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.
And don't forget Cop City will be used to train Israeli cops to lynch more Palestinians too. All cops are bastards.
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-did-israeli-secret-service-teach-floyd-police-to-kneel-on-neck
The Labour leader Keir Starmer sacked a member of his shadow cabinet, Rebecca Long-Bailey for sharing the article, which Mr Starmer said “contained an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory”.
The Morning Star piece alleges that those attending the 2012 conference “learned the violent techniques used by Israeli forces as they terrorise the occupied Palestinian territories under the guise of security operations.”
The article does not explicitly claim that Israeli forces taught American police to kneel on a person’s neck at the conference.
We merely trained cops to dehumanize our ghettofied racially oppressed subjects, we're not fascist!
"how dare you not both sides this argument"
israel had it coming. suck my ass, zionists.
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.
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/
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?
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.
I.e. they're americans
the political economy of primitive accumulation is timeless
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
Sorry you're so hollowed out by the brutality of the world we live in that you're numb to the deaths of children.
Children die every day. You only care about the ones you're told to
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.
withholding that grief precisely because that grief is weaponized by Israel to commit more atrocities
I think this is where we're all at tbh.
I think my solution is to ensure that the culpability isn't misattributed, which is why I emphasized that the blame for their deaths lies with Israel.
An honest-to-goodness Truth and Reconciliation would make great strides for proper attribution.
He I justed posted a Big Joel twitter video where he says exactly that about the grief thing!
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.
Every 18 year old Fascist soldier is a tragedy. We failed to rescue them from Fascism before they could be made in to monsters. : (
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
(Glorified blog)
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.
No kidding. No pay, but they love it. Must be the benefits.
God I can hear the twee ukulele playing right now
And the biggest divide I see is between the people who genuinely want the world to be better and the people who are using political radicalism as their excuse to voice their murder fantasies, who dream about standing in an angry mob as 8-year-olds get sent to the gallows for the crime of being born from a royal vagina.
Spare me your melodrama, children and babies are not your fucking oppressors. If you seriously want to tell me that calling for babies to be beheaded and every Israeli being burned alive is "desperate revenge against oppressors", then I guess Netanyahu really is doing self defense right now.
I am picking a side you dingdong. That doesn't mean I want the side I'm rooting for to ethnically cleanse the other, holy fuck.
Hamas does not have a policy of completely exterminating of all Israelis. You are, despite nominally supporting Hamas, implicitly promoting anti-Hamas Zionist lies.
You completely dodged his point to talk about some other shit.
Ok but the fact that they took hostages that are just "regular settlers" rather than active service members doesn't mean Hamas's goals are to wipe out every settler. And you are acting like if people don't side with the idea of wiping out every settler we aren't siding with Palestine. But thats not even the goal of Hamas. You just made that shit up in your head.
Settler/indigenous is a material relation though, which means it can change if the political landscape changes. If the Palestinians emerge victorious and create a Palestinian state and everyone living in that territory becomes a Palestinian, then those former Israelis aren't settlers anymore. Realistically that process involves killing or driving off the settlers in large numbers to destroy the strength and morale of their political movement, but they aren't some kind of gray goo that you have to eradicate down to the last molecule. Historically most decolonization movements, e.g. in South Africa and Algeria, just won the war, a large majority of settlers fucked off because they didn't get to be colonial lords anymore, and the rest capable of being decent human beings stayed, paid some measure of restitutions, and remained as citizens of the new indigenous state.
if your politics have you conclude you can do nothing and deserve to die, even that you should do something that you then don't do, you don't have actionable politics. you have shit politics. hamas are not doing some 200 IQ definition stretching, they literally mean zionists because they need to go shoot people and need a functional definition of who they are at war with.
you having some martyr complex to excuse inaction does not mean it makes any sense to wish death on random ass civilians or literally babies. the point of whoever it was you read was almost certainly not that because you're white you should be OK with being murdered, it's that you should take action. when we talk about the attacks being an inevitable reaction to decades of occupation, that does not mean we think randos who were living where they were born deserved to die.
it's just especially absurd because you're only saying that because you know damn well you're perfectly safe and that even in the event of a liberation movement they aren't going ti try to murder you. you want to have these callous, unhinged takes and pretend you're applying it equally to yourself when you know that won't happen.
