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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6478 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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It's not conclusive -- absent mind-reading capacity, I don’t want to convict anyone, even in my mind, of anti-Semitism. But one guideline I like to use when evaluating a vocally anti-Israel person is "have I ever heard them voice concern about human rights in Sudan, or Iran, or Belarus, or indeed Gaza? Or is it only the failings of one government that they object to?" There are people who pass this test. Not many, I would say.

You probably havent heard someone criticizing human rights in those countries because its not controversiel and no one tries to make you lose your job or blacklist you.

Zionists first came for Ms Rachel after she mentioned Gaza in a fundraiser for save the children (where she also mentioned Sudan and Congo). She has since increased her focus on Gaza (but she also posts regularly about Sudan) because that is what people do when they are being silenced for doing something than any decent person should find entirely uncontroversial.

You probably havent heard someone criticizing human rights in those countries because its not controversiel and no one tries to make you lose your job or blacklist you.

This doesn't make any sense. If there is little or nothing in the way of negative consequences for criticizing the human rights situation in countries X, Y, and Z, one would expect -- all things being equal -- to hear MORE criticism of those countries.

or indeed Gaza

The dead giveaway is that the people ostensibly most concerned about Palestinian welfare (most of whom tend to present themselves as opposed to Hamas) tend to be the quietest when Palestinians are oppressed or victimised by anyone who isn't an Israeli, including Hamas themselves. "No Jews, no news", as the saying goes.

That being said, epistemic bubbles are absolutely a thing:

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

To the extent that I think Israel's military goals in Gaza were defensible, this is probably a criticism which applies to me.

My friend once said, "I get more liberal the farther away you are". Everyone's concerned about the Palestinians, but no one wants to save the Palestinians. Even less charitably, a good chunk of them are just circlejerking around the "current thing". Antisemitism may be losing its meaning, but so is Zionism. You have to believe that Epstein was Mossad's blackmail kingpin holding US elite by their predaphile balls and that Israel offed Charlie Kirk for... reasons, or you're a philosemitic goycuck. No matter your reservations with Israel's warmongering government and support for West Bank settlers.

No matter your reservations with Israel's warmongering government and support for West Bank settlers.

The people who claim to be agains this but spend 10x the amount of time complaining about antisemitism are not credible.

I supposed it comes down to where you care to expend your attention, but we can just as easily invert the litmus test at the people who uncritically circulate the hare brained conspiracies I mentioned. Are they more credible?

The point of being vocal is to change something that you can affect in the world. Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan. But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving. That would have been cool.

Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan

This seems like the opposite of correct. You could almost certainly stop human rights abuses in Belarus and Sudan with decent sized cash payments (totally not bribes). There is a plausible military path to regime change in Iran wherein a non-human rights violating government comes to power.

The only plausible path to ending human rights abuses in Palestine is by doing one big, quick, human rights abuse and shoving them all into boats and dropping them off somewhere they are not near lots of Jews. Madagascar has been floated elsewhere in this thread in other contexts. Works well for this plan.

Americans can’t affect humans rights abuses in Iran, Belarus, or Sudan

They absolutely can, they generally choose not to. It's not like it would even be surprising if progressives took up Sudan as a major cause du jour and demanded change! And yet.

Do you mean by being the world police? I don’t think the progressives upset about world events want American soldiers to police these places, they just don’t want America to throw their support and money behind them.

But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving.

I would still love to see evidence for these hundreds of thousands of Gazan children who starved. Most pro-Palestine people seemed to quietly drop that specific claim after the UN were forced to walk back the most explosive framing of it.

https://www.rescue.org/press-release/children-gaza-need-protection-hunger-and-injuries-surge-irc-data-shows

Polling indicated that 1 in 3 children in Gaza during the height of the blockade went full days without eating. There are 600,000 Gazans under 10 years old, meaning that 200,000 children were consciously starved by the Jewish State during the food blockaid.

No, it says that one in three children under 3 went a full day without eating in the past 24 hours (kind of an oddly phrased question, but whatever).

We can make reasonable extrapolations from this poll:

  • A family with limited food is not going to single out their youngest child to go without eating; the human instinct is to feed the youngest and most vulnerable. If children under 3 are going a full day without eating, then this is at minimum how long every child is going without eating. The youngest is who needs to eat the most frequently.

  • This poll wasn’t conducted on a day with a particularly limited amount of food, but sampled on a random day. This means they are continually going full days without eating.

  • Doctors who worked in Gaza have confirmed this: Mark Brauner, Tom Adamkiewicz, Nick Maynard, Joanne Perry. (These are the non-Muslim names).

Do you deny that this is starvation?

I don't deny that it's starvation, but I'm unconvinced that Israel is solely to blame for this state of affairs. I read several articles independently claiming that Hamas were seen stealing aid packages and selling them to fund their war effort.

