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She’s supposed to be out flying around the world so Der Spiegel can mock her for using fossil fuels.
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The other obvious parallel to 2001 is that the response to the terror attack has been a rush to war as the only acceptable response, and most of the media is in full lock-step with this view, seeking to smear and discredit anyone who calls for peace. And just as it was with the invasion of Afghanistan and that of Iraq, it is online where you see the greatest pushback against the agreed narrative.
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Oh, for fuck’s sake, really Der Spiegel?
I was struck by, “…Israel, which they view as an imperial settler state”
I mean… it is, objectively, that. You can have different feelings about it, but that’s what it is.
It’s not “collateral damage” if you’re intending to target civilians in the first place (which numerous Israeli government officials have made clear was the point).
And I’d further argue that claiming anti-Zionism (or anti-Netanyahu) is antisemitism is itself antisemitic.
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It’s like saying anyone who disapproves off the Vatican’s generations-long coverup of child sex abuse is anti-Jesus.
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And there are a notable minority who aren’t anti-semitic when they believe that. No Nations, No Borders means NO Nations, NO Borders. All flags are black in a fire.
People didn’t complain when I said that Britain and England shouldn’t exist.
When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for that great structure wherein all nationalities shall be united into a universal brotherhood, — a truly FREE SOCIETY.
Emma Goldman
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“Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?”
The context is that it’s about Greta Thunberg (and her specific statements).
If an article includes the take that Greta Thunberg is antisemitic because she’s expressing sympathy with a civilian population undergoing genocide, the article and its apologists can’t make any appeal to fucking complexity. That’s not a nuanced take. Hell, it’s not a sane one, either.
I’m sorry, “one sided” support for a civilian population being indiscriminately killed? Oh no, how horrible. Both sides! (What’s both sides, here, in this situation? “They’re being killed, but… genocide is sometimes good?”) If it’s mandatory to mention October 7th, why stop there? Why not go through the whole litany of 75+ years of atrocities? It’s not being a Hamas apologist to admit that Oct 7th didn’t happen in a vacuum either.
The Israeli government itself (i.e. Netanyahu and his fellow Likud fascists) pretty much forced a situation where we’re not discussing October 7th because they responded to an atrocity by immediately launching their own atrocity that’s orders of magnitude worse. It kind of overshadows everything else - especially since it’s ongoing. The idea that decent people can’t respond to a current horror without “contextualizing” it (but only in certain ways!) is like saying, “I see you shouting ‘stop’ while someone is being murdered, but I don’t see you decrying every other crime that happened in this neighborhood!”
Let’s… not stray into being a genocide apologist here, okay?
She’s not an elected leader with a constituency she represents, which makes this a pretty absurd statement. What you’re really saying is, “She doesn’t have the right to speak.”
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It’s like responding to gunfire from one firearm by hurling numerous grenades… only 1000x worse.
SSDD.
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… looks like the problem here is they’re asking the rest of the world to sympathize with how complicated it is in Germany, for ethnic Germans. “Oh dear how will we ever figure out the right thing to say? It’s all so fraught!”
when obviously it’s not about them, and the rest of us aren’t terribly interested in their opinions
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Nation-states are modern inventions that go along with the whole capitalist structure. As such, they’re seen (by anarchists, and some others) as inherently oppressive to freedoms of human beings - which, they kind of actually are.
Whether you agree with that position or not - Let’s not pretend that these things exist since the beginning of time, and are naturally occurring entities that have never changed over time. Borders are fictions made by human beings and have radically changed over the course of even the post 100 years or so… Not a single modern nation-state existed as they do today 1000 or 5000 years ago. To say they did is just a lie that flies in the face of all historical evidence. You can certainly make the argument that’s the best way to organize the world (and people will strongly disagree with you for any number of reasons), but to say that they’re not human being is just wrong.
Also, maybe tone down the condescension a little bit there. Just because you don’t agree with a point doesn’t necessitate dismissing it out of hand with a sneer.
