Open Mic for the week of 1/29/2024
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
The Wall Street Journal reports: Alaska Airlines Plane Appears to Have Left Boeing Factory Without Critical Bolts
So now we just have to wonder if plug door reinstallation is something that happens rarely and so this isn’t a problem or if it happens for every plane and so maybe all of them are coming off of the lot like this.Report
The best part about this years Superbowl is going to be seeing the MAGAts fret over whether to root for the team from San Francisco or the team with Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.Report
Seriously, what is wrong with you and your brother? If “MAGAt” is acceptable, so is “Jewish vermin”. If not, then not. Either dehumanization is on the table or it’s off the table.Report
They are called MAGAts because of how they behave, not who they are.Report
When Pinky gets into Hall Monitor mode, there’s no sense trying to talk to him.Report
Their feelings must be tenderly cared for. Our feelings must be f***edReport
“Theirs” and “ours”: the difference between us in politics is trivial compared to the difference between people who dehumanize and those who don’t.Report
Is this in doubt? They’re going to root for Kansas City because San Francisco sucks.
Though I understand that sports fans in San Fran were so excited that they started pooping in the street.
What do you think will be the theme of the halftime show?Report
I remember an old Craig Kilborn joke about riots in Oakland following a Raiders win, where they burned down 12 city blocks resulting in over $20 million in improvements.Report
White supremacists being angry that their blonde goddess is dating a muscular white football player was not something I had on my bingo card.Report
Yeah, there’s no shortage of people upset that she’s not still dating John Mayer.Report
because she doesn’t need him to succeed, out earns him, and is inspiring younger women and girls to live as if they are fully realized humans with their own rights.Report
…how many men are there on the planet that Taylor Swift needs to be able to succeed? How many men does she not out-earn?Report
They had a weirdo fascination with her long before she began dating Travis Kelce. There were all sorts of weird takes about her fertility when she hit 30 and it was a shame she did not have kids yet. Yesterday, I saw a weirdo take about how Kelce gets a 70K bonus check for winning the AFC and “now you know why Taylor Swift dates him” or something like that.
Taylor Swift’s current net worth is 1.1 billion or thereabouts.Report
I will gladly take a 70K bonus check for not messing up the AFC by not playing in it.Report
This might be part of it but not all of it. This was certainly also true before she dated Travis Kelce and they didn’t seem to care. I really think they saw her as their Aryan goddess and desperately wanted her to be a Trump supporter. Being a white liberal woman but dating the avatar of white masculinity is really upsetting them in ways that dating an Africa-American football player might oddly not.Report
You know why she didn’t date Kaepernick?
Because San Francisco sucks.Report
To be honest: I haven’t, actually, seen this. I’ve seen an awful lot of people talking about it, but precious few genuinely right-wing personalities genuinely upset about Kelce/Swift.Report
The complaints that I have seen (and I have seen many) come down mainly in two categories.
1. “JEEZ LOUISE SHOW THE GAME NOT THE FANS IN THE SKYBOX!!!!!!”
2. “Yes. Two famous people are dating. This is not that interesting.”
Number two is sometimes asterisked with “At least I’ve heard of these people.”Report
Have you heard of Megyn Kelly? Charlie Kirk? Tomi Lahren?
Have you heard of the publication called The Federalist?
https://thefederalist.com/2023/09/05/taylor-swifts-popularity-is-a-sign-of-societal-decline/
Still, someone who truly, deeply cares about the state of popular music has to stand athwart Taylor Swift, yelling “what is this @#?!,” and it might as well be an intellectually dyspeptic Gen X guy with nothing to lose.
Nut graf (bolding mine):
And it’s not just that Swift has conquered the unwashed masses, America’s elite tastemakers have also become unrepentant Swifties. This summer, The New York Times covered Swift with an enthusiastic zeal not reserved for any other figure since maybe Obama — even going so far as to publish a distasteful meditation on internet randos’ lesbian fantasies about her.
Most recently, The New Yorker issued its high-toned blessing by publishing a remarkable essay, “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison: Her music makes me feel that I’m still part of the world I left behind.”Report
That’s some fine White Supremacy there, Chip.Report
On the one hand, you can’t blame Taylor Swift for the weird sh*t the legacy media publishes about her (pretty sure she actually complained about the essay suggesting she had some duty to be a lesbian). On the other hand, they definitely publish some really weird sh*t.Report
The legacy media aren’t the ones “standing athwart Taylor Swift”. In fact, they are the “elite tastemakers” who have “become unrepentant Swifties”.Report
Reading comprehension problems aren’t supposed to be contagious.Report
Neither is a state of humorless arrogance yet here you go chiming in.Report
Arrogance I’ll cop to. Humorless, never.Report
Heh, yes, I understand that. The point was that a lot of people seem to be writing very strange things about her. I suppose it goes with the territory of being the most famous person on the planet.Report
As far as I can tell, Taylor Swift is a bog-standard Democrat in her politics and doesn’t hide it. This makes her a traitor to the right-wingers who once saw her as their ideal woman.Report
I bolded that part of the quote for a reason.
That Federalist essay is great in how the writer references Buckley from the early 50s, and specifically attacks the “elite tastemakers”.
There is this continuing theme in American conservatism of betrayal of the elites in a top/bottom coalition against the middle. God And Man At Yale, Leonard Bernstein and the Panthers, Hollywood and Disney and Bud Light are all examples of how conservatives feel betrayed, emasculated and humiliated by the rejection of the elite tastemakers.
Trump is the pinnacle of this humiliation based grievance. He is a guy who was born rich and failed ever upwards and yet could never, with all his millions, buy the respect and admiration of the elite tastemakers.Report
There was an essay that suggested Taylor Swift had a duty to be lesbian?Report
It was in the New York Times: Look What We Made Taylor Swift Do
Report
“There are somethings so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” George Orwell.
I don’t know if social media is making this sort of parasocial relationship people have with celebrities worse or it is was always this bad and social media just allows us to realize this. There are people who just get really into celebrities and live vicariously through them. This manifests in many unhealthy ways like feeling betrayed when your favorite celebrity has a life you don’t approve of like being the wrong sexuality.
Since I’m generally immune to the celebrity bug, thi is also mystifying.Report
I hear about these things mostly from my wife (including about this article), and also find it impossible to understand.Report
Because of my hobby scene, I’m around people who are treated as celebrities within the scene even if they are normal people in real life. That I treat them as normal people annoys many of them to no end.Report
Imagine, if you will, being a football fan. Like, to the point where the games have an impact on your mood for at least a day.
When your team wins, you’re elated. You have a spring in your step. You feel like ordering a pizza from the local pizza place to celebrate if it’s an afternoon game and if your team loses, you’ve lost your appetite and it carries over into the next day.
You only get about 5 or 6 months a year to enjoy your favorite sport so when August rolls around, you’re pretty excited. Hey. They’re doing pre-season stuff. You check out the lineup of coaches. You check out the 2nd string of your football team. You glance over the 3rd string. You talk with your buddies about the upcoming Fantasy Football draft.
You’re really looking forward to it.
Now, with that in mind, imagine watching a game and EVERY SINGLE PLAY THEY TURN TO TAYLOR SWIFT IN THE SKYBOX.
Every goddamn play. The announcers won’t shut up about her. You go to work and your female co-workers start talking about football. No, not football. They’re talking about Taylor Swift being on the football game they watched. Her outfit was so cute! I clapped when she clapped!
Are you happy that Taylor Swift is bringing in new fans to this sport that you love so much?
Be honest.Report
Yes.
that said two of my three daughters are football fans and watch whether I am or not. They are also Swifties. And were planning a Superbowl party well before KC got in.Report
I assume the NFL has done the math and is satisfied that the result is in their favor.Report
As a watcher of these games I can say it isn’t nearly that extreme. I’ve actually started to find the Kelce endorsements of everything since the relationship made him a lot more famous to be much more tiresome than 3 or 4 shots of her in the box during Chiefs games.
That said they had a poll on the dumbass sports radio I listen to in the morning and her presence was deemed annoying by 55%-45%, so YMMV. How annoying? Who knows.Report
Her presence? Or her omnipresence?
There was a San Francisco game last night and they showed that Bob Weir, one of the *ORIGINAL* members of the Grateful Dead was there! Wow! Bob Weir! From the Greatful Dead!
As someone who watches pro wrestling, I understand that they have to go to the celebrity that is there that night and show him on camera. Hey, guys! We’ve got Evan Mobley here tonight! Yell “woo!” into the camera Evan!
“WOO!!!!”
Now let’s get back to the action.
See? Stuff like that is fine. Even forwards from the Caviliers like the WWE.
But every freakin’ night? Dude. I’m not watching basketball. I’m watching wrestling. Quit showing me Evan Mobley!
“Because he’s Black?”
“NO NOT BECAUSE HE’S BLACK BECAUSE I’M TRYING TO WATCH MY WRESTLING SHOW”
I’m sure that the 55% don’t mind her presence.
They mind her omnipresence.Report
I guess I’d disagree that it’s really omnipresence. That said I really only watch the games in my market (many Chiefs games are of course national or semi-national given how good they are so I see lots of them).
I don’t think I’m downplaying it to say they cut to her a few times a game for a few seconds each, which for me personally doesn’t impact the experience. Maybe it is more and it doesn’t register because I usually am watching amidst small children being insane and/or interacting with friends and family.
I do not watch a lot of national sports media and commentary so possible there is a lot more emphasis there.Report
Okay, fair enough.
I don’t watch the games at all. Haven’t watched a football game since the Donkeys were in the Superbowl.
But even I know that Taylor Swift is at every Chiefs game. Even I know that they cut to her after this or that play.
And even though I do not watch football, I know that, if I did watch football, I’d be watching it for football and not for whomever is in the skybox (though I appreciate that if Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead is at the game, they have to show us two seconds of Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead).
If they only show a handful of seconds here or there? Well.
There’s only so many shots you can give of the coach standing at the sidelines chewing gum as if he’s really upset about it.Report
I have no idea what methodology they used or how reliable the number is but this story also came up on idiot morning sports radio:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost.com/2024/01/29/sports/taylor-swift-has-generated-330-million-for-nfl-amid-travis-kelce-romance/amp/
If it is true then it’s easy to see why they keep showing her. I also assume if they detect attrition of money it will stop or happen a lot less.Report
Oh, let me state for the record: I am sure that the NFL is getting more out of their (tangential) relationship with Taylor Swift than she is getting out of her relationship with the NFL. Even if they give her skyboxes for free, she’s bringing in more cash for them than vice-versa.
You say “I don’t think I’m downplaying it to say they cut to her a few times a game for a few seconds each” and, if that’s the case, I’m sure that that’s due to a hard-nose SOB in the back office who is saying the stuff that I’m saying and is overruling a marketing person who suggests putting a camera in her box and mic’ing her up and offering a secondary feed on NFL2 that shows us the game from Taylor Swift’s POV.Report
I’ve seen the joke that she’s going to be on the cover of the next Madden game.Report
They should offer her as DLC. Split DLC sales with her, 80/20, in her favor.
All you get is the occasional cut to the skybox after a particularly good play in which Kelce participated.
They’d make millions. Millions!Report
That is surely possible and it could definitely get to a point where I would find it over done. I suppose some are already there, all I can say is I’m not.
For a point of comparison I found all of the way overwrought racism stuff done in 2020 a lot more distracting and annoying.Report
“Oh, let me state for the record: I am sure that the NFL is getting more out of their (tangential) relationship with Taylor Swift than she is getting out of her relationship with the NFL”
… until the break-up song comes out.Report
If Kelce gets traded, there will be a lot of Swifties distressed when they learn that that doesn’t mean that they get to stop being KC fans.
I don’t make the rules.Report
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/19f9b0g/oc_percentage_of_time_that_networks_allocate_to/Report
Cool, thanks.
The comments to that one are interesting!Report
What do you find interesting about them?Report
They colorfully explain their points of view using clear and concise language while providing context for their opinions of the phenomenon.Report
HELPFUL!Report
What’d you think of this one:
“this graph is a dead ass lie”
Or this:
“According to my coworker she was on screen “for like half the game.”
Or this:
“Thank you, this is like saying well only 0.46% of your cells are cancerous, so it’s fine.
Idgaf about Taylor, but the point isn’t that she takes up part of the actual game. No shit she doesn’t. nothing does. The point is that it’s annoying that they’ve focused on her so much more than they focus on anything else during the off-time because they’re milking her status.”Report
I don’t remember Giselle getting this much hate when they showed her during Patriots games.
I may be as big a football fan as there is here. And I’m not particularly fond of Swift’s music… it’s catchy and all but just isn’t my thing. Meh. I really don’t care what they show in between plays. Honestly, I’d rather see Swift than another 200 ads for Draft Kings (which I actually use but, still…).
I’ve got a colleague who LOVES Swift and probably never watched a football game save for attending a Super Bowl party and it being on in the background. She’s excited that this year she has a team to root for. That’s a good thing!
Also, the Kelce brothers were already a bit of a thing. Besides being brothers who are Hall-of-Fame caliber players at different positions, both of whom were fairly unheralded until they broke through in the pros, they played against each other in the Super Bowl last year and their mom emerged as a bit of a media darling. She showed up with cookies and all that. Not sure if that was her own PR savviness or if they had someone guiding the process for the entire family. The brothers have done a podcast for a few years now… I’ve never listened but Travis was always a bit more of the showy one of the two, perhaps the result of playing one of the “skill positions.”
All in all, there seems to be more time being given talking ABOUT the two of them then actual coverage they’re receiving outside of their actual jobs. Oh well.Report
In fairness Brittany Mahomes has gotten a lot of hate and IIRC so did Kurt Warner’s wife so not unprecedented.Report
Oh no… not unprecedented. I haven’t heard anything about Mahomes but recall his brother catching flak.
Anna Benson used to catch fire. And there was always chatter about whomever Romo was dating.Report
“I assure you, my rage at Taylor Smith is purely because I am tired of hearing about her.
Now read my 35,000 tweets and comments about Taylor Swift and my prognostications about her fertility, sex life, and possible future marriage and career plans.”Report
The interesting thread I’ve seen emerge is folks insisting her success is somehow illegitimate or unearned because she apparently started with some money and/or connections via her father. PERISH THE THOUGHT!Report
I just deleted my reply with the same link.Report
Now, with that in mind, imagine watching a game and EVERY SINGLE PLAY THEY TURN TO TAYLOR SWIFT IN THE SKYBOX.
You’d really have to have a vigorous imagination to imagine that. The NFL broadcasts cut to her less than half a dozen times during the game, almost always on Kelce plays, and for maybe 30 seconds total. (In Sunday’s game, she was shown four times, none in the second half, one of which was tied into the upcoming Grammy broadcast.) Maybe Bubba isn’t interested in Taylor Swift, but if that level of exposure to one of the world’s most famous people, who is in a serious relationship with one of the leading players, bothers him, he ought to ask himself why.Report
I imagine that the answer is something like “jeez louise, get back to the dang game! I can’t watch Sportscenter without them talking about her! I listen to the idiot sports AM radio show and they talk about her! If I wanted to listen to Taylor Swift, I’d listen to Taylor Swift!”
I imagine.
But I say that as someone who does not watch football and isn’t into Taylor Swift beyond, you know, the whole thing about how Red was better than 1989 and 1989 was better than Reputation and Reputation was better than Lover.
But I do think that it’s nice that she’s found a good dude to date and I hope that they manage to make each other happy. Life’s too short, you know?Report
“WHY DOESN’T EVERYONE JUST TALK ABOUT WHAT I WANT TO TALK ABOUT?!”Report
“Why are journalists getting laid off?”Report
To be fair, this is a description of some pretty odd behavior, and I’m someone who loves football (decreasingly so, albeit).Report
It’s really odd behavior that has made its way to me, someone who is vaguely aware that Football happens.
Like, to the point where Saul, SAUL!, is posting about the Superbowl!Report
I’m kind of disappointed in myself for dipping my toes into the latest right wing weirdo nontroversy, but let’s press on, shall we.
It’s been demonstrated by Kazzy and CJ, with empirical data no less, that Ms. Swift occupies a vanishingly small amount of broadcast time. How do you give credence to someone who, despite data to the contrary, believes she’s on TV all the time?Report
If Bubba isn’t interested at all, he doesn’t care, and can’t even perceive, that the exposure to Taylor Swift is minuscule and the interference with the game is non-existent. It is enough for him that some tiny portion of the broadcast dare acknowledge that other viewers exist and cater to them. I guess he never learned to share, even things that aren’t his.Report
I think it has to do with change in baseline.
Turn the clock back. How much Taylor Swift discussion was there during the average football game or episode of Sportscenter?
I submit: None during the games themselves. Sportscenter probably had a handful of references to “we are never ever getting back together” during the Kaepernick thing and maybe a bunch of “look what you made me do” otherwise but, for the most part, it was a reference to a pop song and not a reference to a pop star.
And if what you are looking for in an episode of sportscenter or an episode of Sports Shouting is sports, having segments dedicated to Taylor Swift is vaguely jarring. Having footage show up on the news (or in the comments of a blog) will probably contribute to the whole “we spent years not talking about Taylor Swift, now we can’t shut up about her!” feeling in the brain.
(And that’s without getting into the meta-discussions!)
Compared to baseline? She’s everywhere, man. She’s everywhere.Report
I just don’t know about this one. My sense is that this is more of a ginned up sports media controversy than a sports controversy.
At risk of sounding sexist, football has long been home to nods towards things more likely to appeal to women, or what could broadly (no pun intended) be called chick stuff. This includes breast cancer awareness campaigns, half time shows that feature female-centric pop acts, and things of that nature.
This is because plenty of women enjoy football, but that doesn’t preclude them from being interested in women-centric stuff. There are also plenty of women who don’t like or don’t care about football but still watch it with their husbands and boyfriends and it behooves the NFL to also include things they might find fun or interesting, so that they don’t become hostile to their menfolk being invested in it. Think of it as the grown up jokes sprinkled in childrens movies. Most of this goes unnoticed or uncared about by viewers.
To me this feels more like that than some bizarre, out of nowhere, top down attempt to mold the culture or ruining of the fun with a sermon.Report
I counter with “How did this thread begin?”
I submit: With Saul, FREAKING SAUL, talking about football.
This, somehow, made its way to him. It’s not about art house movies. It’s not about non-musical plays. It’s not about foreign affairs. But he was under the impression that, somehow, Trumpists will be torn between the Swifties and San Francisco.
Despite the fact that they’re all going to go with KC because San Francisco sucks.Report
I thought it was a joke.Report
Really? I read it as a sneer.Report
My sense is that this is more of a ginned up sports media controversy than a sports controversy.
Especially since the conservative hate-on for Swift and Kelce started before they even started dating, when he supported vaccinations and she encouraged young people to vote.
The meeping about how ackshully this is about ethics in sports broadcasting is comical.Report
(“Conservative hate”?!? I have seen more people complaining that Taylor Swift isn’t doing enough to end the conflict in Palestine as well as how she is shirking her obligation to come out of the closet than I have seen anything even *CLOSE* to “conservative hate”.)Report
“Baseline” is just a fancy way of saying that I don’t like this particular minuscule portion of sports programming. There is always some dead time with cutaways to celebrities, politicians, veterans, or heroic first responders. It didn’t used to be Taylor Swift, but there was always something. And Taylor Swift is, at least, a moderately interesting football-related human interest story. If you’re bothered by the non-existent saturation coverage of Taylor Swift, you need to realize that it isn’t all about what most interests you, focus on the damn game, and don’t try to dictate what other folks ought to see.Report
While I appreciate that you are trying to police what people complain about, I submit:
You lack both authority and jurisdiction.
I wish you the best of luck, though. Perhaps you should root for Kansas City in defiance.
This would be good for you personally.
Because San Francisco sucks.Report
I’m not trying to “police” what people complain about, merely pointing out that they are wrong about what they think they perceive and about whether every minute of what they watch has to be Taylored to them and anything that isn’t, no matter how Swiftly it goes by, aggrieves them. No one needs authority or jurisdiction to point and laugh.Report
Ah, the Perception Police.
I voted to “defund”.
But I suppose I should have expected that vigilantes would fill the void.Report
You’ve always had strange notions about policing.Report
I wish we had better cops!Report
Swift has less to risk and her very long dating list is all men.
She supports the LGBQ+ community but I see no reason to suspect she’s not straight.Report
This is the essay:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/opinion/taylor-swift-queer.html
Make what you will of it.
There was apparently a bit of an uproar about it including a pretty negative response from Swift’s people.Report
Chip, are you actually citing “The Federalist” as a rational resource for any reason whatsoever?
also if that piece is an example of “sudden fury” and “MAGAt squealing” then you’ve got rather unique definitions of those terms, because it’s from the middle of last year and is…vaguely snippy about the media omnipresence of a cute blonde pop star, which is certainly a conservative attitude but hardly the kind of frothing-white-supremacist nuttery one expects from Saul’s description of the situation.Report
Details on the U.N. workers who allegedly helped Hamas plan October 7 and participated in it: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/world/middleeast/gaza-unrwa-hamas-israel.htmlReport
I know understand what the memes I saw yesterday were about. Giving the Palestinians their own refugee agency was a big mistake. They should have been under the general refugee agency. UNRWA and really many of the humanitarian NGOs have long been filled with people who encouraged the worst hidebound attitudes in the Palestinians rather than trying to find new places for them or encouraging them to be more realistic when it comes to the existence of Israel.Report
It is literally not the job of refugee agencies to tell people to give up on their wish to return to the country they have had to flee. In fact, it’s the job of refugee agencies to help people return safely when possible.
