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edenfenixblogs · 2 months

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Some Excerpts As I Read

Reader Note: I have read The Color Purple and would never dismiss the importance of Alice Walker’s work. However, let’s not pretend that she’s too sacred to critique and treat like any other artist who does something racist. Her work to combat anti-black racism and highlight Black American struggles do not permit or excuse when she engages in other forms of bigotry.

I have never seen someone make a public stink about the extraordinarily racist poem, of which the section quoted above is only the tip of that particular racist iceberg.

In fact, I did not even know that Walker had written this horrible “poem” (if you can call an antisemitic diatribe with weird spacing a poem) —despite being very active in leftist spaces for my whole adult AND adolescent life and being an avid reader or both novels and poetry until 2023.

It was brought to my attention when she caught flak for being a TERF, as an incidental aside to prove that she was actually bigoted in several ways. A trait she ALSO shares with JK Rowling.

Look at these headlines. This is what comes up when I search “Alice walker transphobia.” They clearly label her as a TERF. But they do not make the same claim about her identity as BEING an antisemite. It is removed from her. Antisemitism is clearly not the focus here, which is fine. It is older news. These stories are reporting on her more recent bigotry. Cool.

These are the first results that come up when I search “alice walker antisemitism.”

The first result is from The Times of Israel, which makes sense, because that’s a place where a lot of Jews live and a lot of Jews will be upset by the things she wrote. But it also doesn’t make sense, because Walker is American. Why is the FIRST result about her antisemitism from an international newspaper that happens to have a large Jewish readership?

Why is the NYT headline about how Walker feels about her own bigotry, instead of how her Jewish readers feel?

The New York Magazine Article looked interesting so I clicked it. It was interesting. You should read it. It is an Op-Ed written by a Black, Jewish woman named Nylah Burton. Kudos to her. It was important. And non-Jews need to read it. It was written in 2018.

The Atlantic is next and primarily takes on the work of critiquing a different article in the New Yorker which also minimized the importance and harmful impact of antisemitism.

And then things get interesting. Still, on the first page of results, is this juxtaposition.

Among the many striking things here is the fact that the Jerusalem Post is writing from 2023. Al Jazeera is writing from 2019.

If you’ve read any of the above links or text you will note that yes, Alice Walker’s “offense” is indeed antisemitism. It’s not really debatable. She’s done many, many horrifically antisemitic things.

And yet, Al Jazeera jumps in, unprompted, to defend a known antisemite? Why?????? Oh, because she supports Palestine.

Well…perhaps…just maybe…supporters of Palestine shouldn’t want to leap to the defense of antisemites who spout blatant misinformation about the I/P conflict, demonize the Jews they know personally, and trade in antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Unless of course…they don’t care that they are pushing pro-Palestine Jews out of leftist spaces in the first place.

When did it become acceptable for leftists to excuse someone’s bigotry as long as the bigot agrees with you on other stuff?

#Jews Don’t Count #David Baddiel #the Jewish experience #jumblr #antiracism #antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #Alice Walker #anti racism #I dare a goy to reblog this challenge

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notaplaceofhonour · 3 months

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Frankly, no, “Zionists cynically weaponize antisemitism to silence criticism of Israel” just isn’t a thing.

Let me be clear:

I am not saying no one in the history of the world has ever incorrectly accused someone of antisemitism or cynically misused the existence of antisemitism to justify awful shit, but this is not more true of antisemitism than any other bigotry. If someone were to doubt most claims of racism & homophobia by default, and accuse NAACP or BLM of “weaponizing anti-Blackness” or GLAAD of “weaponizing homophobia”, we would all rightly understand that as bigotry, but when Jews & the ADL discuss antisemitism, we are usually dismissed & accused of “weaponizing antisemitism” by other progressives.

I am also not saying that Israel’s government has not unfairly suppressed criticism & engaged in an overextension of censorship in the name of antisemitism. In my opinion, it has. But a) if you do not live in Israel, this censorship is not something you experience, and b) Israel overreaching & overreacting to perceived threats is not the same thing as the accusation of sneakily, cynically lying about antisemitism to “deceive the world” that is leveled in the “weaponizing antisemitism” claim.

