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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29416 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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The golem joke is of course starting to show its age; I think David Cole did it best 2019.

I remember once commenting on the thesis of NRx, to the effect that «Cthulhu swims left and left, until He crashes into the shore of New York to be slaughtered» (@2rafa later recalled it in a context vaguely similar to today's). But now, this seems to be happening in earnest. I've observed a few ordinarily peaceful, very liberal Jewish academics who openly threaten they'll remember leftists who've been cheering for Hamas in the wake of this catastrophe. Unsurprisingly, many Jews who've been on board with the identity-driven, anti-white/male progressive rhetorics and policies so long as they did not cross the line of cheering for gleeful murders of their own people now have began to «truly see». It all has happened before, of course – multiple times even, from the «wow Stalin a psycho actually!» in 1937 to neoconservatism to the stuff that Sailer pedantically documents; but I think the demography is currently ripe for a permanent phase transition of Diaspora Jews to a more conservative platform, in following with the younger, more virile and now morally redeemed Israelis.

I might be wrong but that seems to be what the excellent Crémieux hints at, too:

An interesting detail of this war was that Japan probably would have lost were it not for the efforts of a single American banker.

Jacob Schiff was an important proponent of American railroads and he ran numerous major corporations, like Wells Fargo, Union Pacific, and Equitable Life Assurance. He was also Jewish.

Schiff's advocacy on the part of Jews was renowned. He actively fought to combat anti-Semitism at home and abroad, while bankrolling Zionist efforts. One instance that drew particular ire from him was the April 1903 Kishinev pogrom, in which 49 Jews were killed, 92 were gravely injured, and more than 500 suffered other injuries, including the destruction of more than 1,500 homes.

…Or in other words, Jews were being scapegoated for economic downturns. In the town itself, there's evidence that public officials also cooperated with the rioters, enabling this tragedy.…

Schiff had developed a hatred for Russia due to this and several other incidents, so when he saw the Japanese and Russians engaging one another, he offered his help. And help he did!

Schiff floated $200 million in bonds to provide Japan with the modern equivalent of more than $7 billion in war backing. This was equal to about half of Japan's total expenditures during the war and, accordingly, when Japan won, Schiff was lauded. He would go on to receive the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from the Emperor Meiji himself.

Or as the TabletMag has suggested some time ago:

If the Jews committed an incredible moral and cultural sin and deserted en masse to the GOP, exactly how would the Democratic Party ever win an election again?
Jews contribute two-thirds of the money and probably provide 80% of the political energy in the Democratic Party. So you can’t eliminate them, but you can subordinate them. And I think that’s what’s going on here.
The Jews will continue to support progressive policies, but they’ll be subordinated. Some of their places will be given away in the name of justice. The majority of Jews who remain will be made to feel insecure and therefore work really hard, really, really hard to prove that they are adequately woke and not Zios—which is a word David Duke invented and that progressives have now picked up.
Because, even those Jews who say they really don’t like Israel might be crypto Zios. They might be practicing their Zionism in secret. So they have to work really hard to denounce Israel and even to abandon traditional forms of Jewish belief and practice.
In fact, they have to abandon reality entirely, so that LBGTQ Jewish organizations can affirm that Saudi Arabia is friendlier to gay people than Israel.

Well I think that's a pretty bogus forecast. Democrats will continue to win elections. They'll just have to jettison this whole pro-Hamas wing, because after all this graphic stuff, acting in a sufficiently anti-Zionist manner will become a bit too much for any Jew with a modicum of self-respect, and doing politics in the US on the platform «We hate Jews, Jews hate us» is not exactly a winning proposition.

One can hope that, as with Stalinism, some loathsome policies concerning gentiles might be abolished as well.

EDIT: here's Noah conveniently spelling out that Stalin after 1937 bad

But the bloodthirst pouring out from leftists in the streets and on the internet suggests that there’s a deep sickness in the Western leftist movement. It’s one thing to believe that Israel is an apartheid regime and that war against it is justified; it’s another to believe that massacring random festival goers is an acceptable way to prosecute that war. And even if you do think that our modern definition of “war crime” is too restrictive, and that killing large numbers of enemy civilians is an acceptable way to force a belligerent to throw in the towel, it’s still repugnant to joyfully cheer that slaughter, and to march side by side with those who advocate genocide.

