naraburns nihil supernum
7mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
It can mostly be attributed to Gen Z being browner and more foreign in origin than any preceding generation.
One of my biggest criticisms of Jewish politics in the Anglo world has always been liberal Jewry's sympathies for Third-Worldist causes, and the associated scorn meted out to the sort of philosemitic whites who form one of the main pillars of Jewish security in the Anglo world. In that recent Harvard student letter that was retracted after threats of blacklisting from Jewish employers, you could see that most of the groups who signed it had absolutely nothing in common besides their foreign origins or general non-whiteness - one an "African-American resistance organization", another a Bollywood dance troupe, then a Nepali undergraduate group, predictably the Middle East and North Africa caucus, the Pakistani students group, the Islamic Society, and so on. So it's difficult to feel sympathetic for liberal Jews who are now expressing their sense of "betrayal" and "abandonment". Your average Indian, Pakistani or Nepali will live and die without ever meeting a Jew - but give him an F1 visa and send him to Cambridge, and suddenly he feels the need to take a stand against the yahudi, which most Jews feel is preferable to assoaciating with the chuds and gammon.
Can we stop using brown as a proxy term for muslims ?
There are 1:1 as many Hindus as Muslims in the middle-east + south-asia. If you mean muslims, say muslims. An average brown person is just as likely to be rabidly pro-Israel (hindus) as they are to be pro-Palestine (muslims).
That being said, the average hindu immigrant in the US is a typical corporate coconut in every sense of the word. They will parrot what the coastal white elite tell them. So I have been seeing a lot of the diaspora respond with 'Hamas are terrorists, Gazan Civilians have been suffering under Israel for decades' style social media both-sides pandering while privately being sympathetic to the Israeli reaction.
I didn't use brown as a proxy term for Muslims. I have used it as a proxy term for brown people. There were plenty of non-Muslim South Asians adding their names to that letter, including Hindu Indians and Nepalis. Your average Modi-supporting Hindu might be pro-Israel, but very few of them make it to Harvard.
Harvard Indians are most certainly the elite. The Harvard-attending subset of any group is the elite of that group.
Modi-supporting Hindus in India back Israel because they resent liberal favoritism towards Muslims and the perceived kid-gloves manner in which liberal institutions treat Islamic extremism. To them, Israel is a country that "fights back". If you read their rhetoric, they're full of contempt for American/British-educated liberal Hindus and the foreign universities that produce such people, as well as the domestic universities that seem to copy that foreign model. But the sort of Indians who attend Harvard are not really drawn from the same demographic. They belong to that mobile, transnational, globalized subsection of every Third World country that has more in common with their counterparts in the West than with their average co-ethnic in the old country. Their concerns are the usual liberal stuff about "Eurocentrism" and "white supremacy", not Muslims or terrorism.
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Notes -
It can mostly be attributed to Gen Z being browner and more foreign in origin than any preceding generation.
One of my biggest criticisms of Jewish politics in the Anglo world has always been liberal Jewry's sympathies for Third-Worldist causes, and the associated scorn meted out to the sort of philosemitic whites who form one of the main pillars of Jewish security in the Anglo world. In that recent Harvard student letter that was retracted after threats of blacklisting from Jewish employers, you could see that most of the groups who signed it had absolutely nothing in common besides their foreign origins or general non-whiteness - one an "African-American resistance organization", another a Bollywood dance troupe, then a Nepali undergraduate group, predictably the Middle East and North Africa caucus, the Pakistani students group, the Islamic Society, and so on. So it's difficult to feel sympathetic for liberal Jews who are now expressing their sense of "betrayal" and "abandonment". Your average Indian, Pakistani or Nepali will live and die without ever meeting a Jew - but give him an F1 visa and send him to Cambridge, and suddenly he feels the need to take a stand against the yahudi, which most Jews feel is preferable to assoaciating with the chuds and gammon.
Can we stop using brown as a proxy term for muslims ?
There are 1:1 as many Hindus as Muslims in the middle-east + south-asia. If you mean muslims, say muslims. An average brown person is just as likely to be rabidly pro-Israel (hindus) as they are to be pro-Palestine (muslims).
That being said, the average hindu immigrant in the US is a typical corporate coconut in every sense of the word. They will parrot what the coastal white elite tell them. So I have been seeing a lot of the diaspora respond with 'Hamas are terrorists, Gazan Civilians have been suffering under Israel for decades' style social media both-sides pandering while privately being sympathetic to the Israeli reaction.
I didn't use brown as a proxy term for Muslims. I have used it as a proxy term for brown people. There were plenty of non-Muslim South Asians adding their names to that letter, including Hindu Indians and Nepalis. Your average Modi-supporting Hindu might be pro-Israel, but very few of them make it to Harvard.
I mean that raises the question of why Harvard Indians are relatively anti-Israel- it’s definitely not the elite consensus.
Harvard Indians are most certainly the elite. The Harvard-attending subset of any group is the elite of that group.
Modi-supporting Hindus in India back Israel because they resent liberal favoritism towards Muslims and the perceived kid-gloves manner in which liberal institutions treat Islamic extremism. To them, Israel is a country that "fights back". If you read their rhetoric, they're full of contempt for American/British-educated liberal Hindus and the foreign universities that produce such people, as well as the domestic universities that seem to copy that foreign model. But the sort of Indians who attend Harvard are not really drawn from the same demographic. They belong to that mobile, transnational, globalized subsection of every Third World country that has more in common with their counterparts in the West than with their average co-ethnic in the old country. Their concerns are the usual liberal stuff about "Eurocentrism" and "white supremacy", not Muslims or terrorism.
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