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No specific news item for this culture war post, but perusing the comments on the various Iran war takes, I'm consistently baffled by people's attitudes towards Israel that I think are willfully uncharitable and blind to the history of the Middle East in general.
First, there's this idea that Israel is the primary/principle cause of all instability in the region, and that if we suddenly removed all the Jews and gave back the land to the Palestinians, we would have peace. This is absurd. The violence in Lebanon between shiites/sunnis/christians, the question of the Kurds, and the Sunni/Shiite Cold (I guess hot now) war are all conflicts that have their origins long before the founding of Israel. Heck if Israel wasn't there to focus hatred on, the Arabs would probably fight among themselves even more.
Secondly, it's extremely impractical, if not impossible to remove 6 million Jews from land they've now lived on for (at least) three generations. A second Nakba to correct for the first Nakba doesn't exactly seem just to me, and it's not like many of those Jews can actually go back to where they were from before emigrating to Israel. The Arab countries forcibly expelled all Sephardic Jews in 1948 after Israel won its independence (also weird how this was totally okay but Israel actions during the 1948 war are "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing". Israel also hasn't actually lost a war yet, and they won in 1948 without any outside help except for some weapons for the Czech Republic, so this would be an extremely hard sell to a population that really doesn't want to leave.
Thirdly, it's not like Israel hasn't tried to find a peaceful solution to the Palestine question or with its neighbors. Rabin actually signed the Oslo accords (before he was assassinated) and it looked like the Palestinians would be able to move towards self governance. Unfortunately, every government the Palestinians have elected have made it their central platform to destroy Israel, so it's somewhat logical that Israel decided that they couldn't self-govern (similar logic to why Israel and Iran are fighting). When I was living in Israel in the summer of 2019 (not a Jew, just doing research), it looked this might be changing, but unfortunately October 2023 changed all that. In terms of its Arab neighbors, Israel has repeatedly given up territory for peace. Of course unfortunately neither Jordan nor Egypt want the West Bank/Gaza (and also refuse to treat second, third and even fourth generation Palestinian refuges as citizens).
Fourthly, there's a (somewhat true) idea that Israel has an outsized influence in US politics. But the US also has an extremely outsized influence in Israeli politics. Up until the mid 1970s, Israel was heavily socialist country that had far more ties to the Soviet Union than the US wanted. Market liberalization similar to what happened under Reagen/Thatcher destroyed the Israeli Kibbutz system economically (among other things, I have a very long essay on my blog about this) that completely destroyed the Israeli left. Netenyahu is the logical result of this.
Fifthly, the claims of Israeli genocide in Gaza seem to be greatly exaggerated and very selective when it comes to comparisons of other actual genocides going on in the world right now (Sudan). I've been hearing claims of genocide for at least ten years now, but somehow there are more Palestinians in Gaza now than there were then? If the Israelis are trying to genocide the Palestinians they're clearly not very good at it (might be more effective to give out birth control). Claims of apartheid are more fair, but are no different from how Palestinians are treated in Arab countries. Why the special criticism of Israel?
Maybe making a Jewish state in the Middle East wasn't a great idea. So what? We live in the world where that's been the case for nearly 80 years and it's not going away without another ethnic cleansing. Israel does cause a lot of chaos and conflict in the region, but 90% is in direct response to its neighbors wanting to destroy it and kill its entire population. Why is the answer to somehow endorse that, rather than admit that maybe its time for the Palestinians to give up claims to land they haven't lived on since WW2, and the population of the Middle East to accept (as their leaders by and large have) that Israel is here to stay.
I used to think there were principled arguments against Israel and that it made sense to distinguish between anti-Zionists and anti-Semites. I found it annoying when Jews would equate opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism. It felt very manipulative, playing the "antisemitism" card when we're talking about objections to a nation's policies... And of course Israel is a country, countries are made of people and run by politicians, therefore Israel is often going to do things one can reasonably condemn.
I still believe there are a tiny number of people whose opposition to Israel is rooted in genuine principles. I think their arguments are mostly pretty unconvincing, but the New Historians, for example (a school of Israeli historians who are generally pretty critical of Israel and the Israeli narrative about its founding, but obviously don't literally want Israel to cease to exist... Benny Morris is the most notable one) are examples of "anti-Zionists but not anti-Semites."
