I missed that he was the ambassador. Or I tried to forget. I swear that the last time I saw him he was flogging Relaxium on TV.
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I wish he were still doing that kind of grifting shit. I wish all of these incompetent, violent, genocidal assholes who are fucking giddy over destroying our entire planet were relegated to the absolute fucking margins of society and no one took them seriously, and no one wanted to empower themâŚ
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Cross post in world politics
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rhetoric dehumanizing Palestinians
Including that oft-fondled phrasing, âI support Israelâs has a right to existâ
âIt prioritizes Israeli (and Zionist) comfort at the expense of Palestinian freedom.
âIt positions Israel as a normative entity that Palestinians must accept without objection.
âIt suggests that Israel is both ancient and timeless.
âIt consigns Palestinians to bystanders in their own struggle.
âIt unambiguously rebukes anti-Zionism (and anti-Zionists); conversely, it accepts and reinforces the foundational premise of Zionism.
âIt implies that genocide is extraneous to the Israeli state or at worst some kind of aberration.
âIt intimates, contrary to eight decades of evidence, that Israel can continue to exist without committing genocide.
âIt diminishes over a century of Palestinian cultural, intellectual, and political work.
âIt indicates that Palestinians and all oppressed groups can be made expendable.
âIt emphasizes political abstractions in contrast to the sanctity of human life.
âIt bestows on Israel an exceptional status that validates its compulsion to violence.
âIt asks the victim to atone for the sins of the oppressor.
âIt signals compliance to power for aspiring (or established) politicians. The aspiring politician who affirms Israelâs right to exist is really saying, âYou have nothing to worry about with me. Iâm not serious about all that âsocialismâ stuff. I understand the rules you have implemented and I intend to abide by them.â
Not to mention that people who ask about Israelâs right to exist donât seem especially concerned about Palestineâs existence. This apparent oversight isnât accidental. The question was designed by the Israeli government to convey hostility under the guise of humanism, and thatâs exactly how Palestinians (and Arabs more broadly) receive it: as a duplicitous and tiresome expression of hostility.
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Headlines about moods changing when it comes to wars and human rights violations always make me think about past American wars like in Vietnam and Iraq, where people donât want to admit, even to themselves, that they used to be supporters of the wars. And then I just saw this book in the library which has a title that really nails it:
The title comes from this tweet that I donât remember seeing at the time, but which strikes me as depressingly accurate:
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A lot of people object to this for some understandable reasons. Jewish people were the victim of one of the worst modern atrocities of modern history. And had a long history of persecution, especially in Europe, for their religion and perceived âoutsidernessâ⌠But I think part of undoing the absolutely unacceptable position of Jewish people as the eternal âoutsiderâ who is the constant foil to European Christian whiteness is accepting the full humanity of Jewish people⌠meaning that being a human means being capable of wonderful good and awful evil.
This isnât to say that âthe Jewsâ are the ones who are carrying out these actions in Gaza. That just plays right into the hands of the antisemites like Mike Huckabee, Trump, the right wing Zionist Christians, etc. Itâs the whole âgood Jew / bad Jewâ framing that objectifies Jewish people and dehumanizes them. The problem is that these right wing Christian Zionist just hate brown people, especially Muslims (who they imagine all Palestinians to do, never mind that many are, in fact Christians) more. But in their mind Jews are âgoodâ when they are doing the things that they want them to do (carrying out a violent war against others in order to ethnically cleanse the land to prepare it for Jesus), and Jews are âbadâ when they oppose that war, or the Zionist project in general (which they have twisted to their own eschatological ends that bears little resemblance to Herzlâs secular vision of a Jewish state). Hence, Jews are fully people in their eyes, unless they are doing what they want. Itâs more race science shaping their politics here (as much as religion). So, âthe Jewsâ arenât doing this, a government is doing this. The fact that itâs a state that defines itself as a âJewish stateâ is irrelevant. Itâs the supremacist ideology that some in Israel have embraced that is the problem.
But weâre all just people, and weâre al capable to great good acts and great evil acts. Thatâs the nature of peopleness to some degree. People made up all the ideologies, beliefs, religions, etc that drive us to take actions of one kind or another. And we wonât be able to solve these intractable problems (like antisemitism, like islamophobia, like racism, like whatever ism you want to put here) until we understand that fundamentally weâre all people, and one like us doing something bad or evil says nothing about the rest of us⌠we have to be able to look at events like this and come to a consensus on what it is if weâre to stop it.
I donât know⌠whatever the fuck we call this, it has to stop. Gazans are people and whatever members of Hamas did on October 7th doesnât justify this war. It justifies prosecuting members of Hamas who carried this out, maybe, but it doesnât justify starving children.
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An Op-ed in the NYT about the woman who was shot this week who worked for the Israel embassy, Sarah Milgrim, written by one of her friends. She sounds like a person who really believed that an alternative was possible.
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Thatâs incredibly dark if those survey numbers are accurate.
Itâs all terrible, but the stat about 56% of Israelis supporting the forced removal of Arab Israeli citizens is even worse than it might seem at first. From the outside itâs easy for some of us to forget that less than 3/4 of Israeli citizens are Jewish, and about 21% are Arab Israeli. So that would mean that among Jewish Israelis specifically, something closer to 78% of them are in favor of expelling their fellow citizens.
I hope to hell that there was some kind of error in that survey but weâre probably not that lucky.
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The IDF says a lot of things it does routinely are âstrictly prohibitedâ.
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Yeah, cause they are full of shit, of course.
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I hate this woman. does that make me an antisemite?
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