There’s hardly much of a Jewish population in my country but during my days helping a friend raise funds for Gaza, we’ve had plenty time to make some observations. Of course anecdotally, though online seems to behave in a similar way.
First of all, almost everyone just looks away and keeps walking when they see our stand with prints, graphic designs etc relating to Palestine.
The ones that do approach seem very nihilistic across the board, especially the women.
We’ve had a handful of self-proclaimed jews supporting Gaza, however in one case a jew wearing a star of david necklace was immediately harrassed by some white university students who called them “zionist scum” for no apparent reason, even though he donated and condemned Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in general.
Ghent is quite a multicultural city but especially near the university, people are out here just freely distorting the term zionist into a slur so they avoid outright saying “jew”.
Especially online this borderline nazi rhetoric is even more blatant. People like Hasan Piker, the left’s biggest political streamer, don’t get banned from Twitch despite literally praising Houthi terrorist hijacking a civilian boat, uncritically playing a Houthi propaganda video on his stream and praising it while a guest in the room is clearly uncomfortable.
Hasan Piker can’t take criticism so he never seeks out the source and instead responds to a strawman version his viewers tell him.
Then when the gaslighting hits its maximum, of course there comes the utterly pathetic “Why am I getting criticized? Palestinians are dying in Gaza” excuse.
Ok, and? Is his brain so low functioning that it can’t handle multiple topics?
To a lesser extent, the same thing repeatedly happens in this thread as well.
Putting words in people’s mouths to then make a bunch of strawman arguments
Eliminating critical thinking and reducing every position to a binary flowchart:
US/West bad and fake news, therefore anything opposing the US is good and factual. Any semblance of critical thinking and media literacy is gone if it involves someone or something opposed to the US.
It’s abundantly clear that antisemitism is strongly on the rise, particularly amongst part of the left. And no I don’t mean Tweets hurting people’s feelings.
The genocide is constantly brought up as a defense mechanism against discussing the issue of rising antisemitism, or any disagreement at all really.
As previously stated, this thread contains such examples of these tactics.
Why is it so difficult to have a dialogue about more than a singular issue (the genocide)? Why must bringing up any relevant related matter result so often in strawman arguments and baseless accusations of being pro-genocide?