The headline has been altered by independent.
Here’s a link to an archived version
Can we stop acting like Israel is fucking normal? This shit doesn’t even happen in the US.
“This shit doesn’t even happen in the US”
Ok, Trump aside, do you remember the US response to the 9-11 attacks?
Israel is bang out of order, but it doesn’t help that the groundwork for dealing with “terrorists” on a global scale was laid by the US.
Remember renaming French fries to “Freedom Fries” because the French dared to oppose the invasion of Iraq, a country that had very little to do with the terrorist act?
I remember it very well. They did plenty of cringe stuff including burning Dixie Chicks CDs, sure.
But I don’t remember them having a chart-topping song about murdering women in other countries they were not at war with, let alone women who were citizens of nations that are their own allies.
Ok, maybe not that blunt, but it was there. The blueprint and the absurd patriotism that wandered into hostile.
France was a US ally too. And the rhetoric coming out wasn’t from some young men that make pop music but from grown men politicians.
US exceptionalism is one of the factors that has led us here, is what I’m saying.
Dutch guy here. We had our own 9/11 event when Russians shot MH17 out of the air which contained 200 Dutch people. You know what we did? We prosecuted those responsible (in absentia) and they will be arrested once they enter Dutch soil. No kids were harmed in the process (apart from those on the plane). Israel’s response of collective punishment is bad shit crazy!
We prosecuted those responsible (in absentia) and they will be arrested once they enter Dutch soil.
Sounds like you did absolutely nothing
You would think that someone would look at the last 20 years of war on terror and conclude that maybe you shouldn’t handle it the way the US did.
Or look at it and realize you can get away with it, even if it’s a sloppy war because the citizens don’t care if they lose as long as the other side still dies
Yeah you could argue that what Israel is doing is much smaller in terms of body count. Iraq and Afghanistan cost million lives+ and many more ruined. Israel is only at 30-40k so far.
But the quality bluntness of propaganda and cruelty of warfare is definitely different. The palestinian people have been imprisoned on a tiny strip of land and have nowhere to go.
I’ve been wondering why nobody has brought this clear comparison up before. The progressive left knows this will only antagonize the right wing. Since the objective is to save innocent civilian lives and get a ceasefire and not to score political points, they don’t draw the parallel.
And the liberals and right wing are excusing Israels behavior because subconsciously they know they did the same thing. So if Israel is guilty, so is the US.
The only one getting political points from the comparison is Russia to keep the atrocity by Israel going, damage the Reputation of the US and distract from their own war. Well or Israel possibly. Not accusing you at all, just musing from an “information warfare” perspective.
It happens everywhere, with increasing frequency. Depending on who’s calling for killing who, it’s either praised or giggled at or condemned. Off the top of my head…
Snoop Dogg had a mock execution of Trump, where he shot a Trump caricature clown in the head
In South Africa, there are prominent groups dancing around & chanting, “Kill the Boer! The farmer! SHOOT to KILL!! Brrrrrrrap!” But this has been justified because it’s “an old cultural chant”, totally not a threat. Malema has been called out for this, and he has reassured everyone, “We Have Not Called For The Killing Of White People… At Least For Now” But he “cannot ‘guarantee’ what will happen in the future”.
These aren’t really apt comparisons. None of the them are calling for the military to go and kill a citizen of another country.
Toby Keith : Courtesy of the Red White and Blue - https://youtu.be/ruNrdmjcNTc?si=DmXKSLPI2SHVoQM-
There’s plenty more. Or are you just being obtuse on purpose?
None of it is okay. It encourages violence, it desensitizes us, we see a comedian triumphantly holding up a bloodied, decapitated POTUS head with a look of cold indifference on her face and we say, "Oh, it’s okay. It’s not a call to violence specifically, it’s just artistic expression.
I’m picking Trump ones because he’s a big, easy target & the examples are easily found. Not because I endorse Trump. It also showcases how extreme violence is given a platform, praised. But there are plenty more examples just a Google search away.
So it’s fine for people to depict killing a POTUS all the time, and other people you don’t like. That’s acceptable. Kill the white farmers in South Africa, after all, they’re part of an oppressor class & they deserve it. SHOOT to KILL. But calling for the death of 3 random people is a line too far, I guess? 🤨
Your qualms with this are just the result of a culture with no guardrails, no moral foundation. Human life isn’t considered sacred. We tolerate & celebrate depictions of death all the time. This only encourages senseless mass shootings, violence.
“shot in the head” that’s misrepresentation big time. He shoots a gun towards the clowns head but it’s one of those gag guns with a flag coming out with the word “bang” on it… Which rhymes with Trump being depicted as a clown. It’s far more metaphorical than the other examples and you need to be pretty fucking dense to see it as a call for violence against Trump or anyone else.
