FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1hr ago
Okay, well one example of the kind of "ideology" to which I refer is Hamas apologism, which I believe is not reducible to simple anti-Zionism. Supposing a non-Palestinian person who has never been personally victimised by Jews expresses support for Hamas and thinks that their actions on October 7th were justified. Is it reasonable for me to conclude that such a person simply hates Jews as a group, or could such a stance be compatible with anti-Zionism i.e. opposition to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds, without any concomitant antipathy towards Jews as a group?
FtttG
2hr ago
Antisemitic thoughts and speech among Palestinians whose family members have been mistreated by Jews in living memory is just as defensible as any other justified ethnic hatred.
Sure. And what about antisemitic violence? And specifically antisemitic violence targeting Jews who've never set foot in Israel and who have no say in Israeli policy or IDF military tactics?
FtttG
3hr ago
Are you saying Ashkenazim and Mizrahim are respectively sub-groups of Africans and Arabs?
FtttG
3hr ago
It's one thing to be indifferent towards the feelings of Jews. When Israelis criticise Palestinian militants, they are not complaining that Palestinians don't care about their feelings. They are complaining that Palestinian militants are trying to kill them, because they are Jews.
Right. But we're now at the point where Gentiles feel no qualms about lending money at interest either to each other or to people of differing faiths. Probably there are thousands if not millions of people who've chanted "from the river to the sea" support themselves by lending money at interest.
Group A despises Group B. When asked to explain their antipathy, Group A explains they hate Group B because Group B does Activity X to Group A. Subsequently, Group A decides that Activity X isn't such a bad activity after all, and starts doing it to Group B (among other groups) e.g. a Jewish family who takes out a mortgage with a Gentile-owned bank. However, Group A's antipathy towards Group B doesn't budge an inch.
Doesn't this strongly suggest that Group A's antipathy towards Group B really has nothing to do with Activity X, and it's just a convenient pretext to ostracise a group they wanted to harass for unrelated reasons?
FtttG
3hr ago
Unless you want to tell me that Jews aren't white.
I consider Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews white. But there are a few hundred thousand Ethiopian Jews in Israel, and more Mizrahi Jews than Ashkenazi. I doubt most pro-Palestine people could reliably tell the difference between a Palestinian Arab and a Mizrahi Israeli just from a photo.
FtttG
3hr ago
It's not meant to console you in particular. I'm just trying to illustrate that, for reasons of demography, the outright extermination of Jews in a couple of generations is a live possibility in a way it simply isn't for white Europeans.
FtttG
3hr ago
I think your conception of Israel being "awarded" to the Jews by Europe is a bit ahistorical. The country owes its existence to decades of tireless effort by Jews to buy up land in the region. It's not like the British looked at the Jews and Arabs, totted up who was higher on the Oppression Olympics totem pole, and decreed that the Jews were more oppressed so the land belonged to them now.
FtttG
3hr ago
It's even more interesting that you seem to be essentially arguing that antisemitism is defensible or even justifiable.
FtttG
4hr ago
You're referring to the Holocaust, I get that. When you said "the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again" I interpreted that to mean "the pro-Palestine people are asking the EU to award them a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people have been killed". But 6 million of their people haven't been killed. Or did I misinterpret you?
FtttG
4hr ago
Clearly, the pro-Palestinian people are simply asking the EU to do that again
Do what again? Award a group a piece of the Near East after 6 million of their people were killed? Which group has seen 6 million of their people killed recently?
FtttG
4hr ago
Compare Northern Ireland with Israel and the difference is massive. Northern Ireland is safe while Israel is still at war.
I don't think you're comparing apples with oranges.
- Read the mission statements for the IRA, the UVF, the UDA and every other paramilitary organisation in the North. Conspicuous by its absence will be any explicit declaration of intent to completely exterminate the opposing ethnic group. The same cannot be said of Hamas's founding charter. It's extremely difficult to do business with a rival ethnic group who simply want your entire ethnic group dead. How do you come to a compromise? ("Okay – you can have your own state and only kill half of us"?)
- There were moderate leaders on both sides (e.g. John Hume and David Trimble) of the conflict who were willing and able to work together to find a compromise. Every would-be moderate Palestinian leader has good reason to believe he'll be assassinated by one of his own side if he ever dilutes his maximal hatred and distrust of Jews one iota.
- The inability to compromise inevitably results in Palestinian leaders turning down offers far more generous than any offered to Northern Irish Catholics. At no point in the Troubles was complete ceding of territory from the UK to Ireland ever even considered never mind offered, and John Hume and Gerry Adams knew this going into negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement. Meanwhile, Palestinian leaders have been offered their own state at least three times in the last fifty years and turned it down every time. These would strike me as a transparent example of cutting one's nose to spite one's face if you accept the Palestinian leaders' claims at face value that they only want their own state and a "right of return" or similar.
- As odious as some of the IRA's tactics were, they pale in comparison to Hamas's. It's not easy to ask someone to swallow their pride and bury the hatchet with someone who killed your cousin, but it can and has been done. Asking someone to bury the hatchet with someone who murdered your cousin and violated her corpse is a much harder ask.
