Before getting too obsessed over the CPP's giant evil TikTok poisoning young American minds, it might be worth considering Che Guevara - who is a "ubiquitous countercultural symbol" [Wikipedia] and yet had a fairly atrocious record on human rights. Both of which predate the existence of the web, if not the internet itself.
Yeah, I have never understood the Che Guevara thing. Every time I see someone wearing a t-shirt with his face the first thing I think is “This person is advertising their ignorance”. It’s like walking around wearing a Bin Laden or “I Love Hamas” shirt.
My take on it has always been that this is the result of allowing crazy fucks to become professors at universities. It is now beyond obvious just how damaging this has been. We have allowed our youth to be indoctrinated by crazy idiots for decades. Given this context nothing I see today surprises me.
> My take on it has always been that this is the result of allowing crazy fucks to become professors at universities.
I'm thinking that plenty of younger people - especially ones frustrated or angry at the seemingly-poor prospects which the existing social order seemed to offer for their futures - were biased in favor of violent rebels long before there were such things as "professors" or "universities".
I am not calling “people” idiots. Get it right. I am calling people indoctrinated into believing Che was anything less than a monster idiots.
Ask cubans what they think of someone wearing a Che t-shirt.
Better yet, if you are so confident that you know the truth, go get yourself a bright Che t-shirt and walk around Little Havanna for a day. And then, if you are still able to walk, jump over to Cuba and do the same.
Good luck.
The only thing worse I can imagine would be a Hitler shirt or a communist shirt of some kind (Over 60 million people killed).
Wait, you don't speak Spanish? Well. Do you really think the material published by deranged American communist academics even remotely approximates reality? Look at what they have done to our kids. You have a professor --on video-- saying that what Hamas did to kids in Israel was "exhilarating". These people have serious mental illness.
> Oh and you should drop the “deranged American communist academics” line. You anticommunist, right wing ideologues are always so obvious.
No.
You don't have to be right wing to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that communism has been one of the most destructive ideologies on this planet.
I am not a right wing anything. I am a classical liberal/libertarian and an atheist. Which, if I am to generalize, means I tend to use critical thinking and logic to guide my view of the world to the extent possible. It isn't always black and white. With regards to communism, it very much is. It is a failed murderous ideology. It has destroyed everything it has touched.
Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
To say those teaching it as a virtuous ideology are deranged would only be wrong if they were proven to be more ignorant than a brick. It's stupid beyond measurement.
BTW, my family survived this shit. I am not regurgitating something a professor or TV pundit told me. My grandparents saw members of their family murdered by their government. So, yeah, think what you wish. You clearly have no clue what you are talking about. Go live in one of these shitholes for a decade and see what you come back with.
The comments section on tiktok is mental. Its 100% without exception pro hamas. You have a lot of debate in other places but on there its a complete consensus in support of Hamas.
It's mostly pro-Palestine. Some pro-Israel. It's disingenuous to imply people who are opposed to genocide support the aims of Hamas. You're conflating the two because you need to distort the evil of what is happening. Hamas were the bad guys on October 7, Israel have been the bad guys every day since, the children in Gaza were never the bad guys.
Che Guevara also fought (American) imperialism in Latin America, including overthrowing the US's puppet regime in Cuba, and getting killed while doing the same in Bolivia.
It seems like you sincerely can't understand why he'd be seen as heroic. Here's an account of his last moments. For context, the Bolivian government had captured Guevera, but wanted to make it look like he'd been killed in a firefight, rather than executed.
--
A few minutes later, Sergeant Terán entered the hut to shoot him, whereupon Guevara reportedly stood up and spoke to Terán what were his last words: "I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!" Terán hesitated, then pointed his self-loading M2 carbine at Guevara and opened fire, hitting him in the arms and legs. Then, as Guevara writhed on the ground, apparently biting one of his wrists to avoid crying out, Terán fired another burst, fatally wounding him in the chest. Guevara was pronounced dead at 1:10 PM local time according to Rodríguez. In all, Guevara was shot nine times by Terán. This included five times in his legs, once in the right shoulder and arm, and once in the chest and throat.
