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Maoist Pussy posted:Because it is loving Israel now, obviously. Not unless the Palestinians have officially surrendered it to Israel in the war-ending peace deal. The reason why international law has provisions for protection of occupied territory is precisely because occupation does not equal ownership - even if you take control of a large amount of territory in a series of overwhelming military victories, that territory still legally belongs to the pre-conquest owner, and should be returned to them upon conclusion of the war unless the peace agreement specifically calls for the transfer of that land to another government, be it the occupying power or someone else entirely. Regardless of the military outcome, legal ownership of the land does not transfer without the consent of the current legal owner.
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# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 17:34 |
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# ¿ May 17, 2024 01:21 |
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Maoist Pussy posted:If you have lost but failed to surrender, then it should be no surprise when the conflict continues. The civil war for rule of Mandatory Palestine ended long ago with the establishment of the country and government of Israel. This does not mean that private landowners lost their rights to live there, it just means they are under the control of a different government. The fact that territory may change hands after a war does not mean that all the existing inhabitants are obligated to leave - it just means they pay taxes to a different government. Expulsion of the previous inhabitants of conquered land is typically regarded as a crime against humanity. Modern international law and precedents are quite clear on this, generally: you don't want to be responsible for the people, don't seize control over the land in the first place, because the people who live there come with it.
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# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 19:46 |
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quote:Canada's PM forgets Jews in statement on Holocaust quote:MK ramps up battle against far-left NGOs
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# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 00:25 |
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Nothing interesting in the news right now (just another spying scandal) so let's go back in time a couple of months to the last big sexism scandal! http://www.timesofisrael.com/pm-to-oppose-womens-torah-scrolls-at-western-wall-report/ quote:Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly set to side with the ultra-Orthodox parties and oppose the use of Torah scrolls in the women’s section at the Western Wall.
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# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 15:52 |
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team overhead smash posted:They'll probably be forced to change. Just did a quick google and it seems that Haredi employment is on the rise, especially amongst women which is pretty much on part with the national average (I'm guessing they don't particularly care for women becoming torah scholars). Of course that doesn't say anything about the quality of the empolyment and a lot of them live below the poverty line. Haredi culture has always been for woman to go out and work to support the family while the men sit around and study Torah. It's just not economically sustainable for one parent to sit around reading religious texts all day, while the other acts as a sole breadwinner while also doing all the chores and raising their seven kids. Make no mistake about where the power lies, though - the Haredi political parties exclude women entirely, and the sexism is rampant.
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# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 04:17 |
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hakimashou posted:I don't know the rationale, but it would make sense to render certain areas where you had established a buffer or "no go" zone useless for farming so you could prevent farmers from using it. Sure. The problem is that nations only have the right to unilaterally establish buffer zones on their own territory, not someone else's. Gazan civilians are not subject to Israeli military or government authority, and therefore Israeli forces have no right (other than "we have enough military superiority to violate your rights at will and you can't stop us") to enforce a buffer zone over them. If the IDF wants to bulldoze Israeli homes and fields to create a buffer zone in Israeli territory, that would be just fine (assuming that they followed proper Israeli law and procedures, and survived the inevitable political backlash). However, "military necessity" hasn't been a valid justification for using your overwhelming military superiority to freely violate other nations' sovereignty since 1914.
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# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 17:24 |
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Ultramega posted:In the realm of poo poo that actually happened and that warrants a response there were reports on Ma'an News last night about a checkpoint near Beit El that was attacked by an armed palestinian who managed to injure 3 soldiers and was killed during hostilities. Kind of a step up from a random stabbing. I'm assuming "not a lot if the israelis have anything to say about it", but I'm guessing guns are not widely available to west bank palestinians unless they're collaborators right? As far as I can tell, ordinary West Bank Palestinians are not permitted to have guns under either IDF or PA laws. In practice, though, PA security forces aren't the only Palestinians with guns; Hamas and other groups do have some presence in the West Bank, smuggling and black market buying do exist, and so on. So while the presence of guns does tend to indicate ties to some organized group, it doesn't necessarily mean it's the PA.
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# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 17:34 |
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hakimashou posted:And yet, we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and overthrew their governments based on 'military necessity,' and a broad coalition of other nations helped us do it. And this is just one of a great many examples of this since 1914. Huh? We went to war against those countries, and the justification had nothing at all to do with "military necessity". There really isn't any similarity at all. A much more accurate comparison would be if North Korea sent armored bulldozers across the DMZ to level border outposts on the South Korean side in order to "widen the buffer zone" for the sake of "military necessity" - which would be roundly condemned as an act of war and a violation of South Korea's sovereignty, and repelled by military force.
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# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 15:31 |
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drilldo squirt posted:They didn't tell them it was contraceptives and they did it intentionally to only this one group of Jews who, if I remember right, had trouble being recognized as Jews in the first place. What they did is indefensible. You keep saying "they", "they", "they", but who do you mean by that? Because "they" certainly wasn't the Israeli government (this is why details and specifics are important).
