It’s a message board post. I can’t be this angry all the time anymore. They won. I’m trying to figure out how to move to Canada. Should the response be meh? No it should not. But getting angry at the post being racist is like getting angry at a klan member using the N word. It’s just not that surprising.
My people died because of the propoganda machine too. I am dealing with the fall out from the tree of life massacre on a daily basis that was a direct result of the administration using HIAS, an organization I actively raise money for, as a boogy man. The name of my synagogue was literally on the shooters hit list. Tree of life was just closer.
Back off a bit. You don’t know me. This is an internet message board. Take a beat.
There isn’t a person on the planet who can go a month without saying something that someone else could maliciously miscontextualize or lie about to make them look bad. If you disagree, by all means - say so. Just don’t complain when I prove you wrong.
…you didn’t just not condemn the Post. You chose to condemn Ilhan Omar. For saying words. You said that this could all have been avoided if Ilhan Omar had someone “doing her PR”. I’m holding you to account for the things that you actually said. I didn’t call out your post for “not being angry enough.” I’ve called out your post because you chose to blame this on Omar instead of the Post.
And you should know better than anyone else here how dangerous the rhetoric and the propaganda used by outlets like the Post can be. We aren’t going to address the problem of bigoted propaganda by telling Ilhan Omar to “hire someone to do her PR”. This wasn’t her fault. This isn’t a fucking game. This isn’t just politics any more. We can’t afford to run everything through the “PR machine”. Because the goal of the PR machine is to “avoid playing into their narrative” when the goal should be instead to be calling out the false narrative. The former is a defensive strategy while the latter is about going on the offense. You can’t win the war when you are always in retreat.
Not gonna back off. This is an internet message board and I’m explicitly addressing the words that you have chosen to use.
You implied that I was complicit in the murder of 50 people. I’m asking again, politely, for you to take a beat and consider your words. I am fairly certain you aren’t a asshole so kindly stop putting the massacre in NZ on my shoulders.
I did not condemn Omar
I expressed frustration with her continuing to put her foot in her mouth. Rashida Tlaib manages to not do it and you know they are looking. AOC doesn’t exactly but she never ends up saying things on the level of Omar and she is far more hated by the right.
So, sure
Fuck the post. Fuck Fox News. Fuck Rupert Murdock. Fuck Nazis. I’m outraged.
Omar should still be keeping her head down for a few weeks
And I still didn’t have anything to do with the massacre of Muslims.
You should still put your jump to conclusions mat away.
Feel better?
I do.
Now I’m going to take a beat. Feel free to PM me if you want to continue this.
Probably a bad idea. The Arabs didn’t have to leave. But their leaders propagandized them about how the Jews would do horrible things to them if they got the upper hand.
Not to mention, at the same time, Arab pogroms against Jews were happening in all the cities of the Arab world, from Afghanistan to Morocco. Jews had lived largely without incident in cities across the Arab world until 1948. Then they had to flee for their lives to Israel, once there was an Israel. (At the end of 1947, the smart money was on all those Arab armies pushing them into the sea.)
…I wouldn’t “imply” you were complicit in the murder of 50 people. That isn’t my style. If I was going to accuse you of being complicit in the murder of 50 people I just would have said it. But I didn’t do that.
But you are complicit in allowing this hateful rhetoric to go unchallenged. No, Omar isn’t “putting her foot in her mouth.” A statement she made was taken out of context and used as part of a campaign to silence her. You accept the narrative they’ve set up. They’ve framed the story and you’ve accepted the framing. And it is this normalization of the framing that is the problem here. “Its just politics. This is normal. She should know her place and shut the fuck up.” Its this narrative that you are complicit with.
Every word that I write here is carefully considered. I’m not putting the massacre in NZ on your shoulders.
Of course you did.
Yeah, its a shame that Omar doesn’t just shut up, just like those “good Muslims.” I wish Donald Trump would keep his mouth shut, just like all those “good white people.”
