But people don't do things "because they are evil". Even the people you think are evil - they aren't waking up in the morning cackling supervillain laughs while rubbing their hands together and pondering how they can advance the Forces of Darkness. They have their reasons - and maybe we strongly disagree with their reasons or maybe there's a huge disconnect between their plans and their objectives, but generally speaking they are not doing it "to be evil".
Criticism of Israel is fraught. While most people recognize that criticism of Israel is not criticism of all Jews - that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, the fact remains that criticism of Israel is actually criticism of at least some Jews. There is definitely potential for confusion and there is also a lot of overlap. It's a very rare antisemite who isn't also anti-Zionist. But this isn't the entirety of it. There is also the looming shadow of the fact that antisemitism is a very serious and very dangerous thing.
Antisemitism exists and it is pervasive and deadly. It's much more pervasive than most people acknowledge. Here's one way of considering it - the one thing that white supremacist groups have in common more frequently than white supremacist ideology is antisemitism. For example, the leader of the Proud Boys is Enrique Tarrio. Or how about figuring out where to place Kanye on this spectrum. A big thing in white supremacist ideology, despite all their obsessing over the purity of bloodlines - is submissive Asian wives. White supremacists are way more racially diverse than people would expect. So despite the fact that they are characterized by a belief in the superiority of the white race, this is less unifying for them than their hatred of Jews. They hate Jews more than they believe in white supremacy. That's how significant antisemitism is.
So that's context too. When politicians shy away from criticism of Israel, it is driven in part by the knowledge that antisemitism is deadly serious. Knowing that any criticism they espouse could very well end up as recruitment propaganda for hate groups. But sometimes - and right now is one of those times - criticism of Israel is necessary. So there's this fraught push and pull of figuring out what to say - which results in some truly crazy shit as well. And here's the thing - this now obvious language policing where there is massive self-censorship in discussions of anything to do with Israel - that in itself is a massive propaganda tool for antisemites. Hate groups will often talk about globalist Jewish conspiracies where world leaders are just mere puppets of some shadowy cabal of uber wealthy hook nosed demons - truly ludicrous and insane shit. And then you play the tapes of world leaders trying to talk about Israel. I mean obviously this was just Justin being a useless piece of shit - quite clearly he's not acting like the puppet of an Illuminati group - I mean shouldn't the One World Government be able to find better puppets? Anyways, I think we ought to be able to agree that seeing this shit every day might be useful propaganda for spreading the law that Jews control the world. That the self-censorship and the aggressive policing of anti-Israel sentiment is counterproductive.
It's counterproductive in other ways too. Specifically in the same ways that the US' protection of Israel from any consequences for its crimes leads to Israeli governments committing more crimes. If Israel is never held to account for wrong doing - and in fact, that merely identifying Israeli misconduct is enough to "cancel" someone - then Israeli governments are going to drift in the direction of more misconduct. This magical shield which protects Israeli politics from accountability - the US veto on the Security Council and the self-censoring of valid criticism - this means that there is no external pressure for accountability for misdeeds.
Netanyahu and his Likud party is fascist. They spent most of 2023 having to deal with protests against laws placing the government outside of the ambit of judicial review. They passed a law giving operational control of the police to a cabinet minister. They've developed and fostered a private army of violent terrorist which they have unleashed upon the Occupied West Bank - a group so extreme that the Israeli intelligence agency said was a threat to Israel's security. And this is to be expected. Israel is an apartheid state - anti-Palestinian racism is formally and explicitly part of Israel's identity, and their democratic processes go on with this embedded deep within it. New police state laws or new racist measures get no real scrutiny - it's all stuff that they were already doing to some extent, stuff that never gets criticized. And so the country just drifts rightwards continuously because there is no penalty for moving to the right.
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