Zionism

"15 years ago this month the United Nations passed Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. It was an outrage then. It still is. Resolution 3379 not only slanders Zionism--the national liberation movement of the Jewish people--and the State of Israel it created, it also gives license for anti-Semitism".

This claim by the American Jewish Committee, from an ad placed in the New York Times, on November 12, 1990, is a good illustration of the dilemmas raised by the thesis of an exceptionalist Jewish awareness of history. Zionism is not of course racist in the strict sense of that term. Internal Israeli policies are as discriminatory, in some areas, as apartheid, but the standard applied is not race but religion. However, the tacit equation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism is not warranted. It is perfectly possible to be anti-Zionist and not be anti-Jewish. In fact, some Jews are as anti-Zionist as the most fanatical of Islamic fundamentalists. If the intention was to close all possible gaps to anti-Semitism, on the assumption that it can sneak through in many guises, what the "anti-Zionism equals anti-semitism" argument does is fling in the faces of non-Jews that only Jews can be honestly anti-Zionist, because anti-Zionist non-Jews are ipso facto anti-Jewish. Underlying all this, as we said, is a claim of historical exceptionalism that makes mincemeat of any attempt to define historical meaning.

Zombie

In contemporary philosophy of mind, a zombie is a theoretical human being with cognitive abilities but without "consciousness". Theoretically, this means no awareness of awareness. Consequently, no cognitive theories à la Dennett.

"According to common agreement among philosophers, a zombie is or would be a human being who exhibits perfectly natural, alert, loquacious, vivacious behavior but is in fact not conscious at all, but rather some sort of automaton"
Dennett, Consciousness explained (p. 73)