The reality is that it is fucking terrifying “having an opinion while marginalised” on the internet right now. It came to a crescendo a few years ago with Goobergate. What they did with Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn and thousands of other women and marginalized people were actively targeted and harassed, victims of vicious mis-information and propaganda campaigns. And what we are seeing now is a continuation of that.
Lexi Alexander is an Arab-German film director of Palestinian descent. She is an out-spoken defender of Palestine, of women’s rights, one of the toughest people in Hollywood. She directed the only good Punisher movie. She has a third degree black-belt in Karate. Chuck Norris was one of her immigration sponsors to the US. But she wrote last month.
If someone as “tough as nails” as Lexi Alexander is deleting tweets because of harassment, why on earth would you expect someone like Rashida Tlaib to make herself a target?
This stuff is FUCKING TERRIFYING. No people are not speaking out like Ilhan Omar. Its not because they don’t agree with her, but because if you do speak out the harassment gets exponentially worse. Rashida Tlaib is already the subject of misinformation campaigns, lies, harassment and death threats. But unlike you Tlaib had this to say today:
What is it, exactly, that will change “in a few weeks?” Can you be specific? If she says something like “Stephen Miller is a white nationalist” in a few weeks time, would that mean that people would stop claiming that that statement was clearly and obviously anti-Semitic?
Never said you were.
But you are complicit in the campaign to silence Ilhan Omar. If she doesn’t want to “keep her head down” then she should hold her head up high and say what she thinks, no matter what the propaganda machines decides to do with her words. And you should be standing up for her right to say it, you shouldn’t be telling her to “keep her head down” and when the propaganda machine attacks her then you shouldn’t choose to stand with that machine.
Sorry: I don’t like communicating via PM. This isn’t about “making me feel better.” This isn’t about me.
Sorry, but this is just the falsification of history. Americans just gobble up the Zionist propaganda, almost as quickly as we gobble up our own baseless justifications for starting wars with brown and yellow people in the far corners of the earth. And then we wonder why the world hates our ass – we could try not being so fucking ignorant for once.
“The Arabs didn’t have to leave” – that’s like saying that Jews didn’t have to leave Germany or Russia. Especially considering the tactics of Jewish terrorist militias participating in the Deir Yassin massacre. Jewish paramilitaries went from one Palestinian village after another, harassing them, murdering scores of families at the slightest provocation – kinda like the Israeli military does today. Every goddamned massacre that Israel’s military commits and Israel’s so-called “moderates” :rolleyes: endorse is an excessive response to “terrorism”.
“We were looking for a terrorist and we knew he was hiding in an apartment complex full of collateral damage - I mean women and children - so we had to defend ourselves and blow it up or bulldoze it.”
“We were fighting terrorists in Lebanon so we had to destroy all those bridges, bomb water treatment facilities, and create refugee camps in which we won’t allow critical medical supplies to be delivered”
Afghanistan is a part of the Arab world? Well that’s news to me, and I’m sure it’s news to pretty much everyone reading it. Tell me, is Indonesia also part of the “Arab world”? Malaysia? Christ.:rolleyes:
Mate, do me a favor. Let’s pick up this discussion again when you’ve spent quality time reading some history and looked at a map.
I wanted to respond to the above yesterday because I can appreciate it for it’s thoughtfulness and eloquence.
I understand that Zionism can be used as a signal or code for Jew - I’m aware of that and while people reading my posts might think otherwise, I’m not trying to be coy or clever by using that term. I make distinctions between Zionist and Jew.
On the one hand, there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with a Jewish homeland in and of itself. There’s nothing inherently wrong about wanting a safe space for Jews. To that extent, I have no quibble at all with Zionism.
