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Notes -
Texas Governor Abbott signs law attempting to ban free speech at universities whenever the speech criticizes Israel in certain ways (described below).
The Executive Order requires all universities to —
Review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the institution.
Ensure that these policies are being enforced on campuses and that groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine are disciplined for violating these policies.
Include the definition of antisemitism, adopted by the State of Texas in Section 448.001 of the Texas Government Code, in university free speech policies to guide university personnel and students on what constitutes antisemitic speech.
Section 448.001 reads
And this definition includes (among other things) —
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
These examples are intentionally ambiguous and can be weaponized by politicians or the judiciary against critics. The first example simply bans anyone from criticizing Israel in the same way that Israel routinely criticize others, by comparing them to Nazis. This cuts off a whole spectrum of political comparisons from ever applying to Israel. The second example could imply that you are antisemitic if you criticize Israel for things without also criticizing other nations in the same breath, however culturally and politically distant the nation. The third implies that an ethnostate cannot be considered racist if it is Jewish. The fourth implies that no one — not a single politician who is Jewish — can be accused of being more loyal to his self-defined homeland than America.
IMO this is a clear affront to freedom of speech. I find it embarrassing that any conservative in America would sign a law like this. The ambiguity is dangerous because it could be used by biased politicians or judges in its broadest application. While I don’t think it’s good public rhetoric to compare Israel to Nazis, that should be legal because (1) Nazis are everyone’s go-to villains, (2) Israel was recently the subject of an ICJ inquiry regarding genocide, (3) ethnonations should be extra scrutinized for genocide, (4) ethnonations with a history of genocide (Kitos War) and who fondly remember their nation previously committing genocide in their Holy Text should be super extra scrutinized for potential genocidal acts. The holocaust, like it or not, has no actual relevance to the current conduct of the Israeli regime. In real life, multigenerational ethnic groups do not swear off the same violence that their grandparents were victims of. So comparisons are fair game, if usually in bad taste.
I don't get why a campus should want to police free speech at all.
I mean obviously don't hand out benefits and special considerations to known hate groups, but if it is legal to stand at an intersection with a sign of "from the river to the sea" or (equivalently) "kill all the men/women/trans/Jews/Muslims/gingers", I see no reason to forbid them on campus.
Also, it is nice to know that for all their differences, the wokes and the GOP can at least agree on some things (i.e. fuck free speech).
'From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free' isn't even egregious as a phrase. They want borders to be changed. Israel also wants borders to be changed - they've changed them in past wars, annexing the Golan Heights amongst other things! Spain wants Gibraltar back. Ukraine wants Crimea back. Russia wants Novorussia back. Japan wants the Kuril Islands back...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_disputes
Saying 'From the river to the sea' doesn't neccessarily require violence (though realistically it would need a lot of bloody fighting), 'kill the Boer' is a clear call for violence, despite considerable effort from the NYT and leftist media to obfuscate it.
In theory, you could have some kind of non-violent settlement where Palestine gets the territory they want. It's extremely unlikely of course, all kinds of things would need to go wrong for Israel. But in principle it's possible. And that's not even 'not taking it literally' which can apparently be done for much more overt statements. Far easier to 'not take literally' abstract ideas like freedom, as opposed to killing.
I think context matters a lot. Crimea is 'merely' a territorial conflict. Sure, there are a few people living on it who probably have their own preference about which state they want to belong to, but the primary importance is strategic. The overall Ukraine is a bit closer. I vaguely recall that the Russian position is that Ukraine is not a legitimate state and would expect that Putin's preferred outcome would be either the vassalization or annexation of Ukraine, which would probably entail murdering enough journalists to bring them to Russian per-capita standards and so on. Likewise, if China ever gets Taiwan into their clutches, they will of course go full Hong Kong on their civil society. Of course, it is very unlikely that Israels Jewish population in a "river to the sea" scenario would be allowed to stay in Greater Palestine. A return to the medieval Muslim states of tolerance and multi-culturalism (compared to their contemporaries) seems very unlikely. In the best case, the Jews would escape with their lives, but Oct 7 seems closer to the vision of the main "river to sea" proponents. Context matters. Victory and salvation are both relatively abstract ideas which are not terribly offensive, but anyone who phrases them as "Sieg Heil!" will rightly be considered as a Nazi. In another world, "from the river to the sea" could be an innocent call for a transport corridor between Gaza and Jordan, but in this world, it is a genocidal Hamas slogan.
