This is really worth emphasizing against the caricature that leftists support absolutely any party which could be construed as a counterhegemonic force.
The many differences between Hamas and ISIS really couldn't be clearer if you actually examine both groups. One problem is that the term 'terrorist', at least as commonly used, serves to conflate/equate them.
It's one of the limits of mainstream 'progressive' politics in imperial countries that support Israel.
In some ways I think the whole 'war on terror', despite the fact that the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly widely regarded as failures and crimes even in imperial countries, has been like a red scare against all kinds of guerilla/resistance fighters across the world (but especially Muslims).
The labels 'terrorist' and 'terrorism' have become tools for short-circuiting thought and discussion, and that's very deeply engrained. The Israeli media strategy surrounding Operation Al-Aqsa Flood understands this well, and takes full advantage of the fact that mainstream journalists in the imperial core will never call Israel a terrorist state or the IDF a terrorist organization despite the fact that for many decades now, for multiple entire generations, their primary 'opponents' have been not the armies of other nations but civilian populations (sometimes in neighboring countries, like Lebanon, and sometimes in land that Israel claims for itself, like Gaza and the West Bank).
The goal is to paint 'Hamas' (really the al-Qassam brigades, and practically speaking the whole armed resistance) as brutes with a monomaniacal obsession with their own brutality. That's what the equation to ISIS is trying to effect. And it has succeeded pretty well, imo. Liberals aren't condemning Hamas as an explicit scheme but because they feel like doing so is totally obligatory, even for those opposed to the horrors that we see now unfolding.
That's all speaking, of course of ordinary liberals. Liberal propaganda functionaries on TV, and elected officials are certainly sometimes more cynical or self-serving, more actively invested in the false equivalency. But whether they're speaking sincerely or cynically, when liberals condemn 'both sides' in Palestine, the 'terrorist' label is doing its job.
Yes! 😂
Apparently, by a series of accidents, she got into some kind of slapfight with Ben Shapiro over Palestine, and she did an 1.25 hour interview with Norman Finkelstein for The Wire as part of it.
It's actually not a bad interview; she pretty much just lets him talk.
This is the closest thing the world needs to a Shapiro-Finkelstein debate imo. Exposes Finkelstein's knowledge to that audience (for whatever good it will or won't do), without subjecting him to interruption and bad faith maneuvering by Shapiro.
(Obviously, Candace Owen still sucks. Broken clock moment, blah blah blah)
Reaction videos are the lowest form of content imo. Far lazier and far less interesting than speedrunning, coding streams, reading/discussion streams, etc. (Not that I find Twitch streams generally compelling, either.)
And payments to streamers aren't donations in the sense of charity and don't claim to be. They're tips paid to entertainers, like money tossed into the hat of a street musician. It's a different model than wage work but it's not like a scam or a trick or something.
Using those tips to employ the wage labor of others (e.g., video editors) is exploitation, though.
I'm pretty sure that's Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, who wrote a really powerful and informative history of the IDF, starting with the paramilitary organizations that preceded it. (I strongly recommend it even if you don't normally have much interest in military history or military-oriented histories!)
He has a couple of YouTube channels (old, new), though only the newer one seems active. He has a lot of good interviews and lectures available in English on them, often together with other dissident Israeli Jews, like Shlomo Sand and Avi Shlaim.
Incidentally, I believe he is a Marxist, too. In his book, he talks about being active in Matzpen, a defunct revolutionary socialist (and anti-Zionist) organization when he still lived in Israel.
Anyway, yes: extremely based.
Wow. The police apparently let the protesters in one by one, 'checking' them (I assume IDs as well as signage).
Local Call‘s report about the demonstration was titled “At an anti-war demonstration, the police forbade the waving of anti-war signs.” They went on to report what banners were refused by the police: “Massacre does not justify massacre,” “Political solution,” “Bibi should be imprisoned,” “No to Apartheid,” “Food instead of bombs,” and “Return the captives, stop the revenge.”
'Freelance, but not independent' is a strange construction!
Corroborating/comparing translations of political speech seems like a good idea in general though.
