Just as russian bots, israeli bots spreading fake news are worst thing that happened to our society. Crazy that people are falling for this but here we are
How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship? This is even worse. Also, AIPAC is allowed to exist. As a thought experiment replace Israeli with Russian citizenship for the Israeli dual citizens in Congress and replace AIPAC with a hypothetical Russian ARPAC. Imagine how crazy this would be. Yet the current situation is somehow completely acceptable.
> As a thought experiment replace Israeli with Russian citizenship for the Israeli dual citizens in Congress and replace AIPAC with a hypothetical Russian ARPAC
Is Russia the main American ally in the region that contributes enormously to American intelligence and R&D, while also supporting American military operations?
Have you considered that things might go the other way around: if Russia had such a strong influence on the US through its political action lobby as Israel does, Russia would be considered by politicians the main ally of the US, and the economic and military ties between the two countries would be unbreakable. Because the purpose of these lobbies is exactly to influence how a certain country feels and acts about another.
No. The US would be convinced it got another valuable ally- which is not the same as actually having one.
In pretty much the same way, those who fall for long distance romance scams didn't find the love of their life, despite believing so. They found someone who is taking advantage of them.
What operations did Israel support? If anything the US is over involved in the MENA area because of Israel. Before the cringy evangelical push for total support for Israel, the middle east wasn't hostile to the US. Actually the US was seen as the good guys (in the 50s and arguably 60s) because they were strictly pushing Great Britain and France for decolonisation.
"How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship"
By this do you mean Jews? Should be prevent Jewish people from being allowed in congress?
"AIPAC is allowed to exist"
Should we prevent it from existing becuase it supports a Jewish state?
You have no issue with the hundreds of other lobbying groups, just the jewish one.
It's not Jewish, it's pro-Israel (American Israel Public Affair Committee). Israel is a foreign country whose interests might be conflicting with those of the US. That's different, don't you think?
> OP's mention of "Dual Citizens" clearly meaning Jews
"Dual citizens" clearly means "dual citizens".
If the OP had the information that many Jews in Congress were dual citizens, he was wrong- although in fairness it's an understandable false belief when you have US politicians coming to Congress wearing their IDF uniform or propose laws to give IDF veterans the same benefits that US veterans receive.
> concerned with AIPAC and not the other foreign PACS. Wonder what the differentiating factor is?
Just look at the the first PAC in the list you mentioned: it's Accenture. Classified as foreign because their headquarter is in an empty office of a tax haven. AIPAC is not even in this list: it's in the "ideology/ single issue" list, where it stands as the only pro-<some country> PAC in the list (and the 4th largest).
To my knowledge, zero. If you really mean Jews, I think there are roughly 40 between both houses of Congress. None of them are Israeli citizens. Jews are not automatically citizens of Israel though they do have dedicated pathway to obtaining it, but it's not as simple as merely showing up and claim you are Jewish.
> How many congressmen are dual citizens with Israeli citizenship?
I don't know. How many? I was curious and Googled, and couldn't find any good authoritative lists. This Quora answer [0] implies that the answer is zero, as does this Snopes article [1]. Both answers mention that there's various incorrect lists going around that are white supremacist propaganda.
They have defacto Israeli citizenship because of the law of return, no? Not saying I agree with who you're replying to, but if a few dozen congressmen had the same status in Russia, wouldn't you see them as being connected to said country?
I mean, they’re “connected” insofar as they have the potential legal right to move there and acquire citizenship. The question is - is that kind of connection meaningful here?
Speaking personally - I am ethnically Jewish, although I’ve never practiced, and of Polish descent. Technically, if I were to go through the necessary processes, I could acquire citizenship of Israel or Poland. Despite that: I’ve never been to either country, have no known family there, I don’t speak either Hebrew or Polish…the notion that I have any meaningful connection to these foreign countries beyond trivial historical facts is absurd to me. And the idea that, were Poland or Israel to become geopolitical adversaries of Canada, I would be viewed with mistrust, as less Canadian because, through quirks of family history and bureaucracy I’ve been made an offer I never accepted, is pretty disheartening.
At any rate, the upshot of this line of thinking - that we must be wary of Jews with matters of national importance because they are, through no choice of their own, supposedly beholden to a foreign power - is enormously problematic and, yes, anti-Semitic. Similar logic was used to justify Japanese internment camps.
I agree with you on all of that. I don't think there should be any mistrust either, but I understand that there could be biais towards the only Jewish state for Jewish congressmen. Again, that's completely normal (black congressmen have a biais for black related issues, Muslim Congressmen tend to be more pro Palestine)... Does that make any sense?
The downside of that though is that I've seen tons and tons of Jewish public figures completely downplay what's happening in Gaza, almost reflexively. Either that or unabashed support for the IDF. All of that is also common even amongst my more liberal Jewish friends/acquaintances. That's completely understandable in a way, to unite for that cause in this context but it also means that the biais is hard to ignore. Though I don't see it as loyalty to a foreign power at all, they are completely american/Canadian/whatever.
So I see it more as an issue that'd be similar to an all white congress voting on issues that mostly impact black people or other minorities. Is it loyalty? Nope. Is there biais (conscious or not)? Yes. The same goes for a congress with almost no Palestinian or even Muslim voices but a lot more Jewish voices imo.
But yes, the reality is that it almost always lead to a very dangerous way of thinking, and not just a discussion about biais
Israel is meant to be a "safe" space for jews, and the Law of Return will allow you and your decedents to move to Israel when the anti-jewish takes power and you will not feel/be safe in your current location. Maybe you won't think it's so trivial then...
While it doesn't seems so today, that's the premise of the State of Israel after the Holocaust.
He may still be able to say he is Jewish or even deny that he is religious today the trend in the west is the same as in the 1930's. You see it in the UK, France, the US and even in Germany. It doesn't matter what these governments say today. They don't fight or even deny anti-semitism either from the radical right or the marxist and Islamo-left. The protests under the mask of anti-Israel are just these ideas peeking into the surface.
When his business gets boycotted, burned and stolen, when he won't be able to run for office or hold a government position, when his house gets marked and his kids won't be able to go to school the only safe place in that regard will be Israel.
I would just note here that Israel being a safe space after Holocaust is not in line with history. I am not denying that it had some aspects of being a safe space, but the project Israel started much before Holocaust, and Balfour declaration predates Holocaust by decades.
Again, I agree that there can be an argument that Holocaust was a culminating event of the antisemitism in Europe. But i never felt that the antisemitism in the west makes Israel a safe space, is not very congruent one when the both West and Israel touts a shared set of Western values. It is even more surprising since the current conservatives call Western values as Judeo Christian.
I would make it clear that people feeling being alienated even in presence of such values is understandable. But the events of establishing Israel, and the continued invasions of neighbouring countries, and the sheer atrocities committed in the process makes no sense to me. Not to say the constant attempts to portray people who have been living there as usurpers, harbouring Zionist Terrorists, are not the actions of some who seeks a safe space.
The Zionist idea was to create a state where Jews could make their own destiny, which in part is to have a place where every jew can come with the rising antisemitism and pogroms as they could no loner be a people without a state. The Holocaust was one of the catalyst that a safe place for jews must be established i.e. no one will protect us but us. A prime example is the expulsion of Jews ,pogroms being a 2nd class citizen in Arab countries.
It's not surprising at all, should the Jews in the west just go about their lives with classic Christen, revived Marxism and newly imported Islamic antisemitism? These western government do nothing to counter it beside saying they condemn that, which means nothing.
Continued Invasions of neighboring countries?? Your bias is showing, every action of Israel is in response to aggression and terrorism by Israel's neighbors. Don't want to get invaded and bombed to hell? Shouldn't have fired thousands of missiles, rape, behead, mutilate, kidnap, harbor terrorists, dung terror tunnels, blocked trade blew up buses, restaurants and coffee shops. These "neighbors" of Israel always like to cry that Israel is the aggressor but it's always reflection.
Not a comment about who's right or wrong in this war, but it is fascinating that we have entered the age of the Internet being a place where warfare is fought. There have always been people posting web content about conflicts but now with Gaza and Ukraine, it seems that the nations fighting are actively looking at the internet as the fourth field of battle.
Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
I do think the economy is different. You've always been able to just hire a bunch of thugs to stage an event to shape the narrative, like old-school cold war style. That takes money and effort and a modicum of skill and the risk of being caught with your pants down is not negligible.
Difference today is you can stoke the flames of public outrage with just a few people, without even setting foot in the country, while maintaining a lot of plausible deniability, since the modern playbook relies heavily on uncertainty and confusion, meaning you can safely target allies without significant risk of being caught (even if you're caught, you can deny it and say it's hostile propaganda).
Even in the old days, if your operation was caught, you could always claim that it was an enemy false flag. (And if it was your false flag and you were caught, you could always claim that it was an enemy provocation.)
This seems reasonable, but it runs into a little problem. If you engage in political discussion anywhere on the internet, the first thing you'll find is that people, if they have formed an opinion, have exactly 0 interest in changing their mind. If you already hold a genuine and internally formed view on e.g. the Israel - Palestine conflict, then even if somebody sat you (or me) in front of 24/7 propaganda for the other side, they'd be unlikely to ever change either of our minds.
Propaganda only seems to work in two situations. The first is on topics people know nothing about. Each time the US invades some places most people couldn't even find on a map, support for it rises in accordance with the propaganda. But as people learn more, and gradually form their own values, that support tends to rapidly decline. And there are also long-term consequences, because people will remember being lied to. My views on the US war machine and geopolitics in general seem unlikely, at this point, to ever change. And they were largely formed due to the Iraq War. Irrefutable [1] and Undeniable [2] are two 21 year old articles I still go back to on occasion.
The other situation is when it's true. During the Cold War we spread endless propaganda about things like having stocked store shelves. This is doubly effective in the same way that lying propaganda is doubly ineffective. Because not only does it create a desired perception, but once people gradually find out it's really true, it also tends to turn them against their own government who invariably misrepresents such situations. Again, people don't like being lied to.
The purpose of propaganda, in its broadest definition, isn't to change minds. It is to leverage the existing contents of a mind in a way that makes you perform a certain action that is desired by the propagandist.
The belief that holding strong opinions protects against propaganda is dangerous. Strong opinions is where propaganda inserts its levers.
People also seem to discount the effects of internet operations by enemy states. For example, in 2022, the FBI blamed the state of North Korea for a string of hacks on US health systems. The "meatspace" equivalent would've been North Korean operatives infiltrating dozens of hospitals and destroying records or supplies. If that had happened, there would've been a bigger response from the government than "Mind your physical security, hospitals." But it's the internet, so who cares (besides the people immediately affected)?
Indeed and one reason i don't watch or pay attention to news media(TV, online, etc) especially political news. What to believe is real / the truth and with the advent of AI, Deep fake voices and deep fake videos the Internet becomes an even worse place for deciphering truth.
Yes, they’re not new. But it is ridiculously easy and cheap today to do propaganda than even 30 years ago. We’re connected to the outrage machine 24/7 now because of internet/social media/smartphones, vs say 1980.
God knows what % of the population has mental issues because we watch too much Twitter and Facebook and other crap
The holocaust came of age in the dawn of the information age if you count the radio as information technology, albeit a very one-sided information technology where you had the government giving everyone cheap radios that were only marked to tune to German and Austrian radio stations, unless you dared to go out at night to get an antenna up to receive others. [1]
This also applies to the Rwandan genocide. A lot of it was perpetrated via mass media, especially radio. But you can also claim that there were Industrialized genocides before the Holocaust, but what sets it apart is just how much it was defined by industrialized processes.
The Gaza Genocide is similar, the use of AI for target selection (or rather generation), the social media campaigns, using drones for killings, etc. We haven’t seen a genocide before which uses information technology to the extent it really defines whole processes of the genocide.
Germany pioneered a lot of modern propaganda techniques in WWII:
The first television broadcast on earth was of Hitler, and his chief propagandist, Goebbles, continues to have significant influence on modern propagandists. For instance, Biden's publicly compared the tactics Trump used in the 2020 "Big Lie" campaign to those of Goebbles. Of course, there was also the Hitler Youth, which was a pretty successful social engineering campaign.
On the computer side of things: IBM mainframes were famously an enabling technology for the holocaust and german war machine.
Just look at how that's evolved into what's now referred to a "talk radio". Only, you have multiple stations available so you can choose your particular firebrand to listen.
A lot of people have both mechanisms to record what's happening, and share it.
It's been that way with Syria conflict, too, though. A lot was shared in twitter/youtube during that one.
One thing that's seemingly a bit new is how much ordinary Israeli soldiers are sharing their behavior, empowered by their self-righteousness, I guess. Videos from shooting unarmed deaf people up close in their homes, to all kinds of calls for atrocities, actual assaults on international humanitarian aid trucks and violence against the drivers, cheerful mocking of starving people, dedicating videos of them blowing up peoples homes as gifts to their spouses back home in Israel, looting and stealing, wanton destruction of property (like going around and breaking things in someone's gift shop), burning people's houses down, etc. There's so much of this.
Entire 130k strong Israeli telegram channels are dedicated to collective cheering on and mocking of dead and suffering people: https://t.me/s/dead_terrorists Total dehumanization.
Those warned us that we westerners are not immune from getting manipulated into engaging in, and turning a blind eye to mass atrocities against entire groups of people. Even to attempts at their eradication. It was a lesson about the west and humanity.
I believe Telegram channels in them self are an enabler in this. Some sort radicalizing, dehumanizing
Radical elements can find each other and (dis)organize between themself and instigate such actions between military groups outside the chain of command.
Telegram is used to for this in other current wars.
But the difference here is that for many in the West, they are seeing their own participation in it (ie USA, UK) with the Germans giving morale support for it. All those American Boeing-made missiles ripping apart and burning alive those little hungry toddlers camping outside in their cold tents… it tends to make people reflect a little more.
I have a different theory. There are tons of wars and conflicts in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia vs Yemen, Iran vs Irak, Pakistan vs India, civil war in Syria, civil war in Somalia, civil war in Sudan, and everybody else is fighting ISIS. It’s not like the US/West are not involved or that the conflicts are any less bloody or that the parties have "better reasons" to kill each other. And still, they receive no where near as much attention and criticism as Israel/Palestine. I also don’t think the reason is antisemitism (at least in the West). I think the reason is that the West has to view everything through the lens of the culture war: it’s white vs brown and white is evil, therefore Israel is evil.
Israel has created its own perception of itself to the world. They gave up all sense of humanity to go on a revenge spree and now they don’t know when to stop because the whole world sees them as monsters so they probably think it couldn’t get any worse.
Changing the convo to talk about some other wars than Israel / Gaza is just another kind of deflection technique to avoid responsibility.
If it isn’t the antisemitism card, it’s the deflection card.
I am so sick of the claim that if you criticize Israel you must have something against Jews.
Jews are a loosely-defined, globally-distributed cultural group. Israel is a specific, concrete sovereign country. It is a bit like saying if you criticize Venezuela then you must hate "Latinos".
I know for sure that my reasons for criticizing Israel have nothing to do with dislike of Jews. Why? Because I'm inside my own mind, so I would know if I had anything against Jews or not, and I don't.
There are plenty of reasons people care more about Israel's actions than those of any random country that have nothing to do with the fact that Israel is populated mostly by Jews, including:
1. It has historical and cultural ties to Western countries, so Westerners feel naturally interested in what goes on there (see also: why people care more about what's happening in Ukraine than in other armed conflicts around the globe),
2. Israel has a much higher degree of influence over American politics than any other foreign country, which bothers people,
3. It is largely propped up by U.S. aid, so Americans feel responsible for it,
4. Because of point 3., it is one of the only global problems that Americans have a realistic chance of solving by protesting.
> I know for sure that my reasons for criticizing Israel have nothing to do with dislike of Jews. Why? Because I'm inside my own mind, so I would know if I had anything against Jews or not, and I don't.
People are classically horrible at that kind of self evaluation and will do amazing mental gymnastics to assure themselves they have "real" reasons for their opinions rather then the truth.
Unless by point 3 and 4 you mean the complete destruction of Israel I don't see any other outcome Americans protesting could accomplish to "solve" the conflict. Though since it's hard to find a protest that isn't pushing for that maybe your right on point 4.
> People are classically horrible at that kind of self evaluation and will do amazing mental gymnastics to assure themselves they have "real" reasons for their opinions rather then the truth.
If I have no conscious negative feelings towards Jews, don’t treat any of the ones I know differently from anyone else (other than maybe asking them curious questions about their culture/religion), and generally don’t have any negative reaction when I find out someone is Jewish, how would you even measure or define this apparently asymptomatic anti-Semitism?
