My diary on "JVP's Peace Malpractice" drew some objections to the use of the phrase "Jewish supremacism".
Apparently, according to some folks, if David Duke and his ilk use a term then no one else is allowed to use it. Strike the words "the" and 'is" from your vocabulary folks because David Duke undoubtedly uses them. I'm betting he also talks about racism, too; strike that word also. This is ridiculous.
According to Cornel West, Black supremacism is a valid concept. On Daniel Pipes' web site or in The New Republic you can read about Arab supremacism. But supremacism is not a concept that can be applied to Jews because of what? Their superiority? Or is it something else?
I guess it's time to organize a protest against the venerable scholarly publisher SAGE because they published a chapter in their Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies that not only used the phrase "Jewish supremacism" uncritically but also quoted Israeli scholar Baruch Kimmerling describing Israel as a "herrenvolk democracy". Clearly, "David Duke language".
Sun Jul 20, 2014 at 10:05 PM PT Update:
While I was on a bogus timeout ("a hide rating should never be used (in a tip jar or a comment) to express disagreement with a poster's opinion") imposed by some Kossacks who abused the HR button I found a couple more scholarly usages of the phrase "Jewish supremacism" as a description of a real phenomenon. However, it's first worth noting that JVP itself invokes the concept, if not the phrase, when it correctly claims: "the crisis in Israel and Palestine is rooted in the idea that Jewish lives matter more than Palestinian lives." That is the very essence of a supremacist ideology.
The scholarly references to Jewish supremacism can be found in False Inheritance: Israel in Palestine and the Search for a Solution* by Michael Rice (Kegan Paul Int'l, 1994; Routledge, 2010) and Palestine and the Palestinians in the 21st Century by Rochelle Davis & Mimi Kirk, eds. (Indiana Univ. Pr., 2013). Rice (p. 198) argues "Jewish supremacism ... has come to permeate the State of Israel" while Saree Makdisi (p. 264), in the Davis and Kirk book, asserts that Israel is "founded" on the "legalized institutionalization of Jewish supremacism".
Finally, 'the David Duke says it' argument is a fine variation on the informal fallacy of Reductio ad Hitlerum, which is itself a type of association fallacy. So, remember kiddies: "Hide rating a tip jar is not intended to be used against anyone but the most obvious and egregious of trolls. To reiterate, if it's simply a matter of not liking the point of view in a diary, don’t tip or recommend the diarist. Make a comment. Debate. Challenge. Argue. Persuade.if it's simply a matter of not liking the point of view in a diary, don't tip or recommend the diarist. Make a comment. Debate. Challenge. Argue. Persuade." Try that the next time you encounter an opinion you don't like.