Like any other group, Jews are not a monolith; Jews disagree about what is or isn’t antisemitic. Inevitably some of them will be wrong. Some may even have terrible, awful—perhaps even far right—politics & views about what to do about antisemitism. But that does not change the fact that the threat of antisemitism is very real to Jews & every single Jew has every reason to fear it—yes, even the ones with terrible, awful politics.

So stop treating antisemitism like it’s a weapon Jews (Zionist or not) are trying to use to trick & manipulate you, and idk, maybe start by treating it as the bigoted, often existential threat we experience it as & try to engage with Jews on the actual merits of what we say and do?

#you’re legally required to read that ‘let me be clear’ in obama’s voice #antisemitism #i/p #jews don’t count

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mockiatoh · 21 days

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Family reports that the next treatment, he went without his kippah and was treated respectfully by staff.

There have been mounting examples of antisemitic comments made by medical professionals and hostility towards Jewish patients since October 7.

#Jews don’t count

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angrybell · 4 months

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Posted @withregram • @stellaingerescobedo 🚨WATCH & SHARE🚨What took so long ? It took NYT 82 days to confirm what we knew. Where are the women’s rights activists ? Where are the rest of the MSM outlets ?

hate. This is for educational purposes. This page does not intend to promote dangerous acts, organizations, violence, harassments, or bullying.

Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education and research.

#israel #hamas war 2023 #hamas #war on women #Jews #Jewish rape victim don’t count according to the Left

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bruceslatonpite · 1 year

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Blue Jew Mental Illness | Blue Jew OCD | Blue Jew Reddit | Blue Jew Social Media | Blue Jew Be Social Campaign

www.reddit.com/r/OCD/comments/12a3gh4/i_came_up_with_a_joke_today_to_help_deflate_my/

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jewish-sideblog · 2 months

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Btw I think there’s a difference between an ethnostate and an ethnic group gaining self-determination. But I also think most people don’t know the difference. Like. Ireland is 76% ethnically Irish, gives preferential citizenship and immigration status to people of Irish ethnic descent, and has a very bloody and violent recent history of trying to keep non-Irish people from continuing to live in Ireland. And right now there’s an international border separating the “True Irish” from the Ulster, British Irish, largely on the basis of ethnicity, ancestry and religion. Most people consider the multiple wars that Ireland fought to be in the name of self-determination, not in the name of establishing an ethnostate.

Israel is less ethnically Jewish than Ireland is ethnically Irish. Contrary to popular belief, non-Jews living inside Israel have just as much of a citizenship as non-Irish people living in Ireland. They can vote and hold office and move freely and worship whomever they please. It’s just that those rights aren’t extended across the international border to Palestine… just like Ireland’s legal rights don’t extend into Northern Ireland.

I’m not trying to say that Ireland is definitely an ethnostate, and I’m not trying to say that Israel definitely isn’t. I’m saying that you should be consistent in your determination of what counts. If you apply different rules to the Jewish country specifically, and you levy accusations against a Jewish government that you would never levy at a Western government… then you may be antisemitic.

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queer-geordie-nerd · 2 months

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Been thinking a lot lately about that saying that leftists have liked to parrot over the last few years (myself included):

"It's pointless arguing with the Right because I don't know how to explain that you should care about other people" but then when it comes to Jews experiencing a massive surge in antisemitic abuse and violence they're like "Oh, we didn't mean them. They don't count."

And then still expect to be taken seriously and not be called out for rank hypocrisy.

The only reason I can think of that they truly don't see their own failing is that for an alarming percentage of these people, any Jewish person's humanity comes with terms and conditions and they really don’t actually see them as people.

Which is abjectly fucking horrifying and nauseating and something I'm having real trouble coming to terms with.

