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LionArcher posted:I was informed yesterday that Taylor Swift is bad because she did not say ceasefire in her Time's person of the year interview. And that since she is the most famous person on the planet, if she called for a cease fire it would do something, and she could boycott Israel. Beyond this being... kind of a silly point (I don't think the military industrial complex gives a poo poo and they have more money than her) it got me thinking, when has boycotts of that sort of thing historically ever been successful? Even if we look at peaceful protests, historically there's almost always had to be violence to actually get positive results. South Africa, India, the 1989 revolutions, the color revolutions that followed. Portugal, The Philippines. The defeat of the Soviet coup in 91. End of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Overthrow of the South Korean Junta. End of one party rule in Taiwan. There’s a pretty big body of research that says nonviolent resistance is about twice as effective.
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Dec 22, 2023 02:08
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Oscar Wilde Bunch posted:South Africa, India, the 1989 revolutions, the color revolutions that followed. Portugal, The Philippines. The defeat of the Soviet coup in 91. End of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Overthrow of the South Korean Junta. End of one party rule in Taiwan. Not that I disagree that nonviolence was helpful but almost all of those mentioned had overtly violent resistance as well. I think realistically you kinda need both.
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Dec 22, 2023 02:12
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LionArcher posted:I was informed yesterday that Taylor Swift is bad because she did not say ceasefire in her Time's person of the year interview. And that since she is the most famous person on the planet, if she called for a cease fire it would do something, and she could boycott Israel. Beyond this being... kind of a silly point (I don't think the military industrial complex gives a poo poo and they have more money than her) it got me thinking, when has boycotts of that sort of thing historically ever been successful? Even if we look at peaceful protests, historically there's almost always had to be violence to actually get positive results. I get you, and I don't know that I could name any such movement that succeeded without either actual or threatened violence, but that doesn't mean other efforts and methods are useless. I would rather argue that they can all play a role, and sure Taytay doesn't have the power to bring about a ceasefire by herself but, if she voiced support for it, it would be an especially prominent person making the call and it's hard to imagine that pointing her colossal fanbase towards considering the issue wouldn't do anything at all to raise the pressure, and given that it's so cheap - the cost is the caloric energy needed to say a few words - it would take only the tiniest imaginable shift to be worth it. (Granted she'd come under fire from other quarters for it and you could certainly argue she risks losing economically, but A) That's still true to some degree anyway and B) She'd probably also gain a bit from people who are pleased by such a stance.)
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Dec 22, 2023 02:17
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punishedkissinger posted:Not that I disagree that nonviolence was helpful but almost all of those mentioned had overtly violent resistance as well. I think realistically you kinda need both. Yeah you need the Carrot/Stick relationship to fundamentally change things, otherwise the powers that be retain control of the narrative.
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Dec 22, 2023 02:30
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LionArcher posted:I was informed yesterday that Taylor Swift is bad because she did not say ceasefire in her Time's person of the year interview. And that since she is the most famous person on the planet, if she called for a cease fire it would do something, and she could boycott Israel. Beyond this being... kind of a silly point (I don't think the military industrial complex gives a poo poo and they have more money than her) it got me thinking, when has boycotts of that sort of thing historically ever been successful? Even if we look at peaceful protests, historically there's almost always had to be violence to actually get positive results. Basically every prominent person and company in the Western world condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine didn't stop the invasion, but they still did it just the same. This is hyperbole, but only a little - there was definitely a time period when it felt like advertisers and PR people were practically competing to shout fastest and loudest about how they Stood With Ukraine. Whether or not any individual calling for a ceasefire would actually do anything is besides the point, I think.
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Dec 22, 2023 03:05
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punishedkissinger posted:BDS was pretty helpful against South Africa and is effective enough against Israel that AIPAC has worked with many states to make it illegal. Before he championed against "anti-Italian discrimination" on The Sopranos, Steven Van Zandt got together pretty much every big name artist at their peak popularity and fame to declare they would not play Sun City... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fR2r8Qlyyk (brief aside, I hadn't really seen this video in something like 40 years and Jesus, it still has an energy to it.)
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Dec 22, 2023 04:17
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Kchama posted:I'm glad to hear that the Houthi in Yemen were the oppressed and not the oppressors. I'm sure the Jews who once lived there (someone calling them 'antagonized' is funny considering that literally one (1) Jew lives there now thanks to them) The Gazans are quite blatantly the oppressed, but nobody has to pretend they are perfect angels. The battle against the IDF is just even if they do things I completely disagree with to people who aren't the IDF. The world is not black and white. The Houthi in Yemen fought a genocide against the US and Saudi Arabia. They are of course an oppressed population. Again, deflecting massive crimes of Israeli.x in a thread about Israel, by saying “well did you know this other country also did *checks notes* some bad stuff!” is not some profound or worthwhile discussion. It is the essence of concern trolling.
