Your Brain on Hugs posted:

It begins to make sense why Germany is persecuting Jewish people for not supporting Israel. They do not want Germany to be a place for Jewish people to live, and that goal lines up perfectly with Israel's. It's also a great exscuse to crack down on their Muslim population.

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

I suppose you could think about the compensation and repartition as attempts at honest atonement by a people in the immediate postwar period trying to earnestly reckon with what it did, but I don't think that viewpoint is particularly historically accurate. A bunch of very-recently-ex nazis (and their abettors) needed to launder their reputation quickly to regain access to the international community and its markets. israel itself was extremely hesitant to take german money (calling it blood money) and was essentially forced to by its relative weakness as a regional power at the time. German cultural contrition wasn't even really a thing until the 70s or so -- it came about as a reaction to a German cultural attitude that saw itself as much a victim of Hitler as the Jews were.

I'm sure that individual Germans are driven by a feeling of honestly-felt guilt over the actions of their nazi forbears (such as the goofballs who fly the antifaschistische aktion flag with a big israeli flag), but German support of israel, especially at a state level, still being fundamentally driven by its own, partly contemporary and partly historic, antisemitism is -- I'm sorry -- not at all ludicrous. Nazi support for the zionist project is not some weird conspiracy theory, it's historic fact

selec posted:

That there was an entire generation of Germans (and many thereafter) who came home from school one day and got really loving pissed at their parents and grandparents, in the ways they did, tells me that the nation did not reckon with itself properly. You don't come home shocked from school one day to scream at your elders asking what they knew and what they did because the whole nation has this figured out.

I had a great German history teacher who spent a day in class talking about this phenomenon, and his take was that a country that had properly reckoned with this stuff wouldn't have a generationally-shared experience of recoiling in horror from the older members of your family once you hit the right grade in school. He described in in terms that made it seem like a coming of age cliche' for a few generations, an experience so widely shared it became a cultural commonplace. That isn't what happens in a nation that has made peace with what it did, it happens in one that scrambled to pretend it was normal again.

selec posted:

I would've wished for truth and reconciliation commissions and public acknowledgments--in Germany, this might've included bans on participation in any form of government for former Nazis. This would've been tough, because you lose a lot of that famous Nazi Managerial efficiency, but worth it. You don't lose the war and then put the genocidaires back into positions of power because it would be too hard to do it right, unless you do, and that's the extremely hosed moral compromise the Allies encouraged. Ideally former Nazis would not be able to carry any form of identification that didn't acknowledge that status, either. It should've been a badge of shame you couldn't escape until you died.

The reason those children respond with horror is because entire generations that preceded them were not honest with themselves or their children about their national crimes and their own personal complicity. So they failed. They hosed up on being honest and open and saying "humans can become this. I will live with this shame until I die. Do not become what I did. Reject what I could or would not." instead they just pretended nothing was wrong. It didn't work.

So no, I'm not going to give them any loving credit whatsoever for deciding to just not talk about the big Genocidal Oopsie until their kids were forced to learn what Grandpa was up to back then and screamed it out of them.

Lovely Joe Stalin posted:

The Guardian is usually an ok source. But on this particular conflict, this time round, they need to be squinted at a lot. They've been a willing partner in the revolting push to weaponise accusations of anti-semitism against critics of Israel in the UK. It started with their attacks on Jeremy Corbyn when he lead the Opposition, and reached a nadir when they fired their own cartoonist of over 40 years immediately after October 7th for an 'anti-semitic' depiction of Netanyahu. It was the same caricature he'd been doing for years, the difference was that criticising Netanyahu or Israel was now a fireable, and character assassinating, offence.

punishedkissinger posted:

as an institution, some portion of the leadership wanted to avoid killing those aid workers, but as a society they absolutely wanted them dead

BRJurgis posted:

Not trying to attack you, but what's the difference?

VitalSigns posted:

It would only let the leadership off the hook if you presumed they didn't share those attitudes, and their genocidal statements suggest that they do.

I have detected a possibility you seem to have overlooked. It's possible that the motivation for killing aid workers is not 'lusting for aid worker death" (a strawman* if I've ever seen one, I don't think anyone has claimed Israel has a vendetta against charities for no reason), but rather a pragmatic decision to deter organizations attempting to deliver food to Gaza as part of a strategy to use starvation as a weapon in the siege.

That is, I think, a much more believable potential motivation than "lusting for aid worker blood", no?

E: * unintentional strawman of course, I believe you are engaging in good faith and just making a mistake

Irony Be My Shield posted:

punishedkissinger posted:

Quantum Cat posted:

No, it's just the usual hasbarists suicide bombing the thread and derailing discussion to focus on anything but the subject at hand.

Jimbozig posted:

I just want anyone posting anything in defense of the embassy attack to also post the same thing in defense of October 7th because there were military targets in that attack, too. I want to see them posting "they weren't attacking a music festival, they were attacking through a music festival."

