Perhaps Palestinians should remove logs from their own eyes. And it may be that's what they have to do. With Yasser, the PLO, and friends and Hamas and Hezbollah, to name just a few of the more recent, they have sown or have had sown on their "behalf" an entire forest of enmity. — tim wood

Wow.

Such statements send chills down my spine.

Horrifying.

So, let me get this straight - the Muslims are unfortunately "infected" with anti-semitism, and since this is part of their nature and cannot be cured, Israel must unfortunately murder them until they are no longer a threat? — Echarmion

Well, quarantine isn't working, is it. And while I am myself sympathetic to the notion that killing in war is murder, I don't think it stands as a matter of reason. As to collateral casualties, it seems to me the first business of the Palestinians is to get the terrorists out from behind their children and from under their skirts, as noted above. If the Israelis become murderers, certainly the terrorists already are. Perhaps if the Palestinians arrested a few, tried them, and on conviction punished them. Like that's about to happen!

Such statements send chills down my spine.
Horrifying. — Manuel

You are too easily and too selectively horrified.

Some truth in the rant - as it seems to me. But a little truth is a very dangerous thing. It seems to me that he, as are most, lost in confusing trees for forest, appearance and seeming for reality.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/macron-france-palestine-israel-protests-banned

The Enlightened West with its freeze peach and - oh wait, no, it's just fascism.

One day you will say something of substance.

But it isn't today.

I know this topic decently well enough. There aren't too many I can say this with some confidence.

But even if I did not, the fact that a human being doesn't bat an eye at the prospect that an entire population is put under caloric restrictions by an occupying army, which took 78% of the historical land of such people, is astonishing to me. Now it's even more than that.

Granted, the 20th century was a horror filled era, the fact that in 2021 some people don't find such facts bothersome, regardless of whatever else they may believe in terms of culpability, only shows how slow and little we have progressed.

I've seen and read many horrible things. Doesn't mean I get used to them.

One day you will say something of substance.

But it isn't today. — StreetlightX

But on that day, how will you know? Why not today?

Well, quarantine isn't working, is it. And while I am myself sympathetic to the notion that killing in war is murder, I don't think it stands as a matter of reason. As to collateral casualties, it seems to me the first business of the Palestinians is to get the terrorists out from behind their children and from under their skirts, as noted above. If the Israelis become murderers, certainly the terrorists already are. Perhaps if the Palestinians arrested a few, tried them, and on conviction punished them. Like that's about to happen! — tim wood

Oh wow. You're literally advocating for murdering people because they aren't acting properly civilized enough for your tastes?

More strawman bullshit. Mazel tov, Bitcon. Now go somewhere else and jack off your lil shame.

Do they live isolated the way Jews used to? — frank

They tend to live in highly concentrated neighborhoods like Willamsburg in New York City or Meah Shearim
in Israel. So they are isolated in this sense but in the midst of large metropolitan areas.

I take it you lived through it, so who do you blame for the breakdown since the Oslo accords? More Israel? or more PLO?

:up:

They tend to live in highly concentrated neighborhoods like Willamsburg in New York City or Meah Shearim
in Israel. So they are isolated in this sense but in the midst of large metropolitan areas. — Joshs

Ok, so maybe I'm wrong. Judaism thrives.

I don't know what else to tell you besides ancient/religious texts and Jewish oral history. Jews have prayers going back thousands of years that speak to this issue. — BitconnectCarlos

So, Joshua lead a horde of rabid Hebrew tribes to steal Canaanite land (i.e. ethnic cleansing) through mass rapine slaughter at the behest of voices in his fucking head (and voices in dead Moses' fucking head) more than three millennia ago AND THAT "justifies" modern Israelis claim now to "the Jewish Promised Land" and therefore their ("divine birth")right to gradually reenact that ur-myth atrocity by nearly eight decades of dispossessing a centuries-long settled Arab population in order to ethnically cleanse the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea for "Der Judenstaat, Der Judenstaat" über alles? Well, Bitcon et al, to quote my beloved Hillel the Elder: G-F-Y. :shade:

Imagine if this discussion was about slavery and someone responded in this manner. — Maw

We SHOULD imagine that this discussion was about slavery, or the holocaust , or serial killers, or Stalin or Pol Pot. That’s the whole point. The model is worthless if it skirts the most blatant examples of alleged oppression and inhumanity.