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Yeah, it’s not just the bombings, bad as they are, but withholding food, water and electricity - and systematically destroying hospitals and infrastructure. It’s methodical mass death where millions of lives are currently being threatened (which also means there’s a moral imperative at play in response that doesn’t exist when the atrocity has already been committed).
I was reading a recent story about some immigrants to Germany who were taking a Holocaust education class, and their takeaway from the history was, “Oh no, this could happen to us!” Which, given the violent rhetoric and acts non-white immigrants experience in Germany, was completely reasonable. The (white, non-Jewish) people giving the class, however, were really upset - this apparently was not the “lesson” they had intended them to learn, so they kicked them out of the class… It never occurred to the Germans that it wasn’t about them, and the lesson they learned (“this terrible thing happened to other people, and won’t happen again”) wasn’t going to match up with that of others whose lived experiences of modern Germany wasn’t the same as theirs.
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There are two take aways from a solid education about the holocaust… one is the very limited kind, which doesn’t argue for any possible larger implications - it’s specific to the Jewish people living in central Europe (or all of Europe, really) during the 30s and 40s, and with the end of the war, that was over and now the founding of Israel has fixed the problem - no larger message to take away about the possibilities of this kind of thing happening to others in other places (or in Germany to others) because it’s a “sonderweg” that could never be a problem in any other western democratic nation or in modern Germany, because LOOK AT ALL EDUCATION AND MEMORIALS!!! The “problem” has been fixed… It’s just denial that a larger lesson is possible. It’s never again to the Jews only, in other words.
The larger lesson we should learn is that the forces at play, while specific to the Holocaust and germany in general, can teach us lessons about bigotry, state power, othering, and inequality (etc), that are still a very real possibility in the world as it exists today. As long as the kind of “insider/outsider” dynamics are a play in the building and maintaining of modern states, the mass slaughter of people for just being who they are (which could be nearly any minority group, not just the Jewish people) is a real possibility that must be watched for. Never again the Jewish people, but also never again ANY group…
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I appreciate the response, and it wasn’t my intention to make those arguments, disagree with that point, or dismiss it out of hand with a sneer.
I do realize that this was perhaps a poor time to attempt what I intended as a lighthearted Tom Stoppard reference. And for that part, I do apologize.
*Edit to add that on review, I made that same reference the last time the topic came up and I’m not entirely sure it was funny then either.
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… which kind of irony is that 
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So much this.
Years ago around ANZAC Day (the Australian social equivalent of Memorial Day or Remembrance Day), I read a comment by someone whose father won medals for shooting nazis in World War II, to the effect of “My father always told me: If a bunch of people as educated and civilized as the Germans can fall for this nonsense, the rest of us had better watch out.”
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Well said. Thank you.
Which complacency led to the bloody AfD becoming the third largest party in the Bundestag in 2017. That places the shame for Germans in regard to giving fascists and bigots power a lot more recently than 1945; especially since Identitarians there like Jews only slightly more than the brown-skinned immigrants who are the current open focus of their hate.
Fascism and violent bigotry are once again everyone’s problem, including citizens of both Germany and Israel.
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We expect Muslims to condemn Islamic State, and rightly so, because an Islamic State is a fundamentally terrible idea and only benefits the fundamentalists.
We should, by the same logic, recognise that arming and funding a Jewish state is an equally terrible idea.
See also Christian states, ethnostates…
I guess, when you solve for X,
All states are a bad idea.
But a secular state that treats all citizens equally, regardless of race or religion, is better than whatever the fuck Isra3l is.
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What is this nonsense. She has to live in your box? Can’t have public opinion on other issues without gathering “consensus” (i.e. permission) from some nebulous group which presumably includes you.
P.S. You uncritically posting this stuff is the exact problem here: “They say Zionism, but it’s against Jews.”
I can’t believe you thought that full context made it better. That opinion is antisemitic targeting of leftist Jews. You’re attacking their Jewishness, equating it with support for a fascist government.
P.P.S. I’ll spend time protesting Hamas when my government starts sending them bombs.
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