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Ronde van Spanje: Tumult, Unrest, and Vingegaard Wins
There is one road cycling event which exceeds all others in general notability, Tour de France. This post is not about it, but about its Spanish counterpart, alike in the rules, mechanics, participants.
The 2025 edition of the Tour of Spain has just ended on Sunday, and boy was it memorable. Not for the cycling, but for what spilled over the side of the road, onto the course. Namely: Pro-Palestine protests. The stated cause of these protestors was the participation of the team "Israel - Premier Tech" (IPT), which despite its name, is not owned by Israel, but by a Jewish Canadian. (Israel has not exactly disassociated itself from the team, its PM expressing support to the team for not buckling).
Stage 5 was a Team Time Trial, where instead of all cyclists starting together, each team starts separately at regular intervals. Perfect situation for those targeting some team. Protestors were aware of this, and attacked IPT, whose finishing time would later be reduced by 15 seconds.
In Stage 11, when cyclists were about half an hour from the finish, shortened by 3km, it also was declared it would have no winner.
IPT would change jerseys, replacing "Israel" on them with the Star of David.
Stage 16 was altered, when the race was already on, by reducing its length by 8km.
Stage 18 was an Individual Time Trial, where each cyclist starts separately at set intervals, again perfect if one targets a particular cyclist. Race organizers sensed the danger, and shortened the course from 27.2 km to 12.2 km, the day before the stage.
Stage 21, the final one, was set to end in several circuits around Madrid, but that part was cancelled. The stage would have no winner, nor would it count for the Spanish Yellow aka Red Jersey.
Safety concerns also prevented podium ceremony from taking place. An IPT rider, American Matthew Riccitello becoming the leader in the Youth (or White Jersey) classification in stage 20, thus entitled to participate in the ceremony, probably exacerbated the perceived security situation. (The teams would go on to conduct their own ceremony in some parking lot, with the production value of an amateur race.)
Currently the position of PM of Spain belongs to the Socialist Party, and in the conflict between making his country look competent and his support for Palestine, chose the latter. Explicitly supporting the disruptors, (following the Spanish FM's calls for IPT to abandon the race a bit over a week earlier). The opposition opposed, as did Israel's FM and PM of Denmark.
Incidentally, the team at the center of this controversy on Sunday participated in a Canadian one-day-race, "Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal" under "IPT", instead of the full name. The race went smoothly, and was won by an American Brandon McNulty riding for the state-owned team "UAE Team Emirates - XRG".
Protestors having veto rights over sports participants, is something I oppose. It would be anti-pluralist. It would be like some manifestations cancel culture in being a variant of tortious interference. The audience wants to see the best riders, the best riders want to participate, but a politicized minority wants to come between them.
It reminds of some democrat-tinged critiques of the US political system, in that it has too many veto points, thus changes are hard to enact. It is, however, out of of all institutions the government, for which it makes the most moral sense to be veto-full as it is unique in wielding force against everyone. But such a veto-full system applied to all of society would be undesirable, as another person watching a cyclist riding for a team you do not like, does not make one coerced. This is why one should have less say in it.
EDIT: Cycling's governing body, UCI, has issued a statement. Most damning for Spain is the following paragraph:
If you look at the wars that became horrendous PR failures such as Vietnam, the French in Algeria, South Africa etc they have all been wars against a population that fundamentally has no reason to accept that order. The South Vietnamese government had no real claim of authority or legitimacy. The palestinian population has no reason to accept large number Eastern Europeans who moved there in the 90s having more rights than they do. They have no reason to accept having a country that is chopped in two parts of which the largest part isn't connected to the sea.
Israel is dropping like a rock in the polls and especially among young people. Palestine's best weapon is IDF soldiers with tiktok showing the world their true nature. Israel is not going to be viable as a state when the state is deeply unpopular in the rest of the world.
The completely incompetent looking one was the one who dragged Spain into the Iraq war. Competency is ensuring we don't have a Mediterranean state that creates a massive refugee crisis near Europe. A country that bombs six MENA countries in a week is an enemy of Europe.
Israel destroyed Gaza's catholic church and expects to be treated like a normal country. Does Israel treat countries that destroy synagogues the same way?
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
There is no inherent moral right to sovereignty. I'm sorry, you were lied to: the liberal international order is a spook. The breadth of your dominion is limited to the force of your arms - no matter how righteous or unrighteous you may be.
