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So, first of all, I am not Irish. I have some Irish ancestry. I also have English, Scandinavian, German, Jewish, and (according to a DNA test) North African ancestry. As I've said before, I am Jewish enough for the Nazis to have classified me as such in that thing that you say totally didn't happen but was good, but I am not Jewish enough to actually care about Jewish religion or culture or Israel per se. Sorry if that makes it harder to pin me down on my ethnic biases.
Now, the rest of your argument was entirely beside the point because you don't care about the West Bank any more than you care about Gaza. You care about Jews. That is the beginning and the end of it, that is your entire logos on the matter. Your sympathy for Palestinians is an affectation. If a portal to hell opened up and demons invaded Israel, you'd write verbose apologetics for the infernal cause. Absent Jews, obviously you'd be as anti-demon as you are anti-Muslim, but Jews therefore...
I do not believe Iranians or Palestinians are demons, of course. I actually have sympathy for Palestinians and the impossible position they are in, largely because of their leadership (but, it must be pointed out, because of what most of the Palestinian population believes). But to take your straws in order:
The West Bank settlers are awful, I think Israel should put an end to their activities, and other countries should rightfully pressure Israel to do this. That said, even under what passes for "international law," that land basically belongs to whoever can hold it, and "neighboring country encroaches on unincorporated territory and boots out the locals" is a tale as old as time. It's always miserable and tragic, but again, you don't care about the whom, only the who. If Israel did completely pull out of the West Bank and leave the Palestinians there alone, you'd still want Israel to get pushed into the sea by the rest of the Arabs and you'd argue about Gaza and Jordan and Egypt's grievances instead.
The history of Palestine is long and tragic, but it's not directly analogous to England and Ireland, except in the sense that they are inextricably mixed. Israel and Palestine have been mixed since ancient times, and I am no more impressed by Jews' Biblical claims to the land (I don't give a fuck if your holy book says you're rightfully entitled to this land because your ancestors lived here 2000 years ago) than I am by revisionist Palestinian claims that historical Israel never existed and that Palestinians have always had a national identity (they have not) or that Jews haven't been there for centuries.
But again, the historical comparisons are beside the point because I don't believe your "moral intuition" is based on sympathy for Palestinians. it is based on hatred of Jews. Not because this "challenges" us or because you are deeply concerned about the oppressed (in every other context you display nothing but disdain for oppression and social justice narratives). Yes, it's entirely proper to identify your argument as Jew-hatred. If it was anyone but Jews curb-stomping the Palestinians (like, say, the rest of the Arab world, as they have done repeatedly), yes, you'd shrug and say that's what that part of the world is like.
I must have confused the details of a conversation re: Ireland.
This is an ad hominem attack, and a confused one. It’s not clear what you intend by Jewish. Are you counting Neturei Karta? The Samaritans and Karaites? Ezra Koenig? Glenn Greenwald and Max Blumenthal? If you mean “a system of beliefs and behavioral demands”, then there is nothing wrong with liking or disliking it based on its merits. I imagine you strongly dislike Salafism and Khameneism, or there is some ideology which you hate out of an impartial consideration. Do you mean the system of codified rulings considered normative among Rabbinical Judaism as practiced today? I think you got upset when I made a post a while back which specifically analyzed the moral code as taught among Orthodox Judaism.
This is not how the international community has ruled when they have come together at the UN. It seems you’re suggesting that international law is illegitimate. That’s unfortunate. Do you believe moral law is illegitimate? Why shouldn’t the international community come together to enjoin a minimum of rights and obligations?
How so?
When you’re living around everyone with a similar identity, there is no reason to distinguish (say) “Palestinian” from those living in the border regions of Lebanon. The Irish did not have a national identity until the 1800s.
Yes, the Sephardic Jews lived peacefully in Palestine for a long time. They were 2.5% of Palestine in 1800! Surely this doesn’t mean they deserve to inherit the whole thing though, right?
There's nothing confusing about it. Unlike you, I am not confused about your past statements. You attack Jews regularly. You have made it very clear that you do not like Jews. You do not like the Jewish religion and you do not like the Jewish people. You criticize Israel in an unprincipled manner, by which I mean you criticize Israel in a way that only applies to Israel (unlike leftist critics who criticize Israel because they have a general oppressed/oppressor model, or sometimes a general antipathy for all things Western, with which they associate Israel), because it is by proxy attacking Jews. I'm not going to pretend we're talking about the finer points of rabbinical Judaism or Samaritans or Karaites. Nor am I "upset" about this, any more than I was "upset" about your specious analysis of Orthodox Judaism.