Are you actually on the side of Palestinians? You seem more like a bog standard online leftist that has done the bare minimum of recognizing a genocide for what it is and has taken that to mean they can just say whatever edgy nonsense pops into their head and pretend that's anticolonialism. "Oh, you can't criticize me for saying shit that Zionists pretend are the actual stakes of the conflict because I have right opinions."
You are not special here. You are not more outraged than anyone else. You are valuing the clout of appearing more "extreme" to a handful of internet leftists over the damage of giving Zionists screenshots of Palestine supporters actually wanting to commit genocide. If you're worried about what side people are on, first worry whether you're even helping the one you pretend to care about.
Go fuck yourself. If you wanna smugly tell me that I have to be in favor of Israeli genocide to be on the side of Palestine, you can go die in a fucking cave. Call me idealistic if you want, you fucking maniac.
yeah sure whatever im a centrist because i dont want either side to genocide the other you are completely fucking insane
And the biggest divide I see is between the people who genuinely want the world to be better and the people who are using political radicalism as their excuse to voice their murder fantasies, who dream about standing in an angry mob as 8-year-olds get sent to the gallows for the crime of being born from a royal vagina.
I see that divide too. Too many self-described leftists don't really care about society improving somewhat as much as they want to be knee-jerk contrarians against the status quo and also think violence is fun instead of sometimes necessary.
falling into genocidal antisemitic tropes in response to the israeli state being ghouls is not hopeless desperation. these are not palestinians posting after having their homes bombed and their loved ones lynched. this site is still mostly westerners living in much more comfort, lots of white westerners with no real connection to the conflict. most people here have no fucking excuse to be posting like that, other than putting on the costumes of the actually oppressed to vicariously play out their outrage.
it is adventurist nonsense. no, you actually can manage your anger enough to not call for murdering babies, if you lack the discipline to not even help but at least not produce propaganda for zionist liberals - and they do in fact watch this place for shit takes like this - then you are worse than useless.
if you're mad, at least focus on presenting the IDF as monsters instead of presenting their victims' perspective as wanting to kill babies. you can recognize that the actual victims are not going to respond well to being genocided without stepping in to say awful shit on their behalf.
Killing children is inherently evil yes
conflating israelis and jews is not good either
Edit: was a bit hostile, apologies
Specifically singling out babies to me read as a bioessentialist take as babies are not actors with any political agency, and the language of specifically genocide as opposed to, like, hoping the IDF steps on their own landmines has an antisemetic connotation, but I missed the bit about the Nakba. I am much more suspicious of some white person having this extreme a take having some other motivation for talking about genocide than I am someone that was actually directly harmed by Israel.
Specifically singling out babies to me read as a bioessentialist take
While you're correct that it would normally make sense to read it that way, the only reason anyone is talking about babies at all is that the IOF invented a story about "40 beheaded babies" and then immediately said they would not investigate it or provide any evidence. Given that context, I don't think it necessarily makes sense to interpret it as bioessentialist, but rather as an angry (incorrect) reaction to all of the "Hamas are evil baby killers" propaganda.
To clarify, this is not meant to justify the removed comment which was deranged regardless. Just because the evil settler genocide army is making things up about killing babies, that doesn't suddenly mean that killing babies is good.
bioessentialist
off topic but im kinda sure that this has primarily with gender, but I get what your aiming at. Its a mistake to attribute children agency they dont and will not have until they are at least 16-18 (even then its circumstantial and a touchy subject)
I really don't get why people with a communist would bring such inherently false analysis into discourse. Being Jewish has absolutely nothing to do with this. Its a critique of Fascist Nationalism and Settlerismwhich can be done by any member of any race. And again, Children are just unable to be a part of such exploitation because they have no agency whatsoever. Children are inherently innocent.
