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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.
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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