It's a bit funny this comment has already been downvoted to negative points. I'm simply responding to OP with neutral language and valid references. The question is, "Why is he considered a counterculture hero?" The answer, in part, is that he spent his young life fighting imperialism and died a martyr's death.
Honest question: Is there any answer to OP's question that would not get downvoted? Is my original answer being downvoted because it's articulated poorly, or because people don't like the answer?
I downvoted you because you failed to engage with the content of the comment you attached your reply to and instead launched into a tangent on an irrelevant detail.
Here's the comment by OP that I am trying to engage with:
> it might be worth considering Che Guevara - who is a "ubiquitous countercultural symbol" [Wikipedia] and yet had a fairly atrocious record on human rights
My reply to that comment is an attempt to explain why Guevara became a "ubiquitous countercultural symbol" -- because of the substance of his life's work and his tragic death.
I would've considered it more relevant if you had addressed the means by which people came to learn stories about him despite TikTok not being available to livestream his last words to a receptive audience.
Young Americans have always been anti-war. The boomers were not pro VietCong, and Gen X was not pro Saddam Hussein. Zoomers are not pro Hamas. All were/are against war.
"War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing eachother."
Skipped the fact that I asked are they against Ukraine fighting for its freedom?
I think this is about Israel and its admittedly terrible policies in the west bank. I don't think this is about war in general since US soldiers aren't involved in any significant way.
It's not meaningfully different. Even if you disagree with the nuances, these zoomers still trend in that direction, with a good percentage not even believing that Hamas is a terrorist organization.
It means you're trying to bait me with a provocative statistic. Two can play at that game. What does it mean to you that Israel is bombing a population which comprises over 40% children under the age of 14[1]?
It's really wild how you didn't even try to deny what I said. Somehow, raining bombs on a civilian population that is half children and teenagers is an "unfortunate necessity". For all the heated rhetoric and media interviews and videos of flaming wreckage I've seen thus far, nothing has given me such a crystal-clear sense that those who defend Israel's actions in Gaza do not view Palestinians as human beings.
As for why I dispute the claim that 51% of us 18-to-25-year-old Americans support Hamas? Great question. Why indeed should I bother to dispute anything at all with someone who openly supports collective punishment? Clearly, if you don't give a shred of consideration to the Geneva Convention, it's stupid of me to act like you'd have any greater respect for me. What do I know other than dozens of other people my age?
You've written a lot but said very little. Paragraph 1 is entirely indignation without any substance. Paragraph 2 is evading the question. Don't know why you wasted the time writing this if you don't even wanna talk to me. Makes this look like the cope of someone with the depth of a puddle. Guess you're the subject of the article, huh? Fully propagandized by TikToks of goofy leftists and scary war footage.
The worrying thing I see among people supporting the Palestinian cause is that they inadvertently support the Hamas due to conflation of causes. E.g. a recent demonstration in New York shouted Palestine from River to Sea. That essentially means the elimination of the state of Israel.
Also there's a lot of calls against the war with Hamas. I can understand the desire to tone down the violence. But the Hamas must be destroyed for the benefit of all sides.
Unfortunately, children I know who go onto tiktok do come back feeling that the entire world hates Israel. There's a lot of misinformation going on there.
You know that Likud's (Netanyahu's party) platform says:
"The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable ... between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty."?
Besides that, it's a slogan, good for protests. I chanted it myself, and I'm absolutely for a two-state solution.
You know the origin of the slogan is Palestinian? It's not some parody of Israeli nationalism. You might support a two state solution, but you're rubbing shoulders with people that want to cleanse the land jews.
