I'm sorry but I don't understand and I think I need a longer answer.
I could interpret this three ways:
1) "Leftist Activists"; are a mixed group with some supporting pro-LGBTQ rights and others supporting Palestine.
2) "Leftist Activists"; are a homogenous group, including LGBTQ people, of which they support Palestine (and thus, support a regime that would wish them harm)
3) "Leftist Activists"; are a homogenous group, including LGBTQ people, who will always attempt to ally to the downtrodden, even in cases where the downtrodden would wish them to not exist.
Are any of these correct or is there another interpretation I missed?
It's mostly 2. The harder point to prove, though I think it's true, that much of the pro-Palestinian rhetoric is as much anti-Israel, i.e anti-Semetic. It's hard to discuss subjects like this without nuance so most of my observations/opinions tend to be around trends. But a good comparison could be Ukraine and Russia. Much of the US widely supports Ukraine's plight and fully believe that Russia is a belligerent, colonialist nation fully at fault for the war. Nothing gray about it compared to the Israel/Palestine conflict. And yet you don't widespread hate and mistreatment of ethnic Russians in the US. You can't say the same about the treatment Jews, even those born and raised in the US.
> The harder point to prove, though I think it's true, that much of the pro-Palestinian rhetoric is as much anti-Israel, i.e anti-Semetic.
What? My view is totally different.
Most of the pro-Palestinian people intersect with the same anti-fascists under fire from newly pro-Israel people that previously criticized anti-fascists for punching Nazis.
When alt-right people defaced Jewish synagogues before this conflict I find the people arguing for it to be publicly acknowledged as a hate crime are the exact same people that are pro-Palestine now.
Accurate or not, the perception of someone being a Nazi made them punchable. It's not hard to argue people desiring to punch Nazis are probably not anti-Semetic.
Of course it's hard to argue that. Nazis are the great bogeymen right now, wanting to punch them might have little to do with feelings about Jews, and everything to do with just looking for an outlet to attack "the bad people" however defined.
When we read historical cases of witch trials or executing "demons" or "possessed people", it's the same thing.
This goes back to the oppressors and the oppressed. In the case of Punching Nazis, the way I read it is the meme of the anti-fascist that punched Richard Spencer during an ABC interview in 2017[1][2]. The post-modernis in me also like to point out that before then Punching Nazis was endorsed by Steven Spielberg when he directed Harrison Ford to do that as Indiana Jones[3]. And—of course—the supreme glorifies of violence against Nazis Quentin Tarantino who doesn’t let a movie go by unless a Nazi, a rapist, KKK members, etc. get severely tortured, bombed, burned with flamethrowers, etc.
Back to 2017, Richard Spencer is an actually nazi. He is a white supremacist that routinely spouts hate speech against Jewish people. In the case of the ABC interview the oppressed were Jewish people, and the oppressor was Richard Spencer. The Anti-facist very much cared about the Jewish people when he punched Richard Spencer. If Richard Spencer weren’t an oppressor of Jewish People, he wouldn’t have gotten punched.
I think you are mistaken that you cannot logically support both LGBT rights and Palestine. For example, I support LBGTQ+ rights and would not want people who opposed them in America to be treated the way Palestinians are.
30,000 Uyghur women and children weren’t indiscriminately bombed to death via advanced drones, nor were hundreds of innocent civilians massacred at hospitals in China and buried in mass graves. It’s happening in Palestine as we type.
Instead over 1 million of them are sent to concentration camps, abused and killed to harvest their organs. It's genocide eitherway.
The issue isn't covered is really the difference here.
Beware that reasoning. We only knew about the holocaust very late into the war and there were denials just as you claim right now.
And indeed, when the Nazi's were losing they tried quite hard to hide the evidence, however it was so total and immutable in many cases that it could not be hidden, mostly because the allied powers controlled their lands and had free access to their previously governed population..
Without such access proof rarely escapes and when it does the total brutality is considered impossible; this is exactly what happened during world war 2.
Exactly, yeah. What's happening there is awful and very sad, but there's almost nothing I can do about it, whereas our government provides billions in weapons to Israel
... and trillions in trade to China. US could cut trade ties with China.
