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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33914 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Josh Shapiro seeks to downplay his time as IDF volunteer

Considered by many to be a front-runner, it turns out that Governor Shapiro volunteered for the IDF. Will this sink his chances in being selected by the Harris campaign? Or will his selection be yet another demonstration of Zionist influence in American politics? To have a volunteer for a foreign army as the Vice President, a heartbeat from the presidency as they say, seems unconscionable to me, particularly a volunteer for an army that is at the center of violence which is currently bringing the region to the brink. Enter your predictions.

I predict Shapiro will be selected and these articles about his op-ed now being dropped, on a Friday before Kamala's selection, are an indication that Shapiro has been selected by the Harris campaign and this is meant to "clear the air" before the announcement.

To have a volunteer for a foreign army as the Vice President, a heartbeat from the presidency as they say, seems unconscionable to me, particularly a volunteer for an army that is at the center of violence which is currently bringing the region to the brink.

How misleading is this? Was Shapiro a member of the IDF? Another commenter suggested this was a school project, when Shapiro was a student, that created some benefit the IDF enjoyed. Can you clarify what you mean in the above paragraph?

Would you accept that argument for a school project that benefitted the IRGC or the PLA?

Israel is a U. S. ally; Iran and the Beijing claimant to China are, if not 'enemies' per se, at least hostile nations.

I think that might make a difference in many Unitedstatesians' assessment.

the Beijing claimant to China

If we're going with unorthodox phrasings, I personally prefer "West/Mainland Taiwan".

I don't see any reason to move on from "Red China". If they weren't Red, we could be friends.

I like to go with "Chinese Beijing".

I use "China" for the physical location and "PRC" for the government.

It can be important and relevant who the beneficiary is, but my main concern was being led to believe he served as enlisted or an officer in the IDF.

Depends if it was mandatory or not - a conscript's less culpable than a volunteer. Note that I'm not sure from the article whether Shapiro was a real volunteer or whether he was subject to mandatory unpaid child labour referred to as "volunteer" only because of the "unpaid" part. We usually don't blame the Jews in Auschwitz who worked the incinerators for doing so, as their only other choice was to be thrown in the incinerators themselves.

His current story is that his "volunteering" was for a required high school service project. I am sure that wasn't the only project available to fulfill the requirement, however.

From the Wikipedia article on Shapiro's private Jewish high school, it looks like doing a semester in Israel was optional, but I assume that once you made the decision to do that the "volunteering" was part of the deal. Whether the decision to do a semester in Israel was taken by Josh or his parents depends on family dynamics.

.... What are you talking about?

  1. People forced to do X are less culpable for the results of X than people who willingly chose to do X; the culpability lessens with increasing punishment for refusing.
  2. The most extreme example of this I can think of is the way Auschwitz worked; to cut costs, most of the labour to build and operate Auschwitz was performed by its Jewish inmates. Among other things, the ones loading all the Jew corpses into the incinerators were other Jews. However, we generally do not blame these Jews for helping to operate Auschwitz, as refusing to perform such work meant certain death.
  3. Some school activities that are called "volunteering" are not really voluntary; the word "volunteering" is used in reference to "volunteer work" i.e. the children are not paid for their labour, but if they do not do the work they are punished.
  4. I suspect that Josh Shapiro's "volunteer" work for the IDF may have been such a case of mandatory unpaid work.
  5. I strongly suspect that schools in China have such "volunteer" programs for the CPC and/or PLA; it's a classic tool of totalitarian systems (it literally shows up in Nineteen Eighty-Four) because it's free labour that also inculcates a sense of being part of the government system and acts as a crude loyalty screen.

Some school activities that are called "volunteering" are not really voluntary; the word "volunteering" is used in reference to "volunteer work" i.e. the children are not paid for their labour, but if they do not do the work they are punished.

I've heard this referred to as being 'voluntold'.

However, we generally do not blame these Jews for helping to operate Auschwitz, as refusing to perform such work meant certain death.

I would not say things are so clear-cut. Generally, helping running a death camp means being an accessory to murder -- former civilian clerks have been convicted in Germany for that in a few cases (Also, this commonly involves octogenarians in front of a youth criminal court.)

"I had to do it to save my own skin" (which is called duress in English law and entschuldigender Notstand in German law) is not a great excuse for serious crimes.

On the other hand, the culpability of Sonderkommando workers providing unskilled slave labor to the Nazi death machine is minimal, so I would call it excusable.

