If the issues are existential it raises the question what is the purpose of the marches? The placards? The chanting? It can’t be to change Professor Prawer’s mind. Can it?
The tradespeople trying to make an honest living who complain about the disruption to trade are not persuaded. The public are not persuaded. There are no people who were previously ignorant about the issues who now believe that “Palestine should be free”.
There may be some marchers who enjoy the self righteous condemnation of “oppressors” but their performative antipathy doesn’t actually persuade one person to ally with them. In fact, I suspect that your point about Australia being largely free of sectarian violence is a much stronger factor.
The marches remind the unaligned of the importance of pluralism, of tolerance and acceptance. And may actually reduce support. But the marchers don’t care, do they? Because the point is be seen to be righteous.
A narcissistic desire to judge others in the safety of a mob, without fear of any repercussions. A judgemental narcissism which has no purpose other than to feed the craving for self righteousness.
Thank you for this article and for your contribution to last night’s conversations.
Paul, this quote: “There may be some marchers who enjoy the self righteous condemnation of “oppressors” but their performative antipathy doesn’t actually persuade one person to ally with them. In fact, I suspect that your point about Australia being largely free of sectarian violence is a much stronger factor.” So much this. SO SO MUCH THIS.
If you support free speech in Australia, then you should vehemently oppose what is happening to Jacob Hersant.
He is about to go to jail for a Nazi salute. If you support free speech on principle, for everyone, this should be the top priority for all free speech supporters in Australia, including Jews.
What are free speech advocates in Australia doing for him? Why was this law even passed in the first place? Why are people going to jail for this?
The point of the mob marches, shutdowns, vandalism, threats, flag burnings, blacklists etc. is not to persuade, nor is it even to help anyone in Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon. Look at the most recent examples: throwing soup at priceless artworks and releasing insects into hotels and meetings.
The purpose is to make life so miserable not only for their perceived enemies, but for everyone else, that they give in to the mob’s demands only to make the misery and disruptions stop.
? First - please note, I am not American. Fortunately in Australia we did not have much trouble. Secondly, I have never liked violent protest and I don’t care what the cause is or what peoples’ ethnicity is. I would definitely criticise people who robbed and looted.
Generalising about why people attend marches, rallies or protests (of any kind) is always going to fail. Ask people why they attend, if you want to know. Their reasons vary. The behaviour also varies.
Many at pro-Palestine rallies are peaceful and get unfortunately lumped in with a few who are vigilantes.
Having been to marches (about other things) and then seen how we were portrayed in the media, I will always give the benefit of the doubt. The media will only show what fits their narrative, which tends to be that the group demonstrating is very small and violent, and/or engaged in property damage. The police were always in the right. No matter how large and peaceful it really is. No matter how aggressive the police were.
That’s true too, from what I have heard from people who go to protests. However, I haven’t been to a protest for many moons, and never to one that got nasty (or allegedly nasty).
Excellent piece, Katy - I think you covered the ground comprehensively. I'm very pro-Israel - but partly because I'm very pro-pluralist liberal democracy. And the latter must trump the former.
I also hate popular-front politics and being told what to think generally.
The thing which confuses me is “Queers for Gaza”, right? You guys, you know homosexuality is fine in Israel and there’s a flourishing gay community there? And you know what Hamas does to gay and queer people??? (May as well be CHICKENS FOR KFC. Sorry. Particular gripe of mine, hence the all caps.)
Most probably Daniel Andrews, former ALP (and left-faction) Premier of Victoria, and world-famous lockdown-extremist (or at least with his cognisance and support);
The law was passed because the ALP were the elected majority government in Victoria, and the opposition is such a confused and directionless hot mess that they don't have the ability (or integrity) to block or hinder anything the very statist/socialist Victorian ALP want to pass.
There is an interesting discussion to be had on the German/Austrian "edge case" on nazi-salute banning. I think there's probably an arguable case for banning given their unique history. But that's another story.