If your reasoning holds and is relevant, it means that those who side with Israel are "rubbing shoulders with people that want to cleanse the land of the Palestinians". It's right in what you said, plus those people happen to be at the government, have a proper army, have the latest US-made weapons and jet fighters, not to mention nuclear weapons.
So my point is: I think a very small minority of those who protest in favour of Palestine want to actually do what you claim; and even that minority doesn't have anywhere near the means of doing it. While on the other side, not only there is a majority (they have been democratically elected, after all!) that wants the same, but have all the means of doing it and they are doing it right now.
They are not doing it. If Israel wanted to they could do far worse. They've killed an order of magnitude fewer people than they've dropped bombs because their main goal is to destroy Hamas infrastructure, not kill civilians. So no, Israel and Hamas' are not equivalent, despite whatever far-right politician's quote you bring up. Israel is far better morally, and in terms of real actions. Hamas are the ones that deliberately increase civilian deaths, and have reiterated from their inception, to yesterday, that their goal is to kill every jew.
And no, your little slogan isn't cute when 51% of idiotic zoomers think what Hamas did is justified. It's less cute when you look at how Palestinians think about it. It's even less cute when you look at how every other Arab country in the region feels about it. We know from history how Arabs massacre their local jews every time they get embarrassed by Israel. There's no reason to think they're not serious in Palestine.
The Likud is terrible. Notice that Netnyahu pretended to be for a two state solution in the past but used the Hamas to block that from ever happening. But other parties did offer a Palestinian state which was rejected by the PLO and sabotaged by the Hamas.
The Likud was more moderate for a long while, it removed settlements from Gaza and signed the peace treaty with Egypt giving them back territory the size of the entire country (which has oil reserves).
> I chanted it myself, and I'm absolutely for a two-state solution.
It's terrible when the Likud chant it. It's worse when Palestinians do it as I think Jews would fare far worse in a Palestinian controlled state than the inverse ever was.
As far as slogans go, I like "freedom and equality, from the river to the sea".
It flows better, it's not something the people who genuinely want to wipe out Israel can get as excited about, and the Israeli right-wing extremists would also hate the application of it. Win/win/win.
I think there's a strong line between supporting the Palestinian cause and supporting Hamas. If young Americans are actually supporting Hamas, then I think they are ignorant of history or living in a dreamland. Hamas would cut off their heads too.
I think people are naive about the distinction. Not everyone is Japan or Germany that will flip sides over night as national interests change, some people are closer to Afghans. I wonder which one Palestine is?
> According to a Harvard/Harris poll, 51 percent of Americans ages 18–24 believe Hamas was justified in its brutal terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli citizens on October 7.
This was the prompt, from the survey:
> Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?
Note the distinction here. Can be. Not is. The question from the poll is garbage to begin with, IMO, because it's basically the only question anywhere in the poll that even deigns to fathom the idea that maybe Palestinians are suffering as part of the conflict.
But the author is intentionally twisting meaning of the question to turn it into "Young people support terrorism because TikTok!"
> Never. If you're response is anything other than "under no circumstances", then there's a serious problem there...
Plenty of people believe 9/11 was a heinous act, but are willing to recognize that there were factors that caused it to happen (not just, "Al-Qaeda attacked the US because they hate OUR FREEDOM!"), and can believe that the US's response to completely level Afghanistan and Iraq was far in excess of the provocation.
My point being, once again, to look at the poll, and see that this is the only question anywhere in the poll where "grievances of Palestinians" is mentioned. If you happen to be someone who is sympathetic to their plight, answering "Yes" to this question is the closest you can get to on this. Every other question (including this one) is an intentionally binary choice of "I support Israel in 100% of everything they do" or "I support Hamas and love terrorism".
> Plenty of people believe 9/11 was a heinous act, but are willing to recognize that there were factors that caused it to happen (not just, "Al-Qaeda attacked the US because they hate OUR FREEDOM!")
51% of US young people would think that???