And it’s interesting how, in every other use of the word ‘refugee’, we’d all actually understand that obvious fact inherently. Because the governments that cause the existence of refugees are generally understood to be villains that we would wish would stop their oppression of the people who had to flee, allowing everyone to return and live peacefully. But, hey, guess refugee means something else here.
Also, the amount of UNRWA employees that are alleged to be part of it are 12 of 30,000 employees, that’s 0.04% and it is just allegations of being part of the fighting force, not ‘helping plan’.
Guess we should defund the Seattle police, because 0.2% of their officers (2 out of 940) participated in attempting to overthrow the government on January 6th.
This is _also_ just completely unproven allegations by Israel at this point. So assuming it’s _true_ is a bit absurd. Giant amounts of what Israel has claimed about what happened have fallen apart, even if those facts haven’t actually reached the US population.
This entire thing is utter nonsense and an excuse to further continue what is, at this point, pretty clearly a wide-scale attempt at ethnic cleansing, an actual open attempt to steal Gaza.Report
‘
It isn’t the job of relief agencies to participate in acts of war either. The UNRW is a horrible relief agency and basically made life worse for the Palestinians rather than better since 1948. If the Israel-Palestine conflict was treated just like every other conflict rather than the “WORST ATROCITY EVER” or something unique than progress would have been made.Report
If you get a speeding ticket, is the company you work for liable for paying it?Report
Depending on when you get it and whether you were on the clock or not and why you were speeding, yes.Report
Let’s say your driving is off the clock.Report
Still depends on what you were doing when driving.Report
Speeding, with no employer involvement whatsoever.Report
In that situation, possibly not analogizing speeding to plus planning and participating in an attack is a strange lookReport
Under normal rules, the child, grand-child, and great grand-child of a refugee is not a refugee. Undoing a war that happened multiple generations ago shouldn’t be official UN policy.Report
Except thanks to Israel , and UN indifference, and Palestinian intransigence, this war has been lukewarm to hot since 1948. Its very hot at the moment.Report
I would call it “UN support”.Report
If the UN supported Palestinians the way is supports Israel, we’d have a Palestinian state, israeli objections be damned.Report
We’ve been encouraging them to not settle for anything less than “from the river to the sea”.
They don’t need more support, they need less.
Uniquely, the descendant of a refugee is a refugee. They have their own UN agency. They have the right to undo a war 3+ generations ago.
They get support and haven’t needed to accept any of the deals that has been offered over the decades.
The gov of Gaza hasn’t needed to care for their civilians because aid bodies do that. Thus they can focus on destroying Israel.Report
Hey, question, do you think the people _who were actually citizens back in 1948_ should have the right to return back to their home? The remaining people still alive?
Why or why not?
And then explain why you think inheritance and citizenship laws shouldn’t apply? Because, if those people were citizen of the country they were in, their children are also citizens under generally understood law, and if those people owned houses, their children do.
You might argue they are not ‘refugees’ due to their genetics, and maybe…but they do appear to be refugees in that they are logically citizens and lawowners in Israel, but that country will not allow them in due to their religion and race. Wouldn’t that…make them refugees?
These aren’t rhetorical questions, I do really want them answered.
If your premise is that this is time dependent…if Israel steals all of Gaza and forces Palestinians out and puts it own people there, you surely would be okay with them demanding THAT being undone, right?
And, again, if this is some sort of demand that expires, you are willing to force it to happen RIGHT NOW, so that 70 years later you aren’t standing around complaining about how the people forced out of Gaza want a war 3+ generations ago undone?
Confirm right now that you actually care about TIME HAVING PASSED, by arguing that RIGHT NOW Israel doesn’t NEWLY get Gaza.
Because if you think they can just take it by force and keep it and that’s fine, you don’t think this has anything to do with time at all.Report
Replying at the bottom so I have more room.Report
There have been a *LOT* of isolated demands for peace.
If there’s, like, a Six-Day War? Day One: “Well, you have to understand that people are upset.” Day Six: “We call upon Israel to stop fighting and bring peace to the region!”
October 7th: “Well, you have to understand that people are upset.” October 8th: “We call on Israel to have a ceasefire!”
November 24th: “Okay. We’ll have a ceasefire.”
November 30th: “Three Israelis dead, multiple injured in bus stop shooting in Jerusalem, Hamas claim responsibility”
December 1st: “We need to have a new ceasefire!”Report
We’re “calling for a ceasefire” and not “calling for Hamas to surrender”.Report
RE: 12 of 30,000 employees, that’s 0.04%
UNRWA is significantly more connected to Hamas than the typical Palestinian. For example 25% of UNRWA people have relatives who are members of Hamas. The level of support for Hamas inside of UNRWA is also higher.
RE: In fact, it’s the job of refugee agencies to help people return safely when possible.
For them to return, Israel needs to be destroyed.Report
I bet you don’t really have any evidence of that factoid.
I also will point out that Hamas is 40,000 people and the population of Gaza is 2 million, which means that 2% of Gaza is in Hamas, or if we restrict it to people over 18 (about 1 million), something like 6% of them are in Hamas.
Which means a) the amount of UNRWA that participated in the attack seems much much LESS than one would expect statistically, and rather indicates there are very few people who do both jobs, and b) it is not even slightly weird for a random group of people to have 25% of them to be related to 6% of an entire population.
Especially in Gaza, where there are exceptionally large familes.
No it doesn’t. And that’s not actually relevant to what the job of refugee agencies are.Report
RE: I bet you don’t really have any evidence of that factoid. (Percentage of relatives who are Hamas).
https://midmichigannow.com/news/nation-world/fact-check-team-report-implicates-unrwa-employees-in-aiding-hamas-united-nations-relief-and-works-agency-october-7-attack-militants-hostage-kidnapping-logistical-coordination-procurement-of-weapons-gaza-top-donors-united-states-germany-european-union-swe
Dark Matter: For them to return, Israel needs to be destroyed.
DavidTC: No it doesn’t.
Both Israel and Hamas disagree with you.
DavidTC: And that’s not actually relevant to what the job of refugee agencies are.
By any sane definition, they weren’t refugees.
They live in permanent structures, have access to permanent hospitals and so on. The only reason they have their lives on hold is because these things are being supplied by the UN and not by their government.
If their government were to have the responsibility to care for their civilians we’d be done.
The UN and that agency are a big part of the problem.Report
Its an interesting world we live in where politicians are censured by their own parties for doing their jobs – that being finding solutions to problems their constituents face. And yet:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/29/politics/oklahoma-gop-condemns-censures-lankford-border-negotiations/index.htmlReport
Its of a piece with the sudden fury at Taylor Swift, where any deviation from group loyalty must be met with fierce hatred.
Both Lankford and Swift made the mistake of treating the Hated Enemy as partners and equals to be negotiated with.Report
Vox has an article about how Hindu nationalism in India is a threat to Indian democracy and secularism.
https://www.vox.com/2024/1/27/24049025/india-ayodhya-ram-mandir-narendra-modi-bjp-babri-masjid
I’m in general agreement. You also see similar articles about the danger of Jewish theocratic politics, Buddhist theocratic politics, and Christian theocratic politics in the United States. What annoys me and seems to me a big inconsistency is that the Vox set seems to gingerly avoid talking about and wanting to confront the problems that the popularity of Muslim theocratic politics poses in Muslim majority or plurality countries. Many of these places have some very real blasphemy laws. It is almost like Muslims get a general exception to the ban on theocratic politics rather than confrontation. “Can’t do anything about it, can’t talk about.” This annoys me as a Jew because I see more elaborate plots of to protect Muslims from every other religion on the planet but nothing about wanting to protect non-Muslims from Muslim theocrats.Report
You think that’s inconsistent, I know two Jewish liberals who call people MAGAts.Report
Part of this could be because Muslim theocratic politics is a direct threat to fellow Jews and indirectly towards me personally as Jew.Report
There is a universe in which Taylor Swift dated Kirk Cousins when he was the QB for the Washington Redskins.
I don’t know whether that that means that we dodged a bullet or not.Report
There might also be a universe where she’s dating Aaron Rodgers, and more specifically, dating an Aaron Rodgers who didn’t get injured seventy-five seconds into his first game and is right now in that parallel universe leading the Jets to their first Super Bowl since the days of Joe Namath.
Just imagine what sports reporting would look and sound like in that universe.Report
There’s no universe where Rodgers dates someone he suspects is an android sent to assassinate him.Report
Except not because liberals don’t freak out the same way. Try again.Report
Report
That tweets drips misogyny . . .Report
I don’t know about misogyny, but definitely the meaningless word salad of a person with more education than intelligence. Probably went to Harvard.Report
To say that a very popular female musician who advocates for her fans to register and vote reeks of misogyny. And being an idiot . . . .Report
The context of the tweet goes back to this banger:
Report
Now this one I find a little more interesting. My view is that this kind of cultural analysis is inherently really, really low value, mainly because it operates by assuming the truth of a bunch premises that are on their best days very debatable and on their worst totally made up. However she does bring up the interesting issue of wealthy and powerful people appealing to identity to ward off (maybe valid?) criticism. Sort of like when people pointed out to Trevor Noah that his schtick was a lot harder to take seriously by virtue of coming to the US as a rich celebrity.
See also some of the defenses of Claudine Gay we were discussing the other week.Report
Its a counter example to my comment below about code talking, where someone tries to dress up a political resentment in some other clothing.
Here, the person is just being honest.
She isn’t trying to whine about how Swift gets too much airtime or is maybe part of a grand conspiracy.
She is just openly saying that her resentment of Swift is that Swift embraces capitalism and a form of politics the tweeter doesn’t like.
The conservative version of this tweet would be “I don’t like Swift because she is liberal and advocates for LGBTQ rights”.Report
Chip writes that last sentence absolutely impervious to the New York Times editorial that we’ve linked to a couple of times so far.
My main question is whether he knows or whether he doesn’t.
I suppose it doesn’t matter.Report
The “queer” one?
Read it. Doesn’t falsify any of my arguments, but you’re welcome to argue otherwise.Report
Pro-Palestinian activists in California demonstrate why the Right often scores victories against the Broad Left despite being less numerous. Harris was in California to advocate for Reproductive Freedom. Pro-Palestinian activists couldn’t help themselves and exercised their heckler’s veto. The different factions on the Right know when to fall in line when their MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE is not at the forefront.
https://twitter.com/ZachFuentesABC7/status/1752065158988628124?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1752066213071741230%7Ctwgr%5E179bba4615ea2a675dc5143a72368bb17e8a3670%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Dlawyersgunsmoneyblog-comt_i%3D13891320https3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F3Fp3D138913t_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F20242F012Fre-electing-trump-will-mean-substantial-nationwide-restrictions-on-abortion-accesst_e%3DRe-electing20Trump20will20mean20substantial20nationwide20restrictions20on20abortion20accesst_d%3DRe-electing20Trump20will20mean20substantial20nationwide20restrictions20on20abortion20accesst_t%3DRe-electing20Trump20will20mean20substantial20nationwide20restrictions20on20abortion20accesss_o%3Ddescversion%3Dcb3f36bfade5c758ef967a494d077f95Report
One main difference is that the GOP would drum out anyone off message – the Democrats generally don’t.Report
On the sub-thread immediately above, we’re talking about how the right freaks out and has all these cranks. On this sub-thread, the right has discipline and doesn’t let its cranks derail things. This is an illustration of how the enemy is always either 4 feet tall or 10 feet tall.Report
For the urban planners and enthusiasts among us: a four-decade photo tour and timeline on how Williamsburg changed from a neighborhood of boarded up factories, Eastern European immigrants, Hispanic immigrants, and Hasidic Jews to a Bohemia for artists and recent college grads to a very expensive neighborhood with chains and luxury shops in pop-up and permanent locationReport
This is what we liberals, leftists and independents are up against:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/30/media/taylor-swift-super-bowl-right-wing-conspiracy/index.htmlReport
See? Now *THIS* is a conspiracy theory.
Keep your eyes open during the big game. There’s always one inexcusable call made by referees. Will the call that even Phil H admits was questionable be in the favor of Kansas City?
I’m not going to watch it, of course. But you guys should let me know.Report
I hope Vegas has odds.Report
That I’ll trash the refs? 100% likely, and for calls against both teams.Report
What’s interesting is to see the sweaty desperation “respectable” conservatives have in denying their actual resentment of Swift/ Kelce while trying to dress it up in some other, more abstract and principled garb.
No one except the fringers wants to come right out and say they resent the fact that she is a powerful influential woman who is moderately liberal. So they have to dance around and try other angles of attack:
Ackshully, its about sports broadcasting practices;
Ackshully she’s a Pentagon psy-op;
Ackshully, her music is corrupting the yoots;
Saul had a great comment the other day about how after the New Deal and Holocaust, American conservatives’ traditional arguments for white supremacy and laisses-faire economics were demolished, so they had to invent new ones.
Which reminded me of Lee Atwater’s observation about code talking, and I thought of all the sort of codes and dog whistles conservatives have used over the years: “State’s Rights”, “Free Markets”, “Parent’s Rights”, “Law & Order”, all of which were not real or principled, but codewords for the real agenda.Report
You’d think that the White Supremacists would be in favor of Swift and Kelce.
“He wins the Superbowl, proposes marriage, she’s visibly pregnant 6 months later, white women all over the country demand wedding rings and get pregnant too! We have a baby boom OF WHITE CHILDREN EVERYWHERE!!!”
It’s a missed opportunity, I tell ya.
Instead of resenting her, they should be sending him coupons to Jared.Report
You know that they loved her at one time, right?
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/05/27/479462825/taylor-swift-aryan-goddess
This is yet another “betrayal of the elites”.Report
Maybe they came to a secret agreement where she’d denounce them and they’d denounce her but she can still undercut Women of Color and LGBTQ in a plausibly deniable way that would have performative liberals defending the heck out of her while actual progressives see what’s really going on.Report
I mean, I’m just wondering where people are getting this idea that there’s a Huge Seething Mass Of Right-Wing Hate for Swift/Kelce.
Like…she’s a straight white chick whose stage persona is “thank you for coming to see my show, let’s all sing along and have fun”, he’s a straight white football player with well-trimmed hair and no visible naughty tattoos and the talent to back up his high profile, they seem happy together, what exactly are the right-wingers supposed to be Frothingly Angry about? That her political philosophy is probably Suburban Democrat? That he got a vaccine shot? Get real.
It seems like when the “Joker” movie came out and people were publishing articles about how there was 100% definitely going to be “Joker”-inspired mass shooting.Report
I have not seen *ANY* anger toward Taylor Swift.
I have seen anger toward the NFL itself with the whole “get her off my screen!” thing but that’s not toward Taylor. She’s there supporting her BF. Good for her. And, much like Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead, it makes sense to show her waving to the camera once. The anger is “TALK ABOUT THE GAME!” which is *NOT* toward Taylor Swift at all.
Hell, even the “This is an op!” conspiracy theories (which are high quality!) aren’t mad at *HER*.
The only people I’ve seen mad at her are in the examples we’ve seen in the threads already. Crazy people on twitter (who can be dismissed as being crazy people on twitter). Crazy people in the pages of the New York Times (much more difficult to dismiss… does anybody have an article from the Federalist for balance?!?).
But the “they resent Kelce/Swift! I mean Swift/Kelce!” thing isn’t there. They resent how everybody is talking about it instead of the dang game!
Every accusation is a confession, I guess.Report
Right, I can report that in the orthodox Christian ecumenical homeschooling communities Taylor Swift is an ordinary thing. There’s no visible ‘backlash’ is flesh and blood world. Heck, even Ross Douthat is joking that a Swift/Kelce marriage and children might help break the Milennial anti-natalism.
Like all pop music, we talk about some questionable themes and messaging… but that’s just life as the counter-culture.
This is just the usual online quixote complex at work.Report
The most I’ve seen is an intergenerational thing, but much older than usual. People under 50 like her, and people over 50 think she’s kind of boring. Not a lot of passion there, outside of her fans.Report
Yeah, I once made a ‘Cradle-to-Grave’ country playlist and pointed out to my daughters that I had Taylor Swift’s ‘Our Song’ in the mix. Well before Swift was a thing, making me an OG Swiftie.
But yeah, her pop songs seem to clock in well below her talent level and are astonishingly forgettable… but hey, that’s what selling-out is, man.Report
Speaking of premises that could stand some interrogation, the case that her work demands to be taken super seriously artistically seems to be stated much more than made. But I’ll leave it to people with death wishes like FdB to delve into all of that.Report
Right… Pop Icons are rarely making the most interesting songs — you have to trade accessibility (major keys) and mainstream themes for Icon levels of paying fans.
Challenging music is niche.Report
Lousy kids with their boring pop music. Back in my day we’d be drinking and driving while blasting Jethro Tull. Er, I guess I mean “non-lousy kids”.Report
One of the things I remember from reading a Doobie Brothers biography was that they said there were a dozen acts they knew about who were all at least as good as them, but those acts weren’t interested in (or willing to) make a play for pop audiences, and so they never went anywhere.
And, y’know. Sure, it’s “selling out”, but on the other hand, is it bad to make fun music everybody likes to clap and sing along to?Report
Interestingly with the advent of streaming services it’s become way harder to sell out even if you are trying. Swift is the crazy outlier in terms of her ability to capture fans, money, and fame the way she has. Given that she got her start through traditional pop country gatekeepers I wonder if even she could repeat her feat were she starting out today.Report
I think that’s because Taylor Swift has managed to sell an experience, not just “seeing the person do the songs they do”.
Which is, in its way, what everyone expected twenty-first century musicians to have to do. But we’re also seeing that it only really works if you’re Taylor Swift.Report
I’m a Lana Del Rey man, myself. Taylor Swift doesn’t really do minor chords except as a way to get back to the major ones.
Note: I am over 50.Report
That’s why we like all the opposite Cure songs.Report
Welp, Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer has had a complaint lodged about, you guessed it, plagiarism.
The Free Beacon claims to have a copy of the complaint.
They seriously need to hit some conservative professors with this sort of thing to achieve some sort of détente.Report
I suspect the likelihood is “they all do it”, but given Harvard’s, and higher education as a group, being more liberal then conservative, it hits the left a bit more.Report
RE: They seriously need to hit some conservative professors
At Harvard? Isn’t that like looking for dry water?Report
More like looking for free-range buffalo. They used to be everywhere, but that was a long time ago.Report
Man, what was I just saying about code talking and conservative cultural resentment.Report
That it is a good target for changing the subject when bad action is discovered?Report
Lets state that neither you nor I ave any way of knowing if the charges are true.
But for the sake or argument, lets say they are.
Having gotten that out of the way, should i just accept at face value, that the charges made by conservatives are based on principle and not ideology and cultural resentment?
Are you willing to admit I have valid reasons for doubting their honesty?Report
Oh, yeah. People who are that partisan bring up stuff that the other side does not because of any underlying principle but because they just want a win.
They’re seemingly incapable to realizing that the game is iterated and are willing to throw away a norm for some temporary advantage. It’s really weird to watch, if I want to be honest.Report
What’s interesting is that this has several of the elements I talked about.
One is the “Decline” narrative which is central to fascism, where “elite universities used to be good, but they are all rotted and corrupt now.”
And like I said, when they try to point to the Golden Era, they quickly fall into the ditch of absurdity.
The other element it has is the “Betrayal Of The Elite”, where the elite tastemakers bestow favor on those who are undeserving. Like, this DEI person is a priori, fundamentally undeserving of her post and it is an outrage that the elites gave it to her to begin with.
But of course conservatives can’t just come right out and say it that way, so they need to find codewords and sudden inexplicable Principles-Of-The-Moment to camouflage their motives.Report
“Plagiarism bad” is a sudden inexplicable principle-of-the-moment?
Huh.Report
In addition to the long, very long list of Sudden High Minded Principles that conservatives discover, here is a new one.
The high minded principle of Identification Must Never Be Changed.
As in,:
“Permitting an individual to alter his or her license to reflect an internal sense of gender role or identity, which is neither immutable nor objectively verifiable, undermines the purpose of an identification record and can frustrate the state’s ability to enforce its laws,” wrote Robert Kynoch, the department’s deputy executive director, in the memo.
https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/politics/2024/01/30/florida-blocks-trans-people-changing-gender-on-driver-licenses/72407151007/
Now, don’t get confused!
When red haired Miss Smith becomes blonde haired Mrs. Jones, this is not a violation of the Identification Must Never Be Changed principle because shut up that’s why.
And again, please understand- this is not bigotry and animus towards trans people, no not at all!
The principle applies to everyone equally, but of course applies to some more equally than others.Report
If you are looking to change to a form of identification that fits your lifestyle, may I suggest the Sovereign Citizens?
Get identification cards here or, if in England, here.
You shouldn’t have to rely on the government to say who you are. Get your Sovereign ID today!Report
Richard Hanania has a tweet thread on “Taylor Swift” Democrats — the nut of it is this bit:
“Most centrists are simply more positive towards the side that will let them just ignore politics.
It used to be the left that was “that guy,” unable to watch a football game without an ideological agenda. Now it’s conservatives that lose the just be normal contest.”Report
Hanania for his many, many flaws has a knack for pointing out the unappealing, out of control weirdness of modern movement conservatism. The only place they can sort of seem ok is where they act as a narrow check on the out of control weirdness in institutions that come completely under progressive control. Even then they can never consolidate because they have no actual interest in running anything competently nor are they any better at controlling their own weirdness once they get power. Usually they’re a lot worse.
Of course there are times I wonder if we aren’t creeping towards a politics of ‘who wants it less’ as the internet ruins everyone’s ability to maintain perspective in the face of motivated activist fanatics and the replacement of objective feedback loops with bias confirming propaganda organs.Report
He is a stone-cold anti-Semite and homophobe. He is not worth any time.Report
Replying to DavidTC:
RE: And then explain why you think inheritance and citizenship laws shouldn’t apply?
