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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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My honest guess is an overrepresentation of jews and they are overrepresented in the posts on the conflict. Add on to this a large overrepresentation of Americans who have grown up in a society that is almost religiously pro Israel. I think a lot of the justifications for Israel starts with support for Israel and then the arguments are constructed to justify the belief. It is more akin to the support of a football team than a political position.

I have met people who are pro Israel because they want to own the libs. How being on the same side as the ADL and JIDF owns the libs is beyond me.

Israel support is also a safety valve for ventilating anger towards non whites. Back in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars era I met several people who signed up just because they wanted to ventilate their anger caused by immigration. That the wars ended up causing mass immigration to Europe didn't seem to bother them. We get this sentiment a lot in Europe. People who would never say the word repatriation and talk about how migrants have to come here legally will happily cheer on bombing Gaza because they just want to see the cousins of their migrants get killed. Advocating for doing 2% of what Israel does in the suburbs of France isn't politically acceptable so we can bomb their relatives in the middle east causing another refugee crisis.

Insofar as I've seen it here, the three main reasons to be pro-Israel are:

  • religiousness (religious right might not be a potent force here but there are a number of people matching that category, and they tend to be evangelical and fervently pro-Israel)
  • owning the libs (nobody cares who ADL or JIDF are here, of course, or even knows them - it's mainly that the left has traditionally been pro-Palestine for anticolonial/(post-)pro-Soviet reasons, so the enemy of my enemy thinking has quite naturally directed right-wingers to be pro-Israel
  • related to above, pro-Americanism and the idea that to be America's best pal, especially now, also requires supporting Israel.

As /u/2rafa says below the Israel supporters tend to be center-right or right-wing, even among the center-left the sort of fervent Zionism one might encounter in Democrats or Labour is basically non-existent here and the explicitly anti-semitic far-right is a minimal force.

Most of our religious people are not evangelical. We have religious Jews, Mormons, and tradCaths, but no evangelicals that I know of.

Evangelicals are very rare in both rationalist and reactionary spaces. One sometimes finds other Protestants, there are the Episcopalian/Anglican equivalent of tradcaths (many of which are now formally or semi-schismatic from the Church of England), the occasional Germanic Lutheran, some of the weird other Protestant denominations. But Evangelicals are rare. Aspects of Evangelical Zionism have now filtered down to some other US Christian denominations, though, I’ve met Catholics who are very pro-Israel and consider Israel to have some kind of special eschatological role, even if Rome says otherwise.

Hey man, like what about justice man?

I do mean this seriously however. Don't underestimate how many people on both sides are incensed due to their understanding of the facts on the ground and feel like the situation is untenable. In the case of the pro-Israel side you'll find people from all over the word who interpret events as "I have no particular interest in or affection for jews, but I see Hamas as terrorists and terrorism can't be allowed to flourish, out of either a sense of justice, or out of fear for what may later happen to me and mine if people find this valid."

related to above, pro-Americanism and the idea that to be America's best pal, especially now, also requires supporting Israel.

On that front, there's also this, Palestinians celebrating 9/11. Americans may not be able to hold a grudge the way Middle Easterners can, but it's been less than 25 years, not over 2000.

I find it baffling that people even here do not ask what the Arabs themselves say they want. Even the laziest retard (me) can join an Arab telegram group and click 'translate' to see what shit they say. The Arabs repeatedly make it clear that they want to sibjugate the jews and america. Its even on the fucking houthi flag (worst flag design ever btw, breaks al rules)! Yet even HERE people seem disinclined to give Palestinians agency for their own actions, treating them as some oppressed animal that had no choice but to rape teenagers and livestream their murders to their adoring fans. Maybe, just MAYBE, the Palestinians who say they want to kill all jews mean it. I mean, what level of fucking crypto fascism is this, declaring it in the open.

Feigned ignorance of Islamist motives is approximately the official position of law enforcement in Britain so it shouldn't be too surprising for it to be widely espoused.

Magic UK dirt did not in fact morph islamist ultraconservatives into progressive liberals even after 3 generations. Right now the UK like all of Europe is just playing for time, hoping that the animating energy of Islamist hate stops spreading out of the middle east. Fools, the call is coming from inside the house!

I'm not sure that anyone is denying that such Telegram groups exist here. However, the history is full of examples of states in struggle against each other fomenting literally genocidal levels of fury aimed at each other turn, only for all of that to be turned to a much cooler variant of mutual distaste or even eventual careful friendship once a peace has been achieved and been in force for some years. Israel supporters tend to treat it as obvious that that couldn't happen with Palestine, that even a mere suggestion that it could happen is some sort of a gross form of la-la-land naivete, even though Israel and Jordan - the "state of Palestine that already exists", according to Zionists - are close enough currently for Jordanians to shoot down drones aimed at Israel.

The egyptians and jordanians established relations to let things thaw out. The PLO kind of did in 1993, but the second intifada in 2000 killed the momentum for peace and the Fatah-Hamas war buried it concretely. @Dean mentioned that a unilateral withdrawal by Israel from Gaza resulted in renewed hostilities from an unrestrainrd Hamas, and it is on the Palestinians to show that they aren't interested in stabbing the outstretched hand before the Israelis remove their gauntlet.

That doesn't make much sense to me. The dancing Israelis on 9/11 are one of the most widely known conspiracy theory-esque ideas in the United States. It seems like a direct counter example to your argument.

The dancing Israelis, if indeed they were dancing, may have been a bunch of cynical scum -- the story is they were happy because they figured it meant the US would go to town on the Arabs. But there weren't street celebrations in Israel proper, the way there were among Palestinians in East Jerusalem (and also Jersey City).

owning the libs (nobody cares who ADL or JIDF are here, of course, or even knows them - it's mainly that the left has traditionally been pro-Palestine for anticolonial/(post-)pro-Soviet reasons, so the enemy of my enemy thinking has quite naturally directed right-wingers to be pro-Israel

This works both ways, and for any point between the extremes. I really don't think there's a position on the issue that you can take, that doesn't own the libs in some fashion.

The Iraq and Afghan wars weren’t major drivers of mass immigration to Europe. The demographic/sectarian situation in Syria was inherently unstable before Saddam’s overthrow because of the Alawite control of the system, increasing overpopulation and rising immigration from the Sahel and sub-Saharan Africa were well underway, Maghrebi immigration to France was a many decades old phenomenon, as was Turkish, Kurdish and Albanian immigration to Western Europe and Pakistani and Bangladeshi migration to the UK and some other Western European countries.

People who would never say the word repatriation and talk about how migrants have to come here legally will happily cheer on bombing Gaza because they just want to see the cousins of their migrants get killed.

Most hardcore pro-Israel supporters in Western Europe are on the center or hard right. I suppose they’re often not radically pro-repatriation/remigration which is a relatively niche policy position as of today, but most people who are implicitly for it (like Zemmour) are also pro-Israel.

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