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# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 21:17 |
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drilldo squirt posted:I could be wrong but Forbes says I wasn't. http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseknutsen/2013/01/28/israel-foribly-injected-african-immigrant-women-with-birth-control/#6e2f32bb2880 That article, put simply, is poo poo. Though it has plenty of company - because the allegations are so shocking and also the Israel connection, stories quickly shed important details and context as reporters rush to restate the headline and clickbait it up, and failure to appreciate context causes many aspects of it to be misunderstood. The shots were given by health clinics run by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, an American charitable NGO which is not under the control of the Israeli government. The Israeli Health Ministry and other government agencies had no direct control over what happened in the transit camps, which were run by the JDC. And the guy who was directly in charge of those clinics is super good, I can't imagine him being racist against Ethiopians. It's likely that there was no organized, official policy, and that the problem was a result of individual bad actors that the system was not sufficiently monitored to catch.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 00:43 |
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drilldo squirt posted:Do you have anything I can read about this? Unfortunately, I don't have anything specific - the original Haa'retz article is behind a membership wall, and most other English-language reporting about it is sensationalist bullshit. I'll try to write something up, though. For an Ethiopian Jew who wants to immigrate to Israel, you'll first end up in a transit camp, run by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a Zionist-leaning American NGO and charity that provides humanitarian assistance all over the world...and also directly supports organized immigration to Israel, among other things. These camps are, to some degree, officially sanctioned by Israel, but they're run exclusively by NGOs like the JDC and the Israeli government has no direct say in how they're run. The exact details of the relationship are a bit confusing - suffice it to say that Israel has very close ties to NGOs like the JDC, and these NGOs directly support and work with various Israeli projects like this, but they're still independent and not subject to direct Israeli control. Now, at these transit camps, various services are provided to the Ethiopians awaiting their ticket to Israel in order to prepare them for life in a Westernized first-world country and provide them services that they might not have been able to access or afford before. One of these services is healthcare; the JDC camps in Ethiopia provide free or low-cost healthcare, including vaccinations and family planning services. There's also education involved, since access to those things may not have been available to them. The Depo-Provera incident boils down to two major factors: first, some of the Ethiopians living in the transit camps were bullied, intimidated, or outright deceived into receiving Depo-Provera shots. Second, after they traveled to Israel and got regular Israeli doctors there, those regular doctors continued to administer Depo-Provera shots to those Ethiopians without realizing that they didn't want the shots and may not have even known about them. Neither one can directly be attributed to any policy of the Israeli government, although there were clearly some major failures of oversight. The shots in the transit camps would directly be the fault of the JDC's clinics. Typically, we'd blame the JDC as an organization, but there's a problem with that - the Medical Director of the Ethiopia efforts, who's in overall charge of these clinics, is an incredibly good person who has been doing charity medical work in Africa (primarily Ethiopia) for two and a half decades and has personally adopted a number of Ethiopian children, mostly orphans or kids with life-threatening diseases. I find it incredibly hard to believe that he would be pushing a policy of ethnic cleansing against Ethiopians. Some have blamed government pressure - it's known that the Israeli Health Ministry at one point congratulated the JDC family planning program for the number of Ethiopian women they had gotten on birth control, and this is often put forth as proof of bad intentions - but there's no evidence that there was any intention to force people onto birth control. After all, the point of a family planning program is to basically get people on birth control - and as long as they're willingly and knowingly choosing it without any coercion, there's nothing wrong with that. And, again, I have a very hard time believing that Dr. Hodes would be complicit in an ethnic cleansing program, no matter who was pressuring him. That just leaves individual doctors and nurses, or possibly even some mid-level manager pushing it without the higher-ups' knowledge. The intention may not have necessarily been ethnic cleansing - nurses are known to have complained about how hard it was to get Ethiopians to understand how birth control pills worked, and there seems to have been issues getting them to remember to take the pills every single day at the same time no matter what, and communication between the medical staff and the Ethiopians was generally difficult. As a result, a nurse was caught on camera saying that they prefer giving the Ethiopians Depo-Provera rather than other birth control so that they'd be less likely to screw it up. And if they're already in that mentality, it's not a huge leap to suggest that it's entirely possible that some of the health workers may have just said "gently caress it" and started giving shots "for their own good" without much caring whether the patients understood what was going on. Mind you, even if their intentions were entirely benign, it is still incredibly unethical to give someone a treatment of any kind without their informed consent or a pressing life-saving need, well-intentioned "they're too stupid to decide for themselves" paternalism is still racist as hell, and the fact that some people were apparently intimidated into getting the shots indicates that at least some of the people doing it had actively malicious intentions. But it probably wasn't outright ethnic cleansing, and it probably wasn't a sanctioned official policy by the organization - although the failure of either the JDC or the Israeli government to discover this serious misconduct over several years is still a problem for both organizations. As for the shots being continued in Israel, that's a much simpler one to explain - Israeli doctors simply gave the Ethiopian migrants whatever their medical documentation from the transit camps said to give them. Their medical records said they were on Depo-Provera, so the doctors gave them more Depo-Provera. Thanks to the language barrier, the education difference, and possibly racism, they didn't really talk much with the Ethiopian migrants, and therefore never realized that the Ethiopians didn't know they were on birth control or didn't want to be on birth control. No malice here, and no governmental intervention either - just a depressing mixture of apathy and stupidity from individual actors. When the scandal blew up, the Health Ministry issued an advisory to Israeli doctors to make extra double sure that their Ethiopian patients know what they're being given and have willingly consented to whatever they're being given, rather than just trusting the papers, so that hopefully puts an end to the issue. Again, the Israeli government isn't entirely free of blame, since the fact that this was happening for so long is a sign that the requirements of education, availability of translators, and other important factors for integrating Ethiopian migrants into Israel are not being met. However, this end of it was also neither official government policy nor an organized effort toward ethnic cleansing. Now, mind you, just because it wasn't an organized policy of ethnic cleansing doesn't mean that it wasn't a flagrant violation of medical and human ethics and a serious red flag about oversight in these organizations. But it's a far cry from what the headlines suggest.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 03:44 |
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drilldo squirt posted:This is really interesting, thanks. It's too bad their aren't any articles you could find though, I really would have liked to read about it. Like, what happened to the organization that was in charge of these camps and the doctors that were accused of the intimidation. The legal and political fallout of something like this must of been a big deal. There are a few articles that kind if go over the basic points of co tention, like this, but I'm not much of a fan of them since they're light on facts and heavy on "who would believe anything as ridiculous this pathetic anti-semitic scary smear story from the LIEberal media" crap. The most detailed reporting comes from Haa'retz, which originally broke the story, but it's mostly behind their annoying paywall. Ahhhh, consequences. Unfortunately, you're likely to be disappointed. The initial scandal was pretty big, but it was handled very much behind the scenes - no information was released from the investigation (which just finally ended a week or two ago) while it was ongoing, and no sweeping changes or punishments were ever announced, at least in the English-language media. Naturally, the article about the investigation's conclusions is behind Haa'retz's paywall, but I suspect it concludes that it was just a regrettable series of accidents for which no particular person was at fault. There was likely an internal JDC investigation as well, but if so, it was entirely internal and private, and I doubt they'll be publicizing any results or actions taken - they've kept their mouths shut quite tightly about the whole thing. About the best outcome we can hope for is more support for Ethiopians going through this system, so that translators are more available, education is more available, and trustworthy social workers and advocates are available to Ethiopians in both Israel and the transit camps so that these abuses can be caught before they get out of hand.
