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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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There have been cases of the chant being used about potatoes and traffic. After 9/11, when Khamenei condemned the terror attacks, large crowds of Iranians held vigils, and some chanted “death to terrorism”. This is not the behavior of a nation that actually wants death inflicted upon a country.

We are not going to nuke their cities and raze their crops and exterminate civilians wholesale (which their government would certainly do to us if they had the capability).

Well, by the same token, Netanyahu calls Iran “Amalek”, which in the traditional telling, must be fully destroyed along with “all that they have […] both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey”. Do Israelis take this commandment literally? No; every Israeli cleric will explain that Amalek is a symbolic representation of evil. But if you’re Iran, you know what they’ve done to Gaza, and Iraq, and Syria, and Libya… so even a symbolic transliteration is not reassuring.

I'm sure Iranians (and everyone else) have said "Death to Pikachu" or "Death to my mother-in-law" at some point.

This argument is disingenuous and seems a lot like the whole "River to the Sea" debate, where whether it's actually an expression of violent intent depends on whether you hate Jews or not. As I already pointed out, not every single person who chants "Death to " literally wants to see an entire country exterminated, but you are well aware that Iranians chanting "Death to " in the streets mean what they say, even if they think it's figurative because they aren't actually in a position to inflict death.

Netanyahu's "Amalek" reference is in fact pretty loaded and I'm sure he knew what he was saying (and that he could waffle on whether he really has genocidal intent). That said, a politician using loaded rhetoric isn't the same as thousands of people chanting something in unison. If thousands of Israelis start chanting "Iran is Amalek," yes, I would assume that the general sentiment is that they would like to see Iran literally wiped off the map and that a not-insignificant fraction of them really and truly want and expect to do that. There are no doubt a non-zero number of Israelis who really mean it literally, and if I were Iranian, I probably would not be very charitable about interpreting an Israeli's use of that word.

Libya

I was unaware that Israel was a big player in the NATO intervention there.

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