Well I’m glad to hear more people stating the obvious. Well done Bern.
By only condemning human rights violations by Hamas and tacitly approving bigger war crimes by Israel, our American and European leaders are choosing sides in a very obvious and hypocritical manner.
We are unnecessarily antagonizing a billion Muslims and making ourselves a target for terrorism by blindly supporting an unjust apartheid state.
I don’t want to on the side of Hamas, but I also don’t want to be on the side of Israel.
Why drag us into this?
USA and rest of the Western world has enabled Israel for the last 70 years while the Palestinians have been systematically disenfranchised and radicalized. No one put in geniune effort to de-escalate this situation and now shit has hit the fan.
Hamas: murders a thousand I Innocent people, rapes a bunch of women (and by that I include girls), and murders a bunch of babies
Leftists: Well that’s what they get for existing where they were existing.
Most western countries feel and are guilty because they repeatedly killed and exiled Jews and promised them land as retribution that didn’t belong to them in the first place.
About 1/3 of the people living in Palestine were jewish at the time of the partitition. Are you saying the entirety of land should have been given to the muslims?
A refreshing take for sure, and even though Bernie is Jewish he sees this cruel regime for what it really is. There are no excuses for harming innocent civilians, ever!
A lot of jewish actually call this out as a genocide, its just the world leader playing their politics while the people are getting murdered on the ground.
Problem is, at least where I live, the majority of the Jewish community fervently supports Israel.
Moreover, the idea that Israel somehow represents Jewish people as a whole is simply Israeli propaganda that promotes Israel’s interests at the expense of non-Israeli Jews.
I think it’s more pointing out how many politicians (and people in general), especially Republicans, who won’t criticize them, and even say criticizing them is anti-semitic. Him being Jewish means he has more cultural connection to them than they do, yet he still points it out. He also can’t reliably be called anti-semitic because he is a semite (at least the modern meaning of the word. I’m not sure if he speaks Hebrew or other Semitic languages).
Religion has not done a lot of good in the world lately. Turns out the “my way or the highway” approach creates nothing but death and violence.
As a Brit I’m always shocked people focus on us so much. Like yeah we fucked up a lot of places and did awful things, but basically every country in Europe has committed atrocities that are as bad if not worse, like the French in Vietnam or Belgium in Africa, or mother fucking Spain basically wiping put the entire south American continent.
Most of the current day border conflicts are related to the past century’s British policy, both due to the extent of the British Empire and its little interest in preventing trouble in their way out. You see similar issues with French ex-colonies, but since they weren’t as many they don’t appear as much in the news. Border conflicts in old Spanish colonies mostly took place during the 19th century, and they’ve been independent for long enough for their current issues not to have as much to do with Spain anymore. In contrast, there are British people alive today who were kicking around when the victors of WWII decided to split Palestine in half without asking Palestinians for their opinion, and afterwards chose to ignore the ethnic cleansings of Palestinians.
In any case, you shouldn’t take of this personally, unless you actually hold any position of relative power.
Three things: Scale, recency and contrition or perceived lack thereof.
The British Empire is the largest empire there has ever been. At its greatest extent, in 1920, it covered about 1/4 of the entire world, long after having lost many holdings like the US. The second largest, the Mongol Empire, reached almost the same size, but hundreds of years earlier.
In the same time period as the British, the Russian empire covered <20% in 1895, but its proportion of colonial lands to their own was much smaller than for the British Empire and the proportion of the current world population living in those areas is also much smaller. The French colonial empire covered less than 1/10th of the world at its peak in 1920, and was by far the other largest recent holding of colonies geographically and culturally outside of the immediate sphere of the holding country.
Spain is rarely brought up, I think, in large part because the Spanish empire reached its peak in the early 1800’s and so is “history”. Belgium doesn’t get discussed at much because 98% of their colonial holdings was Leopold II’s personal ownership of the Congo Free State. And then we get to the last bit: Contritition.
Nobody goes around saying the massive scale of gross abuse that happened under Leopold II’s rule of the Congo Free State was a good thing. Few people I’ve met ever defend France’s atrocities in Vietnam. Even the defence of their ownership of Algeria, which was special enough to trigger an attempted coup against Charles de Gaulle when he wanted to let it have independence because many saw it as part of France itself, is relatively muted.
