#Because protesting the current president complicit in the genocide is apparently a no no. Even if you'll vote him over Trump

[aingeal98]

The part of the Zionists rhetoric I've seen online especially here on tumblr that really... not so much confuses or disturbs me because every part of supporting racism and genocide is disturbing, but the part that makes me nauseous in a very specific way, is how many of these people claim to be leftists. Not the Israeli government or the majority of Zionists obviously, they're proud racist right wingers. But here on tumblr you have people who believe in feminism and queer rights and would agree easily enough with surface level takes on how racism in America is bad. And when it comes to conservatives and red fascists they can easily tell when a right wing racist or homophobe is arguing in bad faith, they can make long posts explaining the harm behind terf rhetoric and how it differs from the actual fight for women's liberation. They can look at the Russia and Ukraine conflict and use critical thinking to call out bad actors with ease.

But then with Israel and Palestine they just... Flip. All the bad faith arguments they criticised before is now their modus operandi. They ignore the ongoing genocide and the Palestinians talking about it and focus on the oppressors, only reblogging the same one or two Palestinian voices once every now and then that say everything they want to hear and nothing more.

I think the most striking example is that "antisemitism bingo" someone made where the ongoing genocide was something to be laughed at and the blog made fun of Palestinian civilians being tortured. And yet when a blocklist went around of people who interacted with that ghoulish blog, clearly explaining why we should avoid them, (Hijt:The racism and dehumanisation of Palestinians) these "leftist zionists" immediately were like "Oh its a block list of Jewish blogs! It's only blocking us because we're Jewish!"

Like it's the most bad faith easily disproven illogical argument that every random 4chan troll can make. It's not my actions it's because I'm white! It's not my homophobic remarks it's because I'm straight!

I still struggle to understand how they're able to flip so easily from intelligent historical and societal discussions of oppression and intersectionality to denial of the Nakba, denial of the apartheid and racism that has ruled the Israeli state since its conception, denial of the Israeli terrorism and colonisation ongoing in the West Bank that Palestinians have been speaking up about for years (The save Sheikh Jarrah campaign and the murder of peaceful Palestinian activists predates October 7th by quite a bit and yet received far, far less coverage by western media) and denial of everything the government and soldiers and many citizens are currently doing to murder as many Palestinians as possible. How do you go from pointing out cult tactics to a Maga style tribalism enthusiast just because it's Palestinians being oppressed and not another group?

The only reason I can think of is that unlike say, white people or straight people, zionists DO have an understandable, real fear that they can use to promote their racist cult. Antisemitism exists worldwide and is a problem in every single country. Unlike ridiculous concepts like "white genocide" or misandry, there is grounded, factual and understandable reasons for Jewish people to want a community where they can feel safe. And anyone who truly cares about equality for all must be committed to stamping out and dismantling antisemitism in every country and neighbourhood, because Zionists sure as hell aren't. The more antisemitism exists the greater their fuel for justifying and promoting Israel as the One True answer to it all.

But the solution of Israel involved ethnic cleansing in order to built their majority Jewish state, and relies on racism and genocide to maintain it. Just like any other coloniser state, it's not sustainabile and is constantly spiralling towards fascism. (America currently contending for loudest spiral) And that is obvious to anyone who reads up on the history or just like. Talks to Palestinians for five seconds. Israel exists due to racism and dehumanisation of Palestinians, and anyone who considers that an acceptable sacrifice is blatantly morally bankrupt. But the tribalism is simply too strong for that sort of logic and understanding, and whatever reasons they may have for falling into Zionism, it's still unacceptable. If you're still on here talking about "demonising Israel and exaggerating genocide (for the woke agenda, is what they're two steps away from saying) then I have no sympathy or time for you. One day you will be forced to reckon with your cognitive dissonance and willful ignorance, and the self righteous racist narrative you cling to will no longer be enough to protect you from judgement. Normal people with their morals screwed on right don't support fascism and racism. Leftists sure as hell shouldn't support facism and racism. (And yes this goes for those who defend Russian and Chinese imperialism too.)

You talk about feeling isolated, about having no one but fellow zionists to rely on. No one else will accept how complicated the situation is, you say over the sound of ten thousand murdered children killed and celebrated by the fascists you're carrying water for. Everyone else is just too antisemitic! You say as the Israeli government and military celebrates Hannukah by bombing Palestinians and joking that they're lighting one of the candles.

