I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. My first blog post was a movie review, obviously not a high moral priority. Does this make me a monster? Only a crazy person would think this. You recently wrote a post objecting to "much of gay rights" since you find homosexuality disgusting. Your normative views aside, this surely cannot reasonably be a high moral priority. Why aren't you writing about the 6 million people who've died in the eastern Congo war? Why aren't you writing about what China's doing in Xianjiang? According to your logic, you probably hate Uyghurs and Banyamulenge because you're more concerned about getting rid of Pride parades than advocating for their safety.
I think there's a time and place for judicious whataboutism, to encourage people to apply their moral critiques impartially and fairly. In fact, I've defended this view on my blog. But Israel defenders are serial abusers of whataboutism. They ignore the obvious reasons we should pick on Israel, which Kai S-S and I explained in response to your comment on my essay regarding Israel (1). You failed to adequately respond to these reasons.
The primary reason is that Israel receives $3.8B a year from the US (and received over $17.9B in 2023-24), whereas Azerbaijan receives a tiny fraction of that (2). Between 2002 and 2020, the US gave Baku $164M—less than one percent the amount that Israel received in one year (3). Obviously, this gives me good reason to pick on Israel in particular.
Israel has a massive lobby defending it and all its heinous crimes in the West (4). I'm trying to give voice to the other side. Also, if you read my post, you'll note that I'm not merely objecting to Israel's campaign of ethnic cleansing but also its mass killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Azerbaijan has not killed tens of thousands of Armenians (5, 6).
While we're playing the game of assuming malign intentions, I might note that you originally cited the "ethnic cleansing of the Boers" in your comment on my original post to prove my oikophobia. But as Kai S-S pointed out, *no such thing exists.* Perhaps it is you who are arguing in bad faith. And perhaps you hate the Boers too, given that you’ve never written a full blog post condemning their fake ethnic cleansing.
Your entire article about Israel being full of fascists, ruled by fascists, etc, etc, displays no understanding of political dynamics in the Middle East. Israeli politicians issuing threats they never carried out is a pretty low standard for disparaging an entire country.
I can’t imagine what you think of Palestinian society, by multiple degrees more “fascist” than Israel, or are they absolved of blame?
In what alternative universe do you live? Israel is currently blocking all humanitarian aid to Gaza—they’re carrying out their policies. And obviously Hamas is not absolved of blame; I never said that. I’ve written extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including on the specific issue of blame, so you should check out my past articles.
Also do you really deny that Israel is ruled by fascists when there’s an actual self-identifying fascist in Bibi’s cabinet? Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein warned in 1948 that the Israeli right was fascist, and that was before they were carpet bombing hospitals and schools.
Again, naïve about the political dynamics. The amount of aid that entered Gaza prior to this little PR episode of “blocking aid”, was of such a quantity that the only reason any Palestinian would go hungry is due to Palestinian clans and Hamas hoarding supplies. Which they do for both profit reasons, and to facilitate media pieces about “shortages” and “imminent famine”. Again, the pathology of Palestinian society is worth exploring, something you instinctively conflate with Hamas!
Within Israel, any politician calling himself a “fascist homophobe” is part of hysterical internal discourse. I promise you, Bezalel Smotrich has never read about fascism, does not understand the word, and is reacting to a section of the media elite who believe being a religious Jew is a fascist act.
The Zionist establishment was calling the right “fascist,” no need to invoke Arendt or Einstein.
Ever notice that commentators are always careful to say "the CCP" instead of China or the Chinese, whereas they speak of "the Russians" instead of the siloviki or United Russia Party?
I think a lot of that has more to do with the fact that the Russia commentators are from the region and harbor ethnic resentments against them. They actually hate Russians. The China commentators are almost exclusively white, and can have a more dispassionate view of the country and can separate the government from the average person.
