This is a refreshed 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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Notes -
I've said it before that this conflict isn't complicated at all, and anyone with non-room-temperature IQ can grasp the ins and outs within a day or two of reading. Looks like you and a few other readers in the motte are examples of that.
As an ex-Muslim who lives in a Muslim majority country, I think I am very sensitive to how they think, given I used to think like them. It's patently obvious just talking to them that there is just so much, like such a massive nearing blackhole level of density of latent hate for the Jews among even otherwise secular on every other topic Muslims, that I knew that Muslim opinions on Palestine = garbage of the highest order ;unless proven otherwise, is a good prior. You think opinions on a matter could be biased ever? Well, this is an example if there ever was one.
It's not about oppressing Muslims, Muslims "oppress" other Muslims by literal orders of magnitude more for literal orders of magnitude less media coverage and or rage. Compounding into a signal to issue ratio being off by further orders of magnitude.
Ofcourse the media is the enemy of the people is also a good prior. https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/17jlok3/news_attention_to_deadly_conflicts_since_year/
I second this. My extended family members on whatsapp are posting stuff that makes me embarassed that I share 1/8th of my DNA by direct recent descent with them.
I’ve lived in the gulf for several years of my life and knew a lot of wealthy, well educated Arabs.
They really, really hate Jews. Do you know how I knew? They told me! Completely unprompted, multiples times. Apparently they did 9/11 and are the cause of basically every ill in the Arab world.
All this fancy talk about “settler colonialism” blah blah blah never really convinced me because I saw and heard a ton of direct evidence of really intense Jew hate with my own eyes & ears for an extended period of time.
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1/8th of the genetic variance from the human mean I'd hope, unless you consider the sunflowers in the garden extended relatives.
Then again, they likely have better opinions about the conflict..
Funnily enough, despite the trope that Indians are fervent supporters of Israel, I've only seen pro-Palestinian propaganda shared online in my own circles, the most ludicrous being a claim by a girl I danced the night away with that the Gazan Ministry of Education shut down schools because "all the children had been killed" lmao. Well, I wasn't attracted to her at the time for her brains..
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I meant identity by descent rather than identity by state. Identity by descent only looks at segments that have not undergone recombination since they were in the most recent common ancestor, and that is 1/8 between a person and their cousins in expectation.
And this person gets a vote... Given the extreme young age of Gazans, we'd need something like 1 million targeted deaths wiping out half the population of Gaza for it to be even possible for this to be true.
I've also been seeing almost 100% pro-Palestinian propaganda in my personal life apart from the actual Israeli people I know, one of whom has a friend whose aunt and uncle went missing after the attack, he said he hoped they were dead because the alternative was that they were hostages...
The most I can say about it is that at least the stuff I get to see doesn't glorify Hamas, it just selectively reports Israeli attacks while ignoring Hamas completely.
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