But mostly, especially since the latest Gaza War, I no longer take criticism of Israel at face value. Sure, a lot of stuff Israel does is fucked up, a lot of stuff the US does is fucked up, and I would like all countries in the world to do fewer fucked up things. Kumbaya.
But in most places, definitely including here on the Motte, you can map with nearly 100% consistency someone who is "critical of Israel" or "anti-Zionist" to "really hates Jews." It's just become very obvious that you don't have to scratch an anti-Zionist too deeply to find someone who hates Jews. It's true out in the public amongst the "Free Palestine" demonstrators, it's true here among the posters who suddenly have deep humanitarian concern for Palestinians and Iranians. Do they have similar concerns for, say, Ukrainians and Russians? Or the participants and victims in any other conflict anywhere else in the world? Of course not.
Since October 7, demonstrators attacking anything remotely connected with Israel, whether it's an Israeli-run bakery or just a synagogue (which can always be accused of being "Zionist" because the number of synagogues that aren't full of Israel supporters is infinitesimal) have pretty much given the game away. When you claim you don't hate Jews, you just hate like 90% of all Jews, well, that kinda looks like you hate Jews to me.
So, your lengthy defense of Israel isn't wrong, but it's beside the point. Almost nobody is actually criticizing Israel because they think the Israelis should negotiate differently or if they just did this or that they could have peace. There are no circumstances in which Israel will ever be "okay" with them. They just hate Jews. Simple as.
The whole "Joo hater" thing is just a thought-terminating slur against any reasonable criticism of Jewish behavior. It implies you hate Jews, so you make the criticisms, rather than the genuine problems with Jewish behavior and its consequences forming a rational basis for your complaint. Notably it always acquits Jews of any responsibility from the blowback they receive as a consequence of their own behavior.
Here we are today in a total disaster downstream of all the issues you complain about me raising on this forum, and the "Joo haters" schtick rings more hollow than ever.
Thanks for raising your hand, bud. Appreciate the support.
What is "Jewish behavior"? What "blowback" do you think the average Jew on the street deserves because of "their" behavior?
You do not distinguish between Israel and Jews except when it's convenient. When it's inconvenient, you are happy to equate Jews=Israel. When it's convenient, you say you are complaining about Israel and that accusing you of antisemitism is a Jewish mind trick.
You complain endlessly about being identified as a Joo-poster, a Jew-hater, it's a "thought-terminating slur," but the one thing you cannot deny is that you hate Jews. It takes some chutzpah (heh) to complain about being called a Jew-hater as you loudly and vocally insist that hating Jews is rational.
The bottom line, the sum total of your presence and reason d'etre, is that you hate Jews. Of course you think your hatred is rational. Everyone thinks they are being rational. No one says "I just hate people for no reason." But you hate Jews and that is the driver behind everything you post. You basically have no other identity or purpose (at least on this forum, maybe somewhere you have a life that doesn't revolve around Jews), but you sure get offended when someone names it.
He is someone who glorifies the Waffen SS and thinks the Holocaust was a good thing, to the extent he admits it happened. He has said so on this forum.
Now he's claiming that it is simply a hollow shtick and a breach of the rules if he be called a hater of Jews.
This is dishonesty to the level of utter contempt for you.
It didn't happen though. How could I think it was a good thing and it didn't happen?
I don't think it's a good thing that millions of Jews were tricked into walking inside gas chambers that were disguised as shower rooms, it is something that simply never happened.
It is significant that Eric Hunt, notable and prominent holocaust revisionist, left the movement and officially admitted that the holocaust happened roughly as described by mainstream history.
He hadn't become "repentant and reformed Nazi", he just found out that holocaust revisionism is not true, and also not helpful at all.
...
Eric Hunt left Revisionism for a bunch of reasons, internal politics of the movements and such. It's a pretty tough job being a high-profile Revisionist, enormous pressure with little or no pay.
But in the past couple years Hunt has disavowed that article and he is a Revisionist again and he stands by his content, including that video I posted.
