Oh, that’s cool! I’m excited to check this out. I like their content. I don’t love it enough to keep up with it (especially because they’re a little long) but I’m interested to hear their take.

No, but I’m also not sure where you are going with that question. I suppose hezbollah flags directly have something to do with the Palestine protests, whereas nazi flags didn’t really have anything to do with the convoy, so maybe it’s more understandable to have hezbollah/hamas flags there. But they are still terrorists, right? Or are we OK with them now? I’m just not sure what you mean.

Some of the people in that movement thought so. From things they read on the internet, they were led to believe that covid was part of a plan to kill millions of people.

Don’t believe everything you read on the internet, kids. It may lead you to get so emotional over genocide claims that you end up being associated with some actual genocidal groups.

It’s not pretty… https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/poll-shows-palestinians-back-oct-7-attack-israel-support-hamas-rises-2023-12-14/

People on Lemmy seem to think Hamas just wants to bring unicorns and rainbows to the region. When in reality, they’d stone most of the users here for their views.

It’s all weird. I don’t know what kind of social engineering they did to make it OK to kill 1000 civilians, but their campaign was wildly successful.

Do freedom fighters also intentionally hold up in schools, hospitals, and crowded places so they can use civilians as human shields? Do freedom fighters steal free aid meant for the people and force them to buy it back from them or starve? Do freedom fighters typically have their leader living the high life in another country while the people they’re supposedly fighting for suffer?

Yep pretty much. If they let it stay up definitely.

You don’t know me.

But, there is a marked difference between the root causes of these two instances. Though they both stem from similar places. On the far right, you have a media machine that has, for 30+ years, used dogwhistles that basically Pavlov an entire group of people (roughly half the US voting population) into salivating for racism. When the mask came off, they over salivated and moved so far right that they took up the mantle of one of the worst movements in human history. It was a conditioning, built on impulses already present in the population that was susceptible to that conditioning, that needed—like an addiction—to be redoubled and made more acute as time wore on. And there is a serious problem with far right views being made mainstream. Even if they don’t fly a swastika on a flag, that fascist, bigoted mentality is pervasive on the right. It doesn’t have to wear a tiny mustache and an armband to be Nazi.

As for the people on the left, yes, there has also been a long-standing conditioning, but less acute and more just the temperature of the water we’ve all been swimming in. That being antisemitism. So much antisemitism is baked into our culture, a lot like general racism. And yes, some people on the left were pushing it, but not in the same way.

The more overt cause of this phenomenon is online culture and the need to be “more just” or “more [blank],” the blank being whatever issue is being discussed, people want to be more right about it. More extreme, more the movement being a part of these peoples identity. So you get one-upsmanship that shows itself by people embracing ideas that aren’t that great because they want to be more passionate about the issue at hand.

Not to mention, the nuance of hamas being sort of painted as freedom fighters against a genocidal force. Because, in some respect, they are that. They are what’s attempting to stand between the Israeli government and the people of Palestine. But, in reality, they are a far right fundamentalist organization that doesn’t have the Palestinian people’s best interest at heart. They’re largely unelected, undemocratic, bigots.

But there is no room for nuance on a flag. There’s no room for nuance on a protest sign. There is only room for the most basic of messages, and when you couple that with the aforementioned identity issues involved in politics these days, then you have a recipe for idiots misunderstanding what’s good with what’s more “unique” or more of an extreme statement.

So, in short, comparing the two is disingenuous at best.

Honestly? A lot of them probably don’t know what a Hamas or hezbollah flag looks like. So they wouldn’t recognize it enough to say, “hey! That’s not what we’re about!” Americans are pretty uneducated about most of that stuff. If this particular issue weren’t all over the news, social media, and on everyone’s mind, Americans wouldn’t know a goddamn thing about it. Because let’s face it, this situation has been going on for literally everyone at the march’s entire lives. And this is most likely the first time it’s been on their radar. That’s not a lot of time to learn about the entire history of two separate organizations and the complicated history of an entire geopolitical conflict. They’ve only had since oct. 7.

Add Lebanon into the mix? Forget about it. I’m surprised one person there was aware that hezbollah and hamas were allies.

All of this is to say, in some respects, you’re right. Tolerating intolerance should never happen. But to paint an entire group of people that want a people facing genocide to stop fuckin dying as intolerant because probably one person flying both flags (or two people, at most) that the rest of the well-meaning people probably didn’t recognize or didn’t know the history of just feels…wrong to me.

And the entire conversation started because it was likened to right wingers flying Nazi flags. No one is unaware of nazis. It’s not the same.

As for the person/people at this march that were either fine with it or supportive of it, I tried to explain that in my last comment.

It’s not great. But it’s not as cut and dry as writing off the whole goddamn movement to end the genocide. Because that’s what the media is doing here. Not really writing about the march, but writing off the whole march because of these two people. Side stepping the entire issue at hand because they can easily dismiss the entire thing by saying, “well, see? They’re bad people. Forget the message of peace.” It’s like a window getting smashed and the same media writing off the entire BLM march as a riot. Where did you stand then?

I’m genuinely curious though. How did you feel about this tactic being used by the media to discredit and write off the BLM demonstrations? Because this is the same thing being applied to a different situation: the worst or most misguided among an otherwise positive movement being shone a spotlight on in order to derail the conversation and wreck the momentum of the movement. That’s exactly what’s happening here, it’s what happened in 2020. So where do you stand on that

I didn’t downvote, but I would argue that you can’t call someone a freedom fighter if their ideology or political position fundamentally opposes freedom, just because they are fighting for the cause of one particular oppressed group. To put a comparison: some Ukrainians that fought against the Soviet Union during WWII could have seen themselves as freedom fighters who were fighting for the right of self-determination of their nation (as they were fighting a dictatorship, and that was probably their main intention), but you absolutely cannot call yourself a freedom fighter when you’re helping the nazis occupy half of Europe.

Fighting for the freedom to subjugate people to their will instead of someone else’s.

Is the IDF also a terrorist organization? How about the US military? I struggle to see any justifiable reason why Hamas should wear that label while the other two should not.

So one person?

If you want a general ethical position on the issue that I have found consistent so far:

• Hamas is fundamentally different from other liberation groups, in that Hamas doesn’t intend to integrate the descendants of colonizers into the country they want Palestine (the whole of it) to be. For instance, the ANC saw the white South Africans as South Africans - they were colonizers, sure, but they would be citizens of the country they intended to rule, so instead of targeting civilians, they attacked military targets and infrastructure.

• We see everyday what the Israeli government does on this sub, any person who isn’t predisposed in their favor can easily understand that they’re a few steps away from going full nazi.

• The vast majority of civilians on both sides are innocent, and don’t deserve to be brutalized.

So it isn’t really a matter of whether you prefer Israel or Hamas, it is first and foremost, a matter of making sure civilians aren’t subject to abuse, and are capable of living their lives freely and in peace. Of course, it also needs to be understood that the construct that is the political system of Israel-Palestine (this is, only Israel exists as a sovereign country, while “Palestine” is a couple of not too self-governed territories over which Israel practices sovereignity) provokes a continued abuse and misery that will ignite further conflict sooner or later. So while the first priority is getting a cease fire now, aiming for a real, practical 2 state solution or 1 state solution where both Palestinians and Israelis are free citizens without being subject to the whims of the other party is needed if we don’t want to have a similar mess in 5, 10 or 20 years.

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