Yes, the signs are despicable. Yet there are very few of them. But of course a few loonies is what the MSM and enemies of OWS focus on.
The problem for organizers is, there’s no easy way to get anyone to remove a sign. You can’t grab it from them or push them out. That’s called assault.
Occasionally during anti-Iraq war protests in LA, someone had a repellent off-message sign. You can ask them to leave, while maybe surrounding them. But even that can get dicey. And they don’t have to pay the slightest attention to you, either. If they’re part of a well-organized group, then it gets more potentially divisive and explosive. You could, for example, surround the group and ask them to leave. But guaranteed, others there would object to what you’re doing and you might get, say, a bunch of Black Bloc anarchists screaming at you for being fascists while you try to remove the sign while the MSM cheerily films it…
Yes, you may get all sorts of people objecting, from religious fundamentalists and other self-centred authoritarians to confused nut cases, why single out “black-bloc anarchists” from my own personal experience of 60 years with anarchists they are more likely to come down hard against anti-semetics as they would against fascists. I think you blacken the reputation of those who beleave in anarchism. I would expect that from the mainstream media, not from a left leaning, libertarian leaning blog.
Because in the antiwar protests in LA, the Black Bloc were precisely those who hassled ANSWER for doing things like that. They thought ANSWER were authoritarian buttheads (and certainly had a point there too) and generally were hostile to the organizers (or to any organizing.) IMO, the Black Bloc are mostly teenage idiots who think smashing a Starbucks window accomplishes something. And of course lots of other anarchists like you or David, who posts here some, aren’t that way at all.
It could just as easily be LaRouchies or Sparts doing things like that too. My real point is, intervening in something like that to get a loonie sign out can be difficult and have problematic consequences.
That is indeed over-the-top and not at all in the spirit of what this all about. However, we would do well to recall not only Colin Powell’s admonishment that “criticism of Israel is not anti-semitic” but Mirram Webster’s definition of “semite” as well: 1 a : a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia, including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs; b : a descendant of these peoples. A lot of money is funneled to Israel and her genocide of the indigenous population that could be better spent at home.