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dchan87 · 11 months

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Non-paywall version here

Peace in the israel-palestine conflict had already been difficult to achieve before Hamas’s barbarous October 7 attack and Israel’s military response. Now it seems almost impossible, but its essence is clearer than ever: Ultimately, a negotiation to establish a safe Israel beside a safe Palestinian state. Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must. How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

I always wondered about the leftist intellectuals who supported Stalin, and those aristocratic sympathizers and peace activists who excused Hitler. Today’s Hamas apologists and atrocity-deniers, with their robotic denunciations of “settler-colonialism,” belong to the same tradition but worse: They have abundant evidence of the slaughter of old people, teenagers, and children, but unlike those fools of the 1930s, who slowly came around to the truth, they have not changed their views an iota. The lack of decency and respect for human life is astonishing: Almost instantly after the Hamas attack, a legion of people emerged who downplayed the slaughter, or denied actual atrocities had even happened, as if Hamas had just carried out a traditional military operation against soldiers. October 7 deniers, like Holocaust deniers, exist in an especially dark place.

The decolonization narrative has dehumanized Israelis to the extent that otherwise rational people excuse, deny, or support barbarity. It holds that Israel is an “imperialist-colonialist” force, that Israelis are “settler-colonialists,” and that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors. (On October 7, we all learned what that meant.) It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of color.”

This ideology, powerful in the academy but long overdue for serious challenge, is a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century. But its current engine is the new identity analysis, which sees history through a concept of race that derives from the American experience. The argument is that it is almost impossible for the “oppressed” to be themselves racist, just as it is impossible for an “oppressor” to be the subject of racism. Jews therefore cannot suffer racism, because they are regarded as “white” and “privileged”; although they cannot be victims, they can and do exploit other, less privileged people, in the West through the sins of “exploitative capitalism” and in the Middle East through “colonialism.”

This leftist analysis, with its hierarchy of oppressed identities—and intimidating jargon, a clue to its lack of factual rigor—has in many parts of the academy and media replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians. When this clumsy analysis collides with the realities of the Middle East, it loses all touch with historical facts.

Indeed, it requires an astonishing leap of ahistorical delusion to disregard the record of anti-Jewish racism over the two millennia since the fall of the Judean Temple in 70 C.E. After all, the October 7 massacre ranks with the medieval mass killings of Jews in Christian and Islamic societies, the Khmelnytsky massacres of 1640s Ukraine, Russian pogroms from 1881 to 1920—and the Holocaust. Even the Holocaust is now sometimes misconstrued—as the actor Whoopi Goldberg notoriously did—as being “not about race,” an approach as ignorant as it is repulsive.

Contrary to the decolonizing narrative, Gaza is not technically occupied by Israel—not in the usual sense of soldiers on the ground. Israel evacuated the Strip in 2005, removing its settlements. In 2007, Hamas seized power, killing its Fatah rivals in a short civil war. Hamas set up a one-party state that crushes Palestinian opposition within its territory, bans same-sex relationships, represses women, and openly espouses the killing of all Jews.

Very strange company for leftists.

Of course, some protesters chanting “from the river to the sea” may have no idea what they’re calling for; they are ignorant and believe that they are simply endorsing “freedom.” Others deny that they are pro-Hamas, insisting that they are simply pro-Palestinian—but feel the need to cast Hamas’s massacre as an understandable response to Israeli-Jewish “colonial” oppression. Yet others are malign deniers who seek the death of Israeli civilians.

The toxicity of this ideology is now clear. Once-respectable intellectuals have shamelessly debated whether 40 babies were dismembered or some smaller number merely had their throats cut or were burned alive. Students now regularly tear down posters of children held as Hamas hostages. It is hard to understand such heartless inhumanity. Our definition of a hate crime is constantly expanding, but if this is not a hate crime, what is? What is happening in our societies? Something has gone wrong.

In a further racist twist, Jews are now accused of the very crimes they themselves have suffered. Hence the constant claim of a “genocide” when no genocide has taken place or been intended. Israel, with Egypt, has imposed a blockade on Gaza since Hamas took over, and has periodically bombarded the Strip in retaliation for regular rocket attacks. After more than 4,000 rockets were fired by Hamas and its allies into Israel, the 2014 Gaza War resulted in more than 2,000 Palestinian deaths. More than 7,000 Palestinians, including many children, have died so far in this war, according to Hamas. This is a tragedy—but this is not a genocide, a word that has now been so devalued by its metaphorical abuse that it has become meaningless.

I should also say that Israeli rule of the Occupied Territories of the West Bank is different and, to my mind, unacceptable, unsustainable, and unjust. The Palestinians in the West Bank have endured a harsh, unjust, and oppressive occupation since 1967. Settlers under the disgraceful Netanyahu government have harassed and persecuted Palestinians in the West Bank: 146 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem were killed in 2022 and at least 153 in 2023 before the Hamas attack, and more than 90 since. Again: This is appalling and unacceptable, but not genocide.

Although there is a strong instinct to make this a Holocaust-mirroring “genocide,” it is not: The Palestinians suffer from many things, including military occupation; settler intimidation and violence; corrupt Palestinian political leadership; callous neglect by their brethren in more than 20 Arab states; the rejection by Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, of compromise plans that would have seen the creation of an independent Palestinian state; and so on. None of this constitutes genocide, or anything like genocide. The Israeli goal in Gaza—for practical reasons, among others—is to minimize the number of Palestinian civilians killed. Hamas and like-minded organizations have made it abundantly clear over the years that maximizing the number of Palestinian casualties is in their strategic interest. (Put aside all of this and consider: The world Jewish population is still smaller than it was in 1939, because of the damage done by the Nazis. The Palestinian population has grown, and continues to grow. Demographic shrinkage is one obvious marker of genocide. In total, roughly 120,000 Arabs and Jews have been killed in the conflict over Palestine and Israel since 1860. By contrast, at least 500,000 people, mainly civilians, have been killed in the Syrian civil war since it began in 2011.)

If the ideology of decolonization, taught in our universities as a theory of history and shouted in our streets as self-evidently righteous, badly misconstrues the present reality, does it reflect the history of Israel as it claims to do? It does not. Indeed, it does not accurately describe either the foundation of Israel or the tragedy of the Palestinians.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

In this narrative, Israel is tainted by imperial Britain’s broken promise to deliver Arab independence, and its kept promise to support a “national home for the Jewish people,” in the language of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But the supposed promise to Arabs was in fact an ambiguous 1915 agreement with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who wanted his Hashemite family to rule the entire region. In part, he did not receive this new empire because his family had much less regional support than he claimed. Nonetheless, ultimately Britain delivered three kingdoms—Iraq, Jordan, and Hejaz—to the family.

