Went to a Palestinian solidarity protest/rally with some new folks who’d become radicalised against America/the West over the last six months. They aren’t socialists (yet, I’m working on it) - but they’re good people. So, seeing the genocide and its support by our governments filled them with disgust. We talked about the Nakba, the history of Zionism, and the current apartheid etc.
Now, we come to the protest.
Overall, the atmosphere was incredible. Lots of cool signs, different kinds of people, and, of course the pigs. That’s not the problem.
The problem was the fucking speakers. I swear, at least half of them had to be feds whose entire job was to turn people away from turning up at these events.
Some of them, and I mean this literally, wanted the crowd to chant “we support October 7” and “we stand with Hamas”.
I swear, the way the people I was with turned to look at me.
Not every speaker was like this - most were genuine. They talked of labor solidarity, campus organizing, personal anecdotes. But all of that made these speakers stand out all the more.
The worst part is that when it would happen, the organisers was one of them. So this entire thing was a sham from the start.
I feel so bad. I shouldn’t have just brought people to a random protest I saw and should’ve vetted it first.
Like, seriously. I can’t fucking get over this. Who organizes a protests of people from all walks of life in support of Palestine and wants them to chant we stand with Hamas and let’s do one hundred more October 7s?.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Like, of fucking course Hamas is a natural reaction to apartheid and ethnic cleansing and genocide. And of course Oct 7 is nothing compared to the 200 days that followed since (or the 75 years that preceded it). But come the fuck on.
It seems we have yet another Israeli-Palestine struggle session that's turning into a shitshow. I'm locking this.
I've seen photos of protestors with Hezbollah flags. We don't have to apologize for Hamas.
hezbollah, ansarallah and hamas are all showing solidarity with the western protests, and shitlibs like OP want to throw them under the bus for optics
this is why the western left sucks
You can repeat this a dozen times in this post and I won’t care (I’ll roll my eyes at you, but I won’t care). My point is simple.
If you’re going to organise a protest, at least let there be some fucking sign (I don’t mean a literal sign, just a mention on the website, the posters, the socials, something) that your gonna be shouting “I stand with Hamas” and are proud of Oct 7 out there - so I don’t end up bringing the folks I brought to it.
Ambushing them (and me) like that doesn’t work. It’ll make you feel better and like you pulled one over us, but that’s it. And the next time you organise a protest, the people you blindsided won’t turn up.
[All this assuming you’re genuine and not a fed.]
You can have the kind of radical protest you want - but it has to have the kind of radical protesters you need. Advertising it like a general one, and then pulling shit like this is fed behaviour, and if you can’t see that, then, well…
tell your lib friends that october 7th needs to happen again and again until israel ceases to exist because that's reality.
when the russian invasion happened everyone got mad at me for saying I support Russia and they need to crush Ukraine. Now everyone has come around to my position. Don't apologize for being right.
Hezbollah, Ansarallah & Hamas have all shown solidarity with western protests. The least you could do is return the favor and not be a cuck to western lib optics
My brother was a left-liberal up until October 7th. When I talked to him about it, I immediately told him “this is what the Israelis deserve and it is a military action against colonizers”.
Now he is a communist and goes to more Palestine rallies than I do. He said my answer freaked him out but made him curious to dig further.
Unapologetically standing up for the truth and for anti-imperialism worked on a Liberal. Mealy-mouthed shit did not. By optics cucking yourself you are surrendering your most powerful tool for converting Liberals, being correct. People can smell the insecurity when you handwring and beat around the bush. They respect straightforward honesty.
Your contention doesn’t seem to be that we shouldn’t critically support Hamas. It seems to be that we should keep that quiet. Cowardice, weakness, insecurity. A communist disdains to conceal their views.
You weren't ambushed, you were just naive. It's not organizers' fault that you cling to this liberalism, either.
Glad the organizers were infinitely cooler than this post.
Shut the fuck up, if you want to decide what's chanted you can organise the fucking protests, you don't get to turn up to someone else's work and whine that being political is scaring off your dickhead friends.
