Al-Saqr posted:

Before he was martyred in an occupation bombing... Scenes published by journalist Montaser Al-Sawaf of him feeding cats in Gaza

https://twitter.com/aja_egypt/status/1730799220263641141?s=46&t=kY7HKwmb1RBg9U186lxtbg

Sushi X posted:

It appears some of the released hostages are refusing to meet Netanyahu. Another PR loss for Israel.

https://x.com/PalBint/status/1730738976988844198?s=20

Frosted Flake posted:

Someone asked about the German government's support for Israel. Tl;dr :

I see people reacting "why is Germany doing this?" vis a vis loyalty oaths to Israel and so on.

If you want a top line explanation before the sources: Germany has accepted, to varying levels of openness, both the completion of the Holocaust, (which is to say, their government's actions towards living Jews in Israel has to be understood as reflecting a domestic belief that there are only dead Jews in Germany), and, for lack of a better word, its legitimacy. Which is not to say any German official alive today will say the Holocaust was good. Instead, they take as a baseline fact, that there is no longer such a thing as a German Jew, and that while there was a historical Jewish community in Germany, the "proper" place for Jews now is in Israel.

You can see this a bit like contemporary Spain. The expulsion of the Jews and Moors is treated as a regrettable historical incident. Of course, to varying degrees and, charitably, perhaps in different ways behind closed doors, but still. However, Spanish officials do not act as if there is a living Muslim or Jewish population in Spain today, and certainly do not do anything to foster one. 15th century mosques are museums, but permits will not be issued for new ones, if you follow. For the Jewish community in particular, as "the Jews have been expelled from Spain" is treated not just as historical fact but as fait accompli, Spain, like Germany, encourages Jews to go to Israel. It's only natural, after all, they're not part of the national fabric. (liberal frowny face )

You might also compare this to Canada, where land acknowledgements and professions of regret about the treatment of First Nations scale with how many First Nations communities live in a particular area. The most anguished statements of regret and radical calls for reparations, land back, decolonialism etc. are the ones that happen where there is no chance of a native community actually making good on it. America is the same way of course.

So, it is with Germany and the Jews. Jews (of German origin) are in Israel, Jews remain only an artifact of history in Germany. Jews living in Germany might actually want the German government to return their property, (more on that in a moment).

So, how can Germany can act in a way that would make Dual Loyalty an irrefutable truth? I mean, imagine demanding that people within your country owe absolute allegiance, on threat of expulsion, to another nation. It's because, if you take the long view, they have accepted the premise of the Nuremberg Laws. This is directly linked to the Holocaust. Not just because the Nuremberg Laws allowed the Holocaust to happen, by effectively making German Jews nationless, but also because you can accept the premise of the Nuremberg Laws, and not feel particularly bad about it () if the Holocaust has already happened. You don't have to worry about Dual Loyalty if you don't believe that group exists within (Holocaust), or belongs within (Nuremberg Laws), your country in the first place.

It would be completely anathema for the German state to loudly support German Jews swearing allegiance to a foreign power, if they believe there were German Jews. They barely acknowledge that there are Jews today, alive, in Germany. When they do, it's clear, that they are not Germans, and clearer still that in the German government's opinion, they belong in Israel. IMO, The reasons why Germany has been acting the way they have towards Israel have almost nothing to do with guilt and more with this -

Without doing the napkin math or trying to post all of the statistics on my phone, the Third Reich profited, at minimum, $215B in today's money, from the Holocaust - in seized property, immigration tax, literal gold teeth in Swiss bank accounts. That's not including the sale of assets, for example art, or the profits made from seized companies. So, that's a low-ball estimate, and one that relies on the Nazi appraisal (and reporting) of seized assets, which is another way to say they severely undercounted according to every expert. Add to that corruption, Swiss banks, people trying to cook the books once the war was lost etc. and you are looking at huge amounts of assets, in Germany, today that originated in the Holocaust, often either directly owned by the German government or privatized by them at some point, with the proceeds going to the state treasury.

Germany has paid to date, $87B in reparations. Again, even by the roughest estimate, that leaves $128B of assets originally owned by German Jews still in German hands. With that in mind, let's examine Germany paying reparations to the state of Israel, and not Jewish community themselves, encouraging German Jews to emigrate to Israel not just immediately after the war in West Germany, but in a massive state-funded campaign after unification in 1991 as well.

