cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/63691775
Posted this in Fediverse Memes but got deleted for some reason, can't imagine why.
Flippant Anarchism. A lighter take on social criticism with the aim of agitation.
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Context is important here, in my opinion. It is one thing to claim that Judaism is worse than other religions in this regard (which it is not, as evangelicals or ISIS prove, for example), and quite another to accuse religions in general of a tendency toward apartheid. The problem is not Judaism, but Israel's political ideology. It would make no difference if the Israelis were Sikh, Shinto, or Zoroastrian. Furthermore, most Jews do not live in Israel, but in the US.
“Death to Israel” is ambiguous. It can be read, for example, as “Death towards Israel” and, of course, as “Death to the Israelis” or, as you mean it, as “Death to the state of Israel.” The fact that you have to explain what exactly is meant illustrates this very clearly. And I think that the slogan is deliberately ambiguous. It is intended to provoke and reliably achieves its goal through this ambiguity. It would be easy to resolve the contradiction by adding “state of.” And if one is really concerned with objectivity and not emotions, one could also omit the word ‘death’ and just say “Dissolve Israel.” No ambiguity but delivers the message you want. Doesn't sound as impressive and martial tho.
It is simply exaggerated and intellectually lazy to accuse Feddit.org of Zionism, where any criticism of Israel would be suppressed. Recently, there was a discussion on feddit about giving the Israelis a piece of Bavaria and returning Israel to the Palestinians. It was not banned or moderated away.
American nationalists have their “God's own country,” and radical Christians interpret the Bible in exactly the same way as nationalist from Israel interpret the Torah. I don't think I need to quote you any relevant passages from the Bible. ISIS, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Iranian theocracy do the same thing with Islam. Indian nationalists do the same with Hinduism. The problem here is political ideology, not religion per se. If you think that Jews are evil because of their religious background, then you are indeed crossing the line into antisemitism, and we will not agree. If you criticize Israel's political ideology, Zionism, that's completely different and legitimate. But just like religious nationalism in the US, Iran, or India, it has nothing to do with the respective religion. It only serves to legitimize it. To disregard this is either stupidity or malice.
It's not a good sign for a political slogan if you have to read the fine print to get the right interpretation. You're also overestimating how many people are actually confronted with something like this. That's why very few people will have heard about the clarification of this slogan. This in turn leads to provocations, overly emotional debates, misunderstandings, and insults. I can understand why the mods delete such content tbh.
what are you talking about? I am not enforcing shit. I have no power anywhere. I just want to explain why it's ridiculous to accuse people of Zionism because they have a problem with this phrase. Why do you demand the benefit of the doubt for yourself, but are not willing to grant it to others?
If you think that the only way to speak out against a current active genocidal state is to write “Death to Israel,” then that's not just pathetic, it's childish.
I don't think it helps to keep explaining to you that it is perfectly possible to speak out against the genocide of Israel on feddit.org, that this is even the majority opinion there. This is just one of those shitty left-wing purity contests that exist on other issues as well, which have been weakening the left for decades.
Do you read the fine print for "Deutschland verrecke" or "Death to America" as well, or does that only apply when it comes to Israel?
We're on Lemmy, which means unless you limit yourself to just the local feddit.org feed (and I know for a fact that the typical zionists on feddit don't), you get confronted with this on a fairly regular basis. And you wouldn't need any clarification if you knew how to fucking read. Israel ≠ Israelis, it's literally that simple.
I can't. We're on a federated platform with an international community, which made it clear countless times that "Death to Israel" does not refer to killing all the Israelis/Jews in the world, often even explicitly speaking out against this. Considering that most Feddit users are proficient in English, especially admins/mods and those I've seen to misinterpret this slogan, I refuse to believe that they don't know this by now. And somehow this (along with the absolute clusterfuck of Anti-Germans) is almost an exclusively German issue, because the rest of the international Left understands just fine what this slogan means.
Nobody claims that this is the only way, but considering that the existence of Israel as its own state to this day prevents and more than likely will continue to prevent peaceful coexistence, it's a justified one. Is it pathetic and childish? Maybe, but much less so than misinterpreting it to fit your narrative.
