5 ms·

They were provided with a quite plausible motivation. What is the plausible motivation in your scenario?

noduerme 1y ago
I appreciate what you're saying, but plausibility is a funny way to put it, since such a motivation would not have been plausible prior to Oct 7. Before that, I was a curious minority, and they liked to congratulate themsleves on welcoming minorities. Since no one had any problem with me before Oct 7th and then within days of seeing a lot of Jews killed, they apparently all got the bloodlust, I can only conclude that what makes this "plausible" is that they innately have some quantum of racism that, having been forced to suppress themselves so long and not criticize anyone, they're overjoyed to find a group of people to unleash it on. Particularly if they can call those people "white" like themselves, as a way to offset the shame they've been taught. Of which external group I'm probably the only one they've ever met. My only other Jewish acquaintance in the area - who is an absolute pacifist - has also been almost equally shunned out of every place. Except again, strangely, the Arabic-owned places. He works at one. So if by "plausible" you mean that, yes, you can imagine someone doing that, then you're right. If "plausible" means that you think it's justified, then that's another issue.
- throw99841216 1y ago
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  - dingnuts 1y ago
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    - viccis 1y ago
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      - noduerme 1y ago
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        viccis 1y ago
        >I think you have a blind spot to the fact that the war has been an excuse for people to go after Jews I don't think antisemites have ever needed excuses to justify their conduct to themselves or others. And I have yet to see any outcomes for Jews in the US or UK that even approach the consequences that Arabs and those who have vocally opposed Israel's actions have faced. >The very first thing I heard from most of the antifa people was some variation of "They had it coming." Imagine asking some Jewish friends in 1944 in Poland what they thought about the victims of the Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising. You have to put yourself in other peoples' shoes if you want to understand their perspective. >And with them, I can have a real conversation about the facts without any hatred or heated tempers. You actually can't. Arabs know very well that they are being racially scrutinized when it comes to their views about this conflict, and they all know that the best course of action is to be as loudly and visibly Not Mean To Jewish Or Israeli People. It's not a real conversation because the power balance is way off; you have the state apparatus behind you (assuming US or UK) as well as a wide range of doxxing and terrorizing organizations like Betar. There is no free speech when it comes to opinions on Israel in either country I mentioned. >It's indigenous homeland of the Jewish people. I'm well aware of the Blut und Boden narrative about it, and settler colonialism has made fantastic use of it many times in the past (Liberia for example). It is absolutely an ethnostate however, per its own government's legislation (the 2018 Nation-State Bill). An ethnostate can include preferential treatment to a variety of types of Jews (though not all, as many African ones are excluded or subjected to scrutiny not faced by European ones). >The fact that you have a problem with one particular ethno/religious state out of all the states in the Middle East and the world says plenty about your personal biases. I don't, and hell it ain't even just the Middle East. Ask me what I think about the Azeris...
        noduerme 1y ago
        [flagged]
    - pcthrowaway 1y ago
      > if you think it's okay to be rude to a Jewish person at a bar because of literally anything to do with Israel Look I don't have full context here, but more generally there's recently been a lot of conflating Judaism with "support of Israel". If a person is at a bar and you know they support Israel and you're "rude to them" (a subjective statement which can include telling them to re-calibrate their moral compass), then many people, myself included, think that's perfectly OK, regardless of whether that person is Jewish or not. To suggest it's somehow suddenly not OK if that person happens to be Jewish (but presumably it's fine if they're not Jewish?) is kind of ridiculous. I say this as a Jewish person with family in Israel also, who is completely over people (many in my family included) reducing criticism of Israel or intense disapproval of Israel to "antisemitism"
      - noduerme 1y ago
        You're talking about a political conversation in which people are discussing ideas. I'm talking about experiencing a situation in which people I've never even met are actively rude to me because someone told them I "support Israel". I'm perfectly willing to have a conversation about its faults and mistakes. That's not what's going on here. One can be Jewish and not support Israel. One can condemn Israeli policies without being an antisemite. But the reason you're seeing a lot of conflation is that a lot of Jews were murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped from their homes on 10/7, and the world took that as an opportunity to blame Israel and to discuss whether these Jews should really have a country at all. The singling out of Israel as an illegitimate state, out of all countries in the world, is antisemitic. Taking issue with its policies is one thing; taking issue with its right to exist is quite another. If only because the inescapable reality is this: The destruction of Israel would involve the deaths of millions of Jews who don't have any other country to go to. The world may not care, and you may not care, but they care, so they're not going to lay down and die.
