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A short introduction to Liberal Zionist rhetoric, and why they usually just keep quiet.
A day ago a very interesting interview between Krystal Ball and Rep. Adam Smith took place. The topic of contention was Israel.
tl;dr: Openly defending Israel as a jewish ethnostate is OK as a democrat.
The interview starts off cordial enough. Adam establishes himself as the typical neo-liberal everyman who can sympathize with the plight of the downtrodden AND the military industrial complex (What a guy!) whilst Krystal fronts the now typical faux radical left 'not everyone in the DSA is insane, actually. At least I'm not' media personality that goes hard on the issues that pull on the heart strings.
Where things go off the rails unexpectedly is around the 11:30 mark. Krystal compliments Adam on his recent strong voting pattern against aid to Israel, specifically the Thomas Massie amendment, and asks him to explain his thought process and change of heart. Adam waffles on a bit about his opposition to the Netanyahu government, a typical Liberal Zionist talking point, but then suddenly veers off the rails:
This is not out of context, this is the argument. Yes, Liberal Zionists are democrats. Yes, they are against the Netanyahu government. Yes, they believe in the concept of Israel as an explicit ethnostate. He believes it is not possible for Palestinians to represent jews in Israel. Two ethnic groups can not coexist. They are definitionally in a zero sum game of survival. That's the establishment democrat Liberal Zionist view for jews in Israel.
Understandably, Krystal catches on to this
Neo NaziZionist talking point that's somehow found its way into her otherwise progressive liberal leftist studio:Adam replies, a little more flustered than before:
Mein Kamerad... Krystal replies:
To which Adam retorts:
Which is the extent of his argumentation that isn't a soft recital of the many permutations of ethno nationalism argued for on the old /r/AltRight, RIP.
Krystal, to her credit as a host, tries to segue this into something else and asks why the US taxpayer should care about a jewish ethno supremacist project in the middle East, which Mike Huckabee would have been happy to answer. But Adam can't really seek refugee in the Scofield Bible so he doubles down on
Neo NazismZionism for jews:Well OK.
To all the Adam Smiths of the world. Why is having an ethnostate good for the jews but not anyone else? Why don't jews benefit from diversity in their western style open democratic society like everyone else? Why doesn't the magic freedom dirt in Israel transform your third worlders into engineers and scientists like it allegedly does everywhere else in the west, who would be just as jewish as anyone else in a few years. How is it possible to represent anything the Democrats have represented the world over and then believe this for Israel in the back of your brain?
Adam arrived to this interview ready to earnestly make the point that ethnonationalism is good for jews. He wanted to say this and he did. And I get it. Because he's not wrong. It's just that he believes it's wrong for everyone else. Most Liberal Zionists must understand that this contradiction is impossible to defend, which is probably why they don't talk about it at all. Hell, I'm starting to believe they can't even conceive of it. The Dual Morality is so strong it probably doesn't even register as a contradiction. But to hear it from the horses mouth is flabbergasting.
Smith realizes that an Palestinian majority in Israel would turn the country into a failed state and result in a genocide, but does not believe a third world majority in America will turn American into a failed state and/or result in a genocide.
He is wrong about the latter (on the first count if not the second, though it doesn’t really matter), but is this hypocrisy? If anything, it is the bigotry of unreasonably high expectations for the migrants, and for their countries’ assimilation of them, for the supremacy of their culture and political system.
This is underappreciated in analysis of the liberal defense of mass immigration, so often painted as simply self hatred, an unlikely thing because many progressives are the standard type of arrogant narcissist politician and they usually don’t hate themselves, not even deep down.
Most people like Smith do not actually believe that the immigrants will make the country worse, they think everything will be fine. They are convinced of their ideology. They are smart enough to know that ethnic and tribal conflicts exist in the world, but they don’t think it could happen where they live. It is not that they believe they deserve worse, but that they think they are better.
America has already integrated a bunch of different nationalities and ethnicities into one country. We have done it successfully for 250 years. Successfully enough that we just lump "white" people into a single category. Europe has dozens of bloody and heated rivalries that were plenty active up until 50 ish years ago.
There is an argument to be made that we are no longer doing the things that allow for successful integration, but saying integration is impossible seems clearly wrong.
Blacks remain meaningfully unassimilated after all these years, probably because of the many third world cultural and genetic traits they have. That does not bode well for the future. Assimilating whites and east asians is not proof that you can assimilate anyone.
How are you defining "assimilation" in this context and what sort of evidence would you present to support this claim if asked?
Do we have large income gaps between black populations and non-black populations in the US?
If you spend enough time on Twitter you begin to realize any time some SES graph shows up by geography they all look identical. And they are all very similar to % black population. Whether it’s income, murder, life expectancy or whatever else you can think of that shows outcomes you see worse outcomes in heavily black areas.
Even if you do something like group white people versus black people by income you end up finding things like the children of the top 10% of black parental income have the same chance of ending up in jail as bottom income whites.
So basically you can do all kinds of statistical test by race and find huge differences. These things aren’t disputed by the right and the left. They dispute the meaning of these statistical tests. It’s also at the heart of disparate impact is proof of racism.
The lack of convergence to similar outcomes is the evidence for a failure to assimilate.
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I believe that's only true of ADOS, who are functionally a different ethnicity and demographic to modern African migrants. First and second-generation African migrants today are very different and have assimilated more successfully.
This fails the test of high filtration. I do in fact have highly assimilated black ADOS friends. But it’s a small % of the population. The last cycle of African immigrants to the US were highly filtered.
The closest thing we have to unfiltered African population in America would be Somalis and they are not assimilating. And Europe is having similar issues with unfiltered African migration.
The only examples we have of mass migration in the west completely failed to assimilate over 100’s of years.
Sorry, I should have specified - recent African migrants to the United States. The European situation is different.
I agree that those migrants are heavily filtered. That's the point. It's like Indian migration to the US. You can selectively take motivated, educated, high-achieving migrants. The same thing with Asian migration, actually.
Provided you teach scientific racism in civics class. Otherwise society sees highly filter of “X” group being fine. So you loosen the standards. Then the existing group does chain migration and brings over wives and parents. And now you have a voting block to pressure government to let more of their people in.
I’ve had Paki friends shocked when they went to Pakistan and found out their country isn’t as smart as all the brown skinned friends in the states and had no realization of how highly selected for his father was.
So basically non of this works unless you teach racism in public schools.
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