this post was submitted on 31 May 2026
985 points (99.2% liked)
Political Memes
11914 readers
2747 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
1) Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
2) No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
3) Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
4) No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
5) No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Everyone's problematic
Valid criticism, but how does he feel today? Because on October 7, I was pretty supportive of strong retaliation, too.
Then I saw what Israel actually did, which was far beyond a military response on military targets. It wasn't long after they started that they lost my support. I can support the concept of justice, I can't support genocide.
I don't know how he feels about that today, but it is possible that his feelings in November, immediately following the attack, changed after the atrocious response. I think a lot of peoples' did.
Yeah I agree for the most part. I can't find anything about him retracting this comment in the aftermath though. Maybe he did.
Playing devils advocate for Snider, November 2023 was right after October 7th and I don't think there were nearly as many people pointing out and shouting about the ethnic cleansing Israel was using the attack as an excuse to partake in until we got into 2024.
Indeed.
I know "Well, you don’t get to decide on the response" certainly aged like milk, but I think folks in 2023 could be forgiven to be thinking "IDF is going to strike Hamas and Hamas brought them on themselves" as the wanton collateral harm largely wasn't on folks radar at the time. Some folks with more nuanced understandings sounded alarms and were dismissed, but having to respond to that situation mere weeks after October 7th... That's going to be a tough scenario for most people to come out looking ok.
Only naive people and people who had no clue what they were talking about. In 2023, israel had been a settler colonialist genocidal ethnostate for half a century already
Naive is right. I knew straight up anarchists that somehow didn't know the score RE Palestine until they started digging after 2023.
Honestly that was me too, I was also for squashing Hamas until I saw that this turned into genocide.
But his implied question is deep, what amount of retaliation is the correct or maximum amount? Not just in this case, but any case.
Well, for Israel, they have a deep-seated teaching of their culture that straight up tells them what is the appropriate amount of retaliation: it's called the Torah. All these "ultra-Orthodox" people in the Kinesset should know what their Bible says about retaliation. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." This law actually is intended to place limits on retaliation in that one is only owed what has been taken--with many rabbis seeing it as a means for financial compensation. As I understand it, in places like Egypt (where, according to tradition, Israel's forebears were exploited workers, basically slaves) had an unbalanced legal system that allowed for disproportionate retaliation ("you took my eye? Well now your family is dead"), especially as applied for aristocratic types. But the Torah was presented as universally applicable to every Jew.
So, leveling Gaza is disproportionate retaliation according to the very law they claim God Himself gave them.
in that case, the same thing from.the other side though. That attack was just retaliation. How long do you continue with an eye for an ~~eye~~ face? Blowback...
The only sane outcomes is to say doing more of the same will lead to worse atrocities and do something different. All this is retaliation is going to do is make it worse.
look at the Iran thing, lot of conservatives say they're worried Iran will build a nuke and sail it into Manhattan.. why are they worried about that ? what is it they've done to Iran over many decades that they think that's a possible retaliatory outcome ?
That's the eternal question. Too much retaliation isn't just immoral, it's tactically foolish. You horrify your allies and incite revenge. Too little on the other hand and you don't deter.
While I think we should have gone harder in punishment to the active members of the axis governments, I think the post WW2 rebuilding is probably best. Leaders and propagandists are targeted and punished and there's a period of hardship, but you help them rebuild while pressing them towards a less destructive attitude towards you.
The only way to kill your way to peace is to kill everyone. Real peace requires creating an environment where enough of both sides want peace and violence isn't worth it.
It's pretty obvious innit? Targeted counter terror operations. Use the considerable power and expertise available to the government to bring those responsible to justice without demolishing the whole country. Like America should've done (and eventually did) with bin Laden, instead of invading the countries next door for over a decade.
I mean that's what I would do, but to answer more broadly, I think the maximum amount should definitely be constrained to what is legal.
Oh fuck. I thought I liked him. Turns out he's a hypocrite :(
There's a long list of people. He's nowhere near the top. He has time to realize his mistakes, apologize, and get on board in a genuine fashion.
Here's hoping he does realize. But somehow I haven't seen that with anyone so far who was defending the Israeli crimes against humanity in Gaza and elsewhere. Everyone decent so far has been able to both condemn Hamas AND the genocide of the Palestinians.
It's almost like the situation in the ME is exceptionally nuanced and no amount of armchair discussions on social media are going to explain or resolve it.
I'm saying this as a non-Jew who married a Jew and had 3 kids with her.
Condemning settler colonialism is pretty simple. Maybe you're overthinking it?
Nobody cares who you married, and I'm saying this as a mischling jew.
I listen to a lot of Jewish comedians, does my opinion count?
Depends how many of them are named Jerry Seinfeld, I guess 🤷🏻
Is one of them Herschel Shmoikel Pinchas Yerucham Krustofsky?
And believe it or not I agree with you but that said it's not so cut and dry and if you were Jewish you would understand that much.
And being clear no one cares that you're a mischling Jew, and I'm saying this as a Canadian.
I guess it depends on what concepts you are willing to let go of. If you think