Citizens of what? Israel and Palestine both didn’t exist then.
There was wide disagreement on who should be allowed to set up a country and which set of people should run it. The UN proposed two states and the Arabs refused and invaded. We ended up with boarders changing and populations being exchanged… just like in Europe.
RE: if those people were citizen of the country they were in,
They weren’t citizens of Israel.
RE: their children are also citizens under generally understood law, and if those people owned houses, their children do.
Total Nonsense. The children of people living abroad do NOT default to keeping the “citizenship” of their parents.
It’s possible to keep that citizenship but it involves various legal hoops. If my children wanted to get their Polish citizenship now because of their mother, they couldn’t because they can’t write in Polish (they did but only because she made the effort to give it to them as babies).
Further, the state has more than a little involvement on who owns land, especially when it comes to inheritance and especially when it involves people of other states. Every inch of land in the USA used to be owned by the Native Americans.
And, again, if this is some sort of demand that expires, you are willing to force it to happen RIGHT NOW, so that 70 years later you aren’t standing around complaining about how the people forced out of Gaza want a war 3+ generations ago undone?
If we insist that wars don’t settle things, then Poland, Germany, and Russia should all be at war right now because various borders changed.
Time is important because people need to get on with their lives. The massive difference between the Palestinians and the Polish is the Polish moved on, while the world decided the Palestinians were special and didn’t need to.
If the people of Gaza are rounded up by Israel and forced into Egypt, it will be a massive crime. The world will likely do things about it and likely prevent or undo it.
However property rights, crimes, and citizenship don’t transfer from one generation to another automatically. My dad’s land doesn’t automatically become mine. Tony Soprano’s children aren’t automatically criminals. My children didn’t automatically get their mother’s EU citizenship.
They can transfer, but some amount of effort and/or legal hoops need to be done.
In this case, the State of Israel is the governing body and they’ve been regulating+tracking land ownership since their creation. So no, someone in Gaza whose great-grandparents used to own a house in Israel doesn’t have more legal right to it than the last 3+ generations of people who actually live there and have been developing it.
Just exactly like it would be everywhere else.Report
And the Palestinians who have had their land taken by ultra orthodox settlers in the last 30 or so years?Report
Legally and ethically that’s the most problematic thing that Israel has done. We even have Israeli courts say that. That’s why I think Israel should announce what it thinks it’s borders are.
Since that wasn’t done in the context of war and country creation, there’s a lot of room there for the law to reverse things.
But subtract that, and all of Israel’s problems with the Palestinians existed before that, and the only reason for there to be any problems or exceptions to the rules is “because they’re Jews”.Report
They literally displaced, at gunpoint, three quarters of a million people to create their country. Hundreds of towns and villages, often existing for centuries, were destroyed, and thousands of people were killed.
The idea that the only reason anyone had any problem with them was because they were Jewish is complete nonsense. They had a problem because a bunch of lunatics started slaughtering people very much like them right next to them.
It’s like if Canada collapsed somehow, and in that ungoverned land Quebec declared independence and their existence as a Francophile nation (Which might be fine.) but didn’t just take the area of Quebec, but expelled a bunch of non-French from itself and surrounding areas, which it also took. At gunpoint. Just seizing part of the country by force and removing anyone it didn’t like based on their language.
The US, rightly alarmed by this, take control over other parts of [the area that was] Canada to keep this expansionist nation in check, and is constantly hostile to Quebec, ending up in a war with it 20 years later, which Quebec win and ends up in control of _all_ of Canada as an occupied territory, but doesn’t let them go…or vote in Quebec government. Just sorta…owns them for 50 years.
And then, at that point, 70 years later, everyone concludes that the reason the US has a problem with Quebec is that the US and other English-speaking people don’t like French people. Don’t worry, enough people in the US have said racist things about French people that it’s possible to piece them together to prove it…you know, like people awaReport
They literally displaced, at gunpoint, three quarters of a million people
The Arabic states did the same to the Jews (but 900k). Note that’s not because “they’re on the same land”, that was explicitly “because they’re Jews” even though these really were their own citizens.
Syria has killed roughly this number in the last handful of years and displaced millions. The Middle East plays rough. This kind of nasty shows up there every now and then.
The German/Polish/Russian border changes involved far more people moving and were far more extensive.
The world has been over-reacting because it’s Jews.
That over-reaction has kept the problem going for generations.Report
Yes, in response.
Yes, let’s praise the murderous and rapist communists here, where after WWII they sometimes even locked up German _civilians_ in places that _had been concentration camps_ because they wanted to ethnically cleans _Poland_ of Germans, because irony needed to be invented.
Oh, and it wasn’t just the Soviets. Eastern Europe expelled _one quarter of all Germanic people_, destroyed entire communities, and somewhere around a million people died from this.
And the reason this horrific stuff was allowed to stand, and the world didn’t get outraged, is that they were ‘Germans’ (Even the ones that had been living in fricking other countries and had nothing to do with Nazi Germany, or had even _left_ Nazi Germany) and the Germans were Bad(TM).
The difference, of course, is that these Germanic people mostly got expelled to Germany, where they, and the other Germans, actually were allowed to create a government. And so the political movement to retake now-Polish lands died out…in the _80s_.
As opposed to the Palestinians, who were not allowed to create a government by Israel. And the Palestinians, I should point out, put up with the lack of any forward progress on that until the 80s.
The responses are different because the the aftermath was completely different. One had the refugees moving to somewhat safe areas that had self-determination, and the other didn’t.
…except I’m lying, because in fact a bunch of Palestinian refugees _also_ ended up in Jordan, and the _ones in Jordan_ have mostly given up on regaining Palestine. So we actually know what happens there.
It’s the one that got shoved into a tiny area and controlled entirely by people who are constantly dehumanizing and literally stealing land with settlements in an attempt to take the entire place that eventually got pissed enough to fight….which actually took a lot longer than people think, the violence _by Palestinians_ didn’t actually start until the 80s, after 20 years of Israeli rule.Report
Dark Matter: The Arabic states did the same to the Jews (but 900k).
DavidTC: Yes, in response.
So if the USA has some problem in Africa, it’s acceptable if we abuse our African Americans citizens?
Do the grandchildren of the displaced Jews have legal rights to the properties they were forced away from? Do they have a “right to return”?
As opposed to the Palestinians, who were not allowed to create a government by Israel.
Israel did not have the power to stop them from 1949 to 1967, and we’ve seen multiple “state creation” peace offers since then. This is why we have the phrase, “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.
The big issue is whether the Palestinians give up the “right to return” and let the Jews get ad state. As long as they insist on “from the river to the sea” there can’t be peace.
And yes, Israel is not always willing to make peace (now is a good example). But insisting that peace is impossible opens the door to Israel deciding the Palestinians might as well be unhappy with less.
the aftermath was completely different. One had the refugees moving to somewhat safe areas that had self-determination, and the other didn’t.
How many generations does it take for them to not be “refugees”?Report
You mentioned what Arab countries did as a _justification_ for what Israeli did.
Whereas in actuality it happened after, as a _response_ to it. And it, extremely clearly, was a response, it was explicitly stated as such.
I don’t think either side should have done what they did, but there is an actual literal order that events happen in and people need to stop pretending that future events can justify past one.
In some places, they _did_ sell their property. Don’t think all the expulsions looks the same, some of them were literally just increasing pressure on Jews over the decades, and they, like most people immigrating from a country, left fairly normally.
Others had them forced with only a few possessions and limited money, like Egypt and Iraq.
And no, no country has offered to take them back or pay reparation…but those countries are jerks, let’s ask the _expelled Jews_ if they deserve anything:
https://archive.ph/J8voK
“Most recently, a report on Israel television’s Channel 10 in January revealed that Israel intends to demand over $250 billion from seven Arab countries and Iran as compensation for what the Mizrahi Jews left behind. ”
That was as of 2019, so I think we can safely conclude this is still an active issue today.
Now, in some hypothetical universe we can imagine Israel offering compensation for property to the Arabs it expelled, without offering the right to return, but…it has not. In fact, such compensation would do a lot to solve the pretty serious problem that a lot of Palestinians property is owned by absentee Jewish landlords, and a lot of justification for settlements is that ‘Jews own this land’.(1) Maybe Palestinians could actually _own some land_ in Palestine if they were reimbursed for _stolen_ land in Israel.
1) I have no idea in what universe property owners get to randomly decide what legal jurisdiction and even country a piece of real estate is under, but that’s not how it works here.Report
You mentioned what Arab countries did as a _justification_ for what Israeli did.
No, I’m presenting that as an example (of many) of this happening without everyone insisting it disrupt generations. It’s also an example of the Middle East in general. And it wasn’t one “side”, it was lots of countries.
If you want “justification” then with this being expected and normal, it seems reasonable for the Jews to decide they need a nation.
That was as of 2019, so I think we can safely conclude this is still an active issue today.
And how many times has the world condemned it? How much UN money is spent on it?
The world let everyone move on, as opposed to rounding up the victims and putting them in camps to await “justice”. Ergo everyone is better off. Ditto with Germany. Ditto with Poland. No doubt we’ll see the same with the current populations shifts happening at gun point on the Armenia–Azerbaijan border.
we can imagine Israel offering compensation for property to the Arabs it expelled, without offering the right to return,
This has been suggested as part of a peace deal. They have fallen apart because giving up the right to return means the Jews get a country.
Maybe Palestinians could actually _own some land_ in Palestine if they were reimbursed for _stolen_ land in Israel.
So it’s impossible to own land in Gaza? If that’s true then Hamas is probably the problem. More likely they can and do own land.
The world (specifically the UN) has given the Palestinians massive amounts of money which could have been used to contract civilian infrastructure rather than terror tunnels.
The Palestinians in Gaza are the best educated “refugees” in the world. If they didn’t have a rep for terrorism they could emigrate and have a great life. For that matter without terrorism they could make a state there and prosper.
They decided to go to war with their neighbor and have become internally displaced, i.e. “refugees” in practice as well as in name.
The world is focused on preventing Israel from winning and I hear no calls for Hamas to surrender.
If we’d left the Na.zis in charge of Germany, there would have been all sorts of expected problems.Report
Weirdly, we aren’t supporting Syria, or for your other example, Soviet Russia!
In fact, we condemned them, quite loudly. The entire western world did, in fact. As the US, we are actually trying to stop what Syria is doing, and we tried to stop Soviet Russia to the extent we could.
It seems incredibly odd to say ‘This thing is fine and should be allowed because the villains did it and no one said anything (Except all that stuff people said about how evil they were for doing it and how we all agree they are villains because of that.)’.
This is like the reverse ‘Hitler like dogs, ergo, liking dogs is evil’ logic: Syria and Soviet Russia did a thing, ergo, that thing is fine.Report
Weirdly, we aren’t supporting Syria, or for your other example, Soviet Russia!
And what happened after Soviet Russia fell? Did we insist that Poland get it’s land back as part of the price of us supporting Russia?
Our problems with Soviet Russia had nothing to do with moving borders in Europe because everyone moved on.
It is insane to insist that crimes committed many generations ago be retroactively changed. The equiv for the US would be insisting that the USA give multiple states back to the Native Americans.
Nation States are created by crimes. The land normally belonged to a different state (although weirdly not in the case of Israel). We forgive Nation States these crimes because the alternative is these issues drag on for generations and create wars.
we tried to stop Soviet Russia to the extent we could.
This is linking together all of Russia’s crimes to the border changes. We stopped opposing the border changes soon after they happened.
The border changes were fine, if disruptive and a problem at the time, our opposition was to everything else they did.Report
It was Germany who lost land after WWII, not Poland. Treaties after the war gave Poland back all the land it lost and _additional_ land from Germany, which Germans were expelled by force from. (Which Poland called ‘Recovered Territories’ under the logic had lost them to German centuries ago.)
And while no one ‘insisted’ on it, reunified Germany agreed to renounced all claims to that territory in 1990 as it reannounced itself as Germany to the world, to mollify concern that it would start a war over the area.
But we aren’t actually talking about national territorial claims, we’re talking about the right of people who were made refugees by violence having the right to return to where they were removed from, regardless of whether or not that place is the same ‘country’ anymore.
Germany…does sorta think this, in the sense that the political position still exists on the right, and that this has resulted in constant conflict with Poland…and that and the Nazi stuff.
Poland does not agree to any of this, and in fact has managed to get Germany to sign a treaty saying that expelled Germanic people can’t get their land back, at least. Which doesn’t mean they don’t have the right to return, although Poland seems to think they don’t.
Native Americans are not barred from living in the United States, and are in fact citizens of the United States. They are even allowed to move back to where in the US their ancestors lived, we have no restrictions on their movement whatsoever. Cherokees, for example, were forcibly expelled from where I live in Georgia, and…are allowed to come back and live here now, vote in Georgia policies, be full citizens of this country.
Arabs who were expelled from Israel are not allowed to do any of that.Report
It was Germany who lost land after WWII, not Poland.
Go look at some maps before and after the war. Poland had some of it’s land taken and it was given some of Germany’s land.
A significant percentage of the populations of all the countries had to move to stay with “their” people.
we’re talking about the right of people who were made refugees by violence having the right to return to where they were removed from
So Poland is a great example.
This “right” hasn’t been a thing in history and has been a disaster in practice where it’s been attempted.
Countries have the right to control their own borders and decide who they let in and who are citizens.
Arabs who were expelled from Israel are not allowed to do any of that.
The grandchild of someone expelled from a country has zero case for claiming they personally were expelled.
Cherokees, for example, were forcibly expelled from where I live in Georgia, and…are allowed to come back and live here now, vote in Georgia policies, be full citizens of this country.
Only if they personally are citizens. If their parents gave them a different citizenship then they can’t point to an event many generations old and claim they should be let back into Georgia on the basis of that.Report
“Giving back to the Native Americans” doesn’t mean “they have the ability to buy land there”.
It means “this specific house/land will be returned to them” or even “The Cherokee nation will be set up there”. Those are both non-starters.
The Palestinians aren’t fighting to become 2nd class citizens in a Jewish state.
The genocidal religious fanatics in Gaza want to set up an Islamic Republic which will go from the river to the sea and there will be no Jews.Report
Why would they be second-class citizens?
Hey, question, in all the times that Israel stold land from Palestine over the decades, both in Gaza until they ‘freed’ it an din the West Bank, why did they remove Palestinians first? Why not just…claim the land and all the people on it?
At some point, it just becomes clears you have internalized so much propaganda there’s no point in talking.
Hamas, again, is not even particularly religious.Report
Why would they be second-class citizens?
Because it’s a Jewish ethno-state.
The Palestinian vision for how things are supposed to be is an Islamic Republic. No one there on any side wants to have separation of church and state and no one wants to have a neutral state.
Hamas, again, is not even particularly religious.
It’s the “fanatical and genocidal” parts that create problems.
They’re quoting the Koran in their charter as a reason why every member of a different religion needs to die or be driven out so they can build a state devoted to their own religion.
By Western Standards the phrase “genocidal religious fanatic” seems well earned.Report
That isn’t at all what happened.
The UK had control of the area, UN proposed dividing the area up, the UK did not do that and walked away, the Zionists forced a bunch of Arabs to leave an area (Which was much larger than the proposed partition) and ‘declared independence’ over that area, and that was 1948.
The remaining parts of that now-ungoverned area (And note that Israel only left that part alone because it literally did not have enough people to operate it and it was pretending to be a democracy and including that would have had them outvoted.) ended up controlled by Eygpt and Jordan, and later those two countries ended up in a war against Israel. (And pretending that they ‘invaded’ is nonsense, that was a war that was the result of decades of escalation by both sides, and Israel literally is the one that started the military response. I’m not saying Israel is at fault, but the other side isn’t either.)
Israel won that war, and at that point ended up with the rest of the ungoverned area, and had an obligation under international law to make a country. (Although, in fact, almost no one would have had a problem if they’d just seized the entire area and declared it Israel…which they didn’t do because that would have resulted in a non-Jewish majority and they were pretending to be a democracy.)
The entire history of that area has been a constant attempt by Zionists to control as much of it as they can. First, because they were a democracy, they forced out Arabs from an area to get a majority and called that Israel, then they gained control of more of it and called it occupied territory so those people couldn’t vote in their government, and now, the final step, they are killing and forcing out as many of those people from that territory as they can so they can claim the rest of it.
This is textbook ethnic cleansing, this is literally how and why governments do it, because they want to operate a country without some of the population of the area…in Israel’s case, the _majority_ of the population of the area.
it really is amazing how everyone thinks ‘border moving’ is the thing to get used to. The problem is not that the borders moved.
The problem is _displacing the people there and not letting them back_.
No one is asserting that Palestine, the country, gets to own any part of Israel. People are asserting that refugees that were kicked out of what is now Israel at gunpoint get to return to that land and be _Israelis citizen_.
The problem is that Israel thinks it somehow magically has the right to determine its own citizens, instead of working with the people who already existed there and had a right to continue to exist there. A thing which, I feel I should note, we do _not_ let other countries do, and I point, very specifically, at Germany.
Governments exist by consent of the governed (of an area), the governed do not exist (in an area) by consent of the government.
The fact that Israel has managed to set up a government that was very likely to be dismantled once the _actual people who currently lived there at the time_ start voting on it is not really anyone else’s fault. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Israel is _literally trying to do this_, and have failed to do so because Egypt has said ‘No, we won’t be a part of this, Gazans cannot come here to live, because we actually understand what ‘complicity in a war crime’ means.’
I know the media isn’t actually reporting on this anymore because it has become _very_ awkward to pretend this isn’t anything but ethnic cleansing, but a pretty large chunk of the Israeli leadership, including the PM, are openly trying to set up some deal where the people of Gaza move to the Sinai and Israel now owns Gaza and builds ‘settlements’.Report
so can America say “we won’t be complicit in a war crime” and refuse to allow refugees to cross the southern border?Report
You were probably just snarking, but its worth noting that in 1850, when America took the northern half of Mexico, the provisions of the treaty were to recognize the legitimacy of the land claims of the existing Mexican residents and to grant them full rights as citizens.Report
Benefits of being a land of immigrants and not an ethno state.
The US is unusually good at this sort of thing… even freakishly good by world standards.Report
Well, its like being the skinniest kid at fat camp.
Treaty or no treaty, plenty of Mexicans were defrauded or displaced and lost their land and were hardly “full citizens” by our understanding of the word.Report
“The camp counsellors are even fatter, though. And you’re barely fitting on a five-foot wide couch while giving me this lecture.”
“Your point?”Report
This is a strange sentiment in context of Israel and Palestine, especially in light of the millions risking life and limb to enter our country illegally. By any objective measure the descendants of those people are lucky their ancestors were on annexed territory. The revealed preferences of people today in successor states south of the border (prior to I believe the 1820s most of central America was also part of Mexico) says all anyone needs to know on the subject.
Anyway the reason no one cares is because ultimately things worked out for the people in question and but in particular their descendants. That’s not the case for the Palestinians.Report
I wasn’t the one bringing up the analogy, which I agree is strained.
But one of the reasons the Mexicans were willing to sign and keep a peace treaty with the US was that very fact, that thousands of Mexicans weren’t going to be forcibly relocated south of the new border and lose the right to the land they were inhabiting.
“Moving the border” is relatively benign unless it is combined with “And you lose your land and have to relocate to some other place”.Report
Fair enough, and we are certainly in agreement on that point.Report
It’s not even ‘things didn’t work out’… Israel is still creating new settlements in the West Bank. Aka, Israel is still removing Palestinians by force from parts of Palestine!Report
“plenty of Mexicans were defrauded or displaced and lost their land and were hardly “full citizens” by our understanding of the word.”
well if any of those fellas from 1850 are still around they’re welcome to petition the current US government for a redress of grievancesReport
Yep:
California introduces first-in-nation slavery reparations package
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/31/california-black-reparations-bills-00138854Report
what does that have to do with Mexicans from 1850Report
At the moment it’s a proposal to protect hair styles and to make it impossible to develop land because you’d never know if you really owned it.
I’ll wait until after they vote it into place. The final bill might just do the former and not the later.
Edit: If memory serves some native Americans tried something like this in downtown Chicago. The land was theirs 150+ years ago so the fortune 500s who have developed it and put their HQs there should just let it be returned.
The Federal Courts didn’t think much of that.Report
There aren’t really any ethnic cleansing going on in South America right now. At least not any I am aware of. There’s a bunch of violence, but I don’t think any of it is targeted at any group in particular. Who knows.
But there is ethnic cleansing going on in the world, so let’s just change that question to ‘Is it complicity for America to allow in ethnic Armenian refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh. Because, after all, that is what Azerbaijan _wants_…no more ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. By letting the refugees in, by helping them leave, we are helping Azerbaijan! Are we complicit?
Or to bring this back to Israel: Argentina between 1976 and 1983 was controlled by a semi-Nazi military junta that ‘disappeared’ a lot of people, including Jews, and Israel reached out to them and said ‘Hey, just send us your Jews instead of killing them?'(1) Was that complicity? It result in the Jews not being there, which was, after all, the entire point.
Yes. To both. It was complicit. It advanced the bad guy’s goals.
But doing nothing results in even more death.
At some point the good guys make a choice: Do you save the hostages but let bad guys get away with everything, or coldly stand there and let the hostages die so the bad guys don’t win?
Egypt is choosing the second. Not because they’re the good guys, (Honestly, I doubt any country at all is a ‘good guy’) but because they are probably thinking that putting Israel on their borders would result in that expansionist country turning its eyes towards the Sinai next.
