Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7hr ago
I feel this describes most of the Jewish Americans that I knew in college and highschool. Especially the ethnically and culturally Jewish that did little of the actual religion part.
I think "opposed to the existence of Israel" spans a spectrum. There are people who think Israel in its present form is an oppressive ethnostate and it needs to be reformed ("reform" meaning anything from a one-state solution to a two-state solution to various other proposals that have been floated and failed over the years), and there are people who think Israel should literally cease to exist and if that means Israelis literally ceasing to exist, oh well.
Jews and other progressives who oppose Israel on moral grounds but don't actually hate Jews tend to be more of the former; they don't like Israel, but they also tend to not like the United States, or indeed the West. But they don't want to see a bloodbath, however unrealistic the alternatives they suggest.
The actual anti-Semites, of course, tend to be in the latter category, with their answer to "What about the Israelis who live there now?" ranging from "They can all move elsewhere" to "They should die."
It just seems like a doomed project to have an ethnostate and religious minority in a third world area, and neighbors with one of the most war happy religions out there. I am confused how the Israel project seemed like a good idea ever.
In all seriousness, read a few books on the topic. (I recommend reading both pro- and anti-Israel historians.) It might not convince you the Israel project was a good idea, but there are definitely reasons that made sense at the time, both ethno-religious and otherwise. Of course there were many alternative plans besides Israel itself; Uganda, Madagascar, Venezuela, and Alaska were among the proposals. It was both practical and historical reasons that lead to Israel proper being the location chosen. It may well be that it was doomed from the beginning, but for example, "Let all the Jews who want their own state move to America" was definitely not an option when the Zionist movement began in the 19th century, and it wasn't even an option for all the Jews to flee to the US after WWII.
Amadan
Letting the hate flow through me
7hr ago
I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack.
Such a sly rephrasing.
What @FtttG said was:
- sympathetic framing of the perpetrator ("his family were killed in an airstrike in Lebanon")
- claims that such attacks are bound to be expected as a consequence of the war in Gaza i.e. victim-blaming (as if a handful of Australian Jews, many of whom had presumably never set foot in Israel, have the slightest say in Israeli politics or IDF tactics)
- outright suggestions that the attack was staged by Mossad as a false flag attack
This is accurate.
We could perhaps add:
- Pointing out the problematic social media posts of one of the victims.
You're right, almost no one is going to go mask-off and say "I support shooting Jews because I just really fucking hate Jews."
Even the most vehement Jew-haters are more sly than that.
To some degree, it's the euphemism treadmill. But it originated with the well-intentioned desire to treat mentally retarded people more humanely. Telling children not say "retard" did not, of course, cause children to become kinder, especially to retarded people, but since you asked for a steelman, it is now much more widely accepted in society that insulting and abusing the disabled is a shitty thing to do and the status of the mentally retarded is better now than it used to be.
That obviously didn't happen because we made "retard" a no-no word, but it can be argued that the mindset that tabooed the word contributed to greater awareness and sympathy.
I still think tabooing words is retarded, lame, and stupid (no shit, I've been lectured by SJs that "stupid" and "dumb" are offensive and ableist) but you asked for a steelman.
We had a small discussion last week about "Negro" and "Chinaman." Both of those words used to be perfectly acceptable. Now they are considered rude at best. Why? Mostly arbitrary shifts in usage, but those shifts came with improved racial conditions. The one didn't cause the other, but they are associated. Now "Retarded," "Negro," and "Chinaman" to describe a person all sound reductive and dehumanizing.
The advantage, of course, is now you have a power word to use when you really want to be offensive.
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