> Unless by point 3 and 4 you mean the complete destruction of Israel I don't see any other outcome Americans protesting could accomplish to "solve" the conflict.
I do not mean that and I think it’s very unlikely the protests will cause that, and to be clear, I think the maximalist demands being made by protestors (“from the river to the sea”, etc.) are too radical, but again, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily motivated by antisemitic feelings. Perhaps sometimes they are, but it’s by no means a logical necessity.
What I think is possible to achieve by protesting is forcing Israel to back down from its own right-wing maximalist posture towards Palestinians and be open to agreeing some kind of lasting peace or at least easing up on the atrocities they’re committing (and I am mainly thinking of the atrocities they’ve been committing since long before Oct. 7th: the indefinite blockade of Gaza and the creeping settlement Swiss-cheesing the West Bank).
I really appreciate the attempt here, but these people are convinced and refuse to yield to logical questions, e.g. What is the evidence for a genocide? Gaza Ministry of Health says there is a genocide. You mean Hamas? The people who organized and filmed themselves murdering and kidnapping women, old people and children. Why do they have credibility? The UN also says there is a genocide. The UN cites Hamas. The BBC, NYT, HRW... ...also cite Hamas. It's Hamas all the way down. Well, it's the best source we have. Israel is biased, and committing genocide...
I have read the guide, although i appreciate reaffirming it as the source of truth. What’s hard is from a glance at the posters history their comments don’t seem to break the guidelines, but instead fall into the camp of spirited (albeit strongly so) opinions. Are there specific comments made that weren’t in the spirit of the guidelines? It feels “primarily for ideological purposes” is hard to counter in a discussion because “ideological” itself is a murky term at best.
The point is the pattern (I think the person you are responding to is incorrect about flamebait), you'd go look at the topic of their most recent comments - if the vast majority of interactions are to argue X then that seems to fall under 'idealogical battle'.
The issue, in this case, isn't opinions nor the other discourse in the thread. Rather, it is the account's comments over a long stretch of time.
The question "has an account been using HN primarily for political or ideological battle?" is one of the most important criteria we use in HN moderation. When it is the case, we ask an account to stop and/or end up banning it.
This rule has many advantages. One is that it's a reasonably objective call to make (and for readers to verify) regardless of the specific views a user is arguing for or against. Another is that it allows for a certain amount of political and ideological discussion (as long as it doesn't break the site guidelines in other ways, of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
I’m sorry, I did not mean for this comment to be a political point, but rather an observation on how technology is used in mass atrocities. I was hoping to raise a point which I find interesting, which other may or may not agree with. I’ve gotten a couple of excellent replies here raising interesting counterpoints.
After posting this, and reading the replies, I’m actually less convinced about my original point. That is, I’ve learned something.
I believe you, but it's too fine a distinction to make a difference on the important point. Your account has obviously been primarily (even exclusively) focused on this one topic for quite a while now. That's not allowed on HN because if we did allow it, HN would dramatically shift towards becoming a current-affairs site, which is not its mandate.
This is not to say that the topic doesn't matter. Of course it matters, a great deal—more than almost anything that gets discussed here. But that not only doesn't change the above point, it makes it even more important.
As I said the last time I replied to you, I appreciate that your comments have mostly not been breaking the site guidelines in other ways. But the "primarily" test applies regardless.
I don't want to ban you as you've been here a long time and have used the site as intended in the past. But I have to go quite a long way back into the past before that becomes visible. This is not ok.
One nerd to another, I'm rooting for you here, and just want to write a note real quickly that it's very easy to get sucked into this topic. The dopamine circuit we're playing with is a quirk of homo messageboardicus. A couple days ago I did a bunch of conscious things to keep me away from this topic on HN, and with a day or so of detox I've regained my original perspective that this is a deeply cursed species of HN thread. There's lots of other stuff to talk about!
I got very lucky, and the very next day someone started an argument about the futility and/or propriety of user-mode TCP/IP stacks and WireGuard. I wish for you a similarly irresistible nerd snipe for whatever nerd topic lights you up. Good luck!
That would be cross browser support for MathML, or other tools to get math expressions typeset on the web. Those discussions only pop up like once every six months though.
I’m actually way more of a lurker here. There are e.g. once a month a submission about Bayesian Analysis (and a guaranteed once a year submission about Kalman Filters) which I religiously read but hardly ever contribute to (unless a frequentist is advocating for IQ tests or other psychometric devises; then I for sure contribute; but that can lead to flame-wars easily). Every so often there is a back end engineer with an “opinion” on the front end stack which I sometimes answer for, however that often be a flame-y subject, for some reason I’m less tempted to be sucked into flamewars when the subject is actually aligned with my expertise.
That is a 14 year old HN post linking to a dead article, the comments on which say things like
> This is not the 'hacker news' ranking algorithm, this is the ranking algorithm distributed with 'ARC', which is the basis for the HN algorithm, but definitely not equal to it. The biggest missing ingredients are flagged posts dropping off quicker and posts that contain no URL dropping off quicker but there are quite a few other subtle tweaks.
It seems you've been triggered by the mention of the g-word. But when we calmly consider what the commenter is saying:
Israel is using information age technology to commit and propagandize their genocide
It's plainly not an unreasonable proposition, nor does it seem to be intended to engage in battle or provoke. They're simply describing a perfectly horrible situation that happening on the ground (that some recognized experts in the field do consider to be a form of genocide per the UN definition of such) and the fact that modern information technologies seem to be a part of the mechanism that is bringing it about.
The post expresses an opinion, but it definitely wasn't flamebait.
I wasn't responding to any proposition, but rather to the pattern of how the account is using Hacker News over a long stretch of time. That's what the word "primarily" refers to, and it's the most important thing to understand.
Of course I replied to a specific post because any reply has to do that; but I was responding to the account's use of HN over time. That's the issue here.
I wrote the GP in haste and can see how this point wasn't obvious. On the other hand it should quickly become obvious to anyone who clicks on the link I provided (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), which is the purpose of providing the link.
Citing international law, Ms. Albanese explained that genocide is defined as a specific set of acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
“Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide with the requisite intent: causing seriously serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group,” she said.
Furthermore, “the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians,” she continued.
Clearly there are opinions at odds with your opinion.
> the genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure of the native Palestinians,
Hilarious considering every conflict has been started by Palestine. Ceasefires broken by Hamas on multiple occasions. And there’s no settler colonial process happening now or in the past.
But let’s continue to blame Israel when Hamas kills people trying to get food or supplies. Or blame Israel when Hamas fires its own rocket at a parking lot and claims 500 dead. Let’s blame Israel for trying to wipe out a terrorist organization that’s sole purpose is to wipe out the Jewish population and wipe Israel off the map.
While Israel is quite restrained. We will keep calling it genocide even tho ACTUAL genocide is happening every day in Iran and China and Africa. It’s fun to ignore what’s happening elsewhere so we can focus on Israel and making up things that aren’t happening.
Moderation replies have to go somewhere! Did you miss my several explanations about how I wasn't responding to the specific comment, but to an overall pattern? Here they are:
I don't see how I could have been much clearer, so if you read those posts and still have a question that isn't addressed, I'd be curious to know what it is.
Its not at all, even if you mean “social media age”, and not “information age”, it's just one of the first (there are other disputed candidates, e.g., in Ukraine) that are getting first world attention other than after-the-fact.
The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in which Facebook’s role was widely discussed (largely, in the first world, after the fact) was probably the first social media age genocide, if you don't restrict it to ones with immediate first-world attention at a significant level.
I’m thinking in terms of processes and propaganda. While other genocides use information technology for communication and propaganda, this one is unique in that information technology is used throughout, including in target selection and killings. The Rohingya Genocide does not e.g. use drones to carry out killings with targets selected by AI.
> While other genocides use information technology for communication and propaganda, this one is unique in that information technology is used throughout, including in target selection and killings.
No, its not. Heck, the Holocaust used information technology for target selection.
> The Rohingya Genocide does not e.g. use drones
The genocides in the former Yugoslavia used most of the weapons of then-modern warfare, which may not have included drones but certainly involved plenty of weapons systems that incorporate "information technology" in doing the killings.
That's much more oriented to network security, spectrum and hardware, stuff like that. For an American military organisation engaged in internet influence operations you'd want to look at the signature reduction program. Something like 50,000 people strong at this point, insane amounts of resources going into that.
The internet created a whole stratum of people who don’t use tv, radio and newspaper anymore. It’s not that we entered internet warfare, we just exited absolute control of large mass media. Now every TLA has to deal with it somehow.
Why internet is the battlefield? Because everything in our world is based on an opinion. You can sell a lot of bs to your “client” if he has “correct” opinion.
Bad news, our opinion system was designed for groups and villages, not for the internet.
The Internet as we think of it is already a military project. Why do you think so much emphasis is put on countries that assert sovereignty over their own information space?
"Manufacturing Consent" was written in the 80s mostly in response to newspapers, but the ideas have been adapted to the Internet for some time (and talk radio, and cable news, etc.). I'm old enough to remember this from the Iraq war. Yeah, we didn't have microblogging back then, but there were Email campaigns, blogs, message boards, chat rooms, etc.
I think one of the big takeaways for me was aside from deliberate manipulation of media by the government and willing media partners, that journalists also self censor in a way because they are operating in a professional environment and within a certain Overton Window.
Maybe it's not what I should remember most, but it did help remind me that when your livelihood is based on what you say you will be much more measured, regardless of the subject.
Probably why people look to social media or Substack for more independent people who have a longer leash, less on the line, and more to gain, since that's where you get your interesting although many times wrong takes (e.g. Ivermectin for Covid, or Lab Leak Theory)
And let's keep in mind that the term "Public Relations" was explicitly chosen as a Newspeak-term because Edward Bernays realised that the actual term for a war time methodology, "propaganda", was too loaded.[0] And honest.
Internet is a communications medium. It was destined to be flooded with propaganda, whatever you try to call your particular flavour.
Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
> Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools", or "having better stuff than your neighbors is a virtue, failing to do so will lead to dangerous ostracization."
Very tame "Our blender spins twice as fast as the competition" marketing might be arguably free of ideology, but that's a decreasing minority.
>I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools"
I disagree. This isn't peddling an ideology, it's using an existing ideology (or stereotype) in order to peddle a product. A company with a marketing campaign targeting men isn't going to refuse to sell power tools to women, they're just designing their marketing campaign in a way they think will maximize sales overall, using existing biases and ideologies that potential customers already have. Normal companies don't care about ideology unless it helps them make more money, which is their true goal.
What you have described is, in fact, a mode of perpetuating ideology. If what you awere saying were accurate, it would absolve all capitalistic endeavors of reinforcing ideology, even the essential ideology of capitalism inherent in those endeavors.
That’s not how this works. “The medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan would say.
A woman may never consider buying power tools because of the imagery of the propaganda surrounding power tools. Or the salesman may undermine, intimidate, or otherwise obstruct her attempts to purchase one. But regardless your point falls apart because the ideology of capitalism underlying the power tools on the shelf subsumes the ideology of the advertising.
That subsumption, however, does not in any way contraindicate those ideologies present in the advertisement’s framing. It only demonstrates that money is more important than the other ideologies being peddled.
Quite often I default to the word propaganda when talking about anyone's PR campaigns in my own personal battle with trying to undo this. I ratchet it up when talking directly to marketing/PR people. Pretty much every time I'm just looked at as yet another crazy person.
> the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology
Marketing often includes the peddling of an ideology as a foundation for the product buying, especially for big-ticket items. (One buys the product that fits and signals one’s ideology.) To me, this makes marketing even more insidious as we often focus on the product rather than the message. Think Ford, Tesla, Apple …
My brain just came up with the phrase "You can't spell propaganda without PR", which I think is clever. But I'm going to put it into a search engine now and see that it's not original...
That once again, as always it seems, no one is talking about the Panda Gap.
Literally the raison d'etre of PR | propaganda is to distract, to replace, to (in modern terms) throw a dead cat on the table and have everybody talk about that.
Wasn't there something with the Canadian military fighting (what they called) misinformation on social media during the pandemic? Seems like it's already ongoing.
Canadian government was the source of misinformation on social media during the pandemic! Literal curfews were in place with propaganda machine saying how good idea it was.
For purposes of conversation and allowing for a moment your idea is true, to what purpose was the curfews imposed? Who benefited? How? Why were the curfews necessary to achieve those goals?
I think the person you replied to named the purpose as "giving the impression that they were doing something", which is shockingly often the case with politicians: They'll do what they believe will get them voted for again.
I don't think it is necessary to insult people as 'conspiracy nutters' on here. If you don't want to discuss something with someone, just give them a downvote and move on. No need to be uncivil.
The only people who can tell you the actual purpose of an action taken are the people who actually took that action. Everyone else can only speculate.
How curfews can slow the spread of a virus, I have no idea. If you want to slow a virus's spread, you do it by isolating people and preventing them from mingling. A curfew doesn't do that; it just forces them to mingle during a shorter number of hours in a day, which if anything helps the virus spread by increasing the density of people mingling. The allegation that it was just governments trying to look like they're doing something useful is not an unreasonable charge. Any idiot can tell you that preventing someone from going on a bike ride in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is not going to help stop a pandemic, but this is exactly what several governments did.
When you propose that a conspiracy happened, you propose that the purpose of something was different from the stated purpose. So what purpose were you proposing?
>When you propose that a conspiracy happened, you propose that the purpose of something was different from the stated purpose.
Yes, but this doesn't mean that you know the actual purpose.
>So what purpose were you proposing?
I'm not proposing anything; I didn't propose a conspiracy happened, the OP did. I'm just explaining that the conspiracy theorist doesn't have to allege a specific purpose.
As for the curfews, my theory is that it was just plain anti-science stupidity, plus wanting to look like they're doing something, like many political decisions. If you disagree, please explain how someone riding a bicycle outdoors in a rural area with no other humans around somehow spreads a virus. Only countries with truly stupid leadership even had restrictions like these (i.e., UK, they're the only one I know of actually).
My first semester of college in Fall of 1999, I wrote a paper about cyber warfare and the summary was that the superpowers were already doing it, and the only thing expected to change in the future was the resources that were online and susceptible would increase the scale of cyber war.
Go to the Wikipedia pages of these events and click on "Talk" at the top or see the history of those pages. The amount of people fighting over this information war is mindblowing.
If anything, this makes me question the accuracy of historical events that happened before humanity had access to such tools.
My understanding is, historians know that the source material is 90% bullshit (texts written to appease an ego of some lord, chronicles of war against "subhuman" enemies, religious scriptures), they just know how to find the remaining 10%.
> Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
Cyber Force!
They have cyber marines, cyber carriers, cyber destroyers, cyber bombers, cyber jets, and cyber drones. They even have their own sister agency called Veterans Affairs where veterans can go to get virtual healthcare treatment.
I think we’ve been here for a while, and I don’t think you make an overt branch to fight covert wars, you just roll it into the NSA or ops for some (all?) other branches of the military.
May I ask why did you move comments here and changed URL to that other entry, instead of just moving comments from this thread to the other? ISTM you already had a submission with correct URL, so naively it sounds simpler to do one operation than two...
I'd already forgotten! but I think I've reconstructed it. I changed the URL of the current post (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40587079) because the haaretz.com article seemed better than the forbes.com one. Normally we would do it the other way, as you mentioned - we'd move the comments to the submission with the better article. But in this case I didn't want to reward that submitter because their pattern of submissions was clearly breaking HN's guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40587097. So I did it the other way.
Of course it did. This is modern warfare. Welcome to the future.
Just like how we knew everyone was always spying on everyone else long before Snowden, we should all know that everyone is doing this to everyone else long before all the revaluations come down to us. There is no benefit to assuming good faith here.
JIDF turned out to be one guy. That was a sideshow.
This article is from Hareetz, which is a major newspaper in Israel.
There's a huge, organized Israel lobby aimed at the US. It's no secret. There's AIPAC, the American-Israel Political Action Committee. "Lobbying for Pro-Israel Policies", it says on their web site. There are official organizations in the government of Israel which do "public diplomacy".[1]
I'm one of the people who flags some of these articles (though not this one), because they're generally uninteresting, and repetitive. I'm not Jewish, have never been to Israel, and am not part of any brigade.
I flagged it because it's really boring to see people go through the same predictable, tribal motions on a topic that's been covered to death by every media outlet.
> As of May 2024, these campaigns do not appear to have meaningfully increased their audience engagement or reach as a result of our services.
Just like I've predicted many times on HN.