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Dec 22, 2023 05:55
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Wait, it's all oppression?
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Dec 22, 2023 06:44
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Mean Baby posted:The Houthi in Yemen fought a genocide against the US and Saudi Arabia. They are of course an oppressed population. Again, deflecting massive crimes of Israeli.x in a thread about Israel, by saying “well did you know this other country also did *checks notes* some bad stuff!” is not some profound or worthwhile discussion. It is the essence of concern trolling. The entire point of it is that just because they're doing something that might help Gaza, maybe, we shouldn't celebrate them or just take them as Gaza's allies just on their say-so. That 'bad stuff' that the Houthis did was, yaknow, genocide. It turns out that people who suffer immense tragedy and evil can also commit great evil themselves. See, relevantly, Israel. Weirdly, I 'deflected Israel's massive crimes' by actually literally pointing out that Gaza was righteous even despite Hamas's crimes, because of how much worse Israel is! ummel posted:Wait, it's all oppression? It is kind of funny that apparently people who have been oppressed cannot ever do bad. Like, that's Israel's entire thing is that they suffered the Holocaust, so they can commit whatever heinous evil they desire. It would probably be wise not let anyone else gain that mindset.
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Dec 22, 2023 09:47
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Kchama posted:The entire point of it is that just because they're doing something that might help Gaza, maybe, we shouldn't celebrate them or just take them as Gaza's allies just on their say-so. That 'bad stuff' that the Houthis did was, yaknow, genocide. It turns out that people who suffer immense tragedy and evil can also commit great evil themselves. See, relevantly, Israel. No one has posted or proclaimed that the Houthis committed genocide, their was a genocide committed against them they rose up and defeated. Edit: the scale of this is absurd, we are talking about less than 100 people who Israel escorted out of the country during a civil war. Mean Baby fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 10:17
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Young Freud posted:Before he championed against "anti-Italian discrimination" on The Sopranos, Steven Van Zandt got together pretty much every big name artist at their peak popularity and fame to declare they would not play Sun City... *Paul Simon smiles like the little trickster imp he is*
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Dec 22, 2023 10:46
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Mean Baby posted:No one has posted or proclaimed that the Houthis committed genocide, their was a genocide committed against them they rose up and defeated. You're conflating two different events. Israel organized a mass flight of 40000 Jews decades ago because of fear of the Houthi and their hatred of Jews. Less than a decade ago the remaining few hundred left because of intensified persecution of Jews. Which is what has been called ethnic cleansing repeatedly in the thread, because it is. There's literally one Jew left in Yemen, because the Houthi kidnapped him. If you note, I don't say 'oh the Houthi never faced genocide', I explicitly say that just because you faced genocide doesn't make you innocent of crimes yourself. There's a reason why I made a comparison to Israel. Who as we all know faced had to be rescued from a massive genocide effort directed at them. It's cool though that as long as there's not MANY people left to ethnically cleanse it is fine (because you ran out most of them decades ago). Kchama fucked around with this message at 11:26 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 11:23
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Ansar Allah is not without flaws, and not even in the backhanded sense, there are genuinely hosed things about them. They are still the one of the greatest forces for good in this conflict, and undoubtedly one of the most effective ones
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Dec 22, 2023 11:55
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A big flaming stink posted:Ansar Allah is not without flaws, and not even in the backhanded sense, there are genuinely hosed things about them. I do hope they do good for Gaza, I just don't have much hope for it. It would be really nice if they did.
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Dec 22, 2023 12:36
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Kchama posted:You're conflating two different events. Israel organized a mass flight of 40000 Jews decades ago because of fear of the Houthi and their hatred of Jews. Less than a decade ago the remaining few hundred left because of intensified persecution of Jews. Which is what has been called ethnic cleansing repeatedly in the thread, because it is. There's literally one Jew left in Yemen, because the Houthi kidnapped him. If you note, I don't say 'oh the Houthi never faced genocide', I explicitly say that just because you faced genocide doesn't make you innocent of crimes yourself. There's a reason why I made a comparison to Israel. Who as we all know faced had to be rescued from a massive genocide effort directed at them. Operation Magic Carpet (the mass emigration of Yemeni Jews) was in 1949, and was only partially motivated by persecution - it was also driven by enthusiasm to settle the new state of Israel. The Houthis, meanwhile, we're only founded in 1994. Please, please, please don't chat poo poo with such confidence about a country you know so little about.