It raises a lot of questions about that relationship. It would seem as if some people in the German state believe it is preferable, and again, most charitably "less expensive" to pay Israel for all of the Jews to go (and stay) there, than to have a German Jewish community, which might require them to divest some of this portfolio.

There are German laws on the books regarding German citizens who were charged the emigration taxes during the Third Reich. German legal codes are a bit obtuse to me, but so far as I know, for them to be compensated they need to show that their emigration was unjust. You know, that they were German, wished to remain in Germany, and so were unfairly forced to emigrate and give up that 80-90% of their assets. It's connected to right of return, you need to make good on it for the courts to award it to you. Now, if instead people remain in Israel, Canada, whatever, they've forfeited it. This is what I mean about the Nuremberg Laws and the consequences of the Holocaust having a status almost like fait accompli to the German state.

Their logic seems to be that they don't have to return all, or even most, of the money taken from German Jews who were kicked out, if none of them return to Germany.

In fact this was explicitly West German policy (overseen by many civil servants who had served the Third Reich) and is laid out in a recent book, After the Holocaust: Jewish Survivors in Germany after 1945. You see, West Germany did not actually take the Nuremberg Laws off the books, so effectively recognized the German Jews who survived the Holocaust as Displaced Persons, and Jews, but implicitly or explicitly, not as Germans. They therefore tirelessly worked to get rid of them alongside the other Displaced Persons. Survivor accounts are pretty unanimous in being told to go “back to Poland”, and “back East” - which is even more troubling since those were well known euphemisms in Nazi Germany for the programme of ghettoization and extermination in Poland. So, the German public, and German government, effectively acted as if the Nuremberg Laws stood, there was no such thing as a German Jew, and Jews were charitably Poland’s problems, if you don’t read that as “go to Hell”.

The publisher is very generous, the full book is far more frank:

“After the Holocaust tells the story of life after liberation from the perspective of Jewish sworking to rebuild their lives. Since there was no plan for liberation - no structure in place to help survivors settle once they were liberated - these testimonies speak of struggle amid confusion and pain. Ambiguous regulations aimed to repatriate displaced Jews and to confine them to camps were put forth while the classification of German Jews as Germans without entitlement to additional food rations or other support were also put in place. Thus, the normalisation of Jewish life after 1945 amounted to abandonment. And as Germans busied themselves with their own 'catastrophe' of defeat and with the reconstruction of German culture, Jews were left to depend on military and Jewish aid agencies, all pursuing their own, often conflicting, agendas. Jewish culture since the Holocaust incorporates the traumatic memory of the Holocaust as a collective and an individual experience. Yet it also incorporates the memory of how after liberation, Germans remained divided from Jews in their mutual struggle to re-build their lives.”

At the risk of repeating myself, according to Ian Kershaw’s research, Germany made a tidy profit from the Holocaust. It was not just art and jewels that were seized by people murdered at the camps, property and businesses were seized too. These were not returned to surviving German Jews after the war, because they had been seized “legally", and so survivors would have to go to court, for example to evict the German family that had been living in their apartment since they were deported to Dachau. The occupation authorities preferred not to deal with this, and the German court system, on top of the wartime sympathies and histories of the vast majority of people involved (because Jews had been kicked out of the legal professions and civil service, remember, and reinstatement similarly dragged post 45) also had huge backlogs. All of which to say, the German government had huge amounts of property it would prefer the owners not reclaim. Either because the state literally used melted down gold teeth in Swiss banks, a huge part of the budget of Nazi Germany and West Germany also, but that there were fears that it was “disruptive” to displace good Germany families “just” because the Jews who (“formerly”) owned their homes and businesses turned up alive.

(Remember that Jews trying to flee Germany after 1936 had to surrender their immovable property, and also pay gigantic fees.) Post-war West Germany fully intended to keep this property, and budgets until at least the 1950’s were at least partially made possible with expropriated Jewish wealth.

You’ll never guess how this has been framed in liberal scholarship - all the communists' fault . Take Geller’s Jews in Post-Holocaust Germany, 1945-1953 :

“Using archival materials from the Jewish communities of East and West Germany as well as governmental and political party records, Jay Howard Geller analyzes the reestablishment of organized Jewish life in Germany and the Jews' critical ties to political leaders. Whereas the West German community needed to overcome deep cultural, religious, and political differences before uniting, the small Jewish community in Eastern Germany was forced to struggle against communist opposition.”



