found online by Raymond
From PZ Myers:
How can you blame both sides when one side is being gunned down by snipers, and the other is armed, at best, with rocks? When one side is killing children?
But Bari Weiss managed to top it. How horrible that the Palestinian people planned their protest strategically? Why didn’t they schedule it for a day when it wouldn’t make Ivanka Trump look bad?
Talk about missing the whole point…it reminds me of the furious complaints when Black Lives Matter protests inconvenience people. How dare they march where people would notice! Couldn’t they just march down streets in the middle of nowhere that weren’t full of busy white people trying to get to a football game?
Oh, FFS. This is disgusting even by Myers’s standards. Hamas has been firing rockets at Israeli towns near Gaza for years and many of the rioters at the embassy-day clash were carrying Molotov cocktails and other improvised weapons, not just rocks — and some actually told media on the scene that they were looking to break through the fence and kill people in Israel. Hamas has openly declared that most of those killed by Israeli gunfire were its members, not innocent civilians. As for killing children, what kind of idiots bring children to a planned riot in the first place? In previous conflicts in Gaza, Israel has gone to almost absurd lengths to avoid civilian deaths, even telephoning people in targeted areas before planned attacks to warn them to get away.
Yes, Netanyahu is the Israeli equivalent of a Republican and Trump’s embassy move was a pointless provocation. But never forget what kind of people Hamas really are. They would happily murder Myers for being an atheist if he were under their jurisdiction, as they would me. Israel is the only country in that region where open atheists or gays can exist with any safety.
Of course much of the liberal blogosphere and news internet is following the playbook it always does in such cases — blame the Jews, and ignore any facts that don’t fit the narrative. In doing so, they’re solidly part of the nearly 2,000-year-old tradition of Western anti-Semitism. It’s foolish to pretend otherwise.
While I agree, I would not describe liberal reactions as anti-Semitic because I don’t think the fact that Israel is Jewish is relevant. If you replaced the Jews here with Christians, you would see the same reactions.
This comes down to the double standards that many liberals have (Muslims can get away with X, but Christians can’t; black people can get away with Y, but white people can’t; etc.) as well as the sorts of narratives that liberals are more inclined to believe (usually oppressor vs. oppressed, where the oppressed is a minority, weaker, or “misunderstood” group) and through which they filter all information and explain away all problems. Conservatives often make this observation, though they are guilty of it themselves in their own ways. Everyone could do with more consistency in thought, but that requires actually confronting contradictions and being willing to make a change rather than come up with some elaborate rationalization and accuse others of bigotry or ignorance if they don’t accept it.