I am calling it out, however, because it's annoying. (I suppose in that sense, "annoyed" is kind of like being "upset"). I am not going to argue about the history because as much as I find the history of the region quite interesting and endlessly convoluted (having read a number of books by Israeli histories, of both the Zionist and New Historian school, by Palestinian historians, largely of the Edward Said school, and by Western historians both from a pro- and anti-Israel perspective), I know when I engage with you, I am not engaging with someone interested in history, in justice, or in discerning truth and nuance, I'm engaging with someone whose core motivation is animus towards Jews, and thus everything you write on the subject is an argument-as-soldier. I can't change your mind, and you're allowed to hate Jews. But I'm not indulging the pretense that this is a discussion about international law or concern for Palestinians.
“You are hateful and motivated by hate” is the same old anti-Western argument that has been weaponized against Americans for 60 years now. It’s a stale, tired, and debunked anti-Christian canard. It’s been used by Marxists, Soviets, the racially-aggrieved, you name it. In recent years it has been rehashed by the pro-Israel mouthpieces who whisper in Trump’s ear. It is a laser-guided munition aimed directly at the Western Christian soul and its beautiful guilt-prone culture. And we are over it. No one buys it anymore. The guilt-tripwire has been illuminated and darkness will not overpower the Light.
As there is evidently nothing useful I can say to someone insistent on reading everything through the lens of pure hatred, I will only point you to the words of someone more Jewish than you, who has more experience in Israel. Feel free to call him an antisemite. This is from Moshe Ya'alon, the Minister of Defense in the 33rd and 34th Governments of Israel, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Strategic Affairs in the 32nd Government, and the 17th Chief of the General Staff of the IDF:
There is no correlation between what I said and what you said. Nothing I said has anything to do with hatred of America, hatred of the West, or hatred of Christians.
Jewish supremacists exist and there is plenty to criticize Israel about.
Nonetheless, I repeat and assert my point: you do not care about Palestinians. You are not motivated by humanitarian concerns for Palestinians. You are not motivated by concerns that Israel's government is not as moral and democratic as it should be. You are motivated by hatred of Jews, which you express in many threads, even threads having nothing to do with Israel or Palestinians. This you have not and will not deny, you will only keep attempting to divert the issue with counter-accusations, such as trying to find some identity politic label to affix onto me that you think will be rhetorically effective. But prove me wrong and state unambiguously that you are not an anti-Semite and you do not hate Jews. I will state unambiguously that you are wrong and I do not hate America, the West, or Christians.
I have been against war in the Middle East since my youth, long before I knew that Israel played any role in it, back when most people thought it was for oil. My first political engagement was Ron Paul followed by Infowars (it was a different time). I was against it because it harms a lot of innocent people. For the same reason: I’m against the Ukraine war, I want to execute fentanyl dealers, I’m against Somali scammers, I am against mass low-wage migration, I am for tax-maxxing the wealthy into oblivion. “Does it harm innocent people and benefit the evil” — I am against it.
So you ask me how I feel about a “group” but refuse to define it. The issue I have with Israel is its oppression against innocent people, which is more egregious because they lie about it and because America supports it. If you ask me whether we should end relations with KSA for Yemen I would say yes, but this event is simply outside my political awareness, I see nothing about it anywhere and I can’t determine what’s true or false. There are separate issues I have with Jewish organizations:
they run the cars4kids scam which exploits compassionate Americans by stealing their cars under the pretense of charity. Up to 1 billion a year. This is evil. They are not called out by the Jewish community. Ben Shapiro shills them on his show. The Jewish community at large runs cover for it; no jew has stopped associating with the groups operating this scheme for moral reasons. They should be called out. I know people who have donated their car to them. I have, unwittingly, passed by their location on the way to a brewery. Their town is in my state, where they pop out 8 kids each using welfare schemes in addition to the charity scheme. When 70 of them got caught welfare scheming some years ago, they used their political connections to settle: all they had to do was pay back half the amount. You can watch a video about this town published two weeks ago with 8 million views because it turns out a lot of Americans hate evil.
they run the “fellowship of Christians and Jews” charity. This steals hundreds of millions of dollars. They exploit the compassion of Christians by manipulating their guilt-prone instincts under the guise of charity, targeting the elderly. All of the money goes to Israel. This is evil. It is abject evil. No one in the Jewish community calls it out.
they are engaged in the security grant program scheme. They are disproportionate recipients of hundreds of millions of dollars in these grants, and use it to build their religious centers. This was a united effort by the Jewish community, just like how they got themselves to be labeled minority business owners for loans.
in NYC they steal billions of dollars in public money so that their kids can be sent to religious indoctrination centers which do not teach English; they do not even learn how to spell “America”.
How should a normal, compassionate, rational person feel about the groups behind all this?
This is an untruth. It is you who do not define your terms when you say "they" and "the groups behind all this." Because you like to remain weaselly and evasive on the Jewish Question. Most JQ posters are evasive on the topic of what exactly they want to do about Jews (i.e, how they would personally answer the Jewish Question), but you are evasive about who you're condemning when you write all your Jew-posts.
