Israel-Hamas War 2023

[Tamas]

If you disagree actually disagree instead of just flinging insults.

After 245 pages I have said everything I am going to say. Besides, what is to argue with statements like there's no need to talk about the hostages because too much have been talked about them as opposed to the Gazans? (I wonder if you made a comparison of, say, number of Guardian articles on each, how much that'd stand up)

Or that consider the motivations of those calling for hostages to be freed? Or that that hostage kid was killed by Israel anyways so who cares?

This is some incredibly low-sunk stuff.

[Josquius]

If you disagree actually disagree instead of just flinging insults.

After 245 pages I have said everything I am going to say. Besides, what is to argue with statements like there's no need to talk about the hostages because too much have been talked about them as opposed to the Gazans?

I never said that.
I disagreed with the idea that there needs to be a special effort to attract attention to their plight.
We, and more importantly those who can actually do something about it, are well aware. The current course of action is (on the surface at least) all about that at the expense of all else.

Or that consider the motivations of those calling for hostages to be freed?

Exactly. Its not just the surface message that matters. Its the motivations of those using it.

Or that that hostage kid was killed by Israel anyways so who cares?

Convenient that a death doesn't matter if its at the hands of the Israeli military.

[Tamas]

Convenient that a death doesn't matter if its at the hands of the Israeli military.

Convenient that if a hostage dies in an attempt to free them its not the hostage taker's fault.

But I am not going to rejoin this hateful madness you, Raz, Viper and Otto are dancing in.

You can see from this thread how easily people can be riled up to have absolutely abhorent views and declarations.

[Jacob]

The US vetoes full membership for Palestine in the UN.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Biden Administration continues its performative attacks on Israel, it appears to be imminently planning to sanction an IDF unit under the Leahy Law, and has several other IDF units under investigation.

Firstly, I think the Leahy Law is bad policy. A State Department panel should have no say in sanctioning individual military units of other countries (they were also, stupidly, investigating an Australian unit for things it did in Afghanistan years ago.) It should largely be up to the President to make an executive decision on sanctioning other countries--and while it would be within his power to only sanction individual units, I think individual unit sanctions are performative and stupid. If you really think some foreign military needs sanctions, then the whole military should be sanctioned. (Also what just stops the IDF from disbanding a sanctioned unit and distributing its members to other units etc? Stupid law.)

Secondly--like a lot of things with Biden undermining Israel (like letting the UN's antisemitic and hateful ceasefire resolution pass), a lot of you are going to say "this is nothing, not a big deal etc." Some of you think I am overreacting or trolling etc.

What you completely miss is the longstanding campaign to delegitimize Israel. Other countries take America's lead, and the more Biden flirts with playing the delegitimacy game, the worse it gets.

Britain is mostly filled with antisemites, and it is likely Labour will be very anti-Israel, one of the last Western countries that is not extremely anti-Israel.

Young progressives in America are almost antisemitic to a one, and are pushing to make the Dems just another anti-Israel bloc, meaning going forward every election in America will be one for Israel's possible survival. The 50 or so hateful Muslim nations have "stacked the deck" in international relations against Israel.

European governments have fully embraced antisemitism and anti-Zionism due to a combination of a) desire to curry favor with Muslim trading partners, b) desire to curry favor with violent Muslims that Europe has been importing into their countries for years and c) desire to curry favor with far leftist antisemites that are entrenched throughout the world wide leftist movement.

The U.S. is really the last vanguard against Israel being turned into apartheid South Africa, which will put Israel on a long term trajectory for possible destruction and "liquidation" of its Jewish residents. The Democrats have failed to try and push back against the international campaign against Israel, and now many seek to actively join it.

A vote for the Dems is a vote for genocide of Jews.

[OttoVonBismarck]

From The Times, a little sample of what is coming:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/do-you-hate-britain-i-asked-my-pupils-thirty-raised-their-hands-35gxx2t6n

Do you hate Britain, I asked my pupils. Thirty raised their hands
After Katharine Birbalsingh had her prayer ban upheld, the head accused schools of failing to back UK values. One teacher, writing anonymously, reveals the troubling views of children as young as 11

'The Taliban do let girls go to school," boasted the teenage boy. "But they stop them when they turn 11, which is very fair."

In an after-school detention, a handful of pupils were doing their best to convince me, their teacher, that Afghanistan was much nicer now the Taliban were in control. Nothing I said would convince them. It turned out these children not only supported gender inequality but were fans of executing all manner of criminals too.

My pupils are a lively bunch. The school, where I teach humanities, is a large academy in the south of England and caters to those from poor families. Most are Muslim and a few have lived in Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. They burst with character and enthusiasm for improving their lives. I work hard to help them and have a genuine pride in them, in a way only fellow teachers will understand.