Not on 9/11. Maybe 3% at most.
Unrelated but for context: adjusted to population size the Oct/7 attacks would be on a scale of 48,000 people dying on 9/11 not including all the kidnapped people...
> US's response to completely level Afghanistan and Iraq was far in excess of the provocation.
That's a separate discussion. But take into consideration that those countries were both far and invaded politically. Also the Hamas seems to be pleased with the result and is already promising a repeat: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/r1y31101m6
> "I support Israel in 100% of everything they do" or "I support Hamas and love terrorism".
I hope this is the case. But it is still disheartening that even for such a bad example people would choose that. I feel that indicates they don't truly understand how awful the Hamas really is.
I want a Palestinian state and have been politically active in various movements for that purpose. The Hamas is by far the biggest roadblock on that road followed by Netanyahu.
> adjusted to population size the Oct/7 attacks would be on a scale of 48,000 people dying
This is a dangerous argument. Each individual's value is the same irrespective of the size of their group or nation.
Also, following the exact same reasoning, we could say that Israel has killed 1.3 million Palestinians in last three weeks, and almost three million in last 15 years. The fact that the proportion is never mentioned in relation to Palestinians, but only Israelis, is revealing.
> The Hamas is by far the biggest roadblock on that road followed by Netanyahu.
Hamas was bolstered by Netanyahu precisely to weaken the more moderate Palestinian liberation movement and to have some useful enemy to point to in order to continue his politics of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. If they remove Hamas, they'll need to invent another one (and they will, if the bombs are not enough to breed a new generation of terrorists).
No. It means that most of us personally know people who died and kidnapped on that day. It means I was on the phone with a woman and her little girls while terrorist were having a gunfight with her husband within the house...
It means everyone knows someone who's still in Gaza. That's the implication of this scale. It's an important metric to understand the severity of the attack and the severity of the reaction. It's also important to understand the reduced empathy from the Israeli side.
Look at how crazy the USA was on 9/11. Imagine every single person knew someone personally... Imagine some of them were still missing. It would have been at a different level.
I'm very empathetic to Palestinians and agree with the cause of the Palestinian state. I even understand some of the armed resistance...
I don't think that's a valid interpretation of the question. I'm guessing the people committing the crime consider it justified. But that doesn't make sense and I didn't read that in the question.
The goal of the Hamas terrorists was to start a war and kill as many innocent civilians as possible. The end goal is to destroy the state of Israel. Thinking that something like this could be justified by anyone doesn't make sense to me.
This is not correct. You have to look at the historical context and the fact that this is an anti-colonial liberation resistance struggle since about 1929. If you don't understand the root cause of the Palestinian Israeli conflict, you've completely missed the cause of the violence. The root cause is the racist Zionist ideology that, in its implementation in Mandatory Palestine, needed (and still needs) to eliminate the Native population in its acquisition of land. This is clear if you look closely at the settler violence in the West Bank. This is a war for land.
"Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on
Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or
is it not justified?" [0, p. 43]
> Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on
Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or
is it not justified? [call this question "Justified"]
Overall, 24% say "yes" to this. Among ages 18-24, "51%" say yes!
> Do you think that the attacks on Jews were genocidal in
nature or not genocidal? [call this question "Genocidal"]
Overall, 75% say "yes" to this. Among ages 18-24, 62% say yes.
What on Earth is going on here? There's at least a 13% overlap of young people saying that the Hamas attack was both Genocidal and Justified.
It's 18-24 year-old people (or people claiming to be 18-24 years old) answering survey questions under who knows what circumstances. A large fraction is likely intentionally trolling the pollsters to rile up oldsters, and some might be more like 13 and don't quite understand the questions.
I think the funniest example is this pair of questions:
There was an explosion at a Gaza hospital. Do you think
the explosion was caused by an Israeli airstrike or by a
terrorist rocket that went off course? 45% say "Caused by Israeli airstrike", 55% say "Terrorist rocket that went off course"
But then...