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Dec 22, 2023 12:57
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Congressional Staffers are acting as middlemen between the IDF and various NGOs in Gaza, creating another record of the IDF's target selection process: churches and medical sites aren't protected, but it's still important to distinguish churches from mosques, which are outright targets. quote:At one point the Israelis claimed one of the buildings identified on the coordinate list presented by Catholic Relief Services was a mosque. And last week they did bomb two of this charity's buildings, but apparently/hopefully not the Handicap Children's House. They must be stopped before they do bomb the Handicap Children's House. Main Paineframe posted:Basically every prominent person and company in the Western world condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine didn't stop the invasion, but they still did it just the same. This is hyperbole, but only a little - there was definitely a time period when it felt like advertisers and PR people were practically competing to shout fastest and loudest about how they Stood With Ukraine. Your example makes sense but I can think of two key differences between that history and "Taylor Swift wears a keffiyeh": -I'm pretty sure that virtually all the advertisers and PR people you describe were external to Russia, and that within Russia, noteworthy figures and firms were much, much less likely to publicly oppose the war - both because they were more likely to buy into it and because they faced ostracization or state repression for speaking against it. I think one statement from within Russia would've been worth 100 statements from outside Russia. -I am pretty sure that US government policy is more responsive to changes in public opinion than Russian government policy, basically because Joe Biden has to worry about winning re-election and Putin doesn't. Taking these together, I do think that when a major American opinion leader speaks out against the genocide, it causes more voters to take it more seriously in a way that causes Biden to take it more seriously. Quantifying this would just be guesswork bu I don't think it's comparable to the same American saying Russia shouldn't invade Ukraine. Here's an example of Swift having, just by her social media posts, an observable impact on American electoral dynamics: quote:Vote.org said it had 157,041 eligible voters visit the site after Swift’s message on Tuesday, marking the largest National Voter Registration Day since 2020. The organization also experienced a 72% increase in 18-year-old registrations compared to 2019 and a 115% increase in that age range compared to 2022. If she really dedicated her media presence toward promoting opposition to the genocide in Gaza, it could move public opinion by a morally valuable amount (especially because it would motivate other celebrities to do likewise). The cost to her personally might actually be over a billion dollars over the course of her lifetime, when you consider how much it could derail her career and how lucrative that career is now. Mean Baby posted:concern trolling I don't want the Israel/Palestine thread to be dominated by discussion of an ethnic cleansing which is objectively smaller in scale, took place in the very recent past, and over which westerners could basically never exert any positive influence outside donating to the right NGOs. There is another ethnic cleansing going on right now which has killed 20,000, appears to have no end in sight, is killing sn atrocious number of children in particular, and which we can and must stop. It is difficult, for me, to ignore people saying that ethnic cleansing isn't a big deal. The whole reason I've been anti-Israel since I was a kid is my belief that there is no excuse whatsoever for ethnic cleansing. It is sincerely disturbing to see a moral debate over whether ethnic cleansing is always a big deal, with defenders of the ethnic cleansing perpetrators using rhetoric that I regularly have to hear deployed in defense of Israel's crimes (they were only bigoted because of the propaganda of the other side, some of the propaganda is actually true, in the grand scheme of things they represent an oppressed people, the number they ethnically cleansed is not that high, they're fighting terrorists and to criticize their ethnic cleansing is to undermine the war effort). I didn't respond to every mention of the Houthis saying "I can't believe you, don't you know this is the state that did ethnic cleansing, what's wrong with you, we have to be talking about that instead." But when someone says, in the context of a moral debate, that ethnic cleansing isn't a big deal, that's too way much Someone-Is-Wrong-On-The-Internet not to reply. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 15:25
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Kchama posted:You're conflating two different events. Israel organized a mass flight of 40000 Jews decades ago because of fear of the Houthi and their hatred of Jews. Less than a decade ago the remaining few hundred left because of intensified persecution of Jews. Which is what has been called ethnic cleansing repeatedly in the thread, because it is. There's literally one Jew left in Yemen, because the Houthi kidnapped him. If you note, I don't say 'oh the Houthi never faced genocide', I explicitly say that just because you faced genocide doesn't make you innocent of crimes yourself. There's a reason why I made a comparison to Israel. Who as we all know faced had to be rescued from a massive genocide effort directed at them. The distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing is kind of a big one. Accusing a government of dozens of systematic killings vs dozens of people emigrating are two different things. The migration of Jews away from the Arab World is pretty wide reaching and complex. I think to say it is all the Houthi’s fault, again, leaves Israel off the hook for their promotion and support of mass migration to Israel to do a large scale genocide and ethnic cleansing of millions.