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# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 15:25 |
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Yardbomb posted:So what's the defense on this one gonna be, I can only wonder with bated breath. Probably about the same as the recent spree of putting Palestinians in prison over Facebook posts: cries that anti-IDF posts amount to dangerous "incitement" against Israel and lead directly to terror attacks, therefore massive crackdowns on free speech are needed to prevent the dastardly media from provoking the Arabs to further violence. This article sums up the justifications going around for various free speech suppressions in Israel pretty well. Note the unspoken implication that good, proper journalists report pro-Israel stories out of a deep desire for journalistic fairness and integrity, while reporters who write negative stories are evil propagandists maliciously trying to destroy the Jewish state http://www.jewishpress.com/news/ultra-orthodox-mk-media-cameras-are-like-speeding-vehicles/2016/02/03/ quote:MK Rabbi Israel Eichler (UTJ) said at a Knesset committee discussion of the role of journalists in Judea and Samaria that “the media cameras are like a speeding vehicle.” Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Feb 4, 2016 |
# ¿ Feb 4, 2016 15:41 |
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An ex-Border Patrol officer who beat up a Palestinian for laughing at him has lost his appeal and will therefore be forced to serve out his sentence of 300 hours of community service. Another Border Patrol officer has been indicted for secretly photographing the IDs of Jewish women traveling with Arab men and sending them to Lehava and other far-right groups. A police investigation of 15 supposed land purchases by settler organizations in the West Bank has discovered that none of them were valid, and 14 out of the 15 were outright fraudulent. In some, the settlers bribed a Palestinian to sign for the sale of land he didn't own; in others, the signature was outright faked. When asked for comment by the media, the organization's spokesperson denied everything and accused journalists of "racism and anti-Semitism of the most vile sort".
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# ¿ Feb 4, 2016 18:13 |
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Also, and possibly more relevantly, these radical movements are targeting more than just Arabs and Muslims. They're anti-Christian, anti-non-Orthodox, anti-gay, and in many cases they oppose the Israeli government itself. That's what the crackdown is really about - these movements aren't just murdering Palestinians, they're also burning churches, vandalizing Reform synagogues, stabbing gay pride marchers, and throwing stones at soldiers. Ettinger's manifesto called for using terrorism to exacerbate various social tensions in Israel in hopes of sparking an outright civil war, which he hoped would lead to the collapse of the current secular Israeli government and pave the way for the establishment of a Jewish theocracy. These radical movements have simply grown beyond anything that Israel could turn a blind eye to. Moreover, Israel sometimes needs to show a strong response for political reasons. High-profile cases are the ones that make international headlines, and are therefore far more important than the daily violence. That's probably why the Duma arson suspects have been railroaded so hard, complete with "enhanced interrogation" justified under "ticking bomb" clauses.
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# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 19:31 |
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The Knesset passed a law allowing it to suspend MKs. It then immediately suspended three Arab MKs.
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# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 04:04 |
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Demiurge4 posted:Totally not apartheid! Actually, I was wrong - the suspension law hasn't passed yet, and they were suspended by the Ethics Committee. This is part of an ongoing controversy with these three MKs - they met with the families of Palestinian attackers in East Jerusalem, whose bodies have been held by Israeli government for the last four months, in order to discuss the refusal of Israel to return the bodies to their families for burial. Naturally this means they're being widely criticized as traitorous terrorist-supporters, and Netanyahu is making truckloads of political hay out of it. Aside from the Ethics Committee complaints and the suspension law, Netanyahu has ordered the AG to investigate the meetings to see if they can be charged with a terrorism offense in spite of their parliamentary immunity, and there have been the usual calls for banning specific Arab parties outright. Interestingly, there has been a bit of opposition to the suspension law from the far-right, particularly the Haredi - since the law would allow a Knesset supermajority to suspend MKs for any "unseemly" behavior, it could potentially be deployed against any small party, not just the Joint Arab List. Also, the rigbt sometimes meets with the families of terrorists themselves; for example, Ayelet Shaked met with the mother of one of the Duma arsonists. In other news... Military police who went to Ashdod to arrest a draft-dodger were attacked by a mob of angry Haredi rioters, who threw rocks at them and flipped over a police car. Heavy police reinforcements were sent to rescue and extract the officers. None of the rioters were harmed or arrested. The Foreign Press Association in Israel, which represents foreign journalists, was invited to a Knesset committee hearing to "explain" foreign journalists' "biased" reporting.
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# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 22:03 |
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In the latest act of religious hatred, a man stole a Jewish prayer book at the Western Wall from a group of people who were praying there, and then burned the book in front of them. The police put out the fire but did not otherwise bother the man, who was permitted to remain there and was not arrested. If you're shocked by this show of restraint, don't be - after all, the man was a Haredi Orthodox Jew who was attacking Reform Jews - and women, at that. Scandalized by the sinful sound of women's voices at such a holy site, he grabbed a (Reform) prayer book from the nearby Women of the Wall group, but found the contents to be "impure", "heretical", and "against men", so he set it on fire. Meanwhile, a man has been arrested for leaving a pig's foot in a Haredi synagogue, and his indictment is in the works. The man's ethnicity and religion are not mentioned, so he's probably Jewish; his motivation seems to be that he's angry that the Haredi group wrested the property (formerly a homeless shelter) from the city in a legal battle and then closed the shelter to convert it into a synagogue. The planned construction of an Arab middle school in northeast Jerusalem is likely to be canceled after the government came out against it, complaining that it was a "potential threat" to the nearby police station.
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# ¿ Feb 11, 2016 17:01 |
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Ytlaya posted:I'm confused as to how any human being with a functioning brain could believe something like "if Palestinians did the right thing instead of terrorism they could be an economic powerhouse!" And I don't mean this as an insult; I'm honestly curious about what goes on inside of the head of someone who believes something like that. When someone brings up stuff like Israeli blockades, what goes through their head? The blockade is because of the poor relationship between Israel and Hamas, and it's safe to say it wouldn't be in effect (and Gaza's economy would be allowed to function) if Hamas was more cooperative. That said, despite the lack of blockade, it's not like the West Bank is exactly an economic powerhouse either - it functions largely as a source of cheap goods and cheaper labor for Israel.