Given that US intelligence and Israeli intelligence have
said and shown evidence that the hospital explosion was
caused by an off-course terrorist rocket do you think the
explosion was caused by an Israeli airstrike or by a
terrorist rocket that went off 61% say "Caused by Israeli
airstrike", 39% say "Terrorist rocket that
went off course"
Mentioning the involvement of intelligence services makes people less likely to agree with their explanation! (This seems to affect age groups up to 44 to some degree.)
Current death toll seems to be about 1,400 Israelis, 8,000 Gazans.[1] The second number is climbing, but the first isn't. That's from The Economist, not TikTok. They're somewhat skeptical of the numbers, but the total from Gaza has at least 6,400 names attached.
This is a religious war, and every time the US gets into someone else's religious war, it doesn't end well.
It's not a religious war. It's an anti-colonial struggle.
An understanding of events of October 7 starts with an understanding of the historical context of Palestine and Israel: most of the coverage of the events of October 7 deal with the symptoms of the violence and not the source. An understanding of the source of the violence, by no means justified, is needed.
This history starts with an understanding of Zionism, an ideology that is racist, not in its origin, but in the way it manifested itself in the land of Mandatory Palestine. And this racism is part of the settler colonial movement where the logic of the elimination of the Native was activated. These elimination policies were in the DNA of the Zionist encounters with the Natives of Palestine in the late 19th century. They wanted as much of the land of Palestine as possible with as few of the Palestinians as possible. There was always the demographic dimension as well as the geographic dimension in the earliest policies of the Zionist movement and into what later became Israel. The more space the Zionists had, the less space the indigenous people had. These elimination policies could take different forms: genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and they take different forms in different places. What happened in Gaza cannot be taken out of this context of Zionists/Israeli elimination and the ethnic cleansing of half of the population of Palestine that took place in 1947-1949 and the destruction of over 500 villages. The ruins of some of these same destroyed villages where the attackers originated from, and were next to the kibbutzim that were attacked. None of this justifies the violence that took place on October 7 but is needed to understand the source of the violence. The source of this violence is the racist ideology, of a racist Zionist ideology that needs to eliminate the Native. Zionism is not unique in this regard and is similar to other European colonial settler movements that desired to eliminate the native populations on the land they colonized.
The answer is pretty straightforward, they don’t watch TV, people are underestimating the power of brainwashing done by MSM, all info were directly or indirectly controlled, including social media, up until recently, young ones don’t wake up and start the day by reading a newspaper like how boomers did, they have their own communication channels, tiktok is one, but not the only one, there are plenty that is less controlled including video games like Roblox/minecraft, a video like the one below for example will never get shared in any MSM but you can easily find it in tiktok and such.
70 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadMy take on it has always been that this is the result of allowing crazy fucks to become professors at universities. It is now beyond obvious just how damaging this has been. We have allowed our youth to be indoctrinated by crazy idiots for decades. Given this context nothing I see today surprises me.
The damage will take decades to repair.
I'm thinking that plenty of younger people - especially ones frustrated or angry at the seemingly-poor prospects which the existing social order seemed to offer for their futures - were biased in favor of violent rebels long before there were such things as "professors" or "universities".
Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartacus
Maybe you should actually learn about it too. Rather than calling people who disagree with your view of history crazy or idiotic.
I am not calling “people” idiots. Get it right. I am calling people indoctrinated into believing Che was anything less than a monster idiots.
Ask cubans what they think of someone wearing a Che t-shirt.
Better yet, if you are so confident that you know the truth, go get yourself a bright Che t-shirt and walk around Little Havanna for a day. And then, if you are still able to walk, jump over to Cuba and do the same.
Good luck.
The only thing worse I can imagine would be a Hitler shirt or a communist shirt of some kind (Over 60 million people killed).