… In any case, don’t let my analytical tone hide my moral disgust here. People always have a choice whether to cheer for atrocities or to refuse to cheer for them. When your rallies end up with swastikas and “Gas the Jews” and people making fun of dead innocents, well, you made the wrong choice. This episode is going to show a lot of Americans that the leftist movement contains, at the grassroots level, a lot of very inhumane, bloodthirsty people. Ultimately that revelation will hurt the movement in the eyes of progressive Americans, draining some of the goodwill it built up over the last decade.

Muslims make up 1.3% of the US population. Even if you assumed that the Democrats completely disenfranchised the Muslims, they simply aren't a big enough voting bloc to make a difference. Now, Muslims can't exactly swing Republican. Also, we're talking about specifically targeting Hamas, and the global Muslim ego getting hurt as proxy. This isn't some targeted disenfranchisement of Muslim.

From a political calculus perspective, going full pro-Israel + anti-Hamas is not disastrous for democrats. I know that there are more emotional and ideological factors at play here. But it would be unbelievably stupid for the democrats to keep digging their grave here. There simply aren't enough Muslims for being Pro-palestine to be worth it.

I think Tablet’s output over the last few years reflects to some extent a growing neoconservative acceptance, though not embrace, of Donald Trump. Clearly, he wasn’t as much of a Nazi™️ as feared, there weren’t any state-sanctioned pogroms, and it seems now again that the right supports Israel more than the left, plus isn’t his faction being falsely persecuted, and isn’t that bad? DeSantis may have been preferable, but provided Trump has a few Good People in charge, all the nasty election business can be quietly forgotten.

Jewish politics often alternates spastically between neuroticism and pragmatism, sometimes both simultaneously (occasionally warranted). Sectarianism is simply too ingrained for blue haired Berkeley or Columbia Jews to switch to the right (their gentile white peers are the same, of course). But, then again, old men like Howard Schultz, or Reid Hoffmann Silicon Valley types and so on aren’t blue haired Berkeley activists, and it is the former rather than the latter that pays the bills for the DNC. For now, Gavin Newsom is still preferable to the vulgarity of Trump (and is stupid enough to be easily led anyway). In ten years, the logic may differ.

Doesn't all of this apply equivalently to non-Jewish White Democrat voters, though? Jewish group identity might be stronger than general White Americans, but... the exact same things written from a broad White POV would take on some pretty heavy censure.

I suppose non-insane White Democrats will also be repelled by all the Hamas butchery apologia. But the core reason for this is that Jews, who (accurately) perceive normalization of such shit as a personal existential threat in the long run, will make it into a Big Issue and a topic for edifying National Conversation that cannot be just brushed aside and dropped from the news cycle like some embarrassing but non-representative freak accident.

Otherwise, rabid anti-white rhetoric would also have sufficed to discredit leftism.

I don’t think the left will drop Palestine so quickly at all. The invasion will be brutal, in a week or two (maybe less) rhetoric will start to turn again. Maybe not to Chuck Schumer’s level, but certainly in big swathes of the American left. The rapidly growing Muslim American population will continue to elect representatives that align with it, and they won’t drop the Palestinian cause either. Black Americans tend not to care and often have high rates of belief in casual antisemitism anyway.

Certainly over time Jewish support for the Democrats will wane, but that just mirrors what has happened in the UK and elsewhere and reflects the changing demography of the Jewish population as much as it does the public rhetoric of politicians.

The invasion will be brutal, in a week or two (maybe less) rhetoric will start to turn again

I doubt it. Israel will probably keep Gaza under siege for a month or so, then flatten it completely and launch a ground invasion. Yes, they’ll probably kill 500,000 plus civilians through the whole thing, but the news will be supporting them the whole way.

Sure, weird far leftists will have more of a leg to stand on, but nobody listens to them.

you are ignoring the videos that will be shared in social media about that invasion, doubtful it will be pretty and not all faces stomped by a boot will be male.

The rapidly growing Muslim American population will continue to elect representatives that align with it, and they won’t drop the Palestinian cause either.

Ilhan Omar is not a Hamas representative, though, even if some people would like to present her this way.

She isn’t, but one sees across Europe that as Muslim populations grow, their representatives also become more bold.

Schiff had developed a hatred for Russia due to this and several other incidents, so when he saw the Japanese and Russians engaging one another, he offered his help. And help he did!

Japan then, Ukraine today, the more things change, the more they stay the same, uh.

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