1) I will leave out the details of what was actually happening there, because it’s irrelevant to my point.Report
“There aren’t really any ethnic cleansing going on in South America right now.”
so it’s OK for a country to deny entry to refugees but only if they’re fleeing ethnic cleansing?
” Argentina between 1976 and 1983 was controlled by a semi-Nazi military junta that ‘disappeared’ a lot of people, including Jews, and Israel reached out to them and said ‘Hey, just send us your Jews instead of killing them?'(1) Was that complicity? It result in the Jews not being there, which was, after all, the entire point.
Yes. To both. It was complicit. It advanced the bad guy’s goals.”
if you tied me to a chair and pulled my nose hairs out with pliers you could not have got me to post something like that.Report
It is actually against the convention on refugees. Which, to be clear, isn’t illegal per se, but very disapproved of.
But it is a war crime to be complicit in war crime, and sometimes ‘a bunch people forcibly being ejected from an area’ is a war crime, and creating an easy place for someone to eject the people to _is_ complicity.
Fun fact about war crimes: There often is not a solution _from the outside_ that doesn’t make things worse and/or is illegal under international law.Report
RE: The problem is _displacing the people there and not letting them back_.
You mean exactly like what happened with Germany, Poland, and Russia? The borders moved, the civilian population fled to stay in their country with their people.
If they’d been forced into camps to wait for the borders to move back then they’d still be waiting.
If your logic is the Arabs are going to war because they want to be 2nd class citizens in a Jewish state, then that doesn’t agree with what they’re saying.
Egypt has said ‘No, we won’t be a part of this, Gazans cannot come here to live, because we actually understand what ‘complicity in a war crime’ means.’
Egypt used to rule Gaza and the Palestinians there. They don’t want to have a large number of genocidal religious fanatics who can be expected to have armed conflicts with the government, like has happened in three other Arabic states.
Israel won that war, and at that point ended up with the rest of the ungoverned area, and had an obligation under international law to make a country.
If we’re talking about the war of 1948, then you’re claiming that Israel had this obligation but Egypt and Jordan did not, even though Egypt and Jordan had physical control over those areas of land?
Further, at this point in time there were no Palestinians as such. There were Arabs and there were Jews.Report
The current war in Ukraine shows that the problem isn’t unique to Israel/ Palestine.
The ethnic Russians in many cases did NOT just peaceably agree to become Ukrainian. and for that matter, there are plenty of Cuban exiles in Miami who are still hungering for a right of return to “their” land.
Not to mention the partition of India/ Pakistan which resulted in massive bloodshed and the still-simmering tension there.
In short, the idea that “This land belongs ONLY to my ethnic group” is a pretty widespread phenomenon.Report
Israel/Palestine is treated as unique compared to other ethnic conflicts though. I suspect because of a word beginning with a Jew and ending with a W is at play. I don’t think treating Israel/Palestine as unique is the best way forward for either Israel or the Palestinians but I’m not going to get people to stop doing this. We just had a big revelation that the UN Agency just for the Palestinians had a decent number of their staffers participate in the Simchat Torah massacre.Report
I would like to think that the Biden administration is working quietly with the Benny Ganz faction to find some other leadership and but I really have no other way of knowing.
And of course, had the rapprochmonet with Iran moved forward we might have had some leverage to rein in Hamas but that blew up with TFG.Report
These things are happening beyond the scene but there is a lot indirect evidence that the War Cabinet is basically dismissive of Netanyahu. Sometimes openly so according to an Israeli poster on the other blog.Report
The Russia/Ukraine conflict isn’t an ethno conflict.
The Russian Empire needs to control the choke points into their “heartland” in order to feel safe. Ergo about 20 other countries need to be forced into submission and let Moscow right their security policy.
The Ukraine doesn’t own any of the choke points but it’s on the way to the two most important ones.
This is why Russia is so pissed that Poland joined NATO. Russia needs Poland (etc), Poland knows this. Ergo both of their behaviors over the last couple of decades.Report
I am not, I am talking about 1967. Israel had an obligation after that point.
Before that point, starting in 1948/1949, both Egypt (in the Gaza Strip) and Jordan (In the West Bank) _did_ have legal obligation to make a country. And right after the war, the Arab League set up the All-Palestine Government, to do exactly that.
Egypt, as part of this, formally renounced all legal claim to the Gaza Strip.
Jordan did not, and in fact flatly broke international law by eventually annexing the West Bank instead. There were vague noises of protest, but no one really cared, as making all of Palestine be part of Jordan to start with had been on the table for years. Only the UK ever recognized that, but no one was really going to do anything.
The Arab League then put All-Palestine under the control of Egypt, which…did not get very far before the All-Palestine Government was mostly dissolved in 1953, and officially dissolved in 1959. (And things got totally screwed up with Israel invaded the Gaza Strip and Sinai in 1956, which made it clear that Palestine needed a fairly strong military to hold off Israeli aggression.) There is a legitimate question if Egypt actually really intended this ‘government’ to get anywhere. No one is saying that Egypt is the good guy here.
HOWEVER, in 1962, another attempt was made, a new constitution was signed in March 1962, a Legislative Council was setup to pass laws, and Palestine was on its way to self governance. Which seems like a long time, but is not that long for a place that had no real government at all, and had all sorts of chaos with Israel constantly attacking it. It seemed plausible that Palestine would eventually stand by itself.
Then in 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, triggering the defense pack they had with Syria and Jordan, the Six-Day War happened, and both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (And the Golan Heights from Syria) ended up under Israeli control.Report
I am talking about 1967. Israel had an obligation after that point.
That would be right when the Arabs came out with “the three no’s” to proclaim that they (i.e. “all Arabs”) were genocidally opposed to the existence of Israel.
Giving Israel “the legal obligation” to help in it’s own destruction probably doesn’t go anywhere useful.Report
Just to make this clearer, in 1964 the PLO was formed. This would be 3 years before the 1967 war.
When they talked about “ending the occupation” in 1964, it was obvious they meant “no Jews in the Middle East”.
When you talk about “giving the Palestinians a country”, we’re talking about “giving the PLO (later PA) a country”.
Israel has occasionally given them full peace offers, the issue they keep getting stuck on is the Right to Return. Arafat couldn’t even make a counter offer in 2000 because he was afraid they’d accept and he’d be killed by his own people.
Biden’s solution for this is to proclaim the Palestinians a country without a peace deal.
Maybe that will work… but if it works it will only because the Palestinians just got a really good look at what war with Israel looks like.Report
Israel has never offered Palestine an actual country, because every offer of theirs includes restrictions that means Palestine is not actually a sovereign country but under the control of Israel.
The deal Arafat rejected, for the most obvious problem with Palestine’s sovereignty, had Israel control Palestine’s border with Jordon. Contrary to what you seem to think, though, Arafat continued to negotiate, and the process failed when Israel stopped perusing when Ari Sharon was elected, returning Likud to power.
Or, maybe read the actual history: https://theintercept.com/2023/11/28/israel-palestine-history-peace/
You know, it’s almost surreal for you to mention ‘leader involved in peace negotiations getting killed’, because the last _Israeli_ Prime Minister that was involved in what was considered a success of the peace process (The Oslo Accords), Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by an Israeli at celebration of said accords.
The Prime Minister involved in dealing with Arafat, however, got off luckier, just getting voted out of office and political life all together while doing it.Report
The deal Arafat rejected, for the most obvious problem with Palestine’s sovereignty, had Israel control Palestine’s border with Jordon.
If that was the problem then he would have made a counter offer where that wasn’t the case. Instead he didn’t/couldn’t make a counter offer at all.
Arafat continued to negotiate,
Arafat told whoever was in the room whatever they wanted to hear. It got so bad that both Israel and the US saw no reason to even talk with him.
Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated
Yes. But before that it was considered unthinkable. In Israel the gov has a (near) monopoly on the use of force. The Palestinians have lots of armed wings.Report
read the actual history:
There’s more than a little alternative reality in there. Bill Clinton is a liar because he’s consistently pointed to Arafat as the reason peace talks fell apart.
At the same time, Bill isn’t alone, and we can’t point to Arafat’s peace proposal because he refused to make one.
The basic idea that “Arafat would have agreed to X” is a joke because Arafat could have attempted to make that deal himself.
Rather than point to Israeli spies or whomever on what the Palestinians would accept, I’d rather have the Palestinians make a peace proposals themselves.
Bibi certainly wouldn’t accept it (he clearly doesn’t want them to have a state), but the Israeli peace wing has sometimes been in charge and the reason they’re not stronger is because the Palestinians want “from the river to the sea”.
They point that out every time their “moderates” talk about “the occupation” or whatever lasting 75 years on Aljazeera.Report
If they did not want to do it, they should have handed their obligations over to someone else under international law, and certainly shouldn’t have signed Oslo.
Or they could have just annexed the entire thing, as I’ve pointed out quite a lot of countries get away with that even though it’s technically illegal. The only people who would have complained they had just beaten in a war.
What they can’t do is hold on to occupied territory forever with no intent of unoccupying it.Report
What they can’t do is hold on to occupied territory forever with no intent of unoccupying it.
True. But what they need is someone that they can hand the land to without it instantly becoming a terror base.
In theory, pulling out of Gaza, i.e. “unoccupying it”, was supposed to lead to good things. The Palestinians take over and show that they’re more interested in building a state than attacking Israel.
And yes, one of Oslo’s flaws is Israel doesn’t always believe the Palestinians should have a state.Report
Is notification of “Notify me of new posts by email.” not working or is it just me?
I can click the button but don’t get email.Report
I never got notifications through email ever.Report
I’d really like the anti-Zionists to come to a conclusion on what the Jews should have done since the various European and Middle Easter/North Africa states where they lived basically saw them as alien residents and said that the Jews have no role in the national community at all no matter how long a Jewish community lived in a place. Civil rights types movements didn’t prevent Jews from dying. Nobody cared.Report
Well, as I’ve mentioned before, what they could have done is not start to try to get ‘their own’ country in 1917, and instead petitioned Britain to create strong constitutional protections for religious freedom in a secular Palestine as Britain built that country. That area, and the Ottoman Empire in general, had a pretty strong history of protecting Jews, even if they had slightly less rights than Muslims under dhimmi law.
They might not have even had to _ask_ for this. Britain probably would have just done it.
Everything could have worked out, and, hell, this could have finished _before WWII_, which would have drastically changed the Holocaust.
Instead, in 1917, they asked Britain for an ethnostate where they had the majority vote, and knew the only way to get that was to remove enough Arabs that they had the majority…and the Arabs also knew this was the only way it could happen, so it was pretty much instant conflict starting at Balfour…and a bunch of new, exciting antisemitism that ended up in Muslim countries, imported directly from centuries of Christianity antisemitism.Report
Chicago has just voted for a ceasefire. Not in Chicago, in Gaza.
Report
How many thousands of people have died needlessly because the Chicago City Council took this long to act?Report
Did they define whether the ceasefire means “Hamas gives up” or “Israel gives up and goes home”?Report
I think they just want people to stop fighting.
Which makes the whole 23-23 look worse.
Who among us does not want people to stop fighting? Oh, those 23 people.Report
Speed Daily (a Chinese website, so you’ll have to press the translate to English button, probably) reports:
From what online is saying is that this is mistranslated or misunderstood or something. Hasbro and Tencent are only in discussions to sell the rights to make videogames with the IP. Tencent has a video gaming division and the only game in there that I recognized was League of Legends (though there was also a PUBG mobile game that I’d heard of but it’s a phone game so I don’t count it).
I guess they saw Baldur’s Gate 3 and thought “we should get on that!” and they can make Baldur’s Gate Mobile or something.
And it’ll do about as well as Diablo Mobile.Report
Tencent owns a third of Larian Studios, the shop that made “Baldur’s Gate 3”. So this is a little less “let’s get in on that BG3 action” and a little more “we’ve shown that we can pull this off, how about we do the whole thing”.Report
Oh crap. It has now been officially denied.Report
The right-wing take over of New College in Florida by turning it into a jock school is not going as planned: “Totten is a pitcher, which means she’s not easily rattled. But even she acknowledged that arriving at New College was an adjustment. In August, when Totten got to campus, the softball field was lacking a fence, a dugout, a turtle for catching stray pitches and consistent grass. The academic changes were more confounding: Totten studied marketing at Nazarene and assumed she could continue at New College — except New College didn’t have a marketing major, she learned when she arrived. What kind of college didn’t have a marketing major? Also, even weirder, the school didn’t have grades. Instead, students received written evaluations at the end of each semester. That made Totten nervous. She liked metrics; she understood scores, ratings, grades. No one had given her a heads-up about any of these academic features. Amy Reid, the faculty chair and director of the embattled gender-studies program who also serves on the board, told me that many student athletes were surprised to find, upon arrival, that their intended majors — business, sports management, communications — were not offered.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/31/magazine/new-college-desantis-florida.htmlReport
Thoughts and prayers.Report
Note that those majors haven’t been eliminated under new management; it didn’t have them in 2022 either.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220521055127/https://www.ncf.edu/programs/Report
Yes, I’m not sure what Saul was trying to communicate with his excerpt, but the article is largely about these new more traditional students encountering what’s still in some ways a crunchy granola lefty school that lacks a lot of what a typical campus would include.Report
Also worth noting that they’re still doing dog-and-pronoun shows in class.Report
Some movement in the US position on the Gaza war:
State Department reviewing options for possible recognition of Palestinian state
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/31/palestine-statehood-biden-israel-gaza-war
Efforts to find a diplomatic way out of the war in Gaza has opened the door for rethinking a lot of old U.S. paradigms and policies, a senior U.S. official said.
The Biden administration is linking possible normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia to the creation of a pathway for the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of its post-war strategy. This initiative is based on the administration’s efforts prior to Oct. 7 to negotiate a mega-deal with Saudi Arabia that included a peace agreement between the kingdom and Israel.
Saudi officials have publicly and privately made clear since Oct. 7 that any potential normalization agreement with Israel would be conditioned on the creation of an “irrevocable” pathway toward a Palestinian state.
Some inside the Biden administration are now thinking recognition of a Palestinian state should possibly be the first step in negotiations to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict instead of the last, the senior U.S. official said.
Also, Politico is reporting that Biden is imposing sanctions on settlers who attack Palestinians.
These are small measures, but they send large signals that Biden wants a path out of the stalemate.Report
And they said a two state solution was dead.Report
Give Biden the Peace Prize now!
Has a President and his then Vice-President ever won the Peace Prize before?Report
Well, good for Biden. Pushing the Palestinians into statehood would a good step in making both sides “normal” states.
Having said that, if a normal state had launched a 10-7 against another normal state, then we’d expect to see something like the Gaza war.Report
If your complaint about Atlas Shrugged was in the ballpark of “that’s absurd, the government wouldn’t do dumb crap like that, that’s a strawman!”, well…
It’s now a manman.Report
See, I was expecting a different comment from you, coming just one day after the owners of private businesses were hauled in front of Congress and forced to repent for their business practices.
But yeah, government officials demanding answers from private business owners about the harm their practices do to the co0mmunity is um, something I guess.Report
Chip, I absolutely think that if Walgreens cannot explain why they did what they did, they should be forced to close this store. Running a store is a privilege. Not a right.
Shouldn’t be surprised when privileges cease to be extended.Report
Maybe the liberal states just need to retaliate against Walgreens and yank their corporate charters until they come to their senses and do what we want.
I’ve been told this will be upheld by the courts.Report
You should totally get your hands on a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
I think that you’re the first person I’ve ever recommended it to but, seriously, I think you’d get a kick out of it.Report
I’d rather read the other one, about orcs.Report
If Google Maps is to be believed, the likely answer is there are too many pharmacies and hospitals in that area for them to make a profit.
And/or maybe “Blue Hill Pharmacy” (one block away i.e. 0.3 miles) simply does a better job.
But I guess she had to find racism somewhere to oppose.Report
Ayn Rand got a lot of things wrong, but her depiction of the left, as much as it feels like over-the-top caricature, was not one of them.Report
If you punish a business for leaving, then they’re going to think long and hard before they come.Report
When republican congresscritters, Senators or their Presidents or Presidential candidates say deranged crazy stuff we are all expected to sigh and accept that they’re joking, or being misunderstood, or don’t mean it, or can’t do it. But when one congresscritter on the left fringe of her caucus postures in congress, clearly this tars everyone to the left of Mitt Romney and is a sign of impending fulfillment of Randian prophecies.
Maybe someone, somewhere, takes this seriously now days but it’s not the 90’s or the aughts or even the teens- I don’t feel required to do anything but roll my eyes at this.
Credit where it’s due, though, at least it’s not a random twitter post so there is that. Full points for it.Report
It’s good that you feel inclined to roll your eyes at Pressley’s antics, but I’m puzzled by your claim that this she’s some kind of outlier. If you find this objectionable, a huge chunk of the Democratic Party has left you far behind.Report
Oh BB? Pressly is representing the Dems? Show your work. They had a trifecta a little while ago. They’ve had several over the past decades. What bills have they passed or tried to pass to control the ability of businesses to close branches or to nationalize businesses (which this is the next thing to doing). Or is it just talk by a small number of congressfolk?Report
I didn’t say she was the median Democrat. I said she’s not an extreme outlier. In the video she mentions partnering with Warren—who, let’s not forget, had a great deal of establishment support from the media and academia—and Markey on this. Then there’s that whole “Squad” clown car. The aptly-initialed CPC has 99 seats in the House, nearly half of House Democrats. In 2016, when he went head-to-head with Clinton, Sanders got 43% of the vote in the Democratic Primary.
How is this substantially more worthy of ridicule than, e.g., Biden b*tching at grocery chains for not lowering prices as inflation comes down (econ lesson: that’s not how inflation works)?
There is very real risk of the Democratic Party being captured by its low-info left-wing populist wing, much as the Republican Party has been captured by its low-info right-wing populist wing.
In terms of getting actual legislation passed, even when they have a trifecta, the margin is generally so thin that the parties are constrained by their most moderate members, so the fact that Democrats haven’t passed legislation doing something doesn’t mean that there isn’t substantial support for it among the base and/or elected members of Congress. Hypothetically, 80% of Congressional Democrats could be literal communists and 80% of Congressional Republicans literal fascists, and it wouldn’t have much impact on legislative outcomes.Report
Eh, don’t see this as me arguing that Pressley is representative of Democrats in general.
See this as me mentioning shoplifting again.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/01/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
Biden imposes sanctions on far-right Israeli settlersReport
Probably worth including that the sanctions are against four specific individuals.Report
I’m sure that many will be angry because the sanctions aren’t against all of Israel. This is a correct move. It is a punishment for the worst actors in Israeli society and also weakens Netanyahu without directly going against Israel.Report
On four settlers. Four.Report
Here is a 40 minute YouTube documentary on Otaku no Video and the birth of Otaku culture in Japan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXOf7NavfBo
The opening segment lends evidence to support of my theory that the divergent point between Western fandom and Japanese fandom was the decision of Japanese money people to monetize Japanese fandom a lot earlier and heavier than Western money people.Report
When you substitute performative political theatre for sound lawmaking, weird unintended things happen:
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/31/1227608309/a-tennessee-lawmaker-helped-pass-a-strict-abortion-law-hes-now-trying-to-loosen-Report
New development in the evolution of rules regarding whether blocking people’s movement is peaceful protest or a violent felony:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/6-activists-convicted-illegally-blocking-abortion-clinic-tennessee-106839905
I feel like there has to be more to this story, but I also think that if there was real meat to the claim of injuries, the Biden administration and media would be shouting it from the rooftops, and not just insinuating it.Report
I know I’m supposed to just write this off as youthful passion but why should I as a Jew look favorably upon student protestors who describe Israel as “the New Na.zi Germany.” Even if you are sympathetic towards the Palestinians, this should be self-evidentially a ridiculous statement but apparently a lot of people really really need Israel to be the MOST EVIL COUNTRY THAT EVER EXISTED just like the Jews are the MOST EVIL PEOPLE WHO EVER EXISTED:
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2024-02-03/ty-article/.premium/denouncing-israel-as-the-new-nazi-germany-hundreds-protest-outside-columbia-university/0000018d-7091-dd6e-a98d-f4b3eca80000
It is really clear that many allegedly Pro-Palestinian sympathizers in the West care much more about hurting Israel and Israeli Jews than doing anything to help the Palestinians. You have Hamas and other Palestinians saying “we want Arab Muslim Palestine” and somehow Westerners process this as “we want Rainbow Palestine.” It is so utterly disgusting that I just can’t stand it anymore. This is also about boundary markings. These people are basically stating that they don’t want the Jews in their Diversity Coalition at all and we don’t count. It is Left Anti-Semitism at it’s finest. Somebody should just break all of their bones.Report
And yet, where have Jews donated much of their money to? In the exact place where what you described is coming from. Your own people contribute and support the same people that take your money and use it against you….and they still keep giving…..splain that to me.Report
I don’t think that’s what’s happened nor is there some collective Jewish movement responsible or that’s been hypocritical in some way. Even now the establishment policy consensus in this country remains staunchly pro-Israel across partisan lines. What’s changed is the evolution of the facts on the ground over the last twenty or so years. Absent some kind of resolution support for Israel in the US will likely erode over the long haul but we’re far from a place where people doing this sort of thing are remotely representative of national policy. At most they’re a canary in the coal mine.
