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Trump has bombed Iran's nuclear sites, using B2 bombers dropping 30,000-pound massive ordinance penetrators. All aircraft have successfully cleared Iranian airspace, and Trump is claiming that all three nuclear sites were wiped out. No word that I've seen of a counter-attack from Iran, as yet.
AOC has concluded that a president ordering an airstrike without congressional approval is grounds for impeachment. Fetterman thinks it was the right move. Both are, I suppose, on brand.
My feelings are mixed. I absolutely do not want us signing up for another two decades of invading and inviting the middle east, and of all the places I'd pick with a gun to my head, Iran would be dead last. I do not think our military is prepared for a serious conflict at the moment, because I think there's a pretty good likelihood that a lot of our equipment became suddenly obsolete two or three years ago, and also because I'm beginning to strongly suspect that World War 3 has already started and we've all just just been a bit slow catching on. That said, I am really not a fan of Iran, and while I could be persuaded to gamble on Iran actually acquiring nukes, it's still a hell of a gamble, and the Israelis wiping Iran's air defense grid made this about the cheapest alternative imaginable. I have zero confidence that diplomacy was ever going to work; it's pretty clear to me that Iran wanted nukes, and that in the best case this would result in considerable proliferation and upheaval. Now, assuming the strikes worked, that issue appears to be off the table for the short and medium terms. That... seems like a good thing? Maybe?
I'm hoping what appears to me to be fairly intense pressure to avoid an actual invasion keeps American boots of Iranian soil. As with zorching an Iranian general in Iraq during Trump's first term, this seems like a fairly reasonable gamble, but if we get another forever war out of this, that would be unmitigated disaster.
This is a huge W for Israel. And frankly a necessary W for the country. If my generation continues to hold the politics that they hold now as they age, Israel is stuffed in about 20 years. They need to win these wars now, and make peace with the people that they are able to now, or they won't survive when the blue-hairs start being elected to the senate.
I'm not sure I really understand why so many zoomers are so rabidly pro-Palestine. I get being against what is happening in Gaza, but so many people seem to be completely ignorant of the history of conflict, perhaps willfully so. I used to enjoy going on /r/stupidpol, but that place has become as cesspit of pro-Hamas propaganda. Even if you think the state of Israeli was a Western colonialist project (debatable at best), the fact is there are 9 million Jews living there now. If Hamas/other Arab nations get their way, those 9 million Jews will either be all dead or displaced. How is that any better than what they think is happening in Gaza and the West Bank? Part of me hopes that most of my generation isn't really thinking about things that way, but based on reactions in my graduate department to 10/7 (immediate pro-Palestine protests despite the fact that ISRAEL was attacked), make me think that a lot of my generation actually just wants Israel gone. Which makes me pretty sad.
I lived in Israel in 2019, and as far as I could see, it was a country that would be worth preserving. The public infrastructure was functional, vast amounts of food are grown on relatively small amounts of land, and best of all the people there actually seemed to believe in something greater than themselves. I spent a bit of time in the north where most of the 1 million Arab citizens live (and also more time in Jerusalem where non-citizen Arabs are), and while they had complaints about their economic situation/racism from Ashkenazi Jews, it seemed like their lives were far far better than their relatives in the West Bank or even in other Arab countries. Heck in Jerusalem there were Israeli soldiers guarding the entrance to the upper temple complex to make sure I didn't go up there as a non-muslim. Would a Palestinian government grant the same kind of protection to a disenfranchised Jewish minority? For some reason, I doubt it.
I'm definitely much more liberal than a lot of people here, but this is one thing I just cannot stomach from my own tribe. It would be one thing if we just disagreed in the abstract, but most organizations on the left seemed to be obsessed with tying support for Palestine for everything. My grad union for example wants to send union dues to Palestine and to bargain to try and get Hopkins to divest from Israeli companies. I didn't fucking sign up for this shit when I signed my union card.
I wouldn't be so pessimistic. The senate has a conservative bias - I don't see them electing many blue-haired types in the foreseeable future. I agree that this is probably the friendliest administration Israel is going to have for a while but there's probably a lower limit on how strained the relationship is going to get. Unlike almost everyone else in the region, Israel is an actually useful country that's 90% geopolitically aligned with the US in its goals. What's the alternative to being allied with them?
I assume it's the media environment. Most legacy media is run by progressives, who will side with Muslims against Jews in any conflict, while newer media is either permeated with anti-western propaganda like TikTok or has no guardrails against plain old standard anti-semitic crankery like Twitter.
I genuinely hope to see you write more about this at some point.
Agreed. I'm also more liberal than not (pro-choice, mostly pro-trans, etc) but it seems clear that liberalism as a movement has, IMO, ceded leadership almost entirely to people who don't believe in universalist principles or rights but rather have a strictly hierarchical view of the world (the infamous "progressive stack") where Jews/whites inhabit the bottom rung and black people/muslims are at the top.
I think a lot of the bias in the pro-Muslim direction is a lack of lived experience with this stuff. If you’re a zoomer, you were a baby when 9-11 happened, and you didn’t actually see what the intifada did, or any of the ISIS beheadings or suicide bombings and IEDs in Iraq/Afghanistan. So the impression you’d get from the media is something Like “Muslims were sitting in Palestine, minding their own business when those colonialist Jews showed up and for no reason at all decided to require all kinds of security measures and put up walls.” No, every one of the security checkpoints was because of various jihad and intifada attacks against civilians.
I don’t think Israel is perfect here. The settler movement is making everything worse. Bombing hospitals is not a good thing to do. The list honestly goes beyond this as well.
That probably applies to zoomers, but I don't think it explains why the progressive movement (which is dominated by millenials) axiomatically favours Muslims over Jews. I'm pretty sure AOC remembers 9/11.
If you're an (American - also applies to some degree to other Western countries) progressive Millennial, assuredly one of your chief political formational points was the Iraq War, where, in addition to various other forms of propaganda, you'd be suggested to a huge assay of talking heads, "warbloggers" and the like piously intoning that this is all a part of a battle against Radical Islamic Terrorist and unless you want to support exactly the wars the Bush admin wanted you to support or a course even more radical, it meant that you loved and cherished not only cruel dictators like Saddam but also Radical Islamic Terrorism (and even neglecting to use this specific phrase might mean you're symphatizing with Islamists!) and all of this proved that you were a part of an eternal alliance of Islamists and Leftists and also that you were naive and America-hating and what have you. I'm not talking about the official Bush admin point of view, which tried to avoid direct implication of this being a war against Islam after a few false starts, but the general connected propaganda machine around the WoT.
Then it all went belly-up and Middle East turned into a fire pit and the people who made it happen never admitted anything. I suspect that offered quite an inoculation against similar rhetoric for many Millennials, lasting until now and giving flashbacks right now of similar rhetoric being used by people who were supposed to be a reaction precisely to Bush-era warmongering.
The conflict between various Muslim states and Israel (which, really, is what we're talking about when talking about "Muslims and Jews" here, since there's only one Jewish state) is rather more complex and goes back way more than the 00s War on Terror, but one of the reasons why they get jumbled up is precisely because Israelis themselves worked to jumble them up in the public view when they considered it advantageous to do so.
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