But I also worry about them. I share some of the same concerns that Katharine Birbalsingh expressed after her legal victory last week, when she successfully defended a High Court challenge to her ban on prayer rituals. In the absence of a clear commitment to British values, she argued, identity politics was filling the vacuum.

The more I get to know my pupils, the more distressed I am by some of their views. Of course, teenagers have always aspired to radical chic in order to shock their elders. In my youth, we lounged around the school common room repeating Frankie Boyle's most offensive jokes.

But this generation is different. The other day, in response to a comment made by a pupil, I asked a class of 13-year-olds to raise their hands if they hated Britain. Thirty hands shot up with immediate, absolute certainty.
I'm not sure how many of my pupils support the Taliban. It is probably a minority, but not a small one. Many of the boys I teach hold shocking views on women. One Year 8 pupil regularly interrupts lessons with diatribes about how western society is brainwashing young men into becoming more feminine. Most of the lads I teach think women should have fewer rights than men. They spend citizenship lessons arguing that wives should not work.

Such views come from a dangerous manipulation of their faith they find online. The misogynist influencer Andrew Tate is their hero, particularly since his claimed conversion to Islam.

In some ways, the fact that these children hate Britain and all its values is not entirely surprising. Many have relatives whose lives were ruined by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They fled to Britain for a better life, having fought against oppressive regimes. It is strange, then, that a Kurdish boy of Iraqi descent should tell me he admires Saddam Hussein. "Iraq's just a bit rubbish now," he reasons. A blame he can easily place with Britain.

My pupil's childhoods were spent watching parents processing trauma from these wars, while around them British government policies seemed focused on disparaging immigrants: the "hostile environment", Brexit and now the Rwanda plan. A Muslim teacher tells me she has been called a terrorist in the street. The children, she says, will have faced similar harassment.

But all too often these sentiments spill into bigotry towards their own country and others who live here. Due to the Gaza war, no group is more despised than the Jews, with pupils regularly making comments of pure hatred. Teachers are asked: "Who do you support: Israel or Palestine?" We are supposed to remain neutral, but some staff adorn their laptops with pro-Palestinian slogans.

And this reflects a big part of the problem: my school and many others are rolling over and not even attempting to mount a defence of western values.

My colleagues tend to believe that the solution to our pupils' dislike of Britain is to design a curriculum that is packed with hand-wringing about western imperialism and institutional racism. If we teach them we did wrong, then they will know that we are sorry and move on, the argument goes.

This process of radical healing can be useful. It can help to have difficult conversations and entice pupils from different backgrounds into engaging critically with their work. But I also think it has gone too far.

In some schools, the anti-western narrative is woven through much of the curriculum. A friend of mine teaches history and in a single day says he could teach the Spanish colonisation of the Americas, the Portuguese colonisation of Africa, the British colonisation of India, the decolonisation of the British Empire and the slave trade. This relentless focus on empire does not seem to have made our pupils any less angry.

The problem is not limited to my pupils. I once taught at a middle-class school with mostly white children. Here, the curriculum was similarly designed to open minds to the evils of western civilisation. The pupils were not susceptible to Islamism, but were still imbued with a sense that their country is particularly bad. Increasingly, schools are not dissuading children of these prejudices, but confirming them.

My school is only part of the problem. The history curriculum at many schools may now feature the diversity of troops in the First World War, or the 1980s as a period of queer exploration. These are worthwhile subjects for an undergraduate essay, but not substitutes for the basic building blocks of historical knowledge.

I once observed a Year 8 lesson on the "black Tudors". One pupil raised his hand to ask: "Who were the Tudors?" — they hadn't thought to teach the Reformation before the racism. Similarly, when teaching the Norman Conquest, it is becoming unfashionable to teach the pivotal Battle of Hastings. Instead, some schools focus on studying Empress Matilda, who ruled Brit. Again, a worthy subject at some point, but an odd one to teach to Year 7s instead of the fact Harold Godwinson was (probably) shot in the eye with an arrow.

I worry the effect of this pedagogical radicalism is not to calm tensions, but to exacerbate them. A teacher friend visited a school recently and heard its head of history describe the aim of their curriculum as the creation of "scholar activists". They said they wanted to turn pupils into radical agents of protest against a state they say is institutionally racist.

Some of this chaos is down to the growth of academy schools that began under Michael Gove when he was education secretary. Gove attempted to introduce a conservative version of the national curriculum. But now academies and free schools, which now comprise 80 per cent of secondary schools, have greater freedoms to dictate their curriculums. The result for some schools has been much less 1066 and much more "all that" .