But there’s still mainstream support for the British Empire in the UK. There are still people who insist the British Empire was awesome for the colonies that were exploited because they got English and rails and British legal systems and that somehow outweighs the mass murder and brutal exploitation and erasure of local cultures.
E.g. this survey from 2019, where 32% were proud of the British Empire, 37% were neutral, and only 19% considered it “more something to be ashamed of”. 32% were proud of their country’s history of colonialism and oppression. Critically this was significantly higher than for other colonial powers other than the Dutch. At the same time 33% thought it left the colonies better off vs. only 17% who thought they were worse off.
I’m not British, but I’ve lived in the UK for 23 years, and I’ve experienced this attitude firsthand from even relatively young British people (ok, so all of them have been Tories) - a refusal to accept that the fact that a substantial number of these former colonies had to take up arms to get rid of British rule might perhaps be a little bit of a hint that the colonial rule was resented and wrong.
No other modern empire has left behind such a substantial proportion of the world population living in countries that have either a historical identity tied up to rebelling against British rule, and/or have relatively recently rebelled against British rule, and/or still have substantial reminders, such as Commonwealth membership or the British monarch as their monarch. When a proportion of the British population then keeps insisting this was great, actually, there you have a big part of it.
I think the general focus comes from the particular reach of the British empire controlling ~ a quarter of the world, but I agree every major power has done it
That said, in this particular conflict, it’s more about how right after WWII , around the time when the United nations was founded. The world powers knew they basically owned the world at this point with nuclear tech, but justified it by arguing they should use this power to preserve countries borders.
Around the same time when the world powers are saying this, land that Britain colonized in Palestine was given to create Israel. Which is hypocritical.
I can understand machiavellianism in the context of pre 1950 geopolitics, but there will never be peace because of the decision making of Western powers doing something they have acknowledged is unethical
Traditionally, churches and other religious institutions, have been good at building community and programs that benefit the less fortunate among us. You know, the whole “love your neighbor as yourself” thing.
More and more, though, it has devolved into not much more than political extremism and often hateful rhetoric and even calls to physical violence.
I don’t think that is new. It’s true that it helps. But religions have always been involved in war. Up until 200 years ago the Pope was the most powerful person on the planet for at least 1000 years.
In all seriousness, community is the biggest benefit of religion, and the reason I’m ok with it existing in modern society. The idealized church (and these do still exist in smaller churches) is a safe place for people to come, not be judged, and find acceptance and support.
A friend of mine goes to a church like this, and honestly sometimes I’m jealous. I’m as atheist as they come in my personal beliefs, but hearing all the actually cool stuff they do to support their members is really cool. I don’t agree with their religion, but they’re practicing it right as far as I’m concerned.
Religion should absolutely be either personal or small community, though. As soon as you have states using it as justification for violence, that religion has stopped being useful or acceptable.
Agreed, it’s mostly community as far as personal benefits. We had a friend group through it that fell apart recently and my wife wants to go back to church only for the community.
Outreach is mostly a guise in my opinion, a show that’s put on to make the congregation think their money is being used wisely. I have a lot of disdain for organized religion though, having grown up in it and painfully “deconstructing” a couple years ago. I can’t step foot in a church ever again (minus a wedding).
Religion is a plague. It’s the reason we’re going to destroy ourselves. How many of the people who deny climate change (and every other batshit insane position taken by lunatics) are religious right-wingers? By far, most.
the communist elite in china don’t give AF about climate change and they’re nothing close to “right wing” or religious. you’re just cherry picking to make a (very weak) point.
It’s not religion, but it is strict adherence to an ideology and refusing to acknowledge facts that contradict the ideology or make it inconvenient
Shh, Bernie, corporate America might blacklist you from ever working for them.
I (a non-US) watched Hillary in a documentary about her saying Bernie has never worked (in corporate/professional settings) all his life. If that’s true, I don’t think it matters to him.
Bernie being on the right side of history as usual.
At least someone has common sense
I mean, Bernie Sanders always had that. That’s a good part of why people liked him.
See him arguing against various wars where he stood among few against the many and was so far right on these takes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_om-x323Em0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZo97nFS9GU
One of the comments under the videos puts it well:
For every wrong move america has made in the last 40 years, there is a video of Bernie arguing against it.
