Israel declares war on Hamas

[CliffFletcher]

It is remarkable how much more the death of some Muslims arouses sympathy in the West and elsewhere in the Muslim world than others. I don’t buy that it’s because “we’re arming Israel.” We’re also arming Saudi Arabia. And Israel is perfectly capable of defending itself -and take actions against Gaza - without Western military support.

No, it’s clear that who is killing the Muslims of Gaza seems to matters a lot more than the identity of who’s being killed.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

No, it’s clear that who is killing the Muslims of Gaza seems to matters a lot more than the identity of who’s being killed.

Why don’t you go ahead and just say why you think that is instead of these vague allusions to it?

[FlameOn]

The right wing populist crowds on both of the Israeli and Palestinian sides who don't understand nuance. It is a fair point to bring up no one was protesting those other events.

These protests started up BEFORE the Gaza invasion and many of these protestors, even in Canada, carried Hamas flags during their marches. To me that says large component of these protestors aren't really pushing for peace. They also call for an immediate ceasefire but not one of them calls for the release of any of the Israeli hostages, nor are there any explicit condemnations of Hamas actions. Condemnation of atrocities should go both ways. I haven't seen any Israelis protesting on the street outside Muslim businesses chanting "gas Hamas", vandalizing and marking off with Muslim businesses with graffiti for boycott, or firing fireworks at police, but there have been at the Pro-Palestinian protests.

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

It is remarkable how much more the death of some Muslims arouses sympathy in the West and elsewhere in the Muslim world than others. I don’t buy that it’s because “we’re arming Israel.” We’re also arming Saudi Arabia.

Selling arms isn't the same as giving them. And the US clearly plays a far bigger role in what Israel does than it does with a place like Saudi Arabia.

And Israel is perfectly capable of defending itself -and take actions against Gaza - without Western military support.

Sort of. Underscoring their entire operation is the fact that the US is there to back them up if the conflict widens. If that didn't exist, they would obviously have to tread more carefully. Like, if Biden came out tomorrow demanding a ceasefire, you don't think that would influence Israel's operations?

No, it’s clear that who is killing the Muslims of Gaza seems to matters a lot more than the identity of who’s being killed.

Most other examples are civil wars, which are often beyond the power of the west to really influence without getting directly involved. Like how would an outside party like the US realistically stop what has happened in Syria or Myanmar without killing far more people? Yemen is a bit better example, but again, it's a civil war where the US only has relatively marginal influence. They could pressure Saudi Arabia to some extent, but it's really not analogous to what's going on in Israel.

And that doesn't even get into the 75-year history of the Israel-Palestine conflict being the single biggest hotpoint of the region, which is going to obviously lead to more attention being paid to it.

I don't know, I've never understood why people are confused by the fact that things that the US and US allies do tend to garner more protests than other conflicts do, even if the latter cause more deaths. Obviously countries and entities whose policy can be influenced by public opinion are going to have more visible opposition than ones who don't care about it at all.

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by FlameOn

The right wing populist crowds on both of the Israeli and Palestinian sides who don't understand nuance. It is a fair point to bring up no one was protesting those other events.

What exactly would a protest in the US or Canada about a Myanmar junta actually accomplish?

[FlameOn]

Originally Posted by opendoor

What exactly would a protest in the US or Canada about a Myanmar junta actually accomplish?

What would a protest in Canada accomplish with Israel? JT going to politely ask Netanyahu to stop bombing?

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by FlameOn

What would a protest in Canada accomplish with Israel? JT going to politely ask Netanyahu to stop bombing?

You don't think the US and the West in general have influence on Israel's actions? Of course they do. And they are extremely cognizant of shifting public opinion.

A military junta in Myanmar couldn't give a **** what people in the west think, but the US, UK, etc. absolutely do, and they have some influence over how Israel conducts its operations.

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Why don’t you go ahead and just say why you think that is instead of these vague allusions to it?

When people coded as Western or privileged kill people coded as oppressed, it’s regarded in some quarters as much more of an injustice than when people coded as oppressed kill the privileged or each other. The reason is Standpoint Theory.

The attacks in Israel raise a troubling question: Why are so many unwilling to denounce terrorism?

…Some of the most famous universities in the world – including both American institutions such as Princeton, Yale and Stanford and Canadian ones like the University of Toronto – neglected to release statements, or only did so after they came under intense pressure on social media. At Harvard University, it took an outraged thread on X (formerly Twitter) by Larry Summers, a former president of the institution, to prompt his successor into belated action.