For real, instead of just side eyeing their friends and being like "wow such violent antisemitism, amirite?" they could have taken the opportunity to explain why 10/7 happened, the reality of the uprising, and why violent resistance can be effective. Out here posting L's
You're not wrong, but it further raises the question of why OP hasn't already had that conversation with their friends. They've obviously talked enough to get them to the protest, but aren't challenging those kinds of conceptions? "To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong" etc
I’m kind of wondering here how caving to libs worked during the George Floyd protests of 2020.
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The Palestinian people have the right to defend themselves, including militarily. That is not in dispute.
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Civilian casualties are always regrettable. Resistance ideally targets the state's apparatus of repression.
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Just as there were white South Africans who took a role in resisting apartheid, there are Israeli Jews doing so now.µ
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It is indeed important not to alienate liberals. We are at a point where we are gaining wider support among the masses. The size of the protest and the extent to which it is supported by broad sections of the population do matter.
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Pro-Hamas slogans have no positive role in the current wave of protests. Why do we protest? To achieve concrete victories that complicate Israeli imperialism (and in the process grow revolutionary organisations), in casu cease cooperation with Israeli universities (which often have ties to the military) and to disinvest in that country. These things are achievable, which we know because similar demands have already won in quieter contexts. However, shouting pro-hamas slogans now unnecessarily alienates us from people who agree with our demands.
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People's political consciousness follows from their lived experience. If they see or experience repression at a protest with demands they agree with, their political awareness will progress by leaps and bounds. The chances of that happening because of a slogan is much smaller.
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Hamas was supported for years by the Israeli state because it was to their advantage to divide the Palestinian resistance and it was a strategic goal to limit the influence of revolutionary Marxists. This has been partially successful.
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Despite the legitimacy of the Palestinian resistance, we should also be aware of who is organising the resistance and what kind of society they want to create. In the Iranian revolution, the communist party collaborated with the religious movement. Immediately after the revolution, the communists were massacred by the clerics. The society Hamas wants to create is not the one Marxists aspire to. So why alienate yourself from potential allies in your immediate environment by unequivocally supporting Hamas?
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A quote from Lenin to end of with:
“[If we] were to make “recognition of the dictatorship [of the proletariat]” a condition of trade union membership, we would be doing a very foolish thing, damaging our influence among the masses, and helping the Mensheviks. The task devolving on Communists is to convince the backward elements, to work among them, and not to fence themselves off from them with artificial and childishly “Left” slogans.
The same atittude towards pro-Palestinian protesters who are currently insufficiently revolutionary can be witnessed in this thread.
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Of course feds are going to try shit. What did you expect?
Did you forget them starting shit during the George Floyd protests?
Don't let it get you down. This is a war, monsters are going to act like monsters. You just have to keep strong despite them.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
we stand with Hamas and let’s do one hundred more October 7s
Death to America
we stand with Hamas and let’s do one hundred more October 7s
Waow
Meanwhile just in Johannesburg alone:
Show
Show
Show
Show
Trying to get the anti-semetic accusations to stick I would imagine. Not that the actions of Oct 7th and Hamas are, but the public would certainly perceive this as antisemetic.
hamas and oct 7th aren't anti-semitic and pretending they are is already caving to zionist narratives.
But seriously, I hate this question, but how much evil does the Star of David have to be used for before it loses its original meaning and becomes just a hate symbol?
The swastika originally meant a bunch of shit in several different religions but the Nazis made that unacceptable in at least the west, and with the way Israel uses the Star of David I would be shocked if the same doesn’t happen. You can’t spray paint your religious symbol in an elementary school you bombed and not have people hate it.
Some people in this thread really do need to
Violent opposition to genocide is of course justified, but publicly chanting supporting for an event that is, at the very least, widely public perceived as a massacre of civilians, is pretty shitty protest tactics at best. And discrediting fed-work at worst.
Critical support for Hamas. They should do more violent resistance to the IDF, and sadly civilians will die, but that aspect is an unfortunate necessity, not a thing to be lauded. Hamas themselves say they made mistakes in that attack.
People should not stand with them on every issue and event; overall obviously fighting a genocide makes them worthy of support.
