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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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I don't think seething hatred of Israel and its supporters as you describe it is particularly incompatible with neither being pro-uncle-Adolf nor being low-information. "Expel all non-Muslims", the one position I suggested you didn't quote, is surely a pretty uncompromising position (and not exactly peaceful or sober-minded, if you try to imagine how this would have to play out in practice). The problem I had with your Instagram dig is that it suggests Instagram was instrumental (and hence that the position would fall apart with a "better" source), but I don't believe that and your description of your "lived experience" is not really giving evidence of it either.

(Perhaps you are making the mistake of thinking the conspiracism is upstream of the hatred, rather than downstream. For most people, once they find someone repellent, attributing additional evils large and small to them is just the natural course of pro-social action.)

I'm sorry, I'm afraid I really don't know what you're talking about.

I'm confused as to what you are confused about.

Correct me if you disagree with anything in this summary: You gave two caricatures of pro-Palestinians, which seem to broadly be glossable as "naive person whose views are attributable to tragic pictures on Instagram" and "actually wants all Jews to die". I disputed that this is a charitable or reasonable taxonomy. You counter-objected that the people you encountered in real life are asserting unhinged/implausible things ("they rigged the Eurovision!!!" - is that actually so unhinged? I thought it was common sense that Eurovision results are always 100% inside baseball astroturf theatre) and that they are cheering on Hamas. I didn't address the latter (though I think it's at most consistent with "expel them from the Levant" which falls well short of "kill them all" - no evidence that they wish death, even indirectly, upon any Jew outside of the Levant), but asserted that the former is not evidence of being fairly described by either of your two caricatures.

The recent norms flip where antizionism is increasingly just a common position amongst the youth has led to a bunch of people just randomly ingesting a few basic slogans and not really having any full-formed ideas on the subject. It's getting towards anticolonialism territory where there's a lot of people who just think in terms of 'Israelis are not being nice, they should be nice and if they were nice we'd all get along' or 'Jews sacrificing babies to Cthulhu' level stuff.

Well to start with, I disagree that my "caricatures" are any such thing. I personally know a great many young women who really have learned everything they know about the conflict from extremely selectively composed Instagram infographics, including many now known to contain false information. This was obviously true during the BLM craze of 2020, so I don't know why you're acting so shocked that it's true now.

Likewise, when a person who explicitly supports Hamas, thinks the October 7th attack was a good thing, explicitly states that they no longer feel any sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust etc. – I think it's reasonable to conclude that such a person fundamentally supports Hamas's stated mission of exterminating all Jews, even if they wouldn't say so in so many words, even if they would get very defensive if you suggested they have a terminal goal in common with Hitler. The point of the OP was that I would like to devise a gotcha question that would force these people to be more forthcoming about their opinions than they are currently being. When you say "be more charitable – many of them just want to ethnically cleanse Israel of the yahud!" – well, my response is that these people would never openly cop to supporting ethnic cleansing, even though that's obviously the logical endpoint of their worldview.

(And, seriously – you're getting so defensive about how I characterised the pro-Palestinian movement. "How dare you say we want to kill all Jews – we just want to forcibly ethnically cleanse them from the nation-state they've lived in for the better part of a century!" Is that seriously the moderate option? Is this what a "reasonable" pro-Palestinian person looks like?)

I thought it was common sense that Eurovision results are always 100% inside baseball astroturf theatre

Even if that's the case, that's a completely different claim to the claim that Mossad and Shin Bet rigged the votes without the EBU's knowledge. And if they were capable of doing this, I cannot fathom why they'd rig the vote so that they'd come second, making the conspiracy theory doubly inane.

Well to start with, I disagree that my "caricatures" are any such thing. I personally know a great many young women who really have learned everything they know about the conflict from extremely selectively composed Instagram infographics, including many now known to contain false information. This was obviously true during the BLM craze of 2020, so I don't know why you're acting so shocked that it's true now.

