Meanwhile on the International front....

Gotcha.

 

Without diving into the details, I'd say the situation was a little bit different when he made that deal the last time. There weren't 1,400 Israeli corpses barely in the ground, or an active shooting war going on, for example.

 

Of course not.

But it's worth remembering this war has been on 'repeat' for decades, and very little we think unimaginable hasn't already happened.

 

Mobs banging on the barricaded doors of libraries sheltering Jewish kids in these here United States while "nice" people look the other way because "context" is a new one for me. Maybe it's happened in the past, but I'll be damned if I thought it'd happen again.

 

That's certainly the biggest change here, at least for folks of our vintage.

And I really can't account for it.

But American antisemitism seems like a steady-state prejudice to me, always present, like background radiation.

It's very hard to understand these new streams of anger and hatred, however, especially on the left and among the young. Even accounting for a lot of propaganda being pushed into social media streams on both sides of the wire right now it's hard to explain.

Blame some of it on Fanon, I suppose, and the last 30 years of close-reading graduate school anti-colonial scholarship and the notions of apartheid we mentioned upthread.

If you were born in 2000, maybe Israel seems like the bully rather than the bullied.

That might be the biggest change among the young and historically ignorant.

 

contra / thread

 

Wonder how his classroom discussion would have gone had the topic been "Palestine and its Discontents in the 20th and 21st Centuries"?

 

It wasn't made under these circumstances.

 

Not sure I qualify as nice people, I'm not ignoring it so much as I'm just not surprised by it. There is a combination of bigotry against Jewish people and the potential idiocy of college students, two things that I knew about before such disgraceful displays.

I wonder if there is also an element of people thinking there aren't consequences for such behavior, so they are more likely to act out.

 

This is exactly what it is.

This is why, in theory, broken windows policing is great. There are consequences for stupid shit. Of course cops can’t do their jobs without being racist assholes, so they ruin it for everyone.