Text generation is low on the list of things needed to successfully engage in automated spam. Social media is built on reputation, not who can write generic believable text the quickest. And funny enough the ex-OpenAI people (mostly Helen) calling for gov regulation said GPT should not have been released to the public because of this risk.
In a way, I find your comment unintentionally hilarious. Sure, this may actually be true. Consider the source, however. Congratulating yourself by quoting the tobacco company's own research of (the lack of) adverse effects of tobacco seems a tad ill-conceived. The talk of reputation makes it doubly so, since on this topic Sam Altman or any official OpenAI post has no credibility whatsoever.
A lot of social consensus is often made when huge threads on twitter or Instagram have a massive number of supporters behind a topic. So when bots get better at all saying the same thing in seemingly human voices, it trains us to believe that is popular, and likely that that is right
> Social media is built on reputation, not who can write generic believable text the quickest.
This is not the whole picture at all. I’d even say mostly incorrect. You can definitely influence public opinion with a social media consisting entirely of bots, provided the public aren’t aware of it.
I flagged the story because it's uninteresting politics that doesn't satisfy intellectual curiosity.
I flagged your comment because it's anti-intellectual nonsense that attempts to emotionally manipulate readers and is unfounded in reality. Please keep that kind of thing to Reddit.
It's possible that account is banned, but more likely your self-posts might be getting filtered by HN's software which tries to apply this guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.:.
There's reddit.com if you need to vent your outrage about technology and politics. We don't need to turn every website on the internet into reddit, it's okay to have some websites focus on other things.
I specifically made sure not to claim that "tech is not political", because that would be wrong.
The issue is that "X used fake accounts to push political agenda on social media" might be interesting political news, but it's incredibly boring technical news.
Everyone knows that this is possible, and the only novel information here is political.
I'd say that if you posted news which are interesting in how they relate to tech, and also political, you're going to (or at least should have) more success than this article. Even just a proper analysis of how widespread fake political social media accounts area, deeper statistics, more novel processes of this happening, etc. would all be interesting, and would not fall in the politics-first-tech-second bucket.
Posts on all sides of this topic get flagged quickly (by users), and mods turn off the flags on limited occasions—mostly when some significant new information arises and there's at least some chance of a substantive discussion about it.
It's pretty important that most stories about this conflict and similar current affairs get flagged, because otherwise HN's front page would consist of little else, and that's not the purpose of the site. But it's also important that the topics not be ignored completely, even though they're painful. There's no happy medium here, unfortunately.
Here are some links to previous explanations. If you (or anyone, of course) have a look at these and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Appreciate the case by case basis approach to moderation here. There are quite a few topics where discussion becomes suppressed when blanket bans are enforced.
The problem is that we've already solved these issues many times over on other sites that are decades old. HN simply refuses to implement 21st-century forum enhancements.
Brigaded reports? 4chan solved it by adding a mandatory enum to reports to specify what the report is reporting for. Identifying bad reports and banning users as a result becomes trivial.
Flooding with stories about a particular topic? That's what stickies are for and they work particularly well so that mods can auto-delete any non-sticky stories pertaining to the MOT.
Flamewar on a MOT? Add a sticky to the top of the thread like reddit does saying moderation will be minimal and to enter the thread at your own risk.
> There is no planet where the opinion above represents "force."
How about one of the standard Merriam Webster definitions of force: (verb) "to compel by physical, moral, or intellectual means" i.e. by framing their argument to compel by convincing it's from an intellectual standpoint. Not too interested on your hangups for definitions of basic words to be honest here though.
Throwing a tantrum about being unable to redirect outrage freely onto others while masquerading adding functionality to enable that discourse as an "already solved problem implemented by others" with lack of complying to their personal standards being perceived as refusing "enhancements" isn't a discussion, its an emotion driven stance attempting to make the other party look unreasonable.
Gentle reminder that this is against the guidelines, it comes across somewhat as sneering and dismissive (which i don’t think was the intent, but is there none the less).
Reasonable approach and I applaud your effort to maintain the site's purpose while also not ignoring these issues (that do have some relation to the tech industry, as we've seen). Thank you.
The vast majority of submitted stories on Israel (as a subset of politics in general) are off-topic for HN. They almost never gratify one's intellectual curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and almost always lead to massive flamewars and political tangents in the comments. I flag all politics stories - this one is no exception. I want to avoid HN turning into another Twitter or Reddit, thank you very much.
I'm sure the story is true, but I doubt it was effective. I don't think most politicians are really looking at their social media given most of it is trolling junk. I'm sure Russia/Iran/Hamas adjacent countries were doing the same. I just don't think they have been that effective in getting politician support. Direct lobbying or phone/email is much more effective than an online troll farm to get the attention of a politician in DC. I have worked in DC and this still feels very true to this day.
I think the more worrying is going after the low information voter. I didn't think Russia's election interference had much effect in 2016, but now when you look at US Media (largely conservative outlets) their footprint is very visible.
It's not just for the politicians, but the people around them, the companies researching the mood, the normal citizen who will carry the mood to others. It not simply to quantify the effect of this type of social engineering.
I'm aware how it works. But those numbers just aren't that compelling, because as I said every large social media platform is full of large troll farms. It's more about influencing actual constituents to write their Congress person.
We're just arguing semantics at that point though aren't we?
If the purpose of the trolling is to influence a decision, does it matter if the target reads it and is trolled directly or trolls enough constituents to call for action? Either way, the influence was asserted making the effort worthwhile.
No, because there is little evidence it's effective, which is what I said. Israel has lost ground in polling in the US and all around the world as well. If anything, there's a huge backlash online against this sort of things to the degree that it goes overboard into blatant antisemitism.
Politicians are already influenced by AIPAC and other powerful groups working for Israel, doubt they needed more. They've managed to push anti-bds laws/orders in most states.
Aside from the terminally online politicians (like Mike Lee, AOC, Cruz, MTG) most do not use their own accounts or even look at them. They might have a firm that measure constituent engagement, but still to this day the most effective way to complain to your congress person is a phone call or email. If we're being serious, the latter is what these bot farms, etc are after. They want to influence actual constituents to do their ultimate bidding. Now if we can get evidence of a huge phone campaign using AI voice, that would be much more alarming. Israel is doing it, and Iran/Russia/Hamas adjacent are doing it. There's absolutely no denying it.
Helping my parents in their mid-70s is a constant uphill battle with these things. I simply tell her to ignore *everything* and if she needs confirmation to get in contact with me.
> Politics has always been full of deception, people doing politics professionally for decades should know a bit or two about it.
I think it's worth pushing back on this. Deception works when it's unexpected, and if the medium is something politicians aren't familiar with, they may not even be looking for the kinds of deception they're being targeted with. They think themselves hardened to deception, but they may not be open-minded enough to even realize there are forms of deception they haven't prepared for.
You can find examples for everything, the question is whether the incidence among politicians is close to the average elderly population (as implied in the original comment).
I'm not in the US but am familiar with some politicians here, and they too have a problem with recognizing that the feed they received is personalized, the comments are not representative, etc.
If you're wondering why politics sometimes seem out of touch, it's because politicians, their media and the commentariat are locked into an echo chamber already.
If I were an actor interested in influencing the policy of another country, why would I spend $$$ on manipulating the voting populace if I can poison the feed of the people who matter for far less?
Take a look a r/worldnews vs any other subreddit discussing this topic. r/worldnews is controlled. Negative comments towards Israel get comments deleted and users banned. Any other subreddit, there are people arguing from multiple directions. On r/worldnews, you only see dissenting opinions for the first hour or so until the mods "clean up the thread".
Obviously, this is anecdotal information and probably slightly biased.
This is not anecdotal come on. Worldnews is 100% now a narrative control ops by pro Israel forces. Just looking at one thread is enough to confirm this.
It's not the difference. Back when it was easy to see deleted comments, it was clear to see that there was deliberate moderation to suppress certain viewpoints and stories. Now with the API changes its much more difficult, of course.
r/worldnews has been astroturfed by questionable entities for a long time now. I'll never forget when they censored all information about blood drives after the Pulse Nightclub shooting.
It's certainly striking that the quality of the propaganda is very much on par with that of Russia. It's clumsy, it often espouses political views (eg, the faux-anarchist stuff) which are incoherent in America or really anywhere in the West.
You can't make a religious argument to people who don't share your religion, so they're stuck with harassment and bald-faced lies. Even non-Israelis who agree with them on everything end up with a bad taste in their mouth after reading or listening to it.
They don't have any practice making a secular argument about the Palestinian situation, how could they? They fall back to assuring people that Israel is a friend to the US, that Israel is a democracy (a ton of its inhabitants are forced to live in ghettos and refugee camps), that Israel loves gay people (Israel doesn't have gay marriage, or even secular marriage except by treaty), and the worst: "Why don't you give America back to the Indians?"
Russian propaganda is bad, but it's also lazy: it gets them nothing and they don't put a lot of effort into it. Israel is trying as hard as it can. To not ethnically cleanse Israel leaves a population that Europe tried its best to exterminate drifting the stormy seas of having to compromise with their neighbors. This is a population whose neighbors once built factories in order to slaughter them more efficiently.
The difference is that Russia is sanctioned and basically treated as a hostile nation, and Israel gets subsidized arms, unconditional support and any attempt at boycotting it is met by state sanctioned punishments (at least if you are a federal or state employee in the US)
Well their enemies used social accounts to garner support from US citizens so you've got to start somewhere!
It's not like we haven't done this either. I worked for a company in 2005 which was doing this paid for by politicians. Moment I worked this out, I quit.
100% agree (hence my point about quitting) but the problem is it's a difficult position to be in when everything is narrative driven and misreporting and propaganda are rife.
You can sit there and do nothing and wait for your enemy to paint you in a bad light and the next thing you know your usual political allies are throwing money and aid at your enemy. Or you protect your citizens as best as possible by entering the game. The moral high ground may have a higher body count.
This point applies to both sides for ref. And because it's a war, the rules of fair play go out of the window until people are on trial afterwards.
Well there's a problem here. There are rules. But no one really has to abide to them. There are no consequences against a sovereign nation other than political allegiance risk or travel risks for convicts.
An exercise with war casualty stats you can do is look at previous wars and look at the variation in estimates in body counts for each side. Then factor that into the news you are reading it.
End game is there has never been a credible body count from even a small scale war. So to claim anyone is right here on either side is probably selective bias on your part. At best when the dust has figuratively and literally settled, it'll be a decade before anyone has an even remotely credible count.
Manipulation of the body counts is easy material for propaganda. It has been since the dawn of war.
Factor child soldiers into these arguments and it gets very grey. The number itself without compounding facts has little meaning.
And for the sake of credibility, the figures were later revised so you're not even quoting their current estimates and compromising your own credibility!
"Two officials from the Palestinian Ministry of Health have told CNN that although the ministry keeps a separate death toll for identified and unidentified individuals, the total number of people killed remains unchanged.
The total number of dead also does not include the approximately 10,000 people who are still missing and trapped under the rubble, the officials added.
CNN has seen a daily report from the Palestinian health ministry which matches the number OCHA published in the revised version. A total of 15,103 children and 9,961 women have been killed in Gaza since October 7, the Gaza ministry of health said in its latest report."
For the record I didn't verify the deaths, I looked at information release in past conflicts for the last 10 or so years *.
"MoH statistics have also been verified by Human Rights Watch and used by the United States Department of State in past conflicts and as recently as March 2023, despite US President Joe Biden questioning those numbers without evidence."
Palestinian authorities were found to be releasing counts in good faith and never inflated numbers for the sake of an information war. This is a key point, why doubt an organisation that hasn't lied about it's death count before.
Deny, Discredit, Disinform, Diffuse and Defray are things you'll see time and time again in threads like these.
Now, it's a sobering thought 15,000+ children have been murdered, in 2023/2024. With full support of the US, 'ironclad' apparently.
That analogy makes zero sense, the Allies were not a settler colonial organization trying to ethnically cleanse natives. Maybe start learning a bit of history before Oct 7, start by reading about the actions of early Zionists[0].
"The organization [Irgun] committed acts of terrorism against Palestinian Arabs, as well as against the British authorities, who were regarded as illegal occupiers.[7] In particular the Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, British, and United States governments;"
>Well their enemies used social accounts to garner support from US citizens so you've got to start somewhere!
I mean, if Israel started bombing me, I'd try to garner support from US citizens too? There is a world of difference between that and faking social media accounts
Israel never got the memo about calming their propaganda campaigns down - now even the most average Joe (at least in the UK) can spot them a mile off. They aren’t subtle about it.
For a country which is meant to be one of the smartest out there, their propaganda campaigns are an utter disaster giveaway to anyone with a pulse and a few dozen brain cells.
> They are smart with their hacking and that’s where it ends
So are often russians, or chinese. Maybe the concentration is on another level, they are a tiny country but highly educated for generations.
I'd bet if we properly educated and developed whole world we would discover Einsteins and Bolts in many many places out there. Ie elite athletes often come from places around where they could do sport, ie mountaineers but also many others.
My wife lived in Israel on and off for years, I got to visit her for awhile during her dissertation work in the West Bank. Only a few blocks of Tel Aviv deserve the "modern Middle Eastern country" label in my mind. And even then it wasn't nearly as impressive as I thought. Haifa is a lovely town though :)
Yeah, it kind of reminded me of the garbage my old mate and his girlfriend used to spout when I was friends with them - ‘black people have low IQ’ crap. One of the reasons I avoid making friends - I have always attracted nutters.
"IQ has no relationship with the value of a human" has mostly always been a dog whistle; "so ${disfavored outgroup} is scientifically established as less intellectually capable, that doesn't make them any less valuable".
To be fair propagandists generally don't have to aim high. They only have to shift the undecided and uninformed opinions a little bit.
You want to see some of the crap the agencies were pushing out pre-Brexit and it worked, so I wouldn't classify the average UK citizen as much to be contended with (I am UK as well for ref).
The only good thing to come from Brexit is that for some people they woke up and smelt the more expensive coffee than it used to be and had some self reflection. I have spoke with a good few people now that were like ‘I was lied to’… well duh.
Unfortunately it was mostly "I was lied to, but I agree with it anyway because of X" where X is some loose justification to absolve themselves of the self-inflicted mess they got themselves into.
My father was a fine one. His staff fucked off back to Europe, he couldn't hire anyone else and had to fold his company and retire. Then he found out he got cancer and that the NHS had staffing problems due to Brexit.
Me, I am better off for it as I fill a niche demand, but I voted against it because it was generally bad for society and I do not always vote in self-interest.
Our business lost around 90% of European customers. Then the odd customer now from Europe emails in a rage because they had to pay import duties… so then having to tell them that ‘Brexit’ happened!
You are so right though - most people just will refuse to accept they were taken for fools with all the nasty rhetoric about ‘people coming in to our country’… and so many have even been convinced that ripping up the Human Rights act is somehow a good thing (??? Wtf!).
Rich people manipulating the minds of poor people was what Brexit was all about. At the time I was convinced this was a Russian move to make UK weaker. But then again, I was convinced for many years that Trump was a Russian asset to make America implode (which is kind of what happened).
Same playbook as scammers, you want to focus your efforts where they are most likely to have the desired effect, and those who fall for the obvious lies will always be more easily manipulated than those who require a more subtle approach.
See, this is the thing - this propaganda is only meant as the "rationale" that goes along with the real bribe - campaign funding from the likes of AIPAC and DMfI.
The funding is what secures these politicians' votes. The propaganda is what the politicians can use to justify their actions to everyone else. That it's laughably bad is a function less of the capabilities of Israel than the utter fealty that these politicans have to the Israeli cause.
Because anti-Semitism is used to derail any conversation about Israel. If you criticize Israel, you're accused of being an anti-Semite, and actual anti-Semites flood the conversation with actual anti-Semitism that immediately shuts everything down.
General lack of countries with something even vaguely resembling representative government in the Middle East.
Israel seems to only extend that sort of courtesy to a part of its citizenry, but when you remember that the "stable" countries in the region are all more-or-less absolute monarchies, it becomes obvious why the US is willing to at least work with Israel.
Good for them. But if you're Arab Israeli, you don't have the same slate of rights and representation that Jewish Israelis have. See: freedom of movement to and from the Gaza Strip prior to October 7th.
David Wasserstein, Professor of Jewish History: "Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth."
Arabs has 100% the same rights as Israelis.
The freedom of movements to Gaza was not allowed to Jews as well (or every Israeli), since this is an enemy territory.
So I challenge you to find 1 law that treats Jews and Arab citizens differently in Israel
The only Arab-Israeli that ever thought it would be a good idea to wander into Gaza was a mentally ill young man named Hisham al-Sayed a decade ago, and he has been a hostage there ever since.