I forgot to add that he was a racist (he thought blacks were, well, animals, to be used and abused) and a homophobe (he just wanted to kill them all).
That, among other things, is why I say idolizing this monster is a monumental display of stupidity, ignorance or both.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkYIW6NUxXo
https://www.libertaddigital.com/cultura/historia/2017-10-09/...
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-41513971
https://www.cubanet.org/noticias/che-guevara-un-sociopata-as...
https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Milco-Baute/dp/B08BWFKBPG
Etc.
Wait, you don't speak Spanish? Well. Do you really think the material published by deranged American communist academics even remotely approximates reality? Look at what they have done to our kids. You have a professor --on video-- saying that what Hamas did to kids in Israel was "exhilarating". These people have serious mental illness.
Also Spanish is one of the easiest languages to translate so it’s pretty easy to verify.
Oh and you should drop the “deranged American communist academics” line. You anticommunist, right wing ideologues are always so obvious.
No.
You don't have to be right wing to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that communism has been one of the most destructive ideologies on this planet.
I am not a right wing anything. I am a classical liberal/libertarian and an atheist. Which, if I am to generalize, means I tend to use critical thinking and logic to guide my view of the world to the extent possible. It isn't always black and white. With regards to communism, it very much is. It is a failed murderous ideology. It has destroyed everything it has touched.
Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
To say those teaching it as a virtuous ideology are deranged would only be wrong if they were proven to be more ignorant than a brick. It's stupid beyond measurement.
BTW, my family survived this shit. I am not regurgitating something a professor or TV pundit told me. My grandparents saw members of their family murdered by their government. So, yeah, think what you wish. You clearly have no clue what you are talking about. Go live in one of these shitholes for a decade and see what you come back with.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/31/un-official-re...
It seems like you sincerely can't understand why he'd be seen as heroic. Here's an account of his last moments. For context, the Bolivian government had captured Guevera, but wanted to make it look like he'd been killed in a firefight, rather than executed.
--
A few minutes later, Sergeant Terán entered the hut to shoot him, whereupon Guevara reportedly stood up and spoke to Terán what were his last words: "I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!" Terán hesitated, then pointed his self-loading M2 carbine at Guevara and opened fire, hitting him in the arms and legs. Then, as Guevara writhed on the ground, apparently biting one of his wrists to avoid crying out, Terán fired another burst, fatally wounding him in the chest. Guevara was pronounced dead at 1:10 PM local time according to Rodríguez. In all, Guevara was shot nine times by Terán. This included five times in his legs, once in the right shoulder and arm, and once in the chest and throat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Che_Guevara#Execution
Honest question: Is there any answer to OP's question that would not get downvoted? Is my original answer being downvoted because it's articulated poorly, or because people don't like the answer?
> it might be worth considering Che Guevara - who is a "ubiquitous countercultural symbol" [Wikipedia] and yet had a fairly atrocious record on human rights
My reply to that comment is an attempt to explain why Guevara became a "ubiquitous countercultural symbol" -- because of the substance of his life's work and his tragic death.
Is that a tangent, or an irrelevant detail?
"War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing eachother."
- Nico Belic
They don't. I understand that it's easier for you to whatabout a hundred other things than deal with the nuances of an antiwar position.
I think this is about Israel and its admittedly terrible policies in the west bank. I don't think this is about war in general since US soldiers aren't involved in any significant way.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1336308/public-opinion-a...
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/great-debate
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_State_of_P...
But to answer your question, it seems like an unfortunate necessity, which is entirely Hamas' fault.
As for why I dispute the claim that 51% of us 18-to-25-year-old Americans support Hamas? Great question. Why indeed should I bother to dispute anything at all with someone who openly supports collective punishment? Clearly, if you don't give a shred of consideration to the Geneva Convention, it's stupid of me to act like you'd have any greater respect for me. What do I know other than dozens of other people my age?