Tell me: when Islamists in Iran, Afghanistan, or Iraq chant “Death to America,” do they simply mean the dissolution of the United States? Of course not. They mean the death of everything American, including American people. At least, that's how I've always interpreted it. If you think that it's really just an anarchist critique of US statehood, I would find that remarkable. “Deutschland verrecke”, on the other hand, is a phrase used almost exclusively by Germans. Context matters, as I wrote above.
I don't. And I'm in a lot of English subs.
Even if that were true, which I doubt, there is still the possibility that some people will not accept your interpretation, but one of the others. The sentence could, for example, come straight from the neo-Nazi scene. And since you don't know who is behind a post on the internet, ambiguities lead to problems. Especially when one of the interpretations calls for the death of people.
However, Feddit.org is not a left-wing, but rather a general instance like lemmy.world. I am also relatively certain that the sentence would be moderated away on lemmy.world as well.
Yes, your previous poster claims that deleting and prohibiting such posts is “policing anti-apartheid ethnostate press against a current active genocidal state.” This ignores the fact that objective, unambiguous and clear criticism is perfectly acceptable and, in my experience, even represents the majority opinion (which says a lot on a general instance). To conclude from the rejection of “Death to Israel” that Zionism is supported here is not only logically incorrect. It is intellectually lazy, exaggerated, malicious, and, yes, childish.
Calm down and don't accuse me of things I haven't said dummy. Of course Israel is committing genocide and of course the USA is a criminal country. Where did I give the impression that this wasn't the case?
And no, Islamists want people dead, including innocent civilians, as evidenced by their actions. I was just trying to express this in a less confrontational way for small-minded people like you. Even if one considers attacks on innocent civilians in Israel, the USA or Europe to be justified, which is disgusting enough, Islamists also kill innocent people in the Middle East. Be it in Rojava, as was the case a few weeks ago, or anywhere else. How pathetic can you be to side with these people because of your justified rejection of Israel or the USA?
The fact that you call me a racist also shows me that you still cannot distinguish between religion, origin and ideology. So kindly shut the fuck up.
Once again, you are accusing me of something I neither said nor intended.
So why all this stupid hostility? Then you agree with me that when Islamists say “Death to America,” they don't just mean the American state. My argument all along is that the phrase “Death to X” is ambiguous, is used ambiguously, and prompts different people to take different actions. To be honest, I don't know what there is to discuss. Even here in this thread, you see people who agree with the “death to US Americans” interpretation rather than "Dissolve the US". The same applies to “Death to Israel.” Hamas, for example, also does not follow the interpretation that you would like to consider the only sensible one when it kills innocent civilians in Israel. If that's not literal, then I don't know what is. I provide empirical evidence that suggests a literal interpretation, while you simply post links that demonstrate that there are other interpretations as well. Which precisely underscores my argument of ambiguity. Do you just want to burn straw men here?
“Death to Israel” will always be ambiguous. It is a slogan intended to provoke. At least when it is used by Muricans (or other westeners). And then tears about the evil and intentionally wrong interpretations of the other side are shed when the provocation succeeds, which was the plan from the outset. It's the same tactic you hear from Karoline Leavitt every other day. Here in Sauerkrautland, the fascists are doing the same thing, of course. But it's a pathetic tactic for leftists. That's why you mostly hear it from internet edglords or armchair revolutionaries.
Are they? Or are you just bringing the same brain dead energy as US centrist libs who like to claim that anti fascists are the same as fascists somehow? The one thing most Germans can agree on is that Israel "has done bad things" but that the Palestinians are "terrorist scum" who deserve whatever punishment Israel dishes out. That's your Zionist mindset in a nutshell.
Did you ban him for that? Seems like overreacting. It was an interesting debate.
No I didn't.
