The anti-Semitism Questionnaire: Find out if you're an anti-Semite

@Burnley123 The instrument is considerably more sophisticated than it appears here. This paper goes into the validity testing of the instrument. BTW, the authors are British, so you know the paper is top notch!! 🤣

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28116/1/Hirsh%20Allington%20Antisemitic%20Antizionism.pdf

@Burnley123 This is the paper's lead author. You can email him if you're interested.

@flipper1966 I'm not!

@Burnley123 Kinda doubted you would! 🤣

@flipper1966 If someone conflates anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel so brazenly, then I don't care about their credentials or their research methodology. If I can't agree on terms and definitions (or see them as disingenuous) then there is no point.

@Burnley123 This is part of a transnational project using AI to understand anti-Semitism.

https://decoding-antisemitism.eu/

@Burnley123 I respect your distaste for imputing anti-semitism to somebody who criticizes Israel or Israeli politics or the whole Zionist agenda. What interests me about this question goes to a larger academic issue that has intrigued me since I was 23 years old when I read the following quote by the American historian Richard Hofstadter from an article of his titled, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The article has nothing to do with Israel, Jews or anti-semitism. I was fascinated with Hofstadter's thinking about how you can use objective facts to support an unstated agenda:

"One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is precisely the elaborate concern with demonstration it almost invariably shows. One should not be misled by the fantastic conclusions that it is not, so to speak, argued out along factual lines. The very fantastic character of its conclusions leads to heroic strivings for "evidence" to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. . . . But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can be justified to many non-paranoids but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates 'evidence.'"

I'm very much a Nietzschean, and Hofstadter's quote reminds me of something that Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil: "It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of—namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask oneself: 'What morality do they (or does he) aim at?' Accordingly, I do not believe that an 'impulse to knowledge' is the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken knowledge!) as an instrument."

Again, Nietzsche is talking about the use of facts (or knowledge) to support an unstated agenda (or moral).