Israel/Palestine

[jfish26]

Parallel dimension 789,734 TDub contended exactly the opposite.

does it count if no one was there to read it?

If a bear shits in the woods, and no one is there to tell the Pope he is Catholic, is God real?


Back to the serious topic of the thread.....

Blinken is in Israel. He sort of reiterated some of the things I have been saying.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4291 ... up%20Hamas.

Part of me wonders if the strategy is to put him (or other senior US officials) on the ground in Israel as a means of tempering Israel's desire to really push the envelope. I do not mean merely with diplomatic pressure and negotiation. I wonder if the physical presence is intended to delay Israel from escalating.

[KUTradition]

yes

[mjl2]

does it count if no one was there to read it?

If a bear shits in the woods, and no one is there to tell the Pope he is Catholic, is God real?


Back to the serious topic of the thread.....

Blinken is in Israel. He sort of reiterated some of the things I have been saying.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4291 ... up%20Hamas.

Part of me wonders if the strategy is to put him (or other senior US officials) on the ground in Israel as a means of tempering Israel's desire to really push the envelope. I do not mean merely with diplomatic pressure and negotiation. I wonder if the physical presence is intended to delay Israel from escalating.

Probably.

Nasrallah gave what was billed as a big speech today and basically just said they're not going to get super involved. I wonder if the US presence is a major factor there.

US is handling this as good as they possibly could

[ousdahl]

US is handling this as good as they possibly could

“We’re here to give band aids to the kids who got bludgeoned by hammers. We’re also the ones who are giving the hammers to the hammer guys. But pay no mind cuz we’re handling this good.”

[DCHawk1]

[KUTradition]

she might very well be my least favorite dem

[dolomite]

If a bear shits in the woods, and no one is there to tell the Pope he is Catholic, is God real?


Back to the serious topic of the thread.....

Blinken is in Israel. He sort of reiterated some of the things I have been saying.

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4291 ... up%20Hamas.

Part of me wonders if the strategy is to put him (or other senior US officials) on the ground in Israel as a means of tempering Israel's desire to really push the envelope. I do not mean merely with diplomatic pressure and negotiation. I wonder if the physical presence is intended to delay Israel from escalating.

Probably.

Nasrallah gave what was billed as a big speech today and basically just said they're not going to get super involved. I wonder if the US presence is a major factor there.

US is handling this as good as they possibly could

The U.S. Navy is just waiting to pounce on Hezbollah if they really get it on with Israel. Right now they are just sending a few rockets over the border to keep the Israelis on their toes.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

If anyone want's to view the entire video....

https://twitter.com/RashidaTlaib/status ... 3226908144

[ousdahl]

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzNBrgoJ6wm ... BiNWFlZA==

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzNBrgoJ6wm ... BiNWFlZA==

If you or anyone else care....

https://sentinelksmo.org/ku-graduate-te ... l-project/

https://chancellor.ku.edu/response-gtac ... ent-israel

[KUTradition]

never heard of that union

[Shirley]

For many younger Americans and Europeans Benjamin Netanyahu has been the face of Israel for as long as they can remember. That is one of the drivers of the strong anti-Israel sentiment among many who are young, on the left or both.

Mitchell Minute 1712-Netanyahu and Global Views on Israel

[Shirley]

Scott Galloway is a clinical professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, public speaker, author, podcast host, and entrepreneur. I've posted comments by him before. Mainly about, how compared to boomers, younger generations have been screwed. Here's a tweet of his from 5/22: "Baby boomers accumulated seven times the total net worth in their 30s that millennials had by the same age." He's 60, which means he was born in '64, the last year to be a boomer. If you'd rather listen to rather than read this, there's an audio version at the link above.

Short-Form War

Fifty-one percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 believe the Hamas attacks of October 7 “can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians.” That’s not how most Americans feel, and the disparity in sentiment is correlated with age.

This is not unique to the Hamas attack. The older you are, the more likely you are to be pro-Israel: In March 2022, 69% of Americans over 65 had a favorable view of Israel, while just 41% of those under 29 did. Worries about increasing antisemitism in the U.S. are similarly correlated: 85% of seniors say it’s growing; 52% of Gen Zers say it’s not.

Young people are resistant to the views of their elders. And that’s a good thing. As kids enter adolescence, they develop a healthy gag reflex triggered by anything associated with their parents. This helps them develop their own opinions and beliefs about the world, and it’s also good for the parents, because by the time kids are 18, they can be such assholes that everyone’s ready for them to leave the house.

But that doesn’t explain students at my employer (NYU) holding up protest signs reading “keep the world clean” with images of the Star of David in trash cans. I’d like to think this is a fringe view, but when 51% of their cohort believe the murder of 1,200 people is justified, something more serious is happening.

Young people’s attitudes about Israel have been hardening for some time: Months before October 7, a majority of Americans under 43 were more sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Israelis. Yet during that time, U.S. policy has remained staunchly pro-Israel, and American media generally favorable toward Israeli interests. That gap is widening into a gulf, between establishment views and those of young people. All of which made me think of … Dresden.

125,000

In 1945 the U.S. and British air forces rained 4,000 tons of high-explosive bombs on the German city of Dresden for 48 hours straight. The attack was militarily advantageous. It impeded German troop movement, destroyed a key city center, inflicted heavy German casualties, and, as the officers of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey put it, “left the German people with a solid lesson in the disadvantages of war.” It also destroyed acres of historical and culturally priceless art and architecture and killed 25,000 civilians.

