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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28010 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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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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