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Dec 22, 2023 17:12
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Kinda random but I wandered around some Israeli polls with some interesting question: https://haifa.mynet.co.il/picserver/mynet/wcm_upload_files/2023/12/22/B1q00pTfvT/_____________________1_.pdf Google Translate mostly borked it so I translated the questions I found interesting: What should be the Israeli policy in regards to the Israeli-Palestinian conflic? "Two states for two peoples" - 28% "One state for two peoples" - 8% "Annex the West Bank and Gaza" - 25% (while this doesn't explicitly say so this obviously means without giving any rights to Palestinians as opposed to the previous option) "Continue as-is" - 14% "Don't know" - 25% Divided by various demographics (of which I think the ages is interesting):  The main takeaway here is that, predictably, younger Israelis are less likely to support a two-state solution. Much of this can be explained by there just being a lot more younger religious people but not all. Do you think the Hamas movement can be completely annihilated? Definitely possible - 34% Probably possible - 28% Probably impossible - 27% Definitely impossible - 5% Dunno - 6% So 66% have never opened a history book. How do you think the annihilation of Hamas will effect the view of Arab countries towards Israel? Will improve a lot - 11% Will improve - 31% Will get worse - 20% Will get much worse - 6% Will not effect it - 15% Don't know - 17% I guess how stupid the answers are depends on whether you interpret the question as asking about the leaderships or the populace. There is a similar question with "Western Europe" and similar percentages.
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Dec 22, 2023 17:38
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kiminewt posted:Kinda random but... Before this war I was a one-state solution supporter but now I don't think it's possible in my lifetime. How as a Palestinian can you feel safe living in a country where about half the population - the richer half - is Israeli and is more likely than not to have served in the military that butchered your nation, or at least cheered on the military as it did that? At this point I think we basically need a one-state solution (a binational state with no ethnic or religious dimension) AND a two-state solution (a separate Palestinian state for Palestinians who want to rebuild their shattered society without any authority from the people who shattered it). Mean Baby posted:The distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing... The perpetrators of ethnic cleansing are completely responsible for the ethnic cleansing they commit, and ethnic cleansing is always evil. The Houthis did not conduct a genocide and they are not responsible for all migration of Jews in the "Arab World." They are responsible for the violent ethnic cleansing they conducted against Yemeni Jews, and their ongoing violent repression of Yemeni Baha'is with the goal of driving them out and stealing their property. If a Neo-Nazi group in America matched under the banner of "death to Israel and curse the Jews," and violently expelled all Jews from the area they controlled, while pursuing a similar tactic of repression and exile against other religious minorities, I think you would not be so disingenuous about what was happening, calling it simply "emigration." And that other posters would not say, "yeah, they hate the Jews, so what, who wouldn't?" I think you and others are minimizing and dismissing the Houthis as open, proud practitioners of ethnic cleansing of ethnic cleansing because you fear that by approaching it honestly we somehow endanger the Houthi effort against Israel or distract from the Israeli genocide in Palestine. The Houthis are going to continue to organize against the Israeli genocide, and against religious minorities in their own territory, regardless of what is posted on forums.somethingawful.com. if we are going to discuss their internal program of ethnic cleansing, there is no reason not to be factually honest about it, and if we're going to discuss its moral dimensions, there is no reason not to be morally honest about it. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 17:56
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Thank you for sharing. Welcome to team "one state two (or more?) provinces solution" friend.
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Dec 22, 2023 20:14
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Oscar Wilde Bunch posted:South Africa, India, the 1989 revolutions, the color revolutions that followed. Portugal, The Philippines. The defeat of the Soviet coup in 91. End of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Overthrow of the South Korean Junta. End of one party rule in Taiwan. STRONG, STRONG recommendation for you specifically: read IF WE BURN by Vincent Bevins. Just came out. History and analysis of horizontal protest movements that starts around the time of the Arab Spring, and looks at what worked, and what didn't. Whole thread would probably enjoy it!