It's the same as the US's treatment of African Americans for decades; legally they have the same rights but the reality of how they get treated by their government is much different. Just pointing out "Aha! They are equal under law!" is misleading and tries to shut the issue down
> But if you're Arab Israeli, you don't have the same slate of rights and representation that Jewish Israelis have.
You're mixing up two different things. Arab Israelis (as Israel calls them) are Israeli citizens. They have the same rights as any Israeli citizen.
Freedom of movement to and from the Gaza strip is of Gazans, who are not Israeli citizens, and they indeed don't have the same rights in Israel as Israeli citizens.
> Israel seems to only extend that sort of courtesy to a part of its citizenry, but when you remember that the "stable" countries in the region are all more-or-less absolute monarchies, it becomes obvious why the US is willing to at least work with Israel.
According to the wisdom of US foreign policy, yes.
For what it's worth, the US has also tried to work a two-state solution over the last 30 years with various degrees of vigor. That became much harder to accomplish when the Gaza Strip decided to elect Hamas to lead its government in 2006-07.
> For what it's worth, the US has also tried to work a two-state solution over the last 30 years with various degrees of vigor. That became much harder to accomplish when the Gaza Strip decided to elect Hamas to lead its government in 2006-07.
It became much harder when the Israeli hard Right murdered Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and then took over the Israeli government with Netanyahu's election in 1996.
Both fairly explicitly in reaction against the idea of ever accepting a Palestinian State.
It's worth mentioning that Rabin's murder was almost certainly related/triggered to the wave of suicide bombing attacks by Hamas that came as a response to the peace process. The Israeli right was up in arms about how the peace process was leading to terrorism. I.e. the root cause of this was Palestinians, not Israelis.
> the wave of suicide bombing attacks by Hamas that came as a response to the peace process
The Hamas suicide bombings in 1994 were in response to the massacre committed by Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein in February. The first bombing of the "wave" happened in April.
[1]
> This was the first suicide bombing attack to be carried out by Palestinian militants against Israeli civilians in Israel, and was carried out in retaliation for the killing by a settler of 29 Muslims while they were at prayer in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron on 25 February.
> I.e. the root cause of this was Palestinians, not Israelis.
Did you know Israelis ran a covert bombing campaign in Lebanon wherein they blew up hundreds of civilians, blamed it on Palestinians, and then used this to justify the 1982 invasion?
> [Rise and Kill First] contains several pages devoted to the FLLF operation. Based on interviews with officials involved in the operation or who were aware of its existence at the time, it confirms that the Palestinians had been right all along: the FLLF was indeed a creation of Israel, a fictitious group used by senior officials to hide their country’s hand in a deadly ‘terrorist’ campaign.
> As Rise and Kill First documents in detail, the FLLF bombings were an integral part of this Israeli strategy of provocation. Indeed, the new Defense Minister immediately decided to “activate” the FLLF operation and sent Eitan as his personal emissary to “keep an eye” on the clandestine operation. Remarkably, at the time Eitan was serving as Begin’s “counterterrorism” adviser.
> On September 17, 1981, a car bomb exploded outside of the command center shared by the PLO and its Lebanese leftist allies in the port city of Sidon, killing over 20, most of them women and children who lived in nearby apartment buildings, John Kifner reported in the New York Times.
> Two days later, another “terrorist bomb” killed four in a crowded movie theater in West Beirut, Kifner reported. The FLLF claimed responsibility, but Palestinian officials immediately insisted that the group is “fictitious,” a ploy used by Israel to hide its hand in these attacks.
> On October 1, a car exploded near PLO offices in a crowded street in Moslem west Beirut, killing 90, as Kifner and the UPI reported. Several other vehicles loaded with explosives were found and defused in Beirut and Sidon “in what was intended as a devastating blitz against Palestinians and leftist Lebanese militiamen by rightist terrorists.”
> A RAND report on ‘recent trends in international terrorism’ published in April 1983 describes a few of these bombings in some detail. The death toll from these few bombings adds up to 120. By comparison, and according to the same RAND report, in 1980 and 1981 combined Palestinian ‘terrorists’ killed a grand total of 16 people. As UPI journalist Fred Schiff wrote at the time, over just two weeks the FLLF’s ‘wave of terror bombings’ in its totality claimed 308 lives.
> The censor’s decision made it possible for Israeli leaders to insist, in June 1982, that the invasion of Lebanon was justified in the name of fighting “terrorism.” Remarkably, it made it possible for Ariel Sharon to take to the pages of the New York Times in August 1982 and insist that Israeli troops “were greeted as liberators for driving out the terrorists who had raped and pillaged and plundered” the country. They had followed the Jewish doctrine of tohar haneshek, “the moral conduct of war,” Sharon added, a policy that stood “in vivid contrast to the P.L.O.’s practice of attacking only civilian targets.”
Did Israel also fire rockets on its north from Lebanon? Did it try to assassinate it's ambassador to the UK?
Do you have other references to the theory that the reason Israel went to war with Lebanon was FLLF's operations that it blamed on Palestinians? Why would it go to war over people killing each other in Lebanon, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Anyways, in this conflict cherry-picking is a big problem. Pro-Palestinians are very good at cherry picking some questionable Israeli action while totally ignoring the rest of the story. You can't understand reality by cherry picking certain things and spinning a theory to accommodate them. That's how conspiracy theorists think. The scientific method is to try and falsify your theory and really test whether it stands the test of the other events, not the ones' your cherry picking. And naturally for every story check multiple sources to try and get a sense of what really happened. If you're ignoring the rocket attacks on Israel, and other PLO attacks on Israel, and the attempt to assassinate the UK ambassador, as factors in your theory, then maybe your theory is wrong.
> Did it try to assassinate it's ambassador to the UK?
See below quotes. It also did try to assassinate US diplomat John Gunther Dean.
> Do you have other references to the theory that the reason Israel went to war with Lebanon was FLLF's operations that it blamed on Palestinians? Why would it go to war over people killing each other in Lebanon, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Not the sole reason in itself, rather a critical part of whipping political support.
[1]
> From his first day at the Defense Ministry, Sharon started planning the invasion of Lebanon. He developed what came to be known as the "big plan" for using Israel's military power to establish political hegemony in the Middle East. The first aim of Sharon's plan was to destroy the PLO's military infrastructure in Lebanon and to undermine it as a political organization. The second aim was to establish a new political order in Lebanon by helping Israel's Maronite friends, headed by Bashir Gemayel, to form a government that would proceed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. For this to be possible, it was necessary, third, to expel the Syrian forces fro Lebanon or at least seriously weaken their presence there. The destruction of the PLO would break the backbone of of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The resulting influx of Palestinians from Lebanon into Jordan would eventually sweep away the Hashemite monarchy and transform the East Bank into a Palestinian state. Sharon reasoned that Jordan's conversion into a Palestinian state would end international pressures on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.
> Sharon and Eytan, realizing there was no chance of persuading the cabinet to approve a large-scale operation in Lebanon, adopted a different tactic. They started presenting to the cabinet limited proposals for bombing PLO targets in Lebanon, expecting that the guerillas would retaliate by firing Katyusha rockets on Israel's northern settlements and that this would force the cabinet to approve more drastic measures. The idea was to implement Operation Big Pines in stages by manipulating enemy provocation and Israel's response. A number of confrontations took place in the cabinet as a result of these tactics. Ministers opposed to a war in Lebanon because they recognized where these proposals were intended to lead.
> Sharon himself displayed the same deviousness in his relations with the Reagan administration as he did in his relations with his cabinet colleagues. He fed the Americans selective information intended to prove that the PLO was making a mockery of the cease-fire agreement and to establish Israel's right to retaliate.
This coincides exactly with the FLLF terror campaign.
> On 3 June the casus belli that the hard-liners had been waiting for materialized. A group of Palestinian gunmen shot and greviously wounded Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to London, outside the Dorchester Hotel.
> Mossad sources had intelligence to suggest that the attempt of Argov's life was intended to provoke an Israeli assault on Arafat's stronghold in Lebanon in order to break his power.
> Avraham Shalom, the head of the General Security Service, reported that the attack was most probably the work of the faction headed by Abu Nidal and suggested that Gideon Machanaimi, the prime minister's adviser on terrorism, elaborate on the nature of that organization. Machanaimi had hardly opened his mouth when Begin cut him off by saying, "They are all PLO."
[1] Shlaim - The Iron Wall, chapter "The Lebanese Quagmire"
Honestly it's a bit of a blur to me but I do agree that Baruch Goldstein's attack was likely another destabilizing factor. It stood out at the time as something completely insane. For the sake of historical accuracy though Hamas' suicide attacks predate that event, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehola_Junction_bombing
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin condemned the attack, describing Goldstein as a "degenerate murderer" and "a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism" - which is important.
>Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin condemned the attack, describing Goldstein as a "degenerate murderer" and "a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism" - which is important.
Agree that it is important. What is even more strange is that Yitzhak Rabin himself was assassinated by a Zionist Terrorist.
There were many deals and processes and talks, Almost all of them put Israel front and centre, even Oslo accords for instance. But as claimed by Bibi, Zionist Terrorists tried everything to thwart it. And conveniently placed the blame on Palestinians. It was Zionist Terrorists who brought terrorism as we know today to the middle east. It was them who killed in cold blood, the mediator who presented the plan, Count Folke Bernadotte. But all the blame is on Palestinians, while the Terrorists derailed any hope for peaceful coexistence, and continue to do so.
I'm not sure what "Zionist Terrorist" is getting us here in relation to Yigal Amir. There is very little relationship between that dude, who is a religious extremist, and the secular zionists that founded Israel.
I can't really debate your other statements because it's pretty short of facts. I seriously doubt the truth of "zionism brought terrorism to the middle east" as there were e.g. massacres of Jews in the region (Hebron, or Tsfat) that predate zionism.
And sure, Lehi were terrorists, I'm not super familiar with the Bernadotte story but that's well into the conflict, not by any means that start of it.
From my perspective it was the Palestinians, through Hamas, that derailed the Oslo accords. By any measure you can choose, the Palestinian violent opposition to peace eclipsed the Israeli one. Also while Israel has a government with the ability to enforce policy, the Palestinians never had any centralized authority that talks for all of them. While Israel was putting extreme right activists in detention with no trial, the Palestinians were letting Hamas out of their jails with a "revolving door".
What do you mean at least work with Israel? The US is propping up Israel and without that ally Israel would probably implode. What’s messed up is how disrespectful Israel and some of their politicians are to US and their citizens. One thing I like about Israel is that they have a variety of oppinions and schools of thought. What we’re currently seeing is coming from the radical right wing and those atrocities will unfortunately stain Israelis of all types. Hope they do at the next elections.
Israel is a postindustrial economy with a 600,000-man military reserve and (unofficially) a nuclear arsenal of the size and capability needed to destroy the society of any industrialized nation on Earth.
Almost all of the support and protection they've received from the US since October has been mainly to keep leverage on Netanyahu and to keep the war from spreading across the Middle East. For example, if Iran's missiles had bombarded Tel Aviv, you're probably going to see Israel bombarding Tehran, which could pull in Iraq, etc., and Israel has yet to lose a fight against its regional neighbors.
They don't need the US to prop them up economically or militarily, which should bring about a conversation about support come next budget, but I doubt it.
I too would like to see a more moderate group in charge.
Which Israeli defense contractors build airplanes and tanks? Without aircraft and spares you cannot have a modern military. The US absolutely props up Israeli with weapons and military technology that they do not produce in country. Waving around nuclear weapons and a massive number of troops are the actions of states that are weaker then project as (Russia DPRK).
> Which Israeli defense contractors build airplanes and tanks?
Neither do the North Koreans [1][2]? (Caveats [3][4].)
America dropping Israel simply means it finds a new supplier. Russia is out of the picture, given its dependence on Iran, but China and India would be more than willing to supply.
Israel did use to build fighter jets. It built the Kfir. It planned to build a next gen airplane (The Lavi) but was pressured by the US to cancel that plan and instead buy F16s. The US also affects control of what Israeli weapons systems can be sold to who. Presumably part of the agreement to cancel the Lavi project was some sort of US commitment to supply Israel instead.
> What we’re currently seeing is coming from the radical right wing and those atrocities will unfortunately stain Israelis of all types. Hope they do at the next elections.
Wishful thinking, regardless of which elections your talking about. In the US, both sides are working hard to prop up Israel. In Israel before October, Netanyahu was on trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust. Who's even talking about that anymore? Now he gets to be a war Prime Minister.
Iraq and Lebanon both more closely "vaguely resemble" representative government than Israel does. For all their problems, at least all the people they rule over are allowed to be citizens and vote.
500k Palestinians in Lebanon, 2nd-3rd generation "refugees", are not allowed to be citizens and do not have a vote.
(Palestinians are the only people in the world who the UN allow to inherit this status)
Freedom house, which I think is a credible source here, says Israel is free and democratic, and Lebanon and Iraq are not. How does that not contradict your point? The claim was that Israel is the only free and democratic country in the middle east, do you have any credible source that disproves that?
Israel administers the West Bank as a bantustan for the majority of their (technically non-citizen) Arab population, but does not officially count it as part of their territory, so they don’t have to grant the people there citizenship or allow them voting rights. But it’s worth repeating: Israel entirely controls this territory. That is clearly undemocratic.
What is worth repeating this is no different than any other occupied territory in the world or in history. When the US occupied Germany it didn't allow Germans voting rights. When it occupied Japan it didn't give Japanese voting rights. When it occupied Afghanistan or Iraq it didn't give those voting rights either. Puerto Ricans are administered by the US but don't have voting rights.
There is nothing undemocratic about this at all. This is what international law mandates. Israel is prohibited from annexing this territory by said international law. When Israel annexed other occupied territory and gave residents rights (The Golan Heights) the international community refused to accept that.
You can ask why these territories are in this status for this length of time. Part of the reason is that the country it was occupied from, Jordan, does not want it back. Another part is that the Palestinians that live there don't really want this resolved either (at least some really large portion of them). Another part are other external interests that don't want to see this resolved.
What are you talking about? Germany held federal elections less than 4 years after the end of the war. The US didn't occupy germany against their will for 50 years. Japan had elections ONE year after the war. Stop lying.
I'm saying they could not vote in the US which is what the discussion is about. The Palestinians also had elections. I don't think what people are asking Israel to do here is to let the Palestinians have elections while being occupied?
The total physical occupation of Germany lasted 11 years. The final status of Germany was only determined in 1990 in the 2+4 agreement. That's a 45 year period. The US still has bases in Germany.
> I don't think what people are asking Israel to do here is to let the Palestinians have elections while being occupied?
It's incredible how persistently you miss the point.
What people are asking Israel to do is let Palestinians have a say in their own affairs. That can be done _either_ by letting the Palestinian government meaningfully control Palestine (as the West German government did relatively soon after the war ended), _or_ by letting Palestinians have a say in the Israeli government that rules over them (one state solution).
I'm being called a liar for pointing out that in general people living in occupied territories do not have the rights of the citizens of the occupier, which is the exact situation here, and for which Israel is labelled as an "Apartheid State", since there's no Apartheid in Israel proper, only supposedly in said occupied territories.
I think you're factually wrong on your "What people are asking" statement. Different people are asking different things. However, you can totally ask that question as an individual and we can discuss it.
Palestinians do have a say in their own affairs. But you're saying "letting the Palestinian government meaningfully control Palestine". When you say Palestine do you mean the west bank? Would you agree that in Gaza Israeli did let the Palestinians "meaningfully control Gaza"? What was the outcome of that? What do you propose can be done differently in the west bank for example? What level of say/control do you feel would balance Israel's security needs with the Palestinian's need to have a say/meaningful control? Let's talk specifics.
There was West Germany and East Germany. There was "denazification" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification (e.g. promoting of Nazi ideas had a death penalty under the occupation, do you think that'll fly with Israel vs. Palestinians vs. the world?). There were war crime trials for top level Nazis.
EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that when the west bank was occupied by Israel in 1967 it was considered to be part of Jordan and Jordan didn't give up that claim until their peace agreement with Israel. But if your point is that Israel should have at that point given the people living in this area a measure of autonomy to run most aspects of their lives I think I can agree. There was definitely some self governing, e.g. at the city level. I think the demand was of Israel to return this to Jordan at that point in time and Israel refused since it meant there would be large Arab armies 10 minute tank drive from Tel-Aviv. (e.g.). I wasn't around in 1967 and I haven't studied that period in detail.
