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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7798 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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countries. (If everyone had open borders, Israel might not be necessary because Jews unsafe in their homes could always go somewhere else, as occurred many times prior to the 20th century, and could have occurred in the counter-factual 1930s and 1940s

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence, it will be true if Israel collapsed tomorrow, it will be for all the evidence we have true for hundreds of years.

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel.

Has any ethnic group gotten blanket asylum in the West? There has been a slow shift away from permissive asylum policies (see the entire cats thing): nobody is letting in "the other" wholesale (Rwanda? South Sudan? Yazidis?) with maybe a few limited exceptions like Ukrainians fleeing Russian invasion or Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh. That's putting a heavy assumption that those Jews won't be treated as "the other" there (for which there are plenty of pre-WWII examples), and even then I don't think that supposedly-favored groups like white Zimbabweans (whose population there is down at least 80% since the country became independent in 1980) have ever been recognized as categorical refugees.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.

But that may follow from my general skepticism on putting faith in "moral arc of history" memes: literal blood-and-soil nationalism even gets praise from self-declared progressives, as long as who, whom? fits. It's funny to me that the West is expected to allow any-and-all immigration of largely-unverified refugees seeking asylum and giving jus soli citizenship and votes to their descendants, but the residents of the (withdrawing) British mandate for Palestine in 1948 and their descendants are eternally allowed to "resist the occupation" in means that would make even the American far right nauseous. But again: who, whom?.

The basic model these people have of the world is that "the West", as colonisers/imperialists, have forfeited for all time the right to any ethnic criteria for who lives in their countries, while "Indigenous peoples" (basically everyone else) have always lived peacefully and harmoniously in the same spot and so have a fundamentally legitimate claim of ownership of their land.

Would you wager your life on that? Your children's lives?

Were I married to a Jew I would no more worry about the USA going 1930’s Germany on them than I currently do about an alien invasion.

There is a 0% chance of Jews subject to actual antisemitism not getting asylum in a nice western country without Israel. This has been true for Israel’s entire existence,

That's a convenient elision of the fact that the Jews trying to escape the Nazis were in large part turned away from those nice western countries. Even years after the end of WWII, hundreds of thousands of European jews were still sitting in Displaced Persons camps guarded by allied soldiers because no "nice western country" would take them, and were only able to leave after the establishment of Israel as a national homeland for jews (those "nice western countries" still weren't willing to take them).

And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future. France is already markedly unsafe, and as Britain islamicizes over the next couple decades anti-jewish sentiment is likely to increase.

What a perverse cycle of history: the West turned away Jews, Holocaust, West feels guilty and sets up asylum laws Never Again etc, those asylum laws ultimately end the "guilty West," becomes anti-Semitic again, Jews get turned away.

And I wouldn't count on most of Europe being too safe for jews in the future.

Bring back the Slattery Report.

We did get a middling detective story out of it, at least.

There’s a convenient elision of the fact that it’s not the forties anymore. Israel has the right to exist, they don’t have the right to demand a blank cheque from the rest of the world.

If Israel fell tomorrow the Jews would move to Anglosphere countries and Central Europe. Well, the ones that didn’t get massacred in the process of it falling at least. There won’t be a second Holocaust.

It's easy to play armchair general, but I think @Celestial-body-NOS made a point that can't be ignored.

While you might feel certain that Western countries would take in Jewish refugees, you presumably don't have any skin in the game. Would you be willing to be the lives of your family on this?

As a fellow armchair general, let me say that while I think it's probable that Israeli refugees would be accepted, it is far from certain. Nothing is certain when it comes to hypothetical future world conflicts. And if we're indexing from known past events, we know that Jews haven't been welcome with open arms in the past.

they don’t have the right to demand a blank cheque from the rest of the world.

A blank check would entail allowing Israel to actually do what the rest of the arab world - including the palestinians - did and continue to do: pushing all of their enemy's co-ethnics out of all territory they can martially claim. What they're doing now is significantly more humane than what the Saudis did to the Yemenis (and lost), or what the anti-Assad rebels backed by the west did to the Yazidis, or what NATO-ally Turkey does to Kurds, etc., etc., etc. Much of the criticism of Israel is one giant isolated demand for rigor.

Israel has every right to kick the Palestinians out of Gaza to somewhere nonspecific. My objection is solely to having some sort of moral objection to pay for it.

I mean, the US provides aid to Israel because they feel they gain some geostrategic example from it. Maybe they're wrong about that but I don't think there's a moral dimension to it.

Elian Gonzalez has entered the chat. Progressive emphasis on immigration uber allies has long had a lot of exceptions for political utility.

The return of children transported across borders to their parent(s) in the country of habitual residence is, in general, uncontroversial and has nothing to do with immigration law or politics. The relevant treaty is one of the many confusingly-named Hague Conventions - please, dear international community, if you are going to have a treaty with a long and non-memorable name then sign it somewhere that isn't the Hague.

The Eilan Gonzalez case wasn't an immigration case - it was a family law case where the conservative side wanted to make an unprincipled exception and refuse to return a 5-year-old child to his only living parent because Cuba bad.

Incidentally, this type of bullshit on the part of the country the kid is taken to is sufficiently common that the Hague Convention isn't really working. The US returning a child to the parents in the country of habitual residence in the face of noisy local opposition is unusual globally.

please, dear international community, if you are going to have a treaty with a long and non-memorable name then sign it somewhere that isn't the Hague.

The Hague : international treaties :: Leonhard Euler : mathematics.

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