To the extent that we see every conflict as a battle between innocent victims and cruel victimizers, we will gloss over the moral complexities of reality.
Great essay and clear explanation of the toxicity of intersectionality, decolonization, oppression olympics. The proponents of this way of thinking never acknowledge the history of Islamic conquest that ripped through the Middle East and north Africa, complete with slavery that still exists to this day.
Victim cults tend to bond to each other. This is not new and the "woke" embrace of Hamas should not be surprising.
There have been a number of mass shooters who claimed to be motivated by "transphobia," and as the cult becomes more violent and less sane, the urgency of ending it will grow.
I am decidedly opposed to Islamist extremism, but I cannot condone what the Israeli government is currently doing to Palestinians. It is collective punishment which is illegal and immoral
Everything happening in Gaza is the full responsibility of Hamas and of the terrible failures of 75 years of Palestinian leadership.
Arafat ruled for decades and all he did was embezzle himself a fortune and refuse to take on any governing responsibilities, prefering instead to let his cause be used by others as a cudgel to beat the West, as this kept the donations flowing in and the hatred aimed at the Jews instead of at him. He knew then that he was creating a failed state as well as a generation of children who knew and did nothing but bask in Jew hate, and this is what has led us here.
There is a simple solution to all this bloodshed: Hamas puts down their arms and releases all hostages.
The rivers of Western crocodile tears over "Palestinian children" express more care and concern for these children than any leaders of their society ever have. (Hamas has said over and over they don't care how many of their own people are killed as long as the dream of destroying Israel stays alive).
Only if you start the clock/calendar on Oct 7th. My guess is you haven't read any actual history books on Zionism and it's recent history, amirite? Cuz in reality, the Zionists started this war, engaged in terrorism, colonization and ethnic cleansing to stand up their Jewish majority state. Some people object to being ethnically cleansed from their ancient homes, shocking, yes?
Listen up, you hack imbecile. If you actually do the addition, you'll find the Muslims had slightly more years in Palestine than the Jews with some kind of nation state, lol. If that were the basis for awarding this territory, the Muslims still win.
The state of Israel was created in 1948. The land has been inhabited for 12,500 years by the Philistines, for which the Greek named the land Philistia, what we now call Palestine.
"It" is called war and war is ugly, but the IDF is not collectively punishing anyone. They are routing Hamas, and Hamas is using civilians as flak vests. Collective punishment would be an indiscriminate flattening of Gaza and that is not happening. But Hamas carried out collective punishment on 10/7 on civilian children, women and men.
The "indisputable reality" is the so-called combatants of Hamas are slithering through the civilian Gazan population, bringing war down on everyone, just as they did when they instigated it with murder and destruction on 10/7. It's as if every criminal sociopath in the population has been handed a rifle and some grenades, and they don't care who gets hurt. Normal human adults, even female adults, would put themselves at risk to draw the violence away from the children. But not these weasels.
This essay oversimplies matters and overlooks the fact that Israelis are occupying Palestinian land per international law (and not the other way around) and is currently engaged in mass slaughter and destruction of the civilian population of Gaza, with 30,000 dead, mostly women and children, with many survivors rendered homeless and at the brink of starvation. Feminism cares about mass femicide so yeah, this IS a feminist issue.
uhhh where were the stunning & brave feminists on Oct 7 after mass murder and mass rapes? They were silent because of cowardice and conformity.
EVERYTHING happening in Gaza is the fault of Hamas and of 75 years of failed Palestinian leadership. But I guess since they're the "victims" here they have no agency and are spotless saints.
Hope you realize that you're supporting people who would rape, torture and murder you if they had the chance.
Out of the approximately 1200 raped, tortured and murdered on 10/7, how many of them would have to be women before you consider it femicide? How many women and children in Gaza have IDF soldiers raped and tortured? Since we have illegal immigrants pouring over the southern border of the USA and occupying private and taxpayer land as per US law, would that justify going into their camps and committing rape, torture and murder? Since some treaties with Native American tribes were violated and land stolen in the 19th century, would it be okay with you if some tribes went to the burbs and raped, tortured and murdered whoever they could find?
Hamas started this war by killing, raping, and abducting Israelis. Israel should not stop its attacks on Hamas until they have all their people back and Hamas has been neutralized. They should try and limit civilian deaths, but if that means large numbers of Palestinians die, so be it. Hamas is to blame for all of this.