> What is worth repeating this is no different than any other occupied territory in the world or in history. When the US occupied Germany it didn't allow Germans voting rights. When it occupied Japan it didn't give Japanese voting rights. When it occupied Afghanistan or Iraq it didn't give those voting rights either.
It is a lot different from any of those examples, mainly because the U.S. didn’t annex the parts of those countries it cared about (see East Jerusalem), didn’t start moving its own people to the rest of the territory carving it up like Swiss cheese, didn’t prevent people from going and coming, didn’t heavily restrict trade between those countries and their neighbors, etc.
So while indeed they were militarily occupied, the degree of functional civilian control by the democratically elected governments were far greater than that enjoyed in Palestine by the PA or by Hamas.
I agree that the situation in Puerto Rico is undemocratic but again, it’s not nearly as egregious for lots of reasons.
> This is what international law mandates. Israel is prohibited from annexing this territory by said international law. When Israel annexed other occupied territory and gave residents rights (The Golan Heights) the international community refused to accept that.
It is laughable to claim the reason for anything Israel does is “international law” when they flaunt it so cavalierly. Really, they didn’t mind the international legal implications of annexing East Jerusalem or building settlements in the West Bank, but the reason they refuse to annex the rest of it and give people citizenship is because of international law?
That’s clearly not the case. They have taken the parts they care about either by annexation or pseudo-annexation (settlements). The reason they don’t want to annex the rest is because they don’t want Arabs to be nearly half their citizens (annexing it without granting citizenship would be too egregious to ignore in the eyes of the rest of the world) and because there’s nothing there that they want. Expect this to change if the trend of Israel becoming more and more right wing continues.
I agree there are a lot of differences. My point though still stands I think. The reason Palestinians don't enjoy equal rights to Israelis is that they live in an occupied territory of still to be determined status. Whatever process happened in Germany after WW-II failed to happen in the west bank after 1967. Israel would love to resolve this problem, ofcourse on terms it can live with. Israel and the Palestinians have not been able to get to terms they can both live with (understatement of the day) and so the situation persists.
I also think my other point stands that if Israel did annex the West Bank and/or Gaza and give Palestinians equal rights, as it did in Jerusalem or the Golan Heights that would not be viewed as an acceptable solution. The reason I raise this is because criticism is levelled at Israel for not doing that. The Palestinians would not consider this to resolve the conflict and neither would anyone else, they say exactly what you're saying here. I'm not saying the reason Israel isn't doing it is international law but surely the lack of acceptance from anyone to this solution is part of that thought process (and also the question of maintaining Jewish majority in Israel).
Palestinians did get some control, they got total control of Gaza in 2005, partial control earlier of Gaza and the West Bank as part of the Oslo accords.
I also want to be clear that I'm opposed to Israeli settlement in the west bank. I don't think that's helpful. I also don't think it's the real problem here. The legal status of the west bank in Israeli law is still occupied territory, there hasn't been any formal annexation.
One thing I can say as to the annexation/reunification of Jerusalem is that Israel is doing a much better job than Jordan did in maintaining and protecting the rights of all religions to have access to their holy sites. When Jerusalem was under Jordanian control Jews could not access it at all and I think Christians also less than today. So I think Israel is a reasonable guardian of this place and all its citizens and visitors are treated fairly. The final status of Jerusalem would presumably be something agreed to as part of the (maybe never) peace agreement. I think between leaving it "occupied" and the current status the current status is/was the better option for everyone.
There are voices by the way in the right wing of Israel calling for annexation and granting of citizenship.
I don't think Israel is "flaunting" international law more so than most of the rest of the world. It just happens to be in an unsolvable mess of a situation. Israel and Israelis really wanted this resolved in the peace process of the early 90's and were willing to go a long way towards what Palestinians were asking for, but didn't really meet a partner. So to blame this solely on Israel, which is admittedly to some degree in a position of power, but is also very vulnerable, is not fair. I would say at least half the blame is on the Palestinians.
Most Americans have no idea how Israel is governed. Even grasping the basics of how the United States government works is sadly not guaranteed.
All most people know is the spin they've gotten from the media and politicians. Both tend to be very pro Israel in the US. That's changed a little recently, but not much.
Because all the aid for Israel comes back to arms dealers and other wealthy creeps in the US, and they own our politics.
Israelis are just doing what their version of Judaism is telling them to do, it's the neocon Zionists in the US that finance it that are the real danger. It isn't just that they don't care about Palestinian lives, they don't care about Israeli lives, either. They care about Israeli contracts.
Because of the 535 politicians we have, 45 of them have received donations just during the 2024 election cycle. Big names like Ted Cruz, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, Mitt Romney, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, etc.
It's bipartisan enough that I don't believe the parties will be able to come to an agreement to enact any meaningful change. This goes beyond the Republican vs. Democrat issues so it's much more difficult to make this a partisan issue to rally mass support from either party.
That really doesn't mean much in a society that has perfected the art of manufacturing consent[0]
"The survey puts numbers on trends that have become increasingly apparent: Cable news viewers are more supportive of Israel’s war effort, less likely to think Israel is committing war crimes, and less interested in the war in general. People who get their news primarily from social media, YouTube, or podcasts, by contrast, generally side with the Palestinians, believe Israel is committing war crimes and genocide, and consider the issue of significant importance.
WE OFTEN HEAR people say that “Twitter isn’t real life” or that “Nobody watches cable news,” but the survey asked where people get most of their news, asking them to pick just one, and cable and social media won out. Most Americans do in fact get their news either primarily from cable (42 percent) or social media like TikTok, Instagram, or another platform (18 percent). A third of people said they get their news from YouTube or podcasts, with 13 percent saying they got most of their news that way.
Asked generally where folks got their news on a day-to-day basis, with a “check all that apply” option, it’s even more clear how dominant cable (55 percent), social media (38 percent), and podcasts/YouTube (34) are compared to print, at 21 percent. (I read the survey as using “print” as a stand-in for any text-based media, whether digital like The Intercept or on actual printed paper.) "
Even the polls you referenced show how stark the contrast between young and old americans are on this topic. Some of the older americans barely have any education on this topic but just stick with the zionist propaganda they were fed when they were younger, they couldn't even locate Israel/Palestine on a map.
Most of the older christian zealots don't have the critical thinking skills or capacity to change their mind on the topic because their indoctrination is so thorough that they'd rather deny reality than face the facts. Not surprising considering they grew up on a mantra that the so called "chosen" people can do no wrong.
I think if those christians who voted favorably had seen how israelis spit[3] on christians and assault[4][5] christians, their opinions would change swiftly, but the news channels they consume won't feed them this reality because consent needs to be manufactured.
> doesn't mean much in a society that has perfected the art of manufacturing consent
Everyone has a snippy argument for why opioid opinion is wrong. I’m not saying, in this case, that the majority is correct. (Nor the inverse.) Just that it is the reason Israel enjoys such support here.
(Would also note that both sides fervently believe the media is conspiring against them.)
>Everyone has a snippy argument for why opioid opinion is wrong.
So why did you not give your argument? I've at least put in the work to provide evidence & arguments for my thesis, you on the other hand are just saying handwavy stuff.
>I’m not saying, in this case, that the majority is correct. (Nor the inverse.) Just that it is the reason Israel enjoys such support here.
Yes and I've explained how that is largely a product of manufactured consent and there is plenty of evidence for that. I've only provided a fraction of the available evidence here supporting that thesis.
>(Would also note that both sides fervently believe the media is conspiring against them.)
That's just completely asinine framing, at least critique the article, the argument or the data instead of making my position out to be something conspiratorial
So would you also expel Russian and Chinese embassy staff?
Allies influencing other allies is part of the process. Don't just think that it is Israel doing it in America. America is also doing similar actions in other countries where they want to win favour.
They really targeted the dumbest, most venal people in Congress. These particular people will fight for anyone but the people who elected them, so afraid to lose their jackpot.
I think you would be surprised by the list of countries the US IC believes are our most important intelligence "adversaries"; the list includes many of our allies.
Jordan never sunk a US Navy ship and then machine-gunned the sailors trying to escape in lifeboats. But if they did, they wouldn't have painted over the jet's markings first.
"greatest ally" according to whose claim? that reads like propaganda, just plain nonsense. perhaps a contender for greatest external funding liability? not sure how the hard data would rank such numerically.
I believe this was sarcarsm, since American politicians like to always pitch Israel as "America's Greatest Ally", thus making it a common target of sarcasm
as i think of it, it's strange that the US supposedly has a separation of religion from state, in the constitution+amendments, yet funds an external country based on a religion. i wonder what fraction of donations to Israel come back as lobbyists paying politicians to fund the next round of donations. there must be datasets recorded somewhere, but i have no idea where to look.
Yeah, AIPAC really opened my eyes to how deep the ties go. They spend tons of money to put their preferred lawmakers in place, and openly brag on Twitter about how much they spend and their extremely successful track record. It just -feels- like it should be illegal, seeing as it's a foreign country.
I don't know of any government department in Canada, Mexico, the UK, France, Germany, Australia that target U.S. law makers with fake social media accounts.
I'm not saying it's not happening, however, the US has a much bigger stick to use by withholding funds/arms/aid before stooping to this level of influence*. Pretty much no other country has the reciprocal influence to the US, so these kinds of machinations is kind of expected.
*Historical examples of other forms of US meddling/interference is not being ignored, and paves the way to why I would not say not being done.
I have a question of my own. Is there another country whose citizens are regularly elected to Congress? Dual citizens are not barred from holding office in Congress, and certainly there are more than a few English Americans and French Americans who hold citizens in both respective countries, but I have never heard of any winning office (or even running, for that matter).
Ted Cruz says he did not know he was a dual citizen. He said he assumed that because he was a US citizen by birth, left Canada at 4 and lived entirely in the US and never took affirmative steps to claim Canadian citizenship he was not a Canadian citizen.
When a newspaper brought it up he went through the steps to formally renounce Canadian citizenship, which became official in May 2014.
I'm not accusing him of anything, I'm just saying he's one of two known cases. I don't personally consider it a problem and I wouldn't care if he hadn't renounced it.
> he went through the steps to formally renounce Canadian citizenship,
Not a fan of Cruz, but this is sufficient for me. More problematic would be those nations that don't accept or don't allow them to renounce citizenship.
I could be wrong but I think it's an intentional misrepresentation of Israel's Law of Return (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Return), which allows any Jewish person to move to Israel and then become a citizen. It doesn't mean that every Jewish person anywhere in the world is automatically an Israeli citizen whether they want to be or not, but some people like to say that.
>On the day of arrival in Israel, or occasionally at a later date, a person who enters Israel under the Law of Return as an oleh would receive a certificate confirming their oleh status.
On the very day they step off the boat or plane. This isn't the case of "anyone who comes to the US and waits 10+ years might finally get to become a citizen". Seems pretty fucking automatic.
The Wikipedia summary is oversimplified, it's very easy but you do have to affirmatively express an interest and fill out an application (https://www.gov.il/en/service/declaration_of_intent_to_recei...). They don't literally hand it to you when you get off the plane, and even if they did you still can't point to any Jewish person and declare that they must be a citizen of Israel. Most Jewish people have never even been to Israel.
Maybe you're arguing that since it's so easy, all Jewish people in Congress are effectively dual Israeli citizens even if they never actually apply for citizenship. In that case, you'll also be shocked to learn that every single person in Congress is a dual citizen of Dominica, which can be obtained without ever setting foot in the country by just paying $100,000 (https://www.cbiu.gov.dm/dominica-citizenship/). Everyone in Congress can afford that, so we might as well say they've already done it.
Is it really that hard to imagine congress supporting the democratic country with one of the biggest pride parades in the world vs the country that hasn’t had elections in 18 years and is split between 2 leaders who disagree on pretty much everything?
On a more serious note, I figured the majority of US lawmakers already supported the genocide. I'm surprised Israel feels the need to use propaganda for this
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadIs Russia the main American ally in the region that contributes enormously to American intelligence and R&D, while also supporting American military operations?
In pretty much the same way, those who fall for long distance romance scams didn't find the love of their life, despite believing so. They found someone who is taking advantage of them.
Zero? I can't find a reliable source for any congress member being an Israeli citizen
https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/defining-antisem...
Lots of people going masks off now that is cool to be anti-semitic again but now we call it anti-zionist.
By this do you mean Jews? Should be prevent Jewish people from being allowed in congress?
"AIPAC is allowed to exist" Should we prevent it from existing becuase it supports a Jewish state? You have no issue with the hundreds of other lobbying groups, just the jewish one.
Odd that people are only concerned with AIPAC and not the other foreign PACS.
Wonder what the differentiating factor is?
https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...
"Dual citizens" clearly means "dual citizens". If the OP had the information that many Jews in Congress were dual citizens, he was wrong- although in fairness it's an understandable false belief when you have US politicians coming to Congress wearing their IDF uniform or propose laws to give IDF veterans the same benefits that US veterans receive.
> concerned with AIPAC and not the other foreign PACS. Wonder what the differentiating factor is?
Just look at the the first PAC in the list you mentioned: it's Accenture. Classified as foreign because their headquarter is in an empty office of a tax haven. AIPAC is not even in this list: it's in the "ideology/ single issue" list, where it stands as the only pro-<some country> PAC in the list (and the 4th largest).
https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...
I don't know. How many? I was curious and Googled, and couldn't find any good authoritative lists. This Quora answer [0] implies that the answer is zero, as does this Snopes article [1]. Both answers mention that there's various incorrect lists going around that are white supremacist propaganda.
[0] https://www.quora.com/Which-current-members-of-Congress-have...
[1] https://www.snopes.com/news/2024/02/05/dual-citizenship-elec...
Speaking personally - I am ethnically Jewish, although I’ve never practiced, and of Polish descent. Technically, if I were to go through the necessary processes, I could acquire citizenship of Israel or Poland. Despite that: I’ve never been to either country, have no known family there, I don’t speak either Hebrew or Polish…the notion that I have any meaningful connection to these foreign countries beyond trivial historical facts is absurd to me. And the idea that, were Poland or Israel to become geopolitical adversaries of Canada, I would be viewed with mistrust, as less Canadian because, through quirks of family history and bureaucracy I’ve been made an offer I never accepted, is pretty disheartening.
At any rate, the upshot of this line of thinking - that we must be wary of Jews with matters of national importance because they are, through no choice of their own, supposedly beholden to a foreign power - is enormously problematic and, yes, anti-Semitic. Similar logic was used to justify Japanese internment camps.
The downside of that though is that I've seen tons and tons of Jewish public figures completely downplay what's happening in Gaza, almost reflexively. Either that or unabashed support for the IDF. All of that is also common even amongst my more liberal Jewish friends/acquaintances. That's completely understandable in a way, to unite for that cause in this context but it also means that the biais is hard to ignore. Though I don't see it as loyalty to a foreign power at all, they are completely american/Canadian/whatever.
So I see it more as an issue that'd be similar to an all white congress voting on issues that mostly impact black people or other minorities. Is it loyalty? Nope. Is there biais (conscious or not)? Yes. The same goes for a congress with almost no Palestinian or even Muslim voices but a lot more Jewish voices imo.
But yes, the reality is that it almost always lead to a very dangerous way of thinking, and not just a discussion about biais
When his business gets boycotted, burned and stolen, when he won't be able to run for office or hold a government position, when his house gets marked and his kids won't be able to go to school the only safe place in that regard will be Israel.
Again, I agree that there can be an argument that Holocaust was a culminating event of the antisemitism in Europe. But i never felt that the antisemitism in the west makes Israel a safe space, is not very congruent one when the both West and Israel touts a shared set of Western values. It is even more surprising since the current conservatives call Western values as Judeo Christian. I would make it clear that people feeling being alienated even in presence of such values is understandable. But the events of establishing Israel, and the continued invasions of neighbouring countries, and the sheer atrocities committed in the process makes no sense to me. Not to say the constant attempts to portray people who have been living there as usurpers, harbouring Zionist Terrorists, are not the actions of some who seeks a safe space.
It's not surprising at all, should the Jews in the west just go about their lives with classic Christen, revived Marxism and newly imported Islamic antisemitism? These western government do nothing to counter it beside saying they condemn that, which means nothing.
Continued Invasions of neighboring countries?? Your bias is showing, every action of Israel is in response to aggression and terrorism by Israel's neighbors. Don't want to get invaded and bombed to hell? Shouldn't have fired thousands of missiles, rape, behead, mutilate, kidnap, harbor terrorists, dung terror tunnels, blocked trade blew up buses, restaurants and coffee shops. These "neighbors" of Israel always like to cry that Israel is the aggressor but it's always reflection.