Keep in mind he was doing this when nobody else was talking about it, and YouTube basically increased their censorship solely because of Eric Hunt, his content was the very first victim of a high-censorship YouTube. Now that a lot of people on X and such talk about it he's found more satisfaction in the impact of his work. Nick Fuentes cited that video I linked by Hunt as being influential on Nick.
So he's a Revisionist and he stands by that work and he takes credit for the proliferation of Revisionism which he should, he did great work.
Interesting. How he answers to his own questions in this article, what is now his explanation what happened to the one million+ deported to the Operation Reinhard camps who were never seen again?
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Because Holocaust deniers (most of them, with the possible exception of the really low information ones) don't actually think it didn't happen.
Maybe you do really believe there were never gas chambers, and that the numbers are inflated, and there are discrepancies in the accounts of what happened in this camp or that camp. There are always question marks and inaccuracies in the historical record and "Holocaust deniers" excel at cataloging these to argue that the whole thing is a hoax. Like 9/11 truthers, like every other conspiracy theorist, it's not that there aren't questions, and things the public believes because they've become widespread knowledge that aren't actually true, or were taken from one particular account (soap made of Jews, for example, or human skin lampshades). So there are always things you can JAQ about.
But "the Holocaust" - a concerted effort to exterminate Jews - happened, and the strategy of the Holocaust denier is to try to convince people that actually the whole thing was fake because record books at Dachau don't match what someone said in an interview, or what have you. The reality of course is that they know the effort was made to exterminate Jews and they think it was a good thing, but they also know that the public is extremely unsympathetic to this and that Jews benefit from the widespread guilt generated by the Holocaust. So it's a political strategy to try to erode belief that the Holocaust happened, not a historical investigation.
This is why every time we talk about the Holocaust, you immediately jump to the specific things you have canned spiels about, like showerheads in Auschwitz and whether Hitler ever signed an order saying "Kill all the Jews." And try as hard as you can to avoid the obvious glaring holes in the narrative, like where did all those Jews go and how are thousands of people, from Nazis to Jews to German civilians to Allied soldiers, lying about what they saw?
If you were actually interested in historical truth it would be pretty interesting to hear you out, but I can't take any of your arguments seriously because to the degree you might have some interesting research about specifics, I know it's always in service of a very specific agenda and that you selectively omit or fabricate details according to whether the narrative serves that agenda.
No it did not. There has famously never been any written document or order found demonstrating a concerted effort to exterminate all the Jews. Such an order never existed and that was not the German policy.
Some Jews were killed definitely in reprisals etc. But there was no "extermination plan" as claimed, that is a lie as much as the gas chamber story.
You are doing, without a hint of irony or self-awareness, the exact thing that Amadan just criticised you for doing.
You just jumped from "was there an organised attempt to kill all the Jews?" to "was there a specific individual document that said to kill all the Jews?", even though that is not the same question at all, and that is exactly what Amadan just said you would do.
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No, my complaint is that your argument assumes criticism of Jews is motivated by hatred of Jews rather than criticism of actual Jewish behavior.
Are complaints about Black behavior motivated by some unjustified hatred of Blacks? Or are the complaints about Black behavior caused by Black behavior, and the general opinion of Blacks is downstream from that?
Let's apply your argument: The prevailing complaints about Black behavior are almost entirely derived from racism. There's no truth to any of those complaints, maybe <1% have some truth, but the rest of the complaints and stereotypes are just derived from hatred of black people. Of course you think your hatred is rational. Everyone thinks they are being rational. No one says "I just hate people for no reason", but they in fact hate Blacks for no reason and they deceive themselves into thinking there is a rational justification for their sentiment towards Blacks.
My world: the complaints are almost all true, in fact we vastly understate them in an attempt to be tolerant and smooth social cohesion, maybe <1% of the criticisms are false and derived from racism, and negative opinion of Blacks is downstream from that.
So there's not much to say other than you are wrong, my opinion of Jews is downstream from my analysis of these issues, same as Blacks. If you want to call me a "Black-hater" for concurring with prevailing negative opinions and the reasons for them, that's your prerogative but you're just name-calling.