I think so many default to 'oikophobia' because they assume that whatever the stance of a Western government is, it must be the dominant, popular stance, and because dominant, popular things (country music, football, mayonnaise, Coors Light) are the kind of things that some uncool 'hick' in flyer country likes - then they should be the opposite.
It's why Pitchfork used to spend thousands of words on obscure noise bands from NYC who have never played to even 100 people, or why we had those breathless 'here's why Super Mario Brothers is actually racist and homophobic' pop-wokeism articles 10 years ago. It's why Wes Anderson was celebrated by mustachioed turds in Brooklyn as some sort of artistic genius. It's foreign policy via hipsterdom. It's stupid and vapid and anti-intellectual for the sort of crowd who can only regurgitate a New Yorker article's opinion on something instead of developing their own, where the measure of a man is his collection of 'anti-establishment' takes that are about as deep as a bumper-sticker.
Agreed, although I don't think it's exactly anti -normie, it's anti-middle American. Country music isn't the most popular genre, it's less popular than hip hop/rap and pop.
Yes - those genres are associated with blacks, and are therefore ok to like as a 'hip' white person. I think "whiteness" as used by Lefties really boils down to another euphemism for middle-America or being 'conventional' which is apparently a fate worse than death.
It's why you have straight women telling pollsters they're 'bi' or thousands 'self-diagnosing' themselves as having ADHD or being autistic, on and on. I was never convinced it has as much to do with 'power' or 'victim-status' - I think the allure is far dumber than that. It's simply - look how unique I am! Uniqueness is a given by dint of DNA, though. I spent my twenties thinking the things I wore, listened to, read, or ate or drank defined who I was and now in my 40s I understand how sad and insecure that was. I think it was that plus the internet, we're all just little usernames and icons to each other; you and I will likely never have a discussion about the nature of reality or something over the rest of a bottle of Maker's Mark at 2am. Every little identity is a little pinned-on hashtag we can use as shorthand to describe and identify ourselves online, since its common to only interact with someone once or twice online. That desire for both a display of uniqueness and a short-hand of self-expression has metasized into the real world, and it's not just the Left but the Right too - 'raw egg nationalists' and 'tradwives' and other short-hand takes the place of having to project your unique self, but also set you apart as 'not-another-normie' regardless of how much or how little those labels describe your IRL actions or decisions.
Heck, I think it's why "being woke" is/was such a thing - it was an inversion of common sense and folk wisdom ("let me tell you why colorblindness is actually racist!"). Every time I read something 'woke' all I can think is - yes, I get it. You'd be miserable living in Iowa.
I’m a Whataboutist because Whataboutism is just a synonym for rational thinking. Whenever you make a choice, you should ask "what about the alternatives"?
There's a reason whataboutism is generally considered a bad argument, it is rarely a substantive critique (as you've proven quite well). Considering the implications of any policy and weighing the consequences is a natural part of any serious discussion, and thankfully many critics of the Israeli government (including opposition parties in the Knesset) do this when talking about the war in Gaza.
The type of whataboutism you engage in is lazy obfuscation built on sand. A shallow, unproductive finger pointing to issues that serves only as a cynical attempt to displace meaningful discourse and replace it with a game of "name a different ethnic cleansing".
There are many issues that require deep conversations, and no one person can or should engage in all of them. Theo is one of many participating in the important discussion challenging the status quo of US foreign policy in the middle east. I think discussion of the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabalh, or the risks of land appropriation called for by the EFF in South Africa are equally important. I would love to hear you explore those topics in depth. Theo talking about Israel in no way detracts from those conversations, I think your whataboutism on the other hand, hurts our ability to discuss them all.
The specific kind of Whataboutism I mentioned in this article was "what about Palestinian atrocities?". When two sides are fighting and one side has committed atrocities, you ought to find out whether the other side of the conflict has committed atrocities as well.
I've written extensively on Israel and Palestine, and my writing has addressed atrocities committed by both Palestinians and Israelis. I once even debated a New York Times columnist on a podcast about Israel and Hamas. You should do a modicum of research before you go around slandering people as "morally deranged."
