Innocent People in the Middle East, Victimized by Fascist Theocrats

[SD]

Have you noticed too that the politicians can never condemn antisemitism in and of itself, it's always "antisemitism and all other forms of discrimination/hatred".

It's like the left-wing version of All Lives Matter.

[Jason Moyer]

It annoys me that I'm very much opposed to the suffering and violence and death that's happening in Gaza, including what appear to be obvious war crimes, but I constantly find myself arguing against Pro-Palestinian people because they're just...fucking wrong about everything. Like, you can be opposed to what's happening without talking about apartheid and genocide in a way that completely ignores the meaning of those words in the same way that hearing right wing morons say woke has made that word meaningless.

[heywood]

I think apartheid is exactly the right word.

Genocide is the wrong word, but it's not a counter-insurgency operation with collateral damage either. Israel is inflicting collective pain, suffering, and death as a negotiation tactic, just like Hamas.

Trump uncorked the bottle of American antisemitism by embracing white supremacists, and the Gaza war lit a fire under it. It is getting increasingly hard to separate American Jewish identity from Israel. According to these two April polls: Pew, Benenson Strategy Group

79% of Jewish Americans feel close to Israel.
77% say Hamas's cause is not valid.
72% say Israel makes them proud to be Jewish.
62% approve of the way Israel is conducting the war.

And the few Jews who were protesting the war or calling for a ceasefire have gone silent.

[SD]

Under intetnational law, it's impossible for it to be apartheid. As per the 1998 Rome Statute, and the 1973 Apartheid Convention before it, apartheid is strictly defined as systematic domination and oppression by one racial group over another racial group. And neither Israelis nor Palestinians are racial groups.

[RippedPhreak]

I think apartheid is exactly the right word.

Apartheid is racial separation due to racism. Israel keeps the Gazans on the other side of a fence only because the Gazans kept coming into Israel and setting off suicide bomb vests or otherwise murdering Israelis. Not the same thing. Also many Arabs live and work in Israel, without being confined in crumbling ghettos or otherwise being forced into a segregated area. Even Gazans were allowed to come into Israel for work, until the violent attacks got too much to take. Apartheid is absolutely not an applicable word here.

Trump uncorked the bottle of American antisemitism by embracing white supremacists

This is just utterly laughable.

1) There was anti-semitism in the US before Trump.
2) Trump did not embrace white supremacists.
3) The people on college campuses protesting Israel today are not Trump supporters, and would never agree with anything Trump said, or obey anything he told them to do. They are liberals/leftists.

[Jason Moyer]

He embraced QAnon, which is just the same old antisemitic bullshit under a different name.

[Azaran]

Use of hyperbolic language is a deliberate strategy to drown out other voices.

79% of Jewish Americans feel close to Israel.
77% say Hamas's cause is not valid.
72% say Israel makes them proud to be Jewish.
62% approve of the way Israel is conducting the war.

And the few Jews who were protesting the war or calling for a ceasefire have gone silent.

To be fair, Jews are a heavily persecuted minority and without justifying the excesses of Israel, I'm sure many are naturally drawn to defend their homeland, which is surrounded by enemies.

And certain types of criticism are often used as a cover to justify hate. So antisemites will claim to be 'anti zionists', or only critical of Israel, and then use fascist jihadi parlance in their protests.

Tangentially related. A few years ago a US university held a conference against 'Hindu nationalism'. Hindus were upset as they suspected it would be used to fuel hatred against them. And what do you know, it turned into a discussion on how Hinduism and Hindu nationalism were linked, and the effort should instead focus on destroying Hinduism (while also peddling the falsehood that Hindus are not persecuted). Can you imagine if a university helpd a conference on Islamism, and talked about dismantling Islam? They'd have a civil war on campus in no time

[RippedPhreak]

He embraced QAnon

QAnon was a hoax put on by 4chan trolls, just people constantly posting that certain elements of the permanent unelected government bureacracy such as the FBI or CIA were going to be arrested "any day now."

[SD]

The overwhelming majority of Jews are Zionists, because they more than anyone know the consequences of being a nation without a country. Israel was reestablished in 1948. Had it been a decade earlier, who knows how many millions of lives could have been saved.

Today's Columbia University 'protestors' scream "Go back to Poland" at American Jews. In Nazi Europe they used to scream "Go back to Palestine", before deciding that murdering them all was easier.

But between Israel ceasing to exist, and Israel existing again, there was more than two millennia of genocide, persecution, and all-round oppression against Jewish people. Antisemitism didn't spring magically into being in 1948, or when Trump got elected, or when Israel retaliated against the October 7th atrocity. It was always there. Those events just emboldened people to say what they were already thinking.

[heywood]

There have always been neo-Nazi groups in the US, but for 60+ years they mostly remained in the shadows and on the fringes. Jews have not been heavily persecuted here in my lifetime. My point about Trump was that he made it possible for people to espouse their hatred of Jews and other groups without the shame and guilt that had kept it bottled up. It started in 2017 with Trump's response to Unite the Right and snowballed from there. In my part of the country, Patriot Front popped up in 2017 and NSC-131 popped up in 2019. They are both very public and they are getting bigger. They hold marches and rallies, hang up signs, distribute leaflets, hang banners from roadway overpasses, and they recruit at Trump rallies and alt-right events.

Now thanks to Gaza, we've have antisemitism growing on the left as well.