Anyway what I think Lee and other Jewish people who legitimately feel concerned about their personal safety should do is take a self defense class. Maybe buy a gun and take some courses on how to use it properly. I’m not kidding about this. It’s better to ground one’s feelings of security in actual circumstances and one’s own capabilities and planning than outsourcing it to whatever the craziest voices in society are prattling on about.Report
“I don’t think that’s what’s happened ” IIRC, quite a number of wealthy jews have donated to elite universities. I also think it’s fair to, generally, categorize many jews as on the left. Where has a much of the anti Israel come from? The left and the elite universities.
Many left of center jews live in very blue areas and have supported gun control initiatives, so getting a gun is very hard to do. And knowing karate isn’t going to do it when someone’s taking a gun, or bat to your head.Report
Sure, and Christian and/or post Christian gentiles are the people most responsible for any policy in this country by virtue of being the most numerous. Does that mean you personally deserve whatever you get out of the mish mash of public policy that comes out of it and/or have no business complaining about things you personally disagree with because it’s actually all your fault? Of course not.
You either accept these arbitrary, group based collective responsibility fallacies or reject them.Report
To the extent that this is true, one of the really big topics that has gotten kicked around over the last few months is how a handful of them have said “we’re not going to donate anymore!” and that resulted in stuff like the Bill Ackman getting really upset about Claudine Gay (and that’s now spilling over into Sherri Charleston’s plagiarism investigation).
Ross Stevens pulled his donations from Penn, Leon Cooperman pulled from Columbia.
Without getting into the whole “different people are different” thing, saying “they should stop donating” has failed to take into account that several very large checkbooks were, in fact, slammed shut.Report
I still feel like it’s grasping at straws and some pretty loaded ones. I mean, is there a committee of Jews voting on how Bill Ackman spends his money? Of course not.
If we’re really concerned about anti-semitism it seems off to me to suggest something like that is the case. It is also pretty misleading about reality, to the extent it would lead us to conclude that the members of the local synagogue are operating in some sort of coordinated fashion with him no matter how they tend to vote.Report
If the argument is “A bunch of them donate, though”, a counter to that is “A bunch of them *STOPPED*!”
There is no great and grand conspiracy among “the” “Jews” but to the extent that a handful of prominent donors were supporting major universities and, by extension, the stupid DEI stuff, a handful have also said “HOLY CRAP HAVE YOU READ THIS STUPID DEI STUFF?!?!?” and have since stopped donating.
Heck, a handful of Prominent Employers have done stuff like said “Yeah, we’re not going to hire people who associated themselves with some if the stupider stuff out there” and that has resulted in, among other things, Harvard students writing *ME*! JAYBIRD!!! Asking me to take their names out of the posts where I talk about students experiencing backlash due to associating themselves with some of the stupider stuff out there.
I’m saying that, even on its own terms, the conspiracy theory has a *LOT* of *SIGNIFICANT* counter examples.Report
Hey, fair enough. Please understand my griping as being about faulty premises, not the ability to still have the better of a conversation, even when we assume for the sake of argument that said premises are correct.Report
While true, the trend seems to be folks go back to their old previous ways. However, if I’d donating a lot of money to a school, especially before and during when my kids were in same school, and they got harassed because of their religion/ethnicity (i.e. being Jewish) I’d probably pull them out and cease donating. The large donors are regular donors…ie they’ve seen this before and continue to donate. Sure, maybe they stop for a while, a few month, a year, but then go back to donating. Those donors are continuing to support a organization that they have direct evidence that is endorsing, or ignoring folk who want me, my family, my race, dead. I’d have pulled the plug long ago. Yet they seem to continue to donate.Report
Or, and hear me out here, the problem of illiberal and anti-Semitic people in our society is not a problem for Jews to address, but for us Gentiles to overcome.
We Gentiles need to overcome the political power of the pro-Hamas voices and block their attempts at gaining political power.
It is our responsibility to solve, not theirs.Report
No, this is outsourcing responsibility to a collective that doesn’t actually exist. Individuals of course should reject anti semitism and individuals should also make the case against it when/if it comes up in their lives. However your entire formulation is one of total passivity where no one is responsible for anything including their own fate and assumes the existence of some authority capable of coming to the rescue when there is no such thing.Report
That’s exactly how democracy works, is that the protection of rights is a collective responsibility.
With shoplifting, we don’t tell shop owners, “Well, maybe buy a gun” we levy a tax upon the collective body and form a police department, then when a person is apprehended, the case is brought in the name of The People vs John Doe.
When a minority is denied employment or when a swastika is painted on a temple we do inf act have an “authority capable of coming to the rescue”. We have a whole bank of laws and actions that were crafted specifically to come to the rescue of people who are suffering intolerance.Report
No, you’re confusing an individual responsibility to others, or maybe a social responsibility, with a collective responsibility. Those former things do exist and when implemented effectively can lower the burden on individuals a lot, which is a positive, but they can never totally relieve a person of his or her responsibility to themselves. That’s the conservative caricature of liberal thought, with totally helpless ineffectual people waiting for someone to take care of everything for them.
Our criminal justice system could always be better, but the lowest hanging fruits of the social and/or responsibility to others are picked. There are minimally functional police forces, courts, and laws making criminal violence and the most damaging forms of discrimination illegal. That is good but the police have no hard, enforceable responsibility to protect individuals (and they may not ever be totally capable of meeting that anyway). Moreover some group like ‘Gentiles’ that is so big and diffuse as to be an abstraction certainly can’t be said to have responsibilities in any concrete way that actually matters for purposes of this discussion.
What do the Gentiles do? Where are the decisions made? Who is accountable if they fail? No one. It’s a nice sentiment but a meaningless one.
At the end of the day you need to have both responsibilities, hopefully well aligned, so that there are police keeping general order and individual people also looking out for themselves within reason in context of the generally safe environment. Conversely if you rely too much on individual responsibility you can end up with vigilantes and related disorder but too much on social/responsibility to others and you end up with 0 accountability and bad actors taking advantage of helpless people.Report
Liberal democracy only exists because of the big diffuse group called “citizens” organize themselves into manageable groups and exert power.
Between police and individuals, advocacy groups exist and control all the various methods of exerting power and change in a democracy.
Like, per your question us Gentiles organize our political parties and advocacy groups to demand tolerance for Jews.
Its ironic, because that’s exactly what the pro-Hamas people are doing. We just need to meet their organizing efforts with ours.Report
None of that precludes a role of Jewish individuals defending themselves if that’s what they feel they need to do.
There’s also no meaningful pro Hamas contingency in this country to organize against. To the extent people sympathize with them they’re subject to the same generally applicable laws against violence and against discrimination. It seems that Lee is worried that isn’t enough hence my original comment. And if some Hamas sympathetic person decides they are willing to risk it all to try and skirt the law to physically attack a Jew or Jews there isn’t going to be a group of self organized sympathetic gentiles isn’t going to materialize out of thin air to stop a specific event they couldn’t predict. Hence my original comment.Report
Ooof was distracted when writing this comment, I think the intent got through but I apologize to anyone reading it.Report
What I think anti-Semites of all stripes know and are starting to flex their muscles about it is that there aren’t many Jews in the world. Our low numbers and the phantom space Jews inhabit between white and non-white, means that we are not necessary for any political coalition outside of Israel to succeed.
For the Diversity Coalition on the Left, and I consider the Colombian protest to be extreme even by recent standards of anti-Israel protest, teaming up with the soon to be more numerous Muslims in the United States makes a lot more sense politically. Plus many of them don’t see Jews as a real minority and would bristle at that. The advantage that Jews in the United States have is that these groups are outside the Democratic Party and Muslim American social conservatism causes them to be uneasy Democratic voters.Report
Its like we’re living in a Bonhoffer quote come to life.
Fascists always mobilize against minorities because they are in the…minority.
We are seeing intolerance rising against Jews and trans people, neither of whom are large enough to defend their own rights without the aid of the collective majority.Report
Both groups are getting it from many directions on the political spectrum, making the matters more complicated.Report
For obvious reasons I’m thinking a lot about the 1930s and am reminded that the politics of that time weren’t any less complicated than today.
Our history books and Hollywood movies flatten things out and make them seem very simple and obvious but they weren’t.
The fascists of the time were fueled by very real and complex grievances, and the anti-immigrant ethnonationalism back then wasn’t any more simple or obvious than our current hysteria.
Because democracy depends on majorities to govern, protecting minorities has always been its weakest point. Recall in my formulation of the four arguments made by bigots, the last one, the final trump card, is always “Look how popular bigotry is!”Report
I think it’s also that Israel is, herself, becoming less liberal and, with the internet and the demise of the traditional gatekeepers, the old firewalls the Israeli’s used to help manage public perception are not working as well to screen awareness about that out. The longer the territories and the Palestinian question fester the worse it’s going to get- especially if Israels’ domestic politics continue on the trajectory they are on. The Israeli question is not, currently, a partisan issue but it is inching closer to becoming one and the responsibility for that lies predominantly on choices Israelis (specifically Israelis, not Jewish people everywhere- Israelis) and Israeli politicians have made and are continuing to make.
To quote Archer “Do you want ants? Because this is how you get ants.”Report
Israel is still a lot more liberal than every other country in the MENA region and what the Palestinians say they want for themselves. That doesn’t prevent Western activists from seeing Palestinians and other Muslim majority countries as just being as liberal as Sweden on LGBT issues in their headspace.
Like I keep seeing “Queers for a Free Palestine” or people who should know better treating Islam as more pro-LGBT than Reform Judaism for some reason. Now it isn’t bad that LGBT people are sympathetic to the Palestinians per se but they shouldn’t go around deluded that Palestine is going to be some sort of LGBT paradise because they really want it to be that way.
The most annoying aspect of I/P debates is that it always ends up being Real Israel vs. Fantasy Palestine.Report
Jerusalem Post just reported: LGBTQ+ Palestinians can request asylum in Israel, court rules.
Hamas has an opportunity here to do something really, really funny.Report
The takeaway from that article is actually ‘The Israeli government does not like that decision, fought against it, and will appeal it’.
Probably because the IDF has a rather long history of tracking down closeted LGBTQ Palestinians and threatening to publicly out them if they do not turn informant, and if they can just request asylum, that doesn’t work anymore.Report
Oh, so we should compare Islam, a gigantic religion with almost two billion people and tons of different sects, to _Reform_ Judaism? Why would we not compare it to Judaism in general?
Let me fix that: The most annoying aspect of I/P debate is it always end up being ‘a specific subset of Judaism’ vs ‘abstract Islam in general’, instead of actual Israel vs. Palestine.
A reminder: Israel, much like a lot of American states, has currently fallen down a far-right rabbit hole and there has been a rather dramatic spike in both anti-LGBTQ statements by religious and political leaders, and hate crimes against queer people. It’s been ramping up for a while and the situation is getting pretty serious.
Is Palestine better? No, it’s worse.
But you want to know something that is well documented to make people reactionary and homophobia and misogynistic and all sorts of bad things that sorta clump together on the far right?
Enemies. Oppression. People living under harsh and dangerous conditions.(1)
Now, this can be either real or imagined, it doesn’t matter…except here, it sorta does, because unlike the oppression being imagined in American states and Israel, or like was imagined in pre-WWII Germany and all the places there fascism showed up creating imaginary enemies, creating a imagined world where they were under constant siege…
…people in Palestine have, you know, actual harsh conditions imposed by oppressors. Palestine is actually what all those other countries _imagined_ themselves to be, and under those condition, people burrow in, reject any sort of modernity, cling very tightly to tradition and culture and religion.
So, yes, homophobia is a somewhat expected outcome of that. Just like it shows up in collapsed American towns. You get that sort of extreme social conservative when things fall apart. The way to fix that is to _not let things fall apart_, and fix them when they do.
1) And before anyone goes ‘Hey, Israel also has those things’, I say…I could argue with that, but I won’t. If you want to argue that’s what going on, sure! Which makes it just as important to free Palestine so that _Israel_ stops having them as an enemy so that Israel stops being so far-right and reactionary.
—
More to the point for LGBTQ activism, there’s no actually any way to alter Palestine’s behavior towards LGBTQ people right now, because both governments, in Gaza and the West Bank, are deeply broken nonrepresentational governments that don’t hold elections, and have basically existed like that for 20 years because Israel wanted them to. So if anyone wants to fix it, the actual steps are a) stop Israeli control of the Palestinian Authority and force elections, b) stop the war so Hamas can lose power and force elections, c) help get better governance and institution in general, and d) make the situation better in general, and it is only at that point things will get better for LGBTQ people.
It’s a pretty long process, and it’s fair to criticize it for that…but there’s also a more practical reason for LGBTQ activists to demand a halt to the war: More LGBTQ people have been killed in Gaza by Israel during this war than have been killed in Gaza for their sexuality in the entire history of Palestine. That’s what happens, by sheer statistics, when you kill that many people.Report
This isn’t about other Middle East countries. The US does not provide the subsidies, security partnership and diplomatic cover to other MENA countries that it provides to Israel. Israel’s receipt of those benefits is dependant on the good will of the American politicians and voters who provide it irrespective of whether Israel is 10x, 100x or 1000x more liberal than its neighbors.
You keep fixating, Lee, on what the still mostly powerless and voluble left wing fringe says but you keep ignoring why their numbers seem to be steadily increasing. Moreover the far larger number of less kooky but young voters who just are tuning out on Israel in disgust.
Bibi and his clown posse have been working relentlessly to turn Israel into a partisan question and seem to be steadily moving to a barely veiled ethnic cleansing stance towards the territories and the Israeli voters keep putting them back in office. That can’t go on forever without a response.Report
You keep ignoring what I say in response. Israel left Gaza and rather than do anything productive, Hamas turned it into a big launch pad for attacks against Israel. Rather than telling Hamas that they are being ridiculous, you have demonstrations that Hamas was correct and Gaza is still colonized because Israel took steps to protect itself from the rocket barage.
I see no reason why this would not happen with the West Bank with a Gaza type withdrawal. It will to be turned into an even bigger Palestinian militant base for attacks against Israel rather than anything productive. Even the most basic elements of self-defense against this would be seen as colonial aggression because people just want Israel to live with a certain amount, and by that we mean quite a lot, of terrorism as the Palestinians work out their issues because it would keep the rest of the Muslim world calm.
There is simply no evidence that a Gaza type withdrawal form the West Bank would have anything close to the effect you think it would.Report
Ah, but your own summary is incorrect because you keep acting as if the lunatic college demonstration fringe represents anything but themselves. When Hamas took over and made attacks against Israel everyone -except- the demonstrator fringe did just what you said they should have done. They told Hamas off and generally back-burnered the Palestinian cause in general. Israel enjoyed over a decade of diplomatic benefits from that withdrawal and the Palestinian cause spun its wheels for the same time as a direct result of the withdrawal from Gaza.
You also continuously elide that the Israeli right have been Hamas’ largest supporters and patrons outside of the Arabic/Iranian world to a degree that would make the College lunatic crowd blush in inadequacy. Who funneled money and work permits to Hamas and propped them up against the Palestinian Authority? It wasn’t the College demonstrators who did that. And who left the Israeli’s pants down around their ankles, ignored warnings from the Israeli military and intelligence services and enabled Hamas’ attack on October 7th to be so horrifically successful? The left-wing loons never did any of that but they’re who you focus on?
And what has the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank done to support your assertion that the West Bank would become another Gaza if the Israeli’s withdrew, Lee? You assume that, because they ran from Gaza, an undesirable burdensome enclave, that the PA’s self-interested membership wouldn’t fight to the end if their backs were against the wall?
Finally, even if we assume that you’re right, no matter how unlikely it is, and Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank led to it being used as a site to launch terror attacks from; even if we assumed your worst-case scenario, that scenario would be a better state of affairs for Israel than the one they are in now. Terror attacks and raids CANNOT imperil Israels’ survival as a state. The absolutely worst they can do is kill bare handfuls of people. A world where Israel was removed from Gaza and the West Bank but had Palestinians trying to attack them would be a world where Israel had no further long-term threats. They could flatten entire sectors of the neighboring territory in retaliation and, yes, the college crew would march and yap, but no one else would bat an eye. Eventually the Palestinians would get tired of the endless lopsided bloodletting they were suffering and they’d stop. And that is assuming your highly unlikely worst-case scenario was correct. We know this is correct because that’s what happened with Gaza for years after the withdrawal and that was with the Israelis’ still clinging to the territories.Report
“Ah, but your own summary is incorrect because you keep acting as if the lunatic college demonstration fringe represents anything but themselves.”
I don’t know if I’m right about this, but from what I remember the left on this site was a little more favorable towards Israel at the beginning of this. The tone of comments here makes me wonder if we’re seeing the rest of the left fall in line behind the extremists, as often happens.Report
You mis-remember then. Yes, we hold Hamas accountable for its actions, the same way we hold the secular state of Israel accountable for its actions. That’s our through line. That we won’t give up and fall in line behind Israel as this drags on probably appears to be coming under their influence, but our position isn’t changing.
And North is right – Israel still controls way more of this out come then Hamas, and still bears more responsibility then Hamas.Report
Eh, I’d say Hamas is utterly, irredeemably responsible for every horrific thing in the situation and they deserve to be obliterated. But Hamas is a terror group- what can you expect from them?
The Israeli’s are a fishin government, moreover they’re the government of the only liberal democracy in the Middle East. If they want to be treated like that (and they do, they do!) they have to accept the cost of that which is being held to the expectations a liberal democracy is held to.Report
I mean, speaking personally, I’ve definitely cooled on the Israeli’s behavior a little over the decades. Arguing the Israeli/Palestinian issue was a lot easier before the israeli peace wing died of despair, Bibi took over and the Israeli’s have stopped even pretending like they’re willing to relinquish the West Bank. Having Bibi acting as a foreign wing of the GOP hasn’t exactly warmed my attitude either.
I still am pro-Israeli and think they’re still the less irrational and crazed side in the conflict but the gap between them has narrowed and watching it happen has been very sobering.
But as for the larger left? No, it remains functionally and verbally Pro-israeli and, in the case of Biden, may well suffer genuine political costs for that stance. And that fact should make any true supporter of Israel’s blood run cold- it certainly does it for mine. Because if Israel becomes a partisan issue then the Israeli’s will be up sh*t creek with no one but their own actions to blame.Report
PA’s self-interested membership wouldn’t fight to the end if their backs were against the wall?
Without a boot on their neck, the PA will go back to the “Right of Return” and “from the river to the sea” because it’s popular. They already do that even with the boot.
Hamas is as corrupt as the PA, corruption isn’t the problem.
The problem is Hamas reflects the Palestinians’ political asperations.
If Hamas is bought off or killed, something else equally problematic will rise to take it’s place.
The Palestinians want to build an Islamic Republic on this section of land. They view all of the Jews as something that needs to be driven out or killed.
That has a bunch of nasty implications, not the least of which is Israel’s security needs are going to be a thing.Report
Israel’s security needs are already a thing and as long as Israel is in the West Bank there is absolutely no chance that the Palestinians are ever going to alter their stance while the fact of Israel’s occupation and the enabling of their most distasteful impulses and social groups will continue to undermine Israel’s standing abroad. Nothing the Palestinians do by force of arms, not rock throwing, rocket throwing, terrorist raiding or flat out attacking poses -any- material threat to Israel’s survival as a state. The Israelis, as long as they have the support of the developed world and maintain their own internal coherence, have overwhelming advantage in arms and would even if the Palestinians had no occupation in the territories. This is an unambiguous fact.
Removing the Israeli occupation of the territories both defangs the only actual threat to Israel as a going concern (the undermining of her reputation abroad) and will finally unfreeze the Palestinians to actually develop as a people. Perhaps some Palestinians will choose to try and attack Israel: they’ll likely die, and probably a bunch of their neighbors and neighborhoods will get blown up too as a consequence. The world will shrug and say ‘That’s what you get”. Yes the college crowd will gibber “Israel, 1947 argle bargle…” but without the literal reality of the Israeli occupation of the territories they won’t get anywhere. Some of the Palestinians will choose to focus on non-Israeli concerns. They’ll do a lot better. In time perhaps they’ll do well and be good neighbors. Either way the Israeli’s will be fine.Report
“Nothing the Palestinians do by force of arms, not rock throwing, rocket throwing, terrorist raiding or flat out attacking poses -any- material threat to Israel’s survival as a state.”
They’re a front-line position for Israel’s foreign enemies. They’ll go without houses in order to fortify bunkers. They’ve armed themselves as much as they’re able. They’re willing to get themselves and their neighbors killed if it makes Israel look bad killing them. They’ve announced all this, they preach this, and they’ve done it repeatedly.Report
Hamas has done this, sure, and that doesn’t change the fact that they present -zero- threat to Israel’s survival as a country. They may be able to kill some Israeli’s here or there, at a cost of terrible retribution from the Israeli state, but they can’t threaten the state itself. Israels’ state based enemies, meanwhile, have never presented less threat to Israel than they do now. The vast majority of Israel’s old enemies are quite content to be neutral to secretly friendly and their few remaining true state enemies are distant, poor and incapable of projecting adequate destructive force to Israel.
Iran, for example, could send the Palestinians some missiles and that’s about it. The end result would just be some flattened Palestinian neighborhoods and no material risk to the state of Israel.Report
The logical conclusion of that is Israel shouldn’t mind the occasional 10/7 as long as it makes them look better on college campuses.
The reality of the aftermath of 10/7 is a brutal war, associated war crimes, and serious collective punishment.
That also looks really bad to the world. If we’re actually good with that being the lesser evil, then maybe that’s something.
However we didn’t behave that way in the aftermath of WW2. We didn’t leave Hit.ler’s crew in charge. We were in Japan for a long time.
If we’re interested in long term peace then someone needs to help the Palestinians stand up a country that isn’t a death cult. The only group with the power and interest is Israel.