What I'm hoping to see is the Queer Qrusade -- all our Queers flying over to embrace their Muslim fellow Oppressed sisters and brothers in, say Iran, or even better, any place that's still ruled by ISIS. What a love-in it would be.
You are misinformed. Many of us who you sarcastically label “stunning and brave” oppose targeting of civilians REGARDLESS of who is doing it. But sounds like you are perfectly fine with the collective punishment, mass slaughter and starvation of tens of thousands, even millions of women and children, as long as they are Palestinians doing the dying. And how easy to blame everything on Hamas when the 2000 pound dumb bombs were indiscriminately dropped by Israelis. Sorry, Israel has some moral responsibility here. They can’t just play the 10/7 card until every Palestinian man, woman and child is killed or ethnically cleansed. One atrocity does not justify another far larger atrocity.
If what you were saying is true, the death toll would be in the 100s of thousands. It is not....and the numbers that Hamas puts out includes its own troops, possibly half of the number killed.
The so-called Pro-Palestinians have in fact been a disaster for the welfare of the Palestinian people, emboldening Hamas and its use of them as human shields.
“Amnesty International's research provides clear evidence of the gruesome toll of Israel's relentless and unlawful attacks in Gaza. Four months since Israel's offensive began, more than 28,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 60,000 injured amid an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe." The vast majority of these people are not combatants. I'm neither pro Israel or Palestine, but what's happening there is nothing short of horrific, according to nearly every media outlet on the planet, maybe outside the US that is.
If they didn’t dye their hair and wore mundane clothes would they still be queer or non binary? Is it part of the religion? Colorful bunch all the same. Might not be too difficult to separate the narcissists from the autistics if they gave you a chance. I think they come in pairs.
Actually, Palestinians and Jews are closely related, all have common ancestry in the Levant that goes back to the time of ancient Israel. We are genetic cousins. The Palestinians just converted to Christianity or Islam. It is a bit unreasonable for people who have been in Europe for thousands of years to say to the Palestiniabs who have been in the Levant uninterrupted, “we’re back, you leave.”
Ann, please, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Levant/Arabic territories for several thousand years, including Yemeni, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jews. Which is how you end up with synagogues in what is now called Gaza dating from the 500s AD.....a century before the birth of Islam.
This land has changed hands dozens of times. Nobody has any irrefutable claim to it. But 75 years ago it was Palestine and Israel took it; men who would later be prime ministers of Israel stepped proudly over the corpses of innocent women and children. As the IDF does today.
This sums it all up rather nicely, and the final scene is likely prescient.
Why don't you look up the Hebron massacre of 1929. It's only one of the most recent such events prior to the recreation of the state of Israel. Israel was decolonized in 1948, thanks to Britain and the UN. Then 5 Arab countries declared war and lost, and Israel conquered additional territory, as is fair in any defensive war. Arabs - they weren't called Palestinians back then; that's a 1964 Soviet creation - have been wallowing in self-pity and hatred ever since.
The issue of Palestine, but especially the issue of what Israel and the US are doing in Gaza, is not really all that morally complicated. Tens of thousands of innocents are being slaughtered and their homes, land, schools, churches, mosques etc etc destroyed. And we’re told that it’s antisemitic to object to this, because actually there are no innocents! They’re human animals! And besides, the Bible says the land was given by God to a particular tribe only.
Sorry, but “the powerful influence that intersectionality exerts on our culture” has absolutely nothing to do with the strong feelings of disgust and horror that people of all kinds, Jews included!!, feel about what is happening. Trust me.
Just because “systemic racism” is a woke canard in the US context must not blind you to the reality that elsewhere there exist systems that are indeed systematically racist. Or at least one such system!
Nothing to say about the 1,400 victims of the Hamas attack on 07/10, babies burned to death in ovens in front of their parents, a young girl raped until her pelvis shattered, her breast cut off and dragged through Gaza City behind a motorcycle while the citizens kicked her and spat on her, children tied together with wire and burnt alive, the vicious attack on the young people at the Peace concert and innumerable other atrocities...
But hey, they were mostly Jews so they had it coming, right?