...and I don't think I was disputing that. I just think it's uncharitable in the simple sense that it is luring the reader into dismissing the position as flimsy or based on incorrect information, when it is neither (not flimsy in the sense that it would be easy to flip, nor based on incorrect information in the but-for causal sense of based on), using the hypothetical example of making a similar sort of assertion about the pro-Israel side. The majority of them can probably be accounted for by one of "Jewish with unapologetic ingroup preference", "actually hates brown people" and "have learned everything they know about the conflict from crazy posts on FB/Twitter", and I think for my lived-experience intersection of "American" and "pro-Israel" this is actually basically exhaustive (I can't comment on the Irish, because the last time I knowingly talked to an Irishman in the flesh was over a decade ago during undergrad); but I don't think that taxonomy would be appropriate either, because the crazy post people implicitly anchor their worldview in community leaders who do have a more interesting position and likewise would not be swayed from their position if you forced them to read some proper objective reporting.

Likewise, when a person who explicitly supports Hamas, thinks the October 7th attack was a good thing, explicitly states that they no longer feel any sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust etc. – I think it's reasonable to conclude that such a person fundamentally supports Hamas's stated mission of exterminating all Jews,

I disagree about Hamas/Oct 7th. The "no longer feel any sympathy" thing is a bit more complicated, though I have to say I have not heard that in the wild from leftists (even those who fall into the former two categories) at all. If you do see it that way, are you willing to bite the bullet and say that the Russian depiction of Ukraine and supportive Westerners as russophobic and genocidal is likewise accurate, given the abundance of similar rhetoric about every Ukrainian hit on Russia? (If yes, well, props for consistency, although I still disagree; if no, I will argue that you seem to be treating Jews as a special category where ill-wishes upon some members and emotive expressions of hostility are treated as uniquely more serious than for any other)

(And, seriously – you're getting so defensive about how I characterised the pro-Palestinian movement. "How dare you say we want to kill all Jews – we just want to forcibly ethnically cleanse them from the nation-state they've lived in for the better part of a century!" Is that seriously the moderate option? Is this what a "reasonable" pro-Palestinian person looks like?)

I don't recall ever claiming that it is "moderate" or "reasonable"; I was defending it only against your implicit charges of being non-serious (or, to be precise, either non-serious or significantly more immoderate/unreasonable than this still), as I explained above. I believe that on this forum, at least, we ought to be more careful about pegging movements precisely, rather than doing the normie thing and throwing everything outside a fixed window in the "literally Hitler" (literally so, in this case!) pit.

I don’t believe you have to want to exterminate the Jews to believe that Palestine is the historic homeland of the Palestinians and a bunch of Europeans with some shared genetics with the historical population are basically colonizers.

The Ashkenazis basically did colonize Israel. Leftists are universally against colonization. At this point Ashkenazis do have alternative places to go. I’m not against colonization so I don’t have a problem with Israel.

Leftist seem to believe colonization is great for white homelands. So they aren’t anti colonization—they are anti white (or perhaps more charitably anti western).

I've said it before and I'll say it again: in Israel, Mizrahi Jews far outnumber Ashkenazi Jews.

I agree that being opposed to the existence of Israel doesn't necessarily imply that you want to see its citizens exterminated. But the two do often seem to go hand in hand, explicitly or implicitly.

Grok tells me it’s 30-45% Ashkenazi. Mizrahi outnumber Ashkenazi but it’s not far outnumber. But more importantly the Ashkenazi are the ones who conquered Israel. That’s where the military and money to support Israel originates.

I think it's more like 32% Ashkenazi to 45% Mizrahi.

That’s within in my range. And you own data doesn’t support your claim that Mizrahi far outnumber Ashkenazi. And the 32% number seems to exclude Russian Jews who are some would just consider as Ashkenazi Jews and push the two groups to basically equal proportions.

It’s interesting people want to debate the Ashkenazi versus Mizrahi components of Israel. And my gut says it’s because antisemitism is actually anti-Ashkenazi because the Ashkenazi are the ones with power and money. They are colonizers. While Mizrahi are just along for the ride.

The Mizrahi would essentially be a group like the Kurds if they didn’t have some shared ancestry with Ashkenazi.

Grok tells me

Wikipedia, citing a paywalled scientific study from year 2019:

CategoryProportion of Jews in Israel (%)
Mizrahi45
Ashkenazi32
Soviet12
Beta Israel3
Mix/other8

Wouldn't Soviet jews be predominantly Ashkenazi?

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