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   NeonSnake (neonsnake@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-Feb-2024 22:12:13 JST NeonSnake

   I was chatting online with an acquaintance last night, a friend on the periphery of my circles who I don't talk to that often, and they asked me about the Israel/Palestine conflict, prompted by the mess that is the UK parliament right now.

   (Now - before anyone even *thinks* about suggesting to me that they should already know everything about it, they're *incredibly* ill with CFS, and have been bed-bound for several years. Anything above day-to-day survival is hard for them. That's not to say that they've ignored it or are ignorant of it, but they've not kept up with it to the same extent that a lot of us have)

   The bit that they didn't understand, once I'd given them my basic understanding of the history that led to it, is why our "leaders" aren't united in utterly condemning Israel's actions as out and out genocide.

   And I truly had no answer. Not even a "Look, this reason is clearly wrong and immoral, but this feeds into it. Like, people are so petrified of being accused of being Nazis, that they'll reflexively support Israel. Or, the only bigotry that the right-wing will denounce is antisemitism, because their whole identity is caught up in the so-called glory of WWII" and so on. It all sounded so hollow, even to me.

   I couldn't come up with *anything* that sounded even vaguely plausible - no matter how much I disagree with it myself - that wasn't transparently and obviously utter bollocks.

   Between this, plenty of other stuff, and Covid, my faith in humanity is at it's utter lowest right now.

   • Embed this notice
     Wherz Demloots (makberberovic@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-Feb-2024 22:12:12 JST Wherz Demloots

     in reply to

     @neonsnake Sounds like you're dancing around using the word evil when it exists for a reason. We are taught to see shades of grey but it causes us to ignore darkest black. Sometimes it's not grey, sometimes it's black. It's sometimes not rhetorically effective to call evil what it is, but that doesn't mean it's not evil.

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     NeonSnake (neonsnake@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-Feb-2024 22:22:29 JST NeonSnake

     in reply to

     • Wherz Demloots

     @MakBerberovic I think that's a fair comment, I *was* dancing around it, to an extent, because saying "It's because our leaders utter fucking evil cunts" (excuse my industrial-strength language) is hard to say to someone, sometimes, when they need some hope.

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     Wherz Demloots (makberberovic@kolektiva.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-Feb-2024 23:05:11 JST Wherz Demloots

     in reply to

     @neonsnake I don't blame you, for sure.