Respectfully, this is incredibly lazy writing; you are missing the point of Theo's article. Besides that, the logic you are pushing is faulty. The counterfactual world, where Israel is not committing atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, is not a world where Hamas is committing similar atrocities. Similarly, the counterfactual world where Theo doesn't write about Israel is not one where he writes about Africa or Central Asia. Echoing Theo's rationale, it's easier to criticize a culture you are part of--there is more legitimacy to the critique and less ability to be cancelled or otherwise ostracized. Finally, the idea that oikophobia leads to concrete harms is dubious. You support this claim by referencing how decolonization harmed Africa. This is a) speculative, b) fact blind, c) supported with no reference to data or any hard sources. Please improve!
The counterfactual world where Israel is not committing atrocities in Gaza most likely is a world where Hamas is committing similar or worse atrocities. The world in which Israel isn't bombing Gaza is the world where Hamas carries out October 7th attacks.
Re Decolonization: You just don't know any of the relevant facts on this. This blog is too advanced for you and you should not be commenting on it. If you want to learn you can start by reading Liberia, a Country Study https://www.amazon.com/Liberia-Country-Study-Pam-550-38/dp/9995272334
Also look in to the history of Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe, Idi Amin in Uganda, and the present state of South Africa.
Israel has the most powerful military in the Middle East. It could very easily repel future attacks by Hamas by merely stationing more troops on the Gaza border, but the IDF is too busy repressing Palestinians in the West Bank. And the IDF received Hamas's Oct 7 battle plans a year before the attack, (1)!
If you haven’t noticed yet, the reason Hamas and other forms of violent Palestinian opposition to Israel exists is because of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Once Israel stops with the heinous occupation and ethnic cleansing, it removes most of the underlying reason for Palestinian political violence. The causal relationship becomes quite clear when you look at the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and when violence increases and subsides in relation to the peace process, (2).
Surely there’s a world in which Israel refrains from genocide and Hamas does not attack Israel again. The idea that Israel is being forced to kill tens of thousands of civilians and bomb every goddamn school and bakery is sick and wrong. This is the same ignorant bunk as the view that the Palestinians brought their own ethnic cleansing upon themselves.
And WTF is this obscure book on Liberia that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page? You’re the one pushing an insane revisionist narrative of history in which the Europeans came to civilize the barbarous natives. You would need to provide an astonishing amount of evidence of a grand conspiracy by historians to hide the truth to prove your view, given that basically all prominent historians disagree with you. And I see no reason to trust anything you write about Africa since you’ve already proved yourself a liar vis-à-vis the Boers.
How could the colonization of Africa have been a civilizing mission when it involved murdering so many Africans? Think of Von Trotha’s order for German troops to exterminate the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa. Think of Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo: 10 million killed, children held hostage from their parents to force them to work harder, colonies of kidnapped Congolese children worked to death, people’s hands and feet amputated for not meeting quota. Any historically literate person knows that the savages in colonial Africa were not the Africans.
One wonders whether your reactionary drivel really is inspired by historical ignorance and a failure to grasp basic argument. But there's a more parsimonious explanation for someone so eager to justify atrocities against darker-skinned people.
It is not the case that nearly all historians disagree with me. You only see your perspective in the popular press (like the New York Times) but in academic journals, many people do argue that colonialism had a positive impact.
Simon, I responded to your comment under Theo's post, I'm copying it here so anyone who might waste their time reading your article can see it:
Hi Simon, I'll just start by saying that there's no ethnic cleansing of Boers. SA has a very high murder rate, with around 20 000 murders per year, and out of these around 50 victims per year are white farmers. Clearly not ethnic cleansing.