The imperial powers—Britain and France—made all sorts of promises to different peoples, and then put their own interests first. Those promises to the Jews and the Arabs during World War I were typical. Afterward, similar promises were made to the Kurds, the Armenians, and others, none of which came to fruition. But the central narrative that Britain betrayed the Arab promise and backed the Jewish one is incomplete. In the 1930s, Britain turned against Zionism, and from 1937 to 1939 moved toward an Arab state with no Jewish one at all. It was an armed Jewish revolt, from 1945 to 1948 against imperial Britain, that delivered the state.

Israel exists thanks to this revolt, and to international law and cooperation, something leftists once believed in. The idea of a Jewish “homeland” was proposed in three declarations by Britain (signed by Balfour), France, and the United States, then promulgated in a July 1922 resolution by the League of Nations that created the British “mandates” over Palestine and Iraq that matched French “mandates” over Syria and Lebanon. In 1947, the United Nations devised the partition of the British mandate of Palestine into two states, Arab and Jewish.

The carving of such states out of these mandates was not exceptional, either. At the end of World War II, France granted independence to Syria and Lebanon, newly conceived nation-states. Britain created Iraq and Jordan in a similar way. Imperial powers designed most of the countries in the region, except Egypt.

Nor was the imperial promise of separate homelands for different ethnicities or sects unique. The French had promised independent states for the Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, and Maronites but in the end combined them into Syria and Lebanon. All of these states had been “vilayets” and “sanjaks” (provinces) of the Turkish Ottoman empire, ruled from Constantinople, from 1517 until 1918.

The concept of “partition” is, in the decolonization narrative, regarded as a wicked imperial trick. But it was entirely normal in the creation of 20th-century nation-states, which were typically fashioned out of fallen empires. And sadly, the creation of nation-states was frequently marked by population swaps, huge refugee migrations, ethnic violence, and full-scale wars. Think of the Greco-Turkish war of 1921–22 or the partition of India in 1947. In this sense, Israel-Palestine was typical.

At the heart of decolonization ideology is the categorization of all Israelis, historic and present, as “colonists.” This is simply wrong. Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949. They were not completely new to the region. The Jewish people ruled Judean kingdoms and prayed in the Jerusalem Temple for a thousand years, then were ever present there in smaller numbers for the next 2,000 years. In other words, Jews are indigenous in the Holy Land, and if one believes in the return of exiled people to their homeland, then the return of the Jews is exactly that. Even those who deny this history or regard it as irrelevant to modern times must acknowledge that Israel is now the home and only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for four, five, six generations.

Most migrants to, say, the United Kingdom or the United States are regarded as British or American within a lifetime. Politics in both countries is filled with prominent leaders—Suella Braverman and David Lammy, Kamala Harris and Nikki Haley—whose parents or grandparents migrated from India, West Africa, or South America. No one would describe them as “settlers.” Yet Israeli families resident in Israel for a century are designated as “settler-colonists” ripe for murder and mutilation. And contrary to Hamas apologists, the ethnicity of perpetrators or victims never justifies atrocities. They would be atrocious anywhere, committed by anyone with any history. It is dismaying that it is often self-declared “anti-racists” who are now advocating exactly this murder by ethnicity.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

If the “settler-colonist” narrative is not true, it is true that the conflict is the result of the brutal rivalry and battle for land between two ethnic groups, both with rightful claims to live there. As more Jews moved to the region, the Palestinian Arabs, who had lived there for centuries and were the clear majority, felt threatened by these immigrants. The Palestinian claim to the land is not in doubt, nor is the authenticity of their history, nor their legitimate claim to their own state. But initially the Jewish migrants did not aspire to a state, merely to live and farm in the vague “homeland.” In 1918, the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann met the Hashemite Prince Faisal Bin Hussein to discuss the Jews living under his rule as king of greater Syria. The conflict today was not inevitable. It became so as the communities refused to share and coexist, and then resorted to arms.

Even more preposterous than the “colonizer” label is the “whiteness” trope that is key to the decolonization ideology. Again: simply wrong. Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis—that is, about 5 million people—are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands, people of the Middle East. They are neither “settlers” nor “colonialists” nor “white” Europeans at all but inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo and Beirut for many centuries, even millennia, who were driven out after 1948.

A word about that year, 1948, the year of Israel’s War of Independence and the Palestinian Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which in decolonization discourse amounted to ethnic cleansing. There was indeed intense ethnic violence on both sides when Arab states invaded the territory and, together with Palestinian militias, tried to stop the creation of a Jewish state. They failed; what they ultimately stopped was the creation of a Palestinian state, as intended by the United Nations. The Arab side sought the killing or expulsion of the entire Jewish community—in precisely the murderous ways we saw on October 7. And in the areas the Arab side did capture, such as East Jerusalem, every Jew was expelled.

In this brutal war, Israelis did indeed drive some Palestinians from their homes; others fled the fighting; yet others stayed and are now Israeli Arabs who have the vote in the Israeli democracy. (Some 25 percent of today’s Israelis are Arabs and Druze.) About 700,000 Palestinians lost their homes. That is an enormous figure and a historic tragedy. Starting in 1948, some 900,000 Jews lost their homes in Islamic countries and most of them moved to Israel. These events are not directly comparable, and I don’t mean to propose a competition in tragedy or hierarchy of victimhood. But the past is a lot more complicated than the decolonizers would have you believe.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

It is bizarre that a small state in the Middle East attracts so much passionate attention in the West that students run through California schools shouting “Free Palestine.” But the Holy Land has an exceptional place in Western history. It is embedded in our cultural consciousness, thanks to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the story of Judaism, the foundation of Christianity, the Quran and the creation of Islam, and the Crusades that together have made Westerners feel involved in its destiny. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the real architect of the Balfour Declaration, used to say that the names of places in Palestine “were more familiar to me than those on the Western Front.” This special affinity with the Holy Land initially worked in favor of the Jewish return, but lately it has worked against Israel. Westerners eager to expose the crimes of Euro-American imperialism but unable to offer a remedy have, often without real knowledge of the actual history, coalesced around Israel and Palestine as the world’s most vivid example of imperialist injustice.

The open world of liberal democracies—or the West, as it used to be called—is today polarized by paralyzed politics, petty but vicious cultural feuds about identity and gender, and guilt about historical successes and sins, a guilt that is bizarrely atoned for by showing sympathy for, even attraction to, enemies of our democratic values. In this scenario, Western democracies are always bad actors, hypocritical and neo-imperialist, while foreign autocracies or terror sects such as Hamas are enemies of imperialism and therefore sincere forces for good. In this topsy-turvy scenario, Israel is a living metaphor and penance for the sins of the West. The result is the intense scrutiny of Israel and the way it is judged, using standards rarely attained by any nation at war, including the United States.