Finally, Germany was not the only country this happened in. The first waves of “communist oppression” in Poland were, well, see for yourself:

“In Unsettled Heritage, Yechiel Weizman explores what happened to the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries and places of worship that remained in Poland after the Holocaust, asking how postwar society in small, provincial towns perceived, experienced, and interacted with the physical traces of former Jewish neighbors.

After the war, with few if any Jews remaining, numerous deserted graveyards and dilapidated synagogues became mute witnesses to the Jewish tragedy, leaving Poles with the complicated task of contending with these ruins and deciding on their future upkeep. Combining archival research into hitherto unexamined sources, anthropological field work, and cultural and linguistic analysis, Weizman uncovers the concrete and symbolic fate of sacral Jewish sites in Poland's provincial towns, from the end of the Second World War until the fall of the communist regime. His book weaves a complex tale whose main protagonists are the municipal officials, local activists, and ordinary Polish citizens who lived alongside the material reminders of their murdered fellow nationals.

Unsettled Heritage shows the extent to which debating the status and future of the material Jewish remains was never a neutral undertaking for Poles—nor was interacting with their disturbing and haunting presence. Indeed, it became one of the most urgent municipal concerns of the communist era, and the main vehicle through which Polish society was confronted with the memory of the Jews and their annihilation.”



Those awful heavy handed communists in Poland and East Germany made people give their poo poo back and reinstated citizenship for Jews and it caused literal riots. West Germany went another route, they moved heaven and earth to deport German Jews: to Israel, to the DDR, and to Poland. They worked to make staying in West Germany intolerable, to the maximal extent that they could.

For instance, they tried to keep the Jews who survived Belsen from moving into the village - they had to remain on the grounds of the concentration camp, even after liberation. Not just the local people of Belsen, but German officials referred to the Survivors as "the camp's prisoners", using a German word referring to convicts. When Survivors tried to start a Yiddish newspaper, the Germans suggested they go to Israel, and claimed that no printing blocks in that language survived in Germany or would be imported. They complained to the American occupation authorities about a passionate Yiddish culture emerging in the DP camps. They insisted that it was communist, and that the Jewish community remaining in Germany was dangerous, both because the Jews themselves were subversive, and because Good Germans would riot if a “criminal element” disturbed German society.

Finally, until the 2000’s, (West) Germans when discussing Holocaust Survivors amongst themselves in academic literature, which is to say decoupled from global Holocaust Studies (in English), referred to Survivors as “Former Prisoners”. This is one of those German compound word things, but basically referring to them as “Ex-Cons” upheld the justice of their imprisonment, aberrant nature etc.

All of this to say, I recommend anyone reading up on West Germany if they want to know about the intentions behind support for Israel.

Sushi X posted:

It appears some of the released hostages are refusing to meet Netanyahu. Another PR loss for Israel.

https://x.com/PalBint/status/1730738976988844198?s=20

Al-Saqr posted:

Before he was martyred in an occupation bombing... Scenes published by journalist Montaser Al-Sawaf of him feeding cats in Gaza

https://twitter.com/aja_egypt/status/1730799220263641141?s=46&t=kY7HKwmb1RBg9U186lxtbg

Bastard Tetris posted:

Blessed are the cat feeders. It’s real fuckin gross how Israel’s targeting journalists.

Speaking of gross that hip-hop loving sucks, between this and garbage rear end Infected Mushroom can Israel please leave music to normal countries instead of trying to be the Gal Godot of rap, gently caress

Spergin Morlock posted:

Infected Mushroom is good

Comrade Koba posted:

Comrade Koba posted:

30.5 Days posted:

Israelis admit they're intentionally killing civilians but they're doing it to place pressure on Hamas so it's ok. apparently nobody noticed that that is the dictionary definition of terrorism.

https://twitter.com/glcarlstrom/status/1730505366222393682?s=20

Spergin Morlock posted:

Infected Mushroom is good

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

LF was also my introduction to Finkelstein. Lowtax has had a more profound impact on my political education than anyone else.

