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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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It's not technically culture war, but Hamas has just attacked Israel en-masse, overwhelming the Iron Dome with 5000 rockets and even sending raiding parties into Israel. It looks like Haman and/or Shabak haven't done their job at all, and Israel has been caught with its pants down.

For the culture war angle, I think the biggest question is of retribution. On one hand, Israeli public will now demand a reaction that makes the ongoing Hamas attack pale in comparison. On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?

I’m on record as being a squish on the JQ, and by extension the IQ (Israel Question), relative to other users here who share some of my other political commitments. Yes, I’m aware of many of the most damning conspiracy theories about Israel’s skulduggery when it comes to its relationship with American foreign policy, and I even think many of them are 100% true. I have no illusions about Israel, or at least Israel’s leadership, as a genuine friend of the American or European people. I don’t want American boots on the ground to intervene in this crisis.

That being said, my approach to the Israel/Palestine conflict has always been “which side is more similar to me, and to people like me?” There’s no world in which the answer is the Palestinians. We can argue for eternity about whether or not Jews are white, whether Israel is a Western country, whether it’s in the best interests of people who care about the future of the West to strategically undermine Israel, etc., but compared to a bunch of dirt-poor third-world Arabs, it’s no contest. I want to see Israel embrace cruelty and brutality in a way that we have not seen any industrialized modern democracy do in 60 years, and I want it to be an example to the world of the kind of mindset that European and Anglosphere countries absolutely must emulate in the years to come. The world is about to become a far more savage place, and maybe the fact that Israel has always spiritually had one foot in the West and one foot in the Middle East means that it will have to be the first one to tear off that scab.

The problem is that Israel is a major source of migrants. The Israeli state has expanded forcing millions of Arabs out of their homes. When they bombed Lebanon in 2006 I got some new classmates in Sweden. Israel has been a major force acting to destabilize the middle east and create chaos. This means migrants to Europe. Meanwhile Israel has been busy promoting multiculturalism in Europe. Israel has been fighting Syria for decades and there are now vast numbers of Syrian refugees in the world.

The best option for Europe is stable secure arab states. Israel wants to expand and wants dysfunctional failed arab states. The blowback from that means Europe gets another wave of migrants that Israaid can help bring into Europe through their activities on Greece's beaches.

The last thing I want to see is the world get more destroyed and more migrants flood into Europe because of zionists. If there is a step one to saving Europe, it is ending the pro Israel neocon agenda that has been a root cause of migrants. I don't want to meet more people with heroin addictions and missing family members after neocon Americans decided that they wanted to go on another mass murder spree in the middle east.

What we need now is to speak the language they understand- pushback. Palestinians have shown great courage and resolve today when they fought back. The same neocons who made billions bombing Afghanistan while working class whites died of heroin lost dozens of vehicles. The same neocon/zionist establishment who flooded Syria with weapons and my neighbourhood with people who fled from them got humiliated today. Aggression is in their nature, they will only stop once they get properly bitten back.

I recall reading that Israel also tried to push its African asylum seekers into the West and then there was HIAS' role in the Syrian refugee crisis.

I am generally speaking more sympathetic to Israel than to the Palestinians but I think many Westerners are wildly overstating how much in common we have with the Israelis, at least the part of Israel that is ascendant.