How could Jews do this?
Oct 16, 2023 11:08:23 #
travelwp wrote:
That being the case, why should the world give a shit about their situation?
I think that you may have misinterpreted my comment. 3,000 years of any-Jewish hatred and conquests resulting in expulsion from Judea/Palestine/Israel.
Oct 16, 2023 11:21:56 #
travelwp wrote:
That being the case, why should the world give a shit about their situation?
Simple: there are innocents getting killed.
Oct 16, 2023 12:05:40 #
lbrande wrote:
I think that you may have misinterpreted my comment.
I did, sorry.
Oct 16, 2023 12:11:23 #
Triple G wrote:
Simple: there are innocents getting killed.
If innocents have been getting killed for 3,000 years of historical habit, it sounds like outside help is useless.
Oct 16, 2023 12:18:49 #
thom w
Loc: San Jose, CA
travelwp wrote:
If innocents have been getting killed for 3,000 years of historical habit, it sounds like outside help is useless.
The US saying we support Israel right or wrong is not helpful.
Oct 16, 2023 12:30:30 #
travelwp wrote:
If innocents have been getting killed for 3,000 years of historical habit, it sounds like outside help is useless.
Your question was why should we give a shit!
Oct 21, 2023 12:48:53 #
Jew hatred has become a Left-wing shibboleth - and it’s only getting worse
Story by Janet Daley
When did anti-Semitism become a Left-wing thing? Not very long ago there was a more-or-less universal understanding that attacking Jews, and trying to eliminate them en masse, was an attitude specifically associated with movements of the extreme Right. Nazi Germany’s systematic attempt to find a “final solution” to the Jewish problem (which is to say, the problem of Jews continuing to exist) became the most infamous state crime in modern history.
One of the political justifications for this – as opposed to the mystical one of racial purity – was that Jews were aligned with international Communist agitators who were a threat to the German nation that had to be defeated. At the same time as being accused of Left-wing subversion, they were also, of course, being caricatured as global capitalist conspirators whose banking monopoly threatened the economies of sovereign countries. The contradiction at the heart of this Jew-hatred persists to this day and serves a useful purpose to the opportunist camps of Left and Right who can summon up either of the tropes whenever they suit the circumstances.
In the McCarthyite purges of 1950s America, Jews were often identified as Communist fellow travellers, and many of the trade union organisers in the Jewish rag trade (like my own grandmother) were indeed Communist sympathisers. At the very least, American Jews of that generation were Left-liberal Democrats who regarded Republicans as class enemies. Many of their forebears had fled from the pogroms perpetrated by the Tsars and they tended to regard the Russian revolution as a deliverance from that threat of annihilation. Stalin was to destroy that idea with his own persecution of the Jews, who became cast as inherently sinister “rootless cosmopolitans”. It is this label that became the all-purpose anti-Semitic chorus for every nationalist movement: Jews had been for centuries – for millennia, in fact – a people who lived within countries while maintaining their own history and culture.
They were seen as permanent outsiders whose “roots” as Stalin would say, lay in their loyalties to a community that existed beyond national borders. And that idea – of a human bond that is based not on national identity but on common beliefs and moral rules – was supposed to be at the heart of Left-wing thinking. It was the basis for the original Marxist commitment to world revolution (represented by Trotsky) as opposed to the Stalinist heresy of “socialism in one country”.
ut the question of today – the existence of Israel – should have thrown that theme into disarray. Jews now had a country of their own. They were no longer the eternal “rootless” outsiders who could be demonised by any insecure nationalist regime. That the expansion of the Jewish population in the Middle East was a direct consequence of the Nazi Holocaust was widely considered by those on the liberal Left as an unimpeachable justification. Add to that the social model of the kibbutz which was a quite radical collectivist form of communal existence – and Israel became idealised as a pioneering socialist experiment. The contemporary liberal Left – not just an ignoramus like Jeremy Corbyn but even sections of academia – has chosen to adopt this self-contradictory formula in which Jews are damned for being globalist manipulators of wealth with no loyalties to any country and simultaneously, ultra-nationalists who insist on their right to protect and defend their own land. Where Israel was once praised as the only successful progressive democracy in the Middle East, it is now castigated as a colonial oppressor.