Also there's a lot of calls against the war with Hamas. I can understand the desire to tone down the violence. But the Hamas must be destroyed for the benefit of all sides.
Unfortunately, children I know who go onto tiktok do come back feeling that the entire world hates Israel. There's a lot of misinformation going on there.
"The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable ... between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty."?
Besides that, it's a slogan, good for protests. I chanted it myself, and I'm absolutely for a two-state solution.
So my point is: I think a very small minority of those who protest in favour of Palestine want to actually do what you claim; and even that minority doesn't have anywhere near the means of doing it. While on the other side, not only there is a majority (they have been democratically elected, after all!) that wants the same, but have all the means of doing it and they are doing it right now.
And no, your little slogan isn't cute when 51% of idiotic zoomers think what Hamas did is justified. It's less cute when you look at how Palestinians think about it. It's even less cute when you look at how every other Arab country in the region feels about it. We know from history how Arabs massacre their local jews every time they get embarrassed by Israel. There's no reason to think they're not serious in Palestine.
The Likud was more moderate for a long while, it removed settlements from Gaza and signed the peace treaty with Egypt giving them back territory the size of the entire country (which has oil reserves).
> I chanted it myself, and I'm absolutely for a two-state solution.
It's terrible when the Likud chant it. It's worse when Palestinians do it as I think Jews would fare far worse in a Palestinian controlled state than the inverse ever was.
It flows better, it's not something the people who genuinely want to wipe out Israel can get as excited about, and the Israeli right-wing extremists would also hate the application of it. Win/win/win.
This was the prompt, from the survey:
> Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?
Note the distinction here. Can be. Not is. The question from the poll is garbage to begin with, IMO, because it's basically the only question anywhere in the poll that even deigns to fathom the idea that maybe Palestinians are suffering as part of the conflict.
But the author is intentionally twisting meaning of the question to turn it into "Young people support terrorism because TikTok!"
Never. If you're response is anything other than "under no circumstances", then there's a serious problem there...
Plenty of people believe 9/11 was a heinous act, but are willing to recognize that there were factors that caused it to happen (not just, "Al-Qaeda attacked the US because they hate OUR FREEDOM!"), and can believe that the US's response to completely level Afghanistan and Iraq was far in excess of the provocation.
My point being, once again, to look at the poll, and see that this is the only question anywhere in the poll where "grievances of Palestinians" is mentioned. If you happen to be someone who is sympathetic to their plight, answering "Yes" to this question is the closest you can get to on this. Every other question (including this one) is an intentionally binary choice of "I support Israel in 100% of everything they do" or "I support Hamas and love terrorism".
51% of US young people would think that???
Not on 9/11. Maybe 3% at most.
Unrelated but for context: adjusted to population size the Oct/7 attacks would be on a scale of 48,000 people dying on 9/11 not including all the kidnapped people...
> US's response to completely level Afghanistan and Iraq was far in excess of the provocation.
That's a separate discussion. But take into consideration that those countries were both far and invaded politically. Also the Hamas seems to be pleased with the result and is already promising a repeat: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/r1y31101m6
> "I support Israel in 100% of everything they do" or "I support Hamas and love terrorism".
I hope this is the case. But it is still disheartening that even for such a bad example people would choose that. I feel that indicates they don't truly understand how awful the Hamas really is.
I want a Palestinian state and have been politically active in various movements for that purpose. The Hamas is by far the biggest roadblock on that road followed by Netanyahu.
This is a dangerous argument. Each individual's value is the same irrespective of the size of their group or nation.
Also, following the exact same reasoning, we could say that Israel has killed 1.3 million Palestinians in last three weeks, and almost three million in last 15 years. The fact that the proportion is never mentioned in relation to Palestinians, but only Israelis, is revealing.
> The Hamas is by far the biggest roadblock on that road followed by Netanyahu.
