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This is going to sound like edgy contrarianism for the sake of edgy contrarianism, so you'll have to take my word for it when I say that it's not:
I really don't care. And if you told me that counter-protesters were being funded by Israel, I wouldn't care about that either. In a conflict where moral fervor runs high, I am an advocate for the freedom to simply not care.
I'm just tired of the moral guilt tripping from both sides. If you want to criticize the protesters, criticize their tactics. There's plenty to criticize there. But their alleged ties to Hamas add nothing to the story for me. In general I have always felt that concerns over "foreign manipulation of political sentiment" were paranoia of the worst kind. If the governments of Russia or China or the US (organizations that have engaged in plenty of nasty unethical behavior in the past that could plausibly be classified as "terrorism") want to pay for a Times Square billboard and fund some student organizations to get their message out then I say let them. Free speech doesn't stop at our borders; I am for open trade in a global free market of ideas.
I can't reasonably bring myself to be invested in every ethnic and sectarian conflict that happens around the world, particularly when its direct impact on me seems rather limited. If the Sudanese Masalit want to organize protests in the US against the RSF then bully for them; whether they win or lose in their struggles, I'm not going to lose sleep either way. I view Israel-Palestine similarly: just another in a long series of ethnic conflicts in a region of the world that is known for being prone to violent ethnic conflicts.
In some sense I am forced to care, due to the generous financial aid that the US supplies to Israel. But my investment doesn't extend beyond that.
I agree, but I think it’s a lot of the media and social media have take over so much mind-space that it’s driving an obsession with events that most people left to themselves would not care about while causing people to neglect the boring and important stuff they should care about.
Gaza is a case in point to me. The country is the size of Vermont, it has some oil, but its strategic importance is much lower than other oil exporters in the region. For most people, unless they practice Judaism or Islam, it’s no more or less impactful than any other conflict going on right now. If this war happened in 1984 when the news was on for an hour a night, nobody would care outside of Zionist Jews and Muslims. The White House would be doing what it is now— trying to negotiate an end to the fighting while giving bombs to Israel and food to Gaza. As it stands, the world is watching because the world is watched everything all the time.
I always find this instructive stuff when it comes to the outrages of the day. Most of it, when viewed from the point of view of long distance or time frames not only don’t actually matter that much, or matter much much less than the attention paid to them. Most actually resolve themselves without anyone doing anything. Mark that it happens but in a week or a month, it will likely resolve itself.
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