But the decolonizing narrative is much worse than a study in double standards; it dehumanizes an entire nation and excuses, even celebrates, the murder of innocent civilians. As these past two weeks have shown, decolonization is now the authorized version of history in many of our schools and supposedly humanitarian institutions, and among artists and intellectuals. It is presented as history, but it is actually a caricature, zombie history with its arsenal of jargon—the sign of a coercive ideology, as Foucault argued—and its authoritarian narrative of villains and victims. And it only stands up in a landscape in which much of the real history is suppressed and in which all Western democracies are bad-faith actors. Although it lacks the sophistication of Marxist dialectic, its self-righteous moral certainty imposes a moral framework on a complex, intractable situation, which some may find consoling. Whenever you read a book or an article and it uses the phrase “settler-colonialist,” you are dealing with ideological polemic, not history.

Ultimately, this zombie narrative is a moral and political cul-de-sac that leads to slaughter and stalemate. That is no surprise, because it is based on sham history: “An invented past can never be used,” wrote James Baldwin. “It cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay.”

Even when the word decolonization does not appear, this ideology is embedded in partisan media coverage of the conflict and suffuses recent condemnations of Israel. The student glee in response to the slaughter at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and other universities; the support for Hamas amongst artists and actors, along with the weaselly equivocations by leaders at some of America’s most famous research institutions, have displayed a shocking lack of morality, humanity, and basic decency.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israel war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The journalist Deborah Ross wrote in a powerful Times of London article that she was “utterly, utterly floored” that the letter contained “no mention of Hamas” and no mention of the “kidnapping and murder of babies, children, grandparents, young people dancing peacefully at a peace festival. The lack of basic compassion and humanity, that’s what was so unbelievably flooring. Is it so difficult? To support and feel for Palestinian citizens … while also acknowledging the indisputable horror of the Hamas attacks?” Then she asked this thespian parade of moral nullities: “What does it solve, a letter like that? And why would anyone sign it?”

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Olso Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

The problem in our countries is easier to fix: Civic society and the shocked majority should now assert themselves. The radical follies of students should not alarm us overmuch; students are always thrilled by revolutionary extremes. But the indecent celebrations in London, Paris, and New York City, and the clear reluctance among leaders at major universities to condemn the killings, have exposed the cost of neglecting this issue and letting “decolonization” colonize our academy.

Parents and students can move to universities that are not led by equivocators and patrolled by deniers and ghouls; donors can withdraw their generosity en masse, and that is starting in the United States. Philanthropists can pull the funding of humanitarian foundations led by people who support war crimes against humanity (against victims selected by race). Audiences can easily decide not to watch films starring actors who ignore the killing of children; studios do not have to hire them. And in our academies, this poisonous ideology, followed by the malignant and foolish but also by the fashionable and well intentioned, has become a default position. It must forfeit its respectability, its lack of authenticity as history. Its moral nullity has been exposed for all to see.

Again, scholars, teachers, and our civil society, and the institutions that fund and regulate universities and charities, need to challenge a toxic, inhumane ideology that has no basis in the real history or present of the Holy Land, and that justifies otherwise rational people to excuse the dismemberment of babies.

Israel has done many harsh and bad things. Netanyahu’s government, the worst ever in Israeli history, as inept as it is immoral, promotes a maximalist ultranationalism that is both unacceptable and unwise. Everyone has the right to protest against Israel’s policies and actions but not to promote terror sects, the killing of civilians, and the spreading of menacing anti-Semitism.

The Palestinians have legitimate grievances and have endured much brutal injustice. But both of their political entities are utterly flawed: the Palestinian Authority, which rules 40 percent of the West Bank, is moribund, corrupt, inept, and generally disdained—and its leaders have been just as abysmal as those of Israel.

Hamas is a diabolical killing sect that hides among civilians, whom it sacrifices on the altar of resistance—as moderate Arab voices have openly stated in recent days, and much more harshly than Hamas’s apologists in the West. “I categorically condemn Hamas’s targeting of civilians,” the Saudi veteran statesman Prince Turki bin Faisal movingly declared last week. “I also condemn Hamas for giving the higher moral ground to an Israeli government that is universally shunned even by half of the Israeli public … I condemn Hamas for sabotaging the attempt of Saudi Arabia to reach a peaceful resolution to the plight of the Palestinian people.” In an interview with Khaled Meshaal, a member of the Hamas politburo, the Arab journalist Rasha Nabil highlighted Hamas’s sacrifice of its own people for its political interests. Meshaal argued that this was just the cost of resistance: “Thirty million Russians died to defeat Germany,” he said.

Read: Understanding Hamas’s genocidal ideology

Nabil stands as an example to Western journalists who scarcely dare challenge Hamas and its massacres. Nothing is more patronizing and even Orientalist than the romanticization of Hamas’s butchers, whom many Arabs despise. The denial of their atrocities by so many in the West is an attempt to fashion acceptable heroes out of an organization that dismembers babies and defiles the bodies of murdered girls. This is an attempt to save Hamas from itself. Perhaps the West’s Hamas apologists should listen to moderate Arab voices instead of a fundamentalist terror sect.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself— because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

So the war unfolds tragically. As I write this, the pounding of Gaza is killing Palestinian children every day, and that is unbearable. As Israel still grieves its losses and buries its children, we deplore the killing of Israeli civilians just as we deplore the killing of Palestinian civilians. We reject Hamas, evil and unfit to govern, but we do not mistake Hamas for the Palestinian people, whose losses we mourn as we mourn the death of all innocents.

In the wider span of history, sometimes terrible events can shake fortified positions: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made peace after the Yom Kippur War; Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat made peace after the Intifada. The diabolical crimes of October 7 will never be forgotten, but perhaps, in the years to come, after the scattering of Hamas, after Netanyahuism is just a catastrophic memory, Israelis and Palestinians will draw the borders of their states, tempered by 75 years of killing and stunned by one weekend’s Hamas butchery, into mutual recognition. There is no other way.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of Jerusalem: The Biography and most recently The World: A Family History of Humanity.

#israeli palestinian conflict #israel #palestine #decolonize

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 6 months

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By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Published: Oct 27, 2023

Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

How can educated people justify such callousness and embrace such inhumanity? All sorts of things are at play here, but much of the justification for killing civilians is based on a fashionable ideology, “decolonization,” which, taken at face value, rules out the negotiation of two states—the only real solution to this century of conflict—and is as dangerous as it is false.

Very strange company for leftists.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

One repellent example was an open letter signed by thousands of artists, including famous British actors such as Tilda Swinton and Steve Coogan. It warned against imminent Israeli war crimes and totally ignored the casus belli: the slaughter of 1,400 people.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has used the murder of civilians to spoil any chance of a two-state solution. In 1993, its suicide bombings of Israeli civilians were designed to destroy the two-state Oslo Accords that recognized Israel and Palestine. This month, the Hamas terrorists unleashed their slaughter in part to undermine a peace with Saudi Arabia that would have improved Palestinian politics and standard of life, and reinvigorated Hamas’s sclerotic rival, the Palestinian Authority. In part, they served Iran to prevent the empowering of Saudi Arabia, and their atrocities were of course a spectacular trap to provoke Israeli overreaction. They are most probably getting their wish, but to do this they are cynically exploiting innocent Palestinian people as a sacrifice to political means, a second crime against civilians. In the same way, the decolonization ideology, with its denial of Israel’s right to exist and its people’s right to live safely, makes a Palestinian state less likely if not impossible.

