Topspin715

You probably would have said the same exact thing on October 6th, 2023. This is just a three year period, I couldn't find more recent data.

Does the mere existence of a single person being racist elsewhere justify your racism? When you keep cherry picking single "truths" while ignoring your own, it's the extreme opposite of holistic.

I'm not going to continue this conversation if you refuse to recognize or take responsibility for your own bad behavior unless you are literally a Palestinian because it's simply inexcusable otherwise to harbor so much hatred.

Most actions and attitudes of racism don't come from people who identify as being racist Generalizations and stereotypes of all kinds can be harmful Some groups are more vulnerable than others

Whether or not they care, these kinds of exaggerated generalizations lead to the distrust and persecution of any group and can do real harm. When you actually think about politics from a practical standpoint, there will be many different people with different values and objectives. It's not fair or accurate to look at the opinion of a single fringe actor and say that it characterizes the whole government. It would be like taking a few Palestinians who want to get rid of all Jews, which used to be in their charter, and say that represents all Arabs or Muslims. It's harmful to think and speak that way and it's not true.

What do you mean when you say "they"? When you use ambiguous and generalized words like that, there will always be exceptions. The fact that a single person holds a single viewpoint, does not mean that he represents the views of all Israelis or Jews or Zionists. It's not hard to cherry pick one opinion that looks bad and ascribe it to the whole group. In many cases, that's a source of anti-semitism. But even still, man times, anti-seymitism is just based on pure lies and untruths.

Rabbi Manis Friedman (full name: Menachem Manis HaKohen Friedman; Hebrew: מנחם מניס הכהן פרידמן; born 1946) is a Hassid, rabbi, author, social philosopher and public speaker. He was inspired by the Lubavitcher Rebbe in the 1970s, the former leader of the Lubavitch Hasidic dynasty. He is an ultra-orthodox fundamentalist but not a political zionist like Ben Gvir. Here he argues that it is a moral wrong to negotiate with terrorists for political gain. This is an oversimplification of what is going on here but would be curious to hear anybody's thoughts on this in an abstract sense that doesn't pertain specifically to the current conflict. I don't necessarily agree with him that it is always wrong to "negotiate with terrorists". Who is considered a terrorist and who isn't is a deeply political and not clear cut matter. The majority of Western countries (see in red below) officially recognize Hamas to be a terrorist organization but the majority of the rest of the world does not.

Ben Gvir is the leader of the Otzma Yehudit political party (Hebrew: עָצְמָה יְהוּדִית, lit. 'Jewish Power') which is a far-right, ultra-nationalist, Kahanist, and anti-Arab political party in Israel (from wikipedia). It is the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party. His party has 6 out of 120 seats in the Knesset so he is a very small fringe political leader, but it sometimes doesn't take much representation in a democracy to wield a lot of power if you are aggressive and know how to do it. Ben Gvir is a religious Zionist (nationalist) which is maybe the Jewish equivalent of an Islamist. The vast majority of Jews, or people who identify as Jews, do not share his views and beliefs, but he gets a lot of media coverage for being so extreme. He is threatening to resign if the hostage deal goes through, I don't know yet if that's a bluff or an actual threat. Israel's Knesset is a parliamentary system so if enough people vote to dissolve the government, they can do that. Regarding the idea of the hostage exchange, Israel will be releasing 1,000 Palestinians for about 30 Israeli hostages. Some of the Palestinians, I am not sure how many, are being held under administrative detention without due process or formal charges. Some of them are probably legitimate terrorist threats. Yahya Sinwar, the now deceased former leader of Hamas and alleged mastermind of the October 7th attack, was previously released from Israeli prison in a hostage exchange in 2011 in a prisoner exchange where Israel released 1,026 Palestinian prisoners for a single Israel soldier, Gilad Shalit. Yahya Sinawar was sentenced to four life sentences in Israeli prison in 1989 for the murder of two Israeli soldiers and four Palestinians. These decisions are not simple. A near term cease fire agreement is good, but if Israel releases another terrorist mastermind, they might pay for it very badly at some point down the line. I'm trying to be objective about this to stimulate constructive conversation so these are the facts as I see them regarding the recent hostage deal.