Communists know the real enemies, why bring in people and groups that have nothing to do with it.
And yeah, it really should be a rule that one should be suspicious of anything white people (especially imperial core ones) do. Again because of the system they surround themselves in and their material interests are entirely aligned with reactionary thoughts and actions.
While I stand by the statement that calling for babies to be killed as an act of genocide has an extremely antisemetic connotation and I would normally assume someone saying that is doing some antisemetic entryism, I did miss that the bit about the Nakba which better explains their post as coming from actual harm rather than just grandstanding.
However, shit like "death to America" is its own problem, as there isn't actually any relevant desire to ethnically cleanse white people and so it can be understood as either a joke or indeed just about the nation state, as obviously even if you did actually mean to genocide white people for whatever reason there are a lot of people who are not white here or who are literally indigenous, so an unironic "nuke the US" take would be nonsense even before getting to the fact that whiteness is a social construct that can be destroyed without literally killing all white people. And then there's the common criticism of leftists using the imagery of people.in the Middle East as violent terrorists to larp as such, along with using terms like inshallah while wishing for violence.
I disagree with the other user (it's not good to want children to die, children can't be held responsible because they can't understand and affect their environment fully like adults can), but this comment is wrong. Wishing death on Israelis is not at all the same as "6 million wasn't enough". Let's not pretend that being a victim of the holocaust is equivalent in any way to being killed by the people whose land you're settling, or that the Zionist settler state is at all representative of Jews and Judaism (especially those who were killed in the Holocaust).
I'm not saying it was your intent, but I think it's a form of antisemitism to draw that comparison.
As always: Judaism /= Zionism, Zionism /= Judaism
Let's not pretend that being a victim of the holocaust is equivalent in any way to being killed by the people whose land you're settling
Almost all the survivors of the Holocaust are gone, now. But many, many of them voiced their disgust for the conduct of the Israeli state before they passed. Norm Finklestien's parents narrowly survived the camps had he has voiced righteous outrage against the conduct of Israel since he was a young man precisely because of their experience, to name one prominent person (critical support for Norman he has some other views that suck).
One thing Finkelstein mentioned on one of the TrueAnon eps he was on was that his parents, who were not communists, would get pissed off anytime they encountered someone trying to paint Stalin in a negative light. Apparently that was a common thing with jews of that generation, as they saw him as the liberator of their people.
Doesn't really have anything to do with what is being discussed here, I just thought it was interesting.
On the other hand, I think their prediction is actually correct and reactionary turds are going to unmask themselves as time goes on. There are probably some black hammer-esque nerds on here, just by law of large numbers, and they will show themselves
Prepare the ban hammers, I guarantee they'll get (rightfully and correctly) owned immediately when they do.
On the other hand, I think their prediction is actually correct and reactionary turds are going to unmask themselves as time goes on. There are probably some black hammer-esque nerds on here, just by law of large numbers, and they will show themselves as being unable to differentiate between the apartheid Israeli state and Jewish people as a wholeI agree. It is important to remain vigilant for posters who cross the line from anti-colonialism to anti-semitism. I think it is important for all of us to learn about the politics of Zionism over the past 150 years precisely because the more you learn about Zionism the more you realize that it is not monolithic.
There are probably some black hammer-esque nerds on here, just by law of large numbers, and they will show themselves as being unable to differentiate between the apartheid Israeli state and Jewish people as a whole
This might have been the case a couple of years ago or whatever, but I'd be surprised if it still was.
Guess we'll find out.
drawing that parallel is just being a crazy bitch who likes turning on people for making you uncomfortable
When you counter accusations of genocidal intent with "Israeli isn't a race" you've lost the fucking plot. Stop being a freak and think about what you're saying here.
children are inherently innocent what the fuck dude
Getting unified palestinian citizenship and paying restitution for the stolen land?
You advocated for the death of babies. Babies don't even have object permanence let alone the ability to understand what being a settler is.
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
but also 
