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The ones who resent western values are Israel. AIPAC and ADL are some of the biggest threats to western values. Israel is a state fundamentally opposed to western values that causes constant headache for the west.
Israel isn't a western ally, it is nothing but a giant burden on the west causing constant problems in the middle east, engaging in massive foreign interference and receiving a tonne of aid.
Iran is an indoeuropean nation that is stable and exports oil. They are socially conservative while still having a modern and industrial economy. They have done an excellent job at resisting the catastrophic neo-con policies that have swamped Europe with refugees and let jihadists run amok in the middle east. We should be thankful that Iran helped liberate large parts of Iraq and are fighting jihadists in Syria.
What about European women's right not to be raped by the migrants IsraAID is bringing into Europe? What about the christians in the middle east that are being destroyed by the hostile nation of Israel?
While Israel was on the opposite side of the civil war from the majority of Syria's Christians, they have no real beef with the Christian population elsewhere in the middle east; indeed, the one that they deal with directly, the Maronites, Israel would rather be more powerful as a counterbalance to Hezbollah. Of course the Maronites don't particularly want to be an Israeli puppet either.
While I'm sure some Christians have gotten hit as collateral damage in Israeli strikes and Arab Christians by and large are not huge fans of Israel, Israel doesn't seem any worse for surrounding Christian populations than the Muslim governments of those countries are.
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I mean, yeah; a state organized around blood-and-soil nationalism premised on a mythic past and present-day military conquest is pretty opposed to the modern deracinated, pacifistic, cosmopolitan western ideal. A bit surprised that you're in favor of the latter over the former, but wonders never cease!
Clearly the gentile governments of European nations don't care about protecting that right. Sounds like a problem with the Gentiles.
Sounds like another failing of world christendom. You should probably get on that.
Funny how the ADL and AIPAC have been pushing hard for the polar opposite of nationalism for us. Mass migration and open borders to Europe, an ethnostate for Israel.
Yes, we need to get rid of the AIPAC and ADL influence.
Why, it's almost like diaspora populations have strange relationships with the host nation and the metropole. Of course, if you actually look at the people who are doing the on-the-ground work of the mass-migration you get a lot of Catholic groups, not Jews.
Ah yes, the gentiles who actually hold office are just helpless little mice before the terrifying might of...completely ordinary lobbying groups. And it just so happens to aaaaaaallllll be the Jews...couldn't be the Turkish lobby, or the UAE, or the Saudis, or the Iranians.
The US has a policy of ensuring that Israel has a qualitative military advantage over any plausible combination of Middle East powers. This includes billions annually in military aid to Israel and refusing to export advanced weapons to other regional powers. The US even gives aid to Israel's neighbours for maintaining good relations with Israel.
Then there are the loan guarantees, the US's tactical ignorance of Israeli non-NPT nukes and the incredibly slavish rhetoric from US leaders: Donald Trump repeatedly expounded his dismay at how Israel no longer controls the US House of Representatives like it used to.
Or we could look at the Biden administration cabinet: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-in-the-biden-administration
Homeland Security, Secretary of State, Director of National Intelligence, Secretary of Treasury and Attorney General are Jewish along with many more.
It's laughable to think that Turks or Iranians have anywhere near the level of influence in Washington that Jews do.
Since 2008. Extremely GWoT-pilled. What harm, exactly, is this doing to our policy in the region other than generating more $120,000/yr. paperwork compliance jobs for folks living in Falls Church? Were we on the cusp of selling F-35s to the Iranians? Is Egypt making a better case to advance our interests in the region?
The sum-total of all U.S. aid to Israel since its founding 75 years ago is about
0.5%[Edit: /u/Randomranger is correct, this should be 5%; I make sloppy math mistakes] of the 2023 US budget spend. Also, that includes money for highly-productive joint research and development projects, and billions upon billions in laundered subsidies for U.S. military-industrial conglomerates (i.e. grants which can only be used to purchase equipment/services from U.S. firms), both of which we would want done anyway even if Israel wasn't the one doing it.You're right, there couldn't possibly be any other rationale for paying regimes on top of major trade and international supply routes to not blow each other's major infrastructure up. Has to be the nefarious influence of da Joos.