Oh for gods sake. Stop. Or am I misunderstanding you? Is your comment satire? “babies burned to death in ovens in front of their parents”. Do people actually believe this?
If all these things occurred, and not all of them did, even still that does not justify returning evil for evil. Why is this so hard?
Oh, it most certainly is not satire, I truly wish it was.
I have seen the bodycam footage taken by the Hamas terrorists and posted on their social network sites, there is hours of it and it is available if you dig around for it, and I can assure it requires a very strong stomach.
I suggest you do some in-depth research yourself before insulting posters whose information you find distasteful.
Do you expect the Jews to just lie down and permit themselves to be exterminated again, like in the Holocaust?
You have to try to understand the psychology of the Hamas backers.
When they woke up on Oct 7 they would have had to have known that their cause had just destroyed any possible moral authority they had and that no civilized person could any longer support these people or their genocidal bloodthirsty fantasies.
As most people refuse to admit error and lose face (also bc changing opinions may mean losing friends and status), the only possible response to save face is to take an unmistakable moral atrocity and meet it with massive spurious charges to blot out the truth.
All these crocodile tears for Palestinians and all this moral grandstanding about "evil" etc are just people who refuse to face the fact that the people they support are bloodthirsty monsters who would kill them if they could.
No matter what Israel does they will be denounced, because according to much of the global Left they had it coming, deserve it, and should allow Hamas to stage more mass murders in their twisted conceptions of "Justice" and "Equity".
"burned to death in ovens in front of their parents”. Do people actually believe this?"
Of course they do. Just as they believe that Hamas uses "human shields" and that Palestinians were murdering their own children and waving the corpses before the cameras to "make Israel look bad." For a lot of people, Israel can do no wrong, ever.
If you don’t believe eye witness, video, audio, and pathology and coroners’,reports t, what exactly will it take to convince you the reports of atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th are true? You don’t get a pass just because you have a previous opinion, or history, or experience. It happened as reported just as Pearl Harbor, French occupation by the Nazis, and other heinous deeds occurred. You cannot possibly give Hamas a pass because of years of what you might believe.
Oh, but the Gazans elected Hamas so they have it coming right?
Never mind the fact that Netanyahu promoted Hamas so both occupied territories would not have the same leadership in the Palestinian Authority. Squirrel!
The "woke" issue is an irrelevant distraction that sensible people will ignore. These are the same fools who believe that men can become women and that sex is a continuum. Why would anyone care about yet another bit of foolery coming from them?
They are just following the precedent set by Yassir Arafat, whose widow was the only one who knew where the bank accounts were. What I want to know is how that creep always managed to have exactly three days beard growth when seen in public.
1) " Many social movements have waved the banner of progress and justice while slaughtering tens of millions."
So if am I to understand that nationalism and Zionism are not social movements, then I suppose the implication is that in this case the slaughter of tens of thousands of people, and the risk of hundreds of thousands more starving to death, are acceptable outcomes, because they are happening for the right "cause". Perhaps Freedom and Democracy? I reject that argument - the same standard should apply regardless of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.
2) "we need to see people primarily as individuals rather than as avatars of their demographic groups. It’s much easier to dehumanize abstract categories [...]"
Oh the irony of this paragraph, as Gaza lays in ruins, tens of thousands of people are dead, thousands of children have lost one or both parents, or lost one or more limbs. And always the response is "Hamas".
How does that Israeli saying go? "We can forgive [the Arabs] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."
The Hamas attack of 10/7 is reduced to a footnote by the savagery of Israel's collective punishment. Israel is making no pretense of going after Hamas, instead, they are bombing hospitals, apartment complexes, and refugee centers; they told the occupants of Gaza to evacuate the north and concentrate in the south, and now they are bombing the very locale they ordered people to move to.
There are indications that Israel knew the attack was coming as much as a year in advance and did nothing to avoid it, not fortifying the border at all. I have no trouble believing this; the almost immediate announcement that new "settlements" would be established in Gaza is all anyone really needs to know.
The settlements and the settlers are the elephant in the room. Israel is expansionist; most of the governing coalition advocates 𝐮𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 based on claims thousands of years old on land that has changed hands dozens of time. The settlers' Gush Emunim Party claims all of Lebanon and Syria and large portions of Egypt, Iraq, and Iran as Israel. Soon they will be taking land on the other side of indisputably sovereign territory; what then? "Lebanese terrorists?" "Syrian gunmen?"