Worse still were the people and organizations who actively celebrated the pogroms. Multiple chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, an influential organization that counts famous members of Congress among its ranks, encouraged their followers to attend rallies that glorified Hamas’s terror as a righteous form of resistance. As its San Francisco chapter wrote on X, the “weekend’s events” should be seen as part and parcel of Palestinians’ “right to resist.” The Chicago chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement even glorified the paragliders who murdered scores of people at a rave in southern Israel in an invitation to yet another solidarity rally, pairing a now-deleted image of a paraglider with the caption: “I stand with Palestine.”

… All of this raises a simple question: How could such a notable portion of the left side with genocidaire terrorists? Why have key institutions proven so reluctant to denounce one of the worst terrorist attacks in living memory? What, to them, renders the victims of these attacks so much less worthy of solidarity than those of the many other atrocities they have full-throatedly condemned?

…But the double-standard that has in past days become so obvious on parts of the left also has a more profound source, one that is ideological rather than practical or atavistic. Over the past decades, a new set of ideas about the role that identity does – and should – play in the world have transformed the very nature of what it means to be on the left, displacing an older set of universalist aspirations in the process.

This novel ideology, which I call the “identity synthesis,” insists that we must see the whole world through the prism of identity categories such as race. It maintains that the key to understanding any political conflict is to conceive of it in terms of the power relations between different identity groups. It analyzes the nature of those power relations through a simplistic schema that, based on the North American experience, pits so-called whites against so-called “people of colour.” Finally, it imposes that schema – in a fashion that might, in the fashionable academic jargon of the day, ironically be called “neo-colonial” – on complex conflicts in faraway lands.

… And yet, this misleading analogy governs how many on the left ascribe the role of victim and perpetrator, explaining why dozens of student groups at Harvard could claim that Israel is somehow “entirely responsible” for Hamas’s decision to murder more than 1,300 people. At a deeper level, they even help to explain how some of the world’s most prominent left-wing academics can contrive to perceive a deeply authoritarian and overtly theocratic regime that is explicitly hostile to sexual minorities as a progressive movement.

For people like the feminist theorist Judith Butler, what determines whether a movement should count as left-wing or right-wing is based on whether it claims to be fighting on behalf of those they believe to be marginalized. Since Hamas is an organization of underprivileged “people of colour” fighting against “privileged” “white” Jews, it must be seen as part of a global struggle against oppression. Even though its program – which incidentally includes the violent suppression of sexual minorities within the Gaza Strip – is reminiscent of some of the world’s most brutal far-right regimes, Mx. Butler considers it “very important” to classify both Hamas and Hezbollah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opin...y-are-so-many/

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by opendoor

Selling arms isn't the same as giving them. And the US clearly plays a far bigger role in what Israel does than it does with a place like Saudi Arabia.


Sort of. Underscoring their entire operation is the fact that the US is there to back them up if the conflict widens. If that didn't exist, they would obviously have to tread more carefully. Like, if Biden came out tomorrow demanding a ceasefire, you don't think that would influence Israel's operations?



Most other examples are civil wars, which are often beyond the power of the west to really influence without getting directly involved. Like how would an outside party like the US realistically stop what has happened in Syria or Myanmar without killing far more people? Yemen is a bit better example, but again, it's a civil war where the US only has relatively marginal influence. They could pressure Saudi Arabia to some extent, but it's really not analogous to what's going on in Israel.

And that doesn't even get into the 75-year history of the Israel-Palestine conflict being the single biggest hotpoint of the region, which is going to obviously lead to more attention being paid to it.

I don't know, I've never understood why people are confused by the fact that things that the US and US allies do tend to garner more protests than other conflicts do, even if the latter cause more deaths. Obviously countries and entities whose policy can be influenced by public opinion are going to have more visible opposition than ones who don't care about it at all.

You’re talking about about geopolitics. I’m talking about the media and public opinion.

As a former journalist, I understand that empathy is a remarkably capricious and fluid thing. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are killed in war every year. Some elicit tremendous outpourings of outrage and compassion among middle-class westerners sitting at their breakfast tables. Most are completely ignored.

It’s not simple geopolitical alliances that govern which deaths we care about and which we don’t. Where we culturally situate who is being killed and who is doing the killing plays a big part. If the deaths can be fit into an emotionally satisfying narrative, the media’s job is all the easier.

We’ve proven again and again that we don’t particularly care about non-European people in the developing world killing one another. It takes a horror the scope of Rwanda for those deaths to even appear on our radar. But introduce a Western/European/Colonial role to the story, and the engines of public outrage rev up. Because that fits a political narrative that has real juice.

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by Zarley

https://twitter.com/user/status/1720470778997518801

This is a garbage take. There are reasons why the war in Ukraine and terrorist attacks in Belgium get way more news than the many other deadly events going on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...idents_in_2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...rmed_conflicts

They are more relatable to westerners, and are more sellable news. This isn't some antisemitic thing.

There is enough real antisemitism that we should focus on instead of causing people to dismiss it with fake outrage.

