Israel/Palestine thread
Think this merits its own thread...
Discuss my fellow 2+2ers..
AM YISRAEL CHAI.
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23614 Replies
Is that much different than it was 100 years ago? I actually dont know. I know Iran isn't a place a lot of people are looking to immigrate to, but my understanding is they haven't been too bad about kicking minorities out or otherwise persecuting them, as long as they stay in line.
Seems like it'd be good enough to say, "in general ethno-religious centrality is bad" and then when people bring up specific use cases, say those are bad. If an Iranian popped in and was like "We should kick the Kurds out of Iran because Iran is for Iranians", I'd say that's a bad idea. Tossing out a freebee but Modi and his anti-Muslim bigotry and Hindu nationalism is not a good idea.
Israel actually buys most of the arms it gets from the US. A very small part is "handouts," and even this has a lot of implicit and explicit strings attached (although many would argue not enough).
The Palestinians on the other hand, have been waging their war on Israel entire subsidized by handouts. And I think we should be much more critical of how our tax dollar are spent.
I always find it bizarre people like Trolly and Bill Haywood use the "they get American aid so I have a right to tell Israel what to do" argument, but only in one direction; when it is actually much more applicable in the other direction.
But going the other way, it isn't as bad as what has been going on in Pakistan, our putative "ally" the last few decades.
For good or bad, the US decided in their pursuit of an economic empire; they would "play ball" and support some very problematic people and ideas. And to this day the narrative is to ignore this going on, while the left pile drives on Israel and a few other places (often because they are coded 'white' and hence should behave better) that aren't even that bad in the grand scheme of things.
At one point Yglesias wrote a little blurb on the politics of who is supporting who in the Yemen-Sudan axis; and it is pretty wild how the alignments keep shifting for geopolitical reasons with little regard for actual behavior. Which is fine if you are Russia and dont even pretend to care about such things, but for the US would be problematic if anyone was paying any attention (newsflash: they aren't)
Here we go again lol!
Here we go again, again: part 2!
You're both 0/2 now
Trust me, I'm the WE.
And I'll say it again. YOU don't decide how WE get to defend ourselves. You're gonna need to change my color in the spreadsheet my dudes.
So you’re saying we need to get rid of Israel as well right.
Cause of the MGM. It may affect an entire country, like the US
You are opposed to the US becoming more Jewish due to MGM right?
If not, sounds sexist and racist to me.
Are you sexist and racist or do you equally apply this logic to the Jews?
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But Israel isn’t an ethnostate… it’s a modern, multi-ethnic society.
This person is very uninformed and very confused.
I don't support the removal of a young girl's genitals (to block pleasure) using substandard common kitchen knives that frequently lead to sickness, scarring, or far worse. That is all I can tell you. I don't know what else you're saying.
Don't Muslims practice male circumcision too?
A long time ago in my 20s I traveled to India with a couple ethnic Indian friends. And at one point we were traveling through a rural area, and there was some non zero concern locals would suspect I was Muslim*, check my circumcision status (which is the same as the majority of Americans of my generation), and there could be some problems when they saw the results.
*Obviously the people in this area weren't big fans of Islam, as there was much sectarian violence in this particular area in the not so distant past
But you support it when your religion does it to American boys
So you support sexist and racist policies
You just said you don’t support the Islamization of the world due to fgm
You won’t say you don’t support the Jewish changes in the world due to MGM
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30% of Canada has their boys circumcised. There are maybe 350k Jews in Canada (so 175k boys if you want to just be linear). So I don't know what sort of point you're driving home here. But most of the circumcised boys in Canada for example, are not Jews...
Meanwhile YES, as the push into more radical forms of Islam spreads, we see a big increase in the FGM percentages in those countries. And it's an issue because FGM isn't just dangerous, it's arguably amoral. Altering a body to prevent sexual pleasure is one of the more sinister concepts I'm aware of that you can inflict on a 10 year old girl.
Not much different a century ago afaik no. But Egypt has well still has (approx) 10% of copts, and various small groups like the Beduins and others.
per your previous source most FGM in egypt were done by doctors, and i don't think that changes anything tbh (it's actually worse in some way, meaning it's not some old, uneducated tradition being slowly eradicated rather something that's become entrenched in society).
After all we do strongly disagree with gender-related body modification to minors even if it's all done by doctors in first world countries
Male genitalia mutilation is not a Christian thing is it? It’s a Jewish thing, right?
You do realize MGM prevents sexual pleasure in men right ?