To answer your question, the difference is that there isn't an army of propagandists and lobbyists defending atrocities in Tigray or Nagorno-Karabakh in the West. Don't you think it's crazy that despite all the documentation, our politicians still refuse to recognize Israel's crimes? The IDF has basically committed every crime in the book by now, including genocide as it is defined by the UN. Despite this, Israel continues to receive billions in US aid and diplomatic support. Just a few weeks ago now ex-Prime Minister Trudeau said "No one in Canada should be ashamed to say they're a Zionist. I am a Zionist", using a vague and erroneous definition of the word. Not to mention the even worse rhetoric in the US.
What Theo outlines well in this article is the deeply concerning refusal of powerful people in the west, including corporate media and politicians, to call a spade a spade, and their silencing and doxxing of those who speak out against Israel's crimes. The power of special interest groups to obfuscate and misrepresent the truth in western democracies should be deeply concerning to anyone who actually believes in the values that our countries say they stand for- democracy, freedom, and human rights. The reason there's so much focus on Palestine right now is because if we let a false narrative of what's going on in Palestine win, we go down a very dangerous road of normalizing and justifying fascism.
In response to this article: Your comment about the ethnic cleansing of Boers certainly ticked off alarm bells, like "this guy has gone down some white supremacist holes" type thing, but this article shows how truly different your worldview is from that of Theo or myself (or any other sane person). If you seriously think European colonialism in Africa was a "civilizing mission", you're out of your mind. Stop with all these ridiculous appeals to "objectivity" or "moral clarity" when you clearly have none. Perhaps you should bring your thinking into this century and stop writing racist bullshit. No, you're not "advanced" you're a primitive, attached to a barbarous time, and as much as you might hope it would, white supremacy no longer dominates the world and never will again. It's over.
"We almost never hear Jews demand that Arab countries return the property which they stole from Jews in 1948".
What incident is this even referring to? Yes there was depopulation of some Jewish communities in Transjordan in 1948, but they were small in scale and most of these communities have since been repopulated. So obviously this isn't going to be a hot-button issue over 70 years later.
You can point to pogroms and asset-seizures against Jews in various Middle Eastern countries, but the former were perpetrated by civilians, not Arab governments, and most of these incidents didn't literally happen in 1948 and the scale of them was tiny compared to what Palestinians faced in that same year.
Maybe you're referring narrative that Jews were forced or essentially forced to leave the Muslim world due to intense persecution, but this is mostly false. In North Africa, Yemen, Iran, and Turkey Jews faced relatively little discrimination and violence, and their exodus was simply voluntary immigration. There was more persecution in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt but even in those cases people were already leaving before the persecution began and the scale and intensity of it was not close to what Palestinians faced.
It’s a great piece but this is not quite correct, I think it’s a bit of an exaggeration.
“There really are high-ranking members of the Israeli government who refer to themselves as fascists and call for all Palestinians to be killed.”
I’m not aware of anyone in the Israeli government self-identifying as a fascist or calling for all Palestinians to be killed. The far-right types like Ben-Gvir and Kahane himself say that all or almost all Palestinians should be expelled. These are bad people and they support ethnic cleansing but not genocide.
Still your overall point that there are vile far-right people in the Israeli government is certainly true.
I'm sorry, but this is ridiculous. My first blog post was a movie review, obviously not a high moral priority. Does this make me a monster? Only a crazy person would think this. You recently wrote a post objecting to "much of gay rights" since you find homosexuality disgusting. Your normative views aside, this surely cannot reasonably be a high moral priority. Why aren't you writing about the 6 million people who've died in the eastern Congo war? Why aren't you writing about what China's doing in Xianjiang? According to your logic, you probably hate Uyghurs and Banyamulenge because you're more concerned about getting rid of Pride parades than advocating for their safety.
I think there's a time and place for judicious whataboutism, to encourage people to apply their moral critiques impartially and fairly. In fact, I've defended this view on my blog. But Israel defenders are serial abusers of whataboutism. They ignore the obvious reasons we should pick on Israel, which Kai S-S and I explained in response to your comment on my essay regarding Israel (1). You failed to adequately respond to these reasons.