One of the most bizarre aspects of this phenomenon is that so many of the regimes that the Left is willing to support simply because they are opposed to the existence of Israel are violent enemies of the rights of women and sexual minorities. There was something grotesquely absurd about the waving of LGBT+ rainbow banners in that first London mass demonstration supporting the Palestinian cause. Did those marchers have no idea what fate is likely to await anyone who openly promotes gay or trans activism under Islamic fundamentalist regimes?
And what about the rights of women to be educated, to appear in public without their heads covered, to have full lives as equal citizens? Do they think that the present government of Iran – which sponsors Hamas – is in sympathy with these principles? Do they believe that the young Iranian women who are currently risking their lives to defy this oppression are unworthy of consideration?
So social liberals now find themselves parading in solidarity with the adherents of despotisms which decree homosexuality to be punishable by death and women who appear in public without a hijab to be committing a crime.
The simple truth is that none of this is being examined or even discussed on the Left. Support for Palestine, which in the present circumstances, is indistinguishable from supporting Hamas rule in Gaza, has become part of a package of ready-made attitudes for the bien pensant liberal, and the Palestinian movement has benefited enormously from the tactics of infiltration and opinion-forming of the hardcore Left.
The broadcast media, and even the police, are caught in a contrived game of moral equivalence at which the professional Left has always been expert. Seeing Socialist Worker posters held proudly aloft among the Palestinian flags, amid chants that call for the elimination of Israel and its population, might have been shocking a generation ago – but not anymore. Does this all-consuming hatred of Israel take precedence over the commitment to basic human rights which the Left was once committed to defend? Does the hatred of capitalism – of which Jews are seen to be the expert practitioners – now cancel out every other moral principle?
What the Socialist Workers Party (an organisation I knew well in its previous incarnation as International Socialism) now supports is nothing less than what the Nazis once said about the Jews: that they and their global influence must be extirpated once and for all. I really would like to know if all of its members and their hangers-on are comfortable with that.
Story by Janet Daley
When did anti-Semitism become a Left-wing thing? Not very long ago there was a more-or-less universal understanding that attacking Jews, and trying to eliminate them en masse, was an attitude specifically associated with movements of the extreme Right. Nazi Germany’s systematic attempt to find a “final solution” to the Jewish problem (which is to say, the problem of Jews continuing to exist) became the most infamous state crime in modern history.
One of the political justifications for this – as opposed to the mystical one of racial purity – was that Jews were aligned with international Communist agitators who were a threat to the German nation that had to be defeated. At the same time as being accused of Left-wing subversion, they were also, of course, being caricatured as global capitalist conspirators whose banking monopoly threatened the economies of sovereign countries. The contradiction at the heart of this Jew-hatred persists to this day and serves a useful purpose to the opportunist camps of Left and Right who can summon up either of the tropes whenever they suit the circumstances.
In the McCarthyite purges of 1950s America, Jews were often identified as Communist fellow travellers, and many of the trade union organisers in the Jewish rag trade (like my own grandmother) were indeed Communist sympathisers. At the very least, American Jews of that generation were Left-liberal Democrats who regarded Republicans as class enemies. Many of their forebears had fled from the pogroms perpetrated by the Tsars and they tended to regard the Russian revolution as a deliverance from that threat of annihilation. Stalin was to destroy that idea with his own persecution of the Jews, who became cast as inherently sinister “rootless cosmopolitans”. It is this label that became the all-purpose anti-Semitic chorus for every nationalist movement: Jews had been for centuries – for millennia, in fact – a people who lived within countries while maintaining their own history and culture.