And then of course some members of the Sonderkommando fully redeemed themselves by blowing up a crematorium.

But Shapiro has previously claimed this as a thing he did and valued as an experience.

Shapiro's gubernatorial campaign sometimes seemed aimed specifically at trying to get Dougie boy's supporters to call him a Jew.

I've been under the impression, in my own bubble, that Trump could roll up the Dems if he came out and said CEASEFIRE NOW. He's flirted with it, saying he'd fix it when he was in office and that's why Arabs would vote for him. But if he really came out saying he was against the war and calling Biden genocide Joe, the Democrats would be sent into such disarray that he'd win on a gimme putt.

Perhaps Harris and co have the opposite opinion, that Trump or a major enough surrogate can be baited into attacking Shapiro on anti Zionist, anti semitic, anti Israel grounds and this will be good for Harris.

I got another illegal fake anti-Harris attack text, pretending to attack her in ways that clearly benefit her with most voters.

Real Socialists see through Kamala: She's a fake progressive. Kamala supports Law and Order, Border Control and wants to FUND "community policing" across America. Harris can't be trusted to stand for REAL social justice and she should not lead our Democratic Party. stop to end

These seem to be faking attacks from people everyone hates as a qualification for Kamala. The last ones I got were absurd Christian extremist, these are absurd progressive socialists. Maybe this is a continuation of the strategy?

/images/1722680799211828.webp

I've been under the impression, in my own bubble, that Trump could roll up the Dems if he came out and said CEASEFIRE NOW. He's flirted with it, saying he'd fix it when he was in office and that's why Arabs would vote for him. But if he really came out saying he was against the war and calling Biden genocide Joe, the Democrats would be sent into such disarray that he'd win on a gimme putt.

This is like saying “if the Democrats pivoted extremely harshly against immigration, they’d win back some voters”, which is true but also clearly against the personal beliefs of many leading Democrats. Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem, he seems clearly very much sympathetic toward Zionism, has a Jewish daughter and a very much zionist son in law etc. The other places where Trump has changed the Republican platform - for example on LGBT issues/gay marriage and on abortion - are situations where his personal opinions reflect those (relatively) more liberal positions.

I think you misunderstand my argument. Trump's unique personal bond with his voterbase would probably enable him to hold onto the vast majority of them, a larger than normal portion of them, regardless of his statements. While his pivot would cause Democrats to hurt themselves in their confusion. When Trump has gotten to the left of the Dems, the Dems get spooked and either go right and alienate their own voters (who mostly don't trust Democratic politicians anyway), or they go even farther left and alienate everyone else.

So Trump comes out for a ceasefire. Harris is in a Dilemma; if she tries to go further left and withdraw all support for Israel she alienates most normal Americans, if she tries to swing zionist and talk about our steadfast support for Israel she alienates a lot of voters she needs in November. Where does this cash out for votes?

I don't think Trump would follow through on it in office, or that it reflects his personal views. I think it would be a political masterstroke, forcing Harris onto the back foot, and likely tying her to any bad thing Israel does between now and November.

Whereas if Dems pivoted against Immigration, they would alienate a lot of their own voters, who don't trust them on immigration, and they wouldn't really win over any Republican voters, who don't trust them on immigration. What makes Trump unique is his charismatic personal bond with a lot of voters, who think he will do the right thing even when he has specifically said he won't.

I think you mis-estimate the views of the silent majority here. Plenty of people find Trump distasteful but not evil.

Siding with massacring terrorists who started a war is wrong, no matter how many of their own children they throw in front of their armories to get blown up. "Ceasefire Now" is telling Israel to accept getting wiped off the map for the crime of being a successful western country when marxists hate them.

To have a volunteer for a foreign army as the Vice President

He did volunteer work at an Israeli base as part of a broader school program. He did not, as your wording suggests, join the IDF.

I like my national elected officials to work for my nation, not their own.

To give the Devil his due, that wording is essentially Shapiro's. He said he "was a past volunteer in the Israeli army".

I hope that he isn’t selected, but unfortunately it does now appear likely.

Do you expect he'd provide much of a boost to the Harris campaign?

No, but I think it would increase antisemitism if he was selected and Harris won.

Ironically, I expect one of the reasons the Harris campaign is looking at him is because Harris's own views on Palestine might scare their Jewish voters and donors.

Yeah, it would only get harder and harder to gaslight the world into thinking dual loyalty is just an antisemitic trope rather than a systematic problem at the highest levels of the US government.

