Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28302875

Points: 14

# Comments: 3

1) most of Palestine and Palestinians are not in Gaza, bug in the West Bank

2) if Palestine is separate territory from Israel, why Israel builds its roads and cities on it?

Sounds very plausible instead. The original cancel culture is exactly that used to silence critics of Israel- the accusation of antisemitism has been used for decades to terminate careers. People have learned very well to keep their mouths shut.

On the other hand, this is just a trope that needs to die. It's a non sequitur and is in fact an example of kafkatrap:

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kafkatrap

So there can be many reasons. Why do you choose the one that, once somehow transferred 5500 km from Bangladesh to Palestine (not sure how much they have in common), puts the Palestinians' struggle in the worst possible light?

Israel is stealing from others (this is an established fact), its victims react, so Israel "protects itself" against that reaction. Are you ok with this? Do you think that robbers have a right to protect themselves from their victims?

This is an entirely irrelevant, even ridiculous, argument, given the present situation. Which is that there is a very concrete and justified reason for Palestinians to hate Israel, and that's because Israel is oppressing them in a way that no people would ever tolerate and that would be classified and prosecuted as a crime if the perpetrators were any others than the West's darlings.

By the way, a friend of mine is a Palestinian from the West Bank who was subject to Israeli persecution, and had in the end to flee elsewhere. She is Christian, as has been her family since time immemorial. I can assure you she heartily hates Israel nonetheless. (10% of Palestinians were Christians, that's something Israel prefers to gloss over, since any empathy from the Christian west is dangerous).

You want to talk about the atavic, religious hatred that Palestinians harbour for Jews? Cool, then remove all the actual, justifiable reasons for that hatred and after that, if there's any left, we can talk about it.

This is a crime. Why do they do it? Because it's convenient and nobody stops them. Why nobody stops them? Because they've convinced the world that "there is a conflict", that "it's complicated", that "they're antisemites and they want to kill us all".

That's it. Weapons are just a tool. What enables Israel to keep occupying land and persecute Palestinians is just what people think of the whole thing. As long as people think "it's complicated", "Palestinians are just backwards antisemites", Israel will have a free hand in doing what they're doing. That's why convincing people is fundamental: and Israel knows very well, and that's why they censor as much information as possible.

You bet. Jews immigrated en masse to Palestine, then used their leverage at the UN to have half of the country assigned to themselves alone, then proceeded to ethnic cleanse as many Arab villages as possible. In the decades Israel has used every possible excuse to occupy more land, in violation of all laws and agreements, and install their population, while harassing, persecuting, and killing the indigenous population.

You bet that Hamas wants to kill them! It's because they're vicious anti-semite? No.

(By the way, jokes apart: no, Hamas doesn't want to kill all the Jews and has officially said so: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full )

Israel is running a slow-motion ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians, practices apartheid, and violates international law by building settlements on occupied territories... but you say that the reason Palestinians hate Israelis is because of their race? Yeah, sure.

So your explanation implies multiple conspiracies mixed with sensor errors, lying or actually crazy pilots, and a general pretension of being clueless, to send a message of having some advanced technology you could easily publish about in a military tech journal?

Trump is gone. Since he was the main proponent of the idea, and he was despised by half of the nation, they had to despise the idea too, even if it was quite fitting in the context of the anti-China rhetoric of the last few years. Now Trump is gone and the other half of the US is free to pick up his ideas.

These would be the activists who are- as you call them- the instigators, and who might be close to the origin of the events. But the second level is the media- and here you have journalists and bloggers, who are already far removed from the original events and are supposed to report them to a wider audience in a neutral way. And yet you see them grossly misreporting the content of text they have read and that anyone can check: despite much less direct emotional involvement here (if there is any it should be acknowledged and balanced), and the fact that a news article takes much more effort and focus than a simple retweet.

So the justification for the spread of obviously false information can only be either an actual wilful dishonesty (and I don't believe it) or it's nothing else than a selective blindness driven by an instinctive desire to align to the immediate peers.

In fairness those are both very common features of cancellations. Another that comes to mind is Damore, who never wrote what most people attributed to him. I've had perfectly clear for a long time that even smart people will misunderstand the clearest statement if it's what it's socially expected from them.

We could do with the inverse, too. One person could sue for small-ish claims hundreds of harassers. You called me a rapist on social media together with a mob of idiots? Good, that's libel for you and for the other thousand who did. It's going to cost you 10 grands and a reprimand- not enough for a single court case maybe, but put them together and they can be worth it :)