Israel/Palestine post 10/7 - follow-on events/thoughts as relate to other countries

The Daily Northwestern has maintained a solid rolling activity log throughout the day: https://dailynorthwestern.com/2024/04/25/campus/live-pro-palestinian-student-activists-set-up-encampment-on-deering-meadow/

I’m wondering about the Soviet flags at my protest. Why?

I’m going to chalk that up to the Party for Socialism & Liberation folks who have been at many of these

the famous liberty afforded to people by the benevolent soviet union

these are college students, of course they're gonna rock the hammer & sick

It’s probably PSL or RevCom related.

I have to say: I am proud of the youth.

xp
if it was the word “interpellated”

bingo-- though i know the word. and like said, i expected that space would be typo and error free haha, so i knew i had take a note.

had to

traditionally students are the shock troops for social change, which can lead to much good, but they generally are better at than capsizing the boat full of oligarchs than at navigation.

I’m wondering about the Soviet flags at my protest. Why?

― Never fight uphill 'o me, boys! (President Keyes), Thursday, 25 April 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Friend Infected With Left Wing Brain Worms - What to Do?

My ans: nothing. They are doing good

video of arrests at Emory:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2024/04/25/emory-university-pro-palestinian-protest-police-digvid.cnn

the professor at the end of that video who the pigs throw on the ground for speaking to them has been charged with assaulting a police officer

There’s an aspect to this that seems like inter-elite fight, where we’re watching a struggle between different class strata of faculty vs the administrators for control of the institution.

It’s probably PSL or RevCom related.

the professor at the end of that video who the pigs throw on the ground for speaking to them has been charged with assaulting a police officer

Maybe more for the antisemitism thread, but I still think there is a certain grey area that we haven't really figured out how to address/deal with with the rhetoric around "zionism," because the term "zionism" is not well defined. At least pre and during WWII, Nazi meant something specific, a member or supporter of the Nazi party. It seems like "zionist" means anyone who hasn't come to the conclusion that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state in any sense. And I think that is dangerous in combination with a lot of the rhetoric I hear - that zionists should die, that zionists should be targeted by terrorist attacks, etc. And this is "not antisemitism" because you can separate Jews into the good kind (anti-zionist) and the bad kind (zionist).

I don’t use the word because in my experience it was used by Turner Diaries types (i.e. Zionist Occupied Government)

also presumes that being a "zionist" is an immutable position that can't be changed via persuasion

Maoism is trending among younger people… as is the belief that Stalin was a great man … for gen x leftists (and boomers), there is some serious wtf
― sarahell, Friday, April 26, 2024 8:54 AM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I am obviously not a Tankie, but especially for younger people, all that they have seen is radical reactionaries and fascist-adjacent ghouls impose their ideological viewpoints upon the populace with little impunity. The urge to replicate this kind of authoritarian bullshit from a leftist ideological view is understandable, if misguided and ahistorical.

I think it's often shallower than that. Mao and Stalin get reduced down to avatars for "people who successfully opposed capitalism" and I'm not sure they think much past that dubious point

That said, I'm not seeing any pro-Mao or pro-Stalin sentiment among the young leftists of Montreal, and I wonder how concrete or significant this is. On the other hand, there is a legally legitimate communist party in Canada, so maybe it gets channelled into something slightly more defensible up here.

Maybe more for the antisemitism thread, but I still think there is a certain grey area that we haven't really figured out how to address/deal with with the rhetoric around "zionism," because the term "zionism" is not well defined. At least pre and during WWII, Nazi meant something specific, a member or supporter of the Nazi party. It seems like "zionist" means anyone who hasn't come to the conclusion that Israel should not exist as a Jewish state in any sense. And I think that is dangerous in combination with a lot of the rhetoric I hear - that zionists should die, that zionists should be targeted by terrorist attacks, etc. And this is "not antisemitism" because you can separate Jews into the good kind (anti-zionist) and the bad kind (zionist).

The issue is that by tying Judaism to a project like Israel, there is a narrow set of paths by which one can oppose the state without opposing the religion, according to the logic set up by the state itself. I am opposed to the state of Israel, but I am not opposed to Judaism or Jewish people. This tethering of a state apparatus to a religious identity is dangerous in all of its iterations— the same problem exists with Islamic states, and in the US (among others) with Christianity, despite our supposed "melting pot" nature.

The issue then becomes: what is the aim of tying the state to a religion? Who and what does this tethering aim to protect and exclude? Why?