I have friends in Israel and more who have been there, and what I have heard about the intensity of Master Race ("Chosen People") sentiments and bigotry against all non-Jews is sickening.
Despite having had half my great-grandparents murdered by the Nazis, the Germans in concentration camps, the Lithuanians machine-gunned before their neighbors, I can no longer bring myself to stand with Israel. I was once a true believer, given my ancestry, but now I would end all aid to them until the West Bank is emptied of that unobservant settler rabble and Netanyahu is in prison.
And before someone cranks up that "antisemitic" rubbish, ponder that the equation of all Jewery with the right-wing 𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 that is Israel is the reason that innocent Jews all over the world are under attack.
In 1948, the Holocaust a searing memory, Israel seemed like a good idea. In 2024, tens of thousands of dead and maimed children, it isn't anymore.
Intersectionality is junk math, and can be discredited in a few seconds; it is based on a simple error akin to multiplying percentages of sets which are not independent e.g. % days which are Wednesday x % days which are Friday x days in a month = % days which are Monday or Friday. Nope.
“White” is an immaterial concept, similar to gender which, due to entirely subjective varying definition, is meaningless; using it and “black” and “brown” in reference to humans tells you the speaker believes they are omniscient, and cannot be reasoned with.
Feminist objectives, and gay and lesbian liberation objectives are diametrically opposed to the project of fundamental Islamic identities, which like fundamentalist Christian identities seek to amplify patriarchy, and criminalize or exterminate gays and lesbians.
People who believe otherwise are so profoundly uninformed, and IMHO completely socially irredeemable that the only response to them is to ensure through political, legislative and economic processes that they have no actual influence over anyone who they believe can be classified through junk math, the pseudoscience of race, or should be forced to support institutions antithetical to their continued existence.
Great essay and clear explanation of the toxicity of intersectionality, decolonization, oppression olympics. The proponents of this way of thinking never acknowledge the history of Islamic conquest that ripped through the Middle East and north Africa, complete with slavery that still exists to this day.
This is timely. A trans person apparently just shot people at a church in Texas, and they had "FREE PALESTINE" written on the gun.
Victim cults tend to bond to each other. This is not new and the "woke" embrace of Hamas should not be surprising.
There have been a number of mass shooters who claimed to be motivated by "transphobia," and as the cult becomes more violent and less sane, the urgency of ending it will grow.
Actually, Moonbeam, your statement is false. But suppose it were true, then so what?
It is true, although the "trans" part is currently unconfirmed.
"Lakewood Church shooting: AR-15 had 'Palestine' sticker, antisemitic writings recovered, police say"
https://abcnews.go.com/US/lakewood-church-shooting-motive-unknown-pro-palestinian-message/story?id=107158963
https://www.foxnews.com/us/lakewood-church-shooter-identified-genesse-ivonne-moreno-palestine-written-gun
And so is the "Free Palestine" on the gun. BTW, the dreaded Libs of Tik Tok has this very interesting tweet:
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1757080853665169706
FWIW, according to David's ABC News link, the sticker just said "Palestine."
Well, I think it is. But even if you disagree that it’s timely, you have to admit a lot of people are interested.
And I see the woke antisemites are out. 🙄
And the impressionable Normies.
I am decidedly opposed to Islamist extremism, but I cannot condone what the Israeli government is currently doing to Palestinians. It is collective punishment which is illegal and immoral
Everything happening in Gaza is the full responsibility of Hamas and of the terrible failures of 75 years of Palestinian leadership.
Arafat ruled for decades and all he did was embezzle himself a fortune and refuse to take on any governing responsibilities, prefering instead to let his cause be used by others as a cudgel to beat the West, as this kept the donations flowing in and the hatred aimed at the Jews instead of at him. He knew then that he was creating a failed state as well as a generation of children who knew and did nothing but bask in Jew hate, and this is what has led us here.
There is a simple solution to all this bloodshed: Hamas puts down their arms and releases all hostages.
The rivers of Western crocodile tears over "Palestinian children" express more care and concern for these children than any leaders of their society ever have. (Hamas has said over and over they don't care how many of their own people are killed as long as the dream of destroying Israel stays alive).
