The Catastrophic Moral Failing of Those Who Won’t Condemn Hamas

Now explain to me how, in good conscience, one can build a movement to oppose police brutality and racism in one country and, at the same time, glory in the killing of 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in another?

"Yeah, riddle me this, 'leftists': How can one oppose a state-sanctioned system of racist violence and oppression, while also opposing a state-sanctioned system of racist violence and oppression? ✔️mate!"

Also, "unfathomable number of children" is at most, still less than 3 months of gun violence in USA. So pretty strong

vibes on that.

Hahhahahaa the police get training in torture and interogation from Israeli occupation forces. They use illegal sigint technology developed by israeli tech firms. They fly drones prototyped and tested in the skies over Palestine. They throw the same chemical weapons as Israeli cops. HHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAHAHHAHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA
- The "knee on the neck" technique that Derek Chauvin used to murder George Floyd also likely came from the IDF's training.

I like how they slip this in at the end of a paragraph

In the UK, a headmaster at a Jewish school gave his students permission to not wear their uniforms, so that they would be less identifiable to hoodlums glorying in the moment and looking to beat Jews up.

Technically it's a statement of fact, but it's an attempt to launder the opinion of some random guy no one has heard of or cares about as if it represents an objective reality that students were in danger. The author makes no attempt to justify it; we're just supposed to believe that the headmaster was correct. It's either bad writing or sleezy, your call.

Also, does anyone have more info about antisemitism at the rally? The linked article doesn't give any examples in the free portion.

Palestinians are being genocided, but the real victims are white Jews thousands of miles away, because they might hypothetically be assaulted by “hoodlums”, which is definitely a real possibility because some random dude is fearmongering about it.
- Also I'm sure this hasn't caused middle easterners and muslims to experience an even bigger uptick in violence against them in western countries. We definitely don't have a history of that.
Technically it's a statement of fact, but it's an attempt to launder the opinion of some random guy no one has heard of or cares about as if it represents an objective reality that students were in danger. The author makes no attempt to justify it; we're just supposed to believe that the headmaster was correct. It's either bad writing or sleezy, your call.
UK gammons being freakish racists also has absolutely nothing to do with Palestine or Palestinians.
- Britain created Israel

Look, I'm not gonna celebrate killing of "civilians" (they are settlers, which is tbh different. They are also reservists).

But literally hamas wouldn't exist without Israeli occupation and apartheid. They wouldn't exist without Israel imposing the world's biggest concentration camp on Palestinians. Militant struggle would happen with hamas, and if not hamas then another group. I've said this before but it's like putting water over heat and getting mad when it boils. What's the point of condemning hamas when they are just the result of conditions placed upon Palastinians

Israel also funded and backed Hamas to destroy the communist liberation movements lol
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
- Thank youuuuu
- That’s because right wing Israelis were afraid of having to deal with groups perceived as willing to negotiate. They are more comfortable being perpetually at war. Contrary to what they claim, they don’t actually care about the security of their own civilian population. Far easier to expand the settler colony through brute violence, even if it means less security for everyone. They like having an opposition composed of zeolous dead-enders because they can use the need for security as an excuse to kill off more Palestinians or illegally grab more land in the west bank for settlements. Having HAMAS as the only opposition is also optically better. You hear them constantly comparing HAMAS to DAESH. Who in their right mind would want to sit across the table and negotiate with DAESH?
- Is Hamas aware that they were used to destroy the communists? Do they... regret it?
SEO optimized idealist media criticism focused hot take: revenge is cool and good and no west coast PMC hipster who has ever written a fucking marvel movie saying its not has ever experienced anything truly worth avenging.
lukewarm materialist take: revenge is ok in certain contexts assuming the consequences can be avoided or are beneficial to strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat. see the chinese cultural revolution for examples.
- Sure. I can see that, especially the second one. I'm just pointing out that when arguing with liberals you can easily point to Israel's heinous actions and say "What would you and your friends do? What would they want to do? Would you roll over and take it?" And further to the point about "condemning hamas", it's like condemning boiling water. You condemn the person putting the water to heat
You're talking about material conditions, something liberals are allergic to

The romanticization of Hamas’s killing spree by one small subsection of the left, the argument that the shedding of innocent blood is somehow forced on the killers by their victims, is the same one that far-right murderers, such as Anders Beivik or Dylann Roof, have been making these past several years before they open fire with their high-velocity rifles and spray supermarkets, schools, music festivals, churches, synagogues, and mosques with their murderous ammunition.

These clowns do be having the same talking points. Anders Beivik or Dylann Roof weren't trapped in an open air prison for their entire lives. They are very privileged 'people' (white, male, middle income etc) who hate minorities because they want it all for themselves. Meanwhile, people who join Hamas do so because they are frustrated of the repressive colonial force treating them like they aren't humans. Comparing the two is ridiculous.

Comparing Palestinians to far right persons like Breivik and Roof is so disgustingly vile.
OK comparing Beivik and Roof to the Palestinian struggle is definitly one of the most disgusting and vile arguments I've seen through all this. Fuck the author of this.
Well the propagandists are just
in desperatly trying to tie the word [terrorist] to Hamas and thus
magica dooba now
= terrorist subhuman animals deserving to be wiped off the face of the earth.

Why you no
are not also scratched :lib: ? Why you no scratched?
:maybe-later-kiddo: That's it! You're out of the wine cave meetings!
Ah yes, the fact that the right appropriates left-wing arguments is proof that they're both the same, rather than that left-wing arguments are popular and the right is parasitizing them

I'm sorry, but this is like asking me to sympathize with Nazis when Warsaw rose up. ~~I don't care how many Nazi kids are killed, or how many Nazi civilians die.~~ The simple answer is do not be a genocidal apartheid ethnostate and do not support a genocidal apartheid ethnostate.