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Dec 22, 2023 20:33
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selec posted:STRONG, STRONG recommendation for you specifically: read IF WE BURN by Vincent Bevins. Just came out. History and analysis of horizontal protest movements that starts around the time of the Arab Spring, and looks at what worked, and what didn't. Whole thread would probably enjoy it! Oh drat I literally just finished The Jakarta Method because a leftist youtuber cited it. I gotta read this
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Dec 22, 2023 21:13
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Civilized Fishbot posted:Thank you for sharing. How many Jews did the Houthi’s specifically ‘ethnically cleanse’ as an estimate? We’re there any other factors which were also major contributors to Jews leaving Yemen over the past 100 years? I am reading you as as viewing it as black and white and comparable in scale as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This, to mean, reads like concern trolling and whataboutism. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 22, 2023 21:35
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quote:How many Jews did the Houthi’s specifically ‘ethnically cleanse’ as an estimate? The Houthi program of ethnic cleansing has driven the Jewish population in Yemen from 1,500-2,000 in 2016 to approximately 0 or 1 today. I shared sources describing this campaign here. I am interested in why you ask. Is there a number of people where violently expelling them from your land is not really ethnic cleansing? quote:We’re there any other factors which were also major contributors to Jews leaving Yemen over the past 100 years? Obviously. I don't understand why you ask. The Houthis took control of a Yemen that had already been evacuated by the vast majority of its indigenous Jewish population. They are still responsible for a campaign of ethnic cleansing which violently expelled virtually every remaining Jew, and they still continue to engage in violent repression and incitement of terror against other religious minorities: quote:GENEVA (19 June 2023) – UN experts* today called for the urgent release of 16 Bahá’ís abducted by de facto authorities in Yemen last month. They issued the following statement: Mean Baby posted:I am reading you as as viewing it as black and white and comparable in scale as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This, to mean, reads like concern trolling and whataboutism. I do not know where or why you are reading these things, which I have not said. Obviously the scale of Houthi repression of Jews and Bahai involves only a fraction of the number of people, even just the number of children alone, who have been killed in Gaza. If the ICC were able to arrest all criminals against humanity and charge all their crimes, the Israeli state's count of criminals and charges would dwarf that of the Houthis. I don't know what you mean by "black and white." I'll say, and I hope you agree, that ethnic cleansing is among the most evil crimes that a state can commit, and that to ascribe any blame to its victims is abominable. In that sense the ethnic cleansing of Yemeni Jews and Bahai is "black and white" just like the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is "black and white" just like the ethnic cleansing of Japanese Americans in WW2 was "black and white." In the case of America's concentration camps for Japanese people, that ethnic cleansing was committed by a state that, at the same time, was making critically valuable interventions in a struggle against fascist empires, so the state as a whole was neither "black" nor "white," but the ethnic cleansing itself was unambiguously a horrific crime committed against people who in no way provoked it - "black and white." The parallel to today is obvious. I am not concern trolling, I am not trying to direct discussion away from Israel toward the Houthis. I am not doing "whataboutism" - never once have I tried to justify or distract anyone's crimes by gesturing to the Houthi ethnic cleansing campaign. I am solely engaging in a conversation that others began, trying to correct statements about the Houthis which are either objectively incorrect ("they don't care about Jews outside Israel") or morally outrageous ("just because they committed ethnic cleansing, that's no reason not to admire them, it was only because they were really mad at the Jews"). Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 22:46
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Darth Walrus posted:Operation Magic Carpet (the mass emigration of Yemeni Jews) was in 1949, and was only partially motivated by persecution - it was also driven by enthusiasm to settle the new state of Israel. The Houthis, meanwhile, we're only founded in 1994. Please, please, please don't chat poo poo with such confidence about a country you know so little about. The Houthis is named after the Houthi Tribes of Yemen, who uh, certainly were living in Yemen in 1949, and has a lot of leadership from one of those tribes. Hussein Badr al-Din al-Houthi, the founder of the Houthi Movement a member of the Houthi tribe. It was specifically hostility from one of those Houthi Tribes that the Yemeni Jews gave as reason for Israel to whisk them away to the Promised Land. However as I mentioned, I was referring to the much more recent violence and persecution that drove the Jews out in 2016, which was perpetrated by the Houthis Movement, to clarify. Mean Baby posted:How many Jews did the Houthi’s specifically ‘ethnically cleanse’ as an estimate? We’re there any other factors which were also major contributors to Jews leaving Yemen over the past 100 years? Again, sounds like "as long as there's not that many people left, then ethnic cleaning is fine". Whereas it is bad no matter how many people you ethnic cleanse. Kchama fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 22:48
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Mean Baby posted:How many Jews did the Houthi’s specifically ‘ethnically cleanse’ as an estimate? We’re there any other factors which were also major contributors to Jews leaving Yemen over the past 100 years?
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Dec 22, 2023 23:07
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I think it might be sensible to take the conversation back to the topic of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians which is active right now, instead of continually being distracted by an adjacent but divergent topic which might benefit from its own thread, but which only acts here as pages of chaff.