The primary reason is that Israel receives $3.8B a year from the US (and received over $17.9B in 2023-24), whereas Azerbaijan receives a tiny fraction of that (2). Between 2002 and 2020, the US gave Baku $164M—less than one percent the amount that Israel received in one year (3). Obviously, this gives me good reason to pick on Israel in particular.
Israel has a massive lobby defending it and all its heinous crimes in the West (4). I'm trying to give voice to the other side. Also, if you read my post, you'll note that I'm not merely objecting to Israel's campaign of ethnic cleansing but also its mass killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. Azerbaijan has not killed tens of thousands of Armenians (5, 6).
While we're playing the game of assuming malign intentions, I might note that you originally cited the "ethnic cleansing of the Boers" in your comment on my original post to prove my oikophobia. But as Kai S-S pointed out, *no such thing exists.* Perhaps it is you who are arguing in bad faith. And perhaps you hate the Boers too, given that you’ve never written a full blog post condemning their fake ethnic cleansing.
1 https://open.substack.com/pub/theoshouse/p/propaganda-and-the-destruction-of?r=31obph&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=108248251
2 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/u-s-military-aid-for-israel-tops-17-9-billion-since-last-oct-7
3 https://responsiblestatecraft.org/armenia-azerbaijan/
4 https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/israel-lobby-and-us-foreign-policy
5 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37193053/
6 https://www.azatutyun.am/a/32762731.html
Your entire article about Israel being full of fascists, ruled by fascists, etc, etc, displays no understanding of political dynamics in the Middle East. Israeli politicians issuing threats they never carried out is a pretty low standard for disparaging an entire country.
I can’t imagine what you think of Palestinian society, by multiple degrees more “fascist” than Israel, or are they absolved of blame?
In what alternative universe do you live? Israel is currently blocking all humanitarian aid to Gaza—they’re carrying out their policies. And obviously Hamas is not absolved of blame; I never said that. I’ve written extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including on the specific issue of blame, so you should check out my past articles.
Also do you really deny that Israel is ruled by fascists when there’s an actual self-identifying fascist in Bibi’s cabinet? Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein warned in 1948 that the Israeli right was fascist, and that was before they were carpet bombing hospitals and schools.
Again, naïve about the political dynamics. The amount of aid that entered Gaza prior to this little PR episode of “blocking aid”, was of such a quantity that the only reason any Palestinian would go hungry is due to Palestinian clans and Hamas hoarding supplies. Which they do for both profit reasons, and to facilitate media pieces about “shortages” and “imminent famine”. Again, the pathology of Palestinian society is worth exploring, something you instinctively conflate with Hamas!
Within Israel, any politician calling himself a “fascist homophobe” is part of hysterical internal discourse. I promise you, Bezalel Smotrich has never read about fascism, does not understand the word, and is reacting to a section of the media elite who believe being a religious Jew is a fascist act.
The Zionist establishment was calling the right “fascist,” no need to invoke Arendt or Einstein.
Ever notice that commentators are always careful to say "the CCP" instead of China or the Chinese, whereas they speak of "the Russians" instead of the siloviki or United Russia Party?
I think a lot of that has more to do with the fact that the Russia commentators are from the region and harbor ethnic resentments against them. They actually hate Russians. The China commentators are almost exclusively white, and can have a more dispassionate view of the country and can separate the government from the average person.
I think so many default to 'oikophobia' because they assume that whatever the stance of a Western government is, it must be the dominant, popular stance, and because dominant, popular things (country music, football, mayonnaise, Coors Light) are the kind of things that some uncool 'hick' in flyer country likes - then they should be the opposite.