Did the last prophet, PBUH, not conquer peoples who had fundamentally no reasons to accept his order? Was not God on his side?
Similarly, the Israelites have made a conquest of Israel and Judea. Is God not on their side, now?
Possession is nine-tenths of the law. If the Palestinians want a change to the status quo, they should have cultivated an army to beat the IDF. Now they're beggars in the land of their forefathers with no hope of recovery. No, you're not getting your land back: the people with guns who took it aren't in any mood to just hand it over. It is for them to accept the reality of impotence and exile, as every people who lost wars before them have.
I assume you are jewish.
If you missed it there are strict rules of warfare that have been a part of western civilization for a long time. Catholicism has a view of war that is completely incompatible with the jewish view of war. Might is right with ethnic cleansing has not been applied in Europe.
The French on Haiti didn't want their land back. The Boer didn't want to live in a Bantu state. The occupation isn't long term sustainable and will fall apart. Palestinians have effectively ensured Israel is in a permanent state of crisis with an unsolvable public relations crisis.
This is the definition of an ad hominem. Even if he were Jewish, "Your opinion is invalid because Jew" isn't acceptable.
You've been warned and banned repeatedly because of your antagonistic obsession with Jews. As we are obligated to repeat over and over, you can hate whomever you want, but your posting needs to follow the rules.
Banned for two days, but next time you are looking at a longer term ban.
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Citation very much needed.
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I am not Jewish, and my argument would remain the same whether or not I was or wasn't.
I am Chinese.
The Chinese pushed out the Westerners and the Japanese not through impassioned appeals to international law or anti-colonial agitation, but through the barrel of a gun.
Similarly, the Chinese have taken the territories of Tibet and Turkestan for her own against the wishes of the people who live there, with the barrels of guns. If you have enough of them, any occupation is tenable.
I see no reason why the Israelis can't do the same.
There are 250 Chinese for each Tibetan, there are more Palestinians than jews. Also there aren't large Tibetan nations surrounding China.
China didn't defeat its occupants in a big battle, they made occupying China unfeasible in the long run. That is what the Palestinians are doing.
And the Palestinians are, for the most part, impoverished uneducated lumpenproles who live off foreign aid and jihadist payments. Arab armies are jokes and failures. Hamas, Hezbollah, even Iran have been bombed to oblivion. Who is going to come to the Palestinian's aid now? Turkey?
The Israelis don't want to leave Israel. They don't want to leave it so much that they basically stole themselves nukes so that they'd never be coerced to do so. If the Palestinians are competing on who can make the other's situation shittier faster, then they'll lose that competition. If Israel has to choose between becoming an illiberal pariah state like North Korea or its nonexistence it will go for the former every time.
If it gets so desperate as to reach that point, why wouldn't they just murder every Palestinian and dare the international community to do anything about it?
Why are you so certain that their willpower to remain will give up before the Palestinians will?
Just chiming in to say that I have a very similar opinion as you and it disturbs me a little how similar our opinions are.
Israel is always contentious topic, but repeatedly whenever antisemitism-du-jour or unpopularity of how Israel-US relations are among the western world is brought up my reaction is always "obviously?"
What Israel is, is an ethnostate with religious and political mandate to entrench itself in a land surrounded by their religious enemies, full of people that have been historically persecuted on an industrial scale (the exact scale is apparently a hot topic of debate in some circles), and have managed to secure themselves power, a modern military, and alliance with a hyperpower.
What did people think was going to happen if their civilians got shot up and kidnapped?
You look at the countries surrounding Israel and they're generally not very well run. How much of this is down to Mossad/US efforts is up for debate, also, but Arab governance today just generally isn't great. The Chinese attitude is pragmatic; it comes into the mind of the Chinese that if they were in a modal Arab nation that wanted to wipe out Israel for realsies, they would conduct themselves in a very different way after one or two costly failures.
What Israel has done is demonstrate power and capability and networks. They've burned a lot of political credibility to do it, and I'm not sure how popular Bibi is within Israel these days.
The greater problem with the conflict is that everyone looks bad; Arab leaders are caught in a weird catch-22 as always where they need to placate the more card-carrying Muslim extremists within their tribes to maintain political power but are also aware that the further down that path they tread the less likelihood of them being able to function as a country. I believe American hate for Israel is just an ingrained pathology of supporting the underdog, and anger at the use of American resources to support a country they don't really care that much about and personally see no benefit from supporting. The American argument for strong allies in the ME has deteriorated with the tidal wave of oil fracking, and even enforcement of the petrodollar has imploded with oil being now traded in other currencies.
