until we can figure out what the heck is going on, seethes at naysayers
Freddie DeBoer, anti-woke blogger recently featured by @kaamrev, argues all Israelis should go back to
Africa America
Zionism has obviously been disastrous for Palestinian Arabs, many of whom have made their home in that space for generations. But I also think that there's a very pragmatic sense in which the modern Jewish nationalist project makes no sense: there is already a home for the Jews, one in which Jewish people are safe, rich, educated, and healthy. And that home is the United States of America
Unsurprisingly, many commenters call him r-slurred, and he sneeds at every single one of them
ronetc, master of Bayesian probability
"But if that state instead dropped its anachronistic attachment to ethnonationalism and state religion, perhaps that hatred would not prove so implacable." "Perhaps" is doing a lot of heavy lifting right there . . . would Israelis want to take that bet? What do you figure the over and under to be?
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Freddie deBoer
It's almost as if there's a whole other piece that this one paragraph is embedded in, which you've pulled out in an effort to be clever
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Alexander,
noticer
If you're proposing the US take in a few million immigrants, why not take the Palestinians instead?
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Freddie deBoer
Perhaps you should read the entirety of a piece before commenting on it critically
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Ben Cohen,
extraordinaire
While I disagree with a lot in this piece, it seems the core objection I have is that you seem to be conflating object level safety with self determinism with respect safety.
I think it's nearly impossible to say that a jew is safer in Tel Aviv with daily rockets pouring down on them and mandatory military conscription than in Brooklyn, but the idea behind Israel is that no other party can change that. One might argue that, say, 1930s Vienna was one of the best times and places to ever be a Jew, but without the influence over the political environment ....well we all know how this went.
2020s America is, indeed, a fantastic place to be a Jew, but we are still enough of a minority in voting/power/etc that that could change on a dime. Heck, look at the heel turn that left-wing politics has taken towards us in the last few years. You mention in your piece that America could easily lose its power and/or drop it's support of Israel, which would be catastrophic for it's people's safety, but seem to gloss over that the internal attitudes and conditions could shift as quickly.
Freddie deBoer
1. Israel demonstrably cannot secure its own safety.
2. The level of safety it has secured comes on the back of a truly unprecedented and unsustainable level of largesse from a fading superpower.
3. As I say in the piece, your comment implies not just the failure of multiculturalism in Israel but the end of the very project of liberal democracy. Taking what you're saying to its only logical end leaves us with a world in perpetual ethnic war and states that expel or exterminate ethnic minorities.
Janitorial victim
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Freddie deBoer
I have never written a single piece, in 16 years, that was intended to change minds
Many others reply credulously, as if packing up an entire country isn't grandiose nonsense from a documented bipolar man in the midst of a manic episode
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So there's an interesting thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis#The_"Voyage_of_the_Darned" -- in 1939 about 900 European Jewish refugees got on a ship and sailed to Cuba, but were told to frick off. Then to the US, but were told to frick off in very certain terms. Then to Canada, but were told to frick off. So they sailed back; about a third were accepted by the UK, the rest had to get off in France, Netherlands and other continental European countries.
If Freddie thinks that American attitudes towards mass Jewish immigration drastically changed by the end of war (up to giving them a politically independent territory!) idk he's completely divorced from reality.
Yes, and? Is there any liberal democracy in the world that managed to successfully integrate even single digit percentages of Muslim immigrants? No, there is not, not in a single country in the world.
In that sense, as a naive belief that you can just import a bunch of brown people and magic soil will turn them into culturally liberal, productive members of society, the multiculturalism project has undeniably, catastrophically failed. Apparently it requires a lot of effort (and we don't know how much effort and directed at what, because again we have exactly zero success stories) and maybe cannot work with those people at all.
France is unique in their willingness to use illiberal methods in enforcing liberal norms, such as banning burqas, and they've been trying to integrate Muslim Arabs for more than half a century and have nothing to show for it. Everyone else is doing worse than them.
So this is ridiculous wishful thinking. If having a shared state with 50% Muslim population (and the worst, most backwards and inbred and intolerant Muslims that other Muslim countries don't want anything to do with) won't magically work then it means that multiculturalism doesn't work, but multiculturalism must work, it's morally required to work, so nothing could possibly go wrong, cmon Jews, open borders. Absolutely r-slurred.
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It's the same as neocons thinking that knocking down Saddam would naturally lead to liberal democracy in Iraq. It's fantasy politics and a total refusal to meaningfully engage in the realities of the region. The entire Middle East is a cornucopia of states based upon a sect to which the importants are given, Jews and Secularists are often effectively a sect due to the insularity, while other sects are extracted from. This breeds sectarian hatred from those extracted and the sect binded to the state backs the state, even if they personally disagree, out of fear. This causes the out sects to grow genocidal to destroy the power base of the government and the sect binded to the state rationalizes extreme brutality to maintain power. There's typically a hierarchy of sects rather than an ISIS style extermination of other sects. Areas which are demographic strongholds for the core sect are developed while the demographic strongholds for the out sects are extracted and impoverished.
Algeria became independent and only gave Arabic official language status despite 30% of the population being Berbers, only changing this recently after gunning down Berbers protesting being treated as a periphery. While in Syria Alawites rationalize barrel bombings as necessary to prevent their extermination.
Middle Eastern states have a problem of being extractive and exclusionary in a way which is difficult to solve, a way which promotes zero sum politics, and Freddie doesn't seem to be proposing anything novel. Demographics are bound to state apparatus in ways which distinctly rationalize genocide and massacres as self defense against political repression and which makes solving it difficult. Rebellions often don't start as sectarian but gain a sectarian character as they progress due to the sectarian nature of society.
This article is about as meaningful as the people talking about how Alawites should leave to Iran to spare Syria. It's a perfect representation of Marxists existing in a fantasy other world which mirrors reality only superficially.
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He gives 500 citations to prove American Jews are doing okay financially, because it's easy to google, and then fails to provide evidence for any other aspect or think about a single other consequence because the answers can't be found on statista.
I've read a couple things from him before and somehow didn't realize he was completely r-slurred until this
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This reminds me of a quip, idk how historical it is, about why so few Jews actually fled Nazi Germany. Well, a lot of them were financially well off and owned pianos, and it's very hard to move if you have a piano.
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Population of Israeli - Israeli Arabs = 7.4 million
You're right, there no feasible way of removing that many people, the logistics are impossible.
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Keep yourself safe
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Isn't the US on its way to elect Literal Hitler 2.0, the guy who called white nationalists fine people, and who is going to pull 1933 2.0 and crown himself a fascist dictator for life? And even if he is not elected fairly, he's already attempted one deadly insurrection?
But I guess that's a risk that Freddie DeBoer is willing to take, on behalf of Jews.
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Leftist like Freddie ocellate between the West being a utopian fulfilment of cosmopolitan opportunity and the West as a bourgeois dictatorship with a deceptively rigid class structure which encompasses the entire world within a network of bourgeois dictatorships aligned within an ornamentalist array against the proletariat. He seems to think that Israeli Jews and American Jews are interchangable in a way that doesn't make sense.
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If you enjoyed this post, be sure to drop a like and subscribe to my substack
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Hey they are used to being kicked out of countries, so should be some muscle memory there.
But yeah nothing in this piece was remotely appealing.
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We're on the wishing away Israelis and Israel cope, always a new X Factor that will cause Israel's collapse
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horseshoe theory is many dimensional
Snapshots:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/this-is-zion:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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