If all the money poured into conserving status quo was spent on creating better conditions for Palestinian refugees in any of the independent Arab states, Middle East would be a much quieter place
> If all the money poured into conserving status quo was spent on creating better conditions for Palestinian refugees in any of the independent Arab states
Easier said than done. The chaos the PLO caused in Jordan and Lebanon [1] raises legitimate security concerns for any country asked to accept large numbers of Palestinian refugees.
How do you do that when dealing with nationalist governments waging nationalist wars? The most generous framing of either side’s ask in the Gaza war is for nationhood.
Just recently, US has worked with Saudis and Ukrainians and others to supply heavy and novel weaponry to be deployed in eg Yemen, coordinating airstrikes, giving intel etc. to devastating effect and has done even more direct involvement in brutal wars, whether proxy wars of whatever. The PATRIOT act and subsequent militarization of police at home supports the GP’s statement about a boomerang. I don’t think GP meant to say it was only due to Israel or single out Israel as a source US of military cooperation and MIC job creation.
But yes, some people will only care if they can find Jewish connections, eg Zelensky being partly Jewish or MBS or Al Sisi allegedly being partly Jewish due to their stances in opposition to Islamic extremism.
There are people who blame influential Jews for everything, and they’ll go so far as to say that Ataturk was Jewish, in order to care about the Armenian genocide. But they won’t care about, say, the Hamidian massacres of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks that took place 20 years earlier because they can’t find any evidence that Sultan Hamid was Jewish.
They blame Israel for Iraqi expulsion of Jews, until they find out the Farhud was 10 years before Israel was formed as a state.
They even finally started to care about what’s happening in Sudan when they realized they can sort of draw a tenuous line between that and Israel through UAE.
As long as influential Jews are involved they will deeply care about a conflict, eg 9/11 dancing Israelis or clean break memo of PNAC. They will ignore that presidents like W Bush called the Iraq invasion a “crusade” to “rid the world of evildoers”. They also do not like to go back further to, say, bombing of Laos and all throughout southeast Asia because, again, it is hard to blame any Jews for that.
It’s almost as if they have an algorithm: 1) find Jews involved with thing they consider bad, 2) care about that issue but ONLY to the extent they can point out Jewish connections 3) cherrypick and compile lists of Jewish involvement to make it seem that all bad things done by states, corporations, or humanity, is due to Jews. Candace Owens for example recetly said that Stalin was Jewish and that the US slave trade was “not the white man but mostly Jewish”, and that Black lives now really matter to her after years of “White lives Matter” with Ye, now that she found out Jews were behind it.
There is a similar mentality among humans that many fall into, the “victimhood mentality”. And many Jews themselves also have the same thing. In a conflict, often both sides use the same tactics without realizing it.
The way BLM blamed “systemic racism”, various Jews might see “antisemitism“ behind every critique of Israel. It is not just individual but group psychology. The worst scorn is reserved for heaping on defectors, who Black BLM activists would call “uncle Toms” and Jewish Zionist activists would call “self-hating Jews”.
So what’s interesting is the common tactics. I don’t mean to imply it is one sided. Both sides of an ideological conflict (eg abortion, socialism, etc) want to take over a powerful state apparatus to use for their agenda. Both sides want to cynically and hyporcitically exploit millions of people to further their agenda.
For example, antizionists (and more generally revolutionaries / “axis of resistance” supporters who may be either leftist, Islamist or whatever) want to perpetuate statelessness of millions of people in Lebanon, Syria and all over the Middle East, so they can be labeled “Palestinian” because one of their grandfathers was in Palestine circa 1947, so that they can “keep their identity” by essentially forcing on them, and maintain large numbers for “the cause” of removing Jewish majority in any area of the Levant. They oppose giving them citizenship on a jus soli basis even if they and their parents were born in another country. This happens even with Palestinians who themselves got citizenship long ago in Chile, USA, UK, Sweden, Canada etc. It is a similar mentality to “fight to the last Ukrainian” by Ukrainians abroad who left Ukraine an settled in other countries.
Meanwhile, Zionists have a form of that, where many of them constantly play up and almost seem to welcome how badly Jews would be treated among other countries, and downplay the role of their right wing government waging wars in a far more reckless fashion than they could have. Instead of placing the blame on that government for making Jews less safe, they say “you see? This is why you should move to Israel. You’ll be safe here among Jews.”
In short both movements cynically use their own people, almost welcoming hardship for them until they are “forced” to embrace their identity and move back to where they same place both groups are competing to demographically dominate ..