You can call me a Jew-hater all you want, even though it's against the rules of the forum you moderate. I know that "Jew-hater" means "criticizes Jews in any way", I am not here to contend with the semantics of the insults you use to try to dismiss rational and necessary criticism of important issues.
But you can go ahead and think I hate Mark Levin, Randy Fine, Ben Shapiro, Jared Kushner, Jonathan Greenblatt, Bari Weiss, the ADL, AIPAC, etc. simply because they are Jews I hate for no reason, and my analysis of these issues is just me trying to rationalize my pre-existing hatred. It's your prerogative even though it's very stupid and not true.
Is this an admission that you hate Jews and blacks?
Your argument here, as far as I can tell, is not "I don't hate Jews", but "I hate Jews for good reasons".
To wit, let me ask you plainly: how do you feel about Jews?
The last time we discussed this (ironically, discussing whether you flee debates), I put that question to you bluntly, and you vanished and didn't answer.
Would it be fair to characterise the disagreement, as you see it, along these lines? SecureSignals has a strongly negative opinion of Jews and regularly criticises Jews and Judaism. According to Amadan, this is disconnected from any evidential reasoning, but rather SecureSignals has an abiding prejudice against Jews. According to SecureSignals, this negative opinion is justified by the behaviour of the group he dislikes. Is that what you're clashing about?
No, both the "you are an X hater" are only slurs, like calling someone a heretic in Old Salem. I don't engage in affirmation or denial, I reject the tired playbook of trying to jacket someone with an -ist or an -ism or an x-hater. My opinions on Jews are contained in the sum of my writings, if you want to call me a Jew Hater go ahead it's not something I'm going to contend with, you may as well call me a Racist or a Sinner or a Heretic, it's all the same thing to me.
I reject your notions so totally that I'm not going in your little funhouse to argue I shouldn't meet your definition of Jew-hater, please sir don't call me a Jew-Hater I swear I am not! Please! Not playing that game and am never going to, I reject it, it's nothing more than a cheap slur for building consensus that Antisemitism is caused by everything under the sun except for the behavior of Jews.
No, it's not. A slur is an insulting label that can't be assigned a truth value but is simply a boo-light.
You either hate Jews or you don't. If you don't hate Jews, if you are capable of being friends with Jews, you do not wish harm on individual Jews, you just think Jewish culture is hostile to you or Judaism is a wicked religion or whatever, you could say that. You won't say that because you do hate Jews. You hate Jews for being Jewish, which you have constructed as some nebulous pattern of behaviors that applies to 99% of them, or even if it doesn't, accrues guilt to the rest for not denouncing their fellow Jews and refusing to be Jewish.
This "I refuse to play your game" speech is just evasion. You won't honestly and forthrightly state "Yes, I hate Jews" (which you are allowed to do, it's not like you'd be banned for it) because you know that hating an entire ethnicity for being that ethnicity is something even people generally disposed to agree with you about "Jewish influence" would balk at.
You accuse me of uncharitably projecting motives onto you, but the thing is, you make it as obvious as you possibly can (right down to your SS username) what you really think of Jews and what you'd like to do to Jews, while playing a game of denial. "Yes, Jews are my enemies and Jewish behavior is why everyone should hate Jews but how dare you accuse me of hating Jews!"
When someone calls you out on it or tries to get you to actually be honest instead of playing your constant game of ducking and weaving, evading, ghosting, and describing the Holocaust in a Schroedinger state (it both didn't happen and the Jews totally had it coming) you fan yourself in indignation that you would be accused of a "slur" like Jew-hater.
Can the mods please just ban Securesignals already? He flagrantly violates the single-issue poster rule and offers nothing of value to this community. I applaud the efforts at fair-mindedness that have kept him around for so long, but all he does is talk about da joos in a way that makes it hard for me to recommend this place to wven other dissident thinkers. He's hateful and (worst of all) boring dead weight holding the forum down and it's time he was cut loose.