This is strictly my opinion, but from my point of view, the problem that I do have with Zionism isn’t the idea of Zionism itself; it’s the occasional realities of it. And that reality is the fact that Israel was, from the beginning, founded at a cost to other people, and even today, Israel is displacing people whose ties to their land go back centuries, predating many of the Jews who now live there. This isn’t uniquely a Jewish problem, of course. The United States was founded on land that belonged to other people. Much of the Muslim world once belonged to people who weren’t Muslims. And these transformations were violent. Where do we draw the lines? Why make a big stink about Israel and not similar conquests that occurred a couple of centuries before? Those are fair questions to ask, I suppose, and I don’t always have answers.
What I can say is that I think it is important to be as accurate as possible in discussing the history of Israel’s origins. Not to guilt Israel, but to be fair to those who don’t have a political voice. One of the reasons I reacted so viscerally to RTF’s post is because it was just so wildly misleading, and it’s something I see all the time in America particularly. And the reason why I don’t always distinguish Zionists from, say, Likudists is that I rarely see Zionists pushing back against the historical inaccuracies that are so easily dismissed as premises for why Israel continues to mistreat its Arab minority population. It’s just one regurgitated falsity after another, and I blame both the American media and education system and also the pro-Israel lobby. I have acknowledged and will continue to acknowledge that many Zionists can and do push back against the barbarity of Israel’s right wing, and I applaud that. But there cannot be a true mutual understanding of anything until we get a true 360-degree understanding of how Israel’s existence has transformed the region and impacted the people there.
Just so we’re clear, I am all for understanding Zionism’s rationales for the creation of modern-day Israel. I fully agree that Christendom’s centuries-long antisemitism created a world that was unsafe for Jews, which in turn provided legitimate intellectual foundations to the idea of a Jewish state. There is no disputing that, IMO. All I ask is that, in return, people acknowledge that the planning of that state, where they chose to create it, and the political and military means by which they established it be taken into consideration as well, because they had real world consequences and created real-world victims. And it continues to do so, and that is true even when Bibi Netanyahu isn’t running the show. It was just as true when Ariel Sharon presided over Israel.
I should’ve quoted it but I was on my phone. The reality is that it doesn’t matter how good you are at politics, or how clean you are. Nobody is a robot. If your opponents are willing to be full-on bad-faith bullshit artists and take what you say completely out of context, you cannot realistically be careful enough to “avoid giving them ammo”. No matter how good you are at communication, there is nobody in the world who is good enough to go their whole political career without saying something which, taken maliciously out of context, makes you sound bad. The idea that this was somehow “avoidable” is pure victim-blaming.
You have continually ignored or sidestepped the fact that during and after WWII, Jews had literally no place on Earth in which they could reasonably expect to be safe. Not Europe for obvious reasons, not Jim Crow America for almost as obvious reasons, not the rest of the world… nowhere. These were truly desperate people, and it shouldn’t be any surprise that some truly desperate people did some desperate things (as well as having truly desperate things done to them by other desperate people in the Middle East) in order to survive and create a place to live. I don’t think it’s reasonable to criticize such truly desperate people for doing desperate things to survive any more than it’s reasonable to criticize American slaves for killing their masters while escaping, or death camp survivors killing camp guards in anger after liberation. It certainly doesn’t justify the violations of human rights of the present Israeli government, but it’s entirely possible to criticize the policies of the present Israeli government without continually misrepresenting this actual history of the Jews during and after WWII and the creation of Israel.
That doesn’t justify anything or everything done in the creation of Israel, but that human desperation is the root of my Zionism, and of many people’s Zionism, and your continual glossing over of it, as if the creation of Israel was simply one out of many other reasonable options, is very troubling and IMO reflects much of the broader societal anti-Semitism that is still a very powerful force and still twists much understanding of history.
All of your criticism of Israeli government policy is entirely possible without slandering Zionism or misrepresenting this actual history of the Jews and the creation of Israel. Doing those things greatly weakens your reasonable criticism and you should stop it.
Humans behave like humans – when desperate, they sometimes do desperate things. This broadly explains the creation of Isreal just as it broadly explains many actions by Palestinians in the last several decades.