As a queer, working class woman who grew up on a council estate in one of the most deprived and ethnically and religiously diverse regions of the UK (though unfortunately our Jewish population is vanishingly tiny; in my county of Tyne and Wear, less than 4000 individuals out of a total population of 1.1 million) I’ve always been socially conscious and passionate about social justice and proud to call myself a leftist. However, my faith in the integrity of a huge amount of people involved in leftist activism has been pretty much entirely destroyed in the last few months and I loathe that.

They talk a good game but now their words just ring as hollow, empty and entirely performative.

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memecucker · 2 years

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The family tree of humanity is much more interconnected than we tend to think. “We’re culturally bound and psychologically conditioned to not think about ancestry in very broad terms,” Rutherford says. Genealogists can only focus on one branch of a family tree at a time, making it easy to forget how many forebears each of us has.

Imagine counting all your ancestors as you trace your family tree back in time. In the nth generation before the present, your family tree has 2n slots: two for parents, four for grandparents, eight for great-grandparents, and so on. The number of slots grows exponentially. By the 33rd generation—about 800 to 1,000 years ago—you have more than eight billion of them. That is more than the number of people alive today, and it is certainly a much larger figure than the world population a millennium ago.

This seeming paradox has a simple resolution: “Branches of your family tree don’t consistently diverge,” Rutherford says. Instead “they begin to loop back into each other.” As a result, many of your ancestors occupy multiple slots in your family tree. For example, “your great-great-great-great-great-grandmother might have also been your great-great-great-great-aunt,” he explains.

The consequence of humanity being “incredibly inbred” is that we are all related much more closely than our intuition suggests, Rutherford says. Take, for instance, the last person from whom everyone on the planet today is descended. In 2004 mathematical modeling and computer simulations by a group of statisticians led by Douglas Rohde, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that our most recent common ancestor probably lived no earlier than 1400 B.C. and possibly as recently as A.D. 55. In the time of Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti, someone from whom we are all descended was likely alive somewhere in the world.

Go back a bit further, and you reach a date when our family trees share not just one ancestor in common but every ancestor in common. At this date, called the genetic isopoint, the family trees of any two people on the earth now, no matter how distantly related they seem, trace back to the same set of individuals. “If you were alive at the genetic isopoint, then you are the ancestor of either everyone alive today or no one alive today,” Rutherford says. Humans left Africa and began dispersing throughout the world at least 120,000 years ago, but the genetic isopoint occurred much more recently—somewhere between 5300 and 2200 B.C., according to Rohde’s calculations.

At first glance, these dates may seem much too recent to account for long-isolated Indigenous communities in South America and elsewhere. But “genetic information spreads rapidly through generational time,” Rutherford explains. Beginning in 1492, “you begin to see the European genes flowing in every direction until our estimates are that there are no people in South America today who don’t have European ancestry.”

In fact, even more recent than the global genetic isopoint is the one for people with recent European ancestry. Researchers using genomic data place the latter date around A.D. 1000. So Christopher Lee’s royal lineage is unexceptional: because Charlemagne lived before the isopoint and has living descendants, everyone with European ancestry is directly descended from him. In a similar vein, nearly everyone with Jewish ancestry, whether Ashkenazic or Sephardic, has ancestors who were expelled from Spain beginning in 1492. “It’s a very nice example of a small world but looking to the past,” says Susanna Manrubia, a theoretical evolutionary biologist at the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology.

Not everyone of European ancestry carries genes passed down by Charlemagne, however. Nor does every Jew carry genes from their Sephardic ancestors expelled from Spain. People are more closely related genealogically than genetically for a simple mathematical reason: a given gene is passed down to a child by only one parent, not both. In a simple statistical model, Manrubia and her colleagues showed that the average number of generations separating two random present-day individuals from a common genealogical ancestor depends on the logarithm of the relevant population’s size. For large populations, this number is much smaller than the population size itself because the number of possible genealogical connections between individuals doubles with each preceding generation. By contrast, the average number of generations separating two random present-day individuals from a common genetic ancestor is linearly proportional to the population size because each gene can be traced through only one line of a person’s family tree. Although Manrubia’s model unrealistically assumed the population size did not change with time, the results still apply in the real world, she says.