This seems to apply to many conflicts, e.g. Sudan. The US could intervene. Now you might say "US tried something similar and that was not exactly a good experience", but the US certainly can intervene. Or, in Lebanon the US, and all countries in the UN security council promised to intervene (and disarm Hezbollah), but just don't do it.
Not intervening is different than actively supporting. We have given ~ a hundred billion and are about to give tens of billions more in no strings attached military aid. We used our UN Veto dozens of times to prevent calling for a ceasefire
Should we intervene for the Uyghurs? Maybe! But this one seems way more obvious
If that were truly the reason there are protests there wouldn't be any support in Europe, when in reality the movements there are far bigger than in the US.
I mean, sorry, but the black flags and open hostility towards Jews shows what at least a large percentage of the movement is really about. Especially in Europe.
The rest of the movement is the same as leftist movements, imho. It's also not about supporting Palestinians it's about fighting the power, ie. attempting to have political impact by "campaigning" for something SO immoral, unacceptable and unrealistic that there is bound to be a fight. It's about the fight, NOT about a solution. And by campaigning I don't mean campaigning in the sense of political campaigning, or even the vitriol spouting semi-threatening Trump is doing, but being so in the way, sabotaging people's lives, that normal people pretty much have to react with violence (because that's the point of blocking, for example, the Golden Gate bridge: to threaten people's livelihoods, and get a strong reaction that way).
It's not about saving tax dollars ... Yes, there's 1% fringe rightists in there. But seriously? It's not about that.
> It's not about saving tax dollars ... Yes, there's 1% fringe rightists in there. But seriously? It's not about that.
That's missing the point about money. Buying the murder weapon is not in the same category as all the inactions that may go into knowing a murder will happen and not ultimately stopping it.
First, no its not about tax dollars, you're right. It's about the US actively participating. Its something we have the power to easily stop doing. If what's happening in Palestine is comparable to the Uyghurs you're conceding that there are human rights problems.
As for antisemitism is Europe, I can't say. You might be right there. But in the US, most of it as far as I can tell is being horrified at pictures and videos of what's happening and feeling responsible. A lot of people hate what happened in the global war on terror and this is very comparable. I won't say that there is Nobody in it for antisemitic reasons here but I think that's a terrible awful reason, I disavow any antisemitism, and i believe that the vast majority of US people in the movement aren't.
The fight vs solution thing, I'm a little baffled by. Yeah the point of blocking the golden gate bridge is to show that things aren't stable in the status quo, that's how protests work. But it sounds like you're saying that getting a reaction is the entire goal and that's uncharitable and untrue
> It's about the US actively participating. Its something we have the power to easily stop doing.
The same goes for the Syrian massacres. US was very clearly providing support for one side of the conflict.
No protests.
Central Africa. Same.
No protests.
Nigeria. Same.
No protests.
Or how about a HUGE ongoing us involvement resulting in lots of dead? Ukraine.
No protests. (and, no, Minimal Thinking Girl protesting by herself doesn't count)
Lebanon. Yemen. Kashmir. Hungary. Finland ... the list goes on and on. What makes this case of support different? We all know what makes it different ...
The difference is extremely clear: Israel is viewed as a key US ally. We give them more foreign aid than any other nation. We got to bat for them very frequently, and almost all of our UN Vetos have been used preventing things from being said to them. The two countries are very connected. When Nigeria eg. does something, we don't rush to approve more weapons immediately.
The closest equivalent imo is South Africa, which the US government was similarly close with and people were Very Mad in almost the exact same way.
& Finally, I truly do not understand the viewpoint that we should give aid to Israel and not Ukraine. I can see the arguments for both or neither or for just Ukraine but this one's baffling. They are currently being invaded by a much bigger power. They are required to use the weapons they get purely defensively.
Armenia and Lebanon have the same problem in the UN, but it only lasts weeks, and then they fail to defend themselves, and the muslim voting block in the UN is happy when they're militarily defeated, and they just don't care about themselves: not about human rights violations by muslims against anyone else. Not even about disgusting human rights violations by muslims against muslims. Look how much effort people put into getting attention for Sudan, and it's just not getting anywhere, and it won't.
Short answer: they are often one and the same people - leftist activists who have opinions on more than one subject.