Hamas was bolstered by Netanyahu precisely to weaken the more moderate Palestinian liberation movement and to have some useful enemy to point to in order to continue his politics of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. If they remove Hamas, they'll need to invent another one (and they will, if the bombs are not enough to breed a new generation of terrorists).
It means everyone knows someone who's still in Gaza. That's the implication of this scale. It's an important metric to understand the severity of the attack and the severity of the reaction. It's also important to understand the reduced empathy from the Israeli side.
Look at how crazy the USA was on 9/11. Imagine every single person knew someone personally... Imagine some of them were still missing. It would have been at a different level.
I don't think that's a valid interpretation of the question. I'm guessing the people committing the crime consider it justified. But that doesn't make sense and I didn't read that in the question.
The goal of the Hamas terrorists was to start a war and kill as many innocent civilians as possible. The end goal is to destroy the state of Israel. Thinking that something like this could be justified by anyone doesn't make sense to me.
Why not just ask the unambiguous question in the poll? That would have been better, I think we can agree.
"Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?" [0, p. 43]
0: https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/HHP...
Here are two questions on it:
> Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified? [call this question "Justified"]
Overall, 24% say "yes" to this. Among ages 18-24, "51%" say yes!
> Do you think that the attacks on Jews were genocidal in nature or not genocidal? [call this question "Genocidal"]
Overall, 75% say "yes" to this. Among ages 18-24, 62% say yes.
What on Earth is going on here? There's at least a 13% overlap of young people saying that the Hamas attack was both Genocidal and Justified.
I think the funniest example is this pair of questions:
There was an explosion at a Gaza hospital. Do you think the explosion was caused by an Israeli airstrike or by a terrorist rocket that went off course? 45% say "Caused by Israeli airstrike", 55% say "Terrorist rocket that went off course"
But then...
Given that US intelligence and Israeli intelligence have said and shown evidence that the hospital explosion was caused by an off-course terrorist rocket do you think the explosion was caused by an Israeli airstrike or by a terrorist rocket that went off 61% say "Caused by Israeli airstrike", 39% say "Terrorist rocket that went off course"
Mentioning the involvement of intelligence services makes people less likely to agree with their explanation! (This seems to affect age groups up to 44 to some degree.)
This is a religious war, and every time the US gets into someone else's religious war, it doesn't end well.
The article is by a Republican senator.
[1] https://archive.ph/4BdeY
With rising sympathies for Palestinians, I do wonder how much longer this support will continue.
Good question. Probably depends on who comes after Netanyahu.
An understanding of events of October 7 starts with an understanding of the historical context of Palestine and Israel: most of the coverage of the events of October 7 deal with the symptoms of the violence and not the source. An understanding of the source of the violence, by no means justified, is needed.
This history starts with an understanding of Zionism, an ideology that is racist, not in its origin, but in the way it manifested itself in the land of Mandatory Palestine. And this racism is part of the settler colonial movement where the logic of the elimination of the Native was activated. These elimination policies were in the DNA of the Zionist encounters with the Natives of Palestine in the late 19th century. They wanted as much of the land of Palestine as possible with as few of the Palestinians as possible. There was always the demographic dimension as well as the geographic dimension in the earliest policies of the Zionist movement and into what later became Israel. The more space the Zionists had, the less space the indigenous people had. These elimination policies could take different forms: genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and they take different forms in different places. What happened in Gaza cannot be taken out of this context of Zionists/Israeli elimination and the ethnic cleansing of half of the population of Palestine that took place in 1947-1949 and the destruction of over 500 villages. The ruins of some of these same destroyed villages where the attackers originated from, and were next to the kibbutzim that were attacked. None of this justifies the violence that took place on October 7 but is needed to understand the source of the violence. The source of this violence is the racist ideology, of a racist Zionist ideology that needs to eliminate the Native. Zionism is not unique in this regard and is similar to other European colonial settler movements that desired to eliminate the native populations on the land they colonized.
https://files.catbox.moe/i1khdh.mp4