Claiming that Israel is doing a good thing by helping the military industrial complex get stronger and suck up more government funding is just bizarre to me. The fact that more and more tax money gets spent on incredibly corrupt military procurement bodies is something I find sad to think about - the opportunity cost on all that money and the good it could have done for the world is just immense. Is that actually something you think is a positive?
The graft and bloat isn't good, just inevitable. If it wasn't getting laundered through Israel, it would be getting laundered through South Korea, Japan, Australia, the Saudis, etc.
There's nothing inevitable about it. Every single one of these instances of corruption is the result of purposeful, deliberate actions - this is something that is done on purpose and not by some inevitable law of nature. Each instance of corruption strengthens the corrupt aspects of the MIC and makes the problem as a whole worse to boot, as people profiting from that corruption can reinvest in their own "business" and help it grow. While I think there's some validity to the claim that they'd just do it elsewhere without Israel, I think all those other laundering operations should be shut down as well - so the claim that it would be them if it wasn't Israel is just a non-starter.
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The 2008 law merely codifies longstanding US policy. Said policy helped drive Israel's Arab neighbours towards the Soviet Union (who would sell them military equipment).
Your own link says that $330 Billion went to Israel. The budget for 2023 was $6 trillion, so the real answer is 5% of the 2023 budget. $330 billion is a lot of money. More was sent to Egypt, Jordan and so on with the purpose of improving Israel's position. Still more was lost as a result of the Arab Oil Embargo, stemming from Arabs angry with US aid to Israel.
There is no reason to give foreign countries grants to buy equipment. The US could have bought equipment itself, or chose allies who actually fight alongside the US in its wars like Britain or Australia. Israel does not fight alongside the US. They are also known for selling US military technology on to China.
Funnily enough the rivers of gold only opened up when Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, in 1978. And Jordan has no supply routes worth caring about, only proximity to Israel.
To my knowledge (though I'm not an expert) the first time the U.S. provided military aid to Israel was '73 under Nixon, and Nasser didn't need any push to be pro-Soviet; it fell right in line with his third-world-ist, anti-colonial rhetoric. Even then, we were the ones to step in and save him from the Brits, French, and Israelis. But for the U.S., there's an alternate world where the Suez Canal is still run by the Brits, with Israeli troops and settlements on the eastern side. Surely that's a world where the Jews have a lot more power than the current one - so why did we intervene? Why didn't the Jews win on that one?
Thank you for the correction; I am sloppy with math. I have edited the post to reflect this.
Over 40 years? On the brobdignagian scale the U.S. does military-industrial things with? Maybe it's the last couple administrations, but I have a hard time getting worked up about US overspending on things to make defense contractors (or, more recently, community activists) rich. It's just a cruddy fact of life.
Yeah, that one stung in the 70's, but it's 50 years old. OPEC doesn't have that kind of power any more, not since the shale revolution.
Sure there is; it funnels money to defense contractors, but it also ensures that the equipment is actually used in a conflict so we can get data back on how it performs.
Yes, this is the "carrot" part of "carrot and stick" diplomacy. You reward friends for doing what you want, and punish enemies who do things you don't want.
Sure, because letting that country collapse and become the personal playground of the irredentist Palestinian national movement - a movement which even in the 70's showed a marked proclivity to actions harmful to western interests - wouldn't have any negative consequences for anyone except Israel.
The US was at that time more concerned with its reputation amongst the Arabs, who were numerous and possessed large amounts of oil. That's standard strategic logic, plus there was an element of reflexive anti-European imperialism.
The Israel Lobby and jewish presence in government was not so strongly developed in the 1950s as it would later become. Aid really started flooding in under Kissinger. Even if the man said some anti-semitic things from time to time, he was still Jewish and it is not unreasonable to think that he would be sympathetic to his co-ethnics.
Consider the later agreement where the US would station military equipment in Israel for them to use (ostensibly it's for US forces that might arrive but the Israelis ended up using it in Lebanon), signed by Ariel Sharon and US Secretary of Defence Weinberger with a little assistance from AIPAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Cooperation_Agreement
From first principles, wouldn't you assume that if the US cabinet and White House was full of names like Chang, Zhang, Yuan and Dongfeng, the US would lean more pro-China than makes strategic sense? Certain items would never make it onto agendas, some policies would be carried out enthusiastically and others would be given up at the first sign of trouble. People could find reasons why military aid to China was a good thing - stabilizing the region, countering Russia, Vietnam and so on. They could find reasons why China causing problems for the US was acceptable, they have certain legitimate interests and mistakes happen. They could create framing where China is a traditional ally of America, we fought together in WW2 against those awful Japanese, it's a vital trading partner, predestined to be a superpower...
