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Notes -
Most people in America also don’t give a shit about conflicts in which some tens of thousands of people die in the Middle East.
Ukraine was an event because it involved Russia and involved white people. This isn’t some fringe accusation, in the debate in the German Parliament the day after the Russia invasion the most commented upon as powerful speech pretty much directly said that the events were so extraordinary and horrific because they happened to people that look like us in a place that looks a little like this.
What is it about Gazans that makes them more valuable or worth caring about than Africans? For Muslims, the answer is obvious; their enemies are their enemies in an ancient tribal religious conflict, have humiliated the ummah and so on.
For Western dissident rightists, the sole aim is to bloody the nose of the Jews. The worst thing, as Norm said, is the hypocrisy; it is unfair that Jews get their ethnostate even as ‘they’, it is alleged, advocate and work towards Europeans losing their homelands / ethnostates. Israel’s war on Gaza and attempted ethnic cleansing isn’t unreasonable (it is not as if they would be opposed to ethnic cleansing not only in their ancestral homelands in Europe, but also in settler colonies like the US) because the act is unreasonable, it’s unreasonable because of who is doing it.
If they have memed themselves into caring, it is only because - already believing in the inhumanity of their enemy - they can’t help but sympathize with their ‘fellow’ victims, plus some of the Muslims are pretty based and redpilled etc.
As an aside, the Ukraine war comparisons are ridiculous; it’s a war with a clearly defined front against an enemy that wears uniforms. Gaza is a war against an army that doesn’t wear uniforms, melts into the civilian population at will, has no front, and where the enemy’s only strategy (because they would get wiped out in open conflict) is to hide in the most densely populated civilian districts of one of the most densely populated places in earth. That the civilian death toll will be much higher than a forest or marshland in Eastern Ukraine is obvious.
You write of
But really, the dishonest thing is the claim that a low level regional conflict between two tribes about who owns a small patch of the Middle East is the subject solely to lobbying on one side. Gaza is a canvas upon which every political debate is played, from LGBT rights to decolonialism, from nationalism to internationalism, from the politics of victimhood to the politics of strength. It’s also deeply personal to 1.5bn Muslims (perhaps double the total white population of the world) who care a great deal about their honor and who are often very active online.
What happened in Gaza? What happened is what happens when this kind of thing happens, which is all the time. Protesting that it’s special, or different, is more about who is involved than about what is happening.
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