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Dec 22, 2023 23:09
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I don't really have any kind of solution for this, but a minority population of 1500-2000 in a country of 33 million is basically untenable at the best of times. Short of the Yemeni state making a bunch of active efforts to support that population and encourage immigration to supplement those numbers, it probably was the difference between it happening immediately or organically in 20 years. I'm happy to be educated on the facts (though an effort post would probably be more appropriate in the Middle East thread than here), but the Wikipedia page on the Yemeni Jewish population basically jump cuts from 1950 to 1990, so the missing 40 years in the middle seem kind of important. From there, trying to follow the flow from around 2008 to present there are a bunch of citations that say the numbers are in the low hundreds already by that point. Honestly, it kind of feels like how the US census (or any polling, really) ends up with crazy wide uncertainty, so I'm left wondering which numbers are most reasonable. I don't actually see where the claim of 2000 Yemeni Jews in 2016 is coming from in reporting - the closest I can see is if the combined demographics of Jewish and Bahai, so if you can maybe link exactly where you are seeing that it would really help me better understand your point here In some ways I suppose it is more monstrous that they felt the need to persecute a population so small, but when you persecute a single person it seems more accurate to call it a hate crime rather than a genocide or ethnic cleansing. I don't feel great about trying to draw the line where one becomes the other, but I do think there is sort of a minimum scale of event before you can apply those terms to something. Edit: I'm fine to drop it, but this statement: Civilized Fishbot posted:The Houthi program of ethnic cleansing has driven the Jewish population in Yemen from 1,500-2,000 in 2016 to approximately 0 or 1 today. I shared sources describing this campaign here. Does not seem to be supported by your sources or any other sources I have found. By 2016, the Jewish population seems to have been in the mid to low double digits as far as I can tell. The writing in that particular report is really confusing, as it starts from talking about "the combined Bahai and Jewish population of 2000" to "0 or 1 Jewish resident today", which is massively misleading about the magnitude because it says absolutely nothing about how many Bahai Yemenis remain and therefore gives the mistaken impression that 2000 people were killed or displaced when in fact it doesn't definitively say that even 1 person has been (though I'm sure there have been plenty of specific documented incidents against families to substantiate at least several dozens to several hundreds). BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 23:26
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BougieBitch posted:a minority population of 1500-2000 in a country of 33 million is basically untenable at the best of times. This is really not ok! You can't accept a population being removed because they're not a big enough proportion.
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Dec 22, 2023 23:32
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BougieBitch posted:I don't really have any kind of solution for this, but a minority population of 1500-2000 in a country of 33 million is basically untenable at the best of times. We both know that whether the Yemeni Jewish population would naturally have died out or not has nothing to do with the morality of violently pursuing them all into exile out of sheer religious bigotry. quote:I don't actually see where the claim of 2000 Yemeni Jews in 2016 is coming from in reporting - the closest I can see is if the combined demographics of Jewish and Bahai, so if you can maybe link exactly where you are seeing that it would really help me better understand your point here I already provided this source and can share it again. It's a report from 2022 made by Ahmed Shaheed, the "UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief." quote:In Yemen, the Houthis have coerced Jewish and Baha’i communities into leaving, blackmailing them by arbitrarily detaining religious leaders, influencers and community members, negatively impacting the Baha’i population and, reportedly, resulting in only one Jew remaining in the country, from a population of approximately 1,500–2,000 in 2016. One Yemeni Baha’i, currently living in exile, recounted that he was forced to decide between indefinite prison or leaving his country forever. "Only one Jew remaining in the country from a population of approximately 1,500-2,000" is not ambiguous. I believe you already understand my point - my point is that the Houthis did, contrary to the beliefs of some other posters here, commit ethnic cleansing and that this is, contrary to the beliefs of some other posters here, a grave crime against humanity. quote:I don't feel great about trying to draw the line where one becomes the other You don't feel great about it, so why are you doing it? This isn't complicated. When a state forces everyone from a given ethnicity into into exile for being from that ethnicity, that's ethnic cleansing. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Dec 22, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 23:36
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knox_harrington posted:This is really not ok! You can't accept a population being removed because they're not a big enough proportion. I didn't say I accepted the actions taken, I said it was untenable. You are putting moral weight on a statement that is meant to convey a practical fact Civilized Fishbot posted:
Please re-read what you have quoted, your parsing of the statement is not the only reading. The sentence before makes it clear that the report is grouping the Baha'i and Jewish populations and the sentence after again mentions the Baha'i population. If you can find the actual data table that is being cited I will drop this point, but that sentence has a bunch of clauses and your summary is not anything near a direct quote (The link is also dead when I try to do this myself, so I have no way to do the legwork here) Here's the closest match I can find with Google: https://www.state.gov/reports/2022-report-on-international-religious-freedom/yemen And here is an excerpt from the executive summary which uses the same 2000 number for the Baha'i population: "According to a Baha’i Faith spokesperson, the Baha’i Faith community has as many as 2,000 members (2016 estimate, the latest available). " It's not impossible that both populations were very close to the same size, but the way that sentence is worded is very poor, and something like that should be pretty easy to show a citation for if the Jewish population was actually ~2000 at that time Just to be clear, here is what happens if you take that sentence and remove the first clause and everything between commas: The Houthis have coerced Jewish and Baha’i communities into leaving from a population of approximately 1,500–2,000 in 2016. BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 23:43
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Civilized Fishbot posted:We both know that whether the Yemeni Jewish population would naturally have died out or not has nothing to do with the morality of violently pursuing them all into exile out of sheer religious bigotry. To be clear (as you are clearly implying me). I certainly don’t think it was a genocide. It could be an ethnic cleansing (I do think scale and causality / intent matters quite a bit), but considering this is a thread on Israel’s genocide, I’m not sure how relevant it is. Please don’t assume things I don’t say, thanks.