        pcthrowaway 1y ago
        To be clear, I was responding to the insinuation that being rude to someone at a bar due to "literally anything to do with Israel" is antisemitic if they're Jewish. Of course being specifically rude to Jewish people due to their support of Israel is antisemitic, but being rude to people who support Israel is not (we can debate whether it's productive or deserved separately). But since you've gone out of your way to make your position here clearer, I'll offer my response: > But the reason you're seeing a lot of conflation is that a lot of Jews were murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped from their homes on 10/7 A lot of people, Jews and non-Jews were killed on 10/7 (perhaps you're unaware that the majority of casualties that day were not of Jews). > and the world took that as an opportunity to blame Israel and to discuss whether these Jews should really have a country at all "the world" really didn't jump to blaming Israel quite so unanimously on 10/7, though I'm sure those who were already fighting for Palestinian liberation, or who had a deeper awareness of the history surrounding the ongoing occupation, or who were already of the opinion that Palestinians were undergoing a genocide (prior to 10/7) likely thought it important to use the opportunity to raise awareness of the injustices Palestinians had faced since long before October 7. My own opinion at the time was largely "I don't know too much about the history besides what I learned in my Zionist school and from clearly Zionist friends/family, but as someone who appreciated the separation of church and state in the U.S. and Canada growing up, I disagree with religious statehood and ethno-nationalism... but perhaps a lot of the criticism of Israel is driven by antisemitism also and Zionists seem very convinced that it's justified and necessary in this one specific instance because of antisemitism." Since then, having spent much more time reading various narratives, I've come to entirely disagree with that. While yes, there is antisemitism, including among those who criticize Israel, it doesn't seem to me that it's any more common among anti-Zionists than it is among Zionists (believe it or not, many anti-semites support Israel). Furthermore, Westerners "singling out" Israel is much more evidently explained by the Western financial and military support of Israel (in addition to tampering in other middle-eastern affairs) which has enabled a litany of horrifying atrocities inflicted upon Palestinians to continue unchecked. > The destruction of Israel would involve the deaths of millions of Jews who don't have any other country to go to The end of Zionism does not mean the deaths of millions of Jews, any more than the end of Nazi Germany meant the deaths of millions of Germans (incidentally, it did because so many chose to lay down their lives in its defense, or in some cases were compelled to). Beyond the casualties in the war (which if we're being honest was more about stopping Germany's expansion than about liberating people from concentration camps and death camps), only a few high-ranking Nazi officials were put to death after the fall of the third reich; beyond the executions of those convicted of war crimes, Germany was indeed able to continue existing as a state which didn't brutally oppress marginalized groups; there weren't widespread executions of ethnic Germans as some may have feared, merely an end to the unjust system of supremacy. And this is exactly what so many who "single out" Israel are calling for; not "another genocide of Jews" as you're claiming, but a free Palestine for all.
- mapt 1y ago
  I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people. In this timeline, after a group of Hong Kong democracy activists planted bombs that killed a few hundred low-level people at the annual Chinese Communist Party meeting, China responded by announcing plans to bomb Hong Kong into rubble, rid themselves of the menace of democracy once and for all. And then when they heard this, your country announced that they unconditionally supported China in this effort, and would supply them all the bombs they needed to take down these Electoral Terrorists, eliminate every last one who wasn't an enthusiastic proponent of single-Party rule. That local democracy advocates in your country had long been concerned with the Hong Kong situation, had long protested the government's inexplicable support for China in this matter, but were shouted down by every political party and called racists by a consensus that seemed to really be interested in using China to counter the prospect of Indian international ambitions. That watching the bombs drop, and watching your national media invite Chinese people on air for segment after segments, your democracy activists found in discussions online that they weren't actually some kind of radical fringe, that basically everyone outside the media+government was tired of the CCP and tired of our unending support for it. There is a lot of nuance there, but what happened after Oct 7 is basically that Netanyahu & AIPAC, finally seeing an opportunity to answer the Gaza Question once and for all, jumped into their role as the villains in a pre-existing anti-semitic conspiracy theory, and proceeded to play the US like a puppet in order to effectuate a genocide. I can have a nuanced view here; I can separate Jewishness and Zionism. I can talk to you about all the Jewish students at those protests who were holding signs supporting Palestine. I can note the extreme divergence between age cohorts within the Jewish community in the US, I can point out that the US is the largest Jewish population in the world (larger than Israel), who are coexisting perfectly well with gentiles, and that this isn't to Netanyahu's benefit at all. But these people constantly tell us that there is no separation there, that it is antisemitic to be against Greater Israel, that these concepts are one and the same. If that's the case, and you still disfavor genocide, there are Implications. I can understand when some people misunderstand the situation; Antisemitism abroad is what Likud wants and needs to survive.