This isn’t unique to Israel. Armenians vs Azerbaijanis for example seek foreign alliances for protection. Serbs vs Albanians. Tamils vs Sri Lanka. Rohingya vs Burma. Uyghurs vs China. And so on. There are horrific proxy wars happening in Sudan now, and Congo throughout. But people don’t tend to focus on any of that because Ashkenazi Jews are famous and successful in the West. And because Abrahamic religions are based on Judaism, so Israel is quite foundational to all their religions. Not so much Sri Lanka…
You can see in Eastern cultures which are not Abrahamic, not Muslim or Christian, the attitude is the same as to any other sectarian conflict. That is proportional. But it is extremely disproportionate in the West! For the reasons I listed above.
did you see rapid rise in violence against russians after russia started war in ukraine ? did you see rapid rise in violence against azeris after ethnic cleansing that they executed recently ? against chinese for their treatment of Uyghurs. etc.. etc.. etc.. ? I guess no.
but when there is a violence against random jews across the west, somehow israeli government is the guilty one and not antisemitism.
Yep, I did. My mom taught at a school where during the war Ukrainians would gang up on Russians, both being immigrants. A lot of Russian things were “canceled” to the point that Babylon Bee ran this story:
I have seen attacks on Asians ramp up during the start of COVID.
I say the same to both Jews and Black people (being Jewish myself): we live in the least racist, least antisemitic time in hundreds of years, maybe in history. Your grandfather had it much worse. These complaints are first-world problems. Yelling “racist” or “antisemite” on a hair trigger only serves to cheapen the actual words, same as yelling “genocide” while ignoring every other more horrific war, even 200 km to Israel’s north in Syria.
The “magarshak ratio” is the amount of outrage about something vs how many people are actually suffering. To be sure, the disproportionate navel gazing at Israel is due to Jews and Judaism. But similarly, the disproportionate navel gazing at attacks on Jews in USA or other countries, where they have been mostly protected and highly respected by eg the entire Evangelical community, is seen by some as “first world problems” while bombs are raining down in Gaza for example.
Som of the biggest hyporites criticizing Jews for “dual citizenship” and “ethnic cleansing and building an ethnostate” are Armenians like Dan Bilzerian who flew to Armenia with his family to accept citizenship and serve in the Armenian armed forces. People probably just don’t see the symmetries. Or maybe they’re just hypocrite grifters.
AND THERE IS THE INTITUTIONAL LEVEL.
On that level, of governments and corporations, Israel does enjoy an immense amount of support and immunity. Name me another country where every presidential candidate has to go affirm their support at an AIPAC for, say, Italy. As a Jewish person myself, I am uneasy at Jewish participation in PNAC or the military industrial complex and neocon war machine in general. I don’t want Jews to be blamed later for the wars. Alex Karp and Palmer Luckey are of course quite supportive of Israel, but I am not thrilled at the endorsements. And so on.
I am a libertarian, I try to criticize Russia, USA, Iran other countries, and yes Israel, proportionally to what they actually have done. The wars are fought by plebs who die, the politicians stay in their ivory towers and bunkers and give speeches even as they get international arrest warrants for them.
But even just from the point of view of an Israeli citizen, or Ukrainian citizen, or Iraqi citizen etc. these politicians are horrible. Netanyahu was actively against the 2 state solution, Rabin’s wife blames him for inciting the PM’s assassination, and he literally released 1000 terrorists for 1 guy, Gilad Shalit who fell asleep and allowed himself to be captured. It included the masterminds of October 7th. Who does that? He personally allowed Qatari money to go to Hamas, ignored Egyptians’ warnings, ignored warnings from Shin Bet, oversaw a drawdown of security, and his army for hours ignored even the female spotters whose only job it was to report the threats, and who were killed while reporting it for hours! Such extreme negligence goes completely unpunished, nevermind the corruption and investigations that have been put off because of the war. You don’t have to be a leftist or a libertarian to appreciate the level of corruption and immunity from consequences and misaligned incentives of these politicians.
And the excuses the government intitutions give for the negligence or the wars are so laughable that it is hard to think they aren’t deliberately trolling us and rubbin their unaccountability in our face:
The current war vs Venzuela is a great example. They aren’t even trying to explain it anymore. (“hasbara” means explanation in Hebrew, but the same is done by other governments to their people - Russian govt when asked what if Russians wont support the invasion said “we will explain it to them”). The US administration now claims Venezuela is the biggest source of drugs (false) and even weren’t afraid to label drugs WMDs, not even concerned that WMDs were famously not actually found in Iraq during our invasion. They don’t even care about your consent - they know they’ll have your support later! Trump openly said we want to take their oil and land. He says the quiet parts out loud.