Because of the random reshuffling of genes in each successive generation, some of your ancestors contribute disproportionately to your genome, while others contribute nothing at all. According to calculations by geneticist Graham Coop of the University of California, Davis, you carry genes from fewer than half of your forebears from 11 generations back. Still, all the genes present in today’s human population can be traced to the people alive at the genetic isopoint. “If you are interested in what your ancestors have contributed to the present time, you have to look at the population of all the people that coexist with you,” Manrubia says. “All of them carry the genes of your ancestors because we share the [same] ancestors.”

And because the genetic isopoint occurred so recently, Rutherford says, “in relation to race, it absolutely, categorically demolishes the idea of lineage purity.” No person has forebears from just one ethnic background or region of the world. And your genealogical connections to the entire globe mean that not too long ago your ancestors were involved in every event in world history.

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magnetothemagnificent · 8 months

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“Orthodox jewish ppl tend to vote for conditions that make your life materially worse bc the republicans pretend to be nice to them” okay. Cool. My life as a trans person is still shit and I don’t really care why they supported the person who wanted to make it shit; they did and that’s what counts.

Have you considered that maybe Orthodox Jews are just like you, voting for people they think will improve *their* material conditions? Have you considered that maybe transphobia isn't the only axis of oppression and that Orthodox Jews are considering their own safety and well-being just as much as you are considering yours? If you voted for an antisemitic but trans-friendly politician (and there are many of them), do you think Jews wouldn't feel the same way you do? We live in a hell scape and we're all trying to survive, and anyway, Orthodox Jews are such a tiny minority and are not the reason for your oppression, and if you think they are, then you're believing antisemitic conspiracy theories that Jews are the root of all the world's ills.

#sighhh #jumblr #antisemitism #leftist antisemitism #lgbt antisemitism

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edenfenixblogs · 2 months

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Just applied to the DEI council at my workplace.

In the past, I’ve gotten a very “Jews don’t count” vibe from company DEI stuff. But given that I’m also queer and neurodivergent and also given the horror of recent events, I’m hoping I have a shot.

It would feel good to do some IRL, in-person work that could make life easier for everyone.

Cuz right now every day at work feels like “haha they’re all just working and my entire world is crumbling hahahaha it’s like we’re in different worlds hahahah 🙃🙃🙃”

Wish me luck!

#antisemitism #DEI #jumblr #Jews don’t count

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notaplaceofhonour · 2 months

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Antisemitism Required Reading

I get a lot of ignorant comments & tags on my posts about antisemitism, and I’ve already spent way too much time & energy engaging with them. So to preserve my sanity, I’ve made the decision not to engage too deeply with any commenters who haven’t at least read all of these in their entirety:

“Jewish Space Lasers” by Mike Rothschild

“People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn

“Jews Don’t Count” by David Baddiel

"More Than a Century of Antisemitism", GEC Special Report

If you’re not Jewish, please read all of this literature before adding anything to my posts about antisemitism.

Jews, please add any books you think should be on the list!

#I'll be adding and updating this post as I find & vet anything I feel should be required reading #antisemitism #people love dead jews #jews don't count #jewish space lasers #required reading #reading list #dara horn #david baddiel #more than a century of antisemitism #mike rothschild #jewish history

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jewish-culture-is · 10 days

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Jewish culture is being sent a swastika by a teenage neonazi and when venting about how triggering and shaken I was, being told by “friends” that I was overreacting and also talking about “inappropriate subjects”. I don’t see how it could be both. For an environment full of people who claim that “all trauma is valid” and that “bigotry is unacceptable”, Jewish culture is seeing firsthand that Jews really don’t count. Simone Biles would be impressed at the level of cognitive gymnastics that I see in leftist antisemitic spaces these days, they should really try out for the Olympics

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#jewish culture is #judaism #jewish #jumblr #antisemitism #cw nazi mention

