Logical Fallacies of the Anti-Israel Brigades

Elder of Ziyon a couple of months ago brought to our attention a list of the various logical fallacies the anti-Israel haters exhibit; it’s worth a look here.

I expect most anti-Israel voices to be idiotic, just as I expect more antisemites to be idiots.

But especially since October 7, we have seen lots of academics making arguments against Israel that violate basic logical fallacies. One would think that educated people, especially those who teach students, would be embarrassed to say these arguments out loud.

From a master list of logical fallacies found at the University of Texas- El Paso website:

1. Token Endorsement fallacy: “We cannot be antisemitic because we have some Jews who agree with us.”

2.Affective fallacy: “I feel Israel is wrong, so it must be true.”

“Don’t confuse me with facts. My heart has its reasons, that reason does not know. I see pictures of bleeding children crying in pain in Gaza. I don’t need to know anything else.”

3. Alternative Truth fallacy: “Palestinians have their narrative and it is just as valid as any other.”

The Palestinian narrative is this: we are the descendants of the Canaanites, who lived in “Palestine” in the late second millennium B.C.. The people who call themselves Ashkenazi Jews,and claim to have lived in the Land of Israel for 3500 years, are not Jews at all but, rather, descendants of the Khazars, a tribe living in Central Asia. Why shouldn’t our narrative be just as valid as what these descendants of the Khazars claim?

4. Appeal to Closure fallacy: “Israel must concede land because otherwise the conflict will never end.”

But what if any further land concessions by Israel will encourage the Palestinians and other Arabs to wage war? Israel pulled entirely out of Gaza in 2005, but Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad then turned the Strip into an outpost from which to wage war on the Jewish state. And if Israel were to surrender much of the West Bank, essentially allowing itself to be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines, it would then have a nine-mile wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, and could be cut in two at that waist by tanks invading from the east. Continued conflict can be avoided if Israel remains military much stronger than its Arab enemies (and Iran) and is perceived as such. That is the same strategy of deterrence that worked so well to prevent a conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Ideologically, the conflict between Arabs and Israelis cannot ever end because of the teachings of Islam that call for endless Jihad against the Infidels.. But practically, the conflict can be held permanently in abeyance if the Arabs (and Iran) believe that they are sure to lose in any armed conflict.

5. Appeal to Heaven fallacy: “The Hadith says that the last hour won’t come before the Muslims would fight the Jews and the Muslims will kill them.”

“In order to bring universal peace, let’s do what the Hadith says must be done: as good Muslims, kill the Jews. They are holding back ‘the last hour’ for all mankind.”

6. Appeal to Pity fallacy: “Palestinians are weaker than Israel so we must support them..” “Palestinians are suffering so they must be right.”

The Palestinians may by themselves be “weaker than Israel,” but 22 Arab states, and Iran, too, stand with them in opposition to the Jewish state. Qatar alone has given Hamas hundreds of milloins of dollars in financial aid and poured weapons into Gaza. Iran has provided Hezbollah with 150,000 rockets and missiles, held in readiness to be used in a future war against Israel. Besides, why should we declare one side “right” just because they are suffering? Did the Nazis suddenly become “right” when German cities were being firebombed and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed? Did Imperial Japan become “right” because so many Japanese people died in the murderous bombardment of Tokyo, and from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

7. Appeal to Tradition fallacy: “Jews prospered in the Diaspora and therefore they should properly stay there.”

Jews not only did not “prosper” in the Diaspora; their history is also one of persecution and murder. They suffered the blood libel in medieval Europe, which led to attacks on falsely accused Jewish communities. There was the Inquisition in Spain, the torture and slaughter of Jews in Lorraine, Cologne, Worms, Speyer and Mainz by the members of the First Crusade led by Peter the Hermit, the mass murder of Jews by Muslins in Grenada in 1066, the expulsion of Jews, stripped of their property, from England in 1290; they were not allowed back until the rule of Oliver Cromwell. Jews were expelled from France in 1306, stripped of their property. But in 1315, they were allowed back in. Under the rules set in 1315, Jews were ordered not to discuss their religion publicly, made to wear a badge identifying themselves, and cautioned against committing usury, an accusation often leveled at Jews based on racist stereotypes. This turned out to be only a reprieve. In 1394, Charles VI suddenly demanded they leave once again. France’s Jews were given a bit of time to sell to their possessions before being escorted out of French lands. In Spain, the Jews were expelled in 1492, and from Portugal in 1497, in both cases stripped of their possessions.

In Ukraine, the Cossack Khmelnitsky led the 1648-1649 massacre of the Jews, with “savage and unremitting cruelty,” in which a hundred thousand innocent Jews died. It was the greatest mass murder of Jews until the Holocaust.

In 1858, a Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, was taken away from his family because a servant testified that she had secretly baptized the boy; he was raised as a Catholic and never returned to his family. In France, antisemites supported the trumped-up charges of espionage brought against Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a 35-year-old French artillery officer of Jewish descent, who was convicted of treason for communicating French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and sent overseas to the penal colony on Devil’s Island in French Guiana, where he spent five years imprisoned in very harsh conditions before ultimately being freed.

And the United States had its own celebrated miscarriage of justice with a Jewish victim — the lynching in 1915 of Leo Frank by a mob in Atlanta the day after he had been pardoned by the governor of Georgia for a murder he did not commit.

The antisemitic acts of Stalin began in 1948, directed at doctors, almost all of whom were Jews, who were accused of trying to poison high officials. Many were tortured to obtain confessions for nonexistent crimes, and imprisoned.

On August 12, 1952, there was the execution, in the basement of Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters, of 13 Jewish writers in the “Night of the Murdered Poets.” They had all been falsely accused of treason and espionage.

Shall we go on to disprove the claim that Jews ”prospered” in the Diaspora and therefore should stay there”? Just one more event need be mentioned: the Holocaust. This is the word we give to the murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children, and the colossal theft of Jewish property worth many hundreds of billions of dollars.