I genuinely can't tell if these people are aware they're full of shit or just so scared that they've dived deep into cult mentality with zero critical thought allowed. But either way, there should be no more space for them in our community than a nazi, a homophobe or a Trump supporter. They may have parroted similar ideals of equality and justice for long enough, but when push came to shove and the issues began to hit too close to home, they decided that supporting facism is how they want to cope. So be it. Palestine will be free with or without them and I will mourn the intelligent principled people they could have been, but at the end of the day you have to draw the line somewhere. And supporting genocide is generally a solid line to go with.

[hellofastestnewsfan]

When the two strangers accosted Chelsea Clinton, she was attending an NYU vigil for the Muslims murdered by a terrorist in Christchurch, New Zealand. “This right here is the result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the words that you put out into the world,” one declared as the other recorded the encounter. “I want you to know that, and I want you to feel that deep down inside. Forty-nine people died because of the rhetoric you put out there.”

The accuser’s blend of callous indignation and extravagant nonsense brought to mind charges that Chelsea’s parents murdered Vince Foster or that her mother committed treason when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked. But these critics weren’t right-wingers parroting talk radio. They were leftist NYU students.

It would be absurd to blame any anti-racist New York City cosmopolitan for an ethno-fascist’s decision to murder Muslims in a gambit to start a race war. The choice to blame Chelsea Clinton is particularly silly. Her recent activism includes attending a 2017 Muslim solidarity rally, protesting Donald Trump’s attempts to prevent Muslim immigration, extolling the response of Muslims to a hate crime in Portland, Oregon, and lamenting a horrific crime against a young Muslim.

Despite the glaring unfairness of the very serious charge, however, BuzzFeed published a column by the two NYU students, who doubled down on their attempted public shaming. Meanwhile, CNN, Time, The Washington Post, the Daily Mail, ABC News, The Jerusalem Post, Jezebel, USA Today, The New Zealand Herald, People, and many other mass-media outlets covered the altercation. In a world rife with dangerous anti-Muslim bigotry, why did student activists, Twitter users, and the media focus public debate on an outlandishly frivolous accusation?

[Read: The evolution of shaming]

One instructive place to begin: Last month, Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, told reporters that punitive action should be taken against two Democratic House members for their statements on Israel. “It’s not clear what McCarthy particularly found offensive,” Haaretz reported, “but both lawmakers embrace the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel, and both have been accused of tweets that cross the line.”

On Twitter, the journalist Glenn Greenwald flagged that article for his followers. “It’s stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it means attacking free speech rights of Americans,” he declared.

Representative Ilhan Omar responded, “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.”

Some saw her tweet as a standard leftist claim that donor money was corrupting politics, others as an unwitting or intentional echo of an anti-Semitic trope.

“Please learn how to talk about Jews in a non-anti-Semitic way,” the journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon tweeted. “Sincerely, American Jews.” Chelsea Clinton quoted those words, adding, “Co-signed as an American. We should expect all elected officials, regardless of party, and all public figures to not traffic in anti-Semitism.”

That callout upset the NYU students. They felt that casting Omar’s comments as beyond the pale was itself beyond the pale—that it made Chelsea Clinton an anti-Muslim bigot. Fast-forward to the vigil, where they called out Chelsea Clinton in turn. Though it happened face-to-face, it was, in essence, an IRL quote-tweet. The “likes” were provided by classmates who snapped in solidarity.

[Read: The destructiveness of callout culture on campus]

In all those callouts, different readers will take different sides.

Just notice that at every link in that chain of events, public discourse was dominated not by efforts to persuade or debate anything on the merits, but by attempts to cast, locate, or portray the target of one’s opprobrium as out of bounds.

The lesson isn’t that stigma is never appropriate. If someone incites violence against Jews or Muslims, for example, the words ought to be summarily condemned, not considered fodder for debate about whether violent attacks are, in fact, desirable. Still, this episode illustrates that when the constant focus is on the boundaries of legitimate speech, little time or attention is left for substance. And what’s said to constitute bigotry keeps expanding without any apparent limit.

Nowadays, the journalist Damon Linker observed in The Week, “the point is less to convince your opponent that she has made an error of reasoning or is wrong on the facts as to convince your own side, as well as the dwindling crowd of neutral observers … that they are excused from having to take your opponent seriously because she has crossed a line beyond which people shouldn’t be granted a hearing.”

The NYU students’ expansive notion of bigotry now encompasses Chelsea Clinton’s effort to call out what she regarded (whether rightly or wrongly) as anti-Semitic bigotry. Meanwhile, a Washington Examiner headline now declares, “BuzzFeed Platforms the Genocidal Bigots Who Harassed Chelsea Clinton.” Once callout culture takes hold, its perverse incentives generate inanity without end.