They wanted a war and now they have one.
Only if you start the clock/calendar on Oct 7th. My guess is you haven't read any actual history books on Zionism and it's recent history, amirite? Cuz in reality, the Zionists started this war, engaged in terrorism, colonization and ethnic cleansing to stand up their Jewish majority state. Some people object to being ethnically cleansed from their ancient homes, shocking, yes?
"Some people" like the Jews, whose homeland has been in Israel for four thousand years, you mean?
Listen up, you hack imbecile. If you actually do the addition, you'll find the Muslims had slightly more years in Palestine than the Jews with some kind of nation state, lol. If that were the basis for awarding this territory, the Muslims still win.
The state of Israel was created in 1948. The land has been inhabited for 12,500 years by the Philistines, for which the Greek named the land Philistia, what we now call Palestine.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine
https://www.palestinianhistorytapestry.org/history-references-for-embroidery-panels/
https://www.welcometopalestine.com/history-of-palestine/ancient-history/
Everythi g happening in Gaza is actually the full responsibility of Israel.
Wow, hallucination is easy!
Wrong.
In WWII the Luftwaffe killed around 65,000 British citizens in the Blitz.
A couple of years later, the RAF and USAAF killed between 350,000 and 500,000 Germans.
The Japanese raid on Pearl Harbour killed around 2,500 Americans.
Three years later, 98% of Japanese cities were reduced to ash, some of it radioactive.
The deaths were uncountable, estimated to be in seven figures.
And guess what - Japan and Germany learned their lessons and have behaved ever since!
How many dead "Palestinians" do you think it will it take before they get the message too?
War isn't a zero sum game, sow the storm, reap the whirlwind.
"It" is called war and war is ugly, but the IDF is not collectively punishing anyone. They are routing Hamas, and Hamas is using civilians as flak vests. Collective punishment would be an indiscriminate flattening of Gaza and that is not happening. But Hamas carried out collective punishment on 10/7 on civilian children, women and men.
"the IDF is not collectively punishing anyone"
Direct denial of indisputable reality
"These are not maggots"
— Dr. Smirnov "Potemkin" (Eisenstein,1925)
The "indisputable reality" is the so-called combatants of Hamas are slithering through the civilian Gazan population, bringing war down on everyone, just as they did when they instigated it with murder and destruction on 10/7. It's as if every criminal sociopath in the population has been handed a rifle and some grenades, and they don't care who gets hurt. Normal human adults, even female adults, would put themselves at risk to draw the violence away from the children. But not these weasels.
Careful, this same technique can be used when revenge for Israel's actions is dispensed globally.
It is astounding how you zionist apologists can twist and distort reality into delusions that help you sleep at night.
This essay oversimplies matters and overlooks the fact that Israelis are occupying Palestinian land per international law (and not the other way around) and is currently engaged in mass slaughter and destruction of the civilian population of Gaza, with 30,000 dead, mostly women and children, with many survivors rendered homeless and at the brink of starvation. Feminism cares about mass femicide so yeah, this IS a feminist issue.
uhhh where were the stunning & brave feminists on Oct 7 after mass murder and mass rapes? They were silent because of cowardice and conformity.
EVERYTHING happening in Gaza is the fault of Hamas and of 75 years of failed Palestinian leadership. But I guess since they're the "victims" here they have no agency and are spotless saints.
Hope you realize that you're supporting people who would rape, torture and murder you if they had the chance.
Israel has been the homeland of the Jews for around four thousand years, there is very considerable archaeological and documentary evidence for that.
Jerusalem was declared the capital of Israel by King David in 1,000BC
The Islamist "Palestinians" are the land thieves, not the Jews.
Out of the approximately 1200 raped, tortured and murdered on 10/7, how many of them would have to be women before you consider it femicide? How many women and children in Gaza have IDF soldiers raped and tortured? Since we have illegal immigrants pouring over the southern border of the USA and occupying private and taxpayer land as per US law, would that justify going into their camps and committing rape, torture and murder? Since some treaties with Native American tribes were violated and land stolen in the 19th century, would it be okay with you if some tribes went to the burbs and raped, tortured and murdered whoever they could find?