Just ask girls that give blowjobs to victims of MGM and those that aren’t , they will tell you unequivocally that men who haven’t been the victim of MGM cum faster and have better sexual pleasure
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I just want to point out the glaringly obvious here:
It's literally the same thing in Israel. They are not the same ethnicity. And anyone know knows the makeup of Israelis, or who has actually walked anywhere in Israel and looked around, gets that.
Your typical Israeli is going to be traced back to all over the globe, including lots of places like Iran, Iraq, Algeria, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Lebanon, etc... On top of the massive diversity out of Europe.
Then I'm very confused why some guy living in New York thinks Israel is HIS country for people like HIM based on his ethnicity alone. Nevermind that the people of Gaza are genetically indistinguishable from Israelis, nevermind how silly it would look if a guy from NY with Irish grandparents thought he had privileged opinions about Irish politics.
It's pure colonial brain rot: people who look like this live here and people who look like that live over there and that's the only way people can be safe. Completely contrary to modernity.
Sure who did you ever hear saying south korea is a bad place because they don't have enough thai and cambodians as a % of the population ?
Btw see, hindu nationalism isn't about making an ethnostate, do you realize how many ethnicities make up india, even staying strictly within groups that are hindus?
Are all the pornstars out there Jewish? lol.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23937309....
Conclusion: The highest-quality studies suggest that medical male circumcision has no adverse effect on sexual function, sensitivity, sexual sensation, or satisfaction.
This guy, I swear. I'm gonna guess pubmed is not a good enough source...
People in Gaza might be genetically indistinguishable from a portion of Israelis including many jews, but not all lol
Still bad to irreversibly mutilate a minor body part. I can accept it for religious reasons because of how much jews have been discriminated against and because of their exceptional contributions to our societies throughout history but i would ban it for others.
Let the person become adult and then decide if he wants to circumcise or not
Trolly most of the planet functions this way. Literally MOST of it. Even a place like Thailand has their version. Thailand is a modern nation.
But in this case in a Middle East extremely hostile to Jews, it's completely necessary. It's do or die and you're acting like somehow, it's not. Having a nation that can safeguard Jews after the Holocaust, is MANDATORY. Now with Oct 7th? Twice as essential.
That the Saudis accept Israel and campus kids don't want to, is kind of all there is to say. Israel is HERE. It's not going anywhere.
As the saying goes all politics is local and rightly or wrongly Israel gets singled out in the US because there's a close cultural connection with the Jewish diaspora and American politics. I'd say the same thing is true with regards to Britain and the US. People, both left and right, probably know more, what little they do know, about British politics more than, say internal Egyptian politics, because the UK has much more cultural ties to the US than Egypt. I don't think there's anything nefarious about that, there's just too much going on in the world for someone to fully comprehend all politics in every location in the world. No one's immune to that.
On the "left" The Intercept released a lot of info about the US rigging Pakistani elections but it doesn't get a lot of airtime because there are not a lot of well connected Pakistani leftists in the US, though I'd say any leftists that are informed about it probably don't like it.
can't be that, you should check the raging debate in europe even in countries with extremely low numbers of resident jews (like Italy).
The reason Pakistani politics doesn't get airtime is that you can't map it over the left-right western cultural civil war, simple as that.
Which is why Bolsonaro and Milei got a lot of airtime even if most people in the USA and the EU don't have the ****ing basic clue about Argentinian and Brasilian politics (just one example, in both cases those people don't control parliament, so can't pass most of their policy proposals, yet commentators think they can and are super scared and so on).
Israel vs Palestine is 100% mappable over the western civil cultural war. Capitalism vs "something else". "colonizer vs native". "white vs brown" (as silly as it is, that's the mapping many people do).
Military imperialism vs "rightful resistance by the oppressed".
It's 1 for 1 "core cultural values of the right" vs "core cultural values of the left". What doesn't map well gets deleted (homophobia among palestinians for example, women rights).
Most people don't actually care a **** in general about what's not related to them. They care about Israel v palestine more than they usually care about international events because pressure groups managed to make them relate it to it through the above mapping.
You keep flip-flopping, insisting on one hand that it's not an ethnostate but then saying "yes, it's an ethnostate just like Thailand(everyone's go-to example of a successful modern society?)"
Like, you can't say Israel isn't an ethnostate and then gush about how your genetic ties mean Israel is YOUR country for people like YOU. Pick a century and stay in it (hint: the 21st is much safer for Jews than the 19th).