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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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Is anyone else here pretty shocked by many on the Left's support of Hamas after these attacks?

Not really no.

Walter Duranty of the New York Times famously praised Stalin's purges and Mao's Great Leap Forward lamenting the fact that the government of the US under Roosevelt and Truman lacked a similar vision and will to power.

Likeiwse, from radical Marxist railing against "bankers" in the 50 and 60s to incidents like the Crown Hill Riots in the 80s and 90s to the BDS movement of the 2000s and today there's always been a pretty strong undercurrent of anti-Jewish, and anti-Isreal sentiment in particular within the US progressive movement. This sort of thing is just par for the course

Did Duranty praise the purges as they occurred, or did he just praise some sanitized version of them that he credulously swallowed? Honest question; after learning about his shameful Pulitzer I've never been motivated to seek out his later reporting.

Though I'm not at all a fan of the man, even with his most damnable reporting I know about, the thesis was "there's no Holodomor", never "the Holodomor is totally awesome!" I know the Law of Merited Impossibility ("it'll never happen, and when it does you'll deserve it") is a thing, but humanity isn't universally that awful, so I think it's still a huge disappointment when someone transitions from the first to the second half rather than properly reexamining their beliefs instead. Not every mistaken person is evil too.

Did Duranty praise the purges as they occurred, or did he just praise some sanitized version of them that he credulously swallowed?

That's a fair question to which I don't have a good answer.

He certainly praised them along similar efforts elsewhere, but whether that was because he was overly credulous or because he was a crypto-bolshivek has probably been lost to history.