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Notes -
(can move to the Israel/Palestine thread, but thought I'd post here as it's not geopolitics)
Looks like donors of elite schools are starting to pause their donations to schools due to the Israel/Palestine situation.
Well, rather, by the reaction and statements from some students at those schools, combined with the lack of reaction/statement by the school presidents condemning the initial Hamas attack. It seems donors, like Ken Griffin, are either pressuring the school to change tact, or stopping donations altogether.
Just today, apparently [some Jewish students at Cooper Union] were blocked in a library due to a pro-Palestine/anti-Israel rally](https://twitter.com/stopantisemites/status/1717300476524322969?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ). Not sure why the library only had Jewish students (Hillel meeting?), but seems bad if true.
George Washington Uni. got pro-Hamas projections saying things like "glory to our martyrs" (!!) on school buildings (ironically with donors like "Gelman" right underneath the projections). Protests that shout "from the river to the sea" all over every elite school, from Brown to NYU to UCLA, you name it. And on and on...
Social media wasn't that developed, and I wasn't paying attention, last time the large Israel/Palestine hostage situation happened in 2014, or the situation in 2008. Was it always been like this, pro-Hamas/anti-Israel/ and I just didn't notice? Or is it noticeably larger now, more organized, more tolerated? It's not just US either, it's also in UK, it's in Berlin and Vienna and Paris. Obviously there's big protests in Jordan or whatever, as they are closer and have millions of Palestinians, so I'd expect protests there. But it almost seems kind of shocking how brazen many people are, in NYC!?
Seems like influential folks, even sjw/leftist-friendly (?) youtubers, are realizing the changing cultural winds, and perhaps political winds downstream.
The donors' using their money to cause change is not new, but seems like there is urgency from them to change some of the culture in universities. Will this actually change things, though? My bet is no, Griffin's $300mil will not change how Harvard students think and say. What do you guys think?
edit:
This was an interesting thing, that I was trying to but failing to reference/get at:
What's interesting to me here is that the brutality of the terrorism, and the filming of it, seems to have resulted in increased support for Hamas in the West, rather than less. It has energized those who already sympathized with the Palestinians, and recruited some new fans.
Anyone care to hypothesize around why?
Some tentative bullet points from me:
Blood in the water - the enemy has shown weakness, is bleeding. Time to strike.
Just world fallacy (selectively). If the Israelis were tortured it must have meant they deserved it.
Edit: And the flipside: If people see someone doing something horrible, expressing great hate, they think it's justified, according to blank slate + cultural relativism. "The Palestinian terrorist must have been a great person just like me, not a complete antisemite, until they were grievously wronged and the vengeance they inflict is just"... I dunno.
Ay, there’s the rub.
It is quite possible that the same terror attacks, but without self-incrimination, would have yielded far more support than we’re getting. We can’t tell for sure, but might be able to find a proxy. How many people have actually watched the videos or seen hard evidence, and does that correlate with support for the perpetrators?
There is definitely some countersignaling potential: defending poor oppressed Palestinians is old news, while defending radical murderers is edgy enough to get attention. I find it unlikely that the average supporter thinks this way. Then again, people organizing Gaza-themed protests probably aren’t median.
Re: edgy enough. Maybe I'm making a strange connection here, but it reminds me a little of BLM. Was it coincidence that many of the victims of police brutality, who received loud public support, in fact had criminal records?
Walking in a protest march for a criminal, or indeed a Hamas terrorist, is more edgy and intense, more polarized, and thus will make you stand out more as giving unquestioning support to the aggrieved group or person in question. It gives you clout within the group of sympathizers. It also makes the cause harder to swallow for ideological opponents, which may be part of the motivation. Forcing the political opponent, e.g. conservatives to eat crow is more fun than having them gladly joining in. It inflicts some emotional pain and humiliation behind the mask of public support they have to put on.
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You are making a causal claim here, but in order to determine whether it is actually true, you need to have:
I am guessing that you don't have any of those.
