naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #3
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.
Regarding Western liberal narratives on the Gaza war, I’m noticing something I find somewhat odd. I see mainstream liberals arguing that clueless college students are indoctrinated by loony leftist propagandists to be rabid enemies of Israel, our greatest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East etc. And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency. Now that the true extent of anti-Zionist agitation on Western college campuses is revealed on prime TV for the first time in almost a decade (the last major Israeli military operation in Gaza was in 2014, I reckon, not counting the mass shootings at the border in 2018 or so), targeted at a nation and a people they actually care about, suddenly it’s a real problem, a real concern to be tackled.
Now I understand that one can come up with all sorts of cynical and mundane interpretations as to why this is, how it’s unsurprising and so on, and I get that. But then I remember that there were violent anti-police protests in the summer of 2020, the campaign to remove Confederate monuments, the various protests against Trump’s rallies, and in these cases the tone of the protests were, as far as I can tell, pretty much set by the same leftist college agitators who initiate the current anti-Zionist protests, the ones who call themselves anticolonialists, social justice advocates, antiracists and so on. And the big difference was that they weren’t criticized by mainstream liberals the way they are now, even though all their agitation and messaging stems from the same ideological tenets.
Colleges have always been super anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be a Ben Shapiro weirdo to know that.
The only thing that seems different now is that the Nikki Haleys of the world are explicitly saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, so the activist college students are saying “ok guess I’m anti-Semitic too.”
It’s the same phenomenon that people talk about here re: racism. You call everything racist and eventually people start saying “ok guess I’m racist.”
In modern times, anti-Zionism has always been some flavor of anti-Semitism. At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
As for the colleges, it appears this time people on the left are finding out that "it's just a few kids on college campuses" is not really reassuring in the slightest. As when the conservative-leaning normies found out, it's likely too late for them.
That’s really a wild assertion about what anti-zionists want especially considering how many of them are liberal Jews. Having spent an unusually high amount of time on college campuses, 99% of anti-Zionism there falls somewhere between “the Israeli state should stop allowing settlements in the West Bank” and “Israel shouldn’t be an explicitly ethno-religious Jewish state.” If you want to call things on that spectrum “anti-semitism,” fine, but it means you’re going to dramatically over-worry about the number of “anti-semites.”
I think there's a strong parallel between "woke" allegations of racism and white supremacy, and pro-Israel allegations of anti-Semitism.
In both cases there is a real phenomenon, but because it's such a good rhetorical weapon it gets significantly over-diagnosed.
There's even a parallel of the anti-SJW term "Kafka-trapping" - for instance, see how leftist Nathan Robinson complains that Jeremy Corbyn was forced out as UK Labour leader not because of any anti-Semitic comments on his behalf, but because he believed that claims that Labour had an anti-Semitism problem were exaggerated.
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Notes -
Regarding Western liberal narratives on the Gaza war, I’m noticing something I find somewhat odd. I see mainstream liberals arguing that clueless college students are indoctrinated by loony leftist propagandists to be rabid enemies of Israel, our greatest ally, the only democracy in the Middle East etc. And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency. Now that the true extent of anti-Zionist agitation on Western college campuses is revealed on prime TV for the first time in almost a decade (the last major Israeli military operation in Gaza was in 2014, I reckon, not counting the mass shootings at the border in 2018 or so), targeted at a nation and a people they actually care about, suddenly it’s a real problem, a real concern to be tackled.
Now I understand that one can come up with all sorts of cynical and mundane interpretations as to why this is, how it’s unsurprising and so on, and I get that. But then I remember that there were violent anti-police protests in the summer of 2020, the campaign to remove Confederate monuments, the various protests against Trump’s rallies, and in these cases the tone of the protests were, as far as I can tell, pretty much set by the same leftist college agitators who initiate the current anti-Zionist protests, the ones who call themselves anticolonialists, social justice advocates, antiracists and so on. And the big difference was that they weren’t criticized by mainstream liberals the way they are now, even though all their agitation and messaging stems from the same ideological tenets.
Colleges have always been super anti-Zionist. You don’t have to be a Ben Shapiro weirdo to know that.
The only thing that seems different now is that the Nikki Haleys of the world are explicitly saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, so the activist college students are saying “ok guess I’m anti-Semitic too.”
It’s the same phenomenon that people talk about here re: racism. You call everything racist and eventually people start saying “ok guess I’m racist.”
In modern times, anti-Zionism has always been some flavor of anti-Semitism. At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
As for the colleges, it appears this time people on the left are finding out that "it's just a few kids on college campuses" is not really reassuring in the slightest. As when the conservative-leaning normies found out, it's likely too late for them.
That’s really a wild assertion about what anti-zionists want especially considering how many of them are liberal Jews. Having spent an unusually high amount of time on college campuses, 99% of anti-Zionism there falls somewhere between “the Israeli state should stop allowing settlements in the West Bank” and “Israel shouldn’t be an explicitly ethno-religious Jewish state.” If you want to call things on that spectrum “anti-semitism,” fine, but it means you’re going to dramatically over-worry about the number of “anti-semites.”
I think there's a strong parallel between "woke" allegations of racism and white supremacy, and pro-Israel allegations of anti-Semitism.
In both cases there is a real phenomenon, but because it's such a good rhetorical weapon it gets significantly over-diagnosed.
There's even a parallel of the anti-SJW term "Kafka-trapping" - for instance, see how leftist Nathan Robinson complains that Jeremy Corbyn was forced out as UK Labour leader not because of any anti-Semitic comments on his behalf, but because he believed that claims that Labour had an anti-Semitism problem were exaggerated.
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