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of Jerusalem: The Biography and most recently The World: A Family History of Humanity.

Intersectionality and Postcolonial Theory have always been bogus and fraudulent, even just at the level of US society, where they were concocted by ignorant idiots and ideologues. The fact people are using them to interpret geopolitics - but not, for example, Syria or Nigeria - is idiotic and a failure of education. Or, more accurately, the capture and corruption of education, as this is not accidental.

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aimmyarrowshigh · 1 year

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How can you support SALS and also the OTW racism thing? I'm not saying racism is okay, but if all content is okay then all content is okay.

They're not related to each other at all.

The kind of racist content that #EndOTWRacism is talking about violates the most important tenet of the "fandom guidelines" that probably spurred this ask: DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE. If someone is intentionally trying to make fandom unsafe for fans of color, then they are BEING AN ASSHOLE.

Tagging the full, legal name of a scholar of color who called out your pro-Nazi non-fanfic for being pro-Nazi and not a transformative work in the first place, is being an asshole. I don't care that they're shipping their two OCs. I care that they were doxxing a real human being. The issue is not "ship and let ship," it's that this person was BEING AN ASSHOLE.

Writing a fic where you turn a white villain into a Native character for the sole purpose of having him abduct and rape your white protagonist is BEING AN ASSHOLE. Was it a ship that I personally hate? Yes. But the issues with that fic were not that it was the ship that I hate, it was that they intentionally used Native identity as a shorthand for "violent rapist," which is obviously racist. And he's already a rapist in canon as a white guy. I don't have to like the ship to let them ship it. But the issue here wasn't the ship. It was the racism.

Writing a fic where the very recent devastation of a Black community and deaths of thousands of Black people is the vaguely-mentioned background for your two white guys to fall in love and bone down is BEING AN ASSHOLE. Especially when, after people tell you that you're being insensitive and racist, you double down on it being "the best fic idea ever." The issue here was not the ship, which was a hugely popular fandom juggernaut of two white cishet dudes. It was the racism.

Writing a fic where you only ever refer to half of your interracial ship by a racial slur is BEING AN ASSHOLE. If you can't think of any descriptors for a Middle Eastern character besides a slur, then you aren't ready as a person to be writing about a character from the MENA. The issue here isn't the ship, which is, again, a fandom juggernaut, and also canon. It's the racism.

Writing fics where you insist that a character of color is actually white because you don't like ~when politics mix into your space opera and he's too hot to be a person of color anyway~ is BEING AN ASSHOLE, and also it's being racist even if you're shipping him (nay, especially if you're shipping him) with another character of color. Whitewashing a character to make them more palatable to you is obviously racist.

Writing a fic where the only person of color in your boy band is a drugged out, terrible person is BEING AN ASSHOLE. Especially when dude, there are videos of the white guys in the band doing drugs. The issue is not any ship involved, it's the racism.

Now, do I, personally, as a Jewish white person, think that all of those were written with the INTENT of making fandom unsafe for fans of color? Probably not -- I think that the last one was borne of unconscious racism, not intentionally malicious racism. Probably. But that doesn't make it Not Racist. And it doesn't make fandom safer for fans of color to give it the benefit of the doubt.

But most of these? Were literally written TO MAKE FANDOM UNSAFE FOR FANS OF COLOR. To punish fans of color for daring to state opinions about the racism that they've faced from a certain fandom or fan or set of shippers. You do not accidentally doxx a scholar of color in your tags. You do not accidentally HAPPEN to change a white villain's race to make them more villainous. You don't accidentally use a litany of slurs to write about a character of color.

I think that there are more accidentally-racist fics on AO3 than there are intentionally, maliciously racist fics. I've written some fics that are accidentally racist myself, and I've learned from being called out and I can only ever try to do better. #EndOTWRacism is not about getting people banned forever from ever writing anything ever again because they grew up steeped in structural racism and it translated in some way to their writing. It's about a) holding AO3 and the OTW accountable for their promise to hire a diversity consultant, and b) making fandom safer for fans of color when these INTENTIONAL, MALICIOUS acts of racism DO happen. Because they are not the same thing as "someone wrote an icky ship."

Also, frankly, because I've seen this argued, too -- fandom is not meant to be a space for children. So arguing that "well then we need to put in place policies to protect children and make them safer in fandom" is a specious comparison. Fandom has never been for children, it's still not for children, and it'll never be for children. AO3 is not a space that children belong in. It's not designed for children. It's not for them.

But it's also not a space that is For Whites Only. And if the OTW doesn't want it to come across like it's a space For Whites Only, they need to follow through and hire the diversity consultant and recognize that intentional, targeted acts of overt racism *against real fellow fans* are not the same thing as dumb reports about a ship being icky, and they can't treat them both with the same velvet gloves.

If a child under 13 gets onto AO3, lies their way into seeing Snape/Harry content, and feels gross about it, that is on them for lying and on their caregiver for letting them onto an adult site unsupervised. AO3 is not for children. If that child, or their guardian, then makes a report to Abuse that someone who wasn't supposed to be on AO3 bypassed the safeguards set up by AO3 and saw something that is allowed on AO3, that's a them problem.

If an adult fan of color gets onto AO3 and sees that they have been doxxed in the tags of a story, or that their community's dead bodies are being used as fodder for a white-guy love story, or clicks into a fic for a ship they like and are confronted with whitewashing or slurs, and they make a report to Abuse, there needs to be a mechanism in place to make the person who IS MEANT TO BE ON THE SITE safer. Whether that's adding a Warning category for Racism, a way for users to flag a work for being racist and having some kind of pop-up or something show up, better block and mute features, suspending users who doxx or otherwise engage in targeted harassment campaigns, or some combo of the above, the adult fan of color BELONGS on AO3. Their experience being unsafe is an AO3 problem.

It has nothing to do with shipping. No one is saying that everyone who ships Steve/Bucky instead of Sam/Bucky is going to get a big asterisk on their profile that says, "RACIST BECAUSE THEY SHIP A BAD SHIP." But if you write a fic where you kill off Sam in a grotesque way SO THAT Steve and Bucky fall in love? Yeah, that's racist and you're not a safe writer for fans of color to be around.

"But how do I know if I'm being racist???"

RULE #1: DON'T BE AN ASSHOLE. If you're Not An Asshole, then your mistakes are just mistakes. If you're Being An Asshole, then that's a problem, not a mistake.

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nicklloydnow · 11 months

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“Whatever the enormous complexities and challenges of bringing about this future, one truth should be obvious among decent people: killing 1,400 people and kidnapping more than 200, including scores of civilians, was deeply wrong. The Hamas attack resembled a medieval Mongol raid for slaughter and human trophies—except it was recorded in real time and published to social media. Yet since October 7, Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program. Some of this is happening out in the open, some behind the masks of humanitarianism and justice, and some in code, most famously “from the river to the sea,” a chilling phrase that implicitly endorses the killing or deportation of the 9 million Israelis. It seems odd that one has to say: Killing civilians, old people, even babies, is always wrong. But today say it one must.

