2rafa
5hr ago
Most Lebanese expats in America are Christian Maronite elites, many of them even left before the civil war blew everything up. Places that received more Muslim immigrants - especially Australia where about 40% of the Australian Lebanese population are hardline Sunni Muslims - have problems with them.
2rafa
1d ago
I don’t think that this has turned into a happening that big yet. Maybe if the regime falls or looks like it, or they actually fully close the strait, but not yet.
2rafa
1d ago
Trump abruptly cancels press conference scheduled for shortly (ie this US morning). First possibility that comes to mind, given the reported strikes on the ayatollah’s compound, is that they aimed for the supreme leader and either didn’t get him or aren’t sure yet, such that a triumphant morning announcement has been delayed or cancelled.
2rafa
1d ago
I honestly think that if Trump had been fast on the trigger and started targeted bombing IRGC field offices, police stations, local army bases during the height of the last protests it might have been enough. As you say, hard to know for sure but there were at least hundreds of thousands protesting in Tehran which is close to the level where a motivated force can overwhelm non-hardened government sites. But today? There were some renewed student protests this week, but nothing on the level that could topple even a weakened government.
2rafa
1d ago
For the Iranian government to fall, there would have to be mass protests today (or maybe tomorrow) coinciding with more strikes. I don’t know, that feels unlikely.
Iran - US - Israel War Flareup
“Israel says it has launched attack on Iran, as explosions reported in Tehran”
“The US has begun Major Combat Operations in Iran” - Donald Trump (headline flashed up just now on my phone, no link yet)
—-
More to follow but thought I’d post quickly for any commenting.
There was just as much reciprocal persecution of Jews in Arab and Persian lands, in fact 18th century Western European Jewish travelers to Jewish communities in Persia lamented the extreme persecution of the local Jewish community, which was worse than anything in Europe at the time. A specific animus against ‘European Christians’ seems unfounded.
The difference is that outright expulsion was rarer in the Middle East because those were already relatively confessionally diverse societies with various random leftover minority groups, both ethnic and religious, from Assyrian Christians to Samaritans to Zoroastrians to Alawites to Eastern Catholics etc etc. The ruling elite might viciously oppress minority groups but these societies didn’t (until the late 19th century) generally consider the possibility of outright ethnic cleansing. It is unclear to me that being expelled is actually worse than being extremely cruelly oppressed by the way.
By contrast, European Christian societies were more exclusive, regularly fighting wars of religion that were explicitly designed to cleanse territories of other flavors of Christianity until comparatively recently, and Jews were often caught up in that fervor. Ethnically and linguistically they were often still very much diverse, but religiously they were more exclusive, and they fought more internal wars, which again have a habit of leading to ethnic cleansing regardless. In addition, and this is again rarely noted even though it’s obvious, the “110 countries” are mostly European because a large swathe of Mitteleuropa consisted of hundreds of tiny micro states for centuries, whereas the Middle East was mostly divided (at the macro level at least) into much larger polities like the grand caliphates and later Ottoman Empire.
2rafa
1d ago
Buying premade staple ingredients is usually both good value and efficient. For example, I regularly cook with what I guess is a standard vegetable / ‘soffritto’ base (very finely diced onions, celery, carrots) as a base for sauces, stews, whatever. Could I buy the ingredients myself and make this on the weekend, freeze it in bags, then use it when I’m cooking? Sure.
But I can also get it perfectly, finely and evenly diced, with no waste or disproportionate amounts of celery or whatever from the grocery store, where 1lb of the “frozen soffritto mix” costs me $2.50. There’s a French grocery store I found that sells pre-finely-diced frozen shallots, perfect for a fast pan sauce if you don’t want to buy and chop shallots, which I use too.
I also buy pre-peeled garlic, which keeps pretty well (the “hacks” for quickly peeling garlic have never worked for me). I buy jarred diced ginger, chili etc in vinegar, which saves both time and in the latter case that horrible feeling when you chop chili and imperfectly wash your hands and then touch your eye or something.
The store also sometimes has very good pre-marinated meats which, again, save a lot of unnecessary time and effort at miniscule cost (perhaps an additional 10% on top of the price of the meat itself). Store-bought curry sauces are also great; the gain from hand-grinding spices, mashing chillies, hand-making a massaman or red curry paste over a good store-bought base is real, but minimal. I think the same about homemade pie crust. A premium store-bought brownie mix is likewise superior to most homemade alternatives.
2rafa
1d ago
If Ellison wanted a liberal who was also a Zionist there were thousands of people in the NYC media business (and indeed already at CBS News) he could have picked to run the news business, it would be a remarkable turnaround in your view on the ethnocentrism of the Jewish community if you disagreed with this.
