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Notes -
How far does the association go?
Hamas is obviously antisemitic. Some of their defenders doubtless fall in that category. But I have to believe it’s possible to defend a group without endorsing all its positions, let alone its motivations.
Consider a single-issue antifeminist. He holds no opinions about Jews but wishes that sharia law applied to women everywhere. As such, he approves of Hamas’ actions. Is he an antisemite?
Consider a Westerner conservative influencer. He says things like “Islam is right about women” in an attempt to put progressives between a rock and a hard place. Is he an antisemite?
Or consider a Western zoomer. He repeats edgy proposals he hears from people like the first two. He’s not sure if he’s being ironic, post-ironic, or serious…but is he antisemitic?
I don’t think you can draw a line from Hamas to CUAD to Macklemore and keep the ideology intact.
I understand this is a callback to an older post of mine, but I'm really not seeing the connection between the two sentences. Why would facetiously asserting that "Islam is right about women" imply that one is antisemitic? Even sincerely asserting "Islam is right about women" (something no Western conservative influencer has ever done) doesn't imply antisemitism: "Islam is right about women, but wrong about Jews" is a perfectly coherent stance to take, even if it's not one anyone actually adopts.
I don't think Macklemore believes 100% of the same things that Hamas believes. (There's no question that he doesn't share their attitudes to homosexuality, for instance.) But I think the fact that he went out of his way to name-check a fairly minor group like CUAD is strong evidence that he endorses most if not all of their ideology: namely, that Israel is an illegitimate settler-colonial apartheid state, the validity of violent "resistance" against Israeli "occupation", and the belief that all Israeli citizens (and the entire Jewish diaspora, by extension) are complicit in Israel's "occupation", thereby rendering all of them legitimate targets. The belief that every Jew is a legitimate target for violent assault (in other words, the belief that it's okay to murder Jews) is about as pithy a definition of antisemitism as I can think of.
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One reason why we can associate Hamas with antisemitism in the first place is that such people are vanishingly rare. It's like asking if someone who only likes the Nazis for their cool salute is an antisemite. Theoretically they might not be, but I wouldn't bet on it.
He's not a supporter of Hamas, so the question of why he supports Hamas doesn't come up.
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