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jewfrogs · 10 months

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no real disagreement with this post—spiderverse’s gwen stacy is as trans as peter b parker is jewish—but it’s interesting how the incidental nature of peter’s judaism is treated as not only normal but necessary: that this is what stories should do, that it’s the audience’s responsibility to recognize (from one brief glimpse) that he had a jewish wedding and that this means he’s jewish, that not recognizing this is a failure of audience understanding. because i was an ideal audience member in that regard—i’m a jew, i know what a jewish wedding looks like, i wholeheartedly believe that every version of peter parker is jewish regardless of technical canonicity—and i knew immediately, but i know that many, many more people weren’t and didn’t—and frankly, for them, it’s easy to miss! if you aren’t paying attention in that one scene, or if you don’t recognize the signifiers of a jewish wedding, you can very easily come away from the films without knowing that peter b parker is jewish.

which wouldn’t be a big deal, but the need to infer judaism from offhand references is nothing new. it’s on tv tropes (where peter b parker makes an appearance). “ambiguous jews” make up a majority of jewish representation in popular media (and that’s not even counting the ones that are stated as jewish but somehow that never seems to come up in any serious setting). this is something that we are a wee bit tired of.

we might ask: why can’t peter b parker say he’s jewish? why is judaism nearly always shown as something easy to pass over, not especially important to a person? is that necessary? is one short shot sufficient not only as evidence of his jewishness, but as the only way we’re shown that judaism impacts him? do most jews not regularly interact with judaism? do most jews never mention that they’re jewish? are there no jokes that could be included to confirm his jewishness? does a direct address of identity need to be a bland, out-of-place statement? is it a failure of watching or of writing if someone doesn’t know that he’s jewish? why is this the way they chose to portray him as jewish?

this isn’t “spiderverse critical” or anything—these are (mostly) sincere questions, and my problem is less with this particular movie or character and more with the pattern peter b parker plays into, and the way that pattern is treated in reception.

#spiderverse #ribbits

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catsvrsdogscatswin · 11 months

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Thanks to my post about the 28th, it’s come to my attention that a significant portion of humanity don’t read history books for fun, so here’s a few broad strokes of what, exactly, is going on with the cultural connotations of race within Dracula, as understood by an American:

European racism of the day was predominantly based on cultural ethnicity rather than skin color, and one of the main sliding scales (other than how old and prestigious the ancestry was) was how far west you were on the Eurasian continent. The further east you went, the less “civilized” things became, until you hit Asia and Oceania and just became inundated with absolutely rancid racist caricatures. Stuff from the “Orient” was there for exotic/shiny toys and moral lessons about how much better the West was, and not much else, so you can imagine what depictions of actual Asian people thus became.

(We’re faced with this east vs. west scale in Jonathan’s very first entry: Budapest straddles the line between the “civilized” western part of Europe and the “uncivilized,” opulent, and exotic world of eastern Europe. Jon is going from the known and familiar city into the mysterious, unfamiliar wilderness, an extremely common Gothic horror archetype.)

Both the fear of the unknown and the exoticizing/othering of Eastern Europe play heavily into Dracula’s themes, with the sexually predatory Count Dracula coming to England to do all sorts of unspeakable sordid things to innocent English women. (Not exactly Stoker’s finest hour, but this was a typical attitude of the day.)

Following that, it was also thought at the time that one’s moral character was essentially genetic. Certain people of certain races were predisposed to be “better” or “worse,” and your own moral character was also influenced by your parents’ status in society and behavior. A prostitute mother or a criminal father meant you would inherit their dubious moral quality, which is partially where “this person has bad blood” comes from. Bad blood is literally the negative morality passed onto you from your parents: you’ve inherited the bad qualities carried in their blood.

Linking back to the east-west thing, the further east you go -you’ve guessed it- the worse this supposed ancestral bad blood gets. People of “lesser” races included the Romani, Jews, Slovaks (and sometimes the Russians), and they were just supposed to be, like, naturally inclined to be bad. They were Programmed For Crime from the moment they were born, so you didn’t need to explain why such a character was evil when they showed up in your novel: I mean, they’re [INSERT RACE], aren’t they? It’s in the blood. No explanation needed. Everybody knows that.