The Israeli one and the South African ones are in my opinion comparable in that they both call for explicit violence and their only defense is basically “it’s art, I can do what I want”
Call to violence might be a stretch. However, I think it’s either incredibly naive or incredibly dishonest to overlook the depiction of a gun, pointed at a person, the trigger being pulled, the gun going bang, and the president/clown flinching in response.
You only point a gun at something if you intend to shoot it, possibly kill it. There is no exception.
It is indeed an artistic expression & not real, but the imagery is unmistakable. He casually plays out this scene & displays it to the world, basically saying, “Yeah, if this happened…I’m totally okay with this. I put this in my rap videos. No big deal.”
And I think a lot of people on Lemmy feel the same way about Trump.
You’re right, it’s not a national thing, but it’s not okay. The one with Snoop Dogg is a bit different though, because Trump is also inciting violence, so he made himself a legitimate target for responses like that.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Snoop Dogg had a mock execution of Trump, where he shot a Trump caricature clown in the head
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I wish I could agree, but we’ve got some fucked up shit top the country music charts from time to time.
I don’t think any of the fucked up countries song of the last 5 years get close to this. People forget 9/11 was over 20 years ago, that’s an entire generation worth of change. Disney was racist in the past, doesn’t mean it’s an excuse for others to be racists now.
Jasn Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town” was released in 2023 and that’s a commercial song. There are plenty of far worse example.
The US Attorney General John Ashcroft singing his wonderfully jingoistic 2002 masterpiece “Let the Eagle Soar”
Why is it so fucking hard for the U.S. to see Israel for what it is. I mean, as an agnostic I know exactly why, but I still have to ask my country why we can’t call out genocide when we can fucking see it?
It’s like sitting on the sidelines of the holocaust and just saying…well…we have interests in that region, so let’s hold on a minute.
We didn’t get involved in WW2 because of the Holocaust. There were plenty of newspaper articles about it all over the country well before Pearl Harbor, and nothing was done until we were attacked directly.
If there is one thing this whole affair is bringing up in the West is just how extremelly racist even the people who loudly proclaim themselves as “progressives” really are.
You see it when they pull out the anti-semite card to try and bat away criticism of Israel: even if Israel indeed represented all Jews (itself a racist assumption because it presumes “all Jews are the same and think the same”), the etnicity of the people mass murdering civilians because of their etnicity, having any weight on ones judgment of their actions is incredibly racist (of the “different weights for different races” kind).
Personally what I see is people who never stopped being prejudiced racists who judge people on their etnicity rather than their actual actions, only some etnic groups became less fashionable to overly be racist against whilst others did not - the architecture of racism is still well in place and in use, it’s just that for certain etnicities the prejudices changed.
How on earth did you come up with the idea that this is a progressive thing? It’s overwhelmingly conservatives and neoliberals using the “anti-Semitism” charge in defense of genocide.
The overwhelming absence of critique in liberal newspapers can be seen as evidence of self censorship due to “anti-semitism”. But corporatism / imperialism can also explain that. The charge of antisemitism is always hurdled at pro-palestinian (anti-genocide) protesters. Liberal media was also arguing “(a free Palestine) from the river to the sea” is a call to genocide.
Anybody that goes on and on about how people in some groups defined by the genetics they were born with are victims or are aggressors, is using the very same framework of prejudiced treatment as the far right.
Fair treatment is to classify people as victims or aggressors by those people having actually been victims or having victimized others and then help the former and stop and punish the latter. Not only is it wholly irrelevant the etnicity of the people involved (unless the people who victimized others did so due to the etnicity of said others, in which case they should be punished extra hard, IMHO) but it’s also massivelly unfair to paint a wide brush over everybody else who happens to have been born with the same genetics as either because of the actions of just those.
There is no such thing as Positive Prejudice: if you’re judging people differently because of their etnicity, you’re being unfair, even if you are judging them more positivelly than you would otherwise.
Successive ultra-nationalist and ever more far-right governments of Israel weaponized the “positive” prejudice of many towards Jews, and this is why we find ourselves were we are now: because complete total murderous racist sociopaths hid being this whole etnic group and committed ever more hideous acts of violent racism whilst avoiding punishment for it by taking advantage of people who still run around thinking in the very same mental framework of discrimination as the Nazis had - with a different list of “good” etnicities and “bad” etnicities in their minds than said Nazis, but still judging and behaving towards others differently depending on their etnicity.
Israel….what a shithole nightmare
Israel…is real? We should turn that into a meme after that piece of land gets erased by a meteor like in a Bible /s
Is this a case of “if you call us genocidal, we’ll kill you too”?
“in a song which has shot to the top of charts in Israel.”
Tell me again about how the government and Hamas are the bad guys, and the Israeli people only want peace.
They’re not listening to Matisyahu - One Day anymore that’s for sure…