Lib shit. October 7th wasn’t a massacre it was a brilliant, heroic and successful military action. Stop ceding ground loser. The main mistakes Hamas made was not taking even more hostages and not killing even more Israeli scum.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Your optics cuckery is pathetic and a losing strategy. You conceal your aims. You accept Liberal framing. You cower before truth and put up lies
Hamas disagrees with you.
The group said that avoiding harming civilians “is a religious and moral commitment”
It added that “maybe some faults happened” during the attack.
Brother you started the thread by saying people need to touch grass, an inherently bad faith attack. Reap what you sow
Yeah you just accused them of being antisocial shut ins because they have a better grasp on anti-imperialism than you and are more principled in their statements
principled in their statements
That’s not what’s wrong with openly saying you support Hamas and oct7
widely public perceived as a massacre of civilians, is pretty shitty protest tactics at best
So instead of challenging the perception of Liberals you buckle to it, accept their framework and then lie about your ‘critical support’ of Hamas and hide it (or maybe you don’t actually support them after all if you can’t stand up to smears against them)
If you say to me you “critically support Hamas” but then in public condemn them you are lying to either me or the public. Neither is acceptable
Thanks for the shitty bad faith accusations. This kind of conversation sucks.
Brother you started the thread by saying people need to touch grass, an inherently bad faith attack. Reap what you sow
I disagree with the pearl clutching, but what actually is the point of chanting in favor of Hamas at a protest? Is there a path where there could be solidarity between American student groups and Hamas, channels to send aid to Hamas specifically to support their resistance? It seems pretty much impossible to me. Why not just focus on the message that's most effective for divesting from Israel, which is all we can really hope for by protesting anyway?
The situation just reeks of the same kind of impulse to show ideological purity that made the Weather Underground a small group of kids doing random acts of violence instead of a mass movement. Sure, they were ideologically correct and morally justified, but what's the point of being right if you don't have a path to political power?
Idk, could be useful in opening a conversation about the realities of 10/7. There are numerous accounts of Israelis in tanks, helicopters, and on the ground indiscriminately killing anything that moves. By explicitly calling out these events and support for the resistance it allows people like OP or other organizers to explain to their lib friends where the majority of civilian deaths actually came from instead of only allowing MSM to tell them how to feel (that somehow Hamas had hellfire missiles/were roving gangs of rapists)
and sadly civilians will die
only ones I'm sad to see die are the Palestinians, may all settlers face what they deserve
Dead children sucks. Even if they are the children of fascists supporters.
if the IOF didn't want dead settler kids, they shouldn't have unloaded helicopter fire on random people on Oct.7
Didn't think "children dying is bad" would be a controversial take to anybody here but here we are I guess.
Yeah, children cannot be fascists, and they are victims on both sides. As far as adults go though, there are next to 0 “Israelis” that could be considered “innocent civilians.” The vast majority were in the military.
Violent opposition to genocide is of course justified, but publicly chanting supporting for an event that is, at the very least, widely public perceived as a massacre of civilians, is pretty shitty protest tactics at best. And discrediting fed-work at worst.
You're right. Critical support isn't something that makes for good slogans. It's a highly nuanced position that you can't sum up in a catchy chant. Of course October 7 was justified—when you're given the choice between violence or death, it isn't really a choice. But that's a thing that's difficult to distill down to three or four words.
"critical support for some actions of hamas" is a shitty slogan to chant, sorry
Real "Why can't defund the police actually say what they want instead of some crazy anarchy chant?" vibes you get from liberals. It's supposed to get people questioning and open conversation on the topic, not be a manifesto of exactly what is to be done
Yeah this is one of the points where you better not let your online brain write checks your irl self can’t cash. Something like that has a good chance of escalating into violence and the people involved HAVE to recognize that. You have to trust the people around you otherwise you’re just going to end up getting hurt while the libs around you run away because they were just saying it to be funny.
Also this is a direct call out. If you say you support OCT7 and you’re not ready to take a nightstick to the skull potentially you should probably be quite.
Some of them, and I mean this literally, wanted the crowd to chant “we support October 7” and “we stand with Hamas”.
