You need to understand that most people’s understanding of the conflicts in the Middle East started on October 7, 2023.

I guess the point wasn’t clear enough: Israelis and Palestinians both claim the land due to ancestry. Reasonable people understand the issue is complicated; displacement was a friendly replacement for massacred, forcibly removed, and slavery. You can clearly see that the intent of the creation of Israel was to redress a wrong perpetuated over millennia, regardless of the reality that it caused another migration of peoples.

Like you said, Zionism is just the belief in a divine ancestral claim (core, even, for Judaism) to the region. You can be flippant about it being based in religion and dismiss it from your position of privilege behind a keyboard, but there are radical religious people that believe the land is their birthright just as strongly as some Palestinians and are fighting over that. The religious extremists on both sides of the conflict frankly don’t care about your opinions. A two state solution offers the best course for peace in the area, but the extremists from both sides need to be isolated and dealt with. Most Israelis and Palestinians are good people such in the middle of a shitty situation.

Cognitive dissonance

Israelites

Jewish diaspora

The presence of Jews in that area of the Middle East goes back over 3000 years until the expulsions. People don’t dispute that modern-day Palestinians lived there prior to the 1940s - but people conveniently set arbitrary time limits of settlement to allow for one genocide and decry the other.

Politics in the middle east is not a simple case of “Israel bad.” Both groups of people deserve a home and both are going to lose part of their national identity regardless of the outcome. A two state solution is the most prudent solution and arguing otherwise ignores reality.

Not necessarily disagreeing with you, but there’s a reason why European Jews were in such ample supply. It’s hard to negatively judge early Jewish Zionism when many of the Jews in question were liberated from genocide and given their ancestral home back. The actions of the right wing government in Israel don’t speak towards the large number of Israelis that oppose the actions of the government or their particular view of Zionism. The term Zionism has been co-opted by various groups to the point where it no longer carries meaning but instead becomes caricature for a certain type of villain.

If you truly think Hamas is not as bad or worse than Israeli counter-actions, you should reflect on your own beliefs. In this conflict, the military wings of both sides ARE deplorable and deserve universal condemnation. Hamas’s goal is the eradication of Jews; any benefit to the Palestinians under their thumb is accidental at best. If you support Hamas, you support genocide. If you support the IDF’s actions, you support genocide. Full stop.

No, Romney made that rhetorical statement and Blinken looked flabbergasted that the statement was even made.

Romney’s statement was made in the context, ironically, that certain social media “news” is made in the absence of any historical context as appeals to emotions instead of facts. The fact that the Twitter poster made an obvious cut to give “context” to Romney’s strange claim is an example of what Blinken said is wrong with certain social media news “sources”.

TikTok ban discussions have been going on for a long time, well prior to Hamas’s October attack, and it’s a distortion of reality to claim motives otherwise.

Romney should not be a role model for anything other than uncompassionate conservatism. If this type of “news” article is indicative of how many people get their information, then reality really is fluid for a whole lot of people and that’s scary. Though it’s hardly unsurprising with the amount of obvious propaganda sites posting “news” about the conflict that people take as gospel.

deleted by creator

Could it be in the realm of possibility that people in Michigan, and other states, view the conflict in the Middle East as more complicated than “Israel bad”? People are capable of viewing the actions of the current Israeli leadership as anathema while still understanding the rationale behind continued military support.

Using loaded language like “infested” only raises questions on other biases coloring opinions.

And what Hamas is trying to accomplish is also genocide - but this is all besides the point. The larger question is this: what would it take for you to believe even a fraction of what the Israeli military claims?

Can it be true that the IDF is indiscriminately killing Palestinian civilians as well as telling the truth?

Would you claim that Hamas is justified in their killing of civilians if the Israeli military also kills civilians?

Even further: what happens if all foreign governments stop sending aid to Israel and Lebanon/Hamas/etc. attack Israeli citizens with the intent of purging them? Would you suddenly support the IDF in it’s struggle to protect Israeli citizens from these groups who have already made it clear that their primary purpose is the genocide of the Jews in the Levant?

Regardless of anyone’s feelings on the IDF, it is incumbent on all of us to take the claims of Hamas and Israel with a massive grain of salt - you may not believe in the credibility of the IDF but you certainly cannot dismiss the engrained antisemitism of Hamas and others in the region and believe them at face value.

Which is more likely for underground tunnels that don’t hold many people and are kitted for permanent subterranean living:

1. a safe place for a terrorist organization’s leadership and inner circle to plan attacks with the easy ability to traverse the city unknown
2. temporary bomb shelters for the population of Gaza

At what point will people, who bend over backwards to defend a designated terrorist organization who exclusively target civilians, admit that the conflict is more complicated than “Israel bad” - when Hamas revives indiscriminate bus bombings of Israelis (or do they pine for the 90s/2000s again)? Netanhanyu needs to go, but Hamas doesn’t even try to distinguish between military targets and civilians - all Israelis are military targets (genocide). The victims in this conflict are Palestinian and Israeli civilians and this needs to not be forgotten in their haze of Israeli bloodlust.

Blood libel is anti-Semitic.

Just because you don’t understand these code phrases or dog whistles doesn’t mean anti-Semitism doesn’t exist.

The Wikipedia quote is misleading - some European countries used zero/null but it was agreed that the prevailing usage should be the letter O.

Wiki source 12

Apparently, it was originally C and changed later, too.

So genocide is ok as long as enough time passes from the event? It’s such an obvious dog whistle when those opposed to the current genocide are magically unopposed to the genocide perpetrated against a certain group of people “before 1930”. It’s not ok to perform acts of genocide against the Palestinian civilians today nor is it ok for the historical Jewish populations to have had acts of genocide perpetrated against them.

Outspoken libertarians aren’t going to be bullied in college - outspoken anything in college generally leads to people ignoring you. College students that think they’re being bullied most likely attribute normal behavior to bullying - just like incels treat normal human interactions as impediments to getting laid.

It’s vav across many, if not most, Jewish ethnicities (not sure why you’d single out ashkenazi Jews) as well as predominantly a ‘v’ sound in almost all cases. I googled it and found that waw is accurate if we were talking about semitic origins of the letter, not its modern usage in Hebrew.

Adonai, Elohim, and El Shaddai. All 3 names are used in the Torah and all 3 are plural. We were taught that the God of Israel was one of many gods, but that the ancient Israelites were specifically chosen by this god. This god liked to war with the chosen people of other gods and the Torah is full of those tales. Basically, I’m not talking about kaballah but the authors of the Torah using multiple words for the name of God, some of which being plural.

In Hebrew, there are many names for God - some of which are plural (a remnant from when Judaism was polytheistic).

It’s also vav, not waw. The sound is a v.

Hard to forget a decade of Hebrew school.

The Supremacy Clause (Article VI, Clause 2) and the 10th Amendment clearly state that the federal government has more, read: supreme, power over the states. You may be misremembering that the phrase “nor prohibited by it to the States” exists in the amendment. Basically, a federal law today will immediately and automatically nullify a 200 year old state law - precedence nor time of the state law will survive a Supreme Court review even if all 9 Justices are Federalist Society lackeys.

He also knows Bubbles? Small world!