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Have I ever called Greenblatt a "White-Hater"? Do I think Greenblatt just hates every single white person he knows, has no White friends, and every time he meets a White person Greenblatt secretly wishes he could kill him? Obviously I think there's much more nuance to his identity and political perspective, emotional disposition towards Gentiles, in spite of the fact it is clearly oppositional to me, but you will never accept that my disposition is more similar to Greenblatt but on the other side of the conflict than it is to the cartoon villain you have in your head.
I couldn't imagine having a discussion with him and demanding that he either affirms or denies he's a White-Hater, and not only because such an accusation lacks any currency unlike the accusation of being a Jew-Hater. It's bullshit, but you have to resort to those tactics because there is so much actual substance and implications to the criticisms being made you feel the need to play these stupid games I reject.
Not going in your funhouse, sorry- "I have Jewish friends pls don't call me that name!!!" I reject the power of your slur. It's retarded honestly and more retarded than ever given the state of the world and how relevant the criticisms I have made on this forum have proven to be. Calling everybody who criticizes Jews for the consequences of their own behavior "Jew Haters" is losing currency by the hour, you just look ridiculous at this point to be honest.
Poor Jews, so put-upon for no reason, everybody hates them for no reason, and when people criticize them it's almost always because they hate them for no reason. Antisemitism is the fault of everybody in the world except Jews. And if you think otherwise I am going to call you a Jew Hater. Enjoy the last days of that garbage holding any water!
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I didn't suggest anything negative about you. I asked a very straightforward question, and then attempted to precisify the terms of the disagreement.
It is not a gotcha, a funhouse, or any kind of trick to ask you to clarify exactly what you are debating about. As for the sum of your posting, yes, I am quite familiar with it, but it is useful, when there is an ongoing disagreement, to occasionally try to back up and clarify what the disagreement is about.
In this case, I think that "Does SecureSignals hate Jews?" is a meaningfully different question to "Why does SecureSignals hate Jews?" You don't appear to me to be disputing that you have a very negative assessment of Jews, which would make the dispute about the latter question.
Don't waste time with this flimflam, please. Stating what you actually think is not a high bar, and is in fact required by the Motte's rules.
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Criticisms of black behavior that generalize to "Therefore I hate blacks because all blacks are guilty by association with the worst examples" is rightfully criticized as racial hatred, yes.
Wrong. That's not my argument. You know this.
Is it inaccurate to say that you hate Jews? Am I wrong, incorrect, misrepresenting you?
That is wrong, incorrect, and a misrepresentation.
In this very thread I have criticized several of those people. I have in the past criticized the ADL and AIPAC. As I said, I know you have reasons for hating Jews. I just think those reasons are irrational and not worthy of respect.
My opinion of Black people is not derived from the belief they are all guilty of every behavior by association, nor is it with Jews. But that doesn't erase the consequences of the way they tend to behave and its impact on society.
So it's a fine parallel.
The important distinction is that criticism of Blacks is caused by Black behavior. Likewise criticism of Jews is caused by Jewish behavior, it is not "for no reason" like you claimed in your post.
So, all of them? Most of them? A third of them? With black behavior, I know what you speak of, though it's a clear minority of blacks who do those things. What about Jews? Exactly what percentage of Jews do you think are guilty of subverting Western civilization and trying to destroy white people?
One more time: I know you have reasons. They just aren't rational reasons and you generalize from "Some Jewish groups do things I think are bad for me" to "Jews are inherently my enemies."
Well it only takes a very small percentage that do those things to completely enshittify the place they live doesn't it? Places that ought to be the crowned jewel of my community are no longer safe. Things I grew up doing are no longer safe, places I went to closed down because it. None of those impacts are dependent upon the % of the group that engages in that behavior. Obviously if it were small enough to not have those effects then people wouldn't complain about it.
The % of the Jews that are outright spies and traitors (Shapiro, Fine, Levin, Weiss, Kushner, etc.) is small but big and important enough to have disastrous effects on our country, which we are living through right at this moment. The % of Jews that constructively aid the former with political and cultural support is vastly higher even if they aren't directly engaging in the most destructive behavior- that certainly qualifies as subversion. The % of Jews who oppose and criticize it is extremely small but there are a few.
Yes I do have my reasons, I don't like my country being subverted by foreigners to be led into disastrous consequences for their own benefit.
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