I'd be interested to hear about how many New York protests between January and September of this year named themselves with a reference to a terror attack killing over a thousand civilians. I get that plural of anecdote isn't data, but I'd have estimated it at pretty close to zero.
Wait, is the “flood” bit specific? The rest seems generic to the Gaza Strip.
The 10/7 attacks were called "Operation al-Aqsa Flood" by Hamas.
Yowch. That’s really poor taste.
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That is definately enough to flip my view from "I have no idea what you're talking about" to "that is an obvious statement of solidarity to a terror attack".
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Yes, that is my point. That is the best "evidence" that we have, and as you note, it is worthless.
Eh, I agree with /u/gattsuru. "Flood Brooklyn" is an odd turn of phrase unless you're trying to evoke "Operation al-Aqsa Flood"
Yes, obviously. That is not the point. The point is that that sort of anecdotal data has almost no value. Among other things, a pro- Hamas event held a month ago would have gotten no news coverage. And even actual data that includes only the post-attack incidents obviously cannot tell us anything about how attitudes have changed since before the attack. It is no different from someone claiming that, because there were x incidents of anti-black racism in 2022, that therefore nothing has changed since 1960. It is literally impossible to make a claim when half the data is missing.
And that doesn't even include the issue I mentioned of controlling for the effect of Israeli air raids.
Hamas, specifically, I'd have to go back a year ago for something explicit, though the famous Tufts one is kinda telling on itself when the protestors start to insult the Palestinian peace advocate. More broadly, I can show anti-Israeli/pro-Palestine protests in March, anti-anti-anti-Semites in April, commencement speakers in May, so on.
Sometimes this got to equivalent extremes: SJP affiliates promoting literal spree-shooters was a January-this-year-thing.
That's also... notably not what I asked. Maybe there genuinely was a pro-Hamas protest named referencing a thousand-plus fatality attack on civilians, shortly after a separate pro-Hamas protest by the same group has some protestors turn violent in September I and the rest of the internet missed. I can't prove a negative, after all.
But it's a data point that hints and waggles its eyebrows, and I don't think it's the only one.
Your link to the "Flood Brooklyn for Gaza" seems to reinforce my point about the methodological challenges that OP's claim ignores. Gaza is not Hamas. A rally calling for support for Gaza at a time when a hundreds or more civilians in Gaza are dying each day cannot be assumed to be pro-Hamas, and even if it is, the causal relationship between the attack and the level of support for that protest is obviously confounded by the effect of Israel's response.
And if, as you note, there were all those pre-attack events you link, where is the evidence for OP's assumption that the attack led to an increase in support?
Edit: And, btw, I don't give a damn about the "right to return" or adjacent ideas like nationalism, or self-determination, or anti-imperialism, because none of those things have any intrinsic value for actual, individual human beings, which is all that matters. They are claims about the "rights" of groups, and hence they are illegitimate claims, as far as I am concerned.
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"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." -- Osama bin Laden.
Of course, this also requires that people are fools and see strength where there is only brutality; how'd that work out for e.g. ISIS/Daesh (or bin Laden) in the end? But people being fools is also nothing new.
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I don't think it's possible to know that Hamas's self-promotions using videos directly showing their terrorism in action had a net positive or negative effect for their support in the West, but I think it's at least clear that it didn't cause some major backlash. Which is still interesting in itself.
As someone who had a similar mentality on September 12, 2001, I think there's some truth to the "blank slate" explanation. The thinking was immediately, "How badly did Osama Bin Laden and his Musli compatriots be abused by the American empire that they felt helpless to do anything but to hijack planes and murder thousands of people? The depths of evil to which these people were pushed to do shows just how evil America is to the rest of the world, and perhaps those individuals who were murdered didn't deserve it, but America as a whole clearly deserved what happened yesterday." I see something similar happening with the narrative here.
