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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27802 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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(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:

In the 1960s, the radical left and black militants engaged in terrorism and mass violence for several years. During that period, a disproportionate amount of money and leadership on the left came from Jews and Jewish organizations. Then the Panthers took the movement by storm and imposed a Third World, anti-imperialist focus on the left, which turned hard against Israel after the Six Day War in ‘67. The Panthers’ anti-Zionism bled over into plain anti-Semitism, and many disillusioned Jews began to back away from the movement. Then, in ‘69, black militants in NYC picked a fight w/the mostly Jewish NYC teachers’ union, and the virulent antisemitism that had been just beneath the surface burst out into the open. The Jewish Defense League was actually formed in the aftermath of the conflict, to protect and retaliate on behalf of Jews who were being harassed and attacked by black militants.

The loss of Jewish support was the end of the ‘60s radical left as a serious movement, and the long march on the institutions began. Now that it’s had a half decade to regroup, it’s back on the streets causing mayhem. As before, Jewish organizers and groups played a disproportionate leadership role w/BLM, campus radicals, and other militant groups, and as before, the movement has turned against Israel and Jews more generally. If the rest of the cycle repeats, turning against the Jews will mark the beginning of the end of this round of left wing madness…

Hopefully we all learn a more lasting lesson this time.

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.

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

You are making a causal claim here, but in order to determine whether it is actually true, you need to have:

  1. Actual data, not just anecdotes re support for Hamas (not Palestine) before the attack
  2. Actual data, not just anecdotes re support for Hamas (not Palestine) after the attack
  3. The ability to control for the effect of the subsequent and ongoing air raids by Israel on Gaza

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.

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".

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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