I also question the way you're laying 100% of the blame for the sad state of affairs at Israel's fault. I mean, when you include bangers like
an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group
Like, even if I concede that this description applies to the Jews in Israel – surely you must concede that, at the minimum, it also applies to the Palestinian Arabs? If nothing else, Jews in Israel can peacefully co-exist with each other (Israel is a significant outlier in the middle East for having experienced zero civil wars since 1948). Palestinian Arabs are such basket cases that they don't even get along with other Arabs, and inevitably end up starting civil wars whenever they're admitted into neighbouring Arab countries. If you want to say that peace in Israel and Palestine is impossible because there are two competing ethnic groups who both follow "an exceptionally ethnocentric religion with a mindset that makes it difficult to co-exist with any other group", I could understand where you were coming from. But the idea that this description only applies to the Jews and not to the Muslim Palestinians is just laughable on its face.
FtttG
5hr ago
How about not occupying more and more territory.
Funny how this one always gets trotted out, and yet all the occasions Israel offered territory back to their Arab neighbours are overlooked.
FtttG
5hr ago
But we could have influenced the food embargo in Gaza and stopped a few hundreds of thousands of children from starving.
I would still love to see evidence for these hundreds of thousands of Gazan children who starved. Most pro-Palestine people seemed to quietly drop that specific claim after the UN were forced to walk back the most explosive framing of it.
FtttG
5hr ago
Nowhere is the continued existence of Europeans demanded.
To push back on this point: depending on how you define it, there are two orders of magnitude more white Europeans in the world then there are Jews, and the global population of white Europeans has not declined at any point in the last century. Jews are not mistaken to perceive themselves as a vulnerable population in a way that white Europeans are not.
FtttG
5hr ago
People began criticising Israel's "genocide" in Gaza before Israel had even militarily responded to the Hamas attack.
FtttG
5hr ago
or indeed Gaza
The dead giveaway is that the people ostensibly most concerned about Palestinian welfare (most of whom tend to present themselves as opposed to Hamas) tend to be the quietest when Palestinians are oppressed or victimised by anyone who isn't an Israeli, including Hamas themselves. "No Jews, no news", as the saying goes.
That being said, epistemic bubbles are absolutely a thing:
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
To the extent that I think Israel's military goals in Gaza were defensible, this is probably a criticism which applies to me.
In the last three years I have seen plenty of people discussing in complete seriousness how all of the banks and financial institutions are controlled by Jews and that this is bad.
FtttG
5hr ago
I sort of feel that the best solution would be for Jews to just all live in America.
Freddie deBoer argued that, if the purpose of Israel is to be a country where Jews will be safe forever, the US already fits the bill. If I recall correctly, he posted this article before that couple were shot dead in DC and that Egyptian guy threw Molotovs at a group of Jews, one of whom died from her injuries. I'm curious if he's revised his position any.
FtttG
5hr ago
I don’t recall anyone online saying a positive thing about that terror attack.
Funny you bring that up, given I never claimed they did.
FtttG
5hr ago
and the key point ISRAEL did kill a bunch of his family in Lebanon
But this is that exact absurd collective guilt framing the article was decrying!
A few years ago, Liam Neeson told an anecdote about how, when he was younger, a close friend of his was raped by a black man, which drove him into such a rage that he stalked the streets of London carrying a cosh, looking for a black man to beat up in retribution (thankfully he didn't go through with it in the end). He told this anecdote essentially as a cautionary tale about how ugly, prejudiced attitudes can sneak up even on well-meaning people and how one must actively resist the urge to submit to one's darkest base impulses – and even with this context he was still excoriated as a racist.
Meanwhile, a Lebanese man shoots up a synagogue in Canada, and people say "well, several of his family members were killed by people who share ethnic heritage with the people in that synagogue, so he was justified in trying to kill them".
Would an American who lost family on 9/11 be justified in shooting up a mosque? Would an Englishman who lost family in an IRA bombing be justified in shooting up a Catholic church in Clapham?
My point (made more eloquently in the linked article; I'm drunkenly paraphrasing) is that there are a lot of people who would never dream of suggesting that a hate crime targeting e.g. black people might be justified because of how a group of black people behaved in a different country. But when a hate crime targets Jews minding their own business in a country other than Israel, these same people will outright state that such violence is "only to be expected" in light of the actions of Israel (even if the targeted Jews don't hold Israeli citizenship, have never set foot in the country and have personally expressed discomfort with IDF military tactics)
A person who is opposed to the existence of Israel on philosophical grounds but who harbours no ill will towards Jews would presumably condemn anti-Semitic violence outside of Israel just as loudly as they condemn anti-black hate crimes, gay bashing etc. The fact that they tend not to do this, but rather will excuse or justify the violence in question, rather suggests that their motivating impulse is something other than a philosophical opposition to the existence of the Jewish state.
I mean, the Persians aren't Arabs either, but many of them are obviously darker than white Europeans. While I'm sure there's nonzero shared heritage between Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, rounding this off to Mizrahi Jews being a subset of Arabs seems misleading and inconsistent with how we catalogue other ethnic groups.
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