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# ¿ Feb 12, 2016 07:21 |
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Oops, looks like the right-wing extremism is coming from inside the house! But that's not really what I want to talk about today. What's getting my goose right now is the form of Holocaust denial nobody talks about : a denial that anyone besides Jews died in the Holocaust. It's not really directly related to Israel, but it's something that comes up a lot in the Israeli news and it never fails to piss me the hell off. While the fact that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust as part of a systematic campaign of extermination is common knowledge, the total number of civilians killed as part of the Holocaust was around eleven million - in addition to the 6 million Jews, millions of Roma, Slavs, and other smaller groups were also targeted for systematic extermination. Those 5 million "forgotten victims" are surprisingly controversial, often sidelined or outright ignored - many Holocaust memorials marginalize or outright exclude them. But to many, any attempt to remember those five million non-Jews is an unforgiveable act of anti-Semitism, an evil conspiracy to deJudaicize the Holocaust. quote:Holocaust remembrance without Jews? Canada’s new prime minister, Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, gave it a try. His seven-sentence official statement on International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, January 27 mentioned “millions of victims,” “the Holocaust” and “Nazis.” Just not Jews.
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# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 03:07 |
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Cat Mattress posted:So basically they're saying that the Jews are a separate category from human beings, if they are not included by the former formulation and need the latter instead? No, the problem is that it's not enough for Jews to be "included" as just one of many groups targeted for extermination, because then (as the article complains about) "Holocaust victims" won't just mean "Jews". Those people's fear is that Jews will no longer be the special victims of WWII, and that they will no longer be able to claim the Holocaust as uniquely and essentially Jewish. They don't want it to be "eleven million", they want it to be "six million Jews and five million others" - and leaving out the five million altogether is considered to be a small price to pay to avoid the possibility of the second phrase morphing into the first one. The intended result is simple: quote:Whenever I would say that my parents were survivors of the Holocaust, people would look at me oddly and say, “Oh, I didn’t know you were Jewish?” The impression I got was that people were not aware of any other Holocaust victims except Jews. When people hear about the Holocaust, they don't think "crime against humanity" or "crime against a number of different groups", they think "crime against the Jewish people". It's thanks to perceptions like this that, for example, no one knows that gay Holocaust survivors were re-imprisoned by the West German government after the war (since homosexuality was still illegal in West Germany) and were not made eligible for Holocaust reparations until 2000.
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# ¿ Feb 18, 2016 15:36 |
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Avshalom posted:afaik the romani term for the holocaust is porajmos/devouring, someone please correct me if i'm wrong Sounds right, though there are a bunch of ways to spell it. If it were just unawareness or forgetfulness, that'd be one thing. But I fear it's much worse: a deliberate effort to intentionally forget it. I've been trying all day to type up an explanation for some of the reasons for it, but gently caress it. Ultimately, they all boil down the fact that surviving tragedy and enduring oppression don't necessarily make you a person who won't oppress others and will always treat others fairly. Even Holocaust survivors are still just as subject to base human desires and urges and inhumanity as anyone else.
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# ¿ Feb 25, 2016 02:10 |
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lolquote:An Israeli man was critically injured by gunfire meant to stop an assailant in a stabbing attack at the Gush Etzion Junction in the West Bank. I am shocked, just shocked that encouraging civilians to act as armed vigilantes and making active efforts to loosen gun regulations for that purpose led to collateral damage, injured innocents, and shooting the wrong person!
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# ¿ Feb 25, 2016 22:12 |
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Xander77 posted:Soldiers. "Security forces" also refers to soldiers. The first article I saw said "armed bystanders", not "security forces". I've since seen more detailed reports saying that the shooters were soldiers, who killed the victim (a uniformed IDF soldier) while only wounding the attacker, but that's hardly any better! When politicians are actively encouraging civilians to act as armed vigilantes and use guns to stop crime, while openly putting exemptions and loopholes into gun laws and policies so that certain demographics will have far greater access to guns, that's not a question of "gun control". That's setting up a loving race war in the goddamn streets of East Jerusalem. The massive expansion of security force presence by putting a bunch of soldiers on the streets, while slightly less ridiculous, wasn't a good idea either. When both policies were first announced, I predicted that putting a bunch more armed men on the streets to stop stabbings without specific training in dealing with civilian crime would be not only ineffective but also actively dangerous to innocent bystanders. Let's not forget that many of the deadliest attacks started by stabbing an armed Israeli and taking their gun. It's reactive garbage, not a coherent and sensible policy. "Stabbings are still happening? Give more people guns! That didn't work? Even more guns!!!"
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# ¿ Feb 25, 2016 22:48 |
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At an official state memorial service for Ariel Sharon, held to mark the second anniversary of his passing, Netanyahu criticized his Gaza withdrawal as a failure and complained that it contributed to terrorism...right in the middle of his memorial speech for Sharon. quote:Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked former prime minister Ariel Sharon's 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip at a memorial ceremony marking two years since Sharon's death Monday evening at the Knesset. On the other hand, at least he was there - most Likud members didn't even show up at the ceremony, in what is thought to be a deliberate show of disrespect.
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# ¿ Feb 29, 2016 22:07 |
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The best thing to ever come out of any of these threads
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# ¿ Mar 3, 2016 14:40 |
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Xandu posted:It was mostly just the headline. Don't know why they want to re-start negotiations in the final year of his term at a time when Netanyahu won't even meet with him. It's a purely political move with no serious expectation of real progress. Israel has already been stalling defense aid agreements with the hope of potentially getting a better deal under the next administration, and if they're even dragging their feet on aid then they certainly won't be in any rush to give concessions. However, Obama might be looking to change the situation a bit before his successor arrives, and he needs a negotiation attempt to act as his excuse for doing that. Also, starting a new round of negotiations with Israel at thw right time could have a sizeable effect on the elections - after all, this is the first peace negotiations attempt since Netanyahu made his Iran speech at the Republicans' invitation, which was a pretty big deal in the US.
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# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 06:00 |
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Pew Research Group has conducted a major, in-depth survey of Israeli attitudes. It's quite detailed, so I'll probably be digging through it for most of the day, but there's a few headliners that I might as well get out of the way now: - There's basically an even split between religious Jews and secular Jews in Israel. The former tend to believe that the Jewishness of the state should take precedence over its democracy and tend to support legislating religion, while the latter believe that democracy is more important and should take precedence over Jewish principles. More religious Jews also tend to lean politically more to the right. - 76% of Israeli Jews think that it's possible for Israel to be both a Jewish state and a democratic state at the same time; only 27% of Israeli Arabs agree. Israeli Jews overwhelmingly believe that the Palestinian leadership is not genuinely trying to work toward peace, while Israeli Arabs overwhelmingly believe that the Israeli government is not genuinely trying to work towards peace. - A huge majority of Israeli Jews believe that anti-Semitism is very common all over the world and actively increasing, and an overwhelming majority believe that the existence of a Jewish state is necessary for the long-term survival of the Jewish people. Virtually all Israeli Jews (98%) support guaranteed immediate citizenship in Israel for all Jewish immigrants, and 79% of Israeli Jews believe that Israel should give preferential treatment to Jews in general. - 48% of Israeli Jews say that Arabs should be expelled from Israel, while 46% disagree. Like I said, I'll be digging through this for a while, so expect more details (and other interesting factoids less likely to make the headlines) later.
