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Comment by mary_fortran | Hacker News Reader

Y Combinator loves to bash Israel (and Jews!) for some reason. I agree with your assessment. There's plenty of Israel critical material on Facebook. Only a very few items--items that would be not legal under US law, have been cited as examples. There's no secret kabal conspiracy here.

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>"Y Combinator loves to bash Israel (and Jews!) for some reason."

As a Jew, active on HN for years, I have not seen this to be the case at all.

I have seen sporatic posts that appeared biased or racist on both sides of the aisle...definitely not more or less than exists in the real world... and certainly not enough to generalize about YC at all.

That's a false and absurd smear. I can't do better than davemel37's well-reasoned reply.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12488743 and marked it off-topic.

I don't see y combinator's specific involvement at all. It's certainly likely some HN community members aren't huge fans of Israel, since that country acts like an asshole all the time. I don't see much in the way of anti-Jewish sentiment, however, and being critical of Israel is hardly the same thing outside of emotional rhetoric.

My observation is that it's not HN/YC per se who do the bashing, rather it's a subset of readers who seem to hold anti-Israel biases, thus the "Israel is automatically wrong" type of comments that frequently appear in discussions.

That doesn't necessarily equate to antisemitism but doesn't exclude it either. Anti-Israel sentiment is often associated with strains of "social liberalism"[0] and related political positions, leading to anti-Israel comments being made in the context of policy discussion.

OTOH HN readers have shown keen interest in Israeli technological developments. At times praise for their successes has been evident, so obviously not all comments about Israel are negative. I've had the idea there are distinct subsets of HN users with different attitudes. Depending on the subject matter, one or another group is more inspired to add comments.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_liberalism

Edit: added reference

> Account created 3 days ago.

Really makes you think, huh?

Being critical of Israel's government and its policies is not the same as being anti-Semitic. That's a popular rhetorical trick to deflect all criticism, and it's not valid.

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