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 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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