It's why Pitchfork used to spend thousands of words on obscure noise bands from NYC who have never played to even 100 people, or why we had those breathless 'here's why Super Mario Brothers is actually racist and homophobic' pop-wokeism articles 10 years ago. It's why Wes Anderson was celebrated by mustachioed turds in Brooklyn as some sort of artistic genius. It's foreign policy via hipsterdom. It's stupid and vapid and anti-intellectual for the sort of crowd who can only regurgitate a New Yorker article's opinion on something instead of developing their own, where the measure of a man is his collection of 'anti-establishment' takes that are about as deep as a bumper-sticker.
Agreed, although I don't think it's exactly anti -normie, it's anti-middle American. Country music isn't the most popular genre, it's less popular than hip hop/rap and pop.
Yes - those genres are associated with blacks, and are therefore ok to like as a 'hip' white person. I think "whiteness" as used by Lefties really boils down to another euphemism for middle-America or being 'conventional' which is apparently a fate worse than death.
It's why you have straight women telling pollsters they're 'bi' or thousands 'self-diagnosing' themselves as having ADHD or being autistic, on and on. I was never convinced it has as much to do with 'power' or 'victim-status' - I think the allure is far dumber than that. It's simply - look how unique I am! Uniqueness is a given by dint of DNA, though. I spent my twenties thinking the things I wore, listened to, read, or ate or drank defined who I was and now in my 40s I understand how sad and insecure that was. I think it was that plus the internet, we're all just little usernames and icons to each other; you and I will likely never have a discussion about the nature of reality or something over the rest of a bottle of Maker's Mark at 2am. Every little identity is a little pinned-on hashtag we can use as shorthand to describe and identify ourselves online, since its common to only interact with someone once or twice online. That desire for both a display of uniqueness and a short-hand of self-expression has metasized into the real world, and it's not just the Left but the Right too - 'raw egg nationalists' and 'tradwives' and other short-hand takes the place of having to project your unique self, but also set you apart as 'not-another-normie' regardless of how much or how little those labels describe your IRL actions or decisions.
Heck, I think it's why "being woke" is/was such a thing - it was an inversion of common sense and folk wisdom ("let me tell you why colorblindness is actually racist!"). Every time I read something 'woke' all I can think is - yes, I get it. You'd be miserable living in Iowa.
Wes Anderson is a good director!
Moneyquote:
I’m a Whataboutist because Whataboutism is just a synonym for rational thinking. Whenever you make a choice, you should ask "what about the alternatives"?
This one made me think.
Great stuff. I wish I could argue like that.
Love this. I’d describe whataboutism as detail-oriented comparative thinking, which can be applied both productively and counterproductively.
True
There's a reason whataboutism is generally considered a bad argument, it is rarely a substantive critique (as you've proven quite well). Considering the implications of any policy and weighing the consequences is a natural part of any serious discussion, and thankfully many critics of the Israeli government (including opposition parties in the Knesset) do this when talking about the war in Gaza.
The type of whataboutism you engage in is lazy obfuscation built on sand. A shallow, unproductive finger pointing to issues that serves only as a cynical attempt to displace meaningful discourse and replace it with a game of "name a different ethnic cleansing".
There are many issues that require deep conversations, and no one person can or should engage in all of them. Theo is one of many participating in the important discussion challenging the status quo of US foreign policy in the middle east. I think discussion of the ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabalh, or the risks of land appropriation called for by the EFF in South Africa are equally important. I would love to hear you explore those topics in depth. Theo talking about Israel in no way detracts from those conversations, I think your whataboutism on the other hand, hurts our ability to discuss them all.
The specific kind of Whataboutism I mentioned in this article was "what about Palestinian atrocities?". When two sides are fighting and one side has committed atrocities, you ought to find out whether the other side of the conflict has committed atrocities as well.
I've written extensively on Israel and Palestine, and my writing has addressed atrocities committed by both Palestinians and Israelis. I once even debated a New York Times columnist on a podcast about Israel and Hamas. You should do a modicum of research before you go around slandering people as "morally deranged."
