The text below is from Kevin Ovenden, an Irish marxist who founded an organisation to bring aid to Palestine during the 2009 war, and who as aboard the flotilla in 2010 which tried breaking the Israeli Blockade, which was violently attacked by the IOF.
"It's absolutely true that the impact of Israel's killing of seven WCK aid workers casts a harsh light on those who only now complain about this going "too far" after the slaughter of over 30,000 Palestinians and 196 other aid workers.
We should make that point as we seize on this moment to build more widely and to isolate Israel where we are.
But it is not helped by some memes and lazy arguments going around. Those talk of the deaths of "seven white people" at the hands of Israel.
That isn't true. One was Palestinian and a second was Indian-Australian. Not white.
I think some of this comes from not really pausing to think and find out, combined with an extremely annoying habit of people trying to force everything into North American notions of "white skin privilege".
The perversity of that in this case is that it erases the Palestinian-ness of one of the victims and the mixed heritage of another, of the kind that can still raise eyebrows at passport control in parts of the world."
The text below is from Kevin Ovenden, an Irish marxist who founded an organisation to bring aid to Palestine during the 2009 war, and who as aboard the flotilla in 2010 which tried breaking the Israeli Blockade, which was violently attacked by the IOF.
"It's absolutely true that the impact of Israel's killing of seven WCK aid workers casts a harsh light on those who only now complain about this going "too far" after the slaughter of over 30,000 Palestinians and 196 other aid workers.
We should make that point as we seize on this moment to build more widely and to isolate Israel where we are.
But it is not helped by some memes and lazy arguments going around. Those talk of the deaths of "seven white people" at the hands of Israel.
That isn't true. One was Palestinian and a second was Indian-Australian. Not white.
I think some of this comes from not really pausing to think and find out, combined with an extremely annoying habit of people trying to force everything into North American notions of "white skin privilege".
The perversity of that in this case is that it erases the Palestinian-ness of one of the victims and the mixed heritage of another, of the kind that can still raise eyebrows at passport control in parts of the world."
Liberals can't imagine oppression being more then skin deep.