The assumption of the time was that such people were literally born bad, which of course naturally justified how they were treated. When they showed up on a page, you were supposed to distrust them on sight.

Occasionally, low-class people were also treated as a race all their own, like poverty was some kind of moral failing. After all, the older, more prestigious, and wealthier your family was, the better their inherent moral quality, so poor people are obviously uncouth and have bad blood, right?

(It’s an extremely stupid circular way of thinking, but that’s bigotry for ya.)

Dracula is a nobleman with old lineage, but he’s also steeped in the flavor of Eastern Europe: “barbaric” and proud, yet initially treating Jonathan with extreme courtesy; threateningly exotic and yet also familiar with English customs. As we go through the book, you’ll see that he almost exclusively hires Romani, Jewish, or extremely poor for his henchmen: he’s a force of evil that uses other “evil” tools, who bend easier to his will than “normal” people of “proper” races.

(By all means, please pause here a moment to scrub yourself of the nauseating feeling that such a bullshit attitude evokes.)

In any case, Dracula himself is a pretty good example of all these racial ideas converging, which was also why he made such an effective monster to the Victorians: there’s just enough that’s familiar and proper in him that they couldn’t quite properly Other him, which links back to the transformative horror of vampirism turning something formerly good into something very very bad, which with their worldview of “you are born with this moral code because of racial predisposition and lineage” is just shocking. You mean this Eastern European man can infect our formerly good and pure citizens and make them act his way, just by an act of force? Uh-oh.

Anyways TLDR Dracula is a book steeped in the cultural traditions and expectations of the day which means that it’s lovely horror but also an absolute crock of shit at times due to racism (and several other -isms, which I will not cover here because I am trying not to make this an essay).

#Dracula Daily #cw: racism

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hailmaryfullofgrace55675 · 5 months

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im curious about what makes USA religious hate crimes stats tilt so heavily toward jews relative to muslims. there are more jews, but iirc the disparity is greater than the difference between the population percentages. if the crimes to population ratio were the same, i would be surprised but i wouldn’t question it. more hate crimes per jew than per muslim just feels unlikely considering how hostile white american christians are toward the very notion of islam. are hate crimes against muslims more often being counted as racial? is there underreporting? are there just a fuckton of hate crimes happening against haredim and the usa lacks similar enclaves of visibly and loudly fundamentalist muslims? is it particularly trivial to ideate and commit something that gets counted as an antisemitic hate crime, like “apply swastika to building”? i don’t feel like i have many good guesses here. also a correct answer probably involves multiple factors.

#antisemitism #islamophobia #hate crimes

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 month

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By: Douglas Murray

Published: Feb 24, 2024

Like a number of ‘anti-colonialists’, William Dalrymple lives in colonial splendour on the outskirts of Delhi. The writer often opens the doors of his estate to slavering architectural magazines. A few years ago, one described his pool, pool house, vast family rooms, animals, cockatoo ‘and the usual entourage of servants that attends any successful man in India’s capital city’.

I only mention Dalrymple because he is one of a large number of people who have lost their senses by going rampaging online about the alleged genocide in Gaza. He recently tweeted at a young Jewish woman who said she was afraid to travel into London during the Palestinian protests: ‘Forget 30,000 dead in Gaza, tens of thousands more in prison without charge, five MILLION in stateless serfdom, forget 75 years of torture, rape, dispossession, humiliation and occupation, IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU.’ It is one thing when a street rabble loses their minds. But when people who had minds start to lose them, that is another thing altogether.

I find it curious. By every measure, what is happening in Gaza is not genocide. More than that – it’s not even regionally remarkable.

Hamas’s own figures – not to be relied upon – suggest that around 28,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October. Most of the international media likes to claim these people are all innocent civilians. In fact, many of the dead will have been killed by the quarter or so Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets that fall short and land inside Gaza.

