After the recent struggle session which resulted in
CW: It’s pretty self indulgent considering the gravity of the actual situation.
I am left disquieted due to various people who represented zionists positions directly or held space for these. Particularly (but not only) those who are admins and mods. People who think the above image is a “holocaust flag”. And otherwise seem to have conjured a fictious form of anti semitism, just for deploying here.
Well OK maybe it is allowed to give people a week or a month to mull things over and reconsider their positions. But do we come back to it? Or should I just seethe with resentment, hold a grudge, and snipe about other things going forward?
On the other hand, the majority & plurality were on the correct side of things. So that’s good. I just… Idk I don’t expect hegemony but this is literally such a simple issue. I don’t know how anyone who feels different could feel comfortable on this site. it’s like learning mods/admins are triggered by a guillotine.
In some ways it could be “the fighting is so fierce because the stakes are so low”. (The stakes = emojis)
But on the other hand, the stakes are so huge and this is just the scale of fighting that’s near at hand.
Nobody ever accused me of being perfect and well behaved so maybe I’m just throwing stones from a glass house. I explicitly must consent to whatever critique in that regard.
I would like to suggest that on the new user signup page the question be changed to read
What are your views on GSM / LGBTQ rights, racial justice, animal liberation,
Although I have no idea what sort of answers people make to these. So maybe it’s stupid.
Fucking shit. People are fucking being fucking murdered right at this fucking moment.
i think there used to be some legitimacy to worrying about burning the symbol of a minoritized group even in an appropriated context as
but the entity has so thoroughly delegitimized itself even in the eyes of liberals that the shield no longer functions.
The initial argument was flawed as well. The genocide flag has been used before 7 october to raze villages, burn people’s homes and kill people’s children as a warning to leave and not come back. That flag has primarily stood for murder and genocide since the inception of the ‘zionist state’. Just because most USians and Europeans only found out about the genocidal nature of the zionist entity 2 years ago does not mean that they were right to connect that flag to Judaism.
While that initial argument may have been flawed, there are valid arguments to exclude the Star of David from the Israeli flag.
Such as the fact that Zionists have made it a point to connect their country to Judaism. That was the whole point to designing their flag that way to begin with. Anti-semitism and Zionism do go hand in hand, after all. It makes sense that they would force people into making this association.
Excluding the symbol from the flag and replacing it with something else can be seen as a rejection of Israel’s attempt to draw this connection.
It’s naive and US/Eurocentric to think that you can disconnect the star from the genocidal entity. The genocidal entity has used the star in particular to install fear and terror into Palestinian communities by marking homes with it before they were burned and the people in it killed.
Well, yeah. A largely secular settler-colonial project appropriating the star of David and placing it on their flag is deeply gross. But that is the flag of Israel, we don’t have the power to change it. That’s not how that works.
People call Israel “Isntreal” all the time. We don’t have the power to change Israel’s name, so should we stop calling it Isntreal and start respecting its identity as a country?
I’m not even against the new emoji. I’m just trying to make the point that there’s non-zionist perspectives to not use the Star of David by wording things in a different way. We shouldn’t just immediately call people zionists because they chose to word things poorly during a heated discussion.
That “poor wording” was literally putting burning the Israeli flag on the same level as genocide while Israel is carrying out an actual genocide. It’s not acceptable or defensible and yeah, if that’s the kind of slip you make while heated you don’t need any kind of authority.
Also, any other flag literally wouldn’t be the flag of Israel, so…
Yeah, but we passed that point about 78 years ago now. It’s one thing to be concerned about the impression of the wider public but anyone who worries that there’s something wrong with the act of burning the flag of the Zionist entity (as opposed to worrying about what it may do to their reputation with the general public) in the 21st century is misguided at best.
Yeah, I think that the arguments that were used in the recent struggle session were more outdated than intentionally spreading Zionist talking points.