Is this anti-semitism?

well according to that article the Miami dentist did it as a response to the hate crime in Chicago which killed a little boy. maybe he thinks sharing these images is only stoking more anti-Muslim hate. can't really blame him tbh

― frogbs, Tuesday, October 31, 2023 9:28 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

I just don't think there's a tenable position that you should silence people talking about atrocities in order to prevent hate. I get the dilemma of it, but it just doesn't seem like that can work.

I also think there's a lot of turning anger and fear toward easy targets right now. People in America who are genuinely upset by what they see don't feel like they can do much about it, but they can tweet about that guy who tears down flyers or argue over a slogan and its meaning, as though that's the real problem.

I don't think the answer to inadequate empathy given to one side should ever be to minimize the pain of the other side.

Since even regarding Palestinians as categorically "human" is seemingly controversial and can get one reprimanded, fired, or ostracized, it's a little difficult for many people I know to take seriously the idea that there is any minimization of pain on the Israeli side.

the amount and nature of minimization probably depends on whom you're listening to / getting into arguments with

If the title were to read “Save The Hostages By Bombing The Shit Out Of Gaza” I would take it down, because I disagree with it and protest against it

I think the latter is implied to certain people, and the posters are probably being removed for this reason

This is probably fair, though its difficult to imagine bombing Gaza would be beneficial to any hostages. But I take your point that while it doesn't say that people can read a variety of different things into a message. Its still surprising to me all the same

they can tweet about that guy who tears down flyers or argue over a slogan and its meaning, as though that's the real problem.

Obviously its not the real problem, but I think potentially it is A problem?

exactly I mean you turn on the news and they are just talking about the hostages nonstop. and you know for every single one of those hostages the Israeli government has killed at least 10 children and they just do not mention it at all.

I just don't think there's a tenable position that you should silence people talking about atrocities in order to prevent hate. I get the dilemma of it, but it just doesn't seem like that can work.

I get that and think it's dumb to tear down those posters but I also think it's gonna be very hard to prevent hate when you send a very clear message that Israeli lives matter and Palestinian lives very much do not. what Israel is doing right now is going to inflict a generational trauma upon an entire nation and I'm not sure how much the Palestinian people are going to be willing to forgive and forget when half their family winds up brutally massacred for basically no reason other than their apparent love of hitting civilian targets

Its not just dumb, its counter-productive, as it can easily be perceived as saying "these lives don't matter" - haven't said Israeli because many of them weren't.

Also the people tearing down the posters don't generally seem to be Palestinian, for the most part at least

I think the posters are going to be fine

I'm not sure I have anything helpful to add here, but on the topic of bait, it's bothering me that the tweet-video Josh posted initially was from a writer for the far-right Daily Wire. That UC Davis prof who rightfully was condemned for her murderous tweet about journalists' children—after the screenshot got posted I googled it b/c janky screenshots are so easily faked: the first sources I saw were all right-wing rags whose headlines led with the fact the prof is trans. That doesn't mitigate what she wrote and it wasn't fake, though her account was private—again, I don't think that matters in terms of her clearly not deserving to hold a position of authority over students. I guess I just feel sick about how the raw emotion and justifiable fear and rage people are feeling is so easily co-opted by vicious ghouls who see this conflict as just another field to wage their ongoing culture war on

yeah, I've been uncomfortable with a lot of these videos, because of the sources posting them, though at the same time that doesn't negate what is being posted.

I was just struck by the number of them. I didn't notice the sources specifically but I did partly wonder if they were for real at first as this stuff can be misleading too. Presumably its not just being covered by Daily Wire type outlets though?

I've seen them posted from sources I would consider liberal but also pro Israel, too.

fuck the fucking posters

New board description.

Years of let’s go brandon stickers have conditioned me to take any uniform application of print media (flyers, stickers, handouts, billboards etc) as republican astroturfing and the speed and uniformity of the posters themselves make me raise an eyebrow even if, sure, free hostages we should absolutely be on board that

Since even regarding Palestinians as categorically "human" is seemingly controversial and can get one reprimanded, fired, or ostracized, it's a little difficult for many people I know to take seriously the idea that there is any minimization of pain on the Israeli side.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Tuesday, October 31, 2023 9:37 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

On CNN? No. On the left? Absolutely. Not to mention outright denial, conspiracy theory, it was actually the israeli military who killed them all, etc.