Alternately, if the US cabinet was full of Muhammeds and Husseins, I expect Israel would encounter lots of problems. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib are amongst the least pro-Israel politicians in America.
People have natural sympathies for those of the same race and creed.
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Israel is only "a burden" and "causing headaches" in so far as our current so-called "elites" are more aligned with the interests of Iran and HAMAS than they are those of thier own nations.
There is nothing "European" or "Western" about Iran and "stable" is releative. Thier current tegime relies far more heavily on foreign support to maintain thier grip on power than the current Isreali government does.
Our so-called elites argue for "nuance" there to. Hence thier support for anti-western and anti-enlightenment policies like a two-tiered justice system for migrants vs non-migrants under the guise of "decolonization", "social justice", and various other flavors of socialist nonsense.
Christians aren't getting discriminated against or killed by the state of Isreal, they're getting killed by the people the state of Isreal are currently waging a war against.
The elites are completely bought by Israel and are far more zionist that the populations.
We have zero interests in wasting trillions destroying middle eastern countries and we have no interest in causing massive refugee crisis on the border of Europe. We absolutely share an interest with iran, we want a stable Iran that isn't causing a migrant crisis, we want jihadists defeated in Syria and an end to the forever war.
Far more than there is with Saudis. Iranians tend to be the easiest middle easterners to integrate. They even speak an indoeuropean language.
Yes, they sell oil and cashews to us. I hope they continue and don't have their oil industry go the way of Libya's.
The same woke politicians want to bring the migrants here from the wars they created. I oppose the wars that brought them here and the mass surveillance state migration requires. One of the advantages of the middle east rejecting the globalists is that they don't get infected with wokeness.
Israel has driven a large portion of the christians out of the country, killed thousands, bombed churches and orthodox jews spit on christians. The Christian community in Syria has been wrecked during the war in which Israel sponsored the Al Nusra front. Jerusalem should be a christian city and jews are the one religion in the area that completely rejects christ.
If our elites are bought and paid for by isreal why is the US government spending so much money and materiel to keep HAMAS in the fight, while pleading with the IDF to pull thier punches? Why are the most vocal supporters of HAMAS the staff and student bodies of Yale, Columbia, Et Al?
I dont think you have any idea what you're talking about. The state of Isreal has been accepting Christian refugees from across the middle east for decades now, that many of these Christians do not stay in Isreal and instead use it as a stepping-off point to Europe and elsewhere is not the same as Christians being "driven out" of Isreal.
Israel is the greatest welfare queen of them all. Trying to stop Israel from taking their genocide too far makes sense as there is a limit to how blood thirsty they can get and still win elections. Brutal wars in the middle east aren't popular.
Why are these schools cancelling people who don't think Israel has a right to genocide Christians while they cancel people say it is ok to be white?
Israel is terrorizing christians: https://international.la-croix.com/world/israel-unprecedented-report-lists-anti-christian-acts
To be clear, you are complaining about spitting and anti-Christian graffiti in Isreal while ignoring the priests getting imprisoned in Iran, assasinated in Pakistan, and the lynching of non-muslims in Syria and Lebanon.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/20/war-crime-israel-bombs-gaza-church-sheltering-displaced-people
Israel bombs churches, displaces christians and treats them like second class citizens.
Israel sponsored jihadists in Syria, chaos ensued. The christians benefited from a stable regime.
You chose the grafitti example not I and HAMAS is not exactly a unbiased source.
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Iran has colossal numbers of Afghan refugees and has the same issues with them that European countries do. You spout DR memes without even understanding the countries you discuss.
What about funding Houthi Islamists whose flag says ‘Death to America’ serves Western foreign policy aims in Yemen? Since MBS’ ascension Saudi funding to Wahhabi Islamist mosques abroad has been in any case dramatically curtailed, this isn’t 2014.
Whose fault is that? They didn't create the Taliban and then fight the Taliban for 20 years.
What do they mean by death to America? I don't think they mean death to ordinary Americans. They mean death to neoliberal imperialists.