And there's also no way of extricating Israel from this conflict or de-escalating relatively peacefully in a way that either side can accept. Maybe Bibi is aware that America's sufferance for Israeli dalliances will end; America will be happy to keep selling them weapons and infosharing with Mossad, but politically the younger generation getting into politics and the increased irrelevance of traditional American media structures may spell a lapse in Jewish influence on American populism. They'll be fighting over the ME forever, even if America ends up having nothing to do with it.
Hollywood was one of the key structures of Jewish soft power and one of America's most widely exported methods of cultural agitprop; I don't know if anyone's noticed but they're not doing too hot recently. Silicon Valley is American, yes, but a larger and larger share of corporate tech CEOs are looking quite non-Jewish recently.
If the Chinese were in the position of the Arabs they'd form an Arab United Front in 1948 (which, to the credit, the Arabs did try, but the coalition was nowhere near as large as it could have been) and prevented the creation of an Israeli state from the outset. When presented with the horrible atrocities and butcher's bill, they'd say 'send in the next wave'. They wouldn't stop until the Americans and Soviets threatened to intervene and they'd draw up on the armistice lines and actually make peace.
The Japanese did way, way, way worse to the Chinese than the Arabs did to the Israelis, and yet in the modern day they do business with them.
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This isn't actually a choice. Becoming an "illiberal pariah state" is not a long-term stable situation - you can't run a first world economy with Israel's geography while completely cut off from all international trade and support. Take away all the direct and indirect support provided by America, as well as the support provided by diaspora jews (part of becoming a pariah state means that remittances and other sources of funding/support will go away too), and you're looking at a country with a very limited lifespan.
One of the targets of Iran's strikes against Israel was the diamond exchange - the diamond exchange is one of Israel's most profitable trades, despite the fact that they don't actually have any diamond mines in the country. How long is that going to last when Israel is cut off from international trade flows? How long is their tech sector going to last when all foreign investment is pulled? Israel does not have the population demographics or material resources required to sustain themselves when completely cut off from the rest of the world (to say nothing of what their internal politics will look like when the orthodox are forced to work and join the army). Don't forget that the majority of Israelis have the ability to simply fuck off back to their actual home country - and when faced with a choice between grinding poverty in a pariah state and living a first world lifestyle back in the west I think a portion of them will simply leave.
Pariah Israel would simply be a last, desperate grasp before the entire project is swept away into the dustbin of history, and if there's any hope for survival for Israel it means not ending up as a universally despised and hated ethnostate.
Your assumptions are simply incorrect.
Sure, many would leave. But there is a sincere core of Zionists who believe that Israel was promised to them by their God and they will stay there to the bitter end. They will eat rocks and dust and do what they must before they let the Palestinians win. A impoverished state with nuclear weapons and arms - not that it would ever get that desperate - will never fall. The Arab leadership very well know where those warheads are aimed at.
The fantasy of the Israeli state dissolving itself after sufficient isolation is simply that. The onus is on YOU to convince me that it is the case. Just stating it as a matter of fact does not make it so. It is the Palestinian project that looks like it is on the verge of collapse, at this very moment. With no geopolitical sponsor, how could it hope to continue on in any relevant form?
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Actually the funny part about this is Israel may not even be around in its current form in a couple generations and it won’t be due to military conflict. The Satmar Jewish sect is the largest congregation of Jews in the world and they are fervently anti-Zionist as well as many (though not all) Orthodox. Guess who fertility rates are favoring over the long run? And it’s not even close.
All Palestinians may have to do is continue to hold out. Jews are on their side in the long run.
Most Satmars don't live in Israel (as you'd expect) and those that do don't participate in elections. I wasn't able to find any figures online but ChatGPT estimates that the Satmar only make up about 2% of Haredi Jews in Israel, and so an even smaller percentage of the total population.
Haredi non-Zionism is mainly focused on the fact that the Israeli state is too secular, they're not wishing to dismantle the state and let the Arabs take back the land.
My expectation is that as the Haredi welfare teat gets closed off and they are forced to serve in the military, a significant chunk of them will end up joining the religious zionists.
The Satmars don’t live in Israel because they’re opposed to its existence and it’s sacrilegious for them to do so. And they put in work to support groups who desire to see Israel dismantled.