Hamas started this war by killing, raping, and abducting Israelis. Israel should not stop its attacks on Hamas until they have all their people back and Hamas has been neutralized. They should try and limit civilian deaths, but if that means large numbers of Palestinians die, so be it. Hamas is to blame for all of this.
Oh, so this all started in October?
Don't start your Stockholm speech just yet.
EXCELLENT article. I will share it widely, including with a study group I lead.
What I'm hoping to see is the Queer Qrusade -- all our Queers flying over to embrace their Muslim fellow Oppressed sisters and brothers in, say Iran, or even better, any place that's still ruled by ISIS. What a love-in it would be.
You are misinformed. Many of us who you sarcastically label “stunning and brave” oppose targeting of civilians REGARDLESS of who is doing it. But sounds like you are perfectly fine with the collective punishment, mass slaughter and starvation of tens of thousands, even millions of women and children, as long as they are Palestinians doing the dying. And how easy to blame everything on Hamas when the 2000 pound dumb bombs were indiscriminately dropped by Israelis. Sorry, Israel has some moral responsibility here. They can’t just play the 10/7 card until every Palestinian man, woman and child is killed or ethnically cleansed. One atrocity does not justify another far larger atrocity.
If what you were saying is true, the death toll would be in the 100s of thousands. It is not....and the numbers that Hamas puts out includes its own troops, possibly half of the number killed.
The so-called Pro-Palestinians have in fact been a disaster for the welfare of the Palestinian people, emboldening Hamas and its use of them as human shields.
Around 10.000 kids are dead so far in this current conflict. That's the official figure, so , go figure.
What is the source of that figure? And does the source separte civilian casualties from combatants? Thanks.
I see little evidence that Israel is going after Hamas. They are clearing Gaza for new "Jewish settlements."
“Amnesty International's research provides clear evidence of the gruesome toll of Israel's relentless and unlawful attacks in Gaza. Four months since Israel's offensive began, more than 28,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 60,000 injured amid an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe." The vast majority of these people are not combatants. I'm neither pro Israel or Palestine, but what's happening there is nothing short of horrific, according to nearly every media outlet on the planet, maybe outside the US that is.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145742
Amen!
If they didn’t dye their hair and wore mundane clothes would they still be queer or non binary? Is it part of the religion? Colorful bunch all the same. Might not be too difficult to separate the narcissists from the autistics if they gave you a chance. I think they come in pairs.
Actually, Palestinians and Jews are closely related, all have common ancestry in the Levant that goes back to the time of ancient Israel. We are genetic cousins. The Palestinians just converted to Christianity or Islam. It is a bit unreasonable for people who have been in Europe for thousands of years to say to the Palestiniabs who have been in the Levant uninterrupted, “we’re back, you leave.”
Ann, please, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Levant/Arabic territories for several thousand years, including Yemeni, Mizrahi, and Sephardic Jews. Which is how you end up with synagogues in what is now called Gaza dating from the 500s AD.....a century before the birth of Islam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_synagogue
This land has changed hands dozens of times. Nobody has any irrefutable claim to it. But 75 years ago it was Palestine and Israel took it; men who would later be prime ministers of Israel stepped proudly over the corpses of innocent women and children. As the IDF does today.
This sums it all up rather nicely, and the final scene is likely prescient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tIdCsMufIY&pp=ygUdbmluYSBwYWxleSB0aGlzIGxhbmQgaXMgbWluZSA%3D
And don't forget that Jews were expelled and hunted out of many Arabic/Persian countries upon the creation of Israel. Close to a million in total.
Israel did not take it.....it was a creation of the UN/British. Thank you for the video, but your argument is sorely lacking.
And when Italy sided with the Nazis in WWII, Italians in the US and UK were attacked and murdered. What's your point?
It's not the British erecting settlements in the West Bank, it isn't the UN bombing children.
Arabs and Jews lived together in (uneasy) peace .... until Israel.
Why don't you look up the Hebron massacre of 1929. It's only one of the most recent such events prior to the recreation of the state of Israel. Israel was decolonized in 1948, thanks to Britain and the UN. Then 5 Arab countries declared war and lost, and Israel conquered additional territory, as is fair in any defensive war. Arabs - they weren't called Palestinians back then; that's a 1964 Soviet creation - have been wallowing in self-pity and hatred ever since.