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# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 15:51 |
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icantfindaname posted:i normally like roger cohen, but just dude quote:A recent Oberlin alumna, Isabel Storch Sherrell, wrote in a Facebook post of the students she’d heard dismissing the Holocaust as mere “white on white crime.” As reported by David Bernstein in The Washington Post, she wrote of Jewish students, “Our struggle does not intersect with other forms of racism.” That bit set off alarm bells for me, so I dug deeper, very interested in seeing the context of that statement. There's a larger debate going on about intersectionality in the Zionist media because it tends to increase BDS's influence, but that quote is so obviously stupid and offensive out-of-context that something was obviously off. And sure enough, it is. The original shows that the "white on white crime" remark was made by other Jewish students, and she explicitly mentions the fate of Roma, African Jews, and other populations in her counter to that statement. As for the part about intersection, she's actually saying that the Jewish struggle does intersect with other forms of racism, and she complains that anti-semites are trying to deny that - which Cohen selectively quotes out-of-context in just such a way to make it seem as though she's saying the exact opposite thing. As for the rest of her rather long Facebook post, there are some serious cases of anti-semitism buried in there...but they're deep in a long list of incidents composed mostly of poo poo like "That time SFP brought in a Jewish lady to talk about her work with electronicintifada" or "That time Kosher Halal Co Op was told it couldnt serve 'ethnic' food" or "That time a Jewish person made a comment on fb saying 'the only reason people care about the Holocaust is because it happened to white people' and got tons of likes from white and POC friends alike" or, my personal favorite: quote:That time my African Studies professor had an antizionist jewish south african man come in to talk to the class about jazz and resistance. During Q&A she praised a Jewish student for their anti Israel comments relating Israel to South African apartheid. The prof then made funny faces and funny eyes when I spoke up and tried to make the point that we should try to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within its OWN historical context and that its unfair to both Israelis and Palestinians to rely only on shaky comparisons. --- Xandu posted:I'm curious what you all think of this situation. It has some parallels with the Salaita case, though I think she more clearly crosses the line in some cases. To me, the Salaita case wasn't really about what he said, it was about the fact that the university tried to circumvent the due process rights they were contractually obligated to extend to him. It's hard to draw clear boundaries of "academic freedom", since it's an intentionally-vague and largely unwritten principle rather than a hard rule, but "the tenure clause in the professor's contract says the university has to go through steps X, Y, and Z in order to fire them" is a much easier thing to base it on. It's not like it should be impossible to fire a professor for saying things, but the tenure process ideally should act as a filter for such actions, ensuring that only serious breaches make it through the process and "oh no what if they offend the donors" cases are blocked.
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# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 20:52 |
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Israeli Arabs are far more likely than Israeli Jews to see a peaceful two-state solution as possible. However, that number has dropped drastically over recent years - from 74% in 2013 to just 50% in 2015. Among Jews, the number hovers around 43%. Secular, highly-educated Jews are more likely to believe in the two-state solution, while religious and uneducated Jews are more likely to see it as impossible. Disturbingly, younger Israeli Jews are more likely to believe the two-state solution is possible, although since Pew evidently thought age was unimportant and split it into just "under 50" and "over 50", it's hard to draw solid conclusions on how support for these things varies by generation. Still, the rising pessimism among Israeli Arabs is the most alarming factor for sure. This poll happened before the elections and the stabbing epidemic, too; I imagine the numbers are only worse now in both sides. Israeli Jews mostly believe that the Palestinians are not genuinely seeking peace, and are just about evenly split on whether their own government is genuinely seeking peace. Israeli Arabs (including Christians and Druze) mostly believe that the Israeli government is not genuinely seeking peace, and are just about evenly split on whether the Palestinian authorities are seeking peace. In other words, skepticism and cynicism are running high, neither ethnicity trusts the other ethnicity's authorities, and they barely trust their own ethnicity's authorities. The numbers are similar across every demographic spectrum except for settlers and political self-identification. Israeli Jews who self-identify as leftist have drastically less faith (just 23%!) in the Israeli government's commitment to peace and significantly more faith (37%!) in the Palestinian government, while self-identified right-wingers are far more likely (70%) to believe that the Israeli government is genuinely seeking peace and significantly less likely to have any faith (7%) in the PA's intentions. Not exactly shocking, but the sheer size of the gap compared to other demographic differences is notable, as is the fact that left-leaning Jews appear to have more faith in the PA's peaceful intentions than in their own government. Unfortunately, they also appear to be a relative minority view, as at least 50% of every other demographic in the survey (including secular Jews and college-educated Jews) believes that the Israeli government is sincerely pursuing peace. Settlers are closer to the right-wing numbers than to the general population's numbers. They also tend to be more likely to believe that settlements help Israel's security (how????) rather than hurt it, although about half of all Israeli Jews hold that view. A bit over half of Israeli Jews believe that the US is not supporting Israel enough, while three-quarters of Israeli Arabs believe it is giving Israel too much support. No surprises there. When asked whether they were Jewish or Israeli first, a bit less than half of Israeli Jews answered "Jewish", about a third answered "Israeli", and about a fifth answered "Neither/both/don't know". 59% of secular Jews answered "Israeli", but only 17% of Masorti, 6% of Dati, and 2% of Haredi considered themselves Israeli before Jewish. When Israeli Jews asked what things they personally considered essential to Jewish identity, the leading answer was "Remembering the Holocaust", the only option to be chosen by the majority of respondents, and the only option to have at least 50% support among every single demographic polled (except for "people who speak Yiddish at home" and "people who received a Jewish education rather than secular"). If you can't tell from those signs, the demographic least interested in the Holocaust was the Haredi, who had a bare 50% support for that answer - every other religious group had at least 60% support. It appears to be a particularly major factor in the identity of secular Jews, since the only other answers that more than a third of them agreed on were "live an ethical and moral life" plus the write-ins "have a sense of belonging to Jewish community" and "pass down Jewish traditions to our children". It's also interesting how many answerers associated moral qualities with Jewishness - 47% of answerers said "live an ethical and moral life" was essential to Jewish identity, and 27% said "working for justice and equality". The survey also asked what might disqualify people from being Jewish. That is, it asked what things someone can do and still be Jewish. 87% of Israeli Jews said that someone can work on Shabbat or be critical of Israel, yet still be Jewish. 71% said that someone who does not believe in God can still be Jewish. By contrast, only 51% of Israeli Jews said that someone can support a Palestinian right of return and still be Jewish. Also, while it might be overshadowed by that shocker, only 39% of Israeli Jews (mostly the secular ones) believe that someone converted by a non-Orthodox rabbi is a real Jew. This is actually very important, because most American Jews are not Orthodox. One of the more intriguing ideas the researchers raise later is that the different religious groups have entirely different conceptions of who "American Jews" mean, since some of them reject the vast majority of American Jews as "not real Jews" to the point where they don't even consider them Jewish at all. Also, a similar question was asked to Israeli Arabs, where majorities of both Muslims and Christians said that accepting Israel as a Jewish state and rejecting a Palestinian right of return did not somehow disqualify a person from their religion.