Just waiting for a random US future president to create an "Internet" branch of the military. Maybe that's already happened.
Difference today is you can stoke the flames of public outrage with just a few people, without even setting foot in the country, while maintaining a lot of plausible deniability, since the modern playbook relies heavily on uncertainty and confusion, meaning you can safely target allies without significant risk of being caught (even if you're caught, you can deny it and say it's hostile propaganda).
Propaganda only seems to work in two situations. The first is on topics people know nothing about. Each time the US invades some places most people couldn't even find on a map, support for it rises in accordance with the propaganda. But as people learn more, and gradually form their own values, that support tends to rapidly decline. And there are also long-term consequences, because people will remember being lied to. My views on the US war machine and geopolitics in general seem unlikely, at this point, to ever change. And they were largely formed due to the Iraq War. Irrefutable [1] and Undeniable [2] are two 21 year old articles I still go back to on occasion.
The other situation is when it's true. During the Cold War we spread endless propaganda about things like having stocked store shelves. This is doubly effective in the same way that lying propaganda is doubly ineffective. Because not only does it create a desired perception, but once people gradually find out it's really true, it also tends to turn them against their own government who invariably misrepresents such situations. Again, people don't like being lied to.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/02/06/i...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...
The belief that holding strong opinions protects against propaganda is dangerous. Strong opinions is where propaganda inserts its levers.
Here's AI Trump and AI Biden debating live now on Twitch (video isnt great as of today but the voices are) https://m.twitch.tv/videos/2157689323
God knows what % of the population has mental issues because we watch too much Twitter and Facebook and other crap
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger
The Gaza Genocide is similar, the use of AI for target selection (or rather generation), the social media campaigns, using drones for killings, etc. We haven’t seen a genocide before which uses information technology to the extent it really defines whole processes of the genocide.
The first television broadcast on earth was of Hitler, and his chief propagandist, Goebbles, continues to have significant influence on modern propagandists. For instance, Biden's publicly compared the tactics Trump used in the 2020 "Big Lie" campaign to those of Goebbles. Of course, there was also the Hitler Youth, which was a pretty successful social engineering campaign.
On the computer side of things: IBM mainframes were famously an enabling technology for the holocaust and german war machine.
It's been that way with Syria conflict, too, though. A lot was shared in twitter/youtube during that one.
One thing that's seemingly a bit new is how much ordinary Israeli soldiers are sharing their behavior, empowered by their self-righteousness, I guess. Videos from shooting unarmed deaf people up close in their homes, to all kinds of calls for atrocities, actual assaults on international humanitarian aid trucks and violence against the drivers, cheerful mocking of starving people, dedicating videos of them blowing up peoples homes as gifts to their spouses back home in Israel, looting and stealing, wanton destruction of property (like going around and breaking things in someone's gift shop), burning people's houses down, etc. There's so much of this.
Entire 130k strong Israeli telegram channels are dedicated to collective cheering on and mocking of dead and suffering people: https://t.me/s/dead_terrorists Total dehumanization.
Jeez, just like those supremacists of the yesteryears Hollywood made movies to warn us about, then?
We didn't learn though.
Radical elements can find each other and (dis)organize between themself and instigate such actions between military groups outside the chain of command.
Telegram is used to for this in other current wars.
But the difference here is that for many in the West, they are seeing their own participation in it (ie USA, UK) with the Germans giving morale support for it. All those American Boeing-made missiles ripping apart and burning alive those little hungry toddlers camping outside in their cold tents… it tends to make people reflect a little more.
Changing the convo to talk about some other wars than Israel / Gaza is just another kind of deflection technique to avoid responsibility.
If it isn’t the antisemitism card, it’s the deflection card.
Sorry, but most of us know it’s true.
Jews are a loosely-defined, globally-distributed cultural group. Israel is a specific, concrete sovereign country. It is a bit like saying if you criticize Venezuela then you must hate "Latinos".
I know for sure that my reasons for criticizing Israel have nothing to do with dislike of Jews. Why? Because I'm inside my own mind, so I would know if I had anything against Jews or not, and I don't.
There are plenty of reasons people care more about Israel's actions than those of any random country that have nothing to do with the fact that Israel is populated mostly by Jews, including:
1. It has historical and cultural ties to Western countries, so Westerners feel naturally interested in what goes on there (see also: why people care more about what's happening in Ukraine than in other armed conflicts around the globe),
2. Israel has a much higher degree of influence over American politics than any other foreign country, which bothers people,
3. It is largely propped up by U.S. aid, so Americans feel responsible for it,
4. Because of point 3., it is one of the only global problems that Americans have a realistic chance of solving by protesting.
People are classically horrible at that kind of self evaluation and will do amazing mental gymnastics to assure themselves they have "real" reasons for their opinions rather then the truth.
Unless by point 3 and 4 you mean the complete destruction of Israel I don't see any other outcome Americans protesting could accomplish to "solve" the conflict. Though since it's hard to find a protest that isn't pushing for that maybe your right on point 4.
If I have no conscious negative feelings towards Jews, don’t treat any of the ones I know differently from anyone else (other than maybe asking them curious questions about their culture/religion), and generally don’t have any negative reaction when I find out someone is Jewish, how would you even measure or define this apparently asymptomatic anti-Semitism?
> Unless by point 3 and 4 you mean the complete destruction of Israel I don't see any other outcome Americans protesting could accomplish to "solve" the conflict.
I do not mean that and I think it’s very unlikely the protests will cause that, and to be clear, I think the maximalist demands being made by protestors (“from the river to the sea”, etc.) are too radical, but again, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily motivated by antisemitic feelings. Perhaps sometimes they are, but it’s by no means a logical necessity.
What I think is possible to achieve by protesting is forcing Israel to back down from its own right-wing maximalist posture towards Palestinians and be open to agreeing some kind of lasting peace or at least easing up on the atrocities they’re committing (and I am mainly thinking of the atrocities they’ve been committing since long before Oct. 7th: the indefinite blockade of Gaza and the creeping settlement Swiss-cheesing the West Bank).
On and on. For anyone able to absorb new information, I created a YouTube playlist on this. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiJgBiONK7dILxA1zuIKJ_89e...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40519369 (May 2024)
If you keep this up we're going to have to ban you, for reasons explained on many past occasions: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
Edit for anyone concerned: yes, this principle applies regardless of which side of any political conflict an account is identified with.
The question "has an account been using HN primarily for political or ideological battle?" is one of the most important criteria we use in HN moderation. When it is the case, we ask an account to stop and/or end up banning it.
This rule has many advantages. One is that it's a reasonably objective call to make (and for readers to verify) regardless of the specific views a user is arguing for or against. Another is that it allows for a certain amount of political and ideological discussion (as long as it doesn't break the site guidelines in other ways, of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40589862
After posting this, and reading the replies, I’m actually less convinced about my original point. That is, I’ve learned something.
This is not to say that the topic doesn't matter. Of course it matters, a great deal—more than almost anything that gets discussed here. But that not only doesn't change the above point, it makes it even more important.
As I said the last time I replied to you, I appreciate that your comments have mostly not been breaking the site guidelines in other ways. But the "primarily" test applies regardless.
I don't want to ban you as you've been here a long time and have used the site as intended in the past. But I have to go quite a long way back into the past before that becomes visible. This is not ok.
I got very lucky, and the very next day someone started an argument about the futility and/or propriety of user-mode TCP/IP stacks and WireGuard. I wish for you a similarly irresistible nerd snipe for whatever nerd topic lights you up. Good luck!
I’m actually way more of a lurker here. There are e.g. once a month a submission about Bayesian Analysis (and a guaranteed once a year submission about Kalman Filters) which I religiously read but hardly ever contribute to (unless a frequentist is advocating for IQ tests or other psychometric devises; then I for sure contribute; but that can lead to flame-wars easily). Every so often there is a back end engineer with an “opinion” on the front end stack which I sometimes answer for, however that often be a flame-y subject, for some reason I’m less tempted to be sucked into flamewars when the subject is actually aligned with my expertise.
runarberg's comments are just a symptom of a deeper problem, dang
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013
> This is not the 'hacker news' ranking algorithm, this is the ranking algorithm distributed with 'ARC', which is the basis for the HN algorithm, but definitely not equal to it. The biggest missing ingredients are flagged posts dropping off quicker and posts that contain no URL dropping off quicker but there are quite a few other subtle tweaks.
Not really "public".
The post expresses an opinion, but it definitely wasn't flamebait.
Of course I replied to a specific post because any reply has to do that; but I was responding to the account's use of HN over time. That's the issue here.
I wrote the GP in haste and can see how this point wasn't obvious. On the other hand it should quickly become obvious to anyone who clicks on the link I provided (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...), which is the purpose of providing the link.
(more at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40589978)
eg: 26 March 2024 Human Rights https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976
Clearly there are opinions at odds with your opinion.Hilarious considering every conflict has been started by Palestine. Ceasefires broken by Hamas on multiple occasions. And there’s no settler colonial process happening now or in the past.
But let’s continue to blame Israel when Hamas kills people trying to get food or supplies. Or blame Israel when Hamas fires its own rocket at a parking lot and claims 500 dead. Let’s blame Israel for trying to wipe out a terrorist organization that’s sole purpose is to wipe out the Jewish population and wipe Israel off the map.
While Israel is quite restrained. We will keep calling it genocide even tho ACTUAL genocide is happening every day in Iran and China and Africa. It’s fun to ignore what’s happening elsewhere so we can focus on Israel and making up things that aren’t happening.
> But let’s
Please don't speak for me, or for others when expressing your opinion.
> It’s fun to ignore what’s happening elsewhere
Perhaps for you but again, please don't speak for myself or for others.
All that I've spread in my comments above (do please scroll back and check) is the message that opinions are divided.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40589862
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40589978
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40590128
I don't see how I could have been much clearer, so if you read those posts and still have a question that isn't addressed, I'd be curious to know what it is.
The Rohingya genocide in Myanmar in which Facebook’s role was widely discussed (largely, in the first world, after the fact) was probably the first social media age genocide, if you don't restrict it to ones with immediate first-world attention at a significant level.
No, its not. Heck, the Holocaust used information technology for target selection.
> The Rohingya Genocide does not e.g. use drones
The genocides in the former Yugoslavia used most of the weapons of then-modern warfare, which may not have included drones but certainly involved plenty of weapons systems that incorporate "information technology" in doing the killings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command is the closest thing that we have today. It's not a formal branch, though, but rather a joint effort across the existing branches.
A cursory look and it seems Germany and China were first to having a specific branch, but China dissolved theirs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_and_Information_Domain_S...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army_Str...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth-generation_warfare
Why internet is the battlefield? Because everything in our world is based on an opinion. You can sell a lot of bs to your “client” if he has “correct” opinion.
Bad news, our opinion system was designed for groups and villages, not for the internet.
The difference now is the speed, cost and scale. It is super cheap to spread crap today than ever. Also it is quick and the reach is massive.
By the way, Manufacturing Consent is a depressing book. You’d lose what little faith you have in media, if you read it…
Maybe it's not what I should remember most, but it did help remind me that when your livelihood is based on what you say you will be much more measured, regardless of the subject.
Probably why people look to social media or Substack for more independent people who have a longer leash, less on the line, and more to gain, since that's where you get your interesting although many times wrong takes (e.g. Ivermectin for Covid, or Lab Leak Theory)
Internet is a communications medium. It was destined to be flooded with propaganda, whatever you try to call your particular flavour.
Or as I have been saying since the 1990's, the only difference between marketing and propaganda is that with marketing at least you are trying to peddle a product instead of an ideology.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
I disagree, ideologies are often already in there, even when they are simplistic "power-tools are for men and all men require power-tools", or "having better stuff than your neighbors is a virtue, failing to do so will lead to dangerous ostracization."
Very tame "Our blender spins twice as fast as the competition" marketing might be arguably free of ideology, but that's a decreasing minority.
I disagree. This isn't peddling an ideology, it's using an existing ideology (or stereotype) in order to peddle a product. A company with a marketing campaign targeting men isn't going to refuse to sell power tools to women, they're just designing their marketing campaign in a way they think will maximize sales overall, using existing biases and ideologies that potential customers already have. Normal companies don't care about ideology unless it helps them make more money, which is their true goal.
That’s not how this works. “The medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan would say.
A woman may never consider buying power tools because of the imagery of the propaganda surrounding power tools. Or the salesman may undermine, intimidate, or otherwise obstruct her attempts to purchase one. But regardless your point falls apart because the ideology of capitalism underlying the power tools on the shelf subsumes the ideology of the advertising.
That subsumption, however, does not in any way contraindicate those ideologies present in the advertisement’s framing. It only demonstrates that money is more important than the other ideologies being peddled.
Quite often I default to the word propaganda when talking about anyone's PR campaigns in my own personal battle with trying to undo this. I ratchet it up when talking directly to marketing/PR people. Pretty much every time I'm just looked at as yet another crazy person.
Marketing often includes the peddling of an ideology as a foundation for the product buying, especially for big-ticket items. (One buys the product that fits and signals one’s ideology.) To me, this makes marketing even more insidious as we often focus on the product rather than the message. Think Ford, Tesla, Apple …
And guns.
Literally the raison d'etre of PR | propaganda is to distract, to replace, to (in modern terms) throw a dead cat on the table and have everybody talk about that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
The stated purpose was to flatten the curve.
> Who benefited?
The government.
> How?
By giving the impression that they were doing something.
> Why were the curfews necessary to achieve those goals?
They weren't, as far as we know. In Quebec's case they were still scrambling to justify them a few hours before the press conference:
https://www.thesuburban.com/news/legault-s-curfew-decision-w...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/curfew-legality-queb...
I don't think it is necessary to insult people as 'conspiracy nutters' on here. If you don't want to discuss something with someone, just give them a downvote and move on. No need to be uncivil.
How curfews can slow the spread of a virus, I have no idea. If you want to slow a virus's spread, you do it by isolating people and preventing them from mingling. A curfew doesn't do that; it just forces them to mingle during a shorter number of hours in a day, which if anything helps the virus spread by increasing the density of people mingling. The allegation that it was just governments trying to look like they're doing something useful is not an unreasonable charge. Any idiot can tell you that preventing someone from going on a bike ride in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere is not going to help stop a pandemic, but this is exactly what several governments did.
Yes, but this doesn't mean that you know the actual purpose.
>So what purpose were you proposing?
I'm not proposing anything; I didn't propose a conspiracy happened, the OP did. I'm just explaining that the conspiracy theorist doesn't have to allege a specific purpose.
As for the curfews, my theory is that it was just plain anti-science stupidity, plus wanting to look like they're doing something, like many political decisions. If you disagree, please explain how someone riding a bicycle outdoors in a rural area with no other humans around somehow spreads a virus. Only countries with truly stupid leadership even had restrictions like these (i.e., UK, they're the only one I know of actually).
The US hasn't been especially loud about it, but it's been a dominant force in 'internet warfare.'
how competent they actually are at this, who knows...
If anything, this makes me question the accuracy of historical events that happened before humanity had access to such tools.
Cyber Force!
They have cyber marines, cyber carriers, cyber destroyers, cyber bombers, cyber jets, and cyber drones. They even have their own sister agency called Veterans Affairs where veterans can go to get virtual healthcare treatment.
US military spent over half a billion on war propaganda - outsourced to experts.
This is not a war.
(I know nothing about moderation tools)
Just like how we knew everyone was always spying on everyone else long before Snowden, we should all know that everyone is doing this to everyone else long before all the revaluations come down to us. There is no benefit to assuming good faith here.
https://jewishcurrents.org/israels-defense
but like most articles about Israeli hacking, US Big Tech involvement in the war, etc it was immediately flagged once it reached the front page.
I don’t know how much of this is moderators removing posts, or if there is a pro-Israel brigade that is censoring HN’s front page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWD5xiiafBc
it's prudent to assume such operations are still ongoing
This article is from Hareetz, which is a major newspaper in Israel.
There's a huge, organized Israel lobby aimed at the US. It's no secret. There's AIPAC, the American-Israel Political Action Committee. "Lobbying for Pro-Israel Policies", it says on their web site. There are official organizations in the government of Israel which do "public diplomacy".[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_diplomacy_of_Israel
>”Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.”
Just like I've predicted many times on HN.
Text generation is low on the list of things needed to successfully engage in automated spam. Social media is built on reputation, not who can write generic believable text the quickest. And funny enough the ex-OpenAI people (mostly Helen) calling for gov regulation said GPT should not have been released to the public because of this risk.
This is not the whole picture at all. I’d even say mostly incorrect. You can definitely influence public opinion with a social media consisting entirely of bots, provided the public aren’t aware of it.
