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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   26030 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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Look, I'm a supporter of free speech as much as anybody but I'm not going to run into the buzzsaw that is the Jewish lobby. People who have been calling my fellow travellers anti-semitic nazis for years - decades, even - suddenly need my help? I'm not a fan of the Jewish lobby in the current Trump administration but neither am I a fan of the pro-Palestinians. Perhaps conservatives would be more concerned about freedom of thought in the academia if there were any left in the university institutions. I gain nothing by standing on principle and lose nothing by standing out of the way. I don't need to take a side in this conflict: there are more than enough domestic windwills to shake a lance at.

I'd link to the XCKD comic about free speech and its consequences, but everyone here probably has seen it already.

Neutrality isn’t good simply because the needle is so fa to the left on campus that I think using antisemitism to clean house, even if overzealous, cannot help but make things better. Colleges should be places of learning and research, not places where kids become leftist anarchists. Unless those anarchic elements are removed, you really cannot get to free thought or speech. Kids are afraid of blowback from expressing even mildly conservative opinions on campus because of those mobs and in class because the professors are leftists and they need the degree for their future careers. Removing the leftists from college campuses is a good thing for free speech.

Why not just defund the schools, shut down students' access to loans and grants, tax the shit out of endowments and work to obliterate the university scene altogether? Why is speech the problem and not the schools?

In what sense is switching the polarity on which side gets systematically silenced "a good thing for free speech"? I'm very sympathetic to the view that the status quo is very far from free speech, and this is bad, but if your proposed solution is "censor another set of political beliefs" then you aren't restoring free speech. And maybe it's worth doing anyway, if, say, you decide free speech is a lost cause anyway, and that restoring conservative discourse is important in itself. But don't pretend you're restoring free speech by doing so. "Removing [half the political compass] from college campuses is a good thing for free speech" is a hilariously self-contradictory statement on the face of it.

Surely the US doesn't need any more wars in the Middle East?

The trouble is that the Jewish lobby in the US is a gigantic colossus and the Palestinian lobby is a shrieking buzzard. So we see strong US support for Israel and all kinds of negative consequences for the US. It's not like the Israelis are ever going to send troops to help the US in any war, they've never done so before.

False Israeli intelligence about WMDs helped to motivate the Iraq War, the Jewish lobby was eager for that particular disaster. They clearly aren't advancing US interests.

At this moment, the US military surely has more important tasks than bombing Yemen, bombing Yemen has been tried and found wanting. It didn't work when Biden and the Saudis tried it and probably won't work when Trump does it. It's a waste of ordnance and air defences. World sea lanes need to be secured but it's clearly quite difficult for the US to do so militarily. Diplomacy should be tried.

A better solution would be to cut off the Israelis from the military aid teat and make a deal with Yemen. This principle of jettisoning Israel isn't limited to Yemen, it would reduce many problems. It would reduce tension with Iran, it would make diplomacy with the Arab states and Turkey easier, it'd improve relations with Indonesia and Pakistan too. This doesn't mean favouring Palestine or anything, jettisoning them would be fine too. China's cordial Middle East relations should be the target: trade with the sheikhs and get along with them, build some infrastructure, get some oil.

But to achieve this, the Jewish lobby would need to be defanged in the US. Getting to neutrality requires moving in a direction.

Bombing Yemen is unlikely to be a great long term strategy but the U.S. government which makes peace with the Houthis is one which does not care about oil. This seems unlikely.

The Houthi slogan is

"Allah is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam."

I do not expect any US government to be able to make peace with them any time soon, oil or no oil.

Regarding Yemen, I believe it all started with the Saudis. Anyway, American interests there go deeper than Israel.

Surely the US doesn't need any more wars in the Middle East?

Israel was against the Iraq war FWIW. So there. They understood what was going to happen and it came to pass.

This is laughable, the WMD intelligence was laundered from Israel direct to the White House through a special office composed of ultra-Zionists. You can even watch Netanyahu give the hard sell directly to the American Congress on the Iraq War "taking out Saddam" in 2002! This is the exact same man influencing Trump by the way, who Trump considers to be America's greatest ally.

"If you take out Saddam, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran will say... the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone." Netanyahu to the Congress in 2002.

This is the man who OUR AMERICAN CONGRESS gave 58 standing ovations in his Congressional visit last year. From Grok:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received the most standing ovations in a single speech in U.S. Congressional history during his address to a joint session of Congress on July 24, 2024. According to reports, he was given 55 standing ovations throughout his one-hour speech, surpassing all previous records for a single address. This figure is notably higher than other historically significant speeches, such as those by Winston Churchill or previous addresses by Netanyahu himself.

this is laughable, the WMD intelligence was laundered from Israel direct to the White House through a special office composed of ultra-Zionists.

It was a full office of neocons, and the intel wasn't from Israelis. It was various bullshit from dodgy Arab sources being interviewed by Americans, interpreted in a maximally positive way to make the case. In addition, Americans trusted that Chalabi idiot.

Netanyahu give the hard sell directly to the American Congress on the Iraq War "taking out Saddam" in 2002! This is

He was not the prime minister of Israel at the time. Israeli officials were against it in private, although the GOI did not give a statement against it.

As The Guardian reported:

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.

"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.

The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.

In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.

The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.

The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.

In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads

Douglas Feith, on whose authority the Israelis were cleared into the Pentagon, is a Zionist Jew who co-authored the Clean Break Memo as part of an advisory group directly to Netanyahu himself. The memo calls for removing Saddam as an important objective:

Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.

So you have Doug Feith working directly with the Likud party to provide plans for securing Israeli objectives in the Middle East. Then you get Doug Feith on the OSP, who laundered false Israeli intelligence from a clandestine office of the Israeli Prime Minister directly to the White House. Then you have Netanyahu himself giving a hard sell to the American Congress.

Israel was only 'against' the Iraq War insofar that they wanted the US to invade Iran first. The Bush admin said they'd do Iraq and Afghanistan quickly before Iran, who would similarly be a cake walk. Well, we know how that turned out. Israel still wanted the US to invade the whole Middle East (on their behalf) in the long run anyway, they just disagreed about the order.

No.

They're not utter retards, so I highly doubt they wanted US to invade Iran either because that would go very badly.

Iran is a much larger country than Iraq, it has rugged terrain, ties with Russia and China and a somewhat more technologically capable population that is fiercely nationalistic.

US might have been able to topple mullahs with a color revolution, might get lucky and Iranians do it themeselves but an inevitably brutal invasion would have resulted in people rallying to the flag and something that'd make the worst of Iraq look like a cakewalk.

This is not speculation on my part. Israel did, in fact, ask the US to invade Iran first and not Iraq.

There's various sources for this including from US officials such as Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Colin Powell. It's also stated in Mearsheimer's Israel Lobby book from memory.

Look, I'm a supporter of free speech as much as anybody but I'm not going to run into the buzzsaw that is the Jewish lobby. People who have been calling my fellow travellers anti-semitic nazis for years - decades, even - suddenly need my help?

It's not about helping it's about building bridges on important issues. A lot of left-wing commentators on X are sounding more Right Wing on the question of the Jewish lobby every single day.

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