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Notes -
Is the left-right distinction really the relevant political metric we should look at the in US?
The president of NYU's student bar association lost their job offer after expressing support for Hamas. I say they, because it's a trans person who also happens to be black. Can you hit higher on the diversity bingo? Well, take the wrong side where Israel is involved and apparently that does not help you. And it's not like NYU is a conservative campus.
I'm sure this person has a history of anti-White statements (that is usually the case with black progressives). But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism. So, this isn't a case of being a leftist or a rightist. It's a case of being against perceived Jewish interests. Sometimes people talk about the progressive stack and we have once again found out that being black and trans is no defence if you go against Jews. No such punishment against being anti-White. This seems to imply two things:
The highest position on the progressive totem pole is being Jewish, not black or trans.
People who claim Jews are White must explain why making anti-White statements rarely carry punishments but going against Jewish interests does. In other words, Jews have relative privilege in America in a way that is not available to Whites.
I think it's more that they supported terrorists right after a terrorist massacre of innocent civilians. If they had just kept their mouth shut for a few weeks while this was in the news then they would have been fine. I'm not Jewish and I don't really care about Israel all that much but I also would have wanted this person fired. This person sounds like they are a psychotic narcissist with no impulse control and would be awful to work with. That is on top of being a massive PR liability for the firm.
I posted about this earlier, but this whole saga has been shocking to me how these leftists can't even pretend to have sympathy for real victims of a tragedy FOR JUST A FEW DAYS! Instead, they are crying about Israel propaganda and how there's no evidence that these women slaughtered at the music festival were raped. It's like okay fine they weren't raped (even though let's be honest there's a good chance they were). Instead 250 plus civilians were just shot in cold blood then stripped naked and spat upon (literally) while they drove around in trucks celebrating their death and posting it to social media to humiliate them and their families. Even if you pick out that one piece of information, it's still so awful that the raping really doesn't matter one way or another if a rape happened.
All this person had to do was shut up until Israel messes up and kills civilians in their counter attack and they could have gone back to larping as a freedom fighter while working on Wall Street. This person is not a serious person. This whole saga makes me update my priors that Hanania is right about Civil Rights law being the biggest reason for this. What other reason could there be someone so ridiculous is given such an amazing opportunity and red carpet rolled out to invite them to the elite? The sad part is they will still land on their feet and this will probably end up helping them.
At the end of the day though, this isn't really their fault. They were trained to make these kinds of comments with no repercussions. In fact, they probably benefited from these kinds of hot takes. If you look back at their social media history and application letters to elite institutions, it was probably full of similar remarks that they were praised for. And any negative reactions they probably dismissed as bigotry or that the people on the left criticizing them were "liberals". However, they finally ran up against something that at least humans have enough dignity left to hold them accountable for at least for a few months. People don't want to work with someone who supports terrorists who murder innocent civilians and records it for social media. However, in a few months, this will pass and they will have some other elite position making lots of money. This is just the world we live in.
Israel has already done this. Israel has already been doing this for some time, including shooting unarmed journalists. They even sent police to physically assault the pallbearers of her coffin during her funeral (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/6/24/un-israelis-fired-shots-that-killed-journalist-abu-akleh). It isn't like Hamas' latest attack is some sudden new change in the conflict - the Israelis already have done all the things you have said they should have waited for them to do, and has repeatedly been doing these things for years, rape included. While I absolutely agree that this person is larping as a freedom fighter despite having one of the most privileged positions in the country (if you are even a contender for a job in BIGLAW you are actually privileged in the real sense of the word), if I try to see things from their perspective it isn't particularly hard to understand.
From everything I know about modern day left wing political ideology, it is very clearly diametrically opposed to almost everything about the state of Israel. Israel is a white supremacist (jews do not get to renounce white privilege), colonial ethnostate that is brutally oppressing people of colour, while at the same time being extremely friendly towards Trump and the republican party. Left-wing activists frequently and publicly compare the treatment of the Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa, a regime that they condemned and boycotted in no uncertain terms. Israel is a far, FAR greater example of the kind of things that modern left wing politics define themselves in opposition to than any European society or indeed America itself. I'm not one of them, but if you're ensconced in that ideology, Israel is already practically an illegitimate state. Why then would you not celebrate one of the most visible incarnations of a political ideology you hate receiving violent resistance? Factor in the left-wing idolisation of figures like Che Guevara and a shift in attitude towards "punching nazis" being an admirable activity and this all makes sense from their perspective.
From the point of view of the western left and centre-left, Israel is also just a really right-wing country in a way which makes it less sympathetic. The only reason why the current (until the formation of the national unity war government) "National Camp" coalition between the right, the far right and the religious right doesn't have a permanent majority is that Naftali Bennett is outraged by Bibi's corruption - if Likud dumped him for a non-crooked leader then there would be a solid 55% of the vote for aligned right-wing parties. And the principal opposition comes from the liberal centre-right (Yesh Atid) and a bunch of retired generals (what is left of Blue & White).
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