If Israel could get interested in standing up a country and not just in stealing land this might work. But it would require Israel to set it’s borders and cram a peace deal down on the Palestinians that the rest of the world would accept even if they do not.Report
You’ve got it massively backwards. It bears keeping firmly in mind that the Israeli occupation of the Territories directly led to Oct. 7th being as bad as it was. The Likud government diverted intelligence and military attention away from containing Gaza to focus on policing their occupation of the West Bank and supporting general right wing settler fishery. Absent the West Bank occupation Oct 7th would likely have just been a particularly large but not particularly successful business as usual attack from Gaza. As for collective punishment- the Israeli’s have always practiced it to one degree or other and it’s naive to think they’d stop.
Likewise, the last thing the Israeli’s should care about is their popularity on campus. Their big problem is that their active occupation of the West Bank is corroding their standing across entire axes of opinion in the developed world and many of those axes are actual, honest to agnostic God(ess?), angles where Israels’ long-term survival is at stake. If one could make any plausible argument that the occupation of the territories has any significant value perhaps one could counterbalance that consideration but that isn’t the case. The occupation wrongfoots Israel vis a vis Gaza (see Oct. 7th); it exposes enormous numbers of settlers to danger in the West Bank itself and it is utterly poison to Israels’ reputation globally (as we have seen in the decade+ that the Israelis wasted dithering after Sharons clear eyed withdrawal from Gaza). This is without even considering that the more geographically entangled the Israeli’s get the more likely a future point will arrive when they face a South Africa scenario and are forced to absorb all those Palestinians into Israel proper. Nor is it considering the way the occupation is turbocharging the most revanchist and extreme sectors of Israeli society. Even if you don’t care a wit for the Palestinians, in of themselves, any clear-eyed big picture view of Israels medium- and long-term interests would identify getting the fish out of the West Bank as the single thing the Israelis could do that’d yield the best security for their effort. It’s not even close.
WW2 analogies are nonsensical because the Palestinians have never had a nation state of their own and because, by and large, the victors of WWII had no significant designs on the loser’s core homeland. If we’d parked ourselves in Japan intent on settling it with Americans and muttering vaguely about lebensraum whenever anyone asked us what would happen to the Japanese living there already we’d be bleeding in Japan to this very day.
What’s odd, though, is your last paragraph is literally a pithy description of what I’ve been advocating- unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the territories; negotiated if possible but a-la Gaza in 2005 if negotiations prove fruitless. So I’m puzzled as to what you’re arguing against in the rest of your comment.Report
There is literally no evidence that independence would cause the Palestinians to develop a more positive version of their identity. This doesn’t mean the occupation should continual indefinitely but you are basically presuming that nobody would be stubborn or dunderheaded enough to continue a futile quest to drive all Jews out.
The West has been dreaming of a Palestinian Mandela for generations but you can’t even get a Palestinian Gerry Adams. What the world basically wants but won’t say is for Israel to agree to an independent Palestine in exchange for nothing in the short or even medium or medium long term and accept a certain amount, by which we mean quite a lot, of terrorism and extremism still directed against it.Report
The point, Lee, is that it wouldn’t -matter- what the Palestinians did. If Israel was disengaged and the Palestinians attacked then some attacking Palestinians would get shot. If Israel was disengaged and the Palestinians launched rockets or other such nonsense the Israeli’s would level the area around the launch sites. They did it for years after the withdrawal from Gaza and reaped years of latitude and acceptance globally from it. Your worst case scenario for Israeli withdrawal- that the Palestinians all magically turn into Hamasistan and stay that way perpetually, is still a better scenario for Israel than it faces currently with the occupation and settlement of the territories a reality.
And. yes, the Israeli’s should withdraw from the territories even if they get nothing in return. Getting rid of the territories is its own reward. How much compensation should you demand that your enemies pay for you to remove a bomb from your own chest? How much do you expect them to pay if they hate you and love the idea of you exploding?Report
Every time Israel has loosened its grip, the Palestinians have responded with violence. (And yes, every time Israel has tightened its grip, the Palestinians have responded with violence.)Report
So then the obvious answer is to remove their grip entirely and focus on maintaining separation and security. Especially since the grip, light or soft, has external costs above and beyond Palestinian violence.Report
There were people out on the street dancing, laughing, and singing on October 8th, 2023.Report
I don’t recall suggesting that the Palestinians love the Israeli’s.Report
From the point of view of Hamas and even the “moderate” Palestinians, the “occupation” has been going on for 75 years. They’re serious.
If we use the Western definition of “occupation”, far as I can tell, the 10/7 attacks weren’t on settlements.
If Israel pulls out of the West Bank, the bulk of Israel will always be seconds away from rocket attacks. The bulk of Israel’s population lives within 15 miles of the West Bank.
These are tiny places. By USA standards there isn’t enough room to have “separation”. Israel did build walls to prevent attack from Gaza. That led to tunnels and eventually 10/7.
Further, economically “separation” from Israel is over-the-top punishment. Israel’s GDP is $564.15 billion. Gaza and the WB combined have a GDP of $19 billion. Per person that’s about a 15x difference.
If we are trying to keep Gaza and WB in poverty, separation is the way to do it. That’s why the security walls are so brutal.
We can add to that Israeli control over water and power.Report
You literally are making a series of arguments about why the Palestinians should not want to be entirely blocked off from Israel and, eventually, I’d expect the Palestinians would probably come around to that view once they didn’t have the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to fixate on and use as an excuse. Yes, they also claim Israel proper is occupied. So do the college fringers. Their opinions on that don’t matter- Israel won’t disappear for them, it is literally impossible currently and, if the Israeli’s get the fish out of the West Bank, it’ll probably never be possible to uproot them from Israel in the future. That’d be a major reason for Israel to get the fish out of the West Bank.
I’m well aware of the size of the places involved, and if the PA in the West Bank actually went Hamas-like it’d cause no small amount of trouble for the Israeli’s but the PA could be doing rocket attacks on Israel now if they wanted to- they don’t want to because they don’t want the consequences. If the Israeli’s withdrew and the West Bank went Hamas-style the Israelis would go back in and “mow the grass” and the powers that be in the world would be, if not sympathetic to them, then generally permissive. It is only the occupation of the territories that is causing them long term loss of support from the populations in the developed world. This has been proof of concepted exhaustively in Gaza since 2005. The Palestinians suffered years of being brutally discredited after Sharon withdrew and they attacked. It took Netanyahu years of bad behavior and the Settlers in the west bank over a decade of occupation to undermine that consensus.
I agree that Israel separating from the Palestinians would be extremely hard on the Palestinians economically. The Israeli’s would suffer from the lack of cheap labor somewhat too. Perhaps once they separated they could come to some agreement- both sides would have reason to, but trying to sort it out in advance has flagrantly not worked. Both sides have too many excuses and allow their worse impulses to block what they have to do. None of that is a reason for Israel not to drag their settlers out and disengage. The longer they stay in there the harder it’ll get and the more risky it becomes for Israel’s long term well being.Report
Really? Israel is completely dislodged from Gaza but plenty of people in the West starting at the lowest but now going to the highest levels are complaining bitterly about it. There was even an attempt by South Africa to have Israel declared guilty of war crimes and genocide. People are still arguing that Gaza is under occupation despite their being no Israel settlers because Israel controls it’s border with Gaza, etc.
From what I can tell, the growing consensus is that the Palestinians should get full independence. If they decide to be unproductive with their independence and go after Green Line Israel than Israel just needs to endure this until the Palestinians work out their issues and decide to be productive. I see utterly no indication that your position is correct.Report
Lee, your characterization is wildly inaccurate. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005. For doing that they got almost two decades of a virtual free hand with Gaza to blockade, bombard and otherwise do whatever the fish they wanted to Gaza every time Hamas got feisty. That was a remarkable return for Israel pulling a relatively small number of settlers out of the less desirable territory they control. If they did the same thing in the West Bank there’s no reason to think that their return would not be commensurately greater.
And what you leave out, entirely, when you talk about this is what alternative the Israeli’s have. The only other one on top is continuing their occupation of the West Bank, indulging their Settlers and trying to kick the can further down the road and genuinely undermining their long-term prospects of survival. Every month that they stay in the West Bank another group of pro-Israeli voters in the developed world shuffle off this mortal coil and another group of young voters look at the situation and decide Israel is some kind of apartheid state. You can inveigle and shout about that as much as you want but that is literally what is happening and it’s been steadily accelerating. That’s without even talking about what the occupation is doing to Israel domestically.
And, I’ll ask again, how much payment should the Israeli’s expect their enemies to give them to remove the bomb from their own chests? It is insanity to expect anything from them.Report
If Israel was disengaged and the Palestinians launched rockets or other such nonsense the Israeli’s would level the area around the launch sites.
This is awful enough when directed at the tiny minority of Israelis who live within Rocket Range of Gaza. They’re mostly in villages so the gov built bomb shelters for everyone.
All of Israel lives close enough to be terrorized by West Bank Rockets. Rather than a 200 person village, picture New York City being subjected to warnings about rocket attacks several times a week and being told to seek shelter.
“Leveling the area around the launch site” runs into the problem that it’s going to be a mobile launcher set up next to a Masque or Kindergarten.
This is what Lee means when he says Israel is going to be asked to ignore VAST amounts of terrorism. Even if the absolute level only stays the same, the number of people subjected to terrorism will rise to the entire country, and they’re going to be expected to not blow up Kindergartens.
The US would never put up with New York being subjected to terror attacks multiple times a week from rockets. We’d go to war and level or take over as much land as needed to stop it.Report
I am well aware that it would not be fun for the Israeli’s or the Palestinians if the PA went full blown Hamas. But it bears noting that the PA is fully capable of going full blown Hamas now despite the occupation and has chosen not to. It is the height of hubris to think the Israeli’s have a level of control on the West Bank that lets them preclude all forms of attacks. If anything, their settlements make them more vulnerable to attacks- not less. It’s not the 1960’s now. The PA also tamps down on terror or rocket attacks because their paychecks and their well being depends on it. Is the Israeli’s pulled out then the PA would have even more incentive to prevent those attacks, especially with the smoking rubble of Gaza illustrating the alternative.
But, again, the core point is that even if the Palestinians tried to bombard the Israeli’s with rockets, population centers or not, there’d be no existential risk to Israel. The Israelis would be able to reciprocate disproportionately as the did for over a decade in Gaza. Assuredly the college crew would demonstrate but everyone else? They’d shrug and say “Stop poking the bear”. They already want to be done with the whole mess of it and getting Israel out of the West Bank would be an adequate conclusion. Heck, you say so yourself repeatedly by saying Israel needs to set its borders.Report
I’m going to pull this down to the bottom so I have more room to reply.Report
Let’s try again. There was a rally in New York State where Pro-Palestinian students compared Israel to you know what, demanded that the settlers (meaning every Jew in Israel) go home, and Palestine belongs to them. I really don’t understand why people think that Jews should just overlook this sort of rhetoric as something from just and impassioned youth even if they live in the Diaspora. It seems perfectly clear that the message is the only real just solution to many of the Palestinians and their so-called allies is “No Israel, No Jews.”
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2024-02-03/ty-article/.premium/denouncing-israel-as-the-new-nazi-germany-hundreds-protest-outside-columbia-university/0000018d-7091-dd6e-a98d-f4b3eca80000
Nobody has any idea about what to do about this and doesn’t even to seem to like to talk about it much. From what I can tell is that people want an independent Palestine to be created, from Israel to have to accept and endure a certain amount of terrorism and rocket barrage from the new state until the Palestinians decide to move in a more positive direction. By a certain amount, it is generally meant quite a lot.
My other key take away from this as a Jew is that the Diversity/Intersectional Coalition basically decided “Jews don’t count”, they don’t want or even need us and that we most definitely outside the “Sacred Circle of Oppression.” Meanwhile the other side of the aisle is getting more and more openly anti-Semitic. The Jews are alone in the world and lots of my fellow Jews are stuck in a path dependency and don’t realize this. We have hundreds of millions or billions of people that want us dead in the entire world.Report
RE: the settlers (meaning every Jew in Israel) go home, and Palestine belongs to them.
IMHO good parts of the Left translate “settlers” into “Jewish religious fanatics who take land everyone agrees should be Arab” and “Palestine” (and the “occupation”) to mean “The West Bank and Gaza”.
If you that then Israel looks like the villain.
You need to dig a bit deeper to see what they really mean when they say those things.
For example the PA Ambassador (I think to the UN) was explaining that Israel doesn’t have a right to defend itself. That’s not nutpicking, that’s where their heads really are.Report
I think this is true for the most part, what the Palestinians are saying goes in one year and gets translated into something that is more palatable for the West when it comes out the other ear.* In this particular protest, I don’t think we even have that. These protest is definitely saying that all Israelis are settlers and the entire thing belongs to the Palestinians. There is no ambiguity or plausible deniability here.Report
Legally speaking, occupiers of occupied territories _don’t_ have the right to defend themselves from the territory they occupy. Because it’s already theirs. It’s like self-defense against your own arm.
I don’t know what the leader of the Palestinian Authority said, but the Palestinian Authority is, _legally_, a transitional government, created by the Oslo Accords, that exists under Israel occupation. It is supposed to become a real sovereign nation at some point in time. Israel is not, in any manner whatsoever, allowed to attack it, in fact, it’s required to _defend_ it from other nations! That is Israel’s obligation under international law and Oslo.
At least, that would be the situation if Israel had behaved sanely and hadn’t somehow decided that part of Palestine was no longer occupied by them, but still (somehow?) under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority, a position that is completely incoherent and likely illegal under international law. And I say ‘likely’ only because it is so nonsensical that it might be that no one ever thought of banning it.
And then because control was so thin (Because, after all, the Palestinian Authority can really only exercise whatever control Israel allows it to.) that part of the country has functionally broken away…which possibly does make it a sovereign nation for real. Which possibly does allow Israel to attack it in ‘self defense’, except..it doesn’t need to, as Israel already started the war, almost as soon as it declare it wasn’t in control of this hypothetical Nation of Gaza, because Israel has constantly done things like that blockade the ports, and flew aircraft overhead, and shot people across the ‘international’ border, and all sorts of other things that are legally acts of war if done to other nations, so it’s actually _Gaza_ that acted in self-defense. (Note that doesn’t justify kidnapping civilians. Something can be self-defense _and_ a war crime.)
But even if we pretend there is some hypothetical breakaway Nation of Gaza that exists as an (unrecognized by everyone) sovereign nation, Israel is not allowed to attack _Palestine_, or West Bankistan, or whatever you want to call it. The country that the Palestine Authority actually controls, still under Israeli occupation.Report
so it’s actually _Gaza_ that acted in self-defense.
Mass rape and mass murder of civilians is “self-defense”? Do tell.
Legally speaking, occupiers of occupied territories _don’t_ have the right to defend themselves from the territory they occupy. Because it’s already theirs. It’s like self-defense against your own arm.
The Gaza attack wasn’t upon land that is disputed except by people who claim all of Israel is an “occupied territory”.
If the claim is Israel must help itself be destroyed because Jews aren’t supposed to be alive then it should be phrased that way.Report
Why yes, we do. Its the kind of both straighforward and nuanced statement that modern political discourse seems to no longer tolerate.
What we mean is Ultrarightwing Jews who create living quarters inside the West Bank using the Israeli Army to seize land, using the Israeli army to expel the Palestinians living there, and using the Israeli Army to keep hold of those lands while they build on them.Report
What we mean is Ultrarightwing Jews who create living quarters inside the West Bank…
That’s what the West thinks. When I listen to Arabs, they’ll include how this has been going on for 75 years. So their basic definition is different.Report
What is the point of lower education?
Report
This is basically grift for the liberals and the left.Report
If the test scores remained the same, it’d be a grift that you could keep going for a while. See, dig this:
“Why do you care? The children are reading, they’re learning math. Why do you care if we’re also teaching them that they shouldn’t hate other people?”Report
Unfortunately woke instruction and learning are mutually exclusive.Report
From the article:
This one is just (chef’s kiss):
What is the point of lower education? Well, it’s not to improve literacy and math scores, that’s for sure.Report
“What is the point of lower education? Well, it’s not to improve literacy and math scores, that’s for sure.”
It makes the students FEEL GOOD.Report
Almost like the problem isn’t racism and “woke” is just virtue signaling.Report
On the other hand, the battle is being joined and the woke nonsense isn’t faring well.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/in-the-battle-over-early-algebra-parents-are-winning-9f52ea5f?st=ig1vxk0l5ncpn2z&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalinkReport
Maybe we’ll get back to where we were in 2013.Report
To the degree we ever left it, probably yes and probably pretty quickly. What is worthy in woke will be adopted but all the positional pap, self serving ink-clouding and feather bedding is not going to endure.Report
How’s this for a compromise? We’ll send the positional pap, self-serving ink-clouding, and feather bedding down to the crappy schools in the crappy part of town and we’ll teach algebra in the good part of town and say that any discrepancy in test scores is due to racism.Report
Not likely- if it won’t fly in one part of an apparatus it won’t fly anywhere.Report
Sure it will! The schools with zero proficient students have put up with it for years now. Just dump the true believers there. Heck, give them free reign and consider it a perk of the job.Report
If there is anything we can be assured of it’s that the true believers will not be sending their children to schools on the wrong side of the tracks.Report
Periodically, there are mini-scandals where politicians send their kids to private schools instead of to public schools and then get called out on it. There was one that happened just the other day in Tennessee.
Of course, the “school choice” types in Tennessee (and other states) are using this as an opportunity to talk about the failures of local policy on this.
But I really wish that there were an ability to fix this.
Maybe if we made the true believers send their kids to these schools, it would change things.Report
The people who get called out for sending their kids to private schools, at their own expense, generally pay the higher public school taxes they advocate to improve the public schools they don’t use. Maybe what they advocate and pay for doesn’t actually improve those public schools, but the scandal, or even the inconsistency, eludes me.Report
The people who do? Eh, who cares.
The *POLITICIANS* who do? I see why people care.
Hell, I don’t even see the inconsistency. Of course I care more for my kids than I care for yours. You’d be stupid to think that I shouldn’t.Report
Missed the entire point. Try again. I’ll break it down:
1. Politician X advocates more spending for public schools, which increases school taxes;
2. Politician X sends his kids to private school at his own expense;
3. Politician X pays the higher schools taxes his policy called for, to improve schools he doesn’t even use;
4. Opponents of politician X call him out for hypocrisy or inconsistency.
What is the inconsistency or hypocrisy?Report
Well, without getting into questions like “is the problem one that will be fixed by more funding” (given that, say, the schools in Baltimore are in the top quintile of funding for the US), I’d say that part of the problem is the whole issue of sending one’s own children to the good school (even at extra expense) but maintaining the status quo for the public schools despite the public demanding a change away from the status quo.
I don’t see the hypocrisy/inconsistency either.
Of course I’d want to help my children and hobble yours.
You’d be stupid to think that I wouldn’t.Report
I’m with Jay on this one. Politicians who advocate for other people to spend money they might not want to on higher taxes to pay for things that may or may not fix problem schools ought to be putting they’re kids in said public schools. It demonstrates a commitment to the system.Report
Is there an actual argument here? Are you, like Jaybird, conceding that whatever the problem is it is not the hypocrisy or inconsistency with which the politicians are so often taxed?Report
Quite the opposite, in fact. Politicians are asking people to put faith in school systems that even the politicians don’t have faith in.Report
Are they? Are they telling people they can’t send their kids to private schools? Or that they can’t move to school districts that have better results? Or are they directing resources, including their own, to the schools that people who can’t or won’t take these options end up using?Report
I would phrase this issue a bit differently than Jaybird and Slade have. The lesson of covid re: public schools is that parents are putting themselves and their children at the mercy of big bureaucracies that it turns out (at least in some places) are more dedicated to priorities other than the public service mission for which they nominally exist.
I’m not sure if hypocrisy is the right word, but asking parents to put themselves and their children at risk of things that the person asking would not risk for themselves or their children is a sign of really bad leadership.Report
Unless you can afford private schools or expensive neighborhoods with schools that get good results, you are going to be in the public schools in the neighborhoods you can afford. And that is true whether people, including politicians, who can afford to do otherwise do it or not. And nobody serious proposes to change that.
So what is the “gotcha” when a politician votes to raise his own taxes to increase resources at schools he doesn’t use? Hypocrisy plainly isn’t the right word, but it’s the word people use. They should stop.Report
Whether we call it hypocrisy or something else I don’t think it bodes well for the long term health of public education. I strongly doubt we will see public schools go extinct nor will schools flip partisan political control in any serious or consistent way. But I think we could see many public school districts go into a downward spiral, where they become the warehouses of the poor, the poor performing, and the profoundly handicapped. That worries me, but I suppose people can disagree as to whether it would be a good outcome or not.Report
Of course not. It is just my (the parent of 2 K-12 public school children) opinion, that no one else need share, that municipal leaders ought to take pride in what their city has to offer. If the public school offerings are substandard, and that is the reason for choosing private schools for their kids, they ought to come out and say it. Let them lay their cards on the table.Report
About half of the states and counties in America have Republican leadership.
Is it a scandal that the Republican leaders in these states are not “proud of what their county has to offer” by sending their kids to the public schools that they themselves created?Report
What are the proficiency rates in these schools?
What proficiency rates would you say were “good enough, I guess”?
I just checked my high schools and, golly, the one in new york is in the 90s for both! Which strikes me as “pretty good”.
The one here in town has reading in the low 80’s and math in the low *50*s. Which shocks me. (I took Calc AB! I got a 3! The school had a decent enough math program!)
But what’s a “good enough to not merit criticism” score?