I’m not ignoring it, Andy; I just question that it is justification enough to inflict pain upon other people. If my landlord evicts me for reasons that I consider to be unfair, does that give me the right to squat in your home and throw out your belongings? The rationale you are laying out is one I’m familiar with, but it could be used just as easily to retake Israel from the Jews as it was used by Jews to take Israel for themselves. That is what I am saying.
What if we have more massacres in Western cities like the one that just occurred in New Zealand? What if Muslims claim that they no longer feel safe? Does that then give Muslims the right to take over “unsettled” land in Israel, migrate there by the millions, and expel Israeli Jews so that they can reclaim the Holy City for themselves? I’m sure that’s an argument that Iran and even some in Saudi Arabia would be sympathetic to.
This doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m saying. I’m not offering any sort of justification or rationale for cruel and harmful Israeli policies (by all means, keep criticizing the current Israeli government and their awful policies), I’m saying you’re getting the real history wrong, in an ignorant way that strikes me as influenced by the ever-present anti-semitism that influences so much of these discussions.
I respectfully disagree - I don’t think I am getting the real history wrong at all. I’m not denying the pressures that Jews leaving Europe felt, nor do I deny that many Jews simply wanted what they believed would be a safe place to live out the rest of their lives.
But it’s a stretch to believe that Jews migrating to modern day Israel (Mandatory Palestine) didn’t know that they were potentially setting themselves up for conflict with an entirely different group of people. It’s one thing to migrate; it’s another to migrate with the intent on setting up a new state government - some might call that colonialism. And what I’m referring to predates Ben Gurion and the 1948 war with Palestine.
To think of it another way, I think you and I are on the same page in that the United States should allow Central American migrants the opportunity to declare and realize political asylum. But that doesn’t mean I advocate that they take over San Diego for themselves and establish a new nation called Nuevo Honduras. The moment people along the border got a sniff that they wanted to form a new colony or country, you can bet your ass that people wouldn’t put up with it.
Regardless, I am not interested in litigating Israel’s legitimacy. It’s a legitimate state, and has been since at least the Treaty of Balfour irrespective of its controversial origins. Ideally, I would have liked to have seen a 2-state solution become a reality. But the history of the last 100-125 years makes that challenging to say the least, and no, I don’t blame only Israel. Her neighbors didn’t have to embrace Pan Arab nationalism. Moreover, groups like the PLO and Hamas clearly were vying for their own legitimacy at the expense of peace. The Ayatollah wasn’t helpful. Saddam Hussein was hardly helpful. Just because I criticize Israel and Zionism doesn’t mean I’m ignoring any of fault that lies with Arabs, Iranians, and also with global powers, including the US and UK. I don’t deny any of that.
The purpose of my posts is to challenge the far too familiar narratives that I see time and time again in mainstream media, that Israel and her supporters are always the victims of terrorism and that they’re justified in behaving however the hell they want simply because they’re fighting against “terrorism” and because they’re the descendants of Holocaust victims. We’ve talked on another thread about being an “honest broker”. One reason why America has never been viewed as an honest broker in the ME is not simply because our government exploits the region for its resources, but also because most are convinced that American voters are simply not educated enough as participants in a democracy to hold the US and Israeli policymakers accountable, which actually undermines their view of our democracy’s political legitimacy even further.
Colonialism involves powerful nations and organizations imposing their will on the less affluent and powerful (and on their territory) in an exploitative relationship. Desperate people doing desperate things is not colonialism, and it’s offensive and inaccurate to compare the two. Jews were moving to Israel in the late 19th and early 20th out of desperation – because they had no place to go, and their former homes were unsafe for Jews. In this sense it doesn’t matter whether they knew that they were setting up a conflict with the current inhabitants – they literally had no safe options. That’s what I think you keep missing, or glossing over. And it’s entirely unnecessary to the reasonable criticism of Israeli government policy.
I’m snipping the rest because I don’t have a problem with any of the rest of your post.