But I don't think it's right to call it "blank slate," because that implies some sort of genetic explanation. I don't think it's a matter of genetics, but of religion. What I think I was missing as a teenager back then was the religious context and the understanding that many people take their religion VERY seriously, in a way that's almost beyond comprehension for someone like me who was raised atheist in a secular environment. That plus cultural relativism makes it easy to characterize anyone as a freedom fighter.
I'm also wondering what it would have been like if 9/11 happened in this era of smartphones and cheap Internet on planes. What if Al Qaeda livestreamed the events, including in-cockpit views of the planes all the way to the moments of the crashes? And passengers too would have livestreamed so many streams with different angles and such. It would also include the whole "Let's roll" incident that I believe led to the crash of one of the planes before it could hit a Washington DC target. I could see these being morale boosters both for the doves and the hawks immediately following the attacks, and I'm not sure what direction things would've changed, if at all.
I didn't mean to imply a genetic explanation. It's clearly about religion. What I meant by blank slate is that if the sympathizer assumes that the average Gazan is blank of bigotry, in that case they aren't taking the antisemitism into account in the equation. If you simply assume that the Muslims that surround Israel aren't opposed to Jewry on a general basis, that their grievances with Israel are purely political, then it's a lot more reasonable to side with them. As you say, they may be missing that understanding of the depth and seriousness in which Muslims take their religion.
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With the exception of support directly resulting from a larger Muslim population (ie not the result of ‘ideological conversion’ so much as ‘ideological import’), has Western support for Palestine really risen since 2014 or even 2004? I don’t know that it has, it’s essentially been a progressive cause célèbre since the ideological realignment in the 1970s (when much of the radical left switched from Zionist to Palestinian liberationist ideas).
Nothing the student types have chanted at US colleges in the last couple of weeks has been different to what they were chanting when I was at college in the early 2010s.
The ‘Corbynite’ sympathy for Hamas stuff was always less pronounced in the US than Europe, because the former had a smaller Muslim population and a much larger Jewish one, but in either case it’s been a thing for more than 40 years now. Younger people poll as more hostile to Israel than older people, because younger people are almost uniformly more progressive than older people, certainly in the Anglo countries. In France, the radical right is as skeptical about Zionism as the radical left, but again the French hard right is strongly tied to a specific kind of at-least-mildly antisemitic Vichyite right, and to counterrevolutionary ultra-Catholicism of the SSPX school which often blames variably Masons, Jews, Protestants and so on for the decline of France (since 1789).
Not according to this.
The question here is different. On the 2nd on it's Hamas, not Palestinians.
That's true, but it still doesn't show basically any sort of support for Hamas in the US.
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I don't think we have sufficient data to conclude that the brutality and the filming actually directionally increased support, not having access to the counterfactual (what should the counterfactual even be? No brutality but similar media coverage? No brutality but similar volume of media coverage? No brutality and the expected attendant lower volume of media coverage?). Assuming it did, though, two theories would jump out at me:
taking the "this is what decolonization looks like" tweets seriously: in the context of BLM, genuine radicalization on the left has increased and inched closer to the Overton window. If you want armed revolution at home and understand what armed revolution actually looks like, it's not hard to see this as armed revolution as narrated from the perspective of the old regime.
media savvy: however savage the attacks were, the media is remarkably crude and shameless in deploying the entire gamut of tricks to milk them in defense of IL's cause (Russell-conjugating any belligerent action, human interest sob stories, contrived clipping of historical context, social attacks against those who would merely fail to fall in line with these narrative techniques). Especially leftist activists by now would have extensive experience with deploying the same techniques for their own causes, often doing so with much greater finesse; they would recognise that and how they are being played and if they were already tending pro-Palestine this would probably make them bristle as much as a ChatGPT-polished essay about the intersectional oppressions of inceldom and Appalachian origin would.
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Osama bin Laden was definitely right about one thing – if people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they instinctively like the strong horse.
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