#and genocide rhetoric at people

[halalchampagnesocialist]

I was thinking about it more and I think another reason the rhetoric of "no Jews, no news" and "where were the protests for X issue" pisses me off aside from downplaying Palestinian efforts in raising awareness and organising for Palestine is that it assumes Palestinians have a wide range of support in comparison to other causes. Protests for X and Y issues are held and organised by those relevant communities but the particular issues Zionists love to hold up are already opposed by Western countries in which some of these communities live in. Syria being a great example of this. Western governments opposed Assad, provided funding to militias to oust him, saw his backers (Iran and Russia) as enemies etc, so naturally they strongly denounced his atrocities. This energy does not exist with Israel. The minute world leaders issue even the softest condemnation of Israel, Zionists go mad. But even then, we've seen support for Palestine grow a lot this past year, we've seen the ICJ rule that Israel is plausibly committing genocide, and we've seen the ICC issue arrest warrants but what has that achieved in reality? Not only do these governments still back Israel with funds and weapons, but they have done nothing to stop the war. Palestinians in Gaza are still killed daily, and Palestinians in the West Bank are still occupied. The only ones who were actually defending Palestinians were groups like Hezbollah and Houthis which the West has bombed due to their attacks on Israel, whilst Arab states supported that whilst standing idly by as Israel continues to destroy Gaza further. You must be living in some alternate universe to cynically assume that the vast majority of people care about Palestine and not X issue only because Jews are involved.

[caparrucia]

Rings my fucking bell, like a perennial fucking plague maiden:

Center harm, not disgust!

When in doubt (and when not in doubt, just swept by problems bigger than you and assured by someone that they know the answer, so don't think right now, just Do!), center harm.

Focus on what specific harm you're reducing with your actions. Make sure it's tangible and concrete. If your actions are minimizing hypothetical harm at the cost of real, tangible harm on others, 9 out 10 times you're on the wrong fucking side, being weaponized by propaganda.

If a conversation revolves around disgust as a driver for action, you're being radicalized. If a call to action depends on your emotional response, you're being manipulated. I'm sorry, this isn't the 90s anymore, social media has eroded the web of respectability of the pre internet society. The primary axis for misinformation to spread in this day and age is emotional response: half the things you believe are true and share as such are not based on fact, expert opinion or personal research. Social media has conditioned us (all of us! You and me and most dangerously of all, the idiots we put in power) that if something feels true, it probably is.

But do you know for sure it is? Do you think it's true because you have first hand experience or actual time spent on reputable sources learning it to be fact? Or just because it aligns with your worldview and it would be nice for you if it were true?

Are you taking action because you're angry and a group of fellow angry folk invited you to join them? Do you have a plan or is this just catharsis? Are you aware of the consequences of your actions or are you drunk on rage and focused only on the immediate future?

Center harm. Center specific actions and their consequences.

Discomfort is not harm. Disgust is not harm. Hypothetical paranoia is not harm.

The reactionary pipeline is real and your self-image as a progressive is not actually enough to save you from falling down the hole. Radicalization is not hinged on politics alone. Saying you're a leftist is worthless if your thought process and actions themselves are indistinguishable from qanon losers. Conspiratorial thought has literally no politics inherently, and your insistence it does is pure lack of critical thought on display.

Center harm, not feelings, not politics, not group think.

Center harm, and remember that individual actions cannot dismantle systemic structures on their own, so anyone who calls for individual action at the cost of community structures is not actually trying to change anything, and instead actively suppressing efforts to make anything better in any way.

[femmesandhoney]

this also may be too much for tumblr.com political irrationalities, but do people actually believe in a mythical "perfect" politician that exists out there that we just haven't found yet and once we find them then voting will be okay again

[edwardallenpoe]

the conflation of Zionism, the state of Israel, and Judaism is the worst thing on the planet, actually. Saying that supporting Palestine is antisemitism not only makes the struggle against genocide worse but it also makes the struggle against antisemitism worse! The more we conflate antizionism with antisemitism the less we will be able to spot actual antisemitism and the more we will harm the Jewish community and it is the greatest betrayal to Jewish people of all. Zionists (and 'leftists' who's hate for antisemitism is stronger than their love for jewish people and therefore inact alienation and conflation themselves) are doing a huge disservice to Jewish people (especially Jewish people who support Palestine and are being attacked by zionists and face so much antisemitism from zionists) and it's sickening.