Shapiro, born in Missouri, didn't volunteer for the US army but he volunteered for the Israeli army. How much more on the nose can they get while screaming "antisemitism!" when somebody points out the obvious?

Can you spend a week as a high schooler ‘volunteering’ for the US military? The JROTC isn’t really the same thing.

Can we pause to appreciate how fucking insane it is that an AMERICAN high school has its students volunteering for a foreign army as a "project?" And that Jews expect NOBODY to breath a word about this or hold them accountable for their OBVIOUS loyalties to a foreign state and their own international community?

They volunteered on a kibbutz and it turned out that one of the things the kibbutz did was support a local military base in some capacity. I don’t think it’s surprising that a religious Jewish school might engage in an overseas project with an institution in a country where the great majority of religious Jews live.

But again, how much criticism did Paul Ryan get for his own ethnic identity when he attempted to allow essentially unlimited immigration from Ireland to the US (something that no Jewish-American politicians have succeeded in doing for Israelis, I might add)?

But again, how much criticism did Paul Ryan get for his own ethnic identity when he attempted to allow essentially unlimited immigration from Ireland to the US (something that no Jewish-American politicians have succeeded in doing for Israelis, I might add)?

Not to defend Paul Ryan or his immigration policies, but no part of his proposed policy could be construed as allowing "essentially unlimited immigration from Ireland" - what he was trying to do was give Irish nationals access to E3 work visas, which are currently reserved for Australians, and which have an annual cap of 10,500 recipients. At best there'd be a few thousand more Irish visa holders in the US per year, and realistically less than that - the E3's annual cap is never met because Australians prefer to remain in Australia than move to the US, and I doubt it would be any different for the Irish given that they have free access to both the UK and the EU.

More importantly Paul Ryan has never served in the Irish army, or paraded around Congress in the uniform of a foreign military, which is something we're supposed to just pretend is normal when IDF members do it.

I had to go back because I don't remember that particular controversy. It turns out your memory is faulty, as the controversy surrounded giving thousands of additional work visas each year to Irish immigrant workers in a bilateral agreement- not "essentially unlimited immigration from Ireland":

The Senate is slated to vote on a bill supported by the Wisconsin Republican that cleared the House in November, which provides Irish applicants thousands of unused E-3 visas typically allocated to Australian citizens working in “speciality occupations” in the US.

But what you are even more wrong about is that Paul Ryan received no criticism for his own ethnic identity in supporting this policy. In fact, he was criticized for it in every single article I read about this controversy, with wording like:

House Speaker Paul Ryan is pushing a proposal that would greatly expand access to work visas for Irish nationals — a nod to his ancestral heritage — and drawing backlash from both sides of the political aisle.

...

Because he is Irish, Paul Ryan is promoting a bill that could provide Irish nationals with thousands of additional work visas each year. I’d love to see this included in the next op-ed from a white writer lamenting “identity politics,” but I know better.

...

The outgoing speaker, whose ancestors came to America from Ireland to escape famine in the 1850s, has always had a soft spot for the country. He even said he hopes to one day become to U.S. ambassador to Ireland.

In contrast, with Biden's almost-entirely Jewish cabinet which has pushed unprecedented policy initiatives in favor of Jewish NGOs and combatting antisemitism, with sweeping policy coming out of the Jewish-run DHS, Secretary of State Office, and so-on, there is actually no criticism of these Jewish officials using their power for the benefit of Jews in the same way that Ryan received criticism for his Irish heritage regarding his support for that bill.

Your example is just proving my point. The Paul Ryan example is 0.0000000001% the level of Jews supporting Jewish groups domestically and internationally, and the state of Israel, within the United States policy apparatus. And that 0.0000000001% draws criticism and complaint of ethnocentrism by the media whereas the elephant in the room does not.

A Jewish-run Department of State adding Israel to the Visa Wavier Program, despite there being very good reason for Israel to not be included in this program, drew no criticism or suggestion that the move was "a nod to Blinken's ancestry", of course except from the Dissident Right:

Today, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas, in consultation with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, announced the designation of Israel into the Visa Waiver Program (VWP). By November 30, 2023, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) will be updated to allow citizens and nationals of Israel to apply to travel to the United States for tourism or business purposes for up to 90 days without first obtaining a U.S. visa

So (Jewish) head of DHS Mayorkas and (Jewish) of Secretary of State Blinken add Israel to the program and not a whisper of a "nod to their heritage".

The fundemental problem facing pretty much any Democratic candidate today is that "woke people" are overwhelmingly pro-Iran/Hamas and anti-Isreal while US interests both economic and diplomatic skew the other way.