[Read: The excesses of callout culture]

The BuzzFeed article by the NYU students is most noteworthy for the way it elides substantive disagreements. Core to this dispute is whether or not the tweet that Chelsea Clinton published was, in fact, bigoted toward Muslims. Clinton herself obviously doesn’t think so. Yet here’s what the NYU students wrote:

We did a double take when we first noticed Chelsea Clinton was at the vigil. Just weeks before … we bore witness to a bigoted, anti-Muslim mob coming after Rep. Ilhan Omar for speaking the truth about the massive influence of the Israel lobby … we were profoundly disappointed when Chelsea Clinton used her platform to fan those flames.

We believe that Ilhan Omar did nothing wrong except challenge the status quo, but the way many people chose to criticize Omar made her vulnerable to anti-Muslim hatred and death threats. We were shocked when Clinton arrived at the vigil, given that she had not yet apologized to Rep. Omar for the public vilification against her. We thought it was inappropriate for her to show up to a vigil for a community she had so recently stoked hatred against. We were not alone in feeling uncomfortable—many students were dismayed to see her there.

The students are so short on empathetic discernment that they presumed Chelsea Clinton would perceive her own actions just as her harshest critics perceive them. They still don’t seem to recognize that she does not believe her tweet “stoked hatred against” the Muslim community, or fanned the flames of a bigoted mob, or undermined anyone’s physical safety, whether she is right or wrong in those judgments. Needless to say, the students never consider that it might be more constructive to argue with Clinton than to call her out and wish her anguish.

The article continues: “So when we saw Chelsea, we saw an opportunity to have her ear and confront her on her false charge of anti-Semitism against our only Black, Muslim, Somali, and refugee member of Congress. We took our chance to speak truth to power.” But asserting “Forty-nine people died because of the rhetoric you put out there” was neither the truth nor a confrontation on the merits of the anti-Semitism charge. The NYU students were not engaged in an attempt to “speak truth to power.” They were engaged in public shaming.

They later write: “Many have said it was unfair to connect Chelsea’s words to the massacre in Christchurch. To them, we say that anti-Muslim bigotry must be addressed wherever it exists.” Except that they’ve tried to publicly shame Chelsea Clinton while saying nothing about countless examples of clear, virulent bigotry. And they’re still begging the question. Those who believe the students behaved unfairly do not agree that Clinton’s words constituted anti-Muslim bigotry. It is easy for many to imagine her tweeting exactly the same critique, rightly or wrongly, at a non-Muslim who said the same thing about Israel policy.

The authors come closest to valid claims when they write, “Hatred and vilification against Muslims created this killer,” and “Spurred on by professional bigots, anti-Muslim hate now permeates our culture and politics …” It’s perfectly true that anti-Muslim bigotry is pervasive and dangerous. But the (currently too-soft) taboo against anti-Muslim bigotry is weakened, not strengthened, if callouts extend so promiscuously that Chelsea Clinton, of all people, is deemed an anti-Muslim bigot, let alone complicit in 49 murders.

The NYU students did not invent this doomed mode.

They learned it through peer acculturation, perverse incentives, and adults who indulge in question-begging arguments, irresponsible accusations, and careless callouts, all of which are epidemic on the social-justice left and the Republican right. Opportunists such as Representative McCarthy recognize that callout culture is a boon to his political coalition: He can call out the left, exploiting the hypersensitivity that causes leftists to constantly eat their own, confident that he’ll never suffer if and when he is inconsistent, as most of his fellow Republicans won’t call him on the hypocrisy of supporting a serial bigot such as President Trump.

Yet every day is a chance for adults to set a better example.

Representative Omar has succeeded this week with a Washington Post op-ed that sets forth a foreign-policy philosophy and makes a substantive case for it on the merits.

Whereas McCarthy claimed in another recent callout that Representative Adam Schiff is “a modern-day Joe McCarthy,” and President Trump continues to label the entire news media “enemies of the people.” If only that inane public shaming were the work of student activists rather than the most powerful GOP officials.

Public discourse will always include moral limits. Bigotry of the sort expressed by people who favor murdering Muslims or Jews does cross them, as should some words falling short of that. Drawing exact lines will always be hard and controversial. And occasional debates about edge cases are necessary exercises. But none of that comes close to justifying the state of our public discourse today.

Imagine an alternative civic culture in which Republicans applied their purported disdain for callout culture to their own, and where the left worked toward a public discourse with better incentives, lauding participants not for zero-sum callouts but for substantively engaging ideas, people, and policies on the merits. Everyone would be better off. As I write, I see that a critic of the NYU students has resurfaced bigoted tweets that one of them published in high school, extending the chain yet again. There is no one other than all of us to make it stop.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2TPGpqZ