I agree with you in some ways, but it also feels like this excuses people from just joining and causing trouble for the sake of being anti-establishment.
And some of those people clearly don't know what the protests are about, and aren't just refusing to answer.
Again, not wanting to answer a question doesn't mean you don't know what the question is about. All the examples in the video clearly deal with not wanting to answer the gotcha interviewer trying to farm reactions. "It's not my place to explain the official stance of the protest" or "I'm not the spokesperson for this event" in no way translates to "I have no idea what this protest is about."
But why is it a "gotcha"? If they don't want to answer that's fine, but I've seen plenty of videos where people do answer and are clearly clueless.
Do you really think a pro-Trump influencer who is farming reactions to make a selective clickbait video that make protestors look bad is asking the questions because he genuinely wants to know?
Because this is how the game is played -- shop around until you find people that can't answer the questions well or aren't informed about something and then portray them as a representative sample of everyone.
I get that they are doing that, and I don't think the uniformed idiots joining the protests without a clue are representative of the entire protest. Does anyone?
However, it remains true that there are some people at those protests who are dumb as bricks, and if you can find any to be on camera the likelihood is that's it not just those people on camera.
If you understand it, then why do you insist that clearly disingenuous people should be given proper respect and treated as if their questions were valid? Especially as the video is full of examples how they lied and deceived the public.
Also, if you just look around the comment sections of such clickbait videos, yes, clearly people do believe these kinds of videos apply to all protestors or at least the majority of them.
Last edited by Starker; 14th Jun 2024 at 05:01.
Because despite your opinion of the questioners I've seen far too many people talk on this topic that clearly do not know much about it other than "Israel evil genociders huuurrr colonialism".
They strangely have no other suggestions than Israel Must Stop. It feels like taking to pro-lifers.
And these examples have been specifically selected, curated and fed to you. You can find ignorant people anywhere. Or sometimes just people who aren't eloquent enough or don't understand the question well enough. Or sometimes just don't want to answer, for various reasons. Not all people join a protest to have their face plastered all over media and their personal details found out and disseminated.
Also, even if it is the case that someone isn't educated well enough or know the full history of something, that still doesn't mean they can't be concerned about what is happening.
Right now Israel is killing thousands of civilians, most of them women and children. I'm sure it is difficult to fully imagine what this means, but to a small nation this is a catastrophe. Percentage-wise, considering the population of Gaza, if you compared this to a large country such as the US, the death toll would be in the millions. Israel's forces are herding people together into small cramped areas and denying food aid to reach them, so that they get sick and starve to death while Israeli politicians openly talk about killing Gazans off with hunger and disease. Israel's military bombs schools, hospitals, archives and has destroyed or severely damaged nearly all universities in Gaza while their soldiers proudly film themselves setting fire to libraries. In the West Bank, there are hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers who mete out violence with impunity and full backing of Israel's military. Or, as you put it, "huuurrr colonialism". Huuurrr colonialism indeed.
It is in that context that the media is instead choosing handwring about college kids not knowing all the facts and impugning their character by slandering them as lazy (despite them showing up to a protest to be subjected to police violence and have things thrown at them), having ulterior motives (despite the media having no proof of said motives), only following the trend of wanting to protest anything (despite there being clearly articulated reasons for the protests), simply hating jewish people in general (despite quite a few jewish people taking part of the protests and Israel not being representative of, let alone equating to all jews), wanting to do violence (despite most of the protests being by and large peaceful and the vast, vast majority of the violence being done against the protestors, not by them), being manipulated by evil islamists who have infiltrated and are running the universities (which, if you really think about it, would make the protests entirely unnecessary and pointless), and so on and so forth.
But, y'know, college kids so stupid, amirite?
I'm not talking about people in these right wing videos though. I see it in RL all around me and all over social media, which isn't curated.
It's funny how 10 million people, mostly Muslims, are displaced and at risk of starvation in Sudan, and I don't see any protests about this. Or about the Afghans being expelled from Pakistan. Etc etc. It only matters when Israeli is involved so yes, there's a massive amount of anti-semitic feeling in this.
I'd have joined the protests in London, except people were actively supporting Hamas. They were the minority. What amazed me was the silent majority around them.
The forces in Sudan are not doing it with US backing and equipment. Israel is using US bombs in Gaza that US has forbidden their military to use in urban areas due to their disproportionately high impact on civilians.
Furthermore, while you can do little about atrocities perpetuated by dictatorships such as China or Russia and it is somewhat expected of these regimes to behave this way, Israel is a relatively modern and democratic country, though it has been trending downwards pretty fast.
So it's because Israel is a softer target? Interesting.
You do recognise that there's a significant amount of anti-semitic behaviour tied up in this, right? I've been against Israeli military action from the start but only because I knew civilians would be disproportionately harmed. I'm dying to see what happens after the war ends, which I hope is soon.
Disproportionate protests tend to aim for soft targets.Originally Posted by Subjective Effect
Same reason why there's so much bogeyman fear mongering about 'Hindu nationalism' in the west about India (usually just an excuse to attack Hinduism outright), while there's not a peep about how Hindus are treated by Islamists in Pakistan and Bangladesh (a lot worse than Muslims are in India).
Fake 'activists' know they can publicly attack certain groups without consequence, but not all, and will keep quiet if there's actual danger. Hence the glaring lack of antifascists at this notorious fascist protest
I remember reading a short while ago that the Associated Press had more journalists covering Israel/Palestine than it did the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa (50 countries), and that this was nothing unusual where news agencies are concerned. The racism here isn't just against Jews, but against any Muslims who are unfortunate enough to live in places that aren't the Arab colonial project of "Palestine".