Very strange company for leftists.

(…)

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

(…)

Hamas’s atrocities place it, like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, as an abomination beyond tolerance. Israel, like any state, has the right to defend itself, but it must do so with great care and minimal civilian loss, and it will be hard even with a full military incursion to destroy Hamas. Meanwhile, Israel must curb its injustices in the West Bank—or risk destroying itself—because ultimately it must negotiate with moderate Palestinians.

(…)

“The idea in this case is “settler colonialism,” a term that appears often in the pro-Hamas statements collected by the Anti-Defamation League. Various chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America have decried “settler-colonial, Zionist apartheid” and called to “decolonize Palestine—from the river to the sea,” a slogan that, by invoking the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, calls for the elimination of the state of Israel. Mondoweiss, an anti-Israel online publication, has called the Hamas attack “part of the Palestinians’ century-long struggle for liberation” from “Zionist/Israeli settler colonialism.”

Like all theoretical terms, “settler colonialism” can mean different things to different people. But most who use it would probably agree with the definition offered by Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute: “a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population.” The paradigm case is the European colonization of the Americas, where over centuries many indigenous peoples were displaced or killed as Europeans took their land.

(…)

What makes settler colonialism a potent political concept is that, as the Cornell definition says, it is “a system rather than a historical event.” In other words, the displacement of the indigenous population is not something that happened centuries ago but something that is still being perpetrated today, by all the non-indigenous inhabitants of the land and by the culture and institutions they have created.

The Southern Poverty Law Center makes this point clearly in its magazine Learning for Justice: “Understanding settler-colonialism means understanding that all non-Indigenous people are settler-colonizers, whether they were born here or not. Understanding settler-colonialism as both a historical position and a present-day practice helps students see how they fit into a settler-colonial system—and how that system shapes the impact of their actions, regardless of their intent.”

This principle makes today’s anticolonial ideology more radical than the anticolonial movements of the post-World War II era. At that time, national liberation struggles in Africa and Asia were directed mainly against European powers that did not settle the territories they ruled. When the Viet Minh fought the French in Vietnam, or the Congolese National Movement fought the Belgians in Congo, they wanted to reclaim national sovereignty from foreign rulers who had no connection to the country other than the right of conquest.

Freeing a settler-colonial society is a very different prospect, since it would presumably mean expelling many millions of people who were born in the land they are said to have colonized. Modern Jewish settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, English settlement of North America in the 1600s. If the descendants of those first arrivals are still considered settlers in 2023, then the word no longer has its ordinary meaning. Instead it is a permanent, inheritable marker of guilt, like “bourgeois” as a class label in the Soviet Union.

Under the workers’ regime, a bourgeois was not a person who owned a certain amount of property, but anyone whose background indicated that they might be hostile to the working class. That put them outside the realm of moral concern, and they could be killed for any reason or none. The reaction of many anticolonial activists to the massacre of Israelis suggests that a similar logic is at work today.

Even advocates of anticolonial ideology know that there is no prospect of actually “decolonizing” the U.S. The most they hope for is symbolic expressions like Native American land acknowledgments, which have become standard practice at many academic and arts institutions. These statements are often historically ill-informed, but they are not really about historical facts. They advance a political thesis: that in a just world, every territory would be occupied only by the people who belong there.

Ironically, while anticolonialism conceives of itself as a progressive, left-wing ideology, this understanding of the relationship between people and land is similar to that of fascism, which was also obsessed with the categories of native and alien. The Nazi slogan “blood and soil” conveyed the idea that German land could only truly belong to its primeval inhabitants.

Anticolonialists would of course reject this analogy. But they are proudly indebted to Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born French writer whose analysis of anticolonial struggle was born from the Algerian rebellion against French rule in the 1950s. For Fanon, a psychologist, anticolonial movements must be violent, not only because they lack other means of achieving their goals but because violence itself is redemptive and therapeutic. “The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence,” Fanon wrote in his classic 1961 book “The Wretched of the Earth.” “For the colonized people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities.”

When Western sympathizers excuse or endorse the actions of Hamas, it is because they see it in these terms, as a liberation movement fighting a settler-colonial regime. And it is true that Hamas frames its struggle in terms of indigenous rights and redemptive violence—though sympathizers usually overlook the fact that it understands these things in religious fundamentalist terms, which are totally incompatible with other left-wing commitments like LGBTQ rights.

The group’s charter, adopted in 1988, declares that only Muslims are indigenous to the land that is now Israel, so Jews can never belong there: “The land of Palestine is an Islamic endowment consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day.” Likewise, it states that “peaceful solutions…are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement” and that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.”

Hatred of settler colonialism, like hatred of capitalism among communist revolutionaries, believes that it is morally impeccable because it is grounded in genuinely moral instincts: indignation at violence and oppression, hope for freedom and equality. It seems perverse that such instincts should lead to approving the mass murder of children and the elderly.

But like other totalizing ideologies, anticolonialism contains all the elements needed for moral derangement: the permanent division of the world into innocent people and guilty people; the belief that history can be fixed once and for all, if violence is applied in the right way; the idea that the world is a battlefield and everyone is a combatant, whether they realize it or not.

Most observers of the conflict in Israel-Palestine, regardless of whose “side” they are on, don’t fall into these traps. But those who do are increasingly vocal—a bad sign for the future of peaceful coexistence, and not only in the Middle East.”

“Since the “decolonization” agenda is meant only to target Western nations and peoples, you rarely hear of the conquests and empire-building of the non-Western world, which is conveniently forgotten behind a narrative of pervasive victimization.

All of human history is a story of never-ending layers of conquest and defeat and of migration and exile. If it were to be undone, we’d need to extirpate almost all peoples everywhere, including those who are currently portrayed as the hopelessly oppressed.

The earliest phase of the seventh-century Arab expansion was truly explosive, and then it continued at a slower but still impressive clip.

Indeed, it is one of the most sweeping acts of conquest and successful exercises in colonialism in world history. This wasn’t the Mongols driving all before them and then receding to leave little in their trace, or the Normans getting absorbed into the England they conquered. No, the Arabs followed up their military conquest with a cultural imperialism still felt today.

The Arabs would gobble up Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. They chipped away at the Byzantine Empire and launched a no-kidding effort to conquer it wholesale that fell short after two epic sieges of Constantinople. They basically took all of the Persian empire. Eventually, they assembled an empire with the greatest territorial extent since the Romans, encompassing 80 percent of the population of the Middle East and North Africa and reaching to the south of France.

(…)

Its armies “appeared everywhere from central Asia, through the Middle East and north Africa, throughout the Visigothic Iberian Peninsula, and even into southern France.” Everywhere they conquered, they put in place “Islamic governments and introduced new ways of living, trading, learning, thinking, building, and praying.”