Textbook example of how many self-described philosophers end up kicking up so much dust just for the sake of it that everything becomes opaque. The result is as you see here: resorting to pseudo-intellectualism as apologia for colonial atrocities. Imagine if this discussion was about slavery and someone responded in this manner. — Maw

On the other hand, there are a group of commenters on this thread( perhaps you included , perhaps not) who seem to evince textbook characteristics of what I call ‘woke cultishness’ . They have been remarkably consistent: a tendency toward bullying ad hominems and an almost compete refusal to delve into moral nuance, ambiguity and complexity associated with the political
issue they are so passionate about. Why is this? I think that in many ways wokism takes the place of religious cults of years past. It shares many of the same characteristics. An intense desire to belong to a community of shared ideals combined with an unsteady or unscholaely grasp of the underlying ideas leads to a hectoring black and white us against them mentality. As Streetlight proclaimed ‘This Israeli-Palestinian conflict provides the ideal example of pure moral clarity’ Well, yes it does if you only see your politics in such rigid terms, which is the hallmark of woke cultishness. Every political conflict must reduce to moral clarity. If it doesn’t they will be compelled to force it into that mold.
These are not the intelllectuals behind the movement , they are the enforcers, the shock troops.

The thing is , I support the intellectual underpinnings of various forms of wokism and CRT. I think they are here to stay in one form or another, and I certainly prefer them to the conservative alternatives. But I think the bandwagon cultists who are not intellectually secure enough to question and reflect on their driving ethico-political assumptions in respectfuldebate are dangerous , because a bullying kind of verbal violence is their main recourse in discussion combined with an inability to actually DISCUSS.

“ If you've been paying attention to social media over the past week, you will have seen this same attempt to redefine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a racial power dynamic, casting Israel as infinitely powerful and Palestinians as completely without agency. And as in America, where antiracism has redefined racism and relocated the problem to a place where it costs little for white liberal elites to "do the work" combatting it, so has this happened in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where real and urgent civil rights abuses against the Palestinians have been obscured by a binary, maximalist view of the situation that's now fully mainstream.”

"Israelis are the OPPRESSORS and Palestinians are the OPPRESSED," one viral Instagram post reads. "There is no 'fighting', there is only Israeli colonisation, ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and apartheid." This rhetoric is hardly new to the conflict, but it's become absolutely ubiquitous thanks to the binary of wokeness at play here: There is no "fighting" happening because one side, the Palestinian side, is subsumed by its victim status at the hands of Israeli "colonization." No weapon in the hands of a Palestinian is thus ever real—even, apparently, rockets that have killed Israelis—because Palestinians are the OPPRESSED in the situation, as the drawing would have it, and oppressed people cannot fight, apparently. It's wokeness 101: The oppressor has all the power, all the agency, and the Israelis are the oppressors. Case closed.“

Just as the overreach of the antiracism movement in the summer of 2020 was enforced on social media with ruthless dog-piling and public smearing and shaming, people whose statements have been insufficiently woke—who have failed to cast Palestinians as pure victims and Israelis as pure aggressors—have been subjected to shocking amounts of abuse online.”

i Palestinian suffering is real. Too many have been killed in Gaza. Too many have been brutalized by the police. For too long, Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank have been deprived of basic civil rights, like the right to vote for the government that exercises state power against them and freedom of movement. For too long, Gaza has been forgotten and left to languish under an unnecessarily brutal blockade, its young people and children deprived of any future. Israel has all too often penalized nonviolent resistance instead of bolstering civil society and supporting a new generation of Palestinian leadership. These all fall squarely on Israel's shoulders, and all nonviolent means of pressuring Israel to solve these problems are legitimate.”

BATYA UNGAR-SARGON , NEWSWEEK DEPUTY OPINION EDITOR

More strawman bullshit. Mazel tov, Bitcon. Now go somewhere else and jerk yourself off. — 180 Proof

I think this writer is talking about you.

