if you want to make a case that antisemitism plays an unusual role in the US discourse surrounding Israel, your best point of reference is Yemen and US support of Saudi Arabia’s conflict there, which conflict (whomever you blame for it) did lead to mass famine and death, but not to mass protest on US campuses.
Fascinating “War in Gaza Public Opinion Survey” of Israelis, with across Jewish and Arab populations. https://en.idi.org.il/media/23635/war-in-gaza-15-_data_eng.pdf ht #NathanTankus
@susannah@octodon.social it’s very strange. great lover of humanity is also not my impression of Donald Trump but somehow he comes off that way to some?
@BenRossTransit @Alon @grvsmth @djc It’s an excellent piece.
@realcaseyrollins I've gotten a lot of political e-mails. None have so personally professed their love for me. I guess we'll agree to disagree, but I'll maintain, this is really, really different from the pitches I usually see.
@scott i have a gmail address (not the address i actually use) that weirdly gets a lot of e-mails not intended for me, but for people with names similar but not identical to mine (sometimes even quite different). this one was personalized for another S-beginning first name, and sent to that address.
@realcaseyrollins Many politicians try to prove they "care", they "get you".
But this is really quite different in character.
This is just a weird movement.
It's just trying to appeal along entirely different dimensions than a conventional campaign. It's parasocial rather than political.
Screenshot of a Donald Trump campaign email, subject "Is there anything you'd like to share with me?" "I've got something I've been dying to tell you: I WILL NEVER STOP LOVING YOU! PLEASE PLASE PLASE tell me you love me too!" [I LOVE TRUMP BUTTON] I don't care what the DERANGED RADICAL LEFTISTS think. I don't care what the MARXISTS AND FASCISTS think. I don't care what the AMERICA-HATING DEMOCRATS think. I only care about YOU!
@mike_kraft we're just going to disagree. i think abandoning Afghanistan in the way we did was a catastrophe. it is our role, as a matter of happenstance and history, to hold contemporary arrangements together until we can negotiate some other credible architecture. leaving and letting the chips fall where they may would be both catastrophic, on both moral and self-interested terms. it's like a bad marriage with kids. you may want to go, but you can't just walk away. arrangements must be made.
@mike_kraft the US is basically energy independent, a net exporter post the fracking revolution. but unless we prohibit exports, we are exposed to world pricing, so mayhem in the Middle East means we pay more. it's not Saudi vs not Saudi. the US provides the security architecture for the whole region from the Arabian Penninsula to Egypt through Jordan to Iraq, north through Israel up to but not including Lebanon and Syria. 1/
@mike_kraft withdrawal risks letting the whole region become like Lebanon and Syria in the worst case, or letting rival powers (one of or some combination of Iran, Russia, and China) provide the force-backed stability the US now provides. the status quo is superior in my view to either alternative. one might hope stable, genuinely independent, locally legitimate Westphalian states wld spontaneously emerge in current borders, but I don't think the weight of experience suggests that's likely. /fin
@phillmv yes. i just think it odd we're having a whole conversation about Presidential immunity in which Democrats are like "of course we'd never be for that", but the serial murder stuff never gets a mention.
@BenRossTransit @Alon @ikentcpel @djc i agree antizionism is often blurred, usually into its worst forms.
the basic antizionist position to which many not-right-wing Americans, including many American Jews, are gravitating towards concedes that "Jewish and democratic" is too great a contradiction, and so advocates a secular liberal state without religious or national favoritism.
that position may or may not be practical, but it is not advocacy of anything ethically horrid.
@BenRossTransit @Alon @ikentcpel @djc in the United States, the only mainstream zionist position is a two-state solution.
from an American perspective, Netanyahu is objectively antizionist.
he has certainly done more to discredit zionism than any other person in history.
should Obama be prosecuted for ordering hits, including of American citizens?
(drone assassinations overseas see https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/10/us/23awlaki-memo-reupload.html which actively discusses the question, after the long FOIA memo. "we believe the AUMF's authority to use lethal force abroad also may apply in appropriate circumstances to a United States citizen who is part of...an enemy organization". the same target's son was eventually killed too, purportedly as collateral damage to the assassination of another target.)
@Alon @ikentcpel @BenRossTransit @djc the conversation in which he said his main stupidities was in January, long before the much larger protests now. he’s a dude from one campus (these protests are now a national phenomenon), made a “leader” long before the scale of participation is what it is now. he’s nothing more than a well picked nut. you can find others too. but they are not typical.
@Alon @ikentcpel @BenRossTransit @djc many of the protesters are antizionist. that is the position from which they are protesting. if you hold dear and deeply the opposite position, exposure to any of what they are doing may be painful. that is quite distinct from racist or antisemitic, however. a growing fraction of American Jews is antizionist. a remarkable accomplishment of Israel’s leadership.
@Alon @ikentcpel @BenRossTransit @djc no. protesters in general have little organizational association with groups that coordinate and organize them. ANSWER was involved in many anti Iraq War protests. protesters do not have to answer for them. and even US Trump voters and Likud voters do not bear the sins of the leaders they vote for. i voted for Obama, who innovated and routinized assassination. he is a murderer. but i am not.
@ikentcpel @BenRossTransit @Alon @djc absolutely, tarring Americans with Trump’s pathologies while he was President is a form of unjust collective responsibility akin to racism. even Americans who for whatever reason elect not to disavow their President when some third party demands it. Netanyahu is a grifter and war criminal, but Israelis don’t inherit that status, though he is their leader, even if they won’t disavow on demand.
@BenRossTransit @ikentcpel @Alon @djc (oh and leaders are often nuts. they are almost always weirdoes, the opposite of representative. it’s one of the paradoxes of “representative democracy” that the elected class may be called upon to represent, but they can never be representative.)
@BenRossTransit @ikentcpel @Alon @djc absent the epithets, they should be welcome to. and the controversy surrounding this particular thread is over the prevalence of the epithets. do they exist? yes. with any meaningful frequency? maybe not, unless simple expression of the view that Robert E Lee was a great and noble man and the South’s cause was largely virtuous counts as epithet. to me, it would count only as error.
@ikentcpel @Alon @BenRossTransit @djc no, it doesn’t. some fool says outrageous things. it’s not incumbent on everyone in the drum circle to take a break + publicly denounce it. all this started with a real, less dumb, question—do Jewish kids just going about their lives, dressing and acting like they did before all this—face pervasive harrassment. i think the answer is no, but it’s an empirical question we can’t definitively answer.
@mike_kraft we certainly don’t need to abet them! we need to restrain them against the Palestinians, but also prevent adventurism by Iran and its cancerous proxies. not because contemporary Israel is a good actor — it’s a terrible actor — but because a regional interstate war that likely would not stay regional would be an absolute catastrophe. Israel is the new Saudi, an “ally” we dislike, against whose human rights violations we push back to some degree but not enough.