USAID found no evidence of that. AFAIK no evidence was ever presented to journalists or the public. No international organization has supported Israel’s claims. And note the infeasibility of Hamas members (20,000) stealing ~1 million unique aid packages daily or weekly in refugee camps monitored by drones with facial recognition software. Any widespread theft and redistribution would be trivially easy to record. And if this were happening, Israel would have gladly allowed aid simply to be able to target and track Hamas militants. The whole area is under constant surveillance by the most advanced aerial surveillance system in the world. Meanwhile you have prominent Israelis in Netanyau’s cabinet who have promoted the idea of starving them: Gallant, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, Eliyahu, Katz.

This event is significant to the overarching question of whether the whole world holds a bias against the Jews or whether the Jews hold a bias against the whole world. Their most consistent historical stereotype is that they lack compassion for outside groups. You find this in Tacitus, in early Christians, in medieval writers, in Shakespeare. The basis of Western religion is the the split between the mercy-laden story of Christ bringing in outsiders and the hardness of heart of the Pharisees, the forebears of modern Rabbinical Judaism. The occupation of note in Jewish history is moneylending, something the Jews made impermissible to do to another Jew because “one should not swallow up the wealth of his friend without his [even] feeling it, until he finds his house empty of all good, as this is the way of interest, and the matter is well-known”. The most beautiful passage about mercy in the whole English language is literally someone trying to persuade a Jew to be merciful to an outsider:


PORTIA: Then must the Jew be merciful.
SHYLOCK: On what compulsion must I? tell me that.
PORTIA: The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
        It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
        Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
        It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
        ’Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
        The throned monarch better than his crown;
        His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
        The attribute to awe and majesty,
        Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
        But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
        It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
        It is an attribute to God himself;
        And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
        When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
        Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
        That, in the course of justice, none of us
        Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
        And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
        The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
        To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
        Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
        Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there
SHYLOCK: My deeds upon my head! 
        I crave the law, the penalty and forfeit of my bond.

So maybe there is a peculiar lack of compassion for outsiders in the Jewish worldview. This has explanatory power. If this is so, then it’s something they can work on in order to repair their reputation in the West globally.

The most beautiful passage about mercy in the whole English language is literally someone trying to persuade a Jew to be merciful to an outsider:

I have no idea what this is meant to prove. Go through Shakespeare's oeuvre and you can find eloquently-worded expressions of ideas lots of moderns would find repellent: use of the word "Ethiope" as an insult (Much Ado About Nothing), a thirteen-year-old girl marrying an adult suitor (Romeo and Juliet), treatment of physical disability as evidence of moral degeneracy (Henry VI Part 3). So the most revered writer in the English language thought of Jews in terms we would now consider bigoted – so what? You haven't begun to establish that he was justified in holding these opinions – we don't even know if he ever personally met any Jews in his lifetime. "Shakespeare said it, so it must be true" marries you to a lot of really backward opinions.

If your explanation for why so many people hate Jews is because they lack compassion for Gentiles, that invites an obvious question. Would you say the Israelis are less or more compassionate to outsiders than, say, the Palestinians, or the Arabs more broadly? What about compared to Muslims?

The Islamo-left doesn't seem have to much of a problem admiring Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims despite the fact that so many of them are openly hostile to infidels and apostates (not to mention their hostility to women, LGBT people and so on). To me, this suggests there's something else going on other than people correctly recognising that Jews lack compassion for outsiders and acting accordingly.

Additionally, for all your talk of Jews being hostile to outsiders, I don't think it's controversial to assert that an Arab citizen of Israel enjoys a higher standard of living and faces far less harassment and abuse compared to a Jewish citizen of any Arab country. Of whom there are vanishingly few owing to the Arabs' hostility and lack of compassion for outsiders.

I do note that EA and various other ‘bleeding-heart’ movements also tend to be disproportionately Jewish.

One might fairly argue that almost every movement is disproportionately Jewish, due to high IQ and great verbal skills, but there’s something there IMO.

Well, if you can claim 6 million dead, historically that's enough for European powers to feel obligated enough to you to give you a piece of the Near East after the fact as repentance.

Clearly, the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again, but this time it's the Great Satan (the US) getting in the way of the historic, millennium-old European Peoples' tradition of dictating who controls Judea.

Clearly, the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again

Do what again? Award a group a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people were killed? Which group has seen 6 million of their people killed recently?

Well, there was that time the most powerful EU member nation killed a bunch of the people currently occupying the Holy Land back in the early 1940s.

The survivors of that purge had taken that land, formerly administered by Britain (the second-biggest loser of WW2) by 1948.

You're referring to the Holocaust, I get that. When you said "the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again" I interpreted that to mean "the pro-Palestine people are asking the EU to award them a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people have been killed". But 6 million of their people haven't been killed. Or did I misinterpret you?

I'm being somewhat facetious, but yes, you've interpreted that correctly.

I think the modern anti-Semites are correct in their assessment that the Near East is just a treat given to the winners of the Most Oppressed Technically-Not-White People award.
80 years ago that was the Jews (and for people who are 60-80 years old, it is still the Jews), now it's the Palestinians.

I think your conception of Israel being "awarded" to the Jews by Europe is a bit ahistorical. The country owes its existence to decades of tireless effort by Jews to buy up land in the region. It's not like the British looked at the Jews and Arabs, totted up who was higher on the Oppression Olympics totem pole, and decreed that the Jews were more oppressed so the land belonged to them now.

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