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Radiohead playing in Israel - and hell breaking loose :)

This is why US (and not just US) politics are going down the drain. Trolling shouldn't be in tautology with politics, nor should unwitting trolls, as in the case of most media people and politicians.
 
Lexicus said:
Haven't heard one word about this from any liberal free speech defender who lays into college protesters.
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Huh. that's odd. You just quoted nine words from someone like that.
 
You simply note that it happened - no criticism, no discussion of it as a free speech issue.
 
Being aware is the first step in forming an opinion.
 
Lexicus said:
Both settler-colonial states, quite similar situation with de facto separate legal systems. The major difference here is that while white South Africans needed blacks as labor, Israel just wants the Palestinians gone and will probably end up killing or deporting them all.
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Israel Jews are, overwhelmingly, the descendants of refugees, to some degree or another. To conflate that with European imperialism in Africa seems not only simplistic but also really quite offensive.

I don't really agree with this.
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It seems to me fairly non-contentious. I don't pretend that either Israel or the United States are without their problems. But we don't see anything like the viciously thorough social, cultural and economic segregation of Apartheid South Africa. I don't think that there's any really plausible comparison there.

Kyriakos said:
That is rather tenuously tied, imo. Yorke comes across as a fanboi of ww1 there. It doesn't mean he would be in favour of bombing people. It just means he is a bizarre-minded celebrity. Not seeing this as having changed now either.
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That seems terrifically ungenerous. It seems far more generous- far more plausible- to assume that he's simply amused by the idea that his music is so glum that it can only be appropriately visualised with blood and mud and death.


Ajidica said:
They were also a country founded by religious terrorists with a fondness for killing British soldiers and blowing up hotels.
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I've been one to argue that history is uncomplicated.

civver_764 said:
Now I get it.
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Oh, I don't agree with their brand of revolutionary socialism. Socialism in One Country, and moreover, a country that didn't even exist? Self-evident lunacy. My sympathies are entirely with the cultural autonomism of the Bund. But a lot of people on the left, who use "Zionism" in very nearly the same sense and with roughly the same venom as the alt-right, seem to me totally ignorant of the history of Israel and of Zionism as an historical phenomenon.

civver_764 said:
That's nuts. This would never happen for any other country. I wonder why that is... :think:
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There's no political capital to be made in theatrical "anti-anti"-ing any other country. It has little to do with Israel and everything to do with the incestuous nightmare-pool of American electoral politics.
 
^My own impression was that he was very happy his work was likened (and used for) to ww1 moods, in a rather childish "i am weird and death-culty" kind of way ^^ Yet that interview is not the only thing which shows Yorke being bizarre/posery. He is known to have had anger outbursts on stage. Not saying this is unheard of for a major pop musician (i suppose he is a lot less douchey than Cobain ever was), but it is telling re his character and allows for the guess he chose to play in Israel due to reactionism and not some defensible/logical political position.
 
It's probably because they're been playing in Israel for years, and this is the first time anyone has decided to make a big Thing out of it. You can't reasonably impose a political agenda onto a routine and innocuous activity, and then claim that this activity is only taking place to spite you.
 
Borachio said:
Ah. You see? It's that old semitic international Bolshevik plot again.
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My avatar is depicts a large-nosed, heavily bearded Russian man wearing an overcoat and fedora. I'm only surprised that it's taken everyone so long to figure it out.
 
We've been through this a couple of years ago.

That, my friend, is Captain Haddock. Slightly disguised, I'll grant you. But Captain Haddock it is.
 
Traitorfish said:
Israel Jews are, overwhelmingly, the descendants of refugees, to some degree or another. To conflate that with European imperialism in Africa seems not only simplistic but also really quite offensive.
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This seems to be shading into the classic Zionist "ethnic cleansing in self-defense" argument. If Israel is not a settler-colonial state, then there is no such thing as a settler-colonial state. Many of the people who came to the American colonies were also refugees to some degree or another. That doesn't make their treatment of the natives any less criminal, nor does it mean the ethnic cleansing that took place here was somehow justified.

Traitorfish said:
It seems to me fairly non-contentious. I don't pretend that either Israel or the United States are without their problems. But we don't see anything like the viciously thorough social, cultural and economic segregation of Apartheid South Africa. I don't think that there's any really plausible comparison there.
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How many people of color from the US have you spoken to about this?
 