I really appreciate your prolific effortposting here, btw.
Totally agreed. And I still think the best reason not to debate someone like Shapiro is that his whole style is fundamentally dishonest and unfair.
On the one hand, Shapiro is definitely more widely known than Finkelstein, because his grift is very general. Shapiro's a well-funded, all-purpose, professional right wing hack. For people who have heard of him and maybe seen some of his content but have never heard of Norman Finkelstein or Ali Abunimah or Nur Masalha and so on, some kind of engagement with the latter is a very good thing.
On the other, a debate with Shapiro is a trap, because his style of debating means that so much of who 'wins' (who comes across most persuasively) will be determined by who has the rhetorical skills (and a moderator with the right skills) to answer Shapiro's bluster much more than just who is telling the truth. And at the same time, as you've emphasized, Shapiro's core audience is not a very productive choice of audience when it comes to persuasion. So there's a question of how much of the audience Shapiro's name could 'bring in' would even be open to really learning something new.
Personally, I don't think a Shapiro-Finkelstein debate would be a disaster for the cause, though I'm not sure it would be of any value, either. That's why, imo, when it comes to dealing with Shapiro, it's much better to have standalone counter-messaging, whether that's a direct debunking or mostly just elaborating an alternative point of view: in that format Shapiro can't just talk over people and make a scene to drown out the substance of the opposing arguments.
So I basically agree with this whole take, including this part
You aren't going to pursue any of his chud followers. If they unironically watch Shabibo regularly and actually take him seriously then they are so brainstormed they are without hope.
But last night, I had a loooooong conversation about Palestine with a friend who is not super political which started with him asking what I thought of a 40 minute video of Ben Shapiro talking about the history of 'the Israeli-Palestinian conflict'. He said it just 'came up', so he listened to the whole thing while he was working on some chores the other day. He knew I had been spending lot of time thinking, studying, and talking about it, even though I had tried pretty hard not to push him into talking about it too much because he hadn't previously showed that much interest. (We had previously briefly talked about all this stuff when he sent me an excellent, short explainer from BreakThrough News about the racism of Israeli society that he'd stumbled upon online.) I agreed to give it a watch even though, y'know, yuck.
We ended up talking for hours, almost entirely about the history of Palestine, the Zionist project, and Palestinian resistance in general, as well as the Oct 7 attack and the Israeli retaliation. I tried to be direct about the parts of the history that I do and don't know well at this point, and gave him a couple examples of things that stood out to me as big/obvious problems with the historical narrative Ben Shapiro presented in his video. My friend asked a ton of good questions and showed a real readiness to question all 'sides' without letting that critical outlook reduce to an assessment that both sides are equal or that the issue is just too 'complex' to assess.
All of that is to say that while I don't know that Ben Shapiro can be a worthwhile debate opponent given his bad faith, hucksterism, and strategies of talking fast and talking over, there certainly are people exposed to his crap whose interest in this whole situation is increased by that exposure, and who, yet, don't fully buy in and are absolutely ready to receive other perspectives and develop a more truthful picture of the situation.
Shapiro has pretty wide exposure well beyond his chud following. For that reason, I'm glad that experts like Norm, Rashid Khalidi, Ilan Pappé, and others are out there producing free video content online addressing the same subject as Shapiro here. I think my friend might watch Finkelstein's video on the same topic and of about the same length next, but I'm not sure he even would have gotten worked up enough about the details of the history to do so if he hadn't first stumbled upon Shapiro's video and thought 'I don't know the facts here, but this doesn't pass the smell test.'
He said no to a permanent cease fire against Hamas.
Yes. The criticism is precisely that Bernie won't call for an enduring ceasefire. This is not a gotcha.
Hamas killed a bunch of Israeli civilians and expects no consequences, come on.
Hamas is not a naughty child and raining bombs on entire neighborhoods, killing over 10,000 civilians and counting, is not a spanking. What the fuck?
I feel like the current Hamas charter, from 2017 makes it clear that their aims have changed, as do some statements in around 2005/2006 IIRC. Idk about them addressing 'allegations' per se.