Where are you seeing that?

All over Twitter. Including accounts with pretty large followings.

Why I avoid Twitter pt. 233

yeah, note to self to get off twitter again

yes I highly recommend staying off Twitter right now, as bad as it would normally be floating all Elon's paypigs to the top makes it even worse

Those people are not “the Left” They are just a different strain of tinfoil folk.

There are lots of outright Nazis on Twitter being pro-palestinian for clout from dum-dums

@purplechrain had a good thread about this phenomenon a few days ago

Including accounts with pretty large followings.

Second Thought? Hasan Piker? Galloway? Theres a few of these, does depend on your definition of left to some extent tho

fwiw, there's a new NYT article about the posters that purports to identify some of the people behind them:

To Nitzan Mintz, one of the artists behind the fliers, watching them go viral in the first place was a shock. Seeing people rip down the posters has revealed what she said was clear antisemitism. “By accident this campaign did more than bring an awareness of the kidnapped people,” she said. “It brought awareness of how hated we are as a community.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/31/nyregion/israel-gaza-kidnapped-poster-fight.html

I’m seeing quite a bit of conspiratorial thinking about Shani Nouk and how/who killed her, or if she really was killed, but I know her family finally provided DNA sample material from her and her still-missing boyfriend two days before her death was reported by the Israeli government. That makes sense and none of the crankbots had that info. My friend is trying to help the family of the boyfriend locate him, and had been trying to organise getting DNA samples to the correct authorities since the original attack.

Just walked past a poster with the exact same design as the ones we were discussing but with the picture of a child and a text about how she was killed by Israel in Gaza.

anvil which conspiracy theories did Hasan Piker endorse?

Re: Piker, I was just querying man alive as to whether that might who. I've not seen much of what he's said, but other than the "large following" tag, the other reason I thought that might be who he was referring to was the Second Thought people he's connected with saying the people that were killed by Hamas weren't civilians and were therefore legitimate targets. Obviously thats not conspiracy thinking but I thought it fit into the broader picture of what man alive was referring to as he wasn't only referring to conspiracy stuff in his post

Generally I think its more a mixture of carelessness and misinformation than conspiracy stuff. To be fair there's a lot of this from all angles at the moment and its difficult to follow, but with the hospital incident that was reported as an Israeli strike but turned out to be a Hamas misfire (I think? I'm still not 100% clear on this myself), Hasan was listening to footage and confidently saying "oh yes that sounds like a JDAM 257A alright".

But it was more a case of asking man alive who he meant, and these were the only possible examples I could think of

Ok, I have a mate who's a big Hasan fan and if dude was spreading any misinformation I'd want to flag that up for him.

I think the hospital thing remains tbd and probably will be for decades, agreed it's a bad look to play military/detonation expert on the internet tho.

anyone with any sense knows that Israel bombed that hospital.

Those words help nothing and no one, and are counterproductive to convincing anyone “without any sense”. If you think the “we don’t know?” row are not worth convincing then okay, I disagree, but post at will. Just maybe not in the “is this anti-semitism” thread?

Well, this wraps up that Cornell incident:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndny/pr/cornell-student-arrested-making-online-threats-jewish-students-campus

Those words help nothing and no one, and are counterproductive to convincing anyone “without any sense”. If you think the “we don’t know?” row are not worth convincing then okay, I disagree, but post at will. Just maybe not in the “is this anti-semitism” thread?

Thank you for apologising ❤️

Those people are not “the Left” They are just a different strain of tinfoil folk.

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes), Tuesday, October 31, 2023 11:08 AM bookmarkflaglink

I think it's important to keep an eye on what even the tinfoil folk are saying though. The lesson people should have learned from nutcases like Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green is not to dismiss them. They are now the GOP.

I think it's important to keep an eye on what even the tinfoil folk are saying though

100%. Pikers mates Second Thought have 1.6 million subscribers on YouTube and tells their audience the hostages aren't actually civilians. Aaron Mate and Jimmy Dore have both spoken at the UN. Galloway has a large audience.