These both chants are pretty lukewarm. Both are objectively good things to say too. October 7 was not a massacre. What it is perceived as is irrelevant to this fact. Hamas actually showed a lot more restraint than I would have expected and I'm pretty sure Israelis killed more of their own than Hamas did. Normalising support of Oct 7 is fine in my books and does not feel like fed behaviour.
Sometimes I wonder if people who pull stuff like that (I've had similar experiences) are feds or if they just don't realize that the shitposting stays in the designated shitposting areas of the internet and can't be allowed to leak out to IRL.
it's not shitposting, it's the correct anti-imperialist position
I'm afraid you're gonna stay a very lonely anti-imperialist in that way.
Here's a quote from Some Points on The Mass Line for you:
Start from where people are at. Since building the struggle is at the core of our agenda, we can then proceed to outline some key principles and methods of work. The first is that our starting point needs to be the felt needs and wants of the masses of people. Good intentions will not do in this case. They might bring us to the demonstration, but we are likely to be lonely there. So to build struggle, we had better have a handle on what these felt needs are and what people are likely to do in order to achieve them. We have probably all been in meetings where some particular is under discussion, and somebody jumps up and says, “The real issue is X or Y.” Maybe that person is extremely insightful or maybe they are dead wrong (more likely). It really does not matter, we need to start from where people are at.
This is a bastardized reading of Mao to justify tailist social-chauvinism. He was talking about understanding the material needs of the people here, not about Liberal optics and becoming crypto-communists hiding our views
This is a bastardized reading of Mao
Here's what PFLP has to say about the authors of that text:
On behalf of the fighters, cadre, members and Central Committee of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, we extend our comradely greetings to every member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization. As the relationship between our organization and yours grows stronger, we would like to congratulate you for your revolutionary work (...) The challenge of upholding Marxist-Leninist principles in the main imperialist country of the world is a difficult one. But FRSO has done so admirably, and the PFLP is proud to have you as partners in the worldwide M-L movement for socialist revolution.
Here I am thinking we should start chanting "death to america" and "break the back of the Fourth Reich"
I stand with Hamas.
I understand the optics are bad in the US. I still believe it and I'll say it. I don't think there's a way to believe otherwise if you oppose genocide and you fully understand the history of the occupation and of resistance to colonialism. Maybe there's a lot more we could be doing to educate people (more posting!), but I think it's a mistake to deny your actual beliefs in service of the carefully crafted PR produced message that will immediately transform a fully propagandized American liberal into a comrade. For decades we in the West tried depicting the Palestinian people as passive observers of their own destruction, and it somehow has done little to weaken the racist image of the bloodthirsty terrorist. Maybe we need to rely more on the truth: that Palestinians have always fought back, and have not given up.
Possibly feds but honestly some people got a bit juiced that public sentiment is shifting in what seems like a big way, forget where most people are at, at least as long as "supporting the IDF" is still less taboo in the mainstream I think more people who rhetorically "support Hamas" will actually say it than mean it.
They might also be forgetting where most people are at & supremely confident that almost all of the non-militarized Israelis killed in/around Al-Aqsa Flood were killed by the IDF. Which is certainly plausible, I'd feel comfortable assuming it's true but like a lot of things it'll probably be a distant memory by the time we know certainly.
Ideally the *world* could come together to intervene and stop Israel, but sometimes we deal with what we have.
My org was pushing critical support for Hamas and Oct 7 on October 10 and it paid big organizing dividends.
Folks here need to stop listening to the liberals trying to make them cowards. If you do not project and own correct positions you will abandon allies and leave space for liberals to create their own versions of the narrative you should've been running with.
reading these comments and realizing that there are tons of leftists, here and elsewhere, who quietly believe all the right things, but cannot emotionally deal with the fact that anti-imperialist communism isn't as popular as DNC Vote-ism and never will be, so they fedjacket anyone who can on political-tactical grounds.
like, please ask yourselves, do you actually have reason to believe this is the work of feds, or have you failed to apprehend the reality in front of you, and you need some explanation that renders it illusory?