You are the one assuming phrases calling for the death of a nation state are a literal call to genocide everyone inside that nation state. That's the worst possible bad faith interpretation of that phrasing one could make. Yes it's one possible meaning, among many others. Yet despite everyone here telling you your interpretation is bad faith and that's not what we mean by it, here you are insisting your interpretation is the only possible correct one. I don't know if the German language is just very literal about such things, but that's simply not how English works. Essentially what you and Feddit.org and Germany itself has done, is to mischaracterise that phrase by redefining it according to your own biases, and then banning the phrase on the basis of your own definition. That's what is lazy and malicious and childish.
@AntiBullyRanger@ani.social @Flatworm7591@lemmy.dbzer0.com
You said that the possibility of an interpretation of "Death to X" other than yours would be bad faith. But here you can see that this is not the case. Yes, I know this guy is just a sad edgelord. But because everyone knows that this interpretation above also exists, everyone also knows that it is ambiguous. It's meant to be. Pointing this out is not bad faith, but simply describes why the sentence is also rejected by many on the left.
You made that comment with your interpretation, and someone agreed with that sentence on its own. How the fuck does this prove that "Death to X" can be interpreted as killing all people of X?
Islamists may be fine with some civilian casualties, but I have no reason to believe that this is their main goal. Even the actual large scale attacks against the US so far (11-9) were directed towards the nation and its economy (WTC, pentagon, capitol) and not some random civilian hotspot. Then again, this wasn't simply a religiously motivated attack and not every Islamist is the same, some may be more extreme than others, but to me the past events and expressions that I know of have not shown a clear intent to kill all Americans. I don't think it's really an anarchist critique, just a critique against the countless atrocities committed by the American governments and a call for systematic change, as in "Tear America down, then rebuild it into something that can't just meddle in other countries politics and kill our people as it pleases".
The fact that "Deutschland verrecke" is coming from Germans doesn't change anything about the situation, because ironically this one is sometimes accompanied by a "Bomber Harris, do it again!", which actually is a call for killing civilians, coming from Germans themselves. But without the second slogan, I also wouldn't think that this is a call for killing all Germans, no matter if it's Germans or anyone else saying it.
Have you blocked some instances or communities? Because I know for a fact that discussions around this are a somewhat regular occurrence, even with the instances feddit.org is federated with, because I was able to see them as well when I was there. It may not discussed as much anymore as it was up to a year ago, but still occasionally flares up, IIRC it also came up again in the db0 thread about the vote for defederating feddit, but I may be wrong here.
Unlikely. Neo-nazis may be against Jews, but they're generally very pro-Israel. Which is only logical, because ethno-nationalism is kinda their thing, and "better have the Jews over there than here with us". Just take a look at right-wing and literal Nazi Twitter accounts and take a shot every time you see an Israel flag in their name or bio. You'll probably pass out drunk in just 5-10 minutes.
It still has an overwhelmingly left-leaning user base but yeah, fair point. And lemmy.world is the pinnacle of liberal garbage, so wouldn't surprise me. Still, there are a lot of instances that are general-purpose or focused on other non-political topics without misunderstanding this slogan.
They're not wrong. Of course there are more objective ways to go about this, but that doesn't change the fact that moderating such posts is useless policing (hint: "policing" doesn't mean "not allowing one side to post at all") against a side objecting to genocide and the existence of settler-colonial ethnostates. And if you're so sure that it's not a zionist instance, you could try voicing the opinion on Feddit that Israel shouldn't and doesn't have the unquestionable right to exist. I'm very curious if this more neutral way of saying it with no ambiguity about the killing of civilians will get removed. If it will be, which I'm almost certain about, it's a zionist instance. But I'm open to be proven wrong.
And sorry for slightly leaving the discussion at hand here, but with a societal, online and media landscape that has basically no issue with supporting Israel and the IDF or even being in favor of supplying (more) weapons to Israel, which has the known implication of more bloodshed in the real world, happening right now where thousands of innocent civilians, many of them children, are dying every month, we're seriously making a fuzz about a slogan that simply calls for the dissolution of a state at best, and is ambiguous to the political illiterates at worst? This is insane, and I mean this in the literal way.