Then there are the more than 9,000 Hamas terrorists who have been killed by the Israel Defence Forces. As Lord Roberts of Belgravia recently pointed out, that means there is fewer than a two to one ratio of civilians to terrorists killed: ‘An astonishingly low ratio for modern urban warfare where the terrorists routinely use civilians as human shields.’ Most western armies would dream of such a low civilian casualty count. But because Israel is involved (‘Jews are news’) the libellous hyperbole is everywhere.

For almost 20 years since Israel withdrew from Gaza, we have heard the same allegations. Israel has been accused of committing genocide in Gaza during exchanges with Hamas in 2009, 2012 and 2014. As a claim it is demonstrably, obviously false. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the population of the Strip was around 1.3 million. Today it is more than two million, with a male life expectancy higher than in parts of Scotland. During the same period, the Palestinian population in the West Bank grew by a million. Either the Israelis weren’t committing genocide, or they tried to commit genocide but are uniquely bad at it. Which is it? Well, when it comes to Israel it seems people don’t have to choose. Everything and anything can be true at once.

Here is a figure I’ve never seen anyone raise. It’s an ugly little bit of maths, but stay with me. If you wish, you might add together all the people killed in every conflict involving Israel since its foundation.

In 1948, after the UN announced the state, all of Israel’s Arab neighbours invaded to try to wipe it out. They failed. But the upper estimate of the casualties on all sides came to some 20,000 people. The upper estimates of the wars of 1967 and 1973, when Israel’s neighbours once again attempted to annihilate it, are very similar (some 20,000 and 15,000 respectively). Subsequent wars in Lebanon and Gaza add several thousands more to that figure. It means that up to the present war, some 60,000 people had died on every side in all wars involving Israel.

Over the past decade of civil war in Syria, Bashar al-Assad has managed to kill more than ten times that number. Although precise figures are hard to come by, Assad is reckoned to have murdered some 600,000 Arab Muslims in his country. Meaning that every six to 12 months he manages to kill the same number as died in every war involving Israel ever.

There are lots of reasons you might give to explain this: that people don’t care when Muslims kill Muslims; that people don’t care when Arabs kill Arabs; that they only care if Israel is involved. Allow me to give another example that is suggestive.

No one knows how many people have been killed in the war in Yemen in recent years. From 2015-2021 the UN estimated perhaps 377,000 – ten times the highest estimate of the recent death toll in Gaza. The only time I’ve heard people scream on British streets about Yemen has been after the Houthis started attacking British and American ships in the Red Sea and the deadbeat idiots on the streets of London started chanting: ‘Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around.’ Because like all leftists and Islamists there is no terrorist group these people can’t get a pash on, so long as that terrorist group is against us.

I often wonder why this obsession arises when the war involves Israel. Why don’t people trawl along our streets and scream by their thousands about Syria, Yemen, China’s Uighurs or a hundred other terrible things? There are only two possible conclusions.

The first is a journalistic one. Ever since Marie Colvin was killed it became plain that western journalists were a target in Syria. Not eager to be the target, most journalists hotfooted it out of the country. Some who didn’t fell into the hands of Isis. Israel-Gaza wars by contrast do not have the same dynamic and on a technical level the media can applaud itself for reporting from a warzone where they are not the target.

But I suspect it is a moral explanation which explains the situation so many people find themselves in. They simply enjoy being able to accuse the world’s only Jewish state of ‘genocide’ and ‘Nazi-like behaviour’. They enjoy the opportunity to wound Jews as deeply as possible. Many find it satisfies the intense fury they feel when Israel is winning.

Like being fanned on your veranda while lambasting the evils of Empire, it is a paradox, to be sure. But it is also a perversity. And it doesn’t come from nowhere.

==

"From the water to the water, Palestine is Arab."

This is the actual genocide.

#Douglas Murray #Israel #hamas terrorism #hamas terrorists #palestine #palestinians #genocide #ethnic cleansing #israel genocide #gaza genocide #palestinian genocide #genocide myth #antisemitism #genocide lie #religion is a mental illness

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