They were seen as permanent outsiders whose “roots” as Stalin would say, lay in their loyalties to a community that existed beyond national borders. And that idea – of a human bond that is based not on national identity but on common beliefs and moral rules – was supposed to be at the heart of Left-wing thinking. It was the basis for the original Marxist commitment to world revolution (represented by Trotsky) as opposed to the Stalinist heresy of “socialism in one country”.
ut the question of today – the existence of Israel – should have thrown that theme into disarray. Jews now had a country of their own. They were no longer the eternal “rootless” outsiders who could be demonised by any insecure nationalist regime. That the expansion of the Jewish population in the Middle East was a direct consequence of the Nazi Holocaust was widely considered by those on the liberal Left as an unimpeachable justification. Add to that the social model of the kibbutz which was a quite radical collectivist form of communal existence – and Israel became idealised as a pioneering socialist experiment. The contemporary liberal Left – not just an ignoramus like Jeremy Corbyn but even sections of academia – has chosen to adopt this self-contradictory formula in which Jews are damned for being globalist manipulators of wealth with no loyalties to any country and simultaneously, ultra-nationalists who insist on their right to protect and defend their own land. Where Israel was once praised as the only successful progressive democracy in the Middle East, it is now castigated as a colonial oppressor.
One of the most bizarre aspects of this phenomenon is that so many of the regimes that the Left is willing to support simply because they are opposed to the existence of Israel are violent enemies of the rights of women and sexual minorities. There was something grotesquely absurd about the waving of LGBT+ rainbow banners in that first London mass demonstration supporting the Palestinian cause. Did those marchers have no idea what fate is likely to await anyone who openly promotes gay or trans activism under Islamic fundamentalist regimes?
And what about the rights of women to be educated, to appear in public without their heads covered, to have full lives as equal citizens? Do they think that the present government of Iran – which sponsors Hamas – is in sympathy with these principles? Do they believe that the young Iranian women who are currently risking their lives to defy this oppression are unworthy of consideration?
So social liberals now find themselves parading in solidarity with the adherents of despotisms which decree homosexuality to be punishable by death and women who appear in public without a hijab to be committing a crime.
The simple truth is that none of this is being examined or even discussed on the Left. Support for Palestine, which in the present circumstances, is indistinguishable from supporting Hamas rule in Gaza, has become part of a package of ready-made attitudes for the bien pensant liberal, and the Palestinian movement has benefited enormously from the tactics of infiltration and opinion-forming of the hardcore Left.
The broadcast media, and even the police, are caught in a contrived game of moral equivalence at which the professional Left has always been expert. Seeing Socialist Worker posters held proudly aloft among the Palestinian flags, amid chants that call for the elimination of Israel and its population, might have been shocking a generation ago – but not anymore. Does this all-consuming hatred of Israel take precedence over the commitment to basic human rights which the Left was once committed to defend? Does the hatred of capitalism – of which Jews are seen to be the expert practitioners – now cancel out every other moral principle?
What the Socialist Workers Party (an organisation I knew well in its previous incarnation as International Socialism) now supports is nothing less than what the Nazis once said about the Jews: that they and their global influence must be extirpated once and for all. I really would like to know if all of its members and their hangers-on are comfortable with that.
Oct 21, 2023 18:51:53 #
Oct 22, 2023 10:06:20 #
travelwp wrote:
How could Jews do this: for years Jews have treat... (show quote)
What I can never understand is why a Jewish person would be opposed to the Israel's existence. Makes about as much sense as a gay man opposing AIDS research
Oct 22, 2023 15:43:01 #
Shutterbugsailer wrote:
Makes about as much sense as a gay man opposing AIDS research
or A Hamas man opposing killing Jews.
Oct 22, 2023 15:57:46 #
gorgehiker
Loc: Lexington, Ky
Don't accuse me of being a supporter of Hamas. However, Israel is not exactly an innocent victim. Palestinians have been existing in inhumane conditions due to the blockade and other Israeli actions for years.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The deadly attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians and the devastating Israeli airstrikes and blockade of Gaza have raised accusations among international legal experts that both sides were violating international law.
A United Nations Commission of Inquiry said it has been “collecting and preserving evidence of war crimes committed by all sides” since the violence started last week. That evidence could be added to an investigation by the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas in past conflicts.
“Intentional targeting of civilians and civilian objects without a military necessary reason to do so is a war crime, period,” said David Crane, an American international law expert and the founding chief prosecutor of the United Nations’ Special Court for Sierra Leone. “And that’s a standard that both sides are held to under international law.”