Charliegrs posted:

Israel's targe in the consulate bombing was military. The target was the high ranking Quds force officials that were inside the consulate. Of course it was incredibly dumb to kill them there, but the target wasn't the consulate itself.

VitalSigns posted:

What.

Pointing out poor logic by giving an example of a bad conclusion that follows from it is not trolling, it's a pretty basic reasoning method.

It has a name and a wiki entry and everything
Proof by Contradiction

E: Did you quote the wrong post by accident, maybe you meant the guy who was actually making that argument?

cat botherer posted:

To recap,

Szarrukin posted:

the goal is to produce bloated word salad and provoke pointless discussions distracting people from yet another israeli war crime.

skipmyseashells posted:

his point was cluttering up the thread with stupid arguments whenever israel or america does really bad stuff in the news. This is the third time he’s argued about nothing then disappeared directly after

Sephyr posted:

Writers and essayists squirt giant clouds of ink for the same reason squids do: to distract and confuse. I was reading through his posts for a while and most were belabored, multi-paragraph just-asking-questions diatribes that oscilate between pseudo-academic wanking "but what is a people, anyway?" and "ethnostates are cool and good, actually", depending on how much good faith you ascribe.

I mean, we're at the mass grave stage of this debacle. I'm not saying everyone should go out and break things, but after a certain point this fake high-minded debate pervert diatribes become either malicious or tone-deaf.

moths posted:

A pier also lets America scapegoat Ansar Allah for Israel's starvation campaign.

"We tried to provide food by ship but the darn Houthis won't let us!"

Charliegrs posted:

Basically all of the media in the US is calling the campus protests anti semitic.

Gripweed posted:

But what if Israel wants unnecessary delays? What if they don’t want the cargo to make the ship?

VitalSigns posted:

Doubtful.

Trump made noises about opposing wars in 2016 too, but in office he surrounded himself with neocons and mostly did whatever they said: bombed Syria, drone attacks, assassinated American citizens and random foreign civilians, assassinated that Iranian general, etc. He really only backed away from the really insane stuff like carpet bombing Iran.

US oligarchs are extremely dedicated to bringing Ukraine into the American sphere of influence, Trump is unlikely to resist them regardless of what he says now. He will fall in line with the imperial forever wars just like last time.

Majorian posted:

His "plan" for peace is basically to pressure Ukraine to cede territory in hopes of achieving peace with Russia. Obviously neither Ukraine nor Russia will go for it, so he will likely be forced to fall back onto plan B, ie: continuing to support Ukraine to make the generals and MIC happy.

Jai Guru Dave posted:

I just strolled over to Wikipedia to check whether more Palestinians were killed and wounded than Israelis in 2021, at the peak of COVID, and to my absolute dick-shattering shock,

Civilized Fishbot posted:

Interesting post, I mostly agree with it.

Hamas put together some pretty old sources in that original charter. They include that Hadith about how every rock and tree is going to help Muslims kill the Jews, it might not date back to Muhammad but it probably does date back to the earliest centuries of Islam. If you wanted to do the orientalist argument that Hamas is merely acting out some ancient Arab fantasy of killing all the Jews, you'd focus on this. Many people do, for that reason.

But the tone of most of the rhetoric against Jews in that charter is NOT reminiscent of that Hadith, it doesn't have end-of-times religious undertones. Instead it rants about how Jews run the world and must be exposed and expelled, exemplified by its use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which isn't very old, but which is emblematic of that ancient nativist-conspiracist strand of European antisemitism.

Like you said, vicious, pogromist antisemitism is not indigenous to the Middle East, at least not from before the success of Zionism totally warped cultural and political stances toward Judaism. But when a demand for that sort of rhetoric arose among enemies of the Israeli state, Europe was able to supply it, and it really did come finely aged.

So if Biden had said that Hamas circa the 1990s was driven by an ancient desire to kick out the Jews, he'd be technically correct - the only issue being that, like you say, the obvious implication is some Orientalist idea that Muslims intrinsically hate Jews in this way. But "Jews run the world and secretly plot to destroy us all, we must purify our nation of them" is something Hamas imported, not inherited. The ancient desire wasn't passed down from Arab to Arab but from Spainard to Englishman to Pole to Russian etc. And then Hamas bought it at a used book store.

But he's not correct saying it today, because at age 29, Hamas expunged that rhetoric because it no longer met their needs. A cynical ideologue could say they actually decolonized themselves from Western bigotry, but I think that's giving them too little credit as political actors. They made an ugly rational choice to adopt Jew-hating rhetoric when it was useful to them, and a beautiful rational choice to discard it when it wasn't anymore.

Gucci Loafers posted:

https://x.com/axios/status/1788339370837127315

This the first time any American admin has ceased supplying Israel and said it publicly.

punishedkissinger posted:

I think raising the blood pressure of people like this is good, even if it's not a huge material shift in policy.

https://twitter.com/itamarbengvir/status/1788458123436433783

Halloween Jack posted:

It's a shame that Biden only recently gained the power to restrict arms shipments to Israel.