So the fact he picked Weiss transparently has much more to do with her “anti-woke” views and perceived sympathy or at least neutrality toward Trump (whose administration ultimately has to approve his empire building) than policy vis a vis Israel (which a ‘traditional’ candidate from TV news could also have).
2rafa
1d ago
In Singapore the power distribution is relatively ‘fairly’ distributed by proportion; the Chinese are in charge, obviously, but they are also the majority. In Lebanon the outcome of the Civil War was an arrangement that is tripartite and so not strictly proportionate but certainly moreso than it was before (and part of the instability is precisely that the Maronites have fewer children but cling onto the power they have, even still). There aren’t many historic examples of states where a large minority of the population (more than 25%, say) have been Jewish. The highest it got in prewar Eastern Europe was 6-10% really, the latter in Poland on the eve of the Second World War. There just aren’t that many Jews.
2rafa
1d ago
The patriarchs themselves generally remain, but their large extended clans, daughters, grandchildren, many sons, cousins and so on often spend substantial time abroad and have European citizenship.
2rafa
1d ago
As much as I like the idea of all our posting being immortalized by AI, it is very frustrating.
2rafa
1d ago
Any man can have two partner in the same day (even women ones), a loser trucker can have two truck stop whores in a day. That’s not what it’s about.
2rafa
1d ago
Many critics of Islam consider things like the Hajj (which most scholars believe predates Islam) and ritual circling of the meteorite stone embedded in the Kaaba to be pagan, sure. And of course many both Jewish and Muslim critics of Christianity consider aspects of the Trinity to be polytheistic / shirk / etc in character.
The reason Israeli tourists are disliked in non-Muslim parts of Southeast Asia and Latin America and places like Cyprus is simply that they’re largely boorish, annoying, plebeian men fresh with money from their military service and looking to get wasted, laid and cause trouble.
It’s like asking why British tourists have a much worse reputation in Spain and Croatia than in Japan and America; the former are of a very different class and standard of behavior. American working class soldiers have a very bad reputation in eg Okinawa and parts of the Philippines for harassing women etc.
2rafa
1d ago
Lebanon is only good for the elite because they can flee with their ill gotten gains to Switzerland or Dubai after leaving office. If they had to stay in Lebanon the incentives would be very different.
2rafa
1d ago
There is a history of homogenous societies turning on Jews but there was also plenty of antisemitism in corners of diverse empires like the Russian and Ottoman Empires (not so much in the capitals, at least most of the time, but certainly in many of the provinces). In 1980 America was far more diverse than Western Europe and yet had little antisemitism.
In general the “Jews want diversity because Jews do better in diverse countries” point is extremely contrived, it’s gained currency only because it’s promoted both by Jewish progressives who want to defend multiculturalism in a weekly Reform temple sermon and by far-right antisemites who want to ‘explain’ the motive for why Jews supposedly want to destroy formerly-homogenous white countries with mass immigration. There isn’t much evidence for it or against it. Some Jews supported mass immigration, but so did plenty of powerful indigenous Europeans both in Europe and in North America. Jews were more progressive than many other groups on immigration in the mid-20th century of course, but they were also more progressive on economic and other issues (eg being very overrepresented in economic leftist movements), which suggests it wasn’t an immigration-specific thing.
Seems like a failson wannabe Hollywood mogul centibillionaire heir wasting a huge amount of his father’s money (and some dumb money from outside investors of a similar caliber) on an industry that’s about to be completely upended by AI.
Smart move for Netflix to walk away, say what you will, these assets won’t be worth $100bn in 5 years.
As to your last point, the person doing more than anyone else to deport Somalis from Minnesota (including almost all gentile GOP politicians) is Jewish.
2rafa
1d ago
Netflix has plenty of Jewish employees, obviously, but it’s controlled, run and was founded by Reed Hastings, who is of Boston Brahmin Mayflower arch-WASP pedigree.
2rafa
1d ago
In part that’s because the Israel - Iran conflict is merely part of a larger web of interconnected Middle Eastern conflicts that exist above and beyond it, the most significant being about whether Saudi Arabia or Iran is perceived by the Ummah as the more Islamic government, the legitimacy of the guardianship of Mecca and Medina by the Al-Sauds, the millennium-old Sunni-Shia split, the war in Yemen (now tripartite between the Saudis, Iranians and UAE) etc.
People overfocus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but there would be plenty of drama in the region without it.
It actually seems impressive how many Iranian missiles the Gulf states have seemingly shot down. A few casualties here and there, but nothing crazy yet.
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