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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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"Divorcing individual events from their historical context allows you to make nonsensical claims about morality" is incredibly far removed from "It's ok to genocide the jews" and I'm honestly surprised that you read that out of my post. You're putting an incredibly inflammatory comment in my mouth, and I can't see any reason for it.

Your analogy "If I punch you in the face and declare that I'm going to take your home from you by force of arms and then evict you with the help of a bunch of my well armed friends, do I then get to talk about how morally correct I was to do so because you keep trying to punch me in the face and take back your house?" directly implies that yes, it is OK for the Palestinians to "take back" Israel. I did not say "genocide", I said "ethnically cleanse". If this were to happen and somehow you were to keep the Jews from fighting back, most of them would probably leave rather than be genocided.

directly implies that yes, it is OK for the Palestinians to "take back" Israel.

No, it does not. It implies that choosing an arbitrary cut-off point for your moral condemnation is bad and can be used to justify any kind of dishonest conclusion, in the same way that it is an abuse of statistics to start comparing islamic and right-wing terrorism from the date of September 12, 2001. What I am saying is that your argument is useless when it comes to gaining additional clarity on the situation, and if you want to accurately apportion blame and determine who is in the right you need to look at these events in a larger historical context. Maybe the people with the best claim to that land are the French descendants of the Knights Templar - probably not, but my point is that your argument prevents this from happening and obscures the truth of the matter while making one side look better than the other.

I did not say "genocide", I said "ethnically cleanse".

This is an absurd level of hairsplitting and even just looking at wikipedia (lol) the picture provided for the ethnic cleansing article is of an event described as a genocide. Is this really the quality of argument that you want to make?

The distinction I am making is "expel" versus "kill". This is not hairsplitting. That "ethnic cleansing" sometimes euphemistically refers to genocide and the UN definition of "genocide" (but not the more common definition) includes some things which aren't killing is the hairsplitting.