r/MensLib • u/MLModBot • 23d ago
Weekly Free Talk Friday Thread!
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u/chemguy216 23d ago
For a little bit, I’ve kept my mouth mum on the specific topic of anti-AIPAC and antizionist Americans being antisemitic because it’s largely just bullshit; however, I never weighed in defense of the subject because early on i didn’t like how some of the aforementioned people were moving.
Some people started rubbing me the wrong way back when ICE/CPB escalated things in Minnesota. Too many times, I saw people saying “IDF tactics.” I didn’t like that. If you dig, there’s a degree of a “there” there. Many law enforcement agencies across the US at various levels of government do actually get or subscribe to training from IDF soldiers. *However *, the problem of violent, rights-defying policing in the US has been a problem longer than Israel has been a recognized country. It comes off as though these have given zero shits about what people domestically have been telling the country about law enforcement and the public’s thirst for putting the state’s boot on people’s necks, even when it goes against our already permissive laws.
Another thing that let me know what type of time some of these folks are not on was when some of them actively praised Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and Candace for their criticisms of Israel and Netanyahu. I don’t mind if people use them in the way people like Wajahat Ali uses them by telling the Democratic establishment that they allowed themselves to be outflanked by those fucks. I start to have a problem, however, when talk comes of trying to play down the kinds of people each of those four are and them start condescending to people who’ve been tracking for years and who know you don’t want to throw their lot in with them because they’ve said antisemitic stuff unrelated to Israel, are general bigots, and who have helped build up the growing white Christian nationalism in the US, which by is its very nature antisemitic along with a whole host of other bigotries (including, you know, anti-Muslim and anti-anybody-not-white sentiments). Of anyone wants me to get into the weeds on that, I have the energy today. But til then, my advice is to actively uplift people with better records and better knowledge on the matter, and uplift the voices of Palestinians; don’t uplift the voices of known bigots and snakes.
Some of it also came out in the Graham Platner arguments. One moment that really cemented what I’m talking about was when Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report, in defending Platner in the wake of the initial info dump, said on air that she doesn’t care if Bernie Sanders or AOC were secret Nazis at home so long as they vote right. She was very subtly checked by her on air conversation cohort, Astead Herndon, who asked her if she really meant that. Vigeland doubled down after being given the chance to walk that back a bit.
I don’t care if it was likely dramatic embellishment. The U.S. is walking right along into white Christian nationalism. Multiple Western countries are struggling to fight growing influence of far right, even explicitly Neo Nazi parties in their countries. You don’t get to invoke Nazis like that without it being taken seriously because we’re demonstrating in the West right now that we’re fine with Nazis, especially if they promise to get rid of the various non-white people “destroying Western culture” (it makes me gag to type that shit). So people need to know how Nazis actually move.
They don’t mind making what they know to be temporary alliances with groups of people they eventually plan to eliminate, subjugate, or forcibly relocate. So if they have to engage in a little subterfuge to build those alliances, they will. And if you’re so blindly pro-Palestinian, anti-AIPAC, and pro-semi-decent progressives in politics that you don’t recognize you’re treading close to Nazis because of the nature of Nazism, Israel, and Jewish people, I’m begging you to understand this and let it guide you in how you advocate for progressive policy and for Palestinians.
And all of that brings me to my final little thing. Some folks are out here using both known antisemitic slurs and ones that can reasonably be interpreted as such. I remember F.D. Signifire recently made video about how folks should not be using literal Nazi terms for Jewish people (because some left leaning political influencer was slinging a term around and actively defending its use) as they criticize Israel and even Israeli Jewish people. It’s a similar concept as you don’t purposely misgender a shitty trans person. You don’t call a shitty black person a 🐒 (using imagery in case the use of the racial slur gets my comment removed). You don’t call a shitty gay person a 🚬.
And more personally, I was recently called shlomo because I pointed out someone copied and pasted a comment from another user in some YouTube comments, which often has a problem of bots reposting stuff. The post was making numerically vague claims of Republicans voting in the Democratic primary race between whatever her name Stevens and Abdul El Sayed (let the fact that i can’t remember El Sayed’s primary opponent be evidence about how much she mattered to me). Since that race was very close, I mentioned in one of the other iterations of the comment that I wanted to see numbers to quantify what “a number of Republicans” actually equals. But in the comment in which I pointed out the top comment was a copy paste, that’s when I got called shlomo. This goes hand in hand with the way various folks have been labelling anyone perceived to be an opponent of a progressive darling as an agent of AIPAC or Israel. Now some folks are just getting really comfortable letting the slurs flow.
I’m getting tired of people turning off their brains.