This puts the Democrats in a bit of a pickle. They need to be seen providing material support to Hamas lest they alienate thier base, hence the Gaza pier. But they also need to credibly signal that they don't really mean it if the want to appear competent hence the failure of said pier and the nomination of Shapiro as VP.

America's alliance with Israel has been catastrophically costly economically, diplomatically, militarily, reputationally... tapping an IDF volunteer as VP of the United States is not a display of competence. It's a display of being captured by foreign influence.

The current logic of US alignment with Israel is A) counterbalancing Iran, which would be our enemy anyways and B) keeping them out of Russia’s orbit.

Jews are unpopular in the Arab world but actually Arab elites seem able to live with Israel, and none of these countries are democratic enough to have to worry about populist candidates. Israel isn’t notably unpopular in the places the US actually needs popular support.

Quite right. The Arab Oil Shock was a direct result of US military aid to Israel. Massive economic damage there. Osama Bin Laden's Islamic extremism was to a significant extent motivated by treatment of Palestinians as he correctly realized that expensive US military aid to Israel was being used against them (and Lebanon + others).

And then there was the Iraq War which is still explained as a kind of mysterious anomaly. Israel was pushing for it the whole time, Sharon and so on. They provided false intelligence about WMDs. There were all kinds of generals and knowledgeable figures who said things like 'Oh of course we know that the US isn't threatened if Iraq acquires nuclear weapons but Israel certainly is'.

Israel was pushing for it the whole time, Sharon and so on.

Hmmm….

In early January 2002, four months after the September 11 attacks, Israeli national security council director Uzi Dayan met in Washington with his American counterpart Condoleezza Rice. She told him — to his surprise, he later told me — that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. A month later Dayan’s boss, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, met with Bush in the White House and offered some advice, based on decades of Israeli intelligence.

Removing Saddam, Sharon said, according to three sources with direct knowledge, will have three main results, all negative. Iraq will implode into warring tribes of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. You’ll be stuck in an Iraqi quagmire for a decade. And Iran, a far more dangerous player, will be rid of its principal enemy and free to pursue its ambitions of regional hegemony. Bush didn’t agree.

I recall that Sharon told Putin (who was leading a push for WMD inspectors to verify whether Iraq did have WMDs) that the time for inspections was over, it was too late. His spokesman Ra'anan Gissen certainly went around spruking the WMD story.

Netanyahu was publishing op-eds calling for war. Foreign minister Shimon Peres said on CNN that "Saddam Hussein is as dangerous as bin Laden," and that the United States "cannot sit and wait." A month later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post recommending that the Bush administration "should, first of all, focus on Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein."

Netanyahu was of course in favor of the war, and promoted to Bush his own fake intelligence in a way that (as the source of the quote I quoted discusses actually) that bypasses both Mossad and Sharon.

Sharon said a lot of things to a lot of people. Perhaps he didn't want to be seen as too strongly endorsing a US invasion of an Arab state. We do know that he was working with zionists in Bush's cabinet to help launder pro-invasion information to the administration:

The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.

A former IDF brigadier general also criticized Israeli intelligence along similar lines.

"Catastrophic" compared to what?

American neutrality in the decision of Jews to create their ethnostate in the middle of the Arab world. They chose it, they can defend it themselves- not at the economic, military, and diplomatic expense of the United States. It's not too late for America to course-correct, but our "Democracy" will never provide a ticket that is skeptical of the alliance. You either get to vote for the ticket which is already agitating for war with Iran, or the ticket poised to tap an IDF Volunteer as VP. "Democracy", right?

The US was neutral for the first couple decades of Isreal's existence becaus the US was trying to cozy up to Syria and Egypt to keep them out of the Soviet orbit.

It wasn't until 1962 that JFK lifted the embargo prohibitting Isreal from purchasing US arms and by which time the Isrealis had already fought two wars against the Arab world without US help.

This idea you seem to have that US relations with the arab world would be cordial and the middle east peaceful it weren't for those medlesome Jews displays a deep ignorance of both the diplomatic and economic realities of the 20th century (cough oil and the Cold War) as well as the centuries of cultural conflict both within the Arab world and between the Arabs and the West preceding it.

our "Democracy" will never provide a ticket that is skeptical of the alliance

It might at some point in the future. The reason why it doesn't now is, roughly speaking, because more voters either support the alliance, or don't care much about it one way or another and are willing to just continue with the status quo, than oppose it.