I mean, other than NOT A SINGLE FREAKING STUDENT PROFICIENT, of course.Report
As ever, whenever the subject of education comes up, the topic Republicans insistently refuse to address is how to fix it, with no other idea than other than “Lets just run away!”Report
“What about Phonics.”
“So you think that just that *ONE* thing will fix *ALL* of this dysfunction?”
“No, I’m pointing out one of the things that always gets brought up whenever you say that nobody ever suggests anything but going to a good school instead of a bad one.”Report
Who is speaking, here, the person you are quoting?
It can’t be you, because you aren’t a Republican, remember?
I see a lot of Republicans talk about school choice.
I also see a lot of Republicans talk about banning books.
I see a lot of Republicans talk about bathrooms and trans athletes.
I don’t see a lot talking about phonics. I’m sure there are some, but the dominant commentary about education among Republicans is the lifeboat theory of letting the high performers escape and leave the low performers to rot.Report
Some of them talk about bringing back algebra.Report
Talk is easy. Results are hard:
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/in-the-battle-over-early-algebra-parents-are-winning-9f52ea5f?st=ig1vxk0l5ncpn2z&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalinkReport
I saw that! yesterday!
Gotta admit: going back to the less screwed up way after spending a decade in the screwed up way strikes me less as “progress” and more as “whoopsie doodle”.
But I imagine that there are some children who will benefit to the way we used to do things and fewer that will be harmed by them and I wish them all the best.
We should all be more willing to say “whoopsie doodle” when we screw up that massively.Report
The article does little to bear that out, as far as measurable results go.Report
No, not at that failing school in Tennessee that you linked to.
Its school board and parents are mostly Republican, and they aren’t talking about algebra at all.
Oh, but the parents ARE filing a lawsuit to ban books.
See, this is why I keep reminding people that educational achievement or failure doesn’t track along partisan lines.
There are plenty of failing schools in Republican areas, just as there are plenty of successful schools in Democratic areas.Report
Chip, the school in question is in Davidson County which is one of three counties that went for Biden in 2020.
Three out of ninety-five counties, may I point out.
As for the people on the Nashville School Board itself, it looks like they have 8 democrats and 2 republicans.
Pulling the “these guys are *REPUBLICAN*!” works best when they are Republican.
“Those 2 Republicans are *REALLY* good at getting their way!”Report
Your link mentioned Hilslboro School;
I looked it up and it appears to be in Williamson County.
https://www.wcs.edu/HEMS
Were you thinking perhaps of another Hillsboro?Report
That seems to be a different school than this one:
https://hillsboro.mnps.org/
For example, your website points to a K-8 school. And the one that I was talking about was a high school. If you click on my link, you’ll see that it takes you to Hillsboro High School’s webpage.
Which has an address in the 37215 zip code.
Which is in Davidson county.Report
Fair enough.Report
I think her kids are high school aged, and zoned for Hillsboro High School, which is in Nashville (Harmony Korine went there, coincidentally, as did one of my good childhood friends, at the same time as Korine). She lives (I believe) in Oak Hill, a mostly wealthy suburb of Nashville in Davidson County (and therefore under the same city-metro government as Nashville), where she was mayor before being elected to the legislature.
Hillsboro School is a K-8 school on the rural outskirts of Franklin, TN, about 1.5 miles from my parents’ house, and a good hour away from downtown Nashville (though only like 10 minutes from rural Nashville… Nashville is geographically weird).Report
You’re such a romantic when it comes to what you think schooling is for Jay. It is sweet.Report
It’s a jobs program!Report
Goodness gracious no!
Public educations’ purposes, in order of priority, are:
#1: Warehouse kids so their parents can work.
#2: Keep said kids physically safe and generally orderly.
#3: While we have them all in one place, try and do some socializing and educating of said kids.Report
The problem is parental expectations, then.
We’re succeeding at #1 and, if they ain’t dead, we’re succeeding at #2.
You want #3? We can do “socializing” but if you want “educating” you’re going to have to move to the good school district.Report
You say the problem is parental expectations but you’re wrong about that. Consider the big picture. You currently point at, for example, low performing schools in certain districts but the parents there aren’t rioting. The most engaged ones aren’t pleased and are trying to get their kids into schools that tick all three boxes but the vast majority of parents, even in those districts, seem to move on with resigned equanimity. Because, yeah, the schools aren’t performing for goal #3 but they’re generally ticking the boxes on goals #1 and #2.
Consider, as further proof, Covid. What did parents actually lose their minds about the most during Covid shut downs? Across all states but especially in states that kept schools shut the longest? The answer: schools being shut down as kid warehouses. And while student performance/lost learning was a stated concern (and a fashionable one- what kinds of parents like to talk about goal #1?) it was only in hindsight that we concretely determined that remote learning was inferior to in person learning for goal #3. No, the parents revealed preferences reinforce the priorities I define. The kids could have been learning as well or even better than they would in person and parents would still be furious about Covid school shut downs because public schools’ primary function (kid warehousing) was not being satisfied by remote public schooling.Report
it was only in hindsight that we concretely determined that remote learning was inferior to in person learning for goal #3
I submit: while quantitative analysis was going to take years, it was still possible to do an informal qualitative analysis at the time and, indeed, many of the most involved parents did so and came to an early conclusion that was validated by the later quantitative study.Report
That may be, but it doesn’t change the fact that parents were very obviously far more furious that Jr. was physically stuck at home than they were about any potential impacts to Jr.’s academic performance. This was demonstrated by the furor mostly dissipating once the kids returned, physically, to the schools even though the academic impacts remained present. For goal #3 the damage was done by remote learning and remained persistent but for Goal #1 the issue was literally resolved by simply re-opening the schools. Since the uproar dissipated as soon as schools re-opened it is obvious that Goal #1 was the primary parental beef; not goal #3.Report
Eh, I think that there are indicators that politicians (and school board members) lost elections due to such things as education policy.
But there’s enough of an overlap between “parents noticing that the kid’s education is falling off” and “parents having the kid around enough to notice that their education is falling off” that it probably can’t be separated.
But there were a handful of elections that were lost due to education policy. Big enough election losses for even people like us to notice them.Report
Absolutely, there were politicians fired over it, especially in local elections where the elections happened close enough to the school closure events. But the 2022 elections were held and the GOP heavily campaigned on the school closures which were, by large then, a past tense event. It was a flop as an electoral tool for getting Democrats fired. If Education was goal #1 then it shouldn’t have been but since Kid Warehousing was actually goal #1 its flop as an electoral issue is easily explained. The kid warehousing had resumed at that point so it was no longer salient as a parental concern.
So public educations purposes: Kid warehousing, Kid safety, Kid education/socialization. In that order. Not something anyone is proud to write on a banner, a charter or even an op ed but true regardless.Report
…it was only in hindsight that we concretely determined that remote learning was inferior to in person learning for goal #3.
Nonsense. Just about 30 years ago I had started doing research on real-time multi-party multi-media communications using workstations and internet protocols. I certainly wasn’t the only one. Any of us could have told anyone who asked that it wasn’t as good for #3 as face-to-face and a teacher with a class of 25 K-6 students was a particularly hard problem.
When the pandemic started and I saw what sort of remote technology my granddaughter’s class had, I was appalled. My daughter wasn’t too pleased when I burst out with (where the granddaughters could hear), “Wasn’t anyone paying any f*cking attention to the research?”Report
If you were publishing in IT or Comp Sci journals – no, no one was paying attention. If you wanted the teachers to pay attention you needed to publish in their journals.
Bummer I know. Just like the climate scientists are incredulous that no one who reads the Dallas Morning Star also reads their peer reviewed literature.
Even if the had been reading that research, most districts had (at most) a week to pivot. They spent the rest of the pandemic playing catch up, and often with little to no additional initial resource support. So of them di well under that rubric. Most did not. Many lessons learned.Report
Interestingly, at the giant telecom where I did the work legal wouldn’t allow us to publish, although we managed to at least talk about it at little conferences. I was the lead heretic and we were not popular for telling marketing that they were making a disastrous mistake.
The people who wrote the software that the schools pivoted to had no excuse to have ignored the literature. The products they were selling in 2020 were crap.Report
What makes those districts “good?”Report
Proficiency in reading and proficiency in math.
If you really want to get out there, I’d say “graduation rates” and “going on to university” rates and “going on to graduate from university” rates.Report
I assume your question means what is it about those districts that accounts for good results, since “good results” is an entirely obvious and uninteresting answer.Report
I was actually mostly needling Jay over his continued fixation on Baltimore. I almost any other district that is “successful” even by his metrics, there’s a significant overlap between good results and funding. Is a string correlation that holds up regardless of red vs. blue city status, until you get to the really big cities. The fact that Jay keeps trotting out the worst example of failure instead of the many examples of success is always telling.Report
When I last looked at the research, most public schools were pretty good, some were superb, but there was a stubborn remnant of poorly-performing schools that generally served poor and poorly-prepared students. Whether the problems stemmed from what those schools were doing specifically or from the greater difficulty of their task was a large, difficult question. Interestingly, there was a study out of Baltimore several years back that tracked reading achievement. The upshot was that the kids who came in as poorer readers improved during the school year by about as much as the students who came in as better readers, though from a lower baseline. Over the summer, the poorer readers regressed some and the better readers progressed some. (This became known as the Harry Potter Effect.) Rinse and repeat each year, and you’d see consistent gains for both groups during the school year, but a widening gap at the end.Report
Most schools ARE pretty good because most families, most children are also pretty good.
Kinda like Lake Woebegone, where everyone is above average.
In my experience, the single most determinative variable in education outcomes is parental involvement and commitment, followed by funding.
Public/ private, union/ nonunion, doesn’t matter.
This explains why there are these pockets of low performers because we have pockets of dysfunctional families where education isn’t a priority.
Which places education right in the same category as crime or homelessness, where the problem is a small minority of people who need a lot of resources and commitment, and aren’t particularly popular or sympathetic to begin with.
So the impetus is always to toss them out of the lifeboat which is as futile as it is stupid.Report
Chip: So the impetus is always to toss them out of the lifeboat which is as futile as it is stupid.
The alternatives may be worse. The issues are whether we’re rewarding things that should be punished, and whether punishment is something we trust the state to do.
We have a group of dysfunctional families… by the standards of our culture.
Do we trust the gov with the tools it would need to “fix” these cultures? Some of the worst abuses of our history come from well meaning attempts to do that. Taking children away from parents who have the “wrong” culture instantly gets nasty and racist.
Do we shower people from these cultures with resources? If we give their kids 10x more attention that my kid gets, then shouldn’t I make my kid join that culture (or at least lie about it) so she gets that massive advantage?
Sometimes we can avoid these issues. Make easy access to sanity drugs for everyone. If I don’t need them then I won’t care.
Sometimes we can’t. The resources needed to make [child X] successful are the same which mine needs, so why is that kid more deserving than mine much less 10x as deserving?Report
In this particular case, the politician who sends her kids to a private school is in Tennessee.
Do you want me to dig up the test scores for the school district her kids are zoned in? I happen to have them handy.
(I wouldn’t wanna send my kids to that school either.)Report
Your link is either bad or broken.
But tell me, is that district better or worse then your Baltimore whipping post?Report
Ugh, let me go into the guts and fix it.
Okay.
But tell me, is that district better or worse then your Baltimore whipping post?
One of my assumptions is that it is not possible to be worse than those schools in Baltimore. “Not one single proficient student, no not even one” is as bad as it possibly can get.
So I’d say that the question ought to be “is that district better or just as bad as your Baltimore whipping post”? And I’m pleased to answer:
If those schools in Baltimore got these numbers at the end of the 2024-2025 school year, I’d be cheering and asking what, specifically, they had done with regards to reading that was so wildly successful.
The math numbers are really crappy but higher, barely, than zero. So I’d see that as not a step in the right direction but, like, an indicator that they might be trying to take a step in the right direction.Report
Well, Baltimore IS bad. Interestingly, I was talking to a parent in my area, and he said that ONE school district in my county ranked SO HIGH in the ratings that it literally pulled up every other school’s ranking in the county when the county as whole was presented. Those schools taken individually were mediocre at best. This is in one of the richest counties in the state/area.Report
So is my kids school district – which is top ten in one of the bottom states in the union – likely to be good or bad? Is the rest of the state dragging us down or are we bringing them up?Report
School level scores and ratings are posted on the internet. You’re asking a question about numbers, so there is an answer.
My expectation is a “top ten in the state” school is likely to be roughly equal to other top ten schools in other states. There are going to be pockets of failure and pockets of success in every system.
Obviously if you’re going to a micro-state then “top ten” might not be a thing and there will be other exceptions but whatever.Report
And Gary Tan went on a public rant threatening death against the entire board of supervisors because how dare they not listen to him, a very rich person.
The SFUSD had a noble goal to encourage more Black, Hispanic, and Low-income kids to take tougher math in high school. The method may have been very flawed but it had a noble goal.
Instead of acknowledging the noble goal, there are just tons of comments on cranky right-wing engineers on “Haha San Francisco” and a lot of them border on “race realism” but are usually too scared to go thereReport
Saul, you need to quit being hoodwinked by people with stupid plans who are charismatic enough to make you think that they have noble goals.Report
I don’t agree with his methods, but you have to admire that Austrian gentleman’s commitment to the noble goal of helping the German people recover from World War I.Report
It was much worse than that. He quoted rap.
Looking up the story, it’s clear that you’ve crammed at least three misrepresentations into that sentence, but I’m not really interested in going to the mat for a guy I’ve never heard of, so just…try to do better in the future.
As I allude to in my other comment, you can defend pretty much anything with “but they had noble goals!”
In reality, they made it harder for everyone to take advanced math classes in high school by holding back students who were clearly ready to go on to algebra in eighth grade. This was not an unforeseeable side effect of their plan. It was the plan.
Waiting until ninth grade to take algebra was already an option for any student who was not ready in eighth grade. It was the default! Taking away the option to take algebra in eighth grade only makes sense in light of their actual goal, which was to narrow racial academic achievement gaps by holding back the (disproportionately white and especially Asian) more advanced students, Harrison Bergeron style. Why? Because they had given up on getting black and Hispanic students algebra-ready by eighth grade at anything close to the same rate as white, let alone Asian, students. Maybe they’re race realists!
I actually had this happen to me for reasons less related to ideology than to logistics. Sitting through a year of basic 8th-grade math after two years of algebra was awful, but it wasn’t really anyone’s fault. I too wish death on anyone who intentionally inflicts this on kids.Report
I vaguely remember that when I was in 3d grade we were getting the New Math, as it was then called. The part I remember best was the equations with boxes and triangles symbolizing the unknowns instead of the x’s and y’s that we would see six (not five) years later in algebra. In effect, we were getting rudimentary algebra in third grade: 5 + Box=27. What goes in the box? Subtract 5 from both sides and 22 goes into the box.
I suspect that some Ed.D. student had created a study showing that 3d graders would get sidetracked assuming that x and y had some inherent meaning because they were letters rather than being arbitrary placeholders for variables; hence the boxes and triangles. But it was still algebra.
So I can’t get excited over the question of whether algebra is offered in 8th grade or, as it was in my day, 9th. People are entitled to squabble over their preferences, but the little research of which I am aware doesn’t show that it matters much.Report
Nikki Haley has backed off from her previous secessionist remarks, with her usual levels of candor and coherence:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/02/04/states-secede-nikki-haley-00139496
As James L. Petigru famously remarked about the state he had so loyally served before the Civil War: “South Carolina is too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum.”Report
Those of you who believe that the government is involved with choosing who does and who does not win the NFL World Championship Game, you should know that the father of the San Francisco Quarterback was arrested last night for a DUI.
Some theorize that by getting Kelce a win, Taylor Swift will then endorse Joe Biden helping to tighten up the White Female vote in New York, California, Oregon, and Washington.Report
My favorite comment on the subject was this guy who said that Mahomes is going to throw a miracle sixty-yard helmet-catch pass to Marquez Valdes-Scantling and people will be like “well yeah, of course, just like they drew it up in Davos”Report
The Elites put a lot of effort into finding QB/WR teams capable of completing 60-yard passes during The Big Game for a reason.Report
Maybe that’s why Mahomes makes all those crazy last-moment throws as he’s going to the ground, he’s trying to establish the idea that He Just Does That so when he needs to do it to win it doesn’t look suspicious!Report
This is the kind of rabbit hole I can go down!
We should have a contest for the craziest sounding, yet seemingly plausible, scenario.Report
One last thing to take into account:
Report
Those of you who believe that the government is involved with choosing who does and who does not win the NFL World Championship Game,
I’d be every interested in learning who, if anyone here, does believe that, or even takes it seriously.Report
Report
You are aware that X-Files wasn’t a documentary?
Does anyone here actually believe it or take it seriously?Report
I want to believe.Report
That’s hilarious. I wonder if they can do something about the execrable halftime shows we’ve been subjected to.Report
One think that might be the case is that Americans, along with maybe Canadians and the residents of Oceania, are just more laissez-faire about educational outcomes. Let the smart people be smart, the average average, and the dumb flounder. Other developed democracies tend to be a lot less laissez-faire on educational outcomes. Europeans seems to be focused on getting each child the education that is right for them and making sure the smart kids get the best education possible. East Asian developed democracies seem to want to give as rigorous an academic, especially STEM education, to as many kids as possible even if it means doing things that just seem inhumane to everybody else like Korea sleep depriving high school students and not giving them any free time. The goal in its own way is the pursuit of human excellence.Report
Academically inclined liberals tend to trip up on the topic of education a lot because we tend to be nerds who liked learning for learnings sake and also have a strong egalitarian bent. The later means things like rigorous testing and a hierarchy in education at any level seems wrong. Many other people have more practical goals when it comes to education for their children or themselves, they certainly aren’t going to college because they want to take a mandatory Medieval poetry course, and are also more competitive and comfortable with desperate outcomes and educational hierarchies.Report
North: you say so yourself repeatedly by saying Israel needs to set its borders.
Israel needs to be a normal country and stop behaving badly. That means closing the door on it’s Right wing taking land.
However, the Palestinians still believe that all of Israel is theirs, that the Occupation started 75 years ago, and the whole thing is a colony project. So there will be a huge amount of screaming when Israel just takes the land it wants and declares “peace” and this won’t lead to peace.
There is no way to appease the Palestinians and there is no path to peace. For all the talk about how there are no “existential” threats, Israel considers 10/7 to have been an “existential” threat.
North: I am well aware that it would not be fun for the Israeli’s or the Palestinians if the PA went full blown Hamas.
It wouldn’t need to be the PA and it wouldn’t need to be “full blown”. Hamas won in Gaza militarily, but there are other armed groups and attacking Israel is so popular that it wins elections. Worse, even 1% of what Gaza has been like in recent years would invite Israel to have a nasty war just because the West Bank can easily terrorize all of Israel while Gaza was only doing a few tens of thousands.
North: The PA also tamps down on terror or rocket attacks because their paychecks and their well being depends on it. Is the Israeli’s pulled out then the PA would have even more incentive to prevent those attacks, especially with the smoking rubble of Gaza illustrating the alternative.
This is the foreshadowing of instability, not stability. The PA is corrupt and opposes the popular will of the people.
When Israel does the same thing for the West Bank that it tried with Gaza and gets the same result (i.e. we learn the Palestinians like terrorism and insist on a war), what happens?
You talked about how Israel can flatten (kindergarten) launch sites but you also seem to think it won’t need to. Assume that flattening kindergartens actually becomes a thing.
Is the world going to let Israel turn the West Bank into smoking rubble? Is that actually a better outcome than occupation?
Ideally I’d like to see Israel (and good grief, other arab states) stand up a PA functioning state… but “functioning state” might also mean “goes to war with Israel” considering where the Palestinians’ heads are at.Report
“For all the talk about how there are no “existential” threats, Israel considers 10/7 to have been an “existential” threat.”
Just as the Palestinians thinking that all of Israel is a colonialist project that can be rolled back is magical thinking unmoored from reality so too is Israel thinking 10/7 was an “existential threat”. Neither is true and, being false, neither opinion particularly matters.
“Hamas won in Gaza militarily, but there are other armed groups and attacking Israel is so popular that it wins elections. “
This elides the actual reality and exaggerates the problem. Hamas won an election in Gaza in 2006 because the PA was, and is, sclerotic and corrupt. Hamas never permitted another election after that point. The idea that attacking Israel and then getting yourself and your neighbors blown to hell wins elections is based on opinion polls, posturing for media and similar theater. There’s certainly no examples we can point to in Gaza or the West bank to demonstrate that. That the Gazans didn’t get sick of Hamas’ behavior enough to rise up and overthrow them is true but is completely negated by the fact that the West Bank Palestinians have never been annoyed enough about the PA’s collaboration and suppression of violence enough to rise up and overthrow the PA.
If we look to Lebanon the picture clears more. Hezbollah has had several rounds of attacking Israel and then getting themselves and no small portion of Lebanon pummeled to bits in Israeli retaliations. Hezbollah suffered badly in the regard of the Lebanese from these fights- so badly, in fact, that they don’t seem to be very enthusiastic about going another round with Israel for a similar result. It is not all peaches and cream for Israel either- those retaliatory actions cost a lot and killed plenty of soldiers and even Bibi’s clown brigade is not eager to charge into Lebanon for another go around with Hezbollah despite plenty of halfhearted provocations.
“Is the world going to let Israel turn the West Bank into smoking rubble?”
