If you are expecting to read my usual Left Coast column, I tell you now that you will be disappointed. I write, today, from a place of horror—about the massacre unleashed against civilians in Israel this past week, and about the morally cretinous bloodlust reaction some who fashion themselves as being on the “left” seem to have experienced in its aftermath, but also in despair at the ghastly collective punishments being unleashed from the air on Gaza residents by Netanyahu’s far-right government and the Israeli military.
falling into genocidal antisemitic tropes in response to the israeli state being ghouls is not hopeless desperation. these are not palestinians posting after having their homes bombed and their loved ones lynched. this site is still mostly westerners living in much more comfort, lots of white westerners with no real connection to the conflict. most people here have no fucking excuse to be posting like that, other than putting on the costumes of the actually oppressed to vicariously play out their outrage.
it is adventurist nonsense. no, you actually can manage your anger enough to not call for murdering babies, if you lack the discipline to not even help but at least not produce propaganda for zionist liberals - and they do in fact watch this place for shit takes like this - then you are worse than useless.
if you’re mad, at least focus on presenting the IDF as monsters instead of presenting their victims’ perspective as wanting to kill babies. you can recognize that the actual victims are not going to respond well to being genocided without stepping in to say awful shit on their behalf.
Killing children is inherently evil yes
conflating israelis and jews is not good either
Edit: was a bit hostile, apologies
Specifically singling out babies to me read as a bioessentialist take as babies are not actors with any political agency, and the language of specifically genocide as opposed to, like, hoping the IDF steps on their own landmines has an antisemetic connotation, but I missed the bit about the Nakba. I am much more suspicious of some white person having this extreme a take having some other motivation for talking about genocide than I am someone that was actually directly harmed by Israel.
While you’re correct that it would normally make sense to read it that way, the only reason anyone is talking about babies at all is that the IOF invented a story about “40 beheaded babies” and then immediately said they would not investigate it or provide any evidence. Given that context, I don’t think it necessarily makes sense to interpret it as bioessentialist, but rather as an angry (incorrect) reaction to all of the “Hamas are evil baby killers” propaganda.
To clarify, this is not meant to justify the removed comment which was deranged regardless. Just because the evil settler genocide army is making things up about killing babies, that doesn’t suddenly mean that killing babies is good.
yeah this is closer to the mark for me, I get a bit skeptical when ppl start dredging up the romanovs, or all the french children dessalines killed, or whatever fantastical (or even fictional…) potential outcome, as a cautionary tale of what could happen if revolutionaries were to get carried away… like, it’s just incredibly unrelatable to be this ridden with anxiety about potential excesses when more restraint is honestly the last thing we need rn. on the dessalines thing e.g., black jacobins is pretty critical of that whole debacle bc of the geopolitical consequences for haiti but iirc james pretty explicitly rolled his eyes at the white people shuddering in horror at atrocities, it’s just such a weird thing to be concerned about
off topic but im kinda sure that this has primarily with gender, but I get what your aiming at. Its a mistake to attribute children agency they dont and will not have until they are at least 16-18 (even then its circumstantial and a touchy subject)
I really don’t get why people with a communist would bring such inherently false analysis into discourse. Being Jewish has absolutely nothing to do with this. Its a critique of Fascist Nationalism and Settlerismwhich can be done by any member of any race. And again, Children are just unable to be a part of such exploitation because they have no agency whatsoever. Children are inherently innocent.
Communists know the real enemies, why bring in people and groups that have nothing to do with it.
And yeah, it really should be a rule that one should be suspicious of anything white people (especially imperial core ones) do. Again because of the system they surround themselves in and their material interests are entirely aligned with reactionary thoughts and actions.
what, the original commenter said their family lost everything in the nakba, and they were the one unhingeposting not me
if you take away the wildly inappropriate conflation of israelis and jews, your argument seems basically the same as that of people grimacing at “death to america” and trying to sanitize it as only referring to america as a political formation or something bc it’s so important apparently to observe proper optics to win the sympathy of libs. idc what libs think about anything and I’m not expecting posts on hex bear dot net to have any bearing at all on world events. but im drawn to ppl who lowkey feel
stuff literally sometimes bc that electric sense of helpless outrage resonates with me a lot, and even when I don’t agree with someone like the removed poster there’s a sense of safety in knowing for sure where they stand
While I stand by the statement that calling for babies to be killed as an act of genocide has an extremely antisemetic connotation and I would normally assume someone saying that is doing some antisemetic entryism, I did miss that the bit about the Nakba which better explains their post as coming from actual harm rather than just grandstanding.
However, shit like “death to America” is its own problem, as there isn’t actually any relevant desire to ethnically cleanse white people and so it can be understood as either a joke or indeed just about the nation state, as obviously even if you did actually mean to genocide white people for whatever reason there are a lot of people who are not white here or who are literally indigenous, so an unironic “nuke the US” take would be nonsense even before getting to the fact that whiteness is a social construct that can be destroyed without literally killing all white people. And then there’s the common criticism of leftists using the imagery of people.in the Middle East as violent terrorists to larp as such, along with using terms like inshallah while wishing for violence.