This is true even on the Democratic side. Biden, who supports the alliance, won more primary votes than any anti-alliance contender in the primaries. Which does not necessarily mean that the Democratic voter base is for the alliance, it is more that even for most anti-alliance Democratic voters, it is not among the top issues that they care about so they are willing to throw their anti-alliance feelings to the curb and vote for the Democrats anyway.

Granted, a major part of why Biden won is that he seemed more electable than his primary opponents, and in our winner-takes-all electoral system that is a major concern for many people. However, if enough Americans were against the alliance, there would be enough electable anti-alliance politicians that this would not be an issue like it was with Biden.

The fraction of Americans for whom the alliance is truly a top political issue is simply not that big. So I would not necessarily agree with you putting "democracy" in quotes, because to me the US' attitude to the alliance seems to not necessarily be the outcome of undemocratic forces. Certainly undemocratic forces, like pro-Israel lobbying, contribute to it, but at the same time, if the majority of Americans truly wanted to leave the alliance, and it was one of their top political goals, I have a hunch that the US would leave the alliance.

This might actually happen at some point in the future, if anti-alliance sentiment in the US continues to grow.

Often the reasoning becomes circular. Israel helps the US against US enemies. The enemies are enemies due to conflicts caused by Israel.

A good alternative approach is that of China. They buy oil from Saudis, Iranians and Iraqis. No trillion dollar wars and yet they have consistently gotten their oil. They even managed to get Iran and Saudi to join BRICS together.

As an aside, I am peeved by people referring to Saudi Arabia as "Saudi", which is a pseudo-Arabic attributive adjective analogous to a more native "Saudian" (e.g. belonging to the House of Saud, its ruling dynasty). This is as if you chose to refer to the USA as "United", or the USSR as "Soviet" - "Nazi Germany even managed to get America and Soviet to join forces".

In Arabic don't they usually shorten it to السعودي (As-saudi - "The Saudi")?

It's more like saying "America" than saying "The United." The alternative would be calling it "Arabia," which sounds rather archaic in English.

That would be surprising to me if true - I'd expect as-Saudiyyah (السعوديّة) just because gendered languages don't usually forget the grammatical gender of an omitted or implied word (and Arabia is feminine). However, I can't claim to be familiar with real casual usage since my only qualifications are a couple of college classes and general language nerdery.

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Well as you gesture it’s how they refer to themselves and to their country “I’m going back to Saudi this week” etc, so it is what it is.

Right, I did notice Arabs doing this in English, but that doesn't do anything to reduce the feeling of wrongness about the English use to me.

I could imagine the reason they do it is a combination of mistranslation (Arabic definite articles distribute over all attributes/modifiers, so "Saudian" Arabia is literally "the Arabia the Saudian"; hence no distinction is made between attributives ("Saudian (...)") and nominalizations ("the Saudian")) and calque (as they famously like referring to things and people by nisbah/belonging epithets, like al-Baghdadi/"the Baghdadian").

I find the idea of a President that is a citizen of any other country or having served in any other country’s military to be very disturbing. I would feel this way for any country that was the case for, Ukraine, Mexico, the UK, whatever.

It depends on the specific circumstances. Born overseas to US diplomats? Probably not a big deal. But I found myself quite uncomfortable with Rishi Sunak, for example, who went through the green card process in the US and was married to an Indian.

No, it really doesn't depend on anything. Any circumstance where the president served a foreign military is unconscionable unless your name is George Washington.

You shouldn't be comfortable with Sunak, either.

Sunak didn’t serve in a foreign military.

I'm glad you agree that there are exceptions, such as George Washington.

Is he an Israeli citizen?

IIRC you have to be an Israeli citizen to be in the IDF, I could be wrong though.

Sure, but he wasn’t in the IDF…

Aren’t all Jews technically Israeli citizens?

I mean I don’t expect he has an Israeli passport or anything. Just that he does have the right to live there and expect Israeli protection.

Aren’t all Jews technically Israeli citizens?

Eligible for Israeli citizenship. That is not the same thing as being an Israeli citizen.

Otherwise, anyone with a quarter-million in the bank would be considered a citizen of St Kitts and Nevis.

In the sense that every American with one great-grandparent born in Germany is a German citizen, sure. But typically that would be referred to as a right to claim, rather than a citizen, since Jews who meet all eligibility requirements can still be denied for a number of reasons.

That’s fair. And since he spent time in Israel you’d assume he would have claimed it then if he was going to(and didn’t).

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