And of speaking and writing. The caliph Abd al-Malik imposed Arabic as the official language of the empire, an act of the highest cultural significance, since Arabic and Islam were so intertwined. “Arabization,” Jones writes, “was gradually followed by conversion across the Muslim-held territories—a shift that can still be seen, felt, and heard in almost every part of the old caliphate in the twenty-first century.”

Once they had Islam foisted on them, these territories, by and large, never went back, except in the cases of Spain, Portugal, and Sicily.

In the Levant, in particular, as the archaeologist and historian Alex Joffe writes, there was an imperial project that included bringing in new people. Settlers came of their own volition or were moved there by political authorities, Joffe notes, including Egyptians in the early 19th century and Chechens, Circassians, and Turkmen at the hands of the Ottomans later in the century.

A Hamas official once said, “Half of the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.”

Should all this shuffling of population be reversed? Should the land conquered by the Arabs so long ago go back to the Byzantines or Persians, or their legatees? What do Ben and Jerry think?

Obviously, the decolonizers don’t care about any of this, or the fate of the Kurds, Assyrians, and Amazighs, peoples who have suffered more recently from the Arabization of the broader region.

What they really favor is another act of Arab colonization to eliminate the Jewish people, who must succumb, finally and completely, to the long tide of Islamization and Arabization “from the river to the sea.” This isn’t a principled adherence to the rights of indigenous people or a respect for ancient homelands, but Lenin’s notorious formulation, “who whom,” in a different context.”

#israel #gaza #hamas #palestine #war #antisemitism #anti zionisim #racism #wokeism #decolonisation #montefiore #simon sebag montefiore #Lowry #rich lowry #settler colonialism #fanon #franz fanon #marx #karl marx

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dumbestthingiveeverheard · 1 year

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Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard: 7/24/2023

Fifth Place: Elon Musk

I'm sure most people saw that Elon Musk has changed Twitter's name from Twitter--one of the most recognizable names on the internet--to "X" the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet. What exactly caused Musk to think this was a good idea is currently up for debate, but many are calling it another misstep--because it so obviously is.

To give everyone an idea of just how nonsensical this is from a business standpoint: Imagine if McDonald's woke up one day and decided to change its name from the highly well known one they've had since their founding, to "P." Just the letter P, nothing else.

Fourth Place: Ben Shapiro

I would like to thank Matthew Gertz on the platform now known as "X" for compiling these four images which I think perfectly sum up the disconnect between how conservatives think America works and how it actually works.

Third Place: Matt Walsh

Xing--which I assume is what we will now call tweeting--today, Matt had the following to say about feminism:

Anyway, here's Matt back in March:

So the owning of other human beings as property has been a net benefit to civilization, but not giving women the right to vote, open bank accounts on their own, work outside the home, and be able to report both sexual harassment and rape. Mockery--and possibly revealing information about how Matt views the world--aside: What does it even mean for a movement or ideology to kill a person? What possible metric could you be using to justify such a statement?

Second Place: Paul Gosar

Media Matters reported today that Gosar previously used his official newsletter to promote USSA News, a website which has engaged in Holocaust Denial. Postings from the website include:

USSA News on July 22 posted: “David Cole, a Jew, explores Auschwitz and debunks the claims that it was an industrial death camp – still on youtube for now but as more countries outlaw questioning the ‘holocaust’, it is uploaded here in case it is removed to censor inconvenient evidence.”

USSA News on July 21 posted: “Making Adolf Hitler into a Jewish-controlled agent is quite a brilliant plot by International Jewry to divert newcomers away from learning the true history & background of National Socialism (Slavery). Don’t be fooled! … Stand up for Hitler and National Socialism (Slavery)!!” The piece then promoted content on Renegade Tribune, a neo-Nazi site.

USSA News on July 20 posted an article from the antisemitic site Unz Review attacking Jewish people, which begins by stating: “Untrue stories exist at each end of Jewish history’s three thousand years – fictional, fabricated and of immense magnitude.” It then claimed: “Towards the end of the 20th century as belief in the origin stories was fading away, the Holohoax morphed into a fearsome modern religion, in which belief is compulsory.”

USSA News on July 17 lionized Hitler by writing that “the Kalergi Plan consists of the genocide of white people through miscegenation and mass immigration of non-whites to Europe. … Hitler was aware of Kalergi’s plan and did everything in his power to prevent it. Like Gobineau, Hitler considered the Aryan race to be the noblest, the best armed for the struggle for existence, the most beautiful, the most energetic, and the one with the greatest amount of creative genius. What this race lost by mixing it was not compensated by what the others gained by ennoblement.”

I decided to check the website myself, and just today I found an article with the headline "God Is An Anti-Semite" which begins by showing this cartoon.

For those curious, that comic was made by a man named Farstar, here's some information about him according to a Wordpress blog sharing his name:

Farstar88 is a Fascist artist from South Africa who specialises in political cartoons as well as comics in order to provide a much needed narrative that is ruthlessly suppressed and excluded from mainstream consciousness. In a world of political correctness gone completely insane, telling a contrary story even if it is more than sufficiently backed up by facts, is considered an act of aggression and the victims apparently are those whose feelings get hurt when they can’t have their way.

You know, Paul Gosar hasn't really been subtle with his authoritarian leanings over the past few years, this is the man who buddies around with known fascist Nick Fuentes remember, but at some point you have to wonder--why doesn't he just come out and admit it? These aren't people with shaky pasts that you have to dig real deep to find information on, that bit about Farstar--I learned that in about three minutes through Google. At this point, one has to wonder what he has to loose by just loudly declaring that he is, in fact, a fascist--especially given everybody already knows that by this point.

Winner: Ron DeSantis

Speaking of fascists, DeSantis's campaign gave another shout out to its fascist supporters over the weekend through a staffer retweeting a campaign ad with this image of DeSantis superimposed over a fascist symbol.

Again, one has to even wonder why they try to hide it anymore.

Ron DeSantis, you've done the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

#elon musk #ben shapiro #matt walsh #paul gosar #ron desantis

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antiradqueer · 1 year

Note

So I see this blog on rare occasions and I don't interact bc I'm proship. So apologies if I am breaking any DNIs. But I was previously in the radqueer community and I left only two weeks ago. It was fucking disgusting. They are very much anti recovery and anti "no contact paraphiles". It was disgusting because I struggle with impulsive thoughts about the big 3 paraphilias and they were constantly telling me "Oh, it's normal to be pro contact and fuck kids/animals/dead people". I literally went to therapy bc I wanted to kill myself for my thoughts and they were trying to get me to *destroy* my progress. Hell, I was in radqueer discord servers and it was a hellscape. One of them (labeled "Radqueer HQ"/"RQHQ") literally had channels for simping over *real children and animals* and encouraged children to simp for adults. A few others were also very inclusive of transnazis and transharmful identities and would not listen to "cis" Jewish people like myself. It was very hateful and disgusting.