I agree with your 'sticks and stones' concept. While I do not support anti-semites, I would prefer to know who my enemies are, and to be able to converse with them to make them see me as human like them. The alternative to speaking with your enemies is usually violence. Regulating speech beyond a bare minimum doesn't make offensive political views go away - it just takes them underground and gives rise to a victim complex for those that hold them.
This being said, when speech already turns to (objective) harassment, intimidation and incitement of violence - we are already at the point of violence - so that is where I draw the line to regulate speech - it is speech that is objectively no longer in service of having a good faith discussion to resolve differences, but it is speech that is in service of violence.
We already have made intimidation and harassment offences in various contexts. Look at s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, or the case law on assault. It is objectively determined by a judge by asking whether a reasonable person would consider it intimidation or harassment etc.
Someone always holds power to make these determinations in any society. The question is who, and the degree to which they are impartial. And while there will always be individual cases where a judge goes too far or just gets it wrong, that is the purpose of the appeals process. Overall, I think we do it pretty well in Australia and am happy to defer it to a judge rather than to some other person.
And no, I do not support politically partisan judges like what happens in the US. Thankfully we don't have that here (or at least not on the same level).
As for speech being regulated to support whoever is in power...I have little to say on this. If that principle were to be applied to your own substack writings by our current government, much of your speech would be criminalised, and unfortunately, as I have said in my earlier post, the alternative to speaking to your adversaries is violence. I prefer peace.
This is my place. I consider it equivalent to having people around to a dinner party and having a civil discussion. Free speech is one thing, but I don’t have to let you into my house and have you abuse other commenters and make up conspiracies. You’re banned. This is not a productive or useful discussion. Goodbye, farewell.
Great post Katy! Just wanted to highlight one perhaps interesting fact about the mobbing of individual academics and why it's done. To answer the why, we need to know the who. Often times it is radically charged students who are vying for their own professional space in the academic market. By pushing the professor out, doctoral students make space for themselves increasing their own recruitment opportunity. Masters students might get a bit picky LLM dissertation supervisor out. Undergrads might get a course canned. Each student who participates in mobbing hopes to benefit something material. In short, I don't think it's all ideological/virtue signalling rather it's very much about a material gain.
Gosh, I hadn’t thought about that. It is entirely possible this is the case.
The thing is - because these people were masked, we don’t know the who. Another friend of mine who specialises in mob psychology says that the masking also reduces inhibition.
So I used to write a pseudonymous blog. It wasn’t hard to crack the pseudonym; there are only so many red headed academics in Melbourne who are obsessed by remedies. My rule was - never do anything I’d be ashamed to have exposed before a court. Most particularly, before the judge I used to work for, who remains one of the best people I know. I would not like to disappoint him. This is the rule I continue to apply.
Nothing wrong with anonymous blogging. Many forget that in the heydays of internet it was all anon chat room, blogs and weird message boards. Now everyone is a cult preacher sort. It's almost like, "let me explain XYZ through my blog, video, show, etc."
I apply a similar rule: whatever I write today should be something I can publicly stand with.
While the proposal that employers should not punish employees for things irrelevant to their work product is... understandably attractive.... the sad fact of the matter is that as a matter of law, nearly all corporations are specifically designed to be, by human standards, high-functioning sociopaths.
Specifically, corporations follow the law, and the interests of their owners, and for publicly held corporations, the only interest their owners are known to have in common is money.
Which means that, yeah, if there's no law against firing an employee for bad PR, and if the angry internet mobs can credibly threaten that a corporation will lose more money by retaining the employee than by firing them.... the corporation usually has a clear fiduciary duty to drop the employee like a hot potato.
And it doesn't take much. Your average employee is going to have a revenue-advantage-over-replacement-minion of what, less than 10,000 dollars?
Are you Australian? We do have some laws that make it hard here - but the US is the inverse of Australia - ridiculously easy to fire someone in many cases, because the contracts are “at will”.
I suspected as much. So your employment contracts can be terminated very easily. It’s really difficult to do that in Australia because we have very strong industrial relations law, and people can sue for “unfair dismissal” in a large range of instances. In some ways, we’re the Anglosphere legal opposite of the US - the more I’ve looked at it, the more fascinated I’ve become. Maybe I need to write a post on it.
There’s always a balance. It can be a problem to not be able to dismiss someone who’s downright bad or incompetent. On the other hand, it means that our “cancel culture” is less fierce than the US. So I feel maybe the US has to make its employment contracts less precarious, because that’s contributing to the problem there. I doubt they’d want to become like us, however. That’s a specific aspect relating to our history, and the comparative strength of labour unions here - we’ve always had a very strong labour movement and concept of solidarity. Cf US where it’s all about individual freedom. YEAH. I think I am going to have to write a blog post. LOL. Thank you for prodding me.
It is possible to be anti Zionist without being antisemitic. Unfortunately at the moment, many people are not managing that balance - their views boil down to “get Jews out of the Middle East, because they are “colonisers”” which is so historically illiterate and lacking nuance that I can’t stand it - but it is possible. My favourite is the person who said, “The Jews should go back to where they came from.” UM. THEY DID! HEAD MEET DESK.
This is why I've always found land acknowledgements to be so silly. Jews reclaimed their ancient lands. They un-colonized it. Yet, oh so strangely, they are not celebrated for this. Odd, that.
Those Jews were from Russia, Poland, Belarus, Hungary, and Ukraine.
They didn't "uncolonize." They stole land where Palestinians had been living for generations. They literally steal Palestinian homes while the people are out.
Do any of you hear yourselves?
And if that is acceptable, everybody needs to shut up about what whites did in the US, Australia, and everywhere else. Who started the "decolonizing" nonsense in the first place? They have something in common with the people stealing Palestinian homes.
You clearly have not read the Old Testament, and you know nothing about Passover - how the Jews believe God gave Israel to them ~4000 years ago - and how the Babylonians and then the Romans expelled them from Israel and burned down their temple twice. The Romans built a triumphal arch with all the menorahs they stole and burned down. A lot of their religious practices reference the desire to go back to their homeland. Moreover ~60% of modern Jews are Mizrahi (expelled from Middle Eastern Muslim countries and sometimes with their property expropriated) so they can’t go back.
NB: I have Aboriginal ancestry in my mix. I think the decolonisation thing is ahistorical rubbish. All too often the people who spout it know nothing about the complexities of the history, and shove it into a simplistic rubric of “colonised”/“coloniser”.
Please ensure that you educate yourself more thoroughly about the history of a place. You will find that
You think Jews come from Russia, Poland, etc? You think that is our ancient homeland? You think we say “Next year in Krakow” every year at Passover seders? Israel is where we built a temple, where we made a stand at Masada. The land is dotted with towns whose names appear in scripture.
Is it possible that pro Palestinian, anti Israel speech is a disguise for antisemitism? Recently on Glenn Lourys Substack, talking about Te-Nehsi Coates new book the Message, which continues a pro Palestinian anti Israel narritive, one subscriber was ranting blatant Jew hatred, no discourse of Hamas genocide, just one sideism nonsense, much like Coates book. Then pops up an apologist in his defense trying to suggest the issue laid with me and not with the hate speech. What in the hell kind of gaslighting inversion, suppressing my expression of distaste at someone’s antisemitism is this 🤣
In my view, some criticism supposedly of Israel is clearly actually antisemitic (at the very worst, some of it seems to suggest that Jews should not exist at all) but not *all* criticism of Israel falls into this basket. This is why it’s complex.
I haven’t read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book; after reading an interview with him about the book, I decided I shouldn’t bother, precisely because of the “one-sideism” you identify. He did not come across as balanced. What frustrates me is people not knowing about the complexity of the history. At least I know *something* of the history and I don’t shove it into simplistic “good” versus “evil” rubrics.
Agreed, totally. Criticism of any state, country, ethnicity or belief is welcomed, debate is healthy and for us to arrive at some kind of reality of situations like the one in the Middle East with a vast complex history and many opposing narratives, it’s the manner in which it is done. The overt way in which the facts are presented and skewed in order to make false claims that arrive at hate and blaming just the Jews, is that I’m finding unjust and intolerable. The refusal when presented with new knowledge and facts to be ignored.
Human behavior is complex, and the invocation of religious doctrine can sometimes mask deeper socio-political and economic motivations. To attribute every act of violence solely to religious texts is to risk oversimplification, which may obscure the multifaceted nature of historical events.
With an intention to omit or deny the grievous events that have occurred under the guise of any ideology, including Islam. We must seek to approach these complex matters with a discerning mind, recognizing that the truth often resides between the extremes of opposing narratives . The application of reason demands that we scrutinize each claim, considering the socio-political contexts and the motivations behind actions, rather than attributing them solely to religious doctrine.
If the issues are existential it raises the question what is the purpose of the marches? The placards? The chanting? It can’t be to change Professor Prawer’s mind. Can it?
The tradespeople trying to make an honest living who complain about the disruption to trade are not persuaded. The public are not persuaded. There are no people who were previously ignorant about the issues who now believe that “Palestine should be free”.
There may be some marchers who enjoy the self righteous condemnation of “oppressors” but their performative antipathy doesn’t actually persuade one person to ally with them. In fact, I suspect that your point about Australia being largely free of sectarian violence is a much stronger factor.
The marches remind the unaligned of the importance of pluralism, of tolerance and acceptance. And may actually reduce support. But the marchers don’t care, do they? Because the point is be seen to be righteous.
A narcissistic desire to judge others in the safety of a mob, without fear of any repercussions. A judgemental narcissism which has no purpose other than to feed the craving for self righteousness.
Thank you for this article and for your contribution to last night’s conversations.
Paul, this quote: “There may be some marchers who enjoy the self righteous condemnation of “oppressors” but their performative antipathy doesn’t actually persuade one person to ally with them. In fact, I suspect that your point about Australia being largely free of sectarian violence is a much stronger factor.” So much this. SO SO MUCH THIS.
If you support free speech in Australia, then you should vehemently oppose what is happening to Jacob Hersant.
He is about to go to jail for a Nazi salute. If you support free speech on principle, for everyone, this should be the top priority for all free speech supporters in Australia, including Jews.
What are free speech advocates in Australia doing for him? Why was this law even passed in the first place? Why are people going to jail for this?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/09/jacob-hersant-nazi-salute-charges-jail-time-prosecution-ntwnfb
The point of the mob marches, shutdowns, vandalism, threats, flag burnings, blacklists etc. is not to persuade, nor is it even to help anyone in Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon. Look at the most recent examples: throwing soup at priceless artworks and releasing insects into hotels and meetings.
The purpose is to make life so miserable not only for their perceived enemies, but for everyone else, that they give in to the mob’s demands only to make the misery and disruptions stop.
Seriously, that’s what it feels like. “We will throw tantrums until you do what we want, even though most people don’t want this.”
I didn't see any of this when antiwhite BLM mobs were rampaging.
Odd now that this is acceptable to say.
I wonder what changed.
? First - please note, I am not American. Fortunately in Australia we did not have much trouble. Secondly, I have never liked violent protest and I don’t care what the cause is or what peoples’ ethnicity is. I would definitely criticise people who robbed and looted.
Generalising about why people attend marches, rallies or protests (of any kind) is always going to fail. Ask people why they attend, if you want to know. Their reasons vary. The behaviour also varies.
Many at pro-Palestine rallies are peaceful and get unfortunately lumped in with a few who are vigilantes.
Having been to marches (about other things) and then seen how we were portrayed in the media, I will always give the benefit of the doubt. The media will only show what fits their narrative, which tends to be that the group demonstrating is very small and violent, and/or engaged in property damage. The police were always in the right. No matter how large and peaceful it really is. No matter how aggressive the police were.
That’s true too, from what I have heard from people who go to protests. However, I haven’t been to a protest for many moons, and never to one that got nasty (or allegedly nasty).
Excellent piece, Katy - I think you covered the ground comprehensively. I'm very pro-Israel - but partly because I'm very pro-pluralist liberal democracy. And the latter must trump the former.
I also hate popular-front politics and being told what to think generally.
The thing which confuses me is “Queers for Gaza”, right? You guys, you know homosexuality is fine in Israel and there’s a flourishing gay community there? And you know what Hamas does to gay and queer people??? (May as well be CHICKENS FOR KFC. Sorry. Particular gripe of mine, hence the all caps.)
Ahhh, but now you're "pinkwashing Israeli genocide"...
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/pinkwashing-genocide-gaza
...and I wish I knew why spellcheck keeps allowing me to misspell "piece"....
Do you know about the Jacob Hersant case?
Do you support jail time for a Nazi salute?
Is jail time for that view acceptable in a liberal democracy? Who made that decision and why was the law passed in Australia?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/oct/09/jacob-hersant-nazi-salute-charges-jail-time-prosecution-ntwnfb
To take them one at a time:
Yes;
No;
No;
Most probably Daniel Andrews, former ALP (and left-faction) Premier of Victoria, and world-famous lockdown-extremist (or at least with his cognisance and support);
The law was passed because the ALP were the elected majority government in Victoria, and the opposition is such a confused and directionless hot mess that they don't have the ability (or integrity) to block or hinder anything the very statist/socialist Victorian ALP want to pass.
There is an interesting discussion to be had on the German/Austrian "edge case" on nazi-salute banning. I think there's probably an arguable case for banning given their unique history. But that's another story.
I agree with your 'sticks and stones' concept. While I do not support anti-semites, I would prefer to know who my enemies are, and to be able to converse with them to make them see me as human like them. The alternative to speaking with your enemies is usually violence. Regulating speech beyond a bare minimum doesn't make offensive political views go away - it just takes them underground and gives rise to a victim complex for those that hold them.
This being said, when speech already turns to (objective) harassment, intimidation and incitement of violence - we are already at the point of violence - so that is where I draw the line to regulate speech - it is speech that is objectively no longer in service of having a good faith discussion to resolve differences, but it is speech that is in service of violence.
Agreed.
We already have made intimidation and harassment offences in various contexts. Look at s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, or the case law on assault. It is objectively determined by a judge by asking whether a reasonable person would consider it intimidation or harassment etc.
Someone always holds power to make these determinations in any society. The question is who, and the degree to which they are impartial. And while there will always be individual cases where a judge goes too far or just gets it wrong, that is the purpose of the appeals process. Overall, I think we do it pretty well in Australia and am happy to defer it to a judge rather than to some other person.
And no, I do not support politically partisan judges like what happens in the US. Thankfully we don't have that here (or at least not on the same level).
As for speech being regulated to support whoever is in power...I have little to say on this. If that principle were to be applied to your own substack writings by our current government, much of your speech would be criminalised, and unfortunately, as I have said in my earlier post, the alternative to speaking to your adversaries is violence. I prefer peace.
This is my place. I consider it equivalent to having people around to a dinner party and having a civil discussion. Free speech is one thing, but I don’t have to let you into my house and have you abuse other commenters and make up conspiracies. You’re banned. This is not a productive or useful discussion. Goodbye, farewell.
Great post Katy! Just wanted to highlight one perhaps interesting fact about the mobbing of individual academics and why it's done. To answer the why, we need to know the who. Often times it is radically charged students who are vying for their own professional space in the academic market. By pushing the professor out, doctoral students make space for themselves increasing their own recruitment opportunity. Masters students might get a bit picky LLM dissertation supervisor out. Undergrads might get a course canned. Each student who participates in mobbing hopes to benefit something material. In short, I don't think it's all ideological/virtue signalling rather it's very much about a material gain.
Gosh, I hadn’t thought about that. It is entirely possible this is the case.
The thing is - because these people were masked, we don’t know the who. Another friend of mine who specialises in mob psychology says that the masking also reduces inhibition.
The whole wearing of masks is cowardly. I really hope Uni Melbourne takes strict action.
Very cowardly. The Celt in me does not approve. Show me your face, if you’re confronting me. Own your actions and your words.
I think we are in a generation where people hide behind masks, phones, anon accounts to convey their point. What a strange new world 🌍
So I used to write a pseudonymous blog. It wasn’t hard to crack the pseudonym; there are only so many red headed academics in Melbourne who are obsessed by remedies. My rule was - never do anything I’d be ashamed to have exposed before a court. Most particularly, before the judge I used to work for, who remains one of the best people I know. I would not like to disappoint him. This is the rule I continue to apply.
Nothing wrong with anonymous blogging. Many forget that in the heydays of internet it was all anon chat room, blogs and weird message boards. Now everyone is a cult preacher sort. It's almost like, "let me explain XYZ through my blog, video, show, etc."
I apply a similar rule: whatever I write today should be something I can publicly stand with.
While the proposal that employers should not punish employees for things irrelevant to their work product is... understandably attractive.... the sad fact of the matter is that as a matter of law, nearly all corporations are specifically designed to be, by human standards, high-functioning sociopaths.
Specifically, corporations follow the law, and the interests of their owners, and for publicly held corporations, the only interest their owners are known to have in common is money.
Which means that, yeah, if there's no law against firing an employee for bad PR, and if the angry internet mobs can credibly threaten that a corporation will lose more money by retaining the employee than by firing them.... the corporation usually has a clear fiduciary duty to drop the employee like a hot potato.
And it doesn't take much. Your average employee is going to have a revenue-advantage-over-replacement-minion of what, less than 10,000 dollars?
Are you Australian? We do have some laws that make it hard here - but the US is the inverse of Australia - ridiculously easy to fire someone in many cases, because the contracts are “at will”.
American.
I suspected as much. So your employment contracts can be terminated very easily. It’s really difficult to do that in Australia because we have very strong industrial relations law, and people can sue for “unfair dismissal” in a large range of instances. In some ways, we’re the Anglosphere legal opposite of the US - the more I’ve looked at it, the more fascinated I’ve become. Maybe I need to write a post on it.
There’s always a balance. It can be a problem to not be able to dismiss someone who’s downright bad or incompetent. On the other hand, it means that our “cancel culture” is less fierce than the US. So I feel maybe the US has to make its employment contracts less precarious, because that’s contributing to the problem there. I doubt they’d want to become like us, however. That’s a specific aspect relating to our history, and the comparative strength of labour unions here - we’ve always had a very strong labour movement and concept of solidarity. Cf US where it’s all about individual freedom. YEAH. I think I am going to have to write a blog post. LOL. Thank you for prodding me.
Well said. It’s difficult being in the middle.
I have just come across this article.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/oct/14/anti-zionist-beliefs-worthy-respect-uk-tribunal-finds-israel
It is possible to be anti Zionist without being antisemitic. Unfortunately at the moment, many people are not managing that balance - their views boil down to “get Jews out of the Middle East, because they are “colonisers”” which is so historically illiterate and lacking nuance that I can’t stand it - but it is possible. My favourite is the person who said, “The Jews should go back to where they came from.” UM. THEY DID! HEAD MEET DESK.
This is why I've always found land acknowledgements to be so silly. Jews reclaimed their ancient lands. They un-colonized it. Yet, oh so strangely, they are not celebrated for this. Odd, that.
Yeah. I mean, the cognitive dissonance is immense, but heck, the world seems to have gone mad.
Those Jews were from Russia, Poland, Belarus, Hungary, and Ukraine.
They didn't "uncolonize." They stole land where Palestinians had been living for generations. They literally steal Palestinian homes while the people are out.
Do any of you hear yourselves?
And if that is acceptable, everybody needs to shut up about what whites did in the US, Australia, and everywhere else. Who started the "decolonizing" nonsense in the first place? They have something in common with the people stealing Palestinian homes.
You clearly have not read the Old Testament, and you know nothing about Passover - how the Jews believe God gave Israel to them ~4000 years ago - and how the Babylonians and then the Romans expelled them from Israel and burned down their temple twice. The Romans built a triumphal arch with all the menorahs they stole and burned down. A lot of their religious practices reference the desire to go back to their homeland. Moreover ~60% of modern Jews are Mizrahi (expelled from Middle Eastern Muslim countries and sometimes with their property expropriated) so they can’t go back.
NB: I have Aboriginal ancestry in my mix. I think the decolonisation thing is ahistorical rubbish. All too often the people who spout it know nothing about the complexities of the history, and shove it into a simplistic rubric of “colonised”/“coloniser”.
Please ensure that you educate yourself more thoroughly about the history of a place. You will find that
life is less embarrassing…
You think Jews come from Russia, Poland, etc? You think that is our ancient homeland? You think we say “Next year in Krakow” every year at Passover seders? Israel is where we built a temple, where we made a stand at Masada. The land is dotted with towns whose names appear in scripture.
Is it possible that pro Palestinian, anti Israel speech is a disguise for antisemitism? Recently on Glenn Lourys Substack, talking about Te-Nehsi Coates new book the Message, which continues a pro Palestinian anti Israel narritive, one subscriber was ranting blatant Jew hatred, no discourse of Hamas genocide, just one sideism nonsense, much like Coates book. Then pops up an apologist in his defense trying to suggest the issue laid with me and not with the hate speech. What in the hell kind of gaslighting inversion, suppressing my expression of distaste at someone’s antisemitism is this 🤣
In my view, some criticism supposedly of Israel is clearly actually antisemitic (at the very worst, some of it seems to suggest that Jews should not exist at all) but not *all* criticism of Israel falls into this basket. This is why it’s complex.
I haven’t read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book; after reading an interview with him about the book, I decided I shouldn’t bother, precisely because of the “one-sideism” you identify. He did not come across as balanced. What frustrates me is people not knowing about the complexity of the history. At least I know *something* of the history and I don’t shove it into simplistic “good” versus “evil” rubrics.
Agreed, totally. Criticism of any state, country, ethnicity or belief is welcomed, debate is healthy and for us to arrive at some kind of reality of situations like the one in the Middle East with a vast complex history and many opposing narratives, it’s the manner in which it is done. The overt way in which the facts are presented and skewed in order to make false claims that arrive at hate and blaming just the Jews, is that I’m finding unjust and intolerable. The refusal when presented with new knowledge and facts to be ignored.
Human behavior is complex, and the invocation of religious doctrine can sometimes mask deeper socio-political and economic motivations. To attribute every act of violence solely to religious texts is to risk oversimplification, which may obscure the multifaceted nature of historical events.
With an intention to omit or deny the grievous events that have occurred under the guise of any ideology, including Islam. We must seek to approach these complex matters with a discerning mind, recognizing that the truth often resides between the extremes of opposing narratives . The application of reason demands that we scrutinize each claim, considering the socio-political contexts and the motivations behind actions, rather than attributing them solely to religious doctrine.
Oh it won’t let me add the screen shot to show you I’ll add you to this pro terror idealist drivel
Here’s one right now lol