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — The deadly attacks by Hamas on Israeli civilians and the devastating Israeli airstrikes and blockade of Gaza have raised accusations among international legal experts that both sides were violating international law.
A United Nations Commission of Inquiry said it has been “collecting and preserving evidence of war crimes committed by all sides” since the violence started last week. That evidence could be added to an investigation by the International Criminal Court into possible war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas in past conflicts.
“Intentional targeting of civilians and civilian objects without a military necessary reason to do so is a war crime, period,” said David Crane, an American international law expert and the founding chief prosecutor of the United Nations’ Special Court for Sierra Leone. “And that’s a standard that both sides are held to under international law.”
Oct 22, 2023 17:23:23 #
gorgehiker wrote:
Don't accuse me of being a supporter of Hamas. Ho... (show quote)
Here is the history of Gaza:
It belonged to Egyot until 1967. In 1967 Egypt started another war with Israel and lost it. Israel took Gaza in that war.
Israel did not want Gaza. It immediately offered to trade back Gaza and other land in exchange for a peace treaty with Egypt and hopefully all its Arab neighbors. Egypt eventually accepted a land-for-peace trade. They took back Sinai - but refused to take back Gaza. Isrsel was stuck with it.
In 2005 Israel turned Gaza over to Gaza’s Arab citizens and told them to elect their own government and run Gaza as their own autonomous province. Israel hoped Gaza would build a nice, wealthy, happy, stable place. Billions in aid money went to them. They had youth and education and energy. They had always wanted a land of their own. Surely they woukd now flourish!
Politicians arose in Gaza and began campaigning for election. The militia called Hamas - which for ten years had been firing missiles at Israeli civilians and swearing to conquer Israel - ran for election. Anyone could run for election. The people of Gaza had democracy. Wonderful - they would get the government they most wanted!
The people went to the polls in Gaza in 2006 and elected Hamas - the Islamist militia whose work they had watched (and apparently liked) for ten years.:
The democratically elected government of Gaza did exactly what they had promised Gazans: declared eternal war on Israel and kept attacking Israel, stating that every citizen of Israel was a fair target for murder.
They imported weapons for their war. They fired missiles. They dug tunnels into Israel and attacked farmers. So Israel, faced with this threat, blockaded the border to keep the would-be mass murderers from getting weapons easily.
And despite this, for 16 years Gaza has not changed its stance, not asked for peace, not withdrawn its declaration of war, not laid down weapons, not stopped attacking Israel’s people, not changed course, and not built a good or happy land.
This is not what Israel wanted for Gaza.
Israel wanted Gazans to build a Gazan Wall Street, a Gazan Riviera, a Gazan Singapore - a stable nice place where Gazans raised their kids and worked (unless they wanted to work in Israel, as many used to) and played and chilled.
But the current Gaza is the Gaza that Gazans made. They organized themselves into the Hamas militia, the Hamas party; then they voted in that party to be their Islamic jihadist government. And they got exactly what they wanted.
And it is tragic.
But it is not Israel’s fault. It is the decision of the people of Gaza.
Oct 22, 2023 20:59:52 #
travelwp wrote:
How could Jews do this: for years Jews have treat... (show quote)
The problem is that you are thinking that Hana’s is a terrorist organization. That are not. They are the government of Gaza. They have attacked Israel, and violated most international laws of war. Gaza civilians have no rights if they are protecting Hamas, so bombs away!
Oct 22, 2023 21:16:11 #
jcboy3 wrote:
The problem is that you are thinking that Hana’s is a terrorist organization. That are not.
If Hamas goes into a home and guns downs everyone inside and teaches their own young to kill Jews as part of their education and parenting, I consider them to be terrorists.
Oct 22, 2023 22:15:45 #
travelwp wrote:
If Hamas goes into a home and guns downs everyone inside and teaches their own young to kill Jews as part of their education and parenting, I consider them to be terrorists.
That doesn’t resolve the issue of civilians. Thinking of them as terrorists absolves Gaza civilians of responsibility.
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