Whether these people are actually left or not doesn't really matter, they present as left, and they target left-leaning audiences. At the very least they have reach in places Marjorie Taylor Green can't hope to compete in. Saying "these people aren't left" doesnt matter if other people think they are and listen to them. Or if people like Hasan Piker are adjacent to them and present them as left, at which point it becomes a case of who is doing the deciding of what "the left" is or not, and waving them away and saying "they don't count" I don't really think works

This is quite a sleight of hand though, someone said that there were conspiracy theorists “on the left” saying that Israel actually killed its own citizens, which is a tinfoil position and one just as likely to be held by an MTG type. And now Anvil is talking about Hasan Piker and Aaron Mate, neither of whom I’d classify as tinfoil. (Dore is just a moron.)

I went to a Howard Zinn a few months after 9/11 and there was a guy in the audience saying that Israel was behind the attacks, and Zinn just said, “Well, we’ll probably never know who was behind it.” So yes I know there is a strain of conspiracy thinking on the left, but I don’t think of those people as Leftists but rather paranoid thinkers who happened to latch onto the left side of the spectrum.

Its not an intentional sleight of hand!

Where this originated was man alives post which included conspiracy theorists alongside denial, which itself originated out of an earlier post about minimising Israeli pain. I was attempting to address the broader picture of all these things rather than conspiratorial thinking specifically, though other posts in between concentrated on conspiracy thinking specifically, so I think thats partly where the confusion stems from as both conversations were overlapping

So in that bigger picture is where I was including things like "hostages are legitimate targets not civilians" and Hasan authoritative take on the hospital strike based on the sound of a missile.

As to Mate, I've no idea if he is tinfoil or not over Palestine/Israel, but I consider him to be tinfoil over both Syria and Ukraine, as with Max Blumenthal and others in the Greyzone space, which has also leaned into covid conspiratorialism somewhat also

Yes the assertion was that there was minimization of pain on the Israeli side. As well as conspiracy theories.

Someone asked where they are seeing that and it was unclear whether the reference to "the left" was to one or the other.

Don't see a reason to gatekeep that antisemitism exists. Or that bad actors might be motivated to present it as coming from the left.

I've long detected a steady presence of anti-semitism from both the left *and* the right, and often the middle as well. Ignorance is pretty evenly distributed, and there are so few Jews that even ostensible allies or innocents typically don't know much about Jews or Judaism and accidentally fall into anti-semitism. That's the nature of anti-semitism, it's pretty pervasive. Israel aside, the minimization of Jewish suffering is part of the gestalt, as per the "Jews don't count" response to Jewish (mis)representation, in media and elsewhere. Imo.

Can I ask a question of Jewish folks here re: some of what yr getting at, JiC?

Don't worry everyone, Upenn has got this:

https://antisemitism-action-plan.upenn.edu/

https://x.com/RachelJessWolff/status/1719901617305084373?s=20

Apologies for reposting a fed soccer, but is there any reason someone like this shouldn't be "canceled" (also a good callback to the discussion of the overlap between 'the z-word' and just outright antisemitism)

like is it unreasonable to say that this person should not be in a student-facing job in the school of foreign service at Georgetown?

It is sometimes astonishing to me what people who want to have academic careers feel comfortable posting publicly.

her tweets are from 2015....as I found out from this interesting database:

https://canarymission.org/individual/Aneesa_Johnson

here is seemingly every student in America who ever supported BDS:

https://canarymission.org/students

Anyway I'm not shedding any tears for that anti-semite getting fired, but am I wrong to find this campaign creepy as hell?

no

how do you respond to these things - you're asked to condemn something which is unambiguously bad (those tweets) or sometimes more ambiguous but in the former case it seems easy and necessary to condemn - but what agenda does your condemnation serve? or is that even relevant when it should be condemned regardless? but are you helping them pursue a sort of ethnic cleansing in the intellectual sphere by doing so, given that the will and resources to censure this stuff just aren't there for equivalently racist things about (eg) arabs or muslims?