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2kkBMJFFBiwPT1xYlyr50o?si=4ff2d13b2cc04316
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/opinion/israel-hamas-gaza.html
https://theoshouse.substack.com/p/hamas-could-have-moderated
https://theoshouse.substack.com/p/what-is-pure-evil
Your worst essay in a while. Criticizing Israel is not morally deranged as a result of worse crimes existing.
Respectfully, this is incredibly lazy writing; you are missing the point of Theo's article. Besides that, the logic you are pushing is faulty. The counterfactual world, where Israel is not committing atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, is not a world where Hamas is committing similar atrocities. Similarly, the counterfactual world where Theo doesn't write about Israel is not one where he writes about Africa or Central Asia. Echoing Theo's rationale, it's easier to criticize a culture you are part of--there is more legitimacy to the critique and less ability to be cancelled or otherwise ostracized. Finally, the idea that oikophobia leads to concrete harms is dubious. You support this claim by referencing how decolonization harmed Africa. This is a) speculative, b) fact blind, c) supported with no reference to data or any hard sources. Please improve!
The counterfactual world where Israel is not committing atrocities in Gaza most likely is a world where Hamas is committing similar or worse atrocities. The world in which Israel isn't bombing Gaza is the world where Hamas carries out October 7th attacks.
Re Decolonization: You just don't know any of the relevant facts on this. This blog is too advanced for you and you should not be commenting on it. If you want to learn you can start by reading Liberia, a Country Study https://www.amazon.com/Liberia-Country-Study-Pam-550-38/dp/9995272334
Also look in to the history of Robert Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe, Idi Amin in Uganda, and the present state of South Africa.
Israel has the most powerful military in the Middle East. It could very easily repel future attacks by Hamas by merely stationing more troops on the Gaza border, but the IDF is too busy repressing Palestinians in the West Bank. And the IDF received Hamas's Oct 7 battle plans a year before the attack, (1)!
If you haven’t noticed yet, the reason Hamas and other forms of violent Palestinian opposition to Israel exists is because of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Once Israel stops with the heinous occupation and ethnic cleansing, it removes most of the underlying reason for Palestinian political violence. The causal relationship becomes quite clear when you look at the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and when violence increases and subsides in relation to the peace process, (2).
Surely there’s a world in which Israel refrains from genocide and Hamas does not attack Israel again. The idea that Israel is being forced to kill tens of thousands of civilians and bomb every goddamn school and bakery is sick and wrong. This is the same ignorant bunk as the view that the Palestinians brought their own ethnic cleansing upon themselves.
And WTF is this obscure book on Liberia that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page? You’re the one pushing an insane revisionist narrative of history in which the Europeans came to civilize the barbarous natives. You would need to provide an astonishing amount of evidence of a grand conspiracy by historians to hide the truth to prove your view, given that basically all prominent historians disagree with you. And I see no reason to trust anything you write about Africa since you’ve already proved yourself a liar vis-à-vis the Boers.
How could the colonization of Africa have been a civilizing mission when it involved murdering so many Africans? Think of Von Trotha’s order for German troops to exterminate the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa. Think of Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo: 10 million killed, children held hostage from their parents to force them to work harder, colonies of kidnapped Congolese children worked to death, people’s hands and feet amputated for not meeting quota. Any historically literate person knows that the savages in colonial Africa were not the Africans.
One wonders whether your reactionary drivel really is inspired by historical ignorance and a failure to grasp basic argument. But there's a more parsimonious explanation for someone so eager to justify atrocities against darker-skinned people.
1 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html
2 https://theoshouse.substack.com/p/hamas-could-have-moderated
The 10 million Congo story is a myth (though the Belgian Congo was worse than most other contemporary European colonial states)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/king-hochschilds-hoax/
It is not the case that nearly all historians disagree with me. You only see your perspective in the popular press (like the New York Times) but in academic journals, many people do argue that colonialism had a positive impact.