Regarding the Boers, the woke left (and arguably at least the maga right) loves their 'provocative' slogans which they insist should not be taken literally (while at least the more radical fringes take them 100% literally):
Was lock her up non-literal? Team Trump may think 'oh we aren't able to imprison Hillary Clinton right now' or 'there are other more important things we should be doing' but if there was a button that just locked her up, wouldn't they press it? Benghazi, emails, selling uranium to Russia, disappearances... they think she's a criminal.
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Sure, but Hamas doesn't simply want a change in management and a new name on the map. They conceive of Palestine as being essentially and exclusively Arab and Muslim - not all that different from Israel being essentially Jewish.
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In the same way that "blood and soil" could just be a call to recognize the efforts of hard-working small farmers. But if its used by protestors in the immediate aftermath of a horrible attack by a group of white supremacists who are known to have used it as their own slogan... at that point, I feel like using it and claiming innocence is ignorance at best.
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I think ‘from the river to the sea’ shouldn’t be banned at colleges or universities, and I agree that most people who use it don’t intend for it to mean the ethnic cleansing or murder of Israelis. (I also think most people, even at Malema rallies, who shout ‘kill the Boer’ don’t actually want to exterminate Afrikaner farmers, but they do typically quite transparently wish to dispossess them).
Nevertheless, as in that case, ‘from the river to the sea’ effectively means the large-scale murder of Jews, since no Palestinian one-state solution would tolerate a longstanding Jewish presence and because the democratically elected leadership of a free Palestine would almost certainly be an Islamist group that, like Hamas and the Houthis and bolstered by countless extremely anti-Jewish hadiths that have become more prominent in Islamist scholarship over the last forty years (gharqad tree etc), would in practice seek to kill any remaining Jews in Palestine.
You can draw the South Africa comparison, but the simple fact is that South African black people mostly have no personal animus toward whites. There is a politician grift complex and there is plenty of resentment that 30 years after apartheid ended many are still poor etc etc, but the primary racial hostilities in South Africa are between blacks and Indians, between indigenous black peoples (ie. Khoi-San) and Bantus, and between South African citizens and migrants from the Congo and elsewhere in Central Africa who are perceived as pushing down wages for the urban poor. This was substantially true even before 1994, and from the rich to the poor few people in SA actually think that kicking out whites will solve the country’s problem. Even today, polling in SA shows that:
By contrast, it is clear that the primary policy preference of most Palestinians in the Levant is hostility towards Jewish rule of Israel even at extraordinary cost to themselves, no matter how many bodies pile up. There would be no ‘debate’ on land reform in a one-state Palestine (unlike in SA, where whites still own 55% of prime agricultural land, the majority of valuable private enterprise and so on), everything would be taken. And given that this hostility is also a longstanding part of Islamic religious and cultural values, we can assume without any leaps of logic that the end of Israel as a Jewish state would also guarantee, in short order, the end of any Jewish presence in Palestine. Meanwhile, there are many African countries like Namibia, Botswana and Kenya that retain sizable white communities 50+ years after independence.
Why does the EFF get all that support, then?
Off topic, but is there a coherent definition of this word?
The EFF polls around 10-15% now. The EFF is also much more leftist than the ANC or DA, its messaging isn’t solely about taking white money but also about redistribution from rich to poor generally, I don’t think it’s correct to ascribe anti-white animus to every EFF voter even if Malema obviously has it.
There’s no coherent definition of indigenous because whether, for example, South African Bantus or New Zealand Maori are indigenous depends on where you draw the cutoff line.
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They don't even know which river and sea!
This might be true, but seems kind of like an insanity plea.
I mean, these are not kindergardeners who will happily sing every song their minders teach them without any reflection on the deeper philosophical meaning. These are digital natives who presumably can read Wikipedia.
Likewise, not one in ten thousand university students lives under so thick a rock or so deep within a filter bubble that they were factually unaware of the Oct 7 attacks (which are among the largest terror attacks in the western world since 9/11.).
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