Among those that are religious who support Israel, most of that comes ordinarily as you’d expect from the Orthodox, but even then there’s no overriding consensus on the matter. Israel is extremely worried when it comes to mobilizing the very religious sectors of their society because they haven’t been able to move the needle in any substantial way without risking a huge rift in fabric of Israeli society. I think if worst comes to worst things will run the other direction. I don’t share your prediction on this.
Edit: Phone keeps autocorrecting/making typos.
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There is Motte-and-Baileying going on here. Motte: Palestinians screwed up, vae victis; Bailey: we owe Israel continued support, gifts and hospitality.
Why do we have to identify one side as The Good Guys in any conflict and throw everything behind them? Why can't we dismiss this as two groups of barbarians butchering each other and just uninvite them both from our society until they show signs of improvement?
(Also: would you have accepted the same argument regarding the Nazis and their victims?)
Because America loves Star Wars.
They want a clear bad guy and a clear good guy and it'd be best if the bad guy's sword was red so they could tell he was bad.
Most of the disastrous ME foreign policy of the US has boiled down to a popular misunderstanding of trying to map the Evil Autocrat vs the Oppressed Rebels that unfortunately tracks all the way to the very top. Realpolitik has its own weaknesses and failings, but Americans have the political memories of goldfish and the nostalgic memories of geriatrics.
You might like this Substack piece by Librarian of Celaeno (assuming you haven't read it already): "Jedi Brain":
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I think the final point is what gets me, the one about the rebuilding after Shock and Awe receiving no more thought as if Good People naturally get Good Outcomes, medals and a parade. The idea that good is an emergent property of killing all the bad people is something I don't understand except as a seductive lizard-brain problem of having some people to blame. Solzhenitsyn's line about good and evil has stuck with me all my life.
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President Truman did...
"If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.. . ”
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I'm not a fan of Western support for Israel, but the Arabs have done very little in recent times but the occasional pointless terrorism and whining in every international venue that they can. If they want to reclaim the lands of their forefathers, they should strengthen their countries.
And no. Nazism is not the same. Back when countries actually could wage war, people put their chocks down and stopped them. The status quo is the equilibrium of the violence states are willing to achieve their political ends. If the Arabs can't summon the collective will to forge a state to defeat Israel on the battlefield, bluntly, they don't deserve the lands they claim.
The question I meant to ask is whether, before Israel happened, an argument like "if the Jews can't summon the collective will (...) to defeat Germany on the battlefield" would have been acceptable by the same principle.
And either way, Israel gets a lot of support - Arab states trying to defeat Israel alone on the battlefield hasn't really been tried, and if the argument is that the US should help Israel against the Arabs because the Arabs can't defeat the Israel-US coalition, then as long as the US remains militarily dominant this argument is basically circular. If the US decided to back José Santos Almeida of Rua Cleide, 123 in São Paulo with the determination that it displays in supporting Israel, all of South America probably couldn't summon the "collective will" to forge a state to defeat him on the battlefield either; but this doesn't lead us to conclude that the US ought to help this fictional person I placed on a random street from Google Maps become the overlord of his continent.
I can tell you never have ever read any sort of far-right or Neo-nazi argumentation because that is absolutely what they say about America, Great Britain and the Soviet Union - that it was flush through with Jews. (Heck, WW2 being a Jewish victory over Nazism is probably a position you could argue in good faith, with the proper caveats).
Arabs couldn't beat Israel alone, even as a coalition, even before Western support and indigenous nuclear weapons. It is arguable that they have lost military capacity since 1948 with the complete failure of Arab socialism. The Jews are perfectly capable of defending themselves: American diplomatic and military aid is backstopping security, not sovereignty. Israel would not hesitate to expel the rest of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza if Americans withdrew their support: in fact, they would do it immediately.
Realpolitk has nothing to do with morals. There is no 'oughts' or 'shoulds'. Azerbaijan just did it. Who's sanctioning them?
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Poland was legitimately way too uppity, as per usual. They can never be opposed to both Germany and Russia. It just doesn’t work geopolitically.
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The vibe I get is that people here seem to mistakenly think that “Israel” is this one big, indivisible thing. They’re supporting the Zionist regime under the mistaken premise of thinking it’s in support of Jews. Most religious Jews hate the State of Israel because its secular and want to see it dismantled just like Hamas does, and they work to protest and support groups directed at that end of things.
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Because we are conjoined at the Geopolitical hip with Israel. I'm with you on everything else though.
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