[SD]

Antisemitism and, indeed, other forms of racism, have always been a feature on the left, as well as the right. Marx made a number of prejudiced statements about Jews, even though he was descended from rabbis on both sides of the family. Engels despised Slavs, referring to them as "barbarians". Ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union were oppressed and deported en masse. There's nothing in left-wing politics that stops it being tarnished with racist views, particularly if a certain race or ethnicity is perceived as enjoying some kind of privilege.

[Azaran]

Ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union were oppressed and deported en masse

And let's not forget this

The "doctors' plot" (Russian: дело врачей, romanized: delo vrachey, lit. 'doctors' case') was a Soviet state-sponsored antisemitic campaign and conspiracy theory that alleged a cabal of prominent medical specialists, predominantly of Jewish ethnicity, intended to murder leading government and party officials.

.....

Soviet historian Samson Madievsky has advanced a view, based on various memoirs and secondary evidence, that the doctors' plot case was intended to trigger the mass repression and deportation of the Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, similar to the deportations of many other ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union, but the plan was not accomplished because of the sudden death of Stalin.[47]

According to Louis Rapoport, the alleged deportation was planned to start with the public execution of the imprisoned doctors, and then the "following incidents would follow": "attacks on Jews orchestrated by the secret police, the publication of the statement by the prominent Jews, and a flood of other letters demanding that action be taken. A three-stage program of genocide would be followed. First, almost all Soviet Jews ... would be shipped to camps east of the Urals ... Second, the authorities would set Jewish leaders at all levels against one another ... Also the MGB [Secret Police] would start killing the elites in the camps, just as they had killed the Yiddish writers ... the previous year. The ... final stage would be to 'get rid of the rest.'"

[heywood]

Yes, I'm aware of how Jews were treated in the USSR because the majority of Jews in the Boston area seem to be Soviet expats or children of them. Nearly all of the Jewish friends and coworkers I've had in this area are.

[RippedPhreak]

There have always been neo-Nazi groups in the US, but for 60+ years they mostly remained in the shadows and on the fringes. Jews have not been heavily persecuted here in my lifetime.

Decades ago, America was filled with, well...Americans. These days we've brought in millions of people from countries where Jews are hated. They bring those ethnic feuds and hatreds with them, teach it to their children and...here we are. The more immigration we have from the middle east and Africa, the less safe American Jews will be. Same process is happening in places like France, but even faster:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/h...leeing-country

[Jeshibu]

Decades ago, America was filled with, well...Americans. These days we've brought in millions of people from countries where Jews are hated. They bring those ethnic feuds and hatreds with them, teach it to their children and...here we are. The more immigration we have from the middle east and Africa, the less safe American Jews will be. Same process is happening in places like France, but even faster:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/h...leeing-country

We should eject hateful people from the country, so I'm sorry but there's no more place here for you.

[DuatDweller]

Decades ago, America was filled with, well...Americans.

Oh did you meant ex Europeans immigrants? You know British, Irish, Scottish, Germans, Italians, Polish, Russians or perhaps did you meant Native Americans?

[mxleader]

The US is experiencing an insurrection from Hamas led Palestinians and it must be quashed.

[RippedPhreak]

perhaps did you meant Native Americans?

This lib assumption that Americans have no right to their country or their land is always weird. I suspect it's a reflexive verbal tic that you just spit out without thinking about what it means.

[heywood]

Palestinian Americans are still Americans.

The protesters are paying customers of these schools and therefore have standing to complain about what their money goes to support. However, I don't approve of occupying buildings and grounds and preventing the schools from serving the students who aren't involved in the protests. Clear the tents, but don't try to deny them freedom of speech.

The US is a large and diverse country and people have all kinds of different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We should not rush to judge people without trying to put ourselves in their shoes and understand their perspective. This country doesn't work if there is no tolerance of people with different views.

[RippedPhreak]

They may be "Americans" but what I said was that they came from countries where Jews are hated. Crossing our border doesn't mean they stop hating Jews. Thus as we import more and more of them, American Jews will become less safe.

[Azaran]

The US is experiencing an insurrection from Hamas led Palestinians and it must be quashed.

Looks like protesters are now holding mass Islamic prayer services

[DuatDweller]

This lib assumption that Americans have no right to their country or their land is always weird. I suspect it's a reflexive verbal tic that you just spit out without thinking about what it means.

Is just the sudden realization that there are no real Americans anywhere in north, central and south Americas.
We were all immigrants, coming from somewhere else at one point in history.
Even Native Americans that came through the Bering strait in the US and more in the south America its believed that ancient Chinese explorers landed their ships in south American lands and were stranded there.
Its is something that makes you think for a while and meditate, who are we really?

[heywood]

Looks like protesters are now holding mass Islamic prayer services

So? We have these on campuses all the time:

[Jeshibu]

The protesters are paying customers of these schools and therefore have standing to complain about what their money goes to support. However, I don't approve of occupying buildings and grounds and preventing the schools from serving the students who aren't involved in the protests. Clear the tents, but don't try to deny them freedom of speech.

The entire point is to be annoying in order to be heard. Maybe they can more directly inconvenience the university board members instead, but I still think what they're doing is valid.

[DuatDweller]

A helicopter carrying Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi and Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has been involved in an accident, state media reports.

Reports say the helicopter - one of three travelling in a convoy - made a "hard landing" after it got into difficulties in heavy fog in the north of the country.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-...rigin=BBCS_BBC

Israel denies involvement.
"Soup" thickens.