  - gspencley 1y ago
    > I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people. I'm not the person you are asking this question of but, after reading your comment carefully in full, I would like to answer on behalf of myself: I would feel absolutely no differently about any individual person of Chinese ethnicity or citizenship than I did before. Personally, I try to distinguish between the individual and perceived collective associations. And I try not project my personal opinions about global politics or my personal prejudices about a country onto individual friends and acquaintances that I hang out with at a local pub in a completely different country than the one we're discussing. My operating definition of "racism" is: "The religious belief that you can know the contents of an individual's mind and heart based on superficial characteristics - such as their skin colour, ethnicity or country of origin." You can bring your "nuanced" opinion of Israel into it all you want to. But to project that onto an individual in the context of hanging out with a group of friends fits my definition of "racism" exactly. And this would hold even if one were to, hypothetically, concede your opinion of Israel's actions entirely. Your post is a great example of why people so often brand attacks against Israel as "antisemitism." There is nothing wrong with being critical of a government and its policies, or of how a war is conducted. But to project those opinions and feelings onto an individual who is living in a completely different country and who has nothing to do with that conflict other than the fact that they hold citizenship or ethic affiliations is another matter entirely. One is "nuanced" opinion, possibly even objective if the individual is trying to be. The other is trying to mask and justify bigotry and prejudice behind an heir of intellectualism.
rightbyte 1y ago
The clique on pub B might talk down on the clique on pub A without any motivation but not B. Someone that doesn't notice that he is "hated" might also be susceptible to such low key social manipulation to be made believe he is hated. But ye, as I am not in clique A or B there is a lot of guesswork on my part and I cam't argue against someone else's story. I am just trying to bring up the possibility of bad mouthing.
- radlad 1y ago
  The word "hate" itself also offers a lot of room for interpretation.
dang 1y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750547.

I appreciate what you're saying, but plausibility is a funny way to put it, since such a motivation would not have been plausible prior to Oct 7. Before that, I was a curious minority, and they liked to congratulate themsleves on welcoming minorities. Since no one had any problem with me before Oct 7th and then within days of seeing a lot of Jews killed, they apparently all got the bloodlust, I can only conclude that what makes this "plausible" is that they innately have some quantum of racism that, having been forced to suppress themselves so long and not criticize anyone, they're overjoyed to find a group of people to unleash it on. Particularly if they can call those people "white" like themselves, as a way to offset the shame they've been taught. Of which external group I'm probably the only one they've ever met. My only other Jewish acquaintance in the area - who is an absolute pacifist - has also been almost equally shunned out of every place. Except again, strangely, the Arabic-owned places. He works at one. So if by "plausible" you mean that, yes, you can imagine someone doing that, then you're right. If "plausible" means that you think it's justified, then that's another issue.

throw99841216 1y ago
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- dingnuts 1y ago
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  - viccis 1y ago
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    - noduerme 1y ago
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      - viccis 1y ago
        >I think you have a blind spot to the fact that the war has been an excuse for people to go after Jews I don't think antisemites have ever needed excuses to justify their conduct to themselves or others. And I have yet to see any outcomes for Jews in the US or UK that even approach the consequences that Arabs and those who have vocally opposed Israel's actions have faced. >The very first thing I heard from most of the antifa people was some variation of "They had it coming." Imagine asking some Jewish friends in 1944 in Poland what they thought about the victims of the Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising. You have to put yourself in other peoples' shoes if you want to understand their perspective. >And with them, I can have a real conversation about the facts without any hatred or heated tempers. You actually can't. Arabs know very well that they are being racially scrutinized when it comes to their views about this conflict, and they all know that the best course of action is to be as loudly and visibly Not Mean To Jewish Or Israeli People. It's not a real conversation because the power balance is way off; you have the state apparatus behind you (assuming US or UK) as well as a wide range of doxxing and terrorizing organizations like Betar. There is no free speech when it comes to opinions on Israel in either country I mentioned. >It's indigenous homeland of the Jewish people. I'm well aware of the Blut und Boden narrative about it, and settler colonialism has made fantastic use of it many times in the past (Liberia for example). It is absolutely an ethnostate however, per its own government's legislation (the 2018 Nation-State Bill). An ethnostate can include preferential treatment to a variety of types of Jews (though not all, as many African ones are excluded or subjected to scrutiny not faced by European ones). >The fact that you have a problem with one particular ethno/religious state out of all the states in the Middle East and the world says plenty about your personal biases. I don't, and hell it ain't even just the Middle East. Ask me what I think about the Azeris...
