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Notes -
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia, citing a paywalled scientific study from year 2019:
Wouldn't Soviet jews be predominantly Ashkenazi?
I'm more surprised that in 2019 anybody still identifies as Soviet. It's a been a few decades since their fall, c'mon now. Maybe the Soviet Jews came in such large numbers that they have some different subculture or something. Anybody know?
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