Boaz

You suggest the Sassoon family with dealings between India and China as a possible cause of antisemitism. I think not. Those two countries had Jews living within them for over a 1000 years, with no trace of antisemitism. In fact antisemitism started with Christian Rome and was a mainstay of the Catholic and Eastern Churches. It was also practiced by the Muslims with the forcing out of nearly a million Jews from Islamic countries.

Antisemitism literally does not exist outside of the Christian and Muslim worlds. Perhaps because those two faiths, as far as I know, uniquely preach that their adherents are the only ones in heaven. Nazi Germany just followed a grizzly path laid out by the Church.

Extreme Islam is now the main offender, where Christians are as despised as Jews. Christians are leaving Lebanon and Egypt because of their treatment by Islamists, Jews are no longer to be find in either of these lands.

Why is it that Israel is branded as an apartheid state when it gives its non Jewish citizens equal rights, while no critique is made of Saudi Arabia which does not allow any religious places of worship other than Mosques, or Iran which forces Jewish schools to open on the Sabbath? Or why the case of 700,000 Palestinians are given more space than 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries? Or why Muslims can fire thousands of rockets at Israel and threaten it with annihilation without criticism but Israel is not even allowed to build a security fence to contain the hideous epidemic of child suicide murders?

On the question of whose land it is, why are Turkish and English records of occupation ignored and only the Palestinian ones believed? Perhaps the Jewish view of history is more correct than the Arab one.

And don't cast me as an ethnic, my family arrived here four generations ago, I am as Australian as any non-aborigine, and in religion I am an agnostic but I see bias when it occurs.

If criticising Israeli behaviour means I'm anti-semetic...well then I'm loudly anti-semetic and bloody proud to be labelled so.

Stuff all you whinging pro-Israeli bigots.

I am not objecting to criticisms of Israel. I am objecting to total inaccuracies and one sided comments. I am the last person to cry antisemitism, I personally have never experienced it and neither have my sisters, but I do wonder about the motives of those who claim that Israel has apartheid which is patently false, who fail to criticise the Islamic extremist world for bringing up children as suicide murderers with TV programs venerating their deaths, who ignore Israeli democracy and the plightsof non-Muslims including Jews and Christians in Muslim lands.

Why is it that someone who challenges the lies of the Islamist world, or a journalist who run blogs criticising the one sidedness of the press in covering the issues is accused of being emotional or irrational and assumed to be Jewish and Zionist, even if they are neither?

Logic,

By way of introduction let me state that Israel is the most advanced, most secular and most democratic state in its region with many Muslim states falling far behind even the most minimum standards of decency towards non-Muslims. I am however, not so critical of those who engage resistance against the continuing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

By the same token there is much within Israel that constitutes apartheid-like practises, especially in the occupied West Bank where the 'hafrada' policies has created bantustans for the Palestinians. I also refer to the many and various laws which make strong differentiate citizens and residents according to "nationality", which are almost invariably most discriminatory towards non-Jews. Land policy in particular sticks out as a bit of a sore thumb.

OK No problem there. But the occupied territories are not part of Israel. They are considered separate countries which Israel occupies for its own security regions. The land that I think you are referring to is reserved for Jews because it was bought here by Jewish agencies for the use of Jews. That is a difficult one because there is a lot of it, but is it any different in principle from land bought by say the Anglican Church for the exclusive use of elderly Anglicans?

Would you agree that Hamas and the other Palestinian and Arab groups should accept the presence of other religions in the area, and accept states where Muslims are a minority, and that they should accept a state with a majority Jewish population being Israel? Also should they not accept that there was an exchange of populations in the area with Muslims moving out of Israel and a greater number of Jews moving out of Muslim land?. Also that the Arab states should accept these displaced Muslims in the way that Israel accepted the displaced Jews.

I would also like to see Jihad and the glory of martyrdom no longer taught in schools and justuce for Christians, perhaps that is asking for too much.

After all Arafat was not born in Palestine but in Egypt. With commonsense on both sides, and with extremists under control in BOTH there could be a chance of peace.

Nice neat little discussion Lev and Logic but would either of you like to tell me how isolating Bethlehem and turning into a prison fosters any sort of respect by christians for Israel and it's 'free and just' attitudes and practices.

Is Bethlehem also to be regarded as a separate 'Christian country' within Palestine because Israel has decided it should be such? Or is Israels building of Bethlehem's encircling fence with watch towers and checkpoints merely a stratagy to force the Christians out of lands Israel wants to eventually steal.