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# ¿ Mar 9, 2016 16:59 |
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Muscle Tracer posted:Were there analogous questions for Israeli Arabs? No. The "Are you X first or Israeli first" question was asked only to Jews, as was the "What do you consider essential to Xish identity" question; however, all groups were asked at least one "can someone still be an X if they do Y" question.
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# ¿ Mar 9, 2016 20:43 |
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Xandu posted:The data I've seen doesn't indicate they support a one state solution, either, so it creates this weird situation on both sides where neither really believe peace is likely to occur. The difference between "not wanting a two-state solution" and "thinking a two-state solution is impossible" is an important one, which is often glossed over or outright missed by reporters. It's not a decline in desire for peace (though I'm sure there's some of that too), it's a decline in mutual trust and faith. Palestinians no longer trust Israel to negotiate in good faith, and Israelis largely didn't trust Palestinian intentions in the first place. Just look at the numbers - the vast majority of people on each side don't think the other side's government is truly pursuing peace, and about half of each side don't think their own government is truly pursuing peace. And considering the state of both governments, that's not likely to change soon on either side. I went through the "religious observance" pages of the Pew study and there is barely anything interesting or surprising in them. Ultra-religious and very-religious Jews claimed incredibly high observance rates (>98%!) for basically every religious requirement, ceremony, and observance they were asked about, while secular Jews claimed low observance rates (usually below 25%) for everything except Hannukah and Passover, and the kinda-religious Jews were usually about midway between those two extremes. The "all Jews" combined total came in generally around 50% or so for most things, except the aforementioned holidays. Christians and Muslims generally had higher observance rates, around 60-70%. The only thing that really even came close to interesting was that in the Jewish population the men were far more observant and had much higher participation rates than women, while in the Muslim population the women were generally significantly more observant than the men. Next up is the rest of the political questions, I think.
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# ¿ Mar 10, 2016 17:01 |
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Moving on to the "views on education, values, and science" part of the Pew survey. All Israeli Jews except Haredi overwhelmingly think it is important for their children to have a secular education, all Israeli Jews except the secular ones overwhelmingly think religious education is important. Haredi are significantly less interested in having a high-paying job or traveling the world. Interestingly, the more religious Jews were less likely to say that science and religion are in conflict, with two-thirds of Haredi saying that there is no conflict between science and religion. However, religious Jews overwhelmingly said that they did not believe in evolution, with an overwhelming 96% of Haredi saying that all living things have existed in their current form since the beginning of time. My best guess for the disparity, given the poor state of education among the ultra-religious and the intense self-isolation and echo chambering of highly religious communities, is that they may have an intensely distorted view of current science. Israeli Arabs generally have similar responses on all these questions to the Masorti - that is, way more religious than the seculars but noticeably less religious than the Haredi and Dati. Well, that was quick! The answers to the personal religious observance questions are just so uniform and predictable that there's hardly anything to say about them. On to the "Views of the Jewish state and Diaspora" section! I'll skip the ones that have already been discussed, like the Arab-expulsion question 61% of Israeli Jews believe that Israel was given to the Jews by God, while 12% believe that this is not true (the remaining 27% either said "don't know" or weren't asked the question because they didn't believe in God). Among Christians and Druze, only 19% and 17% respectively said that Israel was given to the Jews by God. Muslims were not asked this question. Huge majorities of every Israeli Jewish group say that the term "Zionist" at least somewhat applies to them - except for the Haredi. The levels of enthusiasm vary slightly between the other three groups, but the differences are tiny compared to how much the heavy Haredi disagreement stands out. Disappointingly, the only demographics that really rejected the word were Haredi-heavy demographics. Self-identified left-leaning people were almost as likely to answer affirmatively as self-identified right-wingers. 91% percent of Israeli Jews believe that a Jewish state is necessary for the survival of the Jewish people, with only Haredi and Yiddish-speakers (who are mostly Haredi) expressing any real opposition, and 69% say that a strong Jewish diaspora is necessary. There's about a 50/50 split on whether Jews in Israel should remain in Israel even if they could have a better life elsewhere. When asked about the biggest long-term problem facing Israel, the most popular answer among both Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs was "the economy", with "security/threats/terrorism" being only the second most common answer. Many commenters have already contrasted this with the same question asked in a previous poll to Jewish Americans, who saw terrorism as Israel's biggest problem by a huge margin, while the economy ranked last place for importance in American Jews' perception of the problems Israel is facing. While both Israeli and American Jews largely feel (according to both polls) that they share many common factors, have a common viewpoint, and share a common destiny, this suggests that maybe their perception and understanding of each other is not as clear as they think. Oddly, Haredi are even more likely to feel kinship with American Jews than the other groups are, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of Americans are Reform or Conservative Jews. One explanation I've seen for that is that, since the Haredi don't recognize non-Orthodox Jews as Jews, they're only thinking of the small Haredi communities (which are also the only ones they're likely to know anything about, considering the depth of Haredi self-isolation) in America and not even considering the much larger Reform and Conservative movements when they answer that question.