“Just as the overreach of the antiracism movement in the summer of 2020 was enforced on social media with ruthless dog-piling and public smearing and shaming, people whose statements have been insufficiently woke—who have failed to cast Palestinians as pure victims and Israelis as pure aggressors—have been subjected to shocking amounts of abuse online.”

:up: :up:

Does "more" matter? Any and all terrorist bombings stand as open and suppurating wounds until cured - and what would cure them studiously avoided. In a real but perverse sense the neighbors have made Israel strong, and they don't like it, but they will not acknowledge the reality of it and keep poking at it. Whether this or that particular Palestinian is oppressed, or this or that particular Israeli is beset, the reality is that they are both caught in and victims of imperatives of history. And these, unlike those, for example, of WWII, are just plain unnecessary. Disengaging from them may be not so easy, but easy enough for people with a genuine interest in peace. And for the Israelis, their security interests.

Most Japanese people actually really like foreigners in my experience. — khaled

Of course they do. They’re novelties. Only 2.3% of the country are foreigners. And of those, what’s percentage is non-Asian? Let’s see what happens when foreigners are more than a tiny percentage of the population.

. And for the Israelis, their security interests. — tim wood

I agree with @thewonder that they've become conflict habituated. It's feeding something.

The situation is reinforced by the US, occasional attempts at peace brokering notwithstanding.

here.

What on earth is an ‘oppressor’ and what could ‘Legitimate’ possibly mean? The answer depends of course on whether you’re a relativist TWAT and how far you’re willing to take that. For me, the belief that such notions can be defined in anything but a hopelessly partisan way is at the heart of most conflicts.
— Joshs
In any violent, vicious conflict, whom do you side with, Joshs: the weaker or the stronger? "David" or "Goliath"? Hint: The answer is fucking partisan. :shade: — 180 Proof

Your bullying hostility isnt motivated by a need to back the weaker against the stronger, it’s driven by your moralist judgement of the MOTIVES of the stronger. There’s a huge difference between a need to aid the weak out of pragmatic considerations and a thinking which labels the aggressors as immoral, evil, pathological, greedy, selfish. Demonizing your enemy can justify all kinds of ‘evil’ on your part, starting with something even as simple as bullying other commenters on a philosophy site.
I sense a perhaps hidden theological basis to your self-righteousness.

Ain't "woke", brother, just honest af – speaking Truth to Murderous Impotence! Besides, the only ones who care what that racism/ethnic cleansing apologist says are themselves either imbecilic ignoramuses or racism/ethnic cleansing apologists too. He's talking about me? Cool. I'm just now using this curb to wipe that "badge of honor" off my shoe. What else you got for me, brother, besides more p0m0 evasions or apologetic non sequiturs, strawmen, ad hominems and cognitive dissonance?

The "right" is just a bunch of snowflakes after all.

Your kind of passion and approach to politics was desperately needed 60’
years ago, when there really was something like moral clarity, and the methods you prefer were appropriate. Today almost every political situation the wokeness cultists attach themselves to is riddled with complexities and ambiguities, but the only tool the cultist has available is a bludgeon. The irony is that notions like CRT are intellectually complex , and so lend themselves best to environments like the workplace and academia, where they are having a real and positive effect.

I've been out of academia almost three decades and paid my dues as a pro-affordable housing, pro-decriminalization of victimless offenses, pro-armed resistance to US client-regimes in Latin America & pro-Divestment from SA-apartheid activist throughout the 80s-90s. I've got the literal scars to show for my moral clarity, asshole. Like I said, there's nothing "woke" about me (i.e. no more "woke" than Chomsky, Zinn, Hitchens, Cornel West, Rabbi Lerner and the like). And still you've got nothing but acquiescent silence for Israeli oppression & atrocities. Where's your fucking moral clarity, Joshs?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/14/israels-bombardment-of-gaza-continues-live

And now, the UN estimates 10,000 people have fled there home. If these people were Jews today, you can bet whatever you like that NATO would be carpet bombing countries...

Also Norman Finkelstein live stream, if any one is interested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PTtsugw9pE

fuck him up :fire: