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   HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:55 JST HeavenlyPossum

   Objecting to bad things doesn’t require moral perfection. Demanding that someone first condemn all bad things before condemning one bad thing is lazy sophistry.

   It’s also the case that Israel’s actions are uniquely reviled around the world and that people are quick to rally to oppose its crimes in ways that they are not willing to publicly oppose and condemn the crimes of other state actors. I saw previously few rallies when the Ethiopian government was murdering a million or more Tigrayans, mostly by starving them to death.

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:50 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     • violetmadder
     • 🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸

     @violetmadder @lednabwm

     Jesus was murdered by the Romans on behalf of the creditor class for demanding the restoration of the Jewish religious obligation to forgive debts; I have a hard time blaming him for the bad things that people do in his name that they already wanted to do anyway.

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     🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸 (lednabwm@mstdn.party)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:51 JST 🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸

     in reply to

     • violetmadder

     @violetmadder @HeavenlyPossum

     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸 (lednabwm@mstdn.party)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:52 JST 🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸

     in reply to

     • violetmadder

     @violetmadder @HeavenlyPossum

     Tend? 🤣😂🤣😂🤣😂

   • Embed this notice
     violetmadder (violetmadder@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:52 JST violetmadder

     in reply to

     • 🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸

     @lednabwm @HeavenlyPossum

     You know, like oceans tend to be wet...

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     🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸 (lednabwm@mstdn.party)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:53 JST 🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum Ask yourself what the common denominator is in your examples; it's evil and ignorant militant abrahamic monotheisms....

   • Embed this notice
     violetmadder (violetmadder@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:53 JST violetmadder

     in reply to

     • 🍸Pooka🥕Boo🍸

     @lednabwm @HeavenlyPossum

     Those do tend to kill an awful lot of people, don't they?

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:54 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Causes sometimes also become popular by being popular, in the same way that the Mona Lisa is a good but not exceptional painting that became famous for being famous.

     Mumia Abu-Jamal is one of countless people imprisoned in the US but became *the* cause celebre prisoner among the activist left primarily by being famous. Entirely separate from any question of the worthiness of his cause is the simple fact that calls for his release, and *only* him by name, have been omni-present at countless and entirely unrelated leftist events.

     I suspect Israel is an example of this process, by which the prominence of activism against Israeli crimes reinforces its prominence in a positive feedback loop.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:54 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     But it is also an inescapable fact that the world’s only Jewish state is also the target of a considerable proportion of the world’s public hostility to aggression and abuse by world governments.

     Israel does many bad things. It is also not *uniquely* bad. There are many states that do many bad things around the world, to their own subjects and people across borders, that don’t receive anything like the volume and intensity of criticism that Israel does.

     Some of the same people will say, with a straight face, that Ukrainian resistance to Russian state aggression is invalidated by the existence of the Azov brigade and that criticism of Hamas is tantamount to Nazism.

     We cannot lose sight of anti-Semitism as a unique form of intersectional hatred that has operated *for at least a thousand years* in centuries of racial and class oppression and repeated genocides.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:54 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     I’m not in a position to evaluate which of these causes outweighs the other, and I’m sure I’m grossly oversimplifying a complex situation.

     One can object to Israel’s violence against Palestinians without first having established equal and comparable bona fides by condemning, say, the Saudi monarchy’s obscene and utterly pointless violence in Yemen. There are no teams but those with power and those without, my side always being on the side of those without power, and we don’t need to “both sides” every bad thing by identifying bad acts by a competing national team or racialized Other to condemn in balance.

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     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Tuesday, 31-Oct-2023 06:52:55 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     There are a variety of plausible reasons for this.

     Israel is supported by many of the governments of the countries in which these protests are occurring. Protests might be more likely in places where people feel like they might actually exert a policy impact.

     Israel is also extensively covered by the international press and, critically, English-language press.

     Conceptually, I suspect most Westerners have internalized the idea of Israel as “one of us” and react to Israeli crimes as belonging to “our side,” with a concomitant sense of personal responsibility and sense that Israel might actually listen.