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Another day, another controversy about what is antisemitism and what is legitimate criticism of Israel.
This time, a German architecture prize was rescinded over the recipient signing a letter condemning Israel.
Of course, the Guardian is not quite sure how the founder of the prize is called, oscillating between Schelling and Schilling:
The letter in question is here. Key passages:
We still have 3/4 of that century to go, but good job being optimistic!
This would at least be debatable.
Fair enough.
That would be the the general right self-determination of peoples, as mentioned in the UN charter? Does this also apply to the Uighur, the Kurds, the Basques, the Catalans and so on?
Or is the relevant law the limited recognition of Palestine, or the Oslo Accords?
Was the Hamas rule before the Oct 7 a shining example of self-determination?
Personally, I am somewhat sympathetic to calls to stop the IDF from bombing the hell out of Gaza. I am also fine with demanding that Israel should stick to the Oslo accords in the West Bank and dismantle their illegal settlements.
But to demand political autonomy in the context of Gaza is where I get off the train. The force of political autonomy in Gaza is called Hamas. Their primary objective is to sabotage any peace process by murdering random residents of Israel. Asking for political autonomy for Gaza is like asking for political autonomy for Germany in 1946.
Overall, I don't think that the letter is plainly antisemitic. If the author had signed a similar pledge against Chinese institutions for the Uighur genocide, and also demanded self-determination for the Kurds, I would tend to call them a general advocate for oppressed people. If their only political topic is Israel, then that would be a bit dubious.
In my view, someone boycotting Israel could, theoretically not be anti-Semitic, but I don't know of any organised movement that qualifies.
For such a movement to demonstrate not being anti-Semites, they would need to state conditions XYZ, such that:
However, doing this would lose the support of those who oppose Israel not out of sympathy for Palestinian children but anger that the Jews have somewhere where they can exist without the permission of the Nations.
That is a very uncharitable way to say "The rules of war that you say we have to follow, you have to follow them too." How many people who were complaining about the "kids in cages" at the southern border are ardent Zionists and don't see any inconsistency in their beliefs about the morality of border enforcement? Chuck Schumer is one of these types of people, in 2007 he went to a fundraising gala for Efrat, an Israeli anti-abortion lobby group while being 100% pro choice when it comes to American fetuses.
How many Zionists would tolerate what's happening to Gaza if Gaza were located in South Africa?
Interesting how such "isolated demands for rigor" regarding how America is run never seem to apply to Israel.
Hamas does not follow the rules of war. Furthermore, the rules of war do not say half the things Israel's opponents claim they say.
Does it matter? Anyway, how many Mexicans were launching rockets at El Paso and San Diego? Was there some operation where an organized group directed by the Mexican government (or whatever group controlled the territory) came in and killed and kidnapped a bunch of random Americans? The situations aren't all that similar.
Depends on who was doing it and who was getting it done to, naturally.
Not quite rockets, but the cartels are absolutely using drones to track the Border Patrol, and electronic warfare devices to disrupt our own, signalling quite sophisticated capabilities.
Of course, the reason they're not shooting rockets at us is because the cartels have no interest in trying to destroy the U.S., because we're the cash cow they milk their money out of, whether in the form of smuggling fees for migrants trying to gain access to our labor markets, or sales figures for drugs they supply to our hedonism markets. If October 7 had been a coordinated drug-smuggling operation instead of a violent attack, I somehow don't think the Israelis would have responded with bombs.
Yes. Pancho Villa's attack on the U.S. Army garrison and nearby town of Columbus, NM. Militarily, it was much less effective than 10/7 - the attackers suffered far more casualties (over 100) than they inflicted (17). It still provoked a months-long US invasion that reached hundreds of miles into northern Mexico by U.S. troops and several small pitched battles against both rebel and Mexican government forces that resulted in several hundred casualties. The only reason it wasn't bloodier was that the terrain of Northern Mexico was so inhospitable and so lightly-settled that all belligerents were limited to small cavalry (or automotive) patrols. So there's actually a parallel here.
There was an actual genocide perpetrated by U.S. backed "rebels" against arab religious minorities such as the Yezidi during the Obama administration, complete with the taking of women as sex slaves (at least one of whom "wound up" - three guesses as to how - in Gaza and was recently rescued by the IDF, actually). Barely anyone gave a shit.
The Arab world is currently engaging in a "near genocide" of Christians which is definitely an ethnic purge. I don't see any breathless news coverage of this.
During the recent civil war in Ethiopia a couple years ago, the Tigray people in the north of the country appear to have been subjected to an attempted genocide. Don't remember any huge news coverage about that - we were too busy freaking out about the end of the Trump Administration.
South Sudan appears to be undergoing yet more hideous racial violence between arabs and black african tribes which has displaced more people than the fighting in Gaza, and is being characterized as an attempted genocide. Don't see that leading headlines in U.S. papers, or causing protest movements on U.S. campuses.
There were plenty of war crimes committed in Myanmar's counterinsurgency/anti-drug fight in the Shan during the last decade or so - here's a few from an Amnesty International Report. This one made a bit of a splash because one of the groups being repressed were the muslim Rohingya group, which dovetailed well with reflexive American senses about who is oppressed and thus is an appropriate target for pity. But I don't recall it generating nearly as much vitriol as the Gaza war.
This was just 30 minutes of Googling by a semi-aware person. I'm sure I could find more...there's no shortage of suffering in the world.
Isis wasn't US backed. Do you mean some precursor groups? I thought Isis were mostly sunni militias led by ex-baathist officers.
That actually interests me, but it's not in the article. Some hamas fighter was in isis and brought her home as a souvenir ? That's my best guess, I give up. How?
Not directly, but we sure backed a lot of "moderate" Sunnis in Syria that turned out to be Al Qaida wannabees or even affiliates. To say nothing of what we did indirectly through NATO via the Turks (who, to be fair, were mainly focusing their special hatred on the Kurds)
It's actually worse than that, somehow. I'd post the substance of it here, but it's really quite NSFL; if you want the gory details, go to the link. TL;DR - she was captured by ISIL, had horrible shit happen to her, was sold at least five times as a child sex slave before finally being forcibly "married" at 15-ish to a Gazan fighter. He was captured by coalition forces, but then smuggled through Syria and Turkey to Egypt, from whence he took her back to his family in Gaza. There she was kept as a sex and domestic slave for the family - she was at one point married a second time to this guy's brother. The children of rape she bore them are still in Gaza, being raised as Arab muslims.
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