So let's be specific. The group is Jews. Jewish people. I include here anyone who identifies as Jewish, whether or not they practice Judaism. If your definition is different, then be precise. When you say "the Jewish community" and "Jews do this" and "no Jew does that," do you mean everyone who identifies as Jewish? Do you mean specifically religious Jews, or Zionist Jews, or pro-Israel Jews, or any Jew who does not explicitly condemn other Jews? Am I a Jew because I have Jewish ancestry, even though I have literally zero connection to Jewish culture and religion? Would my Jew blood make me a Jew who does Jewish things? (And is my Jew blood stronger than my Irish blood?) When you bring up things like fraudulent charity programs (I'll accept for the sake of argument that your judgment is correct, though in reality of course I accept nothing you say at face value), how are those "Jewish" schemes that Jews must call out in order to be a considered virtuous? Do you call out every bad thing Christians do and side with people who hate Christians because of it? Even assuming some of these allegedly fraudulent charities are backed by Jewish organizations, is this some behavior that Jews disproportionately engage in, or is charity fraud a pretty widespread phenomenon? (Hint: look into most charities and you'll find a lot of graft and definitely a lot of waste.) This is reminiscent of the Joo-posters who blame pornography on Jews because a lot of pornographers are Jewish-- as if Jews invented pornography, as if consumers of pornography are largely Jews (or wouldn't consume pornography if not for Jews), as if there wouldn't be a pornography industry without Jews. It's all "I hate this group, let's find some examples of members of this group doing bad things -> This group is responsible for all the bad things!"
Your lack of answer is an answer. You hate Jews. You probably carve out some exceptions, like if there is an individual Jew who writes anti-Zionist books and agrees with you "You're right, we Jews are just the worst!" maybe you don't hate him. But by your admission above, you consider Jews as a group to be uniquely perfidious for specious reasons. It's irrational hatred and disingenuously constructed.
What all of these groups have in common is that they hold the Talmud in high regard, and they believe that the authoritative redaction of the Talmud is the Mishneh Torah by Rambam. I can look into this work to see if the behavioral guidelines are responsible for their conduct. In this work, in chapter 10 of Avodat Kochavim, it is written that it is forbidden to have mercy on gentiles:
I can then check to see if this is in effect today, and if this passage is taught. Because I have familiarized myself with the Jewish religion, I am aware that “Chabadniks” are fast becoming the new center of worldwide Jewry. So I can check to see whether this is taught on their official website. It is, as recently as February 18th of this year, so not even a month ago. The passage is there and taught. But is it in effect? Maybe they don’t really believe it is in effect. I can see that the official website has ten Rabbis teaching this course. I click to listen to each. I hear that they all teach it as authoritative and binding in the present day. I see that there are footnotes. These footnotes are new, from the 21st century, added to clarify anything that could be misinterpreted. The footnotes agree with the consensus of rabbis, and are even worse: they add that other authoritative texts consider this rule “one of the 613 mitzvot of the Torah”. I am aware of how seriously they take their mitzvot. The footnotes include this detail —
I find this problematic. They teach, and believe, and confirm, that I should be killed as soon as they get power over me. This is an issue, especially so given the demographic projection of this group, and the power that they already wield in America. For instance, I know that Jared Kushner belongs to this group. I know that Jared Kushner compelled Trump to fire Chris Christie because Christie prosecuted Kushner’s father, and Jared believed that his father’s crime should be decided by a Rabbinial court. Jared believes that the Rabbis should form a clerical court in my state, which supercedes the legal court. (Jared’s father had blackmailed his brother with sexual kompromat; Jared’s father may have brought down Governor McGreevey using an Israeli honeypot, as he had brought McGreevey’s lover in on a visa years earlier from Israel; Vanity Fair has a piece on that story). Jared has influenced his father-in-law, the president of the United States, to wage a war against Iran. This war has killed Americans and could kill many more. It is also killing Iranians, and no Persian ever called me goy.
So here is my criteria: do they believe in Rambam, and the Talmud which informs him? Do they believe these things in an unreformed state, that is, that the rules are in effect today? Do they support Chabad? As I’ve said in comments before, there is no criticism to be made against Reform Judaism, except in those cases where they act as fellow-travelers to a cult that wants me dead. Ezra Koenig is the best singer-songwriter of the 00s; I even love his Jewish music. Jeff Kaplan rules. I like the Weinstein Bros, I think they’re cool. I wish we had 1000 more Von Neumanns.
This thread started with your tender heart bleeding for the poor Palestinians, and when I accused you of not actually caring about Palestinians but only being obsessed with Jews, you…. shifted to screeds about how (almost) all Jews are conniving liars and cheats and the Talmud is evil.
I rest my case.
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