Solving this problem is tricky. It is sad there seems to be little desire to measure and discuss the scale of disaffection I see from my pupils.

Curriculums, to the extent pupils pay attention to them, can be a powerful tool to mould society. Yet hardly anyone is arguing for a balanced, liberal curriculum that would focus on traditional subjects while incorporating critical, or decolonised, narratives. From what I have seen, the alternative to this produces some pretty troubling results.

[viper37]

From The Times, a little sample of what is coming:

Curriculums, to the extent pupils pay attention to them, can be a powerful tool to mould society. Yet hardly anyone is arguing for a balanced, liberal curriculum that would focus on traditional subjects while incorporating critical, or decolonised, narratives. From what I have seen, the alternative to this produces some pretty troubling results.

Good.

We need less secularism and more religion in schools and everywhere in government to make sure this happens more and more.

Less critical thoughts, more spoon fed ideas rejecting liberal values.

You should be happy.  With a little guidance, these kids could have become Christian Conservatives and elected the next MAGA moron anywhere in the world.

[Razgovory]

Yeah, so has viper flipped or something?

[grumbler]

I think that posters using sarcasm should end their posts with "/s" so the slower forum members can appreciate them as well.

[Josquius]

Do you hate Britain, I asked my pupils. Thirty raised their hands
After Katharine Birbalsingh had her prayer ban upheld, the head accused schools of failing to back UK values. One teacher, writing anonymously, reveals the troubling views of children as young as 11

Weird lead in as I could very well have imagined simular in my class of non thinkers.
Hating Britain is the British way. Its a shit country. But it's our shit country.

I once observed a Year 8 lesson on the "black Tudors". One pupil raised his hand to ask: "Who were the Tudors?" — they hadn't thought to teach the Reformation before the racism. Similarly, when teaching the Norman Conquest, it is becoming unfashionable to teach the pivotal Battle of Hastings. Instead, some schools focus on studying Empress Matilda, who ruled Brit. Again, a worthy subject at some point, but an odd one to teach to Year 7s instead of the fact Harold Godwinson was (probably) shot in the eye with an arrow.

So a teacher actually does a good job and covers something interesting the kids wouldn't have heard before rather looping around the same handful of topics for the 3rd time...
But it's a big disaster because theres obviously going to be one kid in class who doesn't even know what he had for breakfast?
Not sure where the existence of black tudors equates to teaching racism. Such odd pearl clutching.
The battle of Hastings gets taught long before year 8. The whole late medieval period in England however tends to be totally ignored so great to see a teacher looking at it.

Just saw another article today incidentally about a study that found culture war nonsense turned off far more voters than they persuaded. I do think people are getting wise. Fingers crossed.

Not sure what this article has to do with the current Israel situation at all however?

[Razgovory]

What is year 8 in people years?

[Grey Fox]

Middle school seniors, so 13?

[OttoVonBismarck]

Josq is exhibiting the typical low IQ hamastan shit we have come to expect.

1. You dislike Britain because of whinging British culture shit, these Muslims hate Britain because they want to see women who go outside with their head uncovered stoned to death. You. Are. Not. The. Same.

2. How it relates to the situation in Israel was explained, by me, in the post immediately prior and in several prior posts. There is a wave of hateful, Muslim-lead antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiment that is dominating many Western countries. The U.S. is functionally the last bastion of the West against this, and when it falls to the Hamastans, Israel will be on the pathway to being treated like apartheid South Africa--with probably very terrible results. Unfortunately due to extreme Jew hatred, the Israelis won't be able to mass flee to Britain and other white countries like a large portion of the Afrikaner population, they will likely just be massacred in place.

[Josquius]

Josq is exhibiting the typical low IQ hamastan shit we have come to expect.

1. You dislike Britain because of whinging British culture shit, these Muslims hate Britain because they want to see women who go outside with their head uncovered stoned to death. You. Are. Not. The. Same.

2. How it relates to the situation in Israel was explained, by me, in the post immediately prior and in several prior posts. There is a wave of hateful, Muslim-lead antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiment that is dominating many Western countries. The U.S. is functionally the last bastion of the West against this, and when it falls to the Hamastans, Israel will be on the pathway to being treated like apartheid South Africa--with probably very terrible results. Unfortunately due to extreme Jew hatred, the Israelis won't be able to mass flee to Britain and other white countries like a large portion of the Afrikaner population, they will likely just be massacred in place.

We are not the same you proclaim here... Yet you have no issue conflating " OMFG woke. Black people and women in history. We R doomed if we don't just learn the list of kings!" With Islamic extremism. 

[OttoVonBismarck]

I'm starting to think Josq did drugs or something before typing that post.