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# ¿ Mar 10, 2016 22:34 |
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Cower at the face of...terror!
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# ¿ Mar 13, 2016 16:30 |
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So I never actually finished going over those survey results. I've been preoccupied with the Haredi tantrum in the Knesset, which initially looked like it could threaten the government but now seems to be going nowhere slow. For those who haven't been following it, there have been a couple of significant developments in favor of non-Orthodox Jews lately in Israel. First of all, non-Orthodox Jews were banned from many Jewish ritual baths (mikvot) by the Orthodox religious councils that ran them, but a court case challenging that went to the High Court, which ruled that the bans were discriminatory and illegal. Second of all, in response to popular demands for non-Orthodox prayer at the Western Wall by groups like Women of the Wall (the existing prayer spot was under Orthodox rule, which pretty much froze out women completely), the government created a second, separate prayer area at the Western Wall not subject to Orthodox restrictions. For a little while it looked like the Rabbinate and the Haredi parties were willing to let the Western Wall compromise (which no one really seems to be happy with) slide, but as soon as it was actually passed into law they threw a huge tantrum about it, tried to block its implementation, and started threatening to leave the coalition unless Netanyahu meets their demands. So far, they're demanding that the Knesset passes a law banning non-Orthodox Jews from ritual baths, in a (likely futile) attempt to circumvent the High Court decision. The attorney general has declared that such a law would be unconstitutional, while the haredi MKs have countered with claims that non-Orthodox are "pretend Jews" and that it is literally undemocratic to pass laws that benefit them. And that's about where it stands right now. Back to stats. Next up: Intergroup marriage and friendship in Israel! First of all, there is virtually no interfaith marriage in Israel. 98% of married Jews, 99% of married Christians, and 99% of married Muslims are married to someone of the same faith. Even among Jewish subgroups, there's not that much intergroup marriage, with most groups (except Masorti) overwhelmingly marrying within their group. Second of all - and far more alarmingly - most Israelis are uncomfortable with the thought of their children someday marrying outside of their religious group. 97% of Israeli Jews and 80% of Israeli Christians would be uncomfortable with their child marrying a Muslim, while 82% of Israeli Muslims and 88% of Israeli Christians would be uncomfortable with their child marrying a Jew. Israeli Jews and Muslims are both only slightly more comfortable with the idea of their child marrying a Christian, and similar levels of discomfort are shown by all groups toward the idea of marrying a Druze. Once again, Israeli Jews are uncomfortable with intermarriage even between different religious subgroups, to the point where secular Jews would rather see their child marry a Christian than a Haredi. As for intergroup friendship...Israeli Jews overwhelmingly say that "all" (67%) or "most" (31%) of their friends are also Jewish. Muslims and Christians were far less likely to answer "all" but made up for it with a lot more "most" answers, so that's possibly just a consequence of their minority status. Between Jewish subgroups, it's the usual deal - Haredi mostly only hang out with Haredi, secular Jews mostly only hang out with other secular Jews, and there's a little blurring of the lines between the middle two groups. Phew. I think I've mentioned this before, but the results for some of these are so predictable that it's downright boring. Thw real conclusion of this survey, rather than any specific set of headline numbers, is "Israeli society is extremely divided and factional, with severe and irreconcilable political conflicts arising from the extreme disagreements between factions". However, there's one more section of the survey, about discrimination, and that one really deserves a post to itself, so I'm going to hold off on that one for a little bit.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2016 15:53 |
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Torrannor posted:I just want to thank you for these really informative posts, they are very enlightening. Can you tell if there is a difference with the interfaith marriages and interfaith friendships among the younger generations, are there useful stats about that in the survey? If yes, is the picture a bit better with younger generations? The survey data is only broken into two age groups: ages 18-49 and age 50+. There's hardly ever any meaningful difference between the two groups that shows in the stats, either. So it's not especially useful for looking at generational differences. Some other demographic differences that Americans might expect to matter, like level of education, are better covered by the survey data - but generally don't have that much impact unless they correlate with religious group membership somehow. I've tried to point out places where any demographic status besides religious subgroup membership (or obvious proxies of that, like Jewish vs secular education) had any real impact on the stats, but most of the time it's a tiny difference at best. The only demographic besides group membership that has any real impact in a lot of these questions (and which I wish the survey paid more attention to) is language spoken at home. Yiddish-speakers are almost overwhelmingly very religiously devout and tend to be even more likely than the overall Haredi to pick the strictest possible answer to a religious question and the most religious answer possible to a question about Jewish identity. Russian-speakers, on the other hand, generally line up with the secular Jews on religious matters and tend to be even more secular than the overall secular Jews when it comes to questions of Jewish identity. However, they both tend to be more pro-diaspora than their Hebrew-speaking neighbors. Also, when it comes to purely political questions with fewer or no religious aspects, they tend to feel differently from their overall religous group. For example, Yiddish-speakers are significantly less likely than the general Haredi group to be pro-settlements, while Russian-speakers are significantly less likely than the general secular group to be anti-settlements. Also, Yiddish-speakers were significantly less likely than the rest of the Haredi to support expelling Arabs from Israel, while Russian-speakers were significantly more likely than the rest of the secular population to support expulsion.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2016 17:26 |
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coyo7e posted:I mean I know having random weirdos trying to stab soldiers is scary and all but it still seems radically lopsided to be giving billions of dollars to a nation that, well, ought to be able to pay their own way after 70ish years, imho. We give billions of dollars to a lot of countries, the amount we give to Israel isn't that unusual. What really sets it apart is the relaxed conditions and rules that let them do more with US aid than other countries. coyo7e posted:I'm sure it's been posted itt before however it's a huge thread that I just came in, and I was hoping if someone could point me to some info of maybe how the BDS movement garners the "anti-Semitic" label by so many pundits I see on TV, hear on podcasts, read in articles, etc. There are a lot of factors and angles on it; BDS, pro-Israel, anti-Israel, and anti-BDS are all much too large to summarize into a single pithy group. The stuff you're asking is just far too broad, so I'll focus on the accusation that BDS is anti-semitic. There's a lot of angles even on that. First, as you seem to be thinking, there's a tendency to purposely accuse any anti-Israel position of being anti-Semitic, regardless of the truth of the claim, in order to dismiss all political criticism as just senseless racism. Second, there is no doubt some actual anti-Semites in BDS, since