Yes that is true

Trauma can pass through many generations via different mechanisms so all Jews today suffer from some kind of Holocaust trauma but the further we get, there is hope. I remember learning about the Holocaust when I was 5 years old and it was shocking to me. It takes decades to figure out how something like that can happen and most never come to terms with it. With peace will come shared prosperity and restored dignity so it's hard to get the lesser end of a true peace deal. It's just that nobody has figured out how to do it yet.

This was a very interesting watch about the history of Islam. The history of the world is a history of conquest and war. There were tons of civil wars and puppet caliphs within the Islamic world. Muslims and Christians have been fighting wars against each other. Protestants fought wars against Catholics. Sunnis fought wars against Shiites. In the last few minutes of this video, he summarizes: "Today, Muslims make up the second largest religious group in the world. There are over 50 countries in the world that have a Muslim majority, not to mention all the countries where Muslims make up a significant minority as well. The Islamic civilization is now recovering from the impacts of colonialism. In many ways, it is still stuck in the time before colonization happened and is trying to find its way forward. This is a civilization that of course did not experience a Reformation or Enlightenment in the European sense of the words. Ideas are being discussed on how Islam can cope with life in the 21st century, the relationship between Muslims and the rest of the world isn't helped by the rampant Islamophobia that we see in today's world."

He makes very good points here that this Middle East was deeply messed up by the Sykes Picot agreement and interference by European powers at the time. The expression "a land without a people for a people without a land" originates earlier than he said and came from Christian Zionism. You can't look at this problem without studying the root causes and they go way back before even 1948. Europe pulled out of the Middle East and just left a huge mess which they don't know what to do with. "A land without a people for a people without a land" is a widely cited phrase associated with the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Its historicity and significance are a matter of contention. Although it became a Jewish Zionist slogan, the phrase was originally used as early as 1843 by a Christian Restorationist clergyman, and the phrase continued to be used for almost a century predominantly by Christian Restorationists.

It's not very helpful to just write him off as "beyond r*tarded", especially when he has experience living in the Middle East and is somewhat logical giving that he's completely a PhD. I'm not saying that he has wisdom but most PhDs can generally create and respond to logic. I don't think what he's saying is accurate, but I am no expert on Islam and it's politics so I'm doing a deeper dive on what Islamism is and where it came from. Non-Muslims are often mistrusting of Islam because of Muhammad's military history compared to somebody like Jesus. The history of humanity is filled with war and conquest but it's something that would be nice to reduce or transcend in the 3rd millennium of the common era.

This is hard for me to personally understand because Muhammad was a military general in the later part of his life as a prophet his military campaigns took lives. A lot of Muslim extremists, like ISIS and Al Qaeda, not only don't seem to mind taking the lives of innocent women and children, but have actively sought to do so. Most people in the US don't know many Muslims, the population is very low here, but when Americans hear about these things in the news, they overgeneralize those kinds of attitudes and values towards all Muslims. The concept of martyrdom is so unfamiliar to even contemporary religious westerners. As I understand it, not everybody has the same attitude about it in the Muslim world, but we lack the nuance to really understand why this is happening. This guy, Gad Saad, is an academic living in Canada, who is a Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jew, born in Lebanon. He sees "Islamism" as being inseparable from the Muslim belief system but I don't think it's accurate or fair to present all Muslims in this way. This lack of judgment or understanding, clearly inflames tensions. Since he was born in Lebanon, I would expect him to know better, but he doesn't for some reason that I don't understand. https://x.com/GadSaad/status/1878585265830396362

People can be careless with language in politics and there's a huge difference between the two. Sometimes out of spite, they will exaggerate and emotionalize conflicts for effect. To understand what's going on, in my opinion at least, it's important to attune to all these subtleties. While many people may not think there's much of a difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide, rhetorically and practically it makes a huge difference, especially when 2/3 of European Jews were wiped out in the Holocaust. I hate seeing what is going on in Gaza but there is no effort to systematically eradicate the Palestinians. To accuse Jews of doing that seems either very stupid to me or intentionally malicious.