I'm saying this as a non-jewish black person. You can SEE how much ACTUAL antisemitism is affecting the Jewish community but zionists are trying to conflate that with pro-palestinian protests and it's so frustrating.

How can zionists say that "from the river to the sea" is more colonialist than "we want '48"?

This post was inspired by an interview on MSNBC about the book "uncomfortable conversations with a jew" and seeing how they're also trying to frame antizionism and anti-Israel protests as equivalent to the civil rights protests and efforts towards freedom from the black community is sickening. This is an actual conversation to be had about antisemitism, antiblackness and intersectional activism and class solidarity between the Jewish community and the black community but the way they frame it in this lense is the biggest disservice, not just to the black and Jewish community but to every marginalized community. You CANNOT say that Israel's efforts to ethnically cleanse and genocide Palestine is the same as the African diaspora's (but specifically African American's) fight for rights and freedom, especially since the two biggest faces of the civil rights movement (Martin Luther King Jr. And Malcolm X, who was a pan African) were for the Jewish community AND for Palestine.

please. We can be pro-palestine and support Jewish people. That is something you can do. And I ENCOURAGE it.

Zionism ≠ judaism. Israel ≠ judaism. We understand this the same way we understand that nazi ≠ German citizens and that the state of russia ≠ russian citizens.

[evansbby]

haven’t i always said that selena gomez always plays the victim??? ALWAYS???

[canichangemyblogname]

Fuck. We are in desperate need of genocide studies in the US. Because people are genuinely arguing that Nazism— and thus the white supremacy which inspired it— is an aberration of European philosophical tradition, rather than the end conclusion of “Western” ideologies.

“Nazism is uniquely evil” implies it cannot happen here and that it originally happened by freak happenstance. If you singularize the actions of the Nazis, you lose critical analysis of what ideas inspired them (see: US genocide of First Nations People) and how the Germans developed their tactics of oppression and murder (see: German genocide of the Herero and the Nama people between 1904-1908).

I believe it’s time we call this kind of rhetoric what it is: genocide denialism and Holocaust revisionism. It denies the European-created genocides before and after the Holocaust, and it rewrites the history leading up to the Holocaust to purposefully cover up the fact that it can and will happen here. Over and over and over. Such rhetoric also (purposefully) denies victims of genocides the world over solidarity with each other. To justify the destruction of Poland, Hitler asked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Would you deny the son of a Shoah survivor the right to march with Armenians? Or would you, like the German state, accuse him of de-singularizing and relativizing the Holocaust and report him to the local antisemitism commissioner?

If you treat Nazism as unlike anything else that’s ever happened or will happen, then you don’t need to worry about it and the tragedies it created happening ever again. “Never again” becomes an empty promise. This type of rhetoric gives people the opportunity to wipe their hands of any culpability in the rise and reproduction of similar systems or other genocides, and they can use this singularity rhetoric to position themselves into a moral category despite supporting similar ideas. That Nazism and the Shoah happened means it was possible and still is possible, among any people.

The “massive, systematic, and efficient nature of” Nazi oppression, brutality, atrocity and its genocidal tactics and policies is a function of modernity and “Western” Enlightenment rationality. It is not an aberration.

[ghostietea]

I think some people need to get it through their skulls that settler colonialism is an inherently genocidal system. Calling for an end to the violence but not a return of Indigenous land is simply a call for the genocide to continue in a quieter and more polite fashion.

