Gleefully, cynically, disingenuously mad. You can practically see them drooling at the thought of stealing reliably Democratic votes during shit like this.
Exactly. I have (as far as I have been able to 
) kept out of the discussion, but I have followed it. Time and again I have gotten away from the thread with a new understanding.
I thank Alessan and Babale for their explanations. I may agree, but either way, understanding the view is at least better.
Your points about the way thay anti-semitism can manifest on the left make me turn that comment right back around. Excellent summation of something I have felt but not necessarily been able to describe, in every post. Thank you for that.
Definitely. As an Israeli-American, this will definitely not make vote Republican.
Don’t get me wrong, congressional Republicans are evil. But they aren’t succeeding only because of the “stick it to the libs” mentality shared by many of their voters. They are also succeeding because of the “Israelis are God’s chosen people” subset of evangelical Christians.
On a personal note, I am experiencing a little bit of schadenfreude at militant college students learning the hard way that there are some things they can’t say without getting canceled, given that they are the same college students who cannot brook the remotest disagreement with any number of their pet issues. There is a lot of talk about “intersectionality” in progressive circles, but I find that’s more often used to keep track of who has the most oppressed points than it is to honestly look at how you can be privileged in some ways and oppressed in other ways. (I take the more Freirean viewpoint, the latter.) They are trying to take this issue and divide it into the oppressed and the oppressors and it’s not working because reality is actually a lot more nuanced than that and now they get to be the ones accused of bigotry. Serves them right. Hopefully they will learn from it.
An aside from this thread:
Many posters to the SDMB have provided their preferred pronouns in their Bio. Click on their avatar and you will see how they prefer to be referred to.
Not everyone does this but it’s a good first check.
@Babale and I do this (as an example).
Carry on.
/hijack
I’ve often wondered if part of the reason Jewishness is sometimes minimized or excluded from intersectionality is from a sense that we have an unfair advantage in that little game. Especially since you can be Jewish and almost anything else.
No multiclassing in intersectionality, people!
My real lesson in intersectionality was working as a social work intern at a Jewish continued care retirement facility. These were people with some of the best possible end of life care available, meaning they came from very wealthy backgrounds. Some of them were racists. They were also sick and dying. Some of them were Holocaust survivors. One lady with dementia thought all the nurses were the gestapo.
This is reality. You can be wealthy most of your life and also suffer unimaginable horror, and also end the same way a lot of people end, lonely and afraid of death.
I didn’t really have a good experience there in terms of growing my skillset, but it taught me a lot about the nuance of existence.
ETA: I should acknowledge that there is a lot of that kind of nuance in my own existence. I experienced some poverty growing up, and an abusive childhood, and the various challenges of being a woman, and I have a number of disabilities that occasionally derail my life. But I was born the kind of smart that leads to academic giftedness, attended some very good universities, married a man from a wealthy family, and have enjoyed many advantages that a lot of people don’t get. Neither part of my experience is more true than the other. But there are far too many who would look at my current privilege and think it makes me more oppressor than oppressed. I think my main issue with framing the world this way is that it isn’t very empathetic.
The Wall St. Journal has featured numerous wailings from right-wingers, upset that American Jews don’t vote Republican because of the party’s supposedly more steadfast support for Israel.
As if there aren’t many more important issues for Jewish voters on which Republicans fall down badly.
Hey, I didn’t know about that, but I should do it – despite my screen name (three orange brother cats of my past) I’m a woman.
That’s kind of how all parts of identity work, though? You can be a woman and almost anything else. You can be queer and almost anything else. You can be Black and almost anything else. Sort of the whole point of intersectionality is that you can be X and almost anything else.
Usually but now always, though I concede the point.
I agree with all of the above… but…
…if there is evidence of ethnic cleansing or genocide in the current government of Israel then that must be addressed and not dismissed out of hand. Several thousand years of oppression does not rule out a group of Jews turning around and committing oppression upon another. Such a thing must be drug out of the shadows and examined under the light so as to be cut away and not be a lethal cancer on everyone else. And throughout that entire process it should be made very clear that it is a small group of bad actors and NOT the whole of a group that is guilty.
Certainly, and I’ll definitely call put incidents that qualify. When settlers act like terrorists and attack Palestinians or burn down buildings in the West Bank, for example, I will happily describe them as such.
Unfortunately, one of the people I spend holiday gatherings with is one of them. Once asked her if she had any sympathy for the sufferings of billions of people her vision of The End would entail. Nope, all she was focused on was “Jesus will take me to heaven for ever and ever!”. Yeah, weird, and a little scary.
This really does need to be better known in Israel. These people are NOT friends of Israel, no matter how much they pose. They support Israel with the stated intention of seeing it all go down in flames at a future point.
I think this is the documentary in question, but I’m not sure -
Every Israeli who I saw react to it was pretty offput.
There are ‘end times’ Christians out thre for sure, but that doesn’t describe why many Christians support the Jewish people.
I attented Baptist and Mennonite churches when I was young. We talked a lot about Israel and the Jews. And the message was that the Jews are God’s chosen people, the only people guaranteed to go to heaven without accepting Jesus, and that was totally okay.
My grandparents desperately wanted to visit Israel, and never got the chance. It was a special, holy place to them, and the Jewish people living there were special. Closer to God. They wanted to walk the country, commune with the people, see the holy sites, etc.
And that was IT. No, “we need to save the Jews to get to heaven” nonsense. Just, we like the Jews because God chose them, and we do not question God. That was what we were taught in church as well.
Which is what normal Christians would be into. They are talking upthread about America’s Christian Right political faction.
As an aside, it’s always kind of mystified me that normal Christians aren’t, like, super into carpentry.
Have not seen any kind of evidence of a command and control center under the hospital. Been more than 2 weeks since IDF occupied the hospital. At least I would expect IDF forces would have secured tunnel areas under/near the hospital and shown the “smoking gun” to international journalists by now. Please share if I’m missing these news reports from reputable international news organizations.
It is of no surprise to have found entrances or tunnels since it is estimated that there are 500km of tunnels in the Gaza Strip. Yet the purported rationale for a very serious IDF operation to attack to the hospital was exactly that. And searching for news on follow ups in the past 2 weeks is mighty thin. Here’s a [Financial Times report](https://al-Shifa hospital), which I consider to be reputable international news, from Dec 3.
I don’t question Israels right to exist or to defend itself. And recognize that there was a horrific war crimes provocative attack by Hamas and their allies. That said, IMHO Israel does not come across favorably by the very IDF Shafia Hospital operation and severe impact on civilian non-combatants that were patients or sheltering there with the purported rationale that underneath was the Hamas headquarters.