The land has been inhabited for 12,500 years by the Philistines, for which the Greek named the land Philistia, what we now call Palestine.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine
https://www.palestinianhistorytapestry.org/history-references-for-embroidery-panels/
https://www.welcometopalestine.com/history-of-palestine/ancient-history/
dd, please. The land has been inhabited for 12,500 years by the Philistines, for which the Greek named the land Philistia, what we now call Palestine.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine
https://www.palestinianhistorytapestry.org/history-references-for-embroidery-panels/
https://www.welcometopalestine.com/history-of-palestine/ancient-history/
The issue of Palestine, but especially the issue of what Israel and the US are doing in Gaza, is not really all that morally complicated. Tens of thousands of innocents are being slaughtered and their homes, land, schools, churches, mosques etc etc destroyed. And we’re told that it’s antisemitic to object to this, because actually there are no innocents! They’re human animals! And besides, the Bible says the land was given by God to a particular tribe only.
Sorry, but “the powerful influence that intersectionality exerts on our culture” has absolutely nothing to do with the strong feelings of disgust and horror that people of all kinds, Jews included!!, feel about what is happening. Trust me.
Just because “systemic racism” is a woke canard in the US context must not blind you to the reality that elsewhere there exist systems that are indeed systematically racist. Or at least one such system!
Nothing to say about the 1,400 victims of the Hamas attack on 07/10, babies burned to death in ovens in front of their parents, a young girl raped until her pelvis shattered, her breast cut off and dragged through Gaza City behind a motorcycle while the citizens kicked her and spat on her, children tied together with wire and burnt alive, the vicious attack on the young people at the Peace concert and innumerable other atrocities...
But hey, they were mostly Jews so they had it coming, right?
Oh for gods sake. Stop. Or am I misunderstanding you? Is your comment satire? “babies burned to death in ovens in front of their parents”. Do people actually believe this?
If all these things occurred, and not all of them did, even still that does not justify returning evil for evil. Why is this so hard?
Oh, it most certainly is not satire, I truly wish it was.
I have seen the bodycam footage taken by the Hamas terrorists and posted on their social network sites, there is hours of it and it is available if you dig around for it, and I can assure it requires a very strong stomach.
I suggest you do some in-depth research yourself before insulting posters whose information you find distasteful.
Do you expect the Jews to just lie down and permit themselves to be exterminated again, like in the Holocaust?
Or do you deny that, too?
You have to try to understand the psychology of the Hamas backers.
When they woke up on Oct 7 they would have had to have known that their cause had just destroyed any possible moral authority they had and that no civilized person could any longer support these people or their genocidal bloodthirsty fantasies.
As most people refuse to admit error and lose face (also bc changing opinions may mean losing friends and status), the only possible response to save face is to take an unmistakable moral atrocity and meet it with massive spurious charges to blot out the truth.
All these crocodile tears for Palestinians and all this moral grandstanding about "evil" etc are just people who refuse to face the fact that the people they support are bloodthirsty monsters who would kill them if they could.
No matter what Israel does they will be denounced, because according to much of the global Left they had it coming, deserve it, and should allow Hamas to stage more mass murders in their twisted conceptions of "Justice" and "Equity".
You are unserious.
?
"burned to death in ovens in front of their parents”. Do people actually believe this?"
Of course they do. Just as they believe that Hamas uses "human shields" and that Palestinians were murdering their own children and waving the corpses before the cameras to "make Israel look bad." For a lot of people, Israel can do no wrong, ever.
Look at some of the comments right here.
If you don’t believe eye witness, video, audio, and pathology and coroners’,reports t, what exactly will it take to convince you the reports of atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th are true? You don’t get a pass just because you have a previous opinion, or history, or experience. It happened as reported just as Pearl Harbor, French occupation by the Nazis, and other heinous deeds occurred. You cannot possibly give Hamas a pass because of years of what you might believe.
Oh, but the Gazans elected Hamas so they have it coming right?
Never mind the fact that Netanyahu promoted Hamas so both occupied territories would not have the same leadership in the Palestinian Authority. Squirrel!
The "woke" issue is an irrelevant distraction that sensible people will ignore. These are the same fools who believe that men can become women and that sex is a continuum. Why would anyone care about yet another bit of foolery coming from them?