* (before I turned off the flags a few minutes ago)
edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40586961 for more
I flagged your comment because it's anti-intellectual nonsense that attempts to emotionally manipulate readers and is unfounded in reality. Please keep that kind of thing to Reddit.
You expect political drama submissions not to be flagged as offtopic?
It's possible that account is banned, but more likely your self-posts might be getting filtered by HN's software which tries to apply this guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.:.
The issue is that "X used fake accounts to push political agenda on social media" might be interesting political news, but it's incredibly boring technical news.
Everyone knows that this is possible, and the only novel information here is political.
I'd say that if you posted news which are interesting in how they relate to tech, and also political, you're going to (or at least should have) more success than this article. Even just a proper analysis of how widespread fake political social media accounts area, deeper statistics, more novel processes of this happening, etc. would all be interesting, and would not fall in the politics-first-tech-second bucket.
and the way we handle it has was worked out over a decade ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If anyone has questions about this, take a look at those links and if there's something unanswered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
It's pretty important that most stories about this conflict and similar current affairs get flagged, because otherwise HN's front page would consist of little else, and that's not the purpose of the site. But it's also important that the topics not be ignored completely, even though they're painful. There's no happy medium here, unfortunately.
Here are some links to previous explanations. If you (or anyone, of course) have a look at these and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40418881 (May 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920732 (April 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618973 (March 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435324 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39435024 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237176 (Feb 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39161344 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38947003 (Jan 2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749162 (Dec 2023)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38657527 (Dec 2023)
Brigaded reports? 4chan solved it by adding a mandatory enum to reports to specify what the report is reporting for. Identifying bad reports and banning users as a result becomes trivial.
Flooding with stories about a particular topic? That's what stickies are for and they work particularly well so that mods can auto-delete any non-sticky stories pertaining to the MOT.
Flamewar on a MOT? Add a sticky to the top of the thread like reddit does saying moderation will be minimal and to enter the thread at your own risk.
How about one of the standard Merriam Webster definitions of force: (verb) "to compel by physical, moral, or intellectual means" i.e. by framing their argument to compel by convincing it's from an intellectual standpoint. Not too interested on your hangups for definitions of basic words to be honest here though.
Throwing a tantrum about being unable to redirect outrage freely onto others while masquerading adding functionality to enable that discourse as an "already solved problem implemented by others" with lack of complying to their personal standards being perceived as refusing "enhancements" isn't a discussion, its an emotion driven stance attempting to make the other party look unreasonable.
I'd argue that the reason most of us are on HN is that it doesn't use 21st century forum enhancements.
I think the more worrying is going after the low information voter. I didn't think Russia's election interference had much effect in 2016, but now when you look at US Media (largely conservative outlets) their footprint is very visible.
If the purpose of the trolling is to influence a decision, does it matter if the target reads it and is trolled directly or trolls enough constituents to call for action? Either way, the influence was asserted making the effort worthwhile.
So they may recognize trolling, but if you tell them "Hey, the President of Israel tweeted at you," they just assume it was the President of Israel.
* my grandmother can't recognize fake information
* my grandmother is old
* politicians are old
* therefore politicians can't recognize fake information
Politics has always been full of deception, people doing politics professionally for decades should know a bit or two about it.
I think it's worth pushing back on this. Deception works when it's unexpected, and if the medium is something politicians aren't familiar with, they may not even be looking for the kinds of deception they're being targeted with. They think themselves hardened to deception, but they may not be open-minded enough to even realize there are forms of deception they haven't prepared for.
Kids these days just know everything is a scam or BS, but I can't seem to convince my parents' generation that someone would lie to them via e-mail.
eg: (Various headlines)
* Australian Politicians Keep Falling For Telegram Scams
* The phishing email that hacked the account of John Podesta
* Who is behind the Westminster WhatsApp 'honeytrap' stings?
If you're wondering why politics sometimes seem out of touch, it's because politicians, their media and the commentariat are locked into an echo chamber already.
If I were an actor interested in influencing the policy of another country, why would I spend $$$ on manipulating the voting populace if I can poison the feed of the people who matter for far less?
Take a look a r/worldnews vs any other subreddit discussing this topic. r/worldnews is controlled. Negative comments towards Israel get comments deleted and users banned. Any other subreddit, there are people arguing from multiple directions. On r/worldnews, you only see dissenting opinions for the first hour or so until the mods "clean up the thread".
Obviously, this is anecdotal information and probably slightly biased.
It's just a different echo chamber...
They don't have any practice making a secular argument about the Palestinian situation, how could they? They fall back to assuring people that Israel is a friend to the US, that Israel is a democracy (a ton of its inhabitants are forced to live in ghettos and refugee camps), that Israel loves gay people (Israel doesn't have gay marriage, or even secular marriage except by treaty), and the worst: "Why don't you give America back to the Indians?"
Russian propaganda is bad, but it's also lazy: it gets them nothing and they don't put a lot of effort into it. Israel is trying as hard as it can. To not ethnically cleanse Israel leaves a population that Europe tried its best to exterminate drifting the stormy seas of having to compromise with their neighbors. This is a population whose neighbors once built factories in order to slaughter them more efficiently.
It's not like we haven't done this either. I worked for a company in 2005 which was doing this paid for by politicians. Moment I worked this out, I quit.
You can sit there and do nothing and wait for your enemy to paint you in a bad light and the next thing you know your usual political allies are throwing money and aid at your enemy. Or you protect your citizens as best as possible by entering the game. The moral high ground may have a higher body count.
This point applies to both sides for ref. And because it's a war, the rules of fair play go out of the window until people are on trial afterwards.
Speaking of trials: U.S. lawmakers had voted to sanction ICC if it tries to prosecute citizens of the US or it's allies.
I guess it is always one rule for thee and another one for me. So much for rules based order.
It doesn't seem reasonable to me to assume that the main objective of any government is to protect its citizens.
i dont know of a single country that wouldnt do the same in their position.
I mean it'd be nice not to have them but as a species we're stupid animals with stupid ideas so there's no end of it in sight.
I don't agree with any of it for ref.
End game is there has never been a credible body count from even a small scale war. So to claim anyone is right here on either side is probably selective bias on your part. At best when the dust has figuratively and literally settled, it'll be a decade before anyone has an even remotely credible count.
Manipulation of the body counts is easy material for propaganda. It has been since the dawn of war.
Factor child soldiers into these arguments and it gets very grey. The number itself without compounding facts has little meaning.
And for the sake of credibility, the figures were later revised so you're not even quoting their current estimates and compromising your own credibility!
https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/...
The total number of dead also does not include the approximately 10,000 people who are still missing and trapped under the rubble, the officials added.
CNN has seen a daily report from the Palestinian health ministry which matches the number OCHA published in the revised version. A total of 15,103 children and 9,961 women have been killed in Gaza since October 7, the Gaza ministry of health said in its latest report."
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/13/middleeast/death-toll-gaza-fa... - Updated 2:12 AM EDT, Tue May 14, 2024
"MoH statistics have also been verified by Human Rights Watch and used by the United States Department of State in past conflicts and as recently as March 2023, despite US President Joe Biden questioning those numbers without evidence."
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/14/has-the-un-really-s...
Palestinian authorities were found to be releasing counts in good faith and never inflated numbers for the sake of an information war. This is a key point, why doubt an organisation that hasn't lied about it's death count before.
Deny, Discredit, Disinform, Diffuse and Defray are things you'll see time and time again in threads like these.
Now, it's a sobering thought 15,000+ children have been murdered, in 2023/2024. With full support of the US, 'ironclad' apparently.
"The organization [Irgun] committed acts of terrorism against Palestinian Arabs, as well as against the British authorities, who were regarded as illegal occupiers.[7] In particular the Irgun was described as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, British, and United States governments;"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
I mean, if Israel started bombing me, I'd try to garner support from US citizens too? There is a world of difference between that and faking social media accounts
For a country which is meant to be one of the smartest out there, their propaganda campaigns are an utter disaster giveaway to anyone with a pulse and a few dozen brain cells.
Seems their propaganda works just fine if that's a commonly held belief :)
I take it back. They are smart with their hacking and that’s where it ends.
So are often russians, or chinese. Maybe the concentration is on another level, they are a tiny country but highly educated for generations.
I'd bet if we properly educated and developed whole world we would discover Einsteins and Bolts in many many places out there. Ie elite athletes often come from places around where they could do sport, ie mountaineers but also many others.
"Average IQ of 83" ... so the average person is "borderline mentally disabled"?
(I'm just commenting in the abstract).
You want to see some of the crap the agencies were pushing out pre-Brexit and it worked, so I wouldn't classify the average UK citizen as much to be contended with (I am UK as well for ref).
My father was a fine one. His staff fucked off back to Europe, he couldn't hire anyone else and had to fold his company and retire. Then he found out he got cancer and that the NHS had staffing problems due to Brexit.
Me, I am better off for it as I fill a niche demand, but I voted against it because it was generally bad for society and I do not always vote in self-interest.
You are so right though - most people just will refuse to accept they were taken for fools with all the nasty rhetoric about ‘people coming in to our country’… and so many have even been convinced that ripping up the Human Rights act is somehow a good thing (??? Wtf!).
Rich people manipulating the minds of poor people was what Brexit was all about. At the time I was convinced this was a Russian move to make UK weaker. But then again, I was convinced for many years that Trump was a Russian asset to make America implode (which is kind of what happened).
All this hate for foreigners. It’s disgusting.
The funding is what secures these politicians' votes. The propaganda is what the politicians can use to justify their actions to everyone else. That it's laughably bad is a function less of the capabilities of Israel than the utter fealty that these politicans have to the Israeli cause.
Israel seems to only extend that sort of courtesy to a part of its citizenry, but when you remember that the "stable" countries in the region are all more-or-less absolute monarchies, it becomes obvious why the US is willing to at least work with Israel.
There have been over 100 Arabs in the Israeli parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab_members_of_the_Kn...
https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/so-what-did-the-muslims-do-f...
https://jewishstudies.stanford.edu/events/david-wasserstein-...
So I challenge you to find 1 law that treats Jews and Arab citizens differently in Israel
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67165002
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel#Civil_...
It's the same as the US's treatment of African Americans for decades; legally they have the same rights but the reality of how they get treated by their government is much different. Just pointing out "Aha! They are equal under law!" is misleading and tries to shut the issue down
You're mixing up two different things. Arab Israelis (as Israel calls them) are Israeli citizens. They have the same rights as any Israeli citizen.
Freedom of movement to and from the Gaza strip is of Gazans, who are not Israeli citizens, and they indeed don't have the same rights in Israel as Israeli citizens.
More directly: apartheid "democracy" > monarchy?
For what it's worth, the US has also tried to work a two-state solution over the last 30 years with various degrees of vigor. That became much harder to accomplish when the Gaza Strip decided to elect Hamas to lead its government in 2006-07.
It became much harder when the Israeli hard Right murdered Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 and then took over the Israeli government with Netanyahu's election in 1996.
Both fairly explicitly in reaction against the idea of ever accepting a Palestinian State.
The Hamas suicide bombings in 1994 were in response to the massacre committed by Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein in February. The first bombing of the "wave" happened in April.
[1]
> This was the first suicide bombing attack to be carried out by Palestinian militants against Israeli civilians in Israel, and was carried out in retaliation for the killing by a settler of 29 Muslims while they were at prayer in the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron on 25 February.
> I.e. the root cause of this was Palestinians, not Israelis.
I.e. This is grossly disingenuous.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afula_Bus_suicide_bombing
> [Rise and Kill First] contains several pages devoted to the FLLF operation. Based on interviews with officials involved in the operation or who were aware of its existence at the time, it confirms that the Palestinians had been right all along: the FLLF was indeed a creation of Israel, a fictitious group used by senior officials to hide their country’s hand in a deadly ‘terrorist’ campaign.
> As Rise and Kill First documents in detail, the FLLF bombings were an integral part of this Israeli strategy of provocation. Indeed, the new Defense Minister immediately decided to “activate” the FLLF operation and sent Eitan as his personal emissary to “keep an eye” on the clandestine operation. Remarkably, at the time Eitan was serving as Begin’s “counterterrorism” adviser.
> On September 17, 1981, a car bomb exploded outside of the command center shared by the PLO and its Lebanese leftist allies in the port city of Sidon, killing over 20, most of them women and children who lived in nearby apartment buildings, John Kifner reported in the New York Times.
> Two days later, another “terrorist bomb” killed four in a crowded movie theater in West Beirut, Kifner reported. The FLLF claimed responsibility, but Palestinian officials immediately insisted that the group is “fictitious,” a ploy used by Israel to hide its hand in these attacks.
> On October 1, a car exploded near PLO offices in a crowded street in Moslem west Beirut, killing 90, as Kifner and the UPI reported. Several other vehicles loaded with explosives were found and defused in Beirut and Sidon “in what was intended as a devastating blitz against Palestinians and leftist Lebanese militiamen by rightist terrorists.”
> A RAND report on ‘recent trends in international terrorism’ published in April 1983 describes a few of these bombings in some detail. The death toll from these few bombings adds up to 120. By comparison, and according to the same RAND report, in 1980 and 1981 combined Palestinian ‘terrorists’ killed a grand total of 16 people. As UPI journalist Fred Schiff wrote at the time, over just two weeks the FLLF’s ‘wave of terror bombings’ in its totality claimed 308 lives.
> The censor’s decision made it possible for Israeli leaders to insist, in June 1982, that the invasion of Lebanon was justified in the name of fighting “terrorism.” Remarkably, it made it possible for Ariel Sharon to take to the pages of the New York Times in August 1982 and insist that Israeli troops “were greeted as liberators for driving out the terrorists who had raped and pillaged and plundered” the country. They had followed the Jewish doctrine of tohar haneshek, “the moral conduct of war,” Sharon added, a policy that stood “in vivid contrast to the P.L.O.’s practice of attacking only civilian targets.”
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/it-is-time-to-break-the-silen...
Did Israel also fire rockets on its north from Lebanon? Did it try to assassinate it's ambassador to the UK?
Do you have other references to the theory that the reason Israel went to war with Lebanon was FLLF's operations that it blamed on Palestinians? Why would it go to war over people killing each other in Lebanon, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Anyways, in this conflict cherry-picking is a big problem. Pro-Palestinians are very good at cherry picking some questionable Israeli action while totally ignoring the rest of the story. You can't understand reality by cherry picking certain things and spinning a theory to accommodate them. That's how conspiracy theorists think. The scientific method is to try and falsify your theory and really test whether it stands the test of the other events, not the ones' your cherry picking. And naturally for every story check multiple sources to try and get a sense of what really happened. If you're ignoring the rocket attacks on Israel, and other PLO attacks on Israel, and the attempt to assassinate the UK ambassador, as factors in your theory, then maybe your theory is wrong.
Yes, and?
> Did it try to assassinate it's ambassador to the UK?
See below quotes. It also did try to assassinate US diplomat John Gunther Dean.
> Do you have other references to the theory that the reason Israel went to war with Lebanon was FLLF's operations that it blamed on Palestinians? Why would it go to war over people killing each other in Lebanon, it doesn't pass the smell test.
Not the sole reason in itself, rather a critical part of whipping political support.
[1]
> From his first day at the Defense Ministry, Sharon started planning the invasion of Lebanon. He developed what came to be known as the "big plan" for using Israel's military power to establish political hegemony in the Middle East. The first aim of Sharon's plan was to destroy the PLO's military infrastructure in Lebanon and to undermine it as a political organization. The second aim was to establish a new political order in Lebanon by helping Israel's Maronite friends, headed by Bashir Gemayel, to form a government that would proceed to sign a peace treaty with Israel. For this to be possible, it was necessary, third, to expel the Syrian forces fro Lebanon or at least seriously weaken their presence there. The destruction of the PLO would break the backbone of of Palestinian nationalism and facilitate the absorption of the West Bank into Greater Israel. The resulting influx of Palestinians from Lebanon into Jordan would eventually sweep away the Hashemite monarchy and transform the East Bank into a Palestinian state. Sharon reasoned that Jordan's conversion into a Palestinian state would end international pressures on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.
> Sharon and Eytan, realizing there was no chance of persuading the cabinet to approve a large-scale operation in Lebanon, adopted a different tactic. They started presenting to the cabinet limited proposals for bombing PLO targets in Lebanon, expecting that the guerillas would retaliate by firing Katyusha rockets on Israel's northern settlements and that this would force the cabinet to approve more drastic measures. The idea was to implement Operation Big Pines in stages by manipulating enemy provocation and Israel's response. A number of confrontations took place in the cabinet as a result of these tactics. Ministers opposed to a war in Lebanon because they recognized where these proposals were intended to lead.