I don't think a lot of people realize that the genocide of Indigenous people worldwide living under settler colonialism is ONGOING. You CANNOT truly see the end of a colonial genocide without an end to the colonialism. As long as Indigenous people are alive, colonizers will find a way to justify and deny genocide because the foundation of 'their' country necessitates the removal and subjugation of the Indigenous population. Indigenous survival is an act of rebellion, one you MUST believe in. You cannot give up on Indigenous people or believe that they are gone, no matter how hard colonizers try to wipe them out. You cannot trust the slander colonizers will spew about how they had to do what they did, about how Indigenous people are all savages who are coming for their women and children, or are somehow unworthy of their country. You can't trust colonizers' fearmongering about how a return of Indigenous land will result in the expulsion and death of all settlers. You CAN'T believe colonizers when they say what they're doing isn't genocide.

The playbook of settler colonialism is old, barely updated because the forces of greed and racism inherent to it have yet to be properly deconstructed. I'm seeing the same tactics used in the genocide of my people that started hundreds of years ago being broadcast live to the world and some people are STILL going along with it. Time and time again people like to 'forget' that it is plainly and explicitly to the benefit of colonizers to dehumanize the colonized so they can steal what is rightfully theirs without opposition and then lie about what they did. As long as the colonial system remains, colonizers have motivation to destroy the Indigenous population physically and culturally, they'll just get less obvious about it. Call this what it is and DON'T be satisfied until the land is returned to its rightful stewards. Palestine MUST be free, you either support decolonization or you support genocide 🇵🇸

[nordfjording]

I get a little bit of a kneejerk thing going when people insist on expanding words like terrorism, genocide, and fascism to every issue. These are very specific words with specific definitions. Atrocities don't have to fit into definitions of terrorism or genocide in order to be universally condemnable. A rule or govt can be inhumane without being facistic. We have to view the world more broadly than that

[gurorori]

haha oh no im definitely not at all disturbed by the prevalence of leftists on all platforms who are loudly 'anti-genocide' when it comes to the palestinian cause (and a couple others at best :3c) yet the only time ukraine [ʊkrɐˈjinɐ] leaves their mouths is in critique, in stark comparison to the former or in complaint about their (american) government sending aid.

at first what i saw often was pointing out the differences in western media framing [ukraine vs palestine], and that's fair (until the words and the agenda of western journalists are used to paint, as a whole, ukrainians who have been actively going through genocide as some kind of white supremacists hogging the blanket of global attention when they kinda just want to live and have the rights to their own land, culture, names and families)

but no one is even caring to do that anymore, today bitches just invent metaphorical scenarios and people to get mad at and to throw an entire ethnos away because wahhhh i decided that you care for X but not for Y!!!.... all while doing the exact thing they are condemning. the exact absolute same and they don't even hide it but do lack the self-awareness to realise

[kingofmyborrowedheart]

I’m sorry but you can’t cry “human rights violation!!!!” when you are actively carrying out a campaign of genocide.

[lith-myathar]

.

[makerscockandballs]

cis people stop buying into the "trans people are the real aggressors" rhetoric whenever we try to defend outselves or bring attention to something challenge (APPARENTLY IMPOSSIBLE)

[crippled-peeper]

older/middle aged and rural trans people who ask “what trans neutral means?” because they genuinely have never heard this word are not oppressing you violently and you don’t need to respond to them with violence. aren’t y’all constantly like “we have bigger battles than this intracommunity drama!!!!” with literally everything else pertaining to trans people? but it’s ok to tell older/poorer/rural trans people to fucking off themselves for only learning the terms “trans masc” and “trans fem”? that’s really weird. get away from me

[rebellum]

People will straight up lie about what people are saying is transandrophobia and then other people will be like "see? Those transandrophobia truthers are EVIL" like bruh even if we WERE a hategroup it would be necessary to actually figure out what we are saying and not blindly believe what other people are saying we are saying. Please use critical thinking.

[sukibenders]

The way some people are reacting to the Oscar nominations, specifically in regards towards Barbie, and many other things surrounding it holds certain undertones, especially when they then start to go and deny America Ferrera's talent among other things, that are very concerning. Like let's not do that. Especially if you're writing an article for a newspaper (LA Times) that makes digs towards the other films and their nominees, mainly who were women, and say that that proves the point of Barbie. Even though the point of the film was that women have to work harder than men just to get their foot in the door, not about shaming other women, but I digress.