[PepsiFree]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

This is a garbage take. There are reasons why the war in Ukraine and terrorist attacks in Belgium get way more news than the many other deadly events going on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...idents_in_2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...rmed_conflicts

They are more relatable to westerners, and are more sellable news. This isn't some antisemitic thing.

There is enough real antisemitism that we should focus on instead of causing people to dismiss it with fake outrage.

Bingo.

To that point, I guess it would be equally interesting as to why the people posting this stuff about Israel didn’t post the same stuff about Russia/Ukraine. Nobody was talking about all the Muslims being killed every year when Russia invaded Ukraine. No, it’s clear that the identity of who is being killed seems to matter a lot more than the killing itself.

I’m sure that game seems a lot less fun when it casts aspersions on the people who have gotten used to being the ones doing the casting.

[WCW Nitro]

Originally Posted by Zarley

https://twitter.com/user/status/1720470778997518801

I would guess is that it's because this conflict has been going on for decades and there is an occupation on top of the bombing. And the Western media itself is providing a lot more coverage.

[Snuffleupagus]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1720470778997518801

Originally Posted by WCW Nitro

I would guess is that it's because this conflict has been going on for decades and there is an occupation on top of the bombing. And the Western media itself is providing a lot more coverage.

Pretty sure most of the 1.4m Muslims in London know whats going on around the world, when Muslims kill Muslims they don't seem to bat an eye but when infidels kill Muslims all hell breaks out.

[CaptainYooh]

Originally Posted by WCW Nitro

I would guess is that it's because this conflict has been going on for decades and there is an occupation on top of the bombing. And the Western media itself is providing a lot more coverage.

That's one take. Another take: it is much easier and safer for all media to take side against Israel than taking sides in Muslim-only conflicts. Doing the latter potentially infuriates Sunni or Shia Muslims on the other side and can result in media offices bombed and journalists killed. Doing the former unites all two billion of them in their righteous rage and carries no physical risk. Relatively easy choice for the majority, I'd say.

[WCW Nitro]

Originally Posted by Snuffleupagus

https://twitter.com/user/status/1720470778997518801


Pretty sure most of the 1.4m Muslims in London know whats going on around the world, when Muslims kill Muslims they don't seem to bat an eye but when infidels kill Muslims all hell breaks out.

Sure , but in those cases the Western nations were not giving unconditional support to the countries doing the killing. That is a big part of the protests.

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by WCW Nitro

Sure , but in those cases the Western nations were not giving unconditional support to the countries doing the killing. That is a big part of the protests.

the west has provided all the weapons for the war in Yemen that's about as unconditional as support gets

[WCW Nitro]

Originally Posted by afc wimbledon

the west has provided all the weapons for the war in Yemen that's about as unconditional as support gets

Yes, but they weren't as blunt in their public support and that conflict did not have the decades of history to build up emotions.It is why non-Arab,non-Muslim opposition to this is much more too.

[Winsor_Pilates]

Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

That's one take. Another take: it is much easier and safer for all media to take side against Israel than taking sides in Muslim-only conflicts. Doing the latter potentially infuriates Sunni or Shia Muslims on the other side and can result in media offices bombed and journalists killed. Doing the former unites all two billion of them in their righteous rage and carries no physical risk. Relatively easy choice for the majority, I'd say.

Non Muslim Westeners also avoid protesting those conflicts because they don't want to look Islamaphobic.

[FlameOn]

Pro-Palestinian mob attacks American airbase in Turkey.



https://www.reuters.com/world/middle...ey-2023-11-05/

Pro-Palestinians vandalizing and marking off perceived Jewish businesses in France

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-minister-says

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by CaptainYooh

That's one take. Another take: it is much easier and safer for all media to take side against Israel than taking sides in Muslim-only conflicts. Doing the latter potentially infuriates Sunni or Shia Muslims on the other side and can result in media offices bombed and journalists killed. Doing the former unites all two billion of them in their righteous rage and carries no physical risk. Relatively easy choice for the majority, I'd say.

I would say the media has been very biased in their approach to covering these events, right up until this past weekend. It is pretty obvious the bias our media is going to maintain toward Israel, so you know it must be pretty bad when even our media is being critical of the state of Israel. That's even with a massive imbalance in the influence over our media systems that Jews have versus Muslims.

Is it ironic that we don't see the coverage of these engagements in the Muslim world where atrocities are happening or just a strategy? Don't put a face to the humanity of the affected people and make people stay locked in on their stereotypes of what Muslims are like. Out of sight, out of mind? If the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word Muslim or see someone in a hijab is terrorist or radical, then you've won the propaganda war. Don't humanize these people so that way you already have your audience believing they are sub-human. Classic propaganda technique?