They also would label things as transids when there's so many better ways to explain shit. "Transseverity", " transtrauma", literally almost any "transabled" bs? That's literally based on the ableist idea that you need to be a certain level of disabled to be a "real" disabled person. "Transspecies"? Welcome to being otherkin. Ik that's a stolen term from otherkin and therians, but it's just so associated with them now that it's ruined. "Transrace"? Pretty much just fetishizing a race. The only context I can imagine it is if you're mixed race and only raised as a single race (which was my case), but even then you literally do not need to label it as "transrace". They're just appropriating an actual term for adoptees. Also, transpersonality, translocation, ect is all just bullshit. Literally the only transid I can relate to is transage, but only on the same level as otherkin. Chrosonian is a much better term for this tho.

I still struggle with hating myself for being in that cult. It was genuinely disgusting and turned me into a person I hate. And you know what? It doesn't make me a racist/ableist/conservative asshole for not being okay with it.

-🌌🐱

Ps: I'm rlly drunk at this moment so I have thoughts and anger(tm)

dw the only real dni here is rqs, i just put that there so people dont start asking

yeah i get what you mean, im sorry you had to go through their shit. i hope you can get through it all /gen

#🌌🐱#suicide mention #tw suicide mention #ask to tag #ill fix tags later #anti radqueer #anti transid #anti transabled #antiradqueer #anti transrace #anti trace #anti transx

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little-klng · 2 years

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look honestly the thing no one really thinks about with the content of the stupid wizard game (prof fig dies and rookwood cursed anne while framing the goblins btw) is that the game itself isnt transphobic beyond like... one single trans character having a dumb name. like, its not directly transphobic aside from the royalties going to jkr get put straight into trans eugenics legislation, but we already knew that and its not related to the games actual content or why it exists. it doesnt matter that the game sucks, that its buggy and barely functions, that it funds transphobia, it doesnt even necessarily matter that "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" (not what that means and it doesnt even apply here). primarily it serves one function, pushing radf*ms (censored to avoid tags) further down the radicalization into alt right, qanon, and neonazi pipeline

the game is marketed mainly to transphobes who will throw whatever amount of money at the first thing some shitty childrens book author who fell off 10 years ago and currently floats her career and reputation on ragebait says will "own the libs/troons". while it doesnt contain any actual transphobia (just promising to fund it), the main message, themes, and story are explicitly pro slavery and antisemitic, and are designed to put you, the player, in the position of a "master race" that has "the right to own slaves" and the slaves "love being enslaved" except when "the hook nosed bank controlling elite" try to "convince" the slaves "to rebel against their masters" in an effort to "destroy and take control over the whi-[COUGH]wizard race". its just blanket coverage over every white supremacist and neonazi conspiracy belief and then gamifying it for the enjoyment of transphobes. and because jkr juices up her fandom on the ragebait so hard that she gets them hungry for whatever political statements shes gonna feed them next, they're just gonna eat that shit up because "troons mad"

we all already know transphobes are just conservatives with a stupid feminism hat, we already know their basis for hating trans people is one singular step away (and most of the time not even that) from white supremacist eugenics and phrenology. you take one single look at "transvestigators" and realize just how bad it really is with them and demanding exclusively eurocentric "pretty and femme" white standards of beauty to even be considered a passing cis woman, its not even subtle. this game doesnt actually have any of that, its just the end piece of the pipeline getting installed for turning transphobes into qanon neonazis, turning their hatred of trans people and trans activists (or basically just anyone who doesnt pass their specific idea of eurocentric traditional gender/sex) into hatred of anyone who isnt "pure" white and christian, which just feeds straight into the "master race/slave race/elite controller" ideology that nazism comes from. transphobes playing this game dont talk about the slavery or the weird way the plot centers around putting down a civil rights movement or the way it belittles "lesser races" for wanting "their worthless artefacts [sic] back" (goblins and their "horn for rallying troops and annoying wizards" with a wedge of cheese shoved in it to mute it, anyone? thats a shofar, which is a jewish rams horn trumpet used during high holidays)

"pureblood"/"mudblood" is already an established part of wizarding world lore as "pureblooded wizards" vs "nasty mixed-blooded wizards", which is already white supremacist anti-interracial bullshit that jkr fully and unironically roots for. this is the same woman that named her only black character "Kingsley Shackebolt" and wrote a slave race to actually love being enslaved and not mind seeing their taxidermied friends heads on the walls getting decorated with santa hats over the holidays. its not surprising that shes a nazi at all, and i feel like all the people who are (rightfully, dont get me wrong) talking about it funding transphobia are not giving the antisemitism/nazism/pro slavery portions of the content enough credit in making this game evolve from "shitty childrens media IP game that barely functions and would be irrelevant by next week" to "$60 ticket on the radf*m to slave cop nazi pipline that is steam+ps5's most preordered game of all time".

its to radf*ms and transphobes what tucker carlson is to your parents, and what rush limbaugh was to your grandparents, and what turning point usa is to your college frat siblings, and what ben shapiro is to your highschool debate team cousins. shitty content designed to make you mad and slowly melts your brain until you're a paranoid wretch that cant stop seeing The Elite Agenda(tm) everywhere you look until you're willing to drop thousands on donations to anyone and anything that promises to protect your freedom to say slurs on the internet and make teenagers kill themselves for being weird. its just not often that it skips a lot of the dogwhistling and just straight up gives you an escapist fantasy where you're a part of the aryan master race and those stupid pesky slaves keep asking for "freedoms" and "equality" because all those evil jews keep trying to tell them what they're missing out on by not genociding white people instead, and you get to violently murder as many as you want to preserve the status quo

tl;dr transphobia is hand-in-hand with alt right conservatism and nazism and this game is just one more stepping stone added to an already decently clear path between the two points. if you paid $60 for a game that barely works because "troons mad", your dignity is pathetically affordable and its no ones fault but yours that you're officially the type of person who would pay money for the ability to own your own slaves and kill jewish people the first chance you get. did you know nazis during the 1930s and 40s offered financial rewards to people turning people in to the government? just thought that was an interesting fact

btw dont reply to this post with some bullshit "well im gonna pirate it so its fine" or "you're just making it more popular by talking about it" im a tumblr blog with less than 1000 followers and its the #1 most preordered game on steam and the ps5 store, and if you insist on still playing master race slave owner simulator through piracy then its whatever, i can just put you with the hundreds of transphobes on my blocklist so you can get along and play together in a nice farm upstate and away from me

#please use the replies instead of reposts i would rather not have this post breach containment. hp fans are super fucking annoying #read a different book. you can even just read better kids books if you insist.#to be perfectly clear im not saying that 'the transphobia doesnt matter' im saying 'the transphobia isnt the point. its just the vehicle #which picks up the intended target audience and drives them to their destination at nazism'#tumblr only tracks the first 5 tags so im just wasting an extra one so i can put my filter tags without it getting caught by trackers #jkr #jk rowling #antisemitism #nazism #racism #transphobia #hogwarts legacy #harry potter #<- filter tags

