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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   26075 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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I take a view that "genocide" rhetoric has been diluted to be meaningless.

No moral politics can accept genocide. But nowadays genocide is thrown about so casually that it's a meaningless term. The Jewish genocide, the Palestinian genocide, the Xinjiang genocide, the white genocide, the trans genocide.

Genocide is the mass slaughter of people based purely on their ancestral heritage. No one--not Israelis, and not Hamas--either publically or privately wants or plans for genocide. There are bad things outside genocide different sides may want, but they are desires centered on power, not murder as an end in itself. The fact that Hamas wants an Islamic caliphate from river to sea (to sea and sea again) is about as far from actual genocide as can be imagined: if Jews peacefully accepted Islamic dominance (and ideally converted), Hamas would be plenty content and wouldn't kill anyone.

Israeli culture, despite its flaws, is better than Palestinian culture, so many people want it to win. But they're uncomfortable acknowledging that some cultures are better than others, so they feel the need to frame Israeli desires as desires to avoid genocide. They're not: they're a desire to maintain Israeli dominance over Palestine because the alternative is worse, and that's a good thing.

Hamas's charter publicly advocates for genocide.

The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

That's their defunct charter from 1988; they dropped that language and their current charter from 2017 states their war is not with the Jewish religion but against Zionists occupying Palestine. Not saying they are lovely human beings, but they don't have that in their charter now.

Hamas affirms that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion. Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine. Yet, it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity.

Note that's a direct quote from an Islamic hadith.

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