That said, I'm not seeing any pro-Mao or pro-Stalin sentiment among the young leftists of Montreal, and I wonder how concrete or significant this is.

xps having been in tankie adjacent spaces most of these people really do know nothing and seem to think the sino-soviet split never happened. they like to use symbols of state power to project a strength and unity that the left doesn't have and there's a huge archive of a century of marxist-leninist theory for them to draw from with prepackaged answers to every question. crappy anarchist zines and ultraleft treatises on value don't have the same appeal. it's like marx said "the tradition of dead [actually existing socialist states] weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living"

there's a tendency to downplay this trend either because people don't come across it or because it's just embarrassing but it has been pretty damaging in the left even if most of the people involved aren't necessarily stalinists in a genuine sense

every socialist state is equivalent to them and anyone who has been hurt or whose family has been hurt by ostensibly socialist or just anti-imperialist regimes is chased out of a lot of left spaces if they talk about their experiences with a lot of racist assumptions projected onto them. it's really fucked up and white western leftists have done genuine harm to solidarity efforts between (for example) syrians and palestinians with their bullshit

I am obviously not a Tankie

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

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there's a tendency to downplay this trend either because people don't come across it or because it's just embarrassing but it has been pretty damaging in the left even if most of the people involved aren't necessarily stalinists in a genuine sense

brave

Nobody can prevent you from wasting your time indulging shit for brains liberal opinions and that’s fine!

I get my fill of those on here

I don't want to stray too far from the point but are the liberal opinions thinking stalin worship is bad or thinking it's consequential enough to be worth opposing? as far as the average bidenite is concerned I'm just a tankie anyway

it depends who you know or where you are but I have run into enough queer marxist leninists who dominate certain spaces and profess to love everything they hate when a red flag is slapped on it and it's hard to leave that alone

The issue is that by tying Judaism to a project like Israel, there is a narrow set of paths by which one can oppose the state without opposing the religion, according to the logic set up by the state itself. I am opposed to the state of Israel, but I am not opposed to Judaism or Jewish people. This tethering of a state apparatus to a religious identity is dangerous in all of its iterations— the same problem exists with Islamic states, and in the US (among others) with Christianity, despite our supposed "melting pot" nature.

The issue then becomes: what is the aim of tying the state to a religion? Who and what does this tethering aim to protect and exclude? Why?

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Friday, April 26, 2024 11:44 AM (fifty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

But I have never seen protesters (other than perhaps right wingers) arguing that it is fundamentally an "evil ideology" for any of the dozens of states that are Islamic in an official capacity to be Islamic, including those funded and supported by the US. No one is protesting that Saudi Arabia or Egypt should be dismantled and turned into secular states.

Additionally, "Zionism" is often used to signify some broader evil, settler colonialism itself, rapacious financial capitalism, police brutality, etc. For example, the fact that the NYPD has done occasional "trainings" with the IDF has been used to suggest that "Zionism" is responsible for the NYPD's brutality, as though it hasn't always been that way.

Have you missed the many calls for Islamic states to become more secular over the years, by both official and unofficial campaigns?

What about the 4-5 million people killed as part of the west’s “war on terror,” which is a war on Islam?

You’ll notice that what leftists oppose is EMPIRE and the wanton destruction of people and culture that does not hew to Western Judeo-Christian “values.”

Training with the IDF and the increased militarization of police after 9/11 go hand in hand, and to be incredulous about this connection is wild to
me, and to claim that Zionism isn’t a settler colonial ideology is also wild.

tabes get the noxious trope "Judeo-Christian" out of your shitty mouth

just say "Christian" when that's what you fucking mean

fuck you

go fuck yourself

eat shit and die you bigoted pig

. The urge to replicate this kind of authoritarian bullshit from a leftist ideological view is understandable, if misguided and ahistorical.

I don’t and will never care or waste attention on shrieking about marginal views in the broader left, sorry if this offends

this is not good: "Student Leader of Columbia Protests: ‘Zionists Don’t Deserve to Live’
After video surfaced on social media, the student, Khymani James, said on Friday that his comments were wrong."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/26/nyregion/columbia-student-protest-zionism.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nU0.2bCg.WdX-HYzAvSls&smid=url-share

people say shit all the time

most of them don't let themselves be the visible leader of a protest movement

It is incredibly easy to oppose Israeli genocide of Palestinians without saying Jews have to die.

I just don’t get the failure to adapt to the audience… these protesters seem pretty smart!

Training with the IDF and the increased militarization of police after 9/11 go hand in hand, and to be incredulous about this connection is wild to
me, and to claim that Zionism isn’t a settler colonial ideology is also wild.

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Friday, April 26, 2024 1:00 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think I'm not explaining myself well or you're misunderstanding. I'm saying that "zionism" gets used as a kind of metonym for these things. Israel did not cause the NYPD to become more militarized, the NYPD sought out Israel's help in becoming more militarized, among many other steps it took. And it was also frankly killing and torturing plenty of people well before 9/11. Zionism did not invent settler colonialism, regardless of whether you think that's the appropriate term.

most of them don't let themselves be the visible leader of a protest movement

this is key. this guy needs to be disavowed and ignored. shit like this utterly taints this movement.

re: judeo-christian seems to be mostly an islamophobic construct of american nationalism and imperialism and of course it does generally just mean white christian nationalism buy often specifically in the context of its (ultimately provisional but superficially unconditional) support for a certain version of zionism - it also relies on a whole cluster of antisemitic assumptions about the special role of jewish people in empire/modernity/capitalism/america/etc.

from the israeli POV maybe the emphases are different