Lexicus said:
This seems to be shading into the classic Zionist "ethnic cleansing in self-defense" argument. If Israel is not a settler-colonial state, then there is no such thing as a settler-colonial state. Many of the people who came to the American colonies were also refugees to some degree or another. That doesn't make their treatment of the natives any less criminal, nor does it mean the ethnic cleansing that took place here was somehow justified.
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The people who came to America as refugees did not, as a very general rule, end up running the place, not before a good few generations have passed. (And don't say the Pilgrims; a persecution complex doesn't make you an actual refugee.) To this day, you've only managed to two non-WASP presidents, in a country where WASPs comprise no more than 40% of the population. Israel is not simply inhabited by the descendants by refugees, it was comprised by them, at a very basic level, and supplemented with almost every passing generation. Israeli millennials, those raised after the final influx of ex-Soviet Jews in the 1990s, are probably the first generation of Israelis for whom Aliyah is just something that excitable Westerners do, and not a necessary.

Further, consider that a good 40% of Israeli Jews, and the core support-base of the Zionist right, are not the lillywhite Ashkenazim, but brown-skinned Mizrahim, people who have inhabited the Middle East for centuries, quite often for as long as there have been Jews to live in it, until they were forced by unfriendly governments into the one corner of the region that would have them. To characterise their ambitions in Israel as "settler-colonialism" seems bizarre on the face of it.

How many people of color from the US have you spoken to about this?
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How many people have lived in both the United States and in Apartheid South Africa, and come to the conclusion that they are culturally much of a muchness? The point is not whether being a person of colour in the United States is a barrel of laughs, it's whether analogies to (let alone direct identifications with) Apartheid South Africa are warranted.
 
Traitorfish said:
Further, consider that a good 40% of Israeli Jews, and the core support-base of the Zionist right, are not the lillywhite Ashkenazim, but brown-skinned Mizrahim, people who have inhabited the Middle East for centuries, quite often for as long as there have been Jews to live in it, until they were forced by unfriendly governments into the one corner of the region that would have them.
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The Mizrahim vote for the right because the Israeli "left" is dominated by white Ashkenazim who hate the Mizrahim almost as much as they hate Arabs. Also the really vicious right-wing parties seem to get much of their support from white people who have immigrated from the former USSR. In any case I'm not sure what the fact that the Mizrahim have lived in the middle east for centuries has to do with this. Most of them never lived in Palestine, which is the territory at issue here...

Traitorfish said:
To characterise their ambitions in Israel as "settler-colonialism" seems bizarre on the face of it.
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It seems equally bizarre to me that you apparently think we can't call it settler colonialism when a group is violently displacing an indigenous population and replacing it with...settlers just because some of the settlers are also refugees. It's also I think fairly obvious that the circumstances of Israel's creation and the 1948 war (really IIRC it was the humiliation of the 1967 war) are what prompted governments in the Middle East to expel their Jewish populations, not of course that I'm defending that. But it seems to me that one of the many issues with Israel is the massive boost its existence (and, again, the circumstances under which it came to exist) has given reactionary forces in the Arab countries (and, needless to say, among the Palestinians).

In any case the fact is that the state of Israel as it exists today was created through ethnic cleansing and systemic land theft. And the occupation and the settlements in the occupied territories are simply a logical extension of that process, not something that can easily be separated from the existence of Israel itself (which is part of the reason that I see a one-state solution as the most realistic and desirable option).

Traitorfish said:
How many people have lived in both the United States and in Apartheid South Africa, and come to the conclusion that they are culturally much of a muchness? The point is not whether being a person of colour in the United States is a barrel of laughs, it's whether analogies to (let alone direct identifications with) Apartheid South Africa are warranted.
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Well, I have lived in both places and saw many similarities even in the brief time I lived in South Africa. The physical segregation there was worse than here, but not by much. The United States is still an extremely racially segregated country and that hasn't really changed much even with the end of Jim Crow. Another similarity is that South Africa and the US (and Israel for that matter) have incredibly unequal political economies where a tiny stratum of the population controls vastly disproportionate amounts of wealth and resources.
 
Traitorfish said:
Israel Jews are, overwhelmingly, the descendants of refugees, to some degree or another. To conflate that with European imperialism in Africa seems not only simplistic but also really quite offensive.
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Netanyahu was born in an independent Israel, and is the son of a mother born in the Palestine Mandate and a father who emigrated to Israel in the 20s. (Thanks Wikipedia!) His government is currently building settlements in disputed land to import a more desirable population who already have housing inside Israel at the expense local population. I would think that the refugee "get out of jail free" card is well and truly past at this stage. How many generations does it have to be before calling current Israeli government policy towards Palestine "settler colonialism" is not wrong?
My serious criticisms of Israeli government policy really only begins in the early 2000s. Prior to that they could either claim in good faith they were fighting a war* or were actively working toward a peace settlement.

*Or the war was self-inflicted, like Ariel Sharon's war-crime bonanza in Lebanon.
 
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"Right to remain silent" ^^
 
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