Comrade Koba posted:

Engorged Pedipalps posted:

Full throated support of Israel is a very good reason to stop talking to somebody tbh

They're either dumb as poo poo or actively full of hate and malice

I feel like these are the kind of people who would ask for a ride to the store and then rob it while you're idling in the parking lot. Even if they're not, why be friends with somebody so awful?

mags posted:

and be happier

Sancho Banana posted:

By showing him what's actually going on. Israel's policies, the brutality of the bombing in Gaza, the real history of the zionost project, everything. Just tell the truth.

F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:

Tell your friend to stop watching corporate news broadcasts, which are 100% American imperial/IDF propaganda. Seriously. There are alternate sources like Novara Media or Al Jazeera on Youtube that do much better reporting than legacy bullshit like NBC because they don't just parrot what Israel tells them to say.

30.5 Days posted:

Seems like if showing your friend this isn't enough, your friend is a bad person:

https://twitter.com/AvigdorLiberman/status/1730297081959530685

Al-Saqr posted:

i wish i could replace every arab army with a dozen american jewish leftisfs israel would be dismantled by now

=====[=====

Jewish activists disrupt a fundraising campaign for the Israeli army in the American city of New York, demanding a permanent ceasefire in ⁧‫Gaza

https://x.com/alarabytv/status/1730549184103612524?s=46&t=kY7HKwmb1RBg9U186lxtbg

Al-Saqr posted:

yet again indonesians are better muslims and better arabs than us pathetic cowardly cuck arabs who are led by illiterate retard dogs

‎A massive demonstration in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, in support of Palestine and denouncing Israel's resumption of its attacks on Gaza

https://x.com/ajarabic/status/1730889382167445603?s=46&t=kY7HKwmb1RBg9U186lxtbg

Comrade Koba posted:

Bastard Tetris posted:

My inflection point was when I moved into a dorm room in college with a Palestinian roommate named Osama because the IDF blew up his university over the summer.

It was September 9th 2001.

The amount of insanely stupid racist poo poo directed at him and his family in a a real liberal city like Los Angeles in the following months was quite the eye opener.

Harik posted:

y'all acting like you've never seen mainstream coverage of plucky lil' israel defending itself against terrorists.

no poo poo anyone who hasn't deliberately dug deeper is like that. there's billions of dollars of propaganda telling them who the "good guys" are.



yes, exactly. as an added bonus they're much better reporting on nearly every other topic as well so you don't become stupider and less informed by watching them.

quote:

Gazans were bracing for expanded hostilities on Saturday, a day after the truce between Israel and Hamas ended, as Israel began turning its focus on southern Gaza for the war's next phase and as the flow of vital supplies of food, water and medicine again slowed to a trickle.
Israel's military said it carried out 200 strikes on Gaza on Friday, plunging the territory's 2.2 million civilians back into the peril and suffering they have been living under since the war began on Oct 7.

BeanpolePeckerwood posted:

also thanks for this post

hadji murad posted:

is their logo the iron dome or a penis

Shageletic posted:

Consider how well the Soviets did in tracking down and executing former Nazis versus them largely being reintegrating back into West Germany

Shageletic posted:

Consider how well the Soviets did in tracking down and executing former Nazis versus them largely being reintegrating back into West Germany

gradenko_2000 posted:

Hamas exercised 'the perfect deception' before Oct. 7 - defense official



Israeli intelligence could not fathom that people who were under surveillance would use unsurveilled methods of communication to communicate

ContinuityNewTimes posted:

There wouldn't have been anyone left in West Germany if they'd denazified properly.

Karach posted:

Ansarallah dude lights a cigarette with a tracer round

https://www.reddit.com/r/N_N_N/comments/188ql43/houthi_rebel_lights_cigarette_with_tracer_round/

Jel Shaker posted:

always replace the “www” in https://www.reddit to old ie old.reddit fyi, means people can see it without having a reddit account

Karach posted:

Ansarallah dude lights a cigarette with a tracer round

https://old.reddit.com/r/N_N_N/comments/188ql43/houthi_rebel_lights_cigarette_with_tracer_round/

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/AkimotoThn/status/1730792542520975807

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/AkimotoThn/status/1730792542520975807

zetamind2000 posted:

given the idf's track record every guy in this tweet will be dead in a week or two

gradenko_2000 posted:

Hamas exercised 'the perfect deception' before Oct. 7 - defense official



Israeli intelligence could not fathom that people who were under surveillance would use unsurveilled methods of communication to communicate