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shit-talk-turner · 1 year

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/jesuismusique.com/2019/10/19/louise-verneuil/%3famp=1

I didn’t need to see this but unfortunately I did and I cringed SO hard. This interview is the cringiest shit she’s ever said/done. How much she wants to mention “her man”? Q: Essential piece of outfit / something she always packs and can’t part ways with? “de chemise mon homme” / “la chemise parfumée mon amoureux” (the shirt of my man, the perfumed shirt of my lover) Q: the perfume of the perfumes? “Celui de mon homme” (that of my man) 🤢🤮 ok girl we get it. She also said she’s “still very superstitious and mystical with an Andalusian great-grandmother” 🤭🤐🙄 then she says “et jouer les Lolita en soirée” fucking HELL. She wants to “play Lolita in the evening”? Girl, you’re in your 30s. Grow the fuck up. And romanticizing/glamorizing Lolita? Well actually not really surprised since she loves Jane/Serge and Jane herself said “Serge hit me with a ruler. God, was it painful” 🙄🤮 this woman loves to glamorize abuse and she thinks she’s a feminist. then she says “vulgarity” is the “unpardonable lack of taste” which is, um, … has she forgotten she’d posted pictures of herself with brown teeth (chocolate I guess), sucking someone’s tongue and giving her bf a blowjob in a booth? Or she thinks that’s classy? Q: most stylish male artist? “Many have left unfortunately, but my man (“mon homme” again) remains the most handsome” 🙄 she also mentions Nico at least twice as her icon, and if you already don’t know, Nico’s friend said she was “Nazi-esque”, she attacked a mixed race woman with a smashed glass wine in her eye and said “I hate black people.” She also told an interviewer she hates “n*gros” (sorry) and they have “features like animals” and she was “capable of very casual racism about Alan [Wise] who was Jewish” …. Q: would you pose for a naked poster or cover? “Oui oui oui et re-oui (yes, yes) everyone remembers it” she really gave herself away in this one, she wants everyone to remember something she’s done. Yet she had the audacity to say in an interview later that she doesn’t want “celebrity” .. sorry this is so long but let it stay here as another part of “why louise sucks” and why many people don’t like her.

Yikes

#Why Louise sucks

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sage-advice-wrapped-in-rice · 2 years

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Currently listeing to a bunch of idiots in my dorm common room justify why they like a whole bunch of problematic artists, one of which is Kanye West. Never have I felt more stealth mode than I do right now(I’m Jewish). I also love one of their commentaries on how he’s only been listening to “minority music” lately and “good on [his] parents for only putting minority music on when [he] was a kid”. On top of that I don’t even think these kids live here. Not sure how they got in considering you need a special key card to enter the building. What the actual fuck lmao

Edit from not even two seconds after I posted this: they just found out Steve Lacy is mixed race and it was a very heated discussion. They also found out that Bruno Mars isn’t entirely Filipino and they’re losing their minds. This is a real quote one of them actually said “but he doesn’t look Jewish”. The response “well his dad’s only half Jewish so that’s probably why”. It took everything in my power not to ask them what they think Jewish people look like. A later quote “He probably gets his darker coloring from his puerto rican side”. The response *with sarcasm* “oh really not from being Jewish?” Dawg holy shit. I’m fighting demons.

Edit from not even two seconds after I posted my update: The guy of the group(there are tow girls and one guy) has now declared he would never want to date someone within his own major because he “doesn’t want to compare his own intelligence to [theirs]” and somehow the women are agreeing. As I’m typing this he’s also talking about how he doesn’t want to date a woman who comes from money or makes more money than him because “he’s used to living a certain way” and they’re being like “yeah mhm I understand”. This isn’t real.

Edit from not even two seconds after I posted my update to the update: They were still on this topic of socioeconomic status in a realtionship and the guy has agreed to date someone who makes less money than him then this happened. Girl 1: “what if the girl was like begging on the street” Guy: “I feel like if you’re like begging on the street then you’re......not really trying”. I’m not even doing my homework anymore I’m solely invested in this conversation. I’m gonna have to go to bed soon but I really don’t want to.

#college #dorm #music #crazy #jewish #bruno mars #steve lacy

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rotzaprachim · 3 years

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#look it's been a weird few days and i think for me serious reflection on parasocial and cult like dynamics on this webbed site but also just #. leftblr and left social media in general #and how i genuinely have a pretty deep regret at things i followed along with or just went. oh that's someone else whos' In the Trenches'#politics that's THEIR EXPERIENCE rather than trusting my own gut and experience #but posting and dealing with anything genuinely is so loaded right now that a) solidly less than 20% of the content and discussion going on #is about what IMHO needs to be on the table which is the fact the person in general became a MASSIVE political influence on this site #ship drama i don't care. tankie politics combined with presenting themselves as a massive expert on decolonial leftist praxis #and pan africanism as well as mixing in some fairly antisemitic content. that i DO #but it's being swallowed out by people who want to start diving into race science or blame deflection and that makes it.... so much harder #to pick apart.#as one of the actual mixed race actual jewish people here (and there are not that many of us) it is SO difficult to pick apart because #suddenly all these white people on either side of the argument have all these unseen jewish friends and friends of color they want to pull o #out and virtue signal with. and it sucks #it sucks because a huge part of the person in questions' popularity to begin with came from them addressing in some way actual issues within #fandom. racism has always been an issue in this fandom. from the start. it's been an issue #if there hadn't been that foothold for them to begin with they wouldn't have gotten where they did. which is not an apology for their behavi #our in any way. or my own. but it is an important recognition of the multi causal issues that Got Us Here #so yeah. i would say a lot more on this issue and len's specific politics but it would requrie diving into what are IMHO genuinely some of #THE MOST nuanced political issues in the modern left and that's not what fandom's into right now when i see takes like the ones i saw this #morning and people want to rebut her with a top joe pornathon or whatever

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 11 months

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By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Published: Oct 27, 2023

Very strange company for leftists.

According to the decolonizers, Israel is and always has been an illegitimate freak-state because it was fostered by the British empire and because some of its founders were European-born Jews.

Those on the left believe migrants who escape from persecution should be welcomed and allowed to build their lives elsewhere. Almost all of the ancestors of today’s Israelis escaped persecution.

Out of this imbroglio, one state emerged, Israel, and one did not, Palestine. Its formation is long overdue.

The Israel-Palestine conflict is desperately difficult to solve, and decolonization rhetoric makes even less likely the negotiated compromise that is the only way out.

The current moment is what happens when you get your information from courses ending in "Studies."

#Simon Sebag Montefiore #Israel #Hamas #Palestine #islam #jihad #islamic terrorism #terrorist organizations #religion #decolonization #decolonize palestine #decolonize #decolonise palestine #defund gender studies #religion is a mental illness

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