• Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin
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    6 months ago

    I don’t have a problem with people protesting for Palestine, I have a problem with the people who are obviously going to stop the day after the voting closes.

    What’s needed is to identify the people encouraging Biden’s moves to condition aid to Israel and spotlight them, give them a bigger platform among Biden voters, and to deplatform the advocates trying to counter that encouragement .

    Continued protests, even disruptive protests occupying college campuses, but definitely not responding to a college trying to unfurl the US flag by projecting “Genocide Joe” onto it, there’s a difference between disruptive protest and abjectly unhelpful antagonism.

    • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Fair point. However:

      Biden’s moves to condition aid to Israel

      Do you believe Biden would have ever made those moves without those protests?

      Or perhaps, even, the leverage of people’s votes might have played a role?

      I am not so sure he would have made any move to condition aid without this disruption and threat.

      I mean: Biden was pretty damned adamant against a ceasefire, but called for one less than a month after he got hit with Uncommitted primary votes. So I think there is some kind of relationship there at least worth crediting.

      • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin
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        6 months ago

        No, leveraging votes on it didn’t do anything but show who was confident that they’d be fine when a second Trump Presidency brought the genocide here too.

        I’ll give you a hint, it is not the Palestinians who also live here in America because we have our own diaspora that also live other places from the homeland.

        My dead kin are not a fetish prop to hand us over to the Trump Brand Morality police because being Arab is now defined as antisemitism.

        I keep seeing that scene from What If where Killmonger murders Stark, “The difference between you and me, is that you can’t see the difference between you and me.”

        First time I watched it I thought it was just Killmonger being meaninglessly vague to platitude his way to justifying his actions, but then I came back online and witnessed the absolute amount of white “leftists” proudly showing their entire asses declaring that they truly could see zero differences between Republican and Democratic administrations and legislative terms.

        These people don’t have a deeply held principal that guides their decision to threaten letting things get exponentially worse. They either have an abject ignorance to what they’re threatening to the people for whom the difference is life and death, or they have an abject cynicism that causes them to see that threat as the entire point to rob the disenfranchised of the chance to define an American progressivism that isn’t led exclusively by bougie white college kids.

        They accuse people who call them out of being “vote karens” but they’re the ones threatening PoC, Religious minorities, Women, and Queer folks to make the DNC’s manager speak with them.

        We would L O V E to see these little snots devise a means of protest that actually puts the consequences on the old white boomercrats who run the party right now. The problem is that they time and time again fucking refuse to do it because putting the work in to become a primary force that can eject party members who step out of line isn’t as satisfying as terrorizing queer folks with “it says “class solidarity” or it gets the Republicans again!”

        BTW this isn’t even the first time this level of cynicism has been employed by the white left, in the 20s and 30s a major strategic goal of the American socialist movement was to attract enough black members that if fighting broke out they’d last long enough as a collective magnet for white conservative rage for the white socialists to achieve some sort of victory scenario. You may have seen similar sentiments in this thread and others like it where especially mask off white “leftists” call for a culling or WWIII or all but outright say that Black folks, women, religious minorities, and queer folks are outside the “Working Class”, basically mask offing on being fascists that use “The Working Class” as an innuendo for “The Race” or “The Nation”

        They don’t see us as partners in solidarity, they see us as meat shields who need to shut up and be grateful they even pretend to care about our interests when they show up for the photo-op rallies and marches, and how dare we use their own language of solidarity to ask them for the herculean labor of standing in line and form filling a ballot, maybe flipping it over to check if there’s public referenda on the docket this year.

        Vote witholding is a tool of privilege wielded by those who know they can ignore the consequences of either outcome. It is Reagan looking his “friend” in the eye and giving no fucks about the AIDs epidemic he was dying from because he knew he was unlikely to catch it himself and that it was a useful political wrench to do what he already decided he wanted to do anyways.

        • ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          Well it is perfectly fine to believe Biden would have called for a ceasefire or conditioning aid to Israel on his own accord without any political pressure.

          • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin
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            6 months ago

            There are means of political pressure that aren’t threatening the cynical welding of one’s own privilege as a hostage taking tool.