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Dec 22, 2023 23:51
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BougieBitch posted:I didn't say I accepted the actions taken, I said it was untenable. You are putting moral weight on a statement that is meant to convey a practical fact How is it untenable? You don't HAVE to mercilessly persecute a minority just because they are small and powerless. It is not a practical fact that that is the case.
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Dec 22, 2023 23:56
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Mean Baby posted:To be clear (as you are clearly implying me) The statement I had in mind was that the Houthis are not bigoted against Jews outside Yemen, which was actually made by a different poster. I was not talking about you at all. Although I would now include you in the description of people who disagree with me on whether ethnic cleansing happened, because I say it happened as a fact and you say you're unsure about it. I don't know if you agree with me that the Houthis committed a grave crime against humanity. quote:It could be an ethnic cleansing (I do think scale and causality / intent matters quite a bit) What scale counts as ethnic cleansing, if not the forced expulsion or murder of at least 1,500 people? What causality counts as ethnic cleansing, if not systemic persecution and blackmail-by-imprisonment with the specific goal of coercing them into leaving? What intent counts as ethnic cleansing, if not outright bigotry against the ethnicity, so important to the political movement/state that they incorporate it into their slogans and fly it on their banners? Mean Baby posted:Please don’t assume things I don’t say, thanks. I have not done this except for your presumption that I was writing about you when I was not. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 22, 2023 23:57
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BougieBitch posted:I didn't say I accepted the actions taken, I said it was untenable. You are putting moral weight on a statement that is meant to convey a practical fact That's doesn't make sense. Making the numbers up but if there were only 400 Yemenis in London I wouldn't accept the "practical fact" that their population is untenable and so can be ignored.
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Dec 23, 2023 00:05
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BougieBitch posted:I didn't say I accepted the actions taken, I said it was untenable. You are putting moral weight on a statement that is meant to convey a practical fact If you click on "English" here, you should be able to see the report. I just tried and found this very easy to Google, but I have to extend good faith that you tried and failed. The report cites the 1,500-2,000 figure to " https://www.refworld.org/docid/56a145d6754.html, p. 10, and consultation." Consultation meaning original research & inquiries conducted by the expert preparing the report. If we go to the linked article, written by Rania El Rajji and published by Minority Rights Group International in 2016, the figure is clearly specific to Yemeni Jews. This report says "may have stayed" - clearly it was the UN's original research that validated the figure. quote:However, according to some research, between 1,500 and 2,000 Yemeni Jews may have stayed in the country but concealed their religious identity for fear of persecution You promised to "drop this point" if I showed you proof that the 1,500 to 2000 figure describes the population of Yemeni Jews specifically - this is that proof. The UN report clearly and unambiguously describes a population of 1,500 to 2,000 Yemeni Jews which was brought down to 1 by a Houthi campaign of coerced exile. This is ethnic cleansing. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 00:15
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knox_harrington posted:That's doesn't make sense. Making the numbers up but if there were only 400 Yemenis in London I wouldn't accept the "practical fact" that their population is untenable It likely would be if no immigration was happening from Yemen. Unless those 400 people exclusively inter-marry, the next generation will likely contain many people who don't identify as Yemeni, and after another there may not be anyone who has a strong cultural connection to Yemen. quote:and so can be ignored But this part isn't the logical conclusion of anything I was saying This is also ignoring the fact that in this context we are talking about Jewish the religion not Jewish the ethnicity. Because people are sliding this point we have statements like: quote:What scale counts as ethnic cleansing, if not the forced expulsion or murder of at least 1,500 people? Which is a new and exciting way of misreading what you already have not adequately supported. In the middle of a civil war, in a country under attack from Saudi Arabia, are you really going to claim that people can only die by murder or only stop being counted as Jewish by death or emigration? You need MUCH more to support that statement than you have currently provided - it's still really bad, and may even rise to the level of ethnic cleansing depending on who is doing it, to pressure a group to convert from their religion, but it is not murder to do so. Civilized Fishbot posted:If you click on "English" here, you should be able to see the report. I just tried and found this very easy to Google, but I have to extend good faith that you tried and failed. Okay, now you HAVE you be trolling. I opened the document in question and here it is, right on page 10: quote:While reports differ as to the exact number of Jews I can't believe you spent an hour on this wild goose chase just to definitely prove yourself wrong. There were 83 Yemeni Jews in 2016, so the 2000 figure HAS to be referring to the Bahai population or the two combined BougieBitch fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 00:21
