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I appreciate your response but I won't be engaging with you on this. I've personally found the anti-Israel/anti-Jewish posters to be too laser focused on that end of the conflict to the point where it makes the conclusions questionable and discussion unrewarding.
My apologies if I have you pegged incorrectly on the Jewish front.
What a coincidence! I too find people who post on the topic of Israel to be incapable of rational discussion because they fail to agree with me and my obviously correct points - just with the opposite political valence to you.
As I made clear down thread, I'm perfectly willing to engage with criticism of Jews, Israel, and this war. I find plenty of people capable of rational discussion about this topic including people I deeply disagree with.
However some of the posters here are clearly just angry, hateful, and blinded by some sort of intense and specific dislike that will never make sense to me and is clearly objectively irrational despite being historically common.
What's the value in discussion with someone who is going to blame the Jews every time? You already know they are going to blame the Jews. They aren't going to say anything novel. They might even be right occasionally but you won't be able to tell because they say the same thing every time.
I've never had any significant interaction with anti-semites in person or in real life prior to this conflict and I now get while growing up the Jewish people I know just automatically assumed anyone who was anti-Israel was anti-semitic.
If someone was criticising the actions of the Nazi regime, would you discount their critiques on the basis that there is no value in discussion with someone who is going to blame the Germans every time? How many people in the upper echelons of the Israeli government, with the ability and authority to make serious decisions, are not Jewish?
What, exactly, is irrational about Coffee Enjoyer's post? Are you going to deny that Israel has nuclear weapons? Are you going to deny that they have, in the past, engaged in both espionage and direct attacks on the US? The most significant intelligence theft in US history (at least to my knowledge) was committed by an Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard.
The kind of low-intelligence antisemitism that you're describing, the kind that belongs to people who just look for some kind of external force they can blame for the problems in their life so they don't have to do anything about, have always existed and will always exist. If it wasn't the Jews it would be the Feminists or the Man or the Illuminati etc. Those people aren't worth talking to, but I'd argue that it isn't the specific target of that kind of mental pathology that distinguishes them.
But you're doing your own thinking a great disservice by shoving every single person with an antipathy towards Israel into that rather cramped box. Have you paid any attention to the recent conflict or the actions Israel has actually taken in the Middle East? Do you think the family of Rachel Corrie are motivated by an "objectively irrational" dislike when they criticise the state of Israel? As someone on the left I can assure you that most people who criticise Israel in my circles have a gigantic list of incredibly specific grievances and problems they have with the state of Israel, and it is in fact the state of Israel which goes out of its way to conflate all criticism of it with criticism of Jews in general, and plenty of prominent organisations do the same (like the ADL).
I'm perfect willing to talk to someone who is anti-nazi, or anti-semitic, or anti-racism.
The problem is that quite a few people who these descriptions apply to are not worth talking to. I'd bet most people in Israeli leadership circles are very aware of how WWI created WWII, and therefore have awareness of the impact of what they do in Palestine has for the future. They'd be willing to discuss these tensions (at least previously).
Woke types? No. The Nazis are Satan if you try and argue that Cambodia or the USSR represent worse regimes you'll be labeled a Nazi or hear a bunch of talking points that are all soldiers or weak-men.
We've spent the last ten years getting used to how these people argue.
Anti-jew posters are often like them. For this specific poster - he recently had a conversation with one of our mods who handled it better and more eloquently than I could.
If you always blame the jews for everything in predictable ways, I'm just going to assume that's what you are going to do. You may eventually be right but that's not through predictive power it's through repetition.
Although - credit to SS for actually posting interesting things about other topics, although it took a bunch of redirection from the mods to get there.
Additionally if you disagree you typically get downvotes, personal attacks, and accusations of being a sheep. Everyone still here is sufficiently heterodox to make that an embarrassing accusation.
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Then don't reply.
I mean it's a tough situation, I'd prefer to not be rude and both options are rude.
I think many people here have something interesting to say for or against this conflict but at this point I've started to find the anti-jew posters aggressively one note on anything that can be blamed on jews. On reddit I'd tag people with RES so I could keep track of things like this, but I don't know how to do that here and I wasn't 100% if he was one of those...and well he made it clear.*
If you are more irked by my lack of response to you, well I watched mainstream media on the recent events, personally heard the talking points in real time, felt convinced I understand the public justification and aims, then watched the dem talking heads land on a narrative of "not clear" and people download that.* I am happy to explore how valid my thought process is on this with a curious party like OP, but your stance suggests a fixed position and willingness to use disingenuous talking point to affirm your stance.
Ex: At this point Trump has been in the public sphere long enough that unwillingness or inability to adjust to his administrations communication style is the fault of the interlocutor. The lack of professionalism is a reason to critsizie them for lack of professionalism, it is not a reason to fail to appropriately engage with their communication.
*Plenty of reasons to dislike Israel and its recent actions, but if what you are saying tries to make Israel seem worse than or equivalent to Iran+terrorists than the complaints just aren't credible and I think discussion is unlikely to be fruitful.
*Seen many times in recent high quality political discussion like with Mark Halperin going "here are the aims! They said that in this speech! Stop pretending it wasn't clear" and talking heads just not engaging.
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The Israeli strategy has long been to confine American discourse to a narrow passage of acceptable comparisons and permitted moral indignations, so I do not find this response surprising.
My guy, I implore you to consider the ramifications of our interaction going like this: "I'm worried you make everything about Israel" "of course Israel made you say that."
You were justifying the war with arguments that could apply against both Israel and Iran. This suggests that your justifications are meritless, because it is nonsensical to fight on behalf of country A against country B for reason C when both countries are doing C. Similarly you argued for war against B when IMO most Americans would support doing C if we were on the receiving end of A’s aggression. It is not possible to discuss the merits of the war without bringing up Israel, the major party to the war, on whose behalf we are currently waging war. I don’t know if you intended your post to be a general justification for American participation in the conflict but this is how it came off. “Why don't people understand this?” — I am a member of the group of people who do not understand it, explaining why it is not understood.
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