Israel sacrificed its moral support when it asked us to look away during its atrocities.

EDIT: Nazi kids are not a thing. I apologize. I was way too hasty. I'm leaving it up as a reminder for others to keep a cooler head.

The most I would say is “it’s unfortunate that innocent children died, their parents shouldn’t have put them in that situation.”
Israel chose to put those kids in harm's way by inciting the conflict, but you should still care that they died. They didn't ask to be born into this mess and had no choice in becoming collateral damage. Take a break from gazing into the abyss.
- War is terrible and the loss of any human life is a tragic and untenable waste but, as an American, children getting gunned down is just a Tuesday. I'm more concerned with the actions the deaths of these particular children will precipitate. Any sort of overly performative grief will only play into that
- First, you aren't wrong and I want to complement you on you seeing the human lives here. It is important!
  To give a
  reply, the only way I can grieve and denounce the violence is by pointedly withholding that grief precisely because that grief is weaponized by Israel to commit more atrocities. This removes the shield Israel uses and exposes them to their own horror.
  To put it another way, I will also withhold support for an abuser because an abuser will use that as a means of defending and continuing their actions. Keeping that support from them, however objectively legitimate that support is, forces them to confront their own actions.
On a slightly less blood-thirsty note, nazi kids aren't a thing, at best they are victims of propaganda.
But parents bear full brunt of responsibility, either by moving to israel or, using brainwormed chomsky argument, by who they vote for.
- nazi kids aren't a thing
  That's a good point. I was too hasty.
- Nazi kids down the street just made fun of me and my Simpsons backpack. So think again.
The Nazis are also responsible for putting their citizens in harm’s way by forcing people resist or retaliate out of rage.
- Yeah, well if I was a Soviet soldier who'd had his family starved to death for generalplan ost and then liberated a death camp I would struggle to not hold every adult German personally culpable.
  Shocking that they had as much appetite for mercy as they did. And I'm glad they did, but I still wonder how they softened their hearts.

It's so fucking stupid.

PROVE YOUR LOYALTY TO THE STATE! PROVE YOUR LOYALTY TO THE STATE! PROVE YOUR LOYALTY TO THE STATE! PROVE YOUR LOYALTY TO THE STATE!

It doesn't fucking matter. None of these twits are going to kill you because you don't buy in to thier campaign of murder. They'll just wring hands and clutch pearls and whine whine whine. Fuckers.

None of these twits are going to kill you because you don't buy in to thier campaign of murder.
Maybe not the “””journalists”””, but their fascist buddies sure will.

Yeah I'm not gonna take lessons in morality from a vile racist who excuses apartheid and the butchery of 700 Palestinian children

Be an American.

Come from a country founded on violence, believe this violence justified.

See another nation using violence for infinitely more justifiable reasons.

"That's terrorism!"

OMG WHY AREN'T YOU ALL SHARING THE SHOCK AND HORROR!

:Wonka-dessert:

When the warnings and inevitability have been out there for decades. Everytime "the left" warned the political establishment that their support for a genocidal aparthied is unacceptable and needs to be tampered with the rights of the Palestinians we were told to

SHUT UP / SIT DOWN / ADULTS ARE TALKING / IT'S COMPLICATED!

When the inevitable happens - we're like yeah we told you but your missle profits and fanatical lunatics are more important than brokering peace. So don't look to us for sympathy when we told you so. Decades and decades and well just

Serious question - what is Portside? Who/what funds them etc. Or is it just a glorified blog?

It doesn't have a Wikipedia page.

https://portside.org/faq
Who are the moderators, in real life?
The Portside moderators (Portside, Labor and Culture) are:  Judy Atkins, Jonathan Bennett, Mark Brody, Peter N. Carroll, Barry Cohen, David Cohen, Ira Cohen, Jeannette Ferrary, Marti Garza, Greg Heires, Geoffrey Jacques, Will Jones, Maureen LaMar, Stephanie Luce, Ray Markey, John P. Pittman, Natalie Reuss, Meredith Schaffer, Jay Schaffner, Kurt Stand, and Ethan Young. Nan Rubin is a regular contributor.
The moderators’ work on Portside is an unpaid labor of love. No kidding. No pay, but they love it. Must be the benefits.
The moderators include a historian, a philosopher and a computer scientist, a professor of labor studies, two librarians, and a public school teacher. Other moderators have held or hold positions in the labor movement, including elected official, researcher, editor, negotiator and organizer.
The moderators are racially diverse. They reside in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota, California, New Mexico, Hawaii and the Washington, DC metropolitan area.
They’ve been involved in more movements, campaigns, causes, demonstrations and debates than they’d care to remember or you’d care to hear about.
- They were right about the me not caring part
- No kidding. No pay, but they love it. Must be the benefits.
  God I can hear the twee ukulele playing right now

Genocide is bad
- in all my years on this site and leftist subreddits and discords and irl meetups, through all of the disagreements and struggle sessions we have I think unironically the one single issue that most determines which users I feel affinity with is the divide of:
  people on the verge of tears from powerlessness and anger crying out for some desperate revenge against oppressors
  vs
  ppl who don't get the sentiment and can only kind of uncomfortably note that we should be better than that

He is a senior fellow at the American liberal think tank Demos, and a lecturer in the University of California, Davis

In 2000, he received a Crime and Communities Media Fellowship from the Open Society Foundations.

least fascistic PMC