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BougieBitch posted:This is also ignoring the fact that in this context we are talking about Jewish the religion not Jewish the ethnicity. Citation needed. BougieBitch posted:You need MUCH more to support that statement than you have currently provided - it's still really bad, and may even rise to the level of ethnic cleansing depending on who is doing it, to pressure a group to convert from their religion, but it is not murder to do so. "Depending on who is doing it" - we know the Houthis, the de facto state for most of Yemen, is doing it. And these Jews were not being pressured to convert, they are being pressured to leave. Just like the Bahai are not being pressured to convert, they are being pressured to leave. This time I will trim out the "1,500-2000" part that gave you so much trouble. quote:In Yemen, the Houthis have coerced Jewish and Baha’i communities into leaving, blackmailing them by arbitrarily detaining religious leaders, influencers and community members... quote:I can't believe you spent an hour on this wild goose chase just to definitely prove yourself wrong. There were 83 Yemeni Jews in 2016, so the 2000 figure HAS to be referring to the Bahai population or the two combined The report describes the interviewees saying one thing, and then cites research painting a very different picture. And it explains why the interviewees underestimated so drastically - the danger of being observably Jewish in Yemen was so severe that the Jews who stayed took efforts not to be observed as Jews. The UN report chose to follow the research. It describes 1,500 to 2,000 Yemeni Jews who lived in Yemen before an ethnic cleansing campaign, and it cites an article describing 1,500 to 2,000 Jews who lived in Yemen before an ethnic cleansing campaign. There really is no ambiguity about what the UN report is saying here, so you can either drop this ridiculous misreading or just say the whole report is bullshit. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 00:27
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BougieBitch posted:It likely would be if no immigration was happening from Yemen. Unless those 400 people exclusively inter-marry, the next generation will likely contain many people who don't identify as Yemeni, and after another there may not be anyone who has a strong cultural connection to Yemen. So is your argument that they probably simply stopped existing as Yemeni Jews through mass conversion in the span of a year in a way that isn't identical to cleansing of some sort? Civilized Fishbot posted:That report is before the ethnic cleansing, it's from 2016. I thought it was happening in 2015 already. Very well, I'll edit that out. Thank you for the correction. Kchama fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 00:36
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Kchama posted:Also, that says "presently remaining", as in, after the ethnic cleansing. Because the report isn't before the ethnic cleansing, and so "presently remaining" would be the amount remaining after the events. That report is before the ethnic cleansing, it's from 2016. The UN says there were 1,500 to 2,000 Jews in Yemen in 2016. It cites both its own research and a report from 2016 suggesting there are 1,500 to 2,000 Jews hiding in Yemen. They were right to hide, because the UN report describes a program of coerced exile - ethnic cleansing - bringing this number down to only 1. If anyone is pretending that the English-language wording is unclear, they can look at the Spanish wording. quote:En el Yemen, el movimiento huzí ha detenido arbitrariamente a líderes religiosos, personalidades influyentes y miembros de las comunidades judía y bahaí para coaccionar a esas comunidades a que se fueran, lo que ha repercutido negativamente en la comunidad bahaí y, según se informa, ha hecho que solo quede en todo el país una persona judía, de una comunidad que rondaba los 1.500-2.000 miembros en 2016. Un miembro de la comunidad bahaí del Yemen, que vive actualmente en el exilio, relató que se vio obligado a decidir entre la prisión indefinida o el exilio permanente en otro país. The Jewish and Bahai communities are described as distinct - las comunidades judia y bahai. There's a Bahai community - la comunidad bahai - and a Jewish community which was reduced from 1,500-2,000 people to 1, and the UN attributes this to a Houthi campaign to make the Bahais and Jews leave Yemen. This is ethnic cleansing. I do not like that the thread is derailed from the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which we all must be doing everything we can to stop. We can't do anything to stop the ethnic cleansing campaign against Yemeni Jews because it succeeded, and I'm confident nobody here has any power in Yemen to stop Houthi repression and forced exile of Bahai people. But most of us, as English-fluent Westerners, have influence over how our countries support or oppose Israel as it conducts genocide. Especially the Americans here, and any Israelis here, although I think they all left. And the Israeli genocide of Palestine dwarfs the sum of Houthi crimes in terms of sheer pain and death. I do not even find this discussion interesting. The problem is, I lack what it takes not to correct someone when they minimize, deny, or justify any act of ethnic cleansing. Civilized Fishbot fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Dec 23, 2023 |
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Dec 23, 2023 00:40
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