Would Al Gore have invaded Iraq?

[darklordoftech]

No. He wouldn’t act against France’s or Germany’s wishes and he wouldn’t see an invasion as worth it.

[darklordoftech]

No.  He would have kept the focus on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan.

He may not be as hawkish as Bush, but those who say “thank God Gore wasn’t President on 9-11” are just wrong.  Gore wouldn’t have been distracted from the actual perpetrators of 9-11.

Correct, and Gore would have sent troops into Tora Bora, capturing or killing Bin Laden.

[darklordoftech]

In addition to everything else that’s been said, Lieberman would be powerless in a Gore administration and the people giving him intelligence and advice wouldn’t be neocons, which, combined with being VP under a Democrat, could change the direction Lieberman’s career goes in and the views that Lieberman develops.

[darklordoftech]

At this point in the discussion the point is always raised that hostility to Israel, and even the assertion that Israel has no right to exist – in other words anti-Zionism – is not the same thing as anti-Semitism, which is hostility to Jews as Jews, not to Israel as a state. Are there not Jews who hold anti-Zionist views (it is said), and does this not prove that anti-Zionism is not the same as anti-Semitism?

As a proposition in logic, that is undeniable. There are many Jews who reject Zionism, although they are a small proportion of all the Jews in the world. They include both leftist secular intellectuals such as Shlomo Sand and Noam Chomsky, and some ultra-Orthodox sects such as Satmar, which reject secular Zionism as blasphemous. Therefore it cannot be asserted that to be an anti-Zionist is also, automatically, to be an anti-Semite.

But in practice this argument doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. For the great majority of the world’s Jews, now and throughout history, identification with the Land of Israel as the historic homeland of the Jewish people, and the belief that the Jews should and will return there, has been and is still central to their identity as Jews, and this is true of both religious and secular Jews. To deny the legitimacy of that identity and that aspiration is in effect an attack on the Jewish people, and is experienced as such by the great majority of Jews.

In practice, most of those who most vocally espouse anti-Zionism, whether from a Muslim background or from a secular leftist background, also explicitly or implicitly espouse one or more of the traditional tropes of anti-Semitic rhetoric. The most powerful of these are that the Jews are uniquely powerful and influential, that they work together as a secret international cabal, that they control the world financial system and the world media, and that they use their power to manipulate governments for their own benefit.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) has developed a “Working Definition of Antisemitism”, which has been adopted by many governments and international organisations. It includes among others the following elements:

* Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

* Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

* Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

This makes it clear that denying the legitimate and permanent existence of the state of Israel, and calling for its abolition or destruction, is inherently anti-Semitic, and needs to be called out as such when it occurs.

https://memegenerator.net/instance/75077259/stay-on-topic-star-wars-stay-on-topic