I don't wonder that journalists are reluctant to upset the apple cart, after all, who would want to work in Timbuktu or Ouagadougou when they could live the high-life in Tel Aviv?
The topic of journalists ignoring Africa, South-America and much of Asia could be a thread in and of itself, and clearly contributes greatly to people not knowing about what's happening in these places, but the fact remains that Israel is considered to be part of the West, more or less, and hence it is a much bigger deal in the West when a Western country commits heinous atrocities. Hell, even the recent Russian attack against their neighbours came as something of a shock to many countries that hadn't been occupied by Russia in the past.
Yes, the first mistake people usually make is thinking that Israel is Western.
Of course there is anti-semitic behaviour, but at the same time there is anti-arab/anti-muslim behaviour as well. People have been harrassed because of their ethnicity/race and in extreme cases, it has even escalated into violence. For example, a while ago I remember a Palestinian child was stabbed to death in the US and Palestinian students have been shot at and injured.
And of course actual nazis gleefully jump into all this while hating both sides equally and escalating things wherever they can.
And the US in particular has a long history now where occasionally merely looking vaguely Middle-Eastern can get you killed -- such as Sikhs getting murdered for wearing a turban or Indians having been killed for being "Middle-Eastern".
In case you're completely oblivious to this fact, I live in India. Hindus are not a 'soft' target compared to Muslims, they're the majority population, so I don't how you managed to land that particular pratfall.
There's no 'fearmongering' about it, this has been the case for India during Mod's regime for the past 10 years. The nationalistic and religious sentiment he's stoking is a very real thing, because it is, in the end, a weapons-grade political tool he knows he can wield. Every now and then, I read on the news that some Muslim's been arrested for possessing beef, or been lynched and killed for it. We've been witnessing policies designed to further marginalise minority populations - Muslims especially - over the past bunch of years. I've witnessed people get more openly hostile and bigoted towards Muslims and other minorities myself.
I also live in an area where I can hear the RSS train kids in the mornings with Hindutva slogans, and I talk to people on a regular basis who are blinded by his demagoguery because he's telling them what they want to hear, and there's promises of great financial prosperity for them via the BJP. None of this stuff is made-up fluff or hyperbole by news agencies. It's real, it's been happening, and it is happening.
Last edited by Sulphur; 15th Jun 2024 at 00:22.
Some of those Hindus do seem a bit extreme. A lot of the more enthusiastic comments under the IDF Twitter account seem to come from Indians. You'll have relatively sober commentary on some military operation or other, and there'll be guys called Vijay and Kumar writing stuff like "Crush the insects" and "Finish them off!"
To be perfectly frank though, I don't think we in the West have much to fear from Hindus.
Nah, we'd be too busy imploding from our massive social contradictions first. India's not in any danger of screwing over its relationship with the west even if it's handshaking Russia in public. If there's anything to be afraid of, it's that Indian techs will be the only people who know how to work your IT infrastructure eventually.
eventually?
But I was told that AI would be handling this from next year.
I remember that case. Absolutely disgusting behaviour. I found it extremely shocking and I've tried to find out the outcome of the trail against the landlord, to no avail. I'm against capital punishment because I think it's not worth it to risk innocent lives, not because I disagree with it in principle, but this case made me wonder.
The US has a long history of lots of people being killed/attacked for dumb reasons. I don't like to use it as a yardstick.
You can't really be serious.
These days, it seems almost every week there's some highly improbable hoax that a large chunk of the right-wing seems to fall for without doing any fact-checking.
See the amount of people who believed the "furry litter boxes in schools" hoax.
See the amount of people who believed the "paul pelosi gay lover" hoax.
Nobody expects even the barest minimum of actual fact-checking from anyone on the right wing. If you think "surely they won't believe <next idiotic thing>" you're always disappointed when they DO, so you learn to lower your expectations, until there are no expectations remaining.
Make some shit up, or edit a fake video and put it out. It's how most of the conservative pundits get their foot in the door, doing that stuff. Or basically just offend people so you go viral then now you're what passes for an intellectual / motivational speaker on the right.
Last edited by Cipheron; 15th Jun 2024 at 07:24.
I told you - I'm not talking about redneck twits.
I'm FB friends with an Indian Hindu from Kerala and he posts about some interesting things that have been happening in India. Surely you must have heard of all the attacks on Hindus in India itself?
Wave of attacks on Hindus by Islamists during Ram Navami festival
3 temples desecrated in West Bengal
Temple attacked in New Delhi
Kaliachak riots, started over an insulting remark about the Prophet. Temples and houses of Hindus were attacked
By comparison, this event mocking Hindu Gods was met with no riots
Hindus trying to renovate a temple get attacked by a mob
Evangelical pastor arrested for bragging about attacking temples
I could go on and on. Wikipedia also has a list
Is there violence against minorities in India, and people lynched for having beef by nationalists? Absolutely.
But why ignore everything else that's happening, and paint a narrative of Hindu oppressors versus defenceless minorities?
How convenient, part of my family hails from Kerala, so clearly we're brothers in arms.
Your very first link is about a temple being built on the site of the Babri Masjid, which was a mosque built in the 16th century that was demolished decades ago by Hindu activists, and one of the sparks of the many, many communal tensions between Hindu and Muslim groups. In order to understand India, you need to understand that community tensions and violence has been going on well since before we achieved independence. You can link all of those articles, and I can link back a dozen more about what extremists have done to Muslims and Christians, running the gamut from murder to rapes.
They key issue, and this is directly in response to your last point, is that the scale of attacks on minorities is much more than the other way around, and the people who hold the power to marginalise them further - and are actively doing so with impunity because they're backed by the government, and in fact in many cases are the government - are not the minority groups. Whataboutisms don't change the balance of those scales.
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