…and here’s a passionate and excellent evisceration of Hurwitz’s ghoulish, and IMO, absolutely obscene rhetoric:
It is not ignorance that drives the comparison of the genocide Israel inflicts upon Palestine to the Holocaust. It is not TikTok smashing anyone’s brain. It is historical memory. And that historical memory, which Hurwitz wants more than anything not to confront, is triggered by Israeli behavior. The behavior of powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians. Of gleefully raiding their lingerie drawers, bombing their hospitals, destroying their cultural symbols, raping them in captivity, turning them into numbers for industrial-scale murder. Of describing their children as the enemy.
What Hurwitz objects to is that Holocaust education works. She is not upset that TikTok is driving misperceptions of the genocide. She is upset that the various social media vectors through which people hear directly from Palestinians drive accurate perceptions of the genocide. She is upset that those perceptions are unavoidable because of Holocaust education. Fearful of activating antisemitism, she doesn’t want Israelis, or any Jews, to be thought of as rapacious murderers. I sympathize. But the only way that will happen is for Israel, whose flag displays the Star of David, to stop murdering Palestinians (and Lebanese, and Syrians, and Iranians, and Yemenis, and and and), and for Jewish institutions beyond Israel to stop rationalizing it.
“Anti-semitism” is increasingly used against entirely reasonable criticisms of Israeli policy, or advocacy for Gazan/Palestinian human rights:
Ms Rachel has never said a single thing even remotely anti-semitic, and organizations like “StopAntisemitism” are doing serious long term damage to Jewish safety around the world by trivializing the issue.
Article explaining that even by its own definitions, Israel has utterly failed in Gaza, at best achieving some variation of the long term status quo, with Hamas in power, albeit over a smaller portion of Gaza amidst the devastation the IDF caused.
And it only cost tens of thousands of innocent lives, plus the complete self-induced demolition of the two party consensus in the US to favor Israel over Palestinians! What a bargain!
That was a long time ago, so no warnings, and no singling out posters. But this thread should be used to talk about the actual situation, and not to endlessly argue the definition of “genocide".
Hamas and this Israeli government are functionally allies - they both want bloodshed forever; they both want to prevent two states; they are both enemies of peace. This Israeli government has utterly failed in its stated goals to defeat Hamas, but in their above shared goals with Hamas, they’ve both been very successful.
I agree, and I’ve said this many times myself. Netanyahu & his ministers and Hamas deserve each other. They each justify the others’ existence. And please note I did not say Israelis and Palestinians.
Israeli settler attacks on Palestinian farmers have ramped up, year after year, with no sign of stopping. And what is the Israeli government doing about this? Nothing. This Israeli government is much worse, in terms of violence and bloodshed of civilians (directed by or tolerated by the government) than Apartheid South Africa or even Jim Crow America, despite being a much smaller country.
This incident continues to be all over lefty social media like Bluesky, but I’ve been looking and googling for actual defenses of her words and, so far, I can’t find any except some very vague, milquetoast insistences that her words were misunderstood (without actual explanation), and that actually, if you know her, Hurwitz is a wonderful and compassionate person. Has anyone seen anything else?
And in addition to Hurwitz, Hillary Clinton is now repeating the same sentiment nearly verbatim - insisting that young people are turning against Israel because of some sinister social media campaign, rather then, you know, the IDF killing thousands and thousands of children:
What the propaganda campaign has been so effective at obfuscating is that Israeli strikes have been on legitimate military target, and that the blame for those deaths lies with Hamas for choosing to fight from behind civilians.
Clearly, a social media campaign by a foreign adversery is actually totally based if it’s pushing a viewpoint you agree with politically; didn’t you learn anything from the Republican reaction to Russiagate? We should thank Qatar, Russia, Iran, and China for sending us TikTok reels that unveil the TRUTH!!! (/s, obviously)
Of course – we should accept Israeli propaganda about why it was good and necessary to kill those children, not other “propaganda” that claims that killing children is very, very bad! And (like Hurwitz and Hillary Clinton insist) we should chastise those who have the pure, evil, anti-semitism-driven gall to dare to show the factual suffering and death caused by IDF operations in Gaza!
If Hamas puts their rockets behind kids then Hamas is the one responsible for the deaths of children. Period, end of story. You can keep distracting from that fact as much as you’d like, but it remains true.