I’m not an expert on this issue though. Bruce Gilley’s paper is a good place to start: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01436597.2017.1369037
Simon, I responded to your comment under Theo's post, I'm copying it here so anyone who might waste their time reading your article can see it:
Hi Simon, I'll just start by saying that there's no ethnic cleansing of Boers. SA has a very high murder rate, with around 20 000 murders per year, and out of these around 50 victims per year are white farmers. Clearly not ethnic cleansing.
To answer your question, the difference is that there isn't an army of propagandists and lobbyists defending atrocities in Tigray or Nagorno-Karabakh in the West. Don't you think it's crazy that despite all the documentation, our politicians still refuse to recognize Israel's crimes? The IDF has basically committed every crime in the book by now, including genocide as it is defined by the UN. Despite this, Israel continues to receive billions in US aid and diplomatic support. Just a few weeks ago now ex-Prime Minister Trudeau said "No one in Canada should be ashamed to say they're a Zionist. I am a Zionist", using a vague and erroneous definition of the word. Not to mention the even worse rhetoric in the US.
What Theo outlines well in this article is the deeply concerning refusal of powerful people in the west, including corporate media and politicians, to call a spade a spade, and their silencing and doxxing of those who speak out against Israel's crimes. The power of special interest groups to obfuscate and misrepresent the truth in western democracies should be deeply concerning to anyone who actually believes in the values that our countries say they stand for- democracy, freedom, and human rights. The reason there's so much focus on Palestine right now is because if we let a false narrative of what's going on in Palestine win, we go down a very dangerous road of normalizing and justifying fascism.
In response to this article: Your comment about the ethnic cleansing of Boers certainly ticked off alarm bells, like "this guy has gone down some white supremacist holes" type thing, but this article shows how truly different your worldview is from that of Theo or myself (or any other sane person). If you seriously think European colonialism in Africa was a "civilizing mission", you're out of your mind. Stop with all these ridiculous appeals to "objectivity" or "moral clarity" when you clearly have none. Perhaps you should bring your thinking into this century and stop writing racist bullshit. No, you're not "advanced" you're a primitive, attached to a barbarous time, and as much as you might hope it would, white supremacy no longer dominates the world and never will again. It's over.
"We almost never hear Jews demand that Arab countries return the property which they stole from Jews in 1948".
What incident is this even referring to? Yes there was depopulation of some Jewish communities in Transjordan in 1948, but they were small in scale and most of these communities have since been repopulated. So obviously this isn't going to be a hot-button issue over 70 years later.
You can point to pogroms and asset-seizures against Jews in various Middle Eastern countries, but the former were perpetrated by civilians, not Arab governments, and most of these incidents didn't literally happen in 1948 and the scale of them was tiny compared to what Palestinians faced in that same year.
Maybe you're referring narrative that Jews were forced or essentially forced to leave the Muslim world due to intense persecution, but this is mostly false. In North Africa, Yemen, Iran, and Turkey Jews faced relatively little discrimination and violence, and their exodus was simply voluntary immigration. There was more persecution in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt but even in those cases people were already leaving before the persecution began and the scale and intensity of it was not close to what Palestinians faced.
Don’t want to be involved with any of these knuckleheads. People weighing these like what do we have to invest in are morally bankrupt.
It’s a great piece but this is not quite correct, I think it’s a bit of an exaggeration.
“There really are high-ranking members of the Israeli government who refer to themselves as fascists and call for all Palestinians to be killed.”
I’m not aware of anyone in the Israeli government self-identifying as a fascist or calling for all Palestinians to be killed. The far-right types like Ben-Gvir and Kahane himself say that all or almost all Palestinians should be expelled. These are bad people and they support ethnic cleansing but not genocide.
Still your overall point that there are vile far-right people in the Israeli government is certainly true.
Bezalel Smotrich has called himself a fascist. Nissim Vaturi has called for all Palestinian men to be killed.