I have no issue with them delivering death to people who are trying to infect the Middle East with gender studies and push millions of migrants into Europe. I consider the people who participated in the wars in the middle east absolute traitors well deserving of the Houthis are delivering.
It serves an important foreign policy goal, kicking the globalists out of the middle east.
This made me chuckle IRL
"The leopards eating faces party surely don't want to eat my face, just the faces of my outgroup!"
Again why are they not saying death to Brazil? Death to China or death to Iceland? Why specifically the US?
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I am sure you would not apply this level of charity to Israelis chanting anti-Palestinian or anti-Muslim slogans.
When people are burning flags and chanting death to a country, they are not making a distinction between "neoliberal elites" and ordinary citizens of that country. It would not even be completely unreasonable to point out that if you think the "neoliberal elites" deserve death, then the people who vote for them and pay taxes to their regime are complicit. This was the justification for 9/11 and basically every other terrorist attack on American soil or against American civilians and military personnel.
When people say "Death to ____," they mean Death to ____, not some abstract and nuanced political objection to ____'s current political leadership.
Which universities in the Middle East are pushing Western gender studies courses? Would love to know how those are going.
In mild, mild fairness, I could imagine that, like with North Koreans, the modal Iranian might carry much less hatred towards an ordinary American in isolation compared to the totality, but that probably doesn't scale well.
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There is no such thing as ‘globalists’, only competing factions seeking to expand their own (global) influence. Why are one side globalists but the other not? Islam is an inherently ‘globalist’ ideology, how could it not be?
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Of course, if you're determined to be charitable you will interpret any "death to [country]" chant as a desire to merely rid it of the bad elites in a manner surgical enough to not kill the entire country, or at least large amounts of countrymen. However, it does not appear to work out that way often.
For the record, I think that when someone says "death to America", they are not aiming to be very discriminate about it if given the chance.
I'm also curious if you'd extend the same charity to the domestic extremists who say "death to AmeriKKKa".
Why are they chanting death to America and not death to Iceland, Zimbabwe or Uruguay? It is clear that they are motivated by the absolutely abhorrent policies that american impoerialists have imposed on them. They are fighting the same military industrial complex that is a cancer on western societies.
A lot of that crowd seem to be actively pushing the same wokeness as the people trying to impose gender studies on Afghans. If they strictly meant the NSA, black rock and Lockheed Martin I would support it. If they want to impose all sorts of wokeness then I don't support it.
This is extremely naive. The same people will happily make terror attacks in arbitrary non-majority muslim countries they can get into, in fact even in majority muslim countries against non-muslim minorities.
How did they get into western Europe? They came because of the wars. Bombing Libya opened up the borders, Syria was a disaster for Europe.
The US sponsored jihadists in Syria and Libya. The west isn't fighting against jihadists as much as the west is fighting stable pan relatively secular states. The trillions wasted fighting "terrorism" in the middle east didn't stop terrorism, it made it much worse.
When the Iraqis kicked the Americans out the refugee waves stoped coming. That means less terrorism here.
They immigrated.
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I'd be more concerned by what they'll do, not what they're motivated by. Generally, fighting a country's military-industrial complex in any meaningful manner is not good for that country. Unless, of course, you're losing badly and are just feeding your soldiers to the enemy's weapon industry.
I think you're displaying the same naivete here that the Russian progressives do when they assume that the West, if it crushes Russia, will only kill Putin and let the planet heal.
When the military industrial complex 10x Afghan heroin production while trying to bring "women's rights" - aka fat women with blue hair using tinder the taliban dealt with them.
When the military industrial complex killed a million Iraqis, wrecked the christian population of Iraq and drove a million Iraqis into Europe they made believers in the second amendment proud.
The difference is, we lose exactly nothing by ending the wars for wokeness in the Middle East and migrants to Europe.
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Most of your participation in this thread has been unimpressive. You are generally just stating that you don't like certain groups. And then describing things in ways that sound more like waging the culture war than sharing any useful information.
This needs to not be how you engage. Its obnoxious. If you can be replaced by a button that just responds every time with "I hate [my outgroup]" then you are failing to participate and engage in a valuable way.
This is a warning. Next time will be temp bans.
No, I am saying that Israel is a disaster for Europe and a huge burden on us with few benefits. The whole neo con project has caused endless issues and I openly support all resistance to it.
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