#or just excusing mass slaughter of civilians as fine if they were the 'wrong' side?

[haruchicken]

That @whenmagicfilledtheair blogs blatant antisemitism while simultaneously denying it scares the shit out of me.

Yeah, they are by far the worst I've seen.

The thing that I find the most frustrating about people like them, and why I even bothered to comment on their pinned post is that they demand answers to questions, but do so already knowing nothing anyone says will appease them. They are not looking for a debate or even open to changing their mind in anyway. You can see that if you look through their blog and see how they respond to anyone trying to provide them with evidence of their antisemitism.

That's why I didn't try to answer their pinned post, because I'm not going to spend hours going through their their blog taking screenshots and then compiling my own sources for why what they said is wrong or antisemitic when they will just deny anything they don't agree with as wrong or Israeli propaganda.

The thing is, it's easy to criticize Israel without being antisemitic--just look at how other Israelis have been doing it for years. But that's not what this person wants--they want to paint Israel as the most evil country on Earth, with the most evil people, who do uniquely evil things that no other country has ever done before.

I'm not Israeli, I'm not even Jewish, so for the most part I haven't said anything about this war. I come to Tumblr for memes, art and fandom shit. Yet, the rise of Antisemitism is really worrying me, especially when it's so easily brushed off with the excuse that it's just Israeli propaganda.

Like, I just don't understand why it's so hard to admit that, yeah, given how old antisemitism and how it's shaped a lot of cultures worldwide that it's possible some of it has slipped into the 'free Palestine' movement. This doesn't mean it's an inherently bad movement or that Palestinians deserve to die or lose their homes. It just means that maybe sometimes people should take a step back and see if some of their inherent biases have effected how they talk about this war as opposed to others that do not involve the Jewish State of Israel.

[hoursofreading]

In the end, I think all these lines are doing the same thing. They’re a series of mental tricks that allow those who know that murdering defenceless people is wrong to pretend that sometimes murdering defenceless people is fine. Your stomach turns, the way mine does, at the thought of pointing a gun on someone who poses no threat to you and suddenly ending their life. But you know that this is being done in the name of liberation, which means you have to be seen to support it. And so to smooth over the gap, you produce this bullshit. You produce evasive bullshit about the misdeeds of the other side or the priorities of other people. You produce intimidatory bullshit about how your own conscience is politically irrelevant. You produce the utterly shameful mystifying Fanonian bullshit about the violence of the oppressed, how much nobler and more defensible it is than the violence of the oppressor. And yes, there is a history and a context here, but violence is violence is violence. What actually face each other are not oppressor and oppressed, or coloniser and colonised, or even Israel and Palestine. It’s not a context or a history. It’s a person with a gun pointing it at a person without a gun, and killing them. And that’s what you’re trying to forget. In the Mishnah it is written that Adam was created alone to teach his descendants that the entire world can be contained in a single life, and that to destroy a single life is to destroy an entire world. The same principle is repeated in surah 5 of the Qur’an, al-Ma’idah. ‘We ordained for the Children of Israel that whoever takes a life, it will be as if they killed all of humanity.’ We have always known. I am an anti-Zionist because I believe that murder is wrong. The state of Israel was born bathed in blood, and its continued existence depends on regular slaughter. Unlike most of the people cheerfully excusing this massacre, I have seen the occupation of Palestine with my own eyes; I have met the people living under its shadow. I know that something very, very ugly might be coming. Since Saturday, Israeli jets have repeatedly bombed Gaza, levelling entire towers, killing hundreds, for essentially no reason other than to shock and demoralise and inflict suffering. There are two million people crammed together in that tiny wedge of land, and half of them are children. But this is just a kind of holding pattern; Israel lazily commits mass killings while its leaders and generals work out what they actually want to do. They were perfectly happy with the status quo in Gaza: a population kept just above starvation level, occasionally emitting rockets like an alarm clock, reminding them to mow the lawn. Hamas’ massacre has, at least, made the status quo untenable. It’s hard to imagine that what comes next won’t be worse. Whatever it is, all responsibility will belong with Israel. But the fact remains that the only just future is one in which Israelis and Palestinians live with each other, however uneasily, and not with ghosts. Every massacre of civilians makes that outcome more unlikely and the situation more hopeless. I respect the oppressed enough to acknowledge that while they might be disempowered, they are not powerless, and they have a responsibility too. THOU SHALT NOT KILL is a commandment. It is not partial. It does not admit excuses. And if you only believe that murder is wrong when it aligns with your anti-Zionism, then you are already lost.

Sam Kriss