special case.
Racial discrimination is that form of ethnocentrism that is based upon
inheritable PHYSICAL characteristics (either real or imagined).

Ethnocentrism can take many NON-racist (but also objectionble) forms,
such as religious discrimination, discrimination based on language or
national origin, etc.  Racism is merely one special case of ethnocentrism.

We trace the ancestry of both Jews and Arabs to the patriarch Abraham.
Zionists consider Jews and Arabs are to be racially identical.  The
differences between Jews and Arabs stem not from race, but rather from
religious, linguistic, and cultural differences -- especially religious.
Even if we were to imagine that Kahane's radical anti-arabism were
representative of Zionism (and it is not), Zionism STILL would NOT be
a racist movement.

Those who claim that "Zionism is racism" demonstrate at best a confusion
of the issues, and at worst, a willingness to lie shamelessly.  In
either case, their words have no credibility, and may be ignored as
ignorant rabble rousing.

	Frank Silbermann