The Allies considered it such a success that a month later the U.S. repeated the tactic at an even greater scale on the other side of the globe, destroying 16 square miles of central Tokyo and killing 100,000 civilians — making March 9, 1945, the deadliest night in human history. Four months after that, Truman ordered the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Contemporary assessments and public opinion in the U.S. focused on the military advantage gained from these attacks, and little mention was made of the horrific human toll. It had no measured impact on U.S. support for the war or those prosecuting it.

What would have happened if the people of Dresden had had TikTok? The same TikTok that is serving me dozens of videos from Gaza, epitomized by a couple taking cover with their innocent child from Israeli bombs. Around them only rubble. Heartbreaking. Heartbreaking enough to make you hate those behind the bombs, whatever their flag or justification.

Three Photos

For most of modern history, governments and elites have had outsized influence on the narrative, especially around foreign affairs. Outright, 1984-style control is unnecessary, when words, sounds, and images are only accessible through controlled channels. Corporate ownership of media, access journalism, and bias go a long way in choosing what stories to cover and how to frame them.

The exceptions prove the rule. When contrary evidence breaks into public awareness, the impact can be profound. Just three photos shifted U.S. public opinion against the Vietnam war more than thousands of dead American soldiers or lost battles: the 1968 image of a South Vietnamese General shooting a prisoner in the head, the 1970 picture of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of a Kent State classmate, and the 1972 image of a naked girl fleeing napalm. If you are over 50, you likely can recall these images just by closing your eyes. If you are over 70, you don’t need to close your eyes. Regimes that lose control of the narrative lose power soon after. The shift in American opinion about Vietnam brought down LBJ. The Gulag Archipelago fatally undermined the Soviet Union’s historical and moral narrative. Ayatollah Khomeini’s taped sermons brought down the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran.

All governments seek to shape the narrative. Vietnam was called the “living room war” because media, especially television, brought it home in ways that newsreels never did during World War II or the Korean War. The lesson the U.S. military took from the experience was a simple one: It had to regain control of the narrative. It implemented a system of “embedding” journalists within military units, which, of course, meant what the journalists saw and how it was presented to them fell largely under government control. Embedding put the genie back in the bottle for a generation. But social media, especially the short-form video format popularized by TikTok, has shattered the bottle.

The Mobile Screen War

Young Americans spend at least 10% of their waking hours on TikTok, and 76% of 18- to 24-year-old Americans are TikTok users, compared to 7% of Americans 65 and older. That’s time they are not spending watching CNN or reading the Wall Street Journal. And on TikTok, the scale and reach of pro-Palestine content dramatically outweighs pro-Israel content. As of this week, videos tagged #StandWithPalestine have received more than 10 times the views of videos tagged #StandWithIsrael — 324 million vs. 3.4 billion. One TikTok user reported that his stream turned rabidly anti-Israel once he started engaging with such posts, and Jewish creators on the platform are reporting escalating harassment.

[...]

CCP

There is a nonzero probability that TikTok is being manipulated and leveraged by the CCP to sow division in America. That probability is high. It’s what we would do and have done. In the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a variety of covert actions aimed at fomenting internal strife. Radio Free Europe, a CIA-backed initiative, broadcast pro-democracy messaging into the Eastern Bloc to encourage dissent. During World War II, Nazi Germany dropped leaflets over American troops that highlighted racial injustices in the U.S., hoping to demoralize troops and incite racial tension. Every nation has done, or is doing, this … actively. The U.S. itself continues to pursue such tactics to this day. The U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group describes itself as follows:

[...]

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

My hope is someone more knowledgable than me will please let me know if this is accurate.

https://twitter.com/MarinaMedvin/status ... 3805196510

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

For many younger Americans and Europeans Benjamin Netanyahu has been the face of Israel for as long as they can remember. That is one of the drivers of the strong anti-Israel sentiment among many who are young, on the left or both.

Mitchell Minute 1712-Netanyahu and Global Views on Israel

I am cynical of that being I believe 80%+ of "younger Americans" have no idea who Benjamin Netanyahu is.

[KUTradition]

^^^^

[Sparko]

It has been a tough lifetime for most Palestinians. This might have been a moot question had Rabin lived. Not bibi fan.

[Shirley]

I miss Christopher Hitchens.

Christopher Hitchens Ripping Islam Apart

Christopher Hitchens Ripping Islam Apart is a compilation video of some amazing moments of our beloved and dearly missed Christopher Hitchens.

Christopher Eric Hitchens was an author, columnist, essayist, orator, religious and literary critic, social critic, and journalist. Hitchens was the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of over 30 books, including five collections of essays on culture, politics, and literature. A staple of public discourse, his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded intellectual and a controversial public figure. He contributed to New Statesman, The Nation, The Weekly Standard, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Slate, Free Inquiry and Vanity Fair. Best of Christopher Hitchens Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 1 is a compilation video of some amazing moments of our beloved and dearly missed Christopher Hitchens.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

It has been a tough lifetime for most Palestinians. This might have been a moot question had Rabin lived. Not bibi fan.

I'm not saying it hasn't been a tough lifetime for most Palestinians but there are often vastly different pictures being painted - depending on who is painting them.
I'm not smart enough to know if October 7th 2023 was a result of Bibi (I assume it was a factor) and what any other Prime Minister would have done if it happened.

[Sparko]

My point is the way to have avoided October 7 2023 was accommodation long before. There were moments of hope years ago. Bibi closed the door on much of it. Conservatives need enemies to animate their base and stay in power.