        noduerme 1y ago
        [flagged]
  - pcthrowaway 1y ago
    > if you think it's okay to be rude to a Jewish person at a bar because of literally anything to do with Israel Look I don't have full context here, but more generally there's recently been a lot of conflating Judaism with "support of Israel". If a person is at a bar and you know they support Israel and you're "rude to them" (a subjective statement which can include telling them to re-calibrate their moral compass), then many people, myself included, think that's perfectly OK, regardless of whether that person is Jewish or not. To suggest it's somehow suddenly not OK if that person happens to be Jewish (but presumably it's fine if they're not Jewish?) is kind of ridiculous. I say this as a Jewish person with family in Israel also, who is completely over people (many in my family included) reducing criticism of Israel or intense disapproval of Israel to "antisemitism"
    - noduerme 1y ago
      You're talking about a political conversation in which people are discussing ideas. I'm talking about experiencing a situation in which people I've never even met are actively rude to me because someone told them I "support Israel". I'm perfectly willing to have a conversation about its faults and mistakes. That's not what's going on here. One can be Jewish and not support Israel. One can condemn Israeli policies without being an antisemite. But the reason you're seeing a lot of conflation is that a lot of Jews were murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped from their homes on 10/7, and the world took that as an opportunity to blame Israel and to discuss whether these Jews should really have a country at all. The singling out of Israel as an illegitimate state, out of all countries in the world, is antisemitic. Taking issue with its policies is one thing; taking issue with its right to exist is quite another. If only because the inescapable reality is this: The destruction of Israel would involve the deaths of millions of Jews who don't have any other country to go to. The world may not care, and you may not care, but they care, so they're not going to lay down and die.
      - pcthrowaway 1y ago
        To be clear, I was responding to the insinuation that being rude to someone at a bar due to "literally anything to do with Israel" is antisemitic if they're Jewish. Of course being specifically rude to Jewish people due to their support of Israel is antisemitic, but being rude to people who support Israel is not (we can debate whether it's productive or deserved separately). But since you've gone out of your way to make your position here clearer, I'll offer my response: > But the reason you're seeing a lot of conflation is that a lot of Jews were murdered, tortured, raped and kidnapped from their homes on 10/7 A lot of people, Jews and non-Jews were killed on 10/7 (perhaps you're unaware that the majority of casualties that day were not of Jews). > and the world took that as an opportunity to blame Israel and to discuss whether these Jews should really have a country at all "the world" really didn't jump to blaming Israel quite so unanimously on 10/7, though I'm sure those who were already fighting for Palestinian liberation, or who had a deeper awareness of the history surrounding the ongoing occupation, or who were already of the opinion that Palestinians were undergoing a genocide (prior to 10/7) likely thought it important to use the opportunity to raise awareness of the injustices Palestinians had faced since long before October 7. My own opinion at the time was largely "I don't know too much about the history besides what I learned in my Zionist school and from clearly Zionist friends/family, but as someone who appreciated the separation of church and state in the U.S. and Canada growing up, I disagree with religious statehood and ethno-nationalism... but perhaps a lot of the criticism of Israel is driven by antisemitism also and Zionists seem very convinced that it's justified and necessary in this one specific instance because of antisemitism." Since then, having spent much more time reading various narratives, I've come to entirely disagree with that. While yes, there is antisemitism, including among those who criticize Israel, it doesn't seem to me that it's any more common among anti-Zionists than it is among Zionists (believe it or not, many anti-semites support Israel). Furthermore, Westerners "singling out" Israel is much more evidently explained by the Western financial and military support of Israel (in addition to tampering in other middle-eastern affairs) which has enabled a litany of horrifying atrocities inflicted upon Palestinians to continue unchecked. > The destruction of Israel would involve the deaths of millions of Jews who don't have any other country to go to The end of Zionism does not mean the deaths of millions of Jews, any more than the end of Nazi Germany meant the deaths of millions of Germans (incidentally, it did because so many chose to lay down their lives in its defense, or in some cases were compelled to). Beyond the casualties in the war (which if we're being honest was more about stopping Germany's expansion than about liberating people from concentration camps and death camps), only a few high-ranking Nazi officials were put to death after the fall of the third reich; beyond the executions of those convicted of war crimes, Germany was indeed able to continue existing as a state which didn't brutally oppress marginalized groups; there weren't widespread executions of ethnic Germans as some may have feared, merely an end to the unjust system of supremacy. And this is exactly what so many who "single out" Israel are calling for; not "another genocide of Jews" as you're claiming, but a free Palestine for all.