as you could no doubt imagine, people who hate Jews aren't exactly going to be big fans of the Jewish State. Third, people may be exaggerating things in their own mind and imagining anti-Semitism where there may not be any because of their belief that anti-Semitism is particularly widespread or that the whole world secretly hates Jews - after all, persecution complexes are already pretty common in conservatives. You've actually asked at quite a good time, so now I'll cover the next section of the big Pew survey on attitudes and religion in Israel: Anti-Semitism and discrimination. First of all, touching on the topic above, 64% of Israeli Jews believe that anti-Semitism is very common around the world, and 35% believe that it is somewhat common; only 1% answered that it was "not too common". Of the 99% who gave one of the first two answers, 76% believed that the amount of anti-Semitism in the world was increasing, while only 1% answered that it was decreasing. In other words, Israeli Jews overwhelmingly believe that anti-Semitism outside of Israel is both widespread and growing. The survey also asked people how much discrimination they saw against different groups in Israeli society (Muslims, LGBT, secular Jews, religious Jews, women, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi), and the results there are super interesting. First of all, Israeli non-Jews were more likely to see discrimination against every group asked about than Israeli Jews were. Yes, Israeli Arab Muslims were slightly more likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against religious Jews than Israeli Jews were. Israeli Jews simply perceived less discrimination in Israeli society than Israeli Arabs of all groups did, even when it came to non-religious groups like women and LGBTs. The biggest gap, unsurprisingly, is that one in five Jews and four in five Muslims thought there was a lot of discrimination against Muslims in Israel. However, the second biggest gap was in discrimination against women - only 25% of Jews thought it was common, vs 42% of Muslims. Also, just as many Israeli Jews (21%) saw discrimination against religious Jews as against Muslims. The group that all Israeli Jews as a whole thought were most discriminated against were Ethiopian Jews (36%), followed by women (25%) and then a three-day tie (21%) between Muslims, religious Jews, and Mizrahi Jews. However, that same question also comes with a deeper breakdown into the Jewish groups, which reveals a lot more nuance than the "All Jews" numbers suggest. First of all, let's look at the various Jewish subgroups. The more religious a group is, the less likely they are to believe there's discrimination against Muslims and the more likely they are to believe there's discrimination against religious Jews. The former is fairly minor (13% of Haredi said Muslims were discriminated against, vs 25% of secular Jews) but the latter is an incredibly drastic effect (64% of Haredi said religious Jews were discriminated against, vs only 9% of secular Jews). Also, secular Jews were noticeably less likely to see discrimination against Mizrahi than the other groups were. Lastly, Haredi were significantly less likely to perceive discrimination against every group aside from religious Jews and Mizrahi. Aside from those things, the answers were about the same among the other three religious subgroups. Ultimately, the Haredi and Dati said that the group that faced the most discrimination in Israel was religious Jews, followed by Ethiopian Jews in second place. The Masorti saw Ethiopians as the most discriminated against, followed by the Mizrahi. Secular Jews said that Ethiopians faced the most discrimination, followed by women. There are also other demographic differences among the Israeli Jews in the answers to that question (sadly, no demographic breakdowns for the non-Jewish groups). Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews were more likely than Ashkenazi Jews to see discrimination against Mizrahi and religious Jews, and less likely to see discrimination against Muslims. Women were more likely than men to see discrimination against women, and somewhat less likely to see discrimination against religious Jews. Israeli Jews under the age of 50 were more likely than the 50+ demographic to see discrimination against every group except Muslims. More educated Jews were less likely to see discrimination against secular, religious, and Mizrahi Jews. College-educated Jews were most likely to see discrimination against Muslims and LGBT, but Jews who had a high school degree but no college were less likely to see discrimination against those groups than Jews without a high school degree were. Russian-speakers were far less likely to see discrimination against anygroup except secular Jews, and Yiddish-speakers basically thought that no one was discriminated against in Israeli society except religious Jews, which a huge majority felt were persecuted.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2016 22:06 |
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It's really no surprise - much of Israeli society has been openly calling for the death of terrorists in all circumstances regardless of necessity for years. The hatred runs deep. http://forward.com/opinion/337068/whos-to-blame-for-israeli-soldier-shooting-immobilized-palestinian-attacker/ quote:Top members of Israel’s political, religious and security establishment have spoken out regularly in favor of killing attackers on the spot, prior to the wave of violence that began last fall. That thinking easily extends to attackers who pose little threat at the moment.
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 13:02 |
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MonsieurChoc posted:It's amazing how powerful the hatred of the oppressor for the oppressed is, throughout human history, compared to the hate of the oppressed for the oppressor. I think it's something like "If we are doing horrible things to them, then they must deserve it otherwise we would be the bad guys). Not just hate, but fear - the oppressor is absolutely terrified of the oppressed, and therefore oppresses them all the harder in order to keep them down, with any hint of defiance being met by vicious reprisals. They oppress the weak out of fear of what might happen if the weak become strong, and therefore specifically seek to make the weak even weaker while intimidating them into staying weak. It was the same in the American South - a slave revolt was basically the scariest thing they could imagine, and even the slightest hint of one led to widespread panic, brutal attacks against blacks, and further intensification of oppression against blacks under the excuse of preventing terrorism. And because of their fear, they felt that their hatred and oppression of blacks was all the more justified. It's a self-reinforcing system, too - the oppression breeds discontent and hatred, which convinces the oppressors to oppress even more, which causes more discontent and hatred, and so on.
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 20:15 |
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# ¿ May 17, 2024 01:21 |
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Please don't get the Israel thread locked, guys! If you don't feel like someone is worth giving a decent response to, then just don't give them a response at all, instead of wasting an entire page in outright mocking them. If Israel discussion gets banned in D&D again because people can't resist going on a spree of awful posts every time certain posters stick their heads in, then you're going to have a hard time posting any criticism of Israel here! To get back on topic, the Western Wall deal looks to be endangered; Netanyahu is showing clear signs of backing down in the face of Orthodox resistance. Netanyahu has also backed down in the diplomatic crunch with Brazil; he's finally withdrawn Dani Dayan's appointment there and appointed him as consul to New York instead. Netanyahu is also losing ground in a big oil/gas drilling deal he's been pushing - the courts are blocking it and refusing to let it through unless the provision that no future Knesset can alter it is dropped.
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# ¿ Mar 29, 2016 02:44 |