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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?
The thing that's gotten me the most is the cheering crowds in the UK who have zero fear of being arrested on "hate speech" charges (unlike anyone who criticizes them), and the academics justifying it saying "Postcolonial, anticolonial, and decolonial are not just words you heard in your EDI workshop," with reminders that they're going to do it to Americans next
It's endless: Dartmouth, Berkeley, Columbia, CUNY, journal editors, professors, HR bureaucrats, the entire blue ecosystem all cheering rape and torture and kidnapping and screaming that my children are next with no fear of any consequences. Armed american terrorist groups who get hagiographies from NPR accusing anyone opposed to massacring children of being pearl clutching racists.
Random union twitter accounts posting "Palestine is rising, long live the resistance🌹" as if it was the most natural thing in the world for them to be doing, while the DSA organizes to support the attacks.
Spend an hour reading the "decolonization" tag. They are telling you what they are, and like Noah Smith I am getting "sort of negatively polarized against these people."
It feels less like masks dropping than like it happened so suddenly that everyone forgot to put their masks on in the first place. The Bataclan attack and European truck massacres developed slowly enough that people could adopt effective strategies: /r/news managed to delete all mention of the attacks for an entire day, and by the time it was acknowledged to have happened the party line was "this awful event had nothing to do with any cause we support."
Now we're just getting the raw unfiltered reactions, just like the combat footage, and we see what the real intentions are.
With all due respect, I'm surprised more people didn't see this coming earlier. "Decolonisation" in its best form has always been one of those failed movements that inadvertently made way to more radical elements that are far less subdued in their hostility towards so called "western values", given the volatile nature of these polities and all around frustration stemming from within due to a lack of economic growth. It's like if the Ashraf Ghani government tried to "decolonise" and is shocked to find himself shaking hands with the Taliban. China did not really "decolonise" either, not any more than Japan or SK did, as much as they claim to be the alternative to western hegemony. The reality is the vast majority of Chinese in all major cities very much live as a westerner does. I'm sure both the government and the general public is well aware of this, though they may not publicly admit it.
That video of Hamas parading that woman's body and accounts of rape, child murders, etc., and several big Muslim names playing apologia, including a liberal Muslim journalist who used to write for Indian Express, might just be the straw that breaks the back for the hard left's camaraderie with 3rd world nationalisms.
The hard left is very much okay with 3rd World Nationalism by any means as long as it is from the "Oppressed". It is only a problem if it is a sentiment expressed by the outgroup.
I looked through the twitter likes of a few prominent Open Source Software developers. I lost any taste for writing Software outside of 9-5.
I don't know how much Social media furor translates over to the real world but I am seeing a lot of white collar (leftist) westerners finding their latent "It is nuanced" superpower in response to the Israeli girl with bloody pant bottoms.
EDIT: Forget "nuanced" most of them say they had it coming, as the posters up the chain mention. I find this horrifying despite regarding the creation of Israel deeply unfair for Palestinians (though they haven't given a good showing since then).
...so you basically went around looking for pro-Hamas-offensive leftist comments to get angry at and then got angry at them?
Like I said earlier, the idea that "most of them say they had it coming" does not match my experience in social media at all, unless it's some sort of a circular definition of "most people who support Hamas say that what Hamas did was good". The feeling I'm getting is that American left is currently mostly in disarray over the events, and the "decolonialists" are at the very least getting a lot of pushback from the other sectors.
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It is nuanced. You can freely debate whether the Versailles treaty drove Germany towards Nazism or not and neither position means you gleefully approve of either death camps or strategic bombing of population centers.
My "It is nuanced" was more in reference to the rhetorical device used to downplay something you don't want to discuss. I think it is important for a civilization to unconditionally condemn acts that cross a line of barbarity. Being able to understand and empathize with the motivations of a murder should not stop one from condemning the act.
This is different from an emotional "let's turn Gaza into a parking lot" response which I consider as problematic as the "they had it coming" arguments.
Some folks even drew equivalence to condemning Hamas' brutality against Israeli civilians with "All Lives Matter".
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