This is similar to the question that Lee asks about Sharon withdrawing from Gaza and getting “nothing” from the world in return. The answer is actually very clear. The world absolutely would. Gaza itself demonstrates this. Sharon hauled Israel and her settlers (kicking and screaming) out of Gaza. The world, in return for Israel withdrawing from the least desirable fraction of the occupied territories, gave Israel almost 20 years of a near blank check in dealing with Gaza after Hamas took over and made it into a terror camp. Kindergartens were levelled, disproportionate strikes answered raids and skirmishes. While the world said the nice moral things about proportionality etc their actions said “Well if you poke the Israeli bear that is what you get.” The Gazan withdrawal stands as a concrete proof of concept for unilateral withdrawal*. Had Sharon not been felled by his stroke and had he prosecuted the same unilateral withdrawal in the West Bank that he did in Gaza it is extremely likely that the entire issue would be in an enormously better state now than it currently is. Has a blood clot ever been more consequential?
“Is that actually a better outcome than occupation?”
Yes. It would be. Because it would finally cut the gordinian knot of this predicament. Israel uses the Palestinians anti-Israeli attitudes and anti-Israeli actions as an excuse to maintain their occupation and to provide cover for their right wing to seize further land. The Palestinians use the Israeli occupation as an excuse to attach the Israelis and indulge in maximal anti-Israeli posturing. The Occupation shields the Palestinians from responsibility for their actions. The Palestinian actions shields the Israeli’s from responsibility to disengage. Both sides extremes feed off the other and grow stronger at the expense of the Palestinian and Israeli’s respective long-term interests. Is the Israeli’s eventually get taken over by their right wing then they’ll go off the deep end and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. That won’t go well for either side. Is the Israeli’s muddle along long enough the way they are they could lose the sympathy and support of the developed world on which Israel’s literal survival depends. That wouldn’t go well for either side either. If Israel were to be disengaged, suffered terror attacks and then responded by blasting big chunks of the West Bank into rubble the world would, absolutey, say “Serves you right” in actions if not in words and when the Palestinians picked themselves up and glared at their compatriots who provoked this response there’d be no “The Israeli’s are occupying us!” excuse for those compatriots to use. Then we’d -truly- see what would win elections: making the Palestinians lives better or poking the Israeli’s in the eyes and then getting Palestinians blown up. My bet is that the former would win out. All our observed human history says it eventually would. And even (in a ludicrously worst case scenario where the Palestinians mindlessly flung themselves at Israel over and over) if it didn’t… that is a state of affairs Israel could endure and even thrive under indefinity; the current status is not.
*And I note this having, myself, considered Sharon to be an over-the-top right-wing Israeli who provoked the Palestinians and was being extraordinarily reckless in not negotiating a Gazan withdrawal and doing so in a manner that didn’t give the PA any credit for Israeli pulling out. In hindsight Sharon was more right than I was and it bears saying so.
“Ideally I’d like to see Israel (and good grief, other arab states) stand up a PA functioning state… but “functioning state” might also mean “goes to war with Israel” considering where the Palestinians’ heads are at.”
Heh, that’d be great. A pony would be nice too. And even your best case scenario still admits to a possible war- and an organized Palestinian state would cause far more devastation in warring with Israel that a unilaterally withdrawn from PA would be able to do.Report
Neither is true and, being false, neither opinion particularly matters.
The war in Gaza proves the opposite. Israel is behaving in Gaza like it’s existence is on the line. This may not have factual truth but it is a political reality. Ergo the amount of terrorism that we should expect Israel to endure before going to war is much less than what we’d like.
The idea that attacking Israel and then getting yourself and your neighbors blown to hell wins elections is based on opinion polls, posturing for media and similar theater.
They don’t promise to get blown to hell. They promise to drive the Jews out. If the Palestinians were able to think rationally about this we would have had peace a generation or two ago.
A lot of the Palestinians want a war more than they want a state. We have this underlying assumption that if we made their lives good enough, they’d change their mind… but that seems more like hope over experience.
Pulling out of the WB *might* work, but if it didn’t then we’d have a Gaza level war, not a “mow the grass” level war. We need to be extremely comfortable with that as the outcome.
So any claims that “it will work” need to also be reconciled with the reality we’re suggesting the Gaza pull out but on a larger scale.
The alternative, i.e. getting Israel to behave better and then having them do for Palestine what we did for Germany and Japan, seems to me like a better bet. We were able to deal with genocidal fascism in both of those countries but it took decades.
The obvious problem is there are parts of Israel that have no interest in seeing a successful Palestinian state. The big way to tell if they have changed their mind is if they’re willing to set borders.Report
“Israel is behaving in Gaza like it’s existence is on the line.”
Heh, no Israel is behaving in Gaza like Netanyahu’s political career is on the line- because it is. The man knows that when the war stops he’ll be out of his job. So he’s continuing the war while he tries to finagle a way to save his job in the background.
“They don’t promise to get blown to hell. They promise to drive the Jews out.”
Yes, and then they fail to do so and get themselves and their neighbors blown to hell instead. You keep making these assertions about what the Palestinians want but the Palestinians haven’t had agency to actually exercise much of what they want for ages.
“Pulling out of the WB *might* work, but if it didn’t then we’d have a Gaza level war, not a “mow the grass” level war. We need to be extremely comfortable with that as the outcome.”
I think you’re wrong there but you seem to be operating under the assumption that I’d consider that dispositive and I assuredly don’t. If the Israeli’s withdraw and the Palestinians launched attacks sufficient to provoke a Gaza 2024 response from Israel then I, along with much of the world, would consider that something the Palestinians largely brought on themselves.
“The alternative, i.e. getting Israel to behave better and then having them do for Palestine what we did for Germany and Japan, seems to me like a better bet.”
And to me that seems like a recipe for almost guaranteed failure. If the Israeli’s “set borders” but remained in occupation then the Palestinians inevitable attacks on the occupying Israeli’s would quickly empower the Israeli elements who’d immediately “unset’ those set borders and get back to the business at hand (that being trying to recreate the Sioux experience for the Palestinians but in the 2000’s rather than the 1800’s). The USA in the German and Japanese situation had absolutely no interest in possessing the lands of the Germans or the Japanese. The Israeli’s are so far from that scenario as to render the very concept laughable even to a person who is largely Israeli sympathetic- which I am.Report
Replied at the bottom because I misthreaded.Report
The USA in the German and Japanese situation had absolutely no interest in possessing the lands of the Germans or the Japanese… a recipe for almost guaranteed failure
That is the problem in a nutshell. The reason I put it on the table is Israel is the only player who has the power and arguably it aligns with their long term interests.
I agree that it’s a terrible idea, but the others on the table are ethnic cleansing and the Gaza withdrawal on steroids.
Israel is behaving in Gaza like Netanyahu’s political career is on the line
The war is overwhelmingly popular in Israel although Netanyahu is not. Although they want the hostages back, the public’s dominate goal is “never again”. With Hamas bragging how they’re going to do it again the moment they can, “never again” means “destroying Hamas”.
the Palestinians haven’t had agency to actually exercise much of what they want for ages.
Serious polling done right before 10/7 showed the Palestinian public wanted Hamas to engage in military actions. As insane as it is, they wanted the war. They were expecting to have all the surrounding Arab entities join them in destroying Israel.
If the Israeli’s withdraw and the Palestinians launched attacks sufficient to provoke a Gaza 2024 response from Israel then I, along with much of the world, would consider that something the Palestinians largely brought on themselves.
The World supported Israel after 10/7 up until Israel invaded Gaza and civilians started dying.
No one calling for a “cease fire” includes “Hamas surrendering”. I hear no one calling for that.
I think the world wouldn’t back Israel leveling the WB in response to terrorism because 10/7 is as extreme as it gets and (excluding the US and Germany) the world is effectively backing Hamas right now.Report
Nobody expects Hamas to do the right thing and everybody sees Israel as the only adult in the room. The issue is nobody wants to come out and say this because the norms of diplomacy built up over the centuries prevent this. So what happens is that people just kind of pretend Hamas exists when it is convenient for them or that the Palestinians really just want their own state even they say the only just result in their opinion is “No Israel, No Jews.”Report
Nobody expects Hamas to do the right thing
For some I think they disagree with what “the right thing” is.
Palestinian terror organizations get a pass because they represent the actual (just) will of the Palestinians. Israel isn’t supposed to counter attack (much less get civilians killed) because Israel isn’t supposed to exist. They don’t have the right to defend themselves.
So “the right thing” is for Israel to stand back and wait for the next attack.
RE: pretend … that Palestinians really just want their own state
That. Back when Briton owned the land and was trying to solve this, one of their summations of the problem amounted to that. Preventing the Jews from having a state was more important than getting their own state.Report
Hamas is a terror group. No one expect them to stop being a terror group, it’d be dumb to expect otherwise. The only people who support Hamas are people who support terror. What more is there to say? Expect them to surrender? Why would they- they’re a terror group and the Israeli’s are literally giving them what they want. The people who aren’t giving Hamas what they want are the other terror groups in the region, the Arab states in the region and the diplomatic World in general. But the Israeli’s? They’re acting exactly how Hamas wants them to.Report
There is a magical underpants gnome logic to this thinking.
1. Israel doesn’t “overreact” to the Simchat Torah massacre.
2. XXXXXXX
3. Hamas somehow mystically magically withers away and the hostages are freed.
Meanwhile, the Iranian clerical regime is firmly in place even though many Iranians no longer want it to be in place. But the military and security apparatus are very loyal to the Iranian clerical regime and that is enough.Report
Except that’s not what I said and I can’t help noticing how you have to keep clinging to the Hamas side of the Oct 7th attacks because looking at Likuds part in it (negligence of the Gazan border so they could play manifest destiny in the territories) or the Israeli rights’ part of the larger picture makes the whole thing unpleasantly slanted in my direction.
And if we’re talking about magical thinking take a look at what the Israeli’s official roadmap of what is going to happen going forward is. Oh wait, that’s right, they don’t have one except “We’ll retain full control of all territories from the Jordan to the sea and the Palestinians will just deal.
But that’s what the problem is with you and Dark’s position. You honestly think that the Palestinians can be persuaded to do what the Israeli’s want. If you just hector them enough or if you just occupy them enough or stomp hard enough.
I hold no such delusions. The Israeli’s could prosecute unilateral withdrawal tomorrow if they chose to- and they’d, in the worst case scenario, end up firmly secured for the long term. I realistically accept that Israels’ enemies don’t want to help it survive long term. You and Dark keep giving people who despise the Jewish state a veto over it acting in its own interest- and on top of that you even make it easy for them.Report
The Palestinians might not be persuadable but I definitely do not think that a uniliteral withdrawal is going to do that much either. The lesson from the Gaza withdrawal is that the Palestinians just need to complain bitterly about still being occupied because they don’t have everything they want and Israel is exercising control over the land border making them prisoners.
At first only the activists would agree but the wailing just needs to be sustained long enough with some diplomacy and eventually other countries would agree that the Occupation continues despite their being no settlements. There would always be some argument that Palestine is under occupation even if doing everything a country can do.Report
The problem that nobody wants to acknowledge is that only… what? 6%? 8%? of Palestinians are incorrigible and move away from the incorrigible ones far enough down the spectrum and, looky there, now you have cheap labor.
They want to work. The money ain’t bad, really, all things considered. And when stuff is peaceful? Well, you’ve got a job, you’ve got some coin in your pocket, you’ve got music on the radio, you’ve got family, you’ve got some tzatziki to put on the bread… it’s not as bad as it could be.
It’s just punctuated by that incorrigible 6%… well, it’s probably closer to 8% now. 10%Report
You’re right, but 6% is crazy high.Report
Compared to what? Is it crazy high that 8% of Americans are convicted felons? Is it crazy that 11% of Americans live in poverty? That 18% of Americans in 2022 support having an Authoritarian dictator in the US?
I mean, 6.8% of Americans are LGBTQ+, and they got state legislatures to file 510 laws restricting or eliminating their right in 2023 alone.Report
Get rid of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and the antics of that 6-10% would suddenly start being viewed in a very very different light by the other 90%.Report
It’s at least 50%.Report
Ummm Israel -was- exercising control over Gaza’s land borders and was starving them but the world spent almost two decades -not caring- about that because of the way the Gazans behaved. Speaking personally, I observed a significant argumentative lapse, after Sharons’ withdrawal, when the usual suspects were utterly gob smacked by the reality of the Gazan withdrawal and then were additionally backfooted by how badly the Palestinians reacted. They only got their feet back under themselves predominantly by pointing, accurately, at the continued occupation and land expropriation going on at Israeli hands in the West Bank.
The lesson is that unilateral withdrawal generally worked. Israel got almost twenty years from withdrawing unilaterally from Gaza even though the more egregious occupation and behavior on their part persisted on the West Bank. What would the Palestinians and their fellow travelers have to hang their hats on if Israel pulled out of the West Bank? The answer is not nothing, they’d no doubt complain about how the newly released territories were treated and especially how the Israeli’s would react to any attacks originating from those territories but those complaints are nothing. They’re inconsequential. Israel spent 20 years easily brushing off the Gazan situation. If the territories had been anything like Gaza (and note this is, itself, an unlikely worst-case scenario) then Israel would be fine, diplomatically, militarily and economically speaking.
You keep imagining that the left fringes wailing would be taken up by people who actually matter in the event of withdrawal but, absent an actual occupation and disenfranchisement of actual people that is a theory with very little actual evidence behind it. Whereas we know for a fact that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is minting Israel-unsympathetic voters across the developed world in spades.
And, honestly, it baffles me a bit because I know you have no particular attachment to the occupation of the territories. I’m assuming it some kind of “withdrawing would be giving them something for nothing” kind of mind set but I assure you that Israel’s most fervent enemies; Hamas, Iran and the truly fervent left wing fringers would be utterly horrified, appalled and dismayed if the Israeli’s pulled out of the territories. I can think of nothing what so ever that would genuinely hurt and upset those people more.Report
You keep gesturing to polling which is talk which is, fundamentally, incredibly cheap. I keep pointing to actual, recent, historical actions which are the opposite. Gaza from 2005-10/7 was a case study of Israel unilaterally withdrawing, Hamas being deranged and the world giving Israel more or less free hand to pummel and punish the Gazans in response. Frankly the only thing that kept the Gazans holding on to their cause at all seems to have been how Israels’ occupation of the West Bank is causing a steadily growing countervailing force of sympathy for the Palestinians in the world. Eliminate that occupation and the Palestinians would have no arguments left that’d sway anyone who matters.
And, it bears repeating again that 10/7 was as bad as it was because Israel (Likud) had redirected their military and intelligence focus to the West Bank to enable settlements and similar rat-fishing which left their pants down for Hamas’ attack. Hamas is 100% responsible for what they did and richly deserve to be obliterated but the Israeli’s quite literally cannot obliterate Hamas and the Israeli’s government demonstratable fished up which caused 10/7 to be as apocalyptic as it is. All reports are that Hamas is willing to return the hostages for an end to the hostilities but the Israeli’s understandably, want more than that which is driven by Likud trying to find a way out of the hole they’ve put themselves into.
“The World supported Israel after 10/7 up until Israel invaded Gaza and civilians started dying.”
The only part of this where you’re wrong is where you imply that the World has stopped supporting Israel in Gaza. They’re verbally pumping the brakes, sure, but talk is cheap and the Israeli’s are manifestly out over their skiis in Gaza driven, again, by the fact that Israel is suffering from a government that cares about its own welfare first and Israel’s interests a distant second. In terms of actual, concrete actions the world has done -nothing- to inconvenience the Israeli’s despite how wildly over the top the Israeli’s have been and how nonsensical their administrations idea of the future state is.
“I think the world wouldn’t back Israel leveling the WB in response to terrorism because 10/7 is as extreme as it gets and (excluding the US and Germany) the world is effectively backing Hamas right now.”
We’ll have to agree to disagree on that because it’s deranged. The world in general and the US in particular has provided concrete material and semi-concrete diplomatic cover for Israel ever since 2005 and especially since 10/7 and they’ve given virtually nothing to Hamas (and, for the record, I approve of this imbalance of support). The only way one can claim any equivalence between how the Israeli’s and how Hamas are treated is if you put the posturing a talk of the left fringe on the same level as the formal statements and concrete actions of the states involved which is… irrational… to put it mildly.Report
You keep gesturing to polling which is talk which is, fundamentally, incredibly cheap.
It’s the recent info we have. If you want actions, we had those non-violent protests in Gaza that were attempting to “peacefully” destroy Israel. They started out separate from Hamas.
It’s possible to raise the bar for proof so high that we don’t have any, and then claim because we don’t know anything it’s reasonable to assume the Palestinians don’t support violence.
But that ignores all of the evidence we do have suggests enough of them support violence to be a real problem. The polls, the marches to destroy Israel, the talk from “moderates” on how the occupation has been going on for 75 years and it needs to end, crowds chanting from the river to the sea, the dancing in the streets when a Jew is killed, Mein Kampf being a top ten book every year, and so on.
Hamas being deranged and the world giving Israel more or less free hand to pummel and punish the Gazans in response.
Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. Here is a link to the number of rocket attacks since then. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/palestinian-rocket-and-mortar-attacks-against-israel
Every rocket attack terrorizes (tens of) thousands of Jews. That’s the purpose.
The “free hand to punish Gaza in response” ignores Israel is expected to endure hundreds or thousands of these without leveling Gaza and if they do counter attack they’ll be blowing up schools.
This situation is barely acceptable only because only a tiny minority of Jews are vulnerable. If the number of Jews being terrorized by a random rocket attack were 1000x more, then Israel would need to go to war after a few rockets and not tens of thousands.
Israeli’s government demonstrable fished up which caused 10/7 to be as apocalyptic as it is.
If the plan only works if the gov makes no mistakes in the context of a war, then it’s not a workable plan.
Gaza is a disaster. There is vast suffering on both sides. 18 years of “peace” is now being paid for and the price is very high.
So pulling out and letting Hamas run things hasn’t worked well. The PA attempted to stop this but couldn’t. The UN and their “aid” is part of the problem.
We’re in denazification territory for what needs to be done, but it will take decades. The question then becomes, “who should do it”.Report
Ah, but no part of my position is predicated on the presumption that the Palestinians will eschew violence or Jewish hatred or that they can be convinced to do so- those are your positions. My position is that Israel is capable of enduring and surviving Palestinian attacks if they fully withdrew from the territories and that what they could not endure the world would tolerate them retaliating against. We have seen this again and again both in Gaza and Lebanon. When Israel isn’t actively occupying the territory, the world has been quite accepting of disproportionate retaliation by the Israelis up to and including blowing the heck out of hospitals and schools if the attacks originate from there.
Moreover, the experience of Lebanon suggests that deterrence is far from unlikely. The PA in the West Bank has, despite the occupation, been relatively peaceable and there is nothing to suggest that they would go gently into the night if Israel withdrew from the West Bank and Hamas tried to take over. Indeed, the West Bank Palestinians aren’t blind and with Gaza as an example I am profoundly dubious they’d embrace Hamas and hurtle themselves in kamikaze attacks against a disengaged Israel. The idea that they would is, if anything, even more speculative than the idea that they’d simply focus mostly on their own affairs.
And I can’t help but noticing that you keep pointing, as an alternative, at some kind of active occupation/re-education/societal reformation scheme for the Palestinians that in any other context you, as a libertarian, would laugh out of the room as utterly impossible.
Unilateral withdrawal, on the other hand, is something the Israeli’s are perfectly able to do. Moreover, border security, rocket interdiction and terror attack blocking are all things they have extensive experience doing to no small amount of success. Likewise with threatening ruin if their neighbors misbehave. In fact, Israel has had considerable success in threatening/cajoling their neighbors into cold peace. All that is needed is for the Palestinians to be made into neighbors rather than prisoners or possessions of Israel. This is without even talking about how withdrawal would also immediately put an end to the only genuine threat to Israel’s long term existence: their active occupation of and land theft from the Palestinians that the developed world has steadily and increasingly come to see as unjust and immoral.Report
RE: societal reform
I think it’s strikingly unlikely to work short of war and shattering the society which has the issues. However that’s where Israel wants to go with Gaza.
Lebanon and the difficulty of societal reform are massive counter points, the other one would be the idea that Israel can actually do this for decades without the program being co-op’ed by it’s Right.
Hmm…. I’ll have to think about this a while. Your arguments are fairly convincing.Report
Societal reform would be a lot easier if people could come out and talk about the popularity of some really bad policies and politics in Muslim majority countries rather than them being the proverbial elephant in the room. Vox will routinely have articles about the dangers of Hindu theocratic nationalism, Jewish theocratic nationalism, or Christian theocratic nationalism in the United States to multicultural secular democracy. When it comes to the dangers of Political Islam to multicultural secular democracy, a lot of people get very quiet. This isn’t helping.Report
No one expects anything better of them Lee. Iraq? Saudi Arabia? Even Jordan. No one expects much of anything to anything to come out of those nations but ruin, a bit of primary resources and immigration.
Outside of Islamic nations and the fever dreams of Fox news the threats of theocratic Islam are pretty meager- especially since the great terror of Terror has finally subsided (along with the manifest failure of OBL’s terror jihad program).
India, Israel, and various Christian dominated nations are places that claim to be or aspire to be liberal, modern, developed societies and so expectations and criticisms are set and presented accordingly.Report
The West’s society largely doesn’t point out that people’s religions are wrong. It’s one of the big ways that we function.
Islam’s founder won, and he set up a theocracy. Ergo their teachings expressly have their church controlling their state.
He over came great odds and made it work… for his lifetime. It fell apart when he died because he’d promised all sides that they would take over after he died.
There are a bunch of ideas in there which don’t work well with a 21st century state.Report
FWIW I’ve enjoyed the discussion. It’s good to stretch the thoughts out and shake em thoroughly from time to time.Report
Ditto to all that. Thank you.Report