Safely ensconced hundreds of miles away, the HAMAS leadership is entitled to follow Emperor Palpatine, "Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen."
and several are centimillionaires and one a billionaire....living in Qatar.
They are just following the precedent set by Yassir Arafat, whose widow was the only one who knew where the bank accounts were. What I want to know is how that creep always managed to have exactly three days beard growth when seen in public.
Were you aware that Arafat was gay? I read that a couple of months ago....but can't remember where. His wife and daughter lived very nicely in Paris.
I have no idea how he managed his private life.
More child molester, I understand, and I do mean 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥, like prepubescent boys.
Very common in that part of the World!
He also is reputed to have died of AIDS.
The two key contradictions in this piece:
1) " Many social movements have waved the banner of progress and justice while slaughtering tens of millions."
So if am I to understand that nationalism and Zionism are not social movements, then I suppose the implication is that in this case the slaughter of tens of thousands of people, and the risk of hundreds of thousands more starving to death, are acceptable outcomes, because they are happening for the right "cause". Perhaps Freedom and Democracy? I reject that argument - the same standard should apply regardless of who is the perpetrator and who is the victim.
2) "we need to see people primarily as individuals rather than as avatars of their demographic groups. It’s much easier to dehumanize abstract categories [...]"
Oh the irony of this paragraph, as Gaza lays in ruins, tens of thousands of people are dead, thousands of children have lost one or both parents, or lost one or more limbs. And always the response is "Hamas".
How does that Israeli saying go? "We can forgive [the Arabs] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."
The Hamas attack of 10/7 is reduced to a footnote by the savagery of Israel's collective punishment. Israel is making no pretense of going after Hamas, instead, they are bombing hospitals, apartment complexes, and refugee centers; they told the occupants of Gaza to evacuate the north and concentrate in the south, and now they are bombing the very locale they ordered people to move to.
There are indications that Israel knew the attack was coming as much as a year in advance and did nothing to avoid it, not fortifying the border at all. I have no trouble believing this; the almost immediate announcement that new "settlements" would be established in Gaza is all anyone really needs to know.
The settlements and the settlers are the elephant in the room. Israel is expansionist; most of the governing coalition advocates 𝐮𝐧𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 based on claims thousands of years old on land that has changed hands dozens of time. The settlers' Gush Emunim Party claims all of Lebanon and Syria and large portions of Egypt, Iraq, and Iran as Israel. Soon they will be taking land on the other side of indisputably sovereign territory; what then? "Lebanese terrorists?" "Syrian gunmen?"
I have friends in Israel and more who have been there, and what I have heard about the intensity of Master Race ("Chosen People") sentiments and bigotry against all non-Jews is sickening.
Despite having had half my great-grandparents murdered by the Nazis, the Germans in concentration camps, the Lithuanians machine-gunned before their neighbors, I can no longer bring myself to stand with Israel. I was once a true believer, given my ancestry, but now I would end all aid to them until the West Bank is emptied of that unobservant settler rabble and Netanyahu is in prison.
And before someone cranks up that "antisemitic" rubbish, ponder that the equation of all Jewery with the right-wing 𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 that is Israel is the reason that innocent Jews all over the world are under attack.
In 1948, the Holocaust a searing memory, Israel seemed like a good idea. In 2024, tens of thousands of dead and maimed children, it isn't anymore.
Intersectionality is junk math, and can be discredited in a few seconds; it is based on a simple error akin to multiplying percentages of sets which are not independent e.g. % days which are Wednesday x % days which are Friday x days in a month = % days which are Monday or Friday. Nope.
“White” is an immaterial concept, similar to gender which, due to entirely subjective varying definition, is meaningless; using it and “black” and “brown” in reference to humans tells you the speaker believes they are omniscient, and cannot be reasoned with.
Feminist objectives, and gay and lesbian liberation objectives are diametrically opposed to the project of fundamental Islamic identities, which like fundamentalist Christian identities seek to amplify patriarchy, and criminalize or exterminate gays and lesbians.
People who believe otherwise are so profoundly uninformed, and IMHO completely socially irredeemable that the only response to them is to ensure through political, legislative and economic processes that they have no actual influence over anyone who they believe can be classified through junk math, the pseudoscience of race, or should be forced to support institutions antithetical to their continued existence.