> Sharon himself displayed the same deviousness in his relations with the Reagan administration as he did in his relations with his cabinet colleagues. He fed the Americans selective information intended to prove that the PLO was making a mockery of the cease-fire agreement and to establish Israel's right to retaliate.
This coincides exactly with the FLLF terror campaign.
> On 3 June the casus belli that the hard-liners had been waiting for materialized. A group of Palestinian gunmen shot and greviously wounded Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador to London, outside the Dorchester Hotel.
> Mossad sources had intelligence to suggest that the attempt of Argov's life was intended to provoke an Israeli assault on Arafat's stronghold in Lebanon in order to break his power.
> Avraham Shalom, the head of the General Security Service, reported that the attack was most probably the work of the faction headed by Abu Nidal and suggested that Gideon Machanaimi, the prime minister's adviser on terrorism, elaborate on the nature of that organization. Machanaimi had hardly opened his mouth when Begin cut him off by saying, "They are all PLO."
[1] Shlaim - The Iron Wall, chapter "The Lebanese Quagmire"
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin condemned the attack, describing Goldstein as a "degenerate murderer" and "a shame on Zionism and an embarrassment to Judaism" - which is important.
Agree that it is important. What is even more strange is that Yitzhak Rabin himself was assassinated by a Zionist Terrorist. There were many deals and processes and talks, Almost all of them put Israel front and centre, even Oslo accords for instance. But as claimed by Bibi, Zionist Terrorists tried everything to thwart it. And conveniently placed the blame on Palestinians. It was Zionist Terrorists who brought terrorism as we know today to the middle east. It was them who killed in cold blood, the mediator who presented the plan, Count Folke Bernadotte. But all the blame is on Palestinians, while the Terrorists derailed any hope for peaceful coexistence, and continue to do so.
I can't really debate your other statements because it's pretty short of facts. I seriously doubt the truth of "zionism brought terrorism to the middle east" as there were e.g. massacres of Jews in the region (Hebron, or Tsfat) that predate zionism.
And sure, Lehi were terrorists, I'm not super familiar with the Bernadotte story but that's well into the conflict, not by any means that start of it.
From my perspective it was the Palestinians, through Hamas, that derailed the Oslo accords. By any measure you can choose, the Palestinian violent opposition to peace eclipsed the Israeli one. Also while Israel has a government with the ability to enforce policy, the Palestinians never had any centralized authority that talks for all of them. While Israel was putting extreme right activists in detention with no trial, the Palestinians were letting Hamas out of their jails with a "revolving door".
Which Israel can't be blamed for enough.
Let's just leave this place filled with insurgents without any coordination with the authority. I wonder what will happen.
What do you mean at least work with Israel? The US is propping up Israel and without that ally Israel would probably implode. What’s messed up is how disrespectful Israel and some of their politicians are to US and their citizens. One thing I like about Israel is that they have a variety of oppinions and schools of thought. What we’re currently seeing is coming from the radical right wing and those atrocities will unfortunately stain Israelis of all types. Hope they do at the next elections.
Almost all of the support and protection they've received from the US since October has been mainly to keep leverage on Netanyahu and to keep the war from spreading across the Middle East. For example, if Iran's missiles had bombarded Tel Aviv, you're probably going to see Israel bombarding Tehran, which could pull in Iraq, etc., and Israel has yet to lose a fight against its regional neighbors.
They don't need the US to prop them up economically or militarily, which should bring about a conversation about support come next budget, but I doubt it.
I too would like to see a more moderate group in charge.
Neither do the North Koreans [1][2]? (Caveats [3][4].)
America dropping Israel simply means it finds a new supplier. Russia is out of the picture, given its dependence on Iran, but China and India would be more than willing to supply.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People's_Army_Air_For...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanks_of_North_Korea
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokpung-ho
[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkava
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Lavi
Why would Israel bombing Tehran pull in Iraq? Iraq and Iran have never been friends.
Wishful thinking, regardless of which elections your talking about. In the US, both sides are working hard to prop up Israel. In Israel before October, Netanyahu was on trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust. Who's even talking about that anymore? Now he gets to be a war Prime Minister.
And now... Iraq?! you must be joking or cynic
Imagine if in the last century, the billions of refugees and descendants of refugees of the world, would all still be kept as ethernal refugees.
The nations of the world are a condescending bunch. Implying that the Palestinians are not to be treated as equals to Germans, Ukrainians, etc.,
https://freedomhouse.org/country/iraq/freedom-world/2024 https://freedomhouse.org/country/lebanon/freedom-world/2024 https://freedomhouse.org/country/israel/freedom-world/2024
There is nothing undemocratic about this at all. This is what international law mandates. Israel is prohibited from annexing this territory by said international law. When Israel annexed other occupied territory and gave residents rights (The Golan Heights) the international community refused to accept that.
You can ask why these territories are in this status for this length of time. Part of the reason is that the country it was occupied from, Jordan, does not want it back. Another part is that the Palestinians that live there don't really want this resolved either (at least some really large portion of them). Another part are other external interests that don't want to see this resolved.
The total physical occupation of Germany lasted 11 years. The final status of Germany was only determined in 1990 in the 2+4 agreement. That's a 45 year period. The US still has bases in Germany.
It's incredible how persistently you miss the point.
What people are asking Israel to do is let Palestinians have a say in their own affairs. That can be done _either_ by letting the Palestinian government meaningfully control Palestine (as the West German government did relatively soon after the war ended), _or_ by letting Palestinians have a say in the Israeli government that rules over them (one state solution).
I'm being called a liar for pointing out that in general people living in occupied territories do not have the rights of the citizens of the occupier, which is the exact situation here, and for which Israel is labelled as an "Apartheid State", since there's no Apartheid in Israel proper, only supposedly in said occupied territories.
I think you're factually wrong on your "What people are asking" statement. Different people are asking different things. However, you can totally ask that question as an individual and we can discuss it.
Palestinians do have a say in their own affairs. But you're saying "letting the Palestinian government meaningfully control Palestine". When you say Palestine do you mean the west bank? Would you agree that in Gaza Israeli did let the Palestinians "meaningfully control Gaza"? What was the outcome of that? What do you propose can be done differently in the west bank for example? What level of say/control do you feel would balance Israel's security needs with the Palestinian's need to have a say/meaningful control? Let's talk specifics.
By the way, I'm totally not an expert in post WW-II Germany, I don't really know if we can apply the same methods or not: https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/german...
There was West Germany and East Germany. There was "denazification" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification (e.g. promoting of Nazi ideas had a death penalty under the occupation, do you think that'll fly with Israel vs. Palestinians vs. the world?). There were war crime trials for top level Nazis.
EDIT: It's also worth mentioning that when the west bank was occupied by Israel in 1967 it was considered to be part of Jordan and Jordan didn't give up that claim until their peace agreement with Israel. But if your point is that Israel should have at that point given the people living in this area a measure of autonomy to run most aspects of their lives I think I can agree. There was definitely some self governing, e.g. at the city level. I think the demand was of Israel to return this to Jordan at that point in time and Israel refused since it meant there would be large Arab armies 10 minute tank drive from Tel-Aviv. (e.g.). I wasn't around in 1967 and I haven't studied that period in detail.
No.
> What was the outcome of that?
Impossible to say because it has never happened.
The demand, not "ask", is that Israel end the Occupation.
It is a lot different from any of those examples, mainly because the U.S. didn’t annex the parts of those countries it cared about (see East Jerusalem), didn’t start moving its own people to the rest of the territory carving it up like Swiss cheese, didn’t prevent people from going and coming, didn’t heavily restrict trade between those countries and their neighbors, etc.
So while indeed they were militarily occupied, the degree of functional civilian control by the democratically elected governments were far greater than that enjoyed in Palestine by the PA or by Hamas.
I agree that the situation in Puerto Rico is undemocratic but again, it’s not nearly as egregious for lots of reasons.
> This is what international law mandates. Israel is prohibited from annexing this territory by said international law. When Israel annexed other occupied territory and gave residents rights (The Golan Heights) the international community refused to accept that.
It is laughable to claim the reason for anything Israel does is “international law” when they flaunt it so cavalierly. Really, they didn’t mind the international legal implications of annexing East Jerusalem or building settlements in the West Bank, but the reason they refuse to annex the rest of it and give people citizenship is because of international law?
That’s clearly not the case. They have taken the parts they care about either by annexation or pseudo-annexation (settlements). The reason they don’t want to annex the rest is because they don’t want Arabs to be nearly half their citizens (annexing it without granting citizenship would be too egregious to ignore in the eyes of the rest of the world) and because there’s nothing there that they want. Expect this to change if the trend of Israel becoming more and more right wing continues.
I also think my other point stands that if Israel did annex the West Bank and/or Gaza and give Palestinians equal rights, as it did in Jerusalem or the Golan Heights that would not be viewed as an acceptable solution. The reason I raise this is because criticism is levelled at Israel for not doing that. The Palestinians would not consider this to resolve the conflict and neither would anyone else, they say exactly what you're saying here. I'm not saying the reason Israel isn't doing it is international law but surely the lack of acceptance from anyone to this solution is part of that thought process (and also the question of maintaining Jewish majority in Israel).
Palestinians did get some control, they got total control of Gaza in 2005, partial control earlier of Gaza and the West Bank as part of the Oslo accords.
I also want to be clear that I'm opposed to Israeli settlement in the west bank. I don't think that's helpful. I also don't think it's the real problem here. The legal status of the west bank in Israeli law is still occupied territory, there hasn't been any formal annexation.
One thing I can say as to the annexation/reunification of Jerusalem is that Israel is doing a much better job than Jordan did in maintaining and protecting the rights of all religions to have access to their holy sites. When Jerusalem was under Jordanian control Jews could not access it at all and I think Christians also less than today. So I think Israel is a reasonable guardian of this place and all its citizens and visitors are treated fairly. The final status of Jerusalem would presumably be something agreed to as part of the (maybe never) peace agreement. I think between leaving it "occupied" and the current status the current status is/was the better option for everyone.
There are voices by the way in the right wing of Israel calling for annexation and granting of citizenship.
I don't think Israel is "flaunting" international law more so than most of the rest of the world. It just happens to be in an unsolvable mess of a situation. Israel and Israelis really wanted this resolved in the peace process of the early 90's and were willing to go a long way towards what Palestinians were asking for, but didn't really meet a partner. So to blame this solely on Israel, which is admittedly to some degree in a position of power, but is also very vulnerable, is not fair. I would say at least half the blame is on the Palestinians.
All most people know is the spin they've gotten from the media and politicians. Both tend to be very pro Israel in the US. That's changed a little recently, but not much.
Israelis are just doing what their version of Judaism is telling them to do, it's the neocon Zionists in the US that finance it that are the real danger. It isn't just that they don't care about Palestinian lives, they don't care about Israeli lives, either. They care about Israeli contracts.
It's bipartisan enough that I don't believe the parties will be able to come to an agreement to enact any meaningful change. This goes beyond the Republican vs. Democrat issues so it's much more difficult to make this a partisan issue to rally mass support from either party.
Americans’ views of the Israeli people are broadly positive [1].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/05/30/how-ameri... 64%
"The survey puts numbers on trends that have become increasingly apparent: Cable news viewers are more supportive of Israel’s war effort, less likely to think Israel is committing war crimes, and less interested in the war in general. People who get their news primarily from social media, YouTube, or podcasts, by contrast, generally side with the Palestinians, believe Israel is committing war crimes and genocide, and consider the issue of significant importance.
WE OFTEN HEAR people say that “Twitter isn’t real life” or that “Nobody watches cable news,” but the survey asked where people get most of their news, asking them to pick just one, and cable and social media won out. Most Americans do in fact get their news either primarily from cable (42 percent) or social media like TikTok, Instagram, or another platform (18 percent). A third of people said they get their news from YouTube or podcasts, with 13 percent saying they got most of their news that way.
Asked generally where folks got their news on a day-to-day basis, with a “check all that apply” option, it’s even more clear how dominant cable (55 percent), social media (38 percent), and podcasts/YouTube (34) are compared to print, at 21 percent. (I read the survey as using “print” as a stand-in for any text-based media, whether digital like The Intercept or on actual printed paper.) "
Even the polls you referenced show how stark the contrast between young and old americans are on this topic. Some of the older americans barely have any education on this topic but just stick with the zionist propaganda they were fed when they were younger, they couldn't even locate Israel/Palestine on a map.
Most of the older christian zealots don't have the critical thinking skills or capacity to change their mind on the topic because their indoctrination is so thorough that they'd rather deny reality than face the facts. Not surprising considering they grew up on a mantra that the so called "chosen" people can do no wrong.
I think if those christians who voted favorably had seen how israelis spit[3] on christians and assault[4][5] christians, their opinions would change swiftly, but the news channels they consume won't feed them this reality because consent needs to be manufactured.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[1] https://theintercept.com/2024/04/30/gaza-israel-palestine-ca...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJNfKTO7XK8
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBdF3qyO2zU
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq28ZFNzaWM
Everyone has a snippy argument for why opioid opinion is wrong. I’m not saying, in this case, that the majority is correct. (Nor the inverse.) Just that it is the reason Israel enjoys such support here.
(Would also note that both sides fervently believe the media is conspiring against them.)
So why did you not give your argument? I've at least put in the work to provide evidence & arguments for my thesis, you on the other hand are just saying handwavy stuff.
>I’m not saying, in this case, that the majority is correct. (Nor the inverse.) Just that it is the reason Israel enjoys such support here.
Yes and I've explained how that is largely a product of manufactured consent and there is plenty of evidence for that. I've only provided a fraction of the available evidence here supporting that thesis.
>(Would also note that both sides fervently believe the media is conspiring against them.)
That's just completely asinine framing, at least critique the article, the argument or the data instead of making my position out to be something conspiratorial
Allies influencing other allies is part of the process. Don't just think that it is Israel doing it in America. America is also doing similar actions in other countries where they want to win favour.
Yes? This happens periodically when someone is caught doing something outside of normal diplomatic duties.
Jordan seems to be a much stronger friend to us in the region.
as i think of it, it's strange that the US supposedly has a separation of religion from state, in the constitution+amendments, yet funds an external country based on a religion. i wonder what fraction of donations to Israel come back as lobbyists paying politicians to fund the next round of donations. there must be datasets recorded somewhere, but i have no idea where to look.
In the Middle East. Which is sort of true. (Cairo, Riyadh and Doha aren’t as reliable.)
Our traditional greatest ally is the U.K.
France is our oldest ally. But it (and Poland) are weaker and have been less reliably at our side than Britain has been.
Spying and keeping tabs on your friends is one thing. Influence campaigns among close allies are generally not the way it works.
Do you know of any? Can you cite them?
*Historical examples of other forms of US meddling/interference is not being ignored, and paves the way to why I would not say not being done.
When a newspaper brought it up he went through the steps to formally renounce Canadian citizenship, which became official in May 2014.
Not a fan of Cruz, but this is sufficient for me. More problematic would be those nations that don't accept or don't allow them to renounce citizenship.
>On the day of arrival in Israel, or occasionally at a later date, a person who enters Israel under the Law of Return as an oleh would receive a certificate confirming their oleh status.
On the very day they step off the boat or plane. This isn't the case of "anyone who comes to the US and waits 10+ years might finally get to become a citizen". Seems pretty fucking automatic.
The Wikipedia summary is oversimplified, it's very easy but you do have to affirmatively express an interest and fill out an application (https://www.gov.il/en/service/declaration_of_intent_to_recei...). They don't literally hand it to you when you get off the plane, and even if they did you still can't point to any Jewish person and declare that they must be a citizen of Israel. Most Jewish people have never even been to Israel.
Maybe you're arguing that since it's so easy, all Jewish people in Congress are effectively dual Israeli citizens even if they never actually apply for citizenship. In that case, you'll also be shocked to learn that every single person in Congress is a dual citizen of Dominica, which can be obtained without ever setting foot in the country by just paying $100,000 (https://www.cbiu.gov.dm/dominica-citizenship/). Everyone in Congress can afford that, so we might as well say they've already done it.
In: blame FB comments for congress funding Israel
Is it really that hard to imagine congress supporting the democratic country with one of the biggest pride parades in the world vs the country that hasn’t had elections in 18 years and is split between 2 leaders who disagree on pretty much everything?
Do you mean NYC Pride or Sao Paolo Gay Pride Parade?
On a more serious note, I figured the majority of US lawmakers already supported the genocide. I'm surprised Israel feels the need to use propaganda for this