You’re seeing it happen in real-time. Again. But when it’s us, whether Iraq or Venezuela, most people heavily tone down their criticism that you would have had for the 73% of Russian public supporting THEIR invasion. But it’s all very similar. The symmetries are striking. 73% of US Americans also supported the invasion of Iraq.
so you have a couple example of anecdotal evidence from past . no example similar violence as it been ongoing against jews . attacks on places of worships, schools, kindergartens, holidays celebrations or just any assembly. attacks that end up with dead people. antisemitism went up on oct 7th even before cult of genocide witnesses was established
what you are doing in many paragraphs (laden with historical errors or misinformation) is whitewashing antisemitism and shifting blame back to jews.
Imagine you’re Black and we’re having this same conversation about systemic racism as if everyone is inherently a racist in society. Anyone who disagrees is called an uncle tom, is that reasonable?
Are there people who don’t like Jews? Of course. The most despicable were the people who came out to protest Israel in the days after October 7th, after the largest attack on Jews in Israel probably ever. And among them were rabid antisemites chanting vile things. Yes.
But look around. Are there a lot of mass shootings in USA? Yes. Many of them are not against Jews. You have to look at statistics. And this is miniscule compared to the violence in the world, eg in Mexico with the drug cartels. We have law and order. We also have a lot of homeless druggies and crazies.
But try to see others facing an entire systematic apparatus. The USA has spent decades trying to get people to hate Russians, for example, at an institutional level. First, it was that they’re commies. Then it was that they love Putin. Also Muslims by and large got similar treatment as Communists during McCarthyism and Cointelpro, after the CIA themselves funded the mujahideen and empowered jihadists (mujahideen is Arabic for jihadists, literally).
Once again, they brazenly admit they were responsible, but they are proud of it anyway. Both Democrats and Republicans:
It always goes through the same stages with these governments. First they gaslight you. Then they engage in “special military operations”. Then they draft you. Then they invade. Then they occupy, lose a lot of money and get people killed. Then the next generation of politicians says it was “a big mistake”. Russians can’t explain to their kids why they fought in Afghanistan in the 80s, and Americans can’t explain why they fought in Iraq.
So yeah I blame the politicians. And even if you were an Israeli, even if you were a radical right wing Kahanist, you could admit that Netanyahu and his government were negligent and call for an investigation of his handling of Hamas and the threats it posed, leading up of Octobed 7th. Agree?
I just don't understand why do you need to create a new incompatible protocol when ActivityPub exists - unless enshittification is in the roadmap. Even less I understand why prefer it over e.g. Mastodon from the user's perspective
For me the difference is exactly what the article is about. TikTok was the first to abandon even a pretense of being about communication and became all about content. Facebook and IG have went the same way and are barely better these days, but TikTok exemplifies the trend
An infinite stream of all possible information, true and false is exactly as useful as no information at all - and social media are getting pretty close to this ideal
That's a classic trick of opinion manipulation. You start an account that posts factual content that caters to target audience. Then once the rapport is built, you throw your narratives in. The barrier to do this, on scale, all the time has never been lower
All media is opinion manipulation. You could even stretch that to say that all communication is opinion manipulation.
Highly respected and highly ranked mass media sometimes publish outright lies and made up stories, completely knowingly. Because they are in the business of manipulation. So you have to trust your gut, and verify if something smells strange. Many times it isn't even possible to verify, as for much of war reporting.
There will never be a time when there will be an absolute guarantee of anything. Not as long as there are people.
I think there's a difference between trying to stay informed and seeking information. I swipe to my newsfeed and see seven stories ranging from local to national, from local news station to fox to New York times. Fact checking each of these stories will take time that I do not care to spend, and I imagine most folks will not.
“If you don’t care about false alarms, why do you listen to the fire alarm sounding and then evacuate the building? The only rational answer is that the fire alarm is just entertainment to you”
The rational answer is that they look at the news to see if there are any stories important and relevant enough that they would care to verify them.
Yes, agreed. News has become entertainment, because the standard for news has fallen so much. Which makes actual news harder for most people to attain.
Ahem. The Baltics got independence when the Soviet regime collapsed. With all due respect to the struggle of anyone who opposed this regime while it existed, attributing the collapse of the Soviet Empire to the resistance in the Baltics is a bit too much. It was mostly driven my processes internal to Russia itself.
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