mapt 1y ago
I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people. In this timeline, after a group of Hong Kong democracy activists planted bombs that killed a few hundred low-level people at the annual Chinese Communist Party meeting, China responded by announcing plans to bomb Hong Kong into rubble, rid themselves of the menace of democracy once and for all. And then when they heard this, your country announced that they unconditionally supported China in this effort, and would supply them all the bombs they needed to take down these Electoral Terrorists, eliminate every last one who wasn't an enthusiastic proponent of single-Party rule. That local democracy advocates in your country had long been concerned with the Hong Kong situation, had long protested the government's inexplicable support for China in this matter, but were shouted down by every political party and called racists by a consensus that seemed to really be interested in using China to counter the prospect of Indian international ambitions. That watching the bombs drop, and watching your national media invite Chinese people on air for segment after segments, your democracy activists found in discussions online that they weren't actually some kind of radical fringe, that basically everyone outside the media+government was tired of the CCP and tired of our unending support for it. There is a lot of nuance there, but what happened after Oct 7 is basically that Netanyahu & AIPAC, finally seeing an opportunity to answer the Gaza Question once and for all, jumped into their role as the villains in a pre-existing anti-semitic conspiracy theory, and proceeded to play the US like a puppet in order to effectuate a genocide. I can have a nuanced view here; I can separate Jewishness and Zionism. I can talk to you about all the Jewish students at those protests who were holding signs supporting Palestine. I can note the extreme divergence between age cohorts within the Jewish community in the US, I can point out that the US is the largest Jewish population in the world (larger than Israel), who are coexisting perfectly well with gentiles, and that this isn't to Netanyahu's benefit at all. But these people constantly tell us that there is no separation there, that it is antisemitic to be against Greater Israel, that these concepts are one and the same. If that's the case, and you still disfavor genocide, there are Implications. I can understand when some people misunderstand the situation; Antisemitism abroad is what Likud wants and needs to survive.
- gspencley 1y ago
  > I want you to think about how you would feel in a hypothetical about Chinese people. I'm not the person you are asking this question of but, after reading your comment carefully in full, I would like to answer on behalf of myself: I would feel absolutely no differently about any individual person of Chinese ethnicity or citizenship than I did before. Personally, I try to distinguish between the individual and perceived collective associations. And I try not project my personal opinions about global politics or my personal prejudices about a country onto individual friends and acquaintances that I hang out with at a local pub in a completely different country than the one we're discussing. My operating definition of "racism" is: "The religious belief that you can know the contents of an individual's mind and heart based on superficial characteristics - such as their skin colour, ethnicity or country of origin." You can bring your "nuanced" opinion of Israel into it all you want to. But to project that onto an individual in the context of hanging out with a group of friends fits my definition of "racism" exactly. And this would hold even if one were to, hypothetically, concede your opinion of Israel's actions entirely. Your post is a great example of why people so often brand attacks against Israel as "antisemitism." There is nothing wrong with being critical of a government and its policies, or of how a war is conducted. But to project those opinions and feelings onto an individual who is living in a completely different country and who has nothing to do with that conflict other than the fact that they hold citizenship or ethic affiliations is another matter entirely. One is "nuanced" opinion, possibly even objective if the individual is trying to be. The other is trying to mask and justify bigotry and prejudice behind an heir of intellectualism.

rightbyte 1y ago

The clique on pub B might talk down on the clique on pub A without any motivation but not B. Someone that doesn't notice that he is "hated" might also be susceptible to such low key social manipulation to be made believe he is hated. But ye, as I am not in clique A or B there is a lot of guesswork on my part and I cam't argue against someone else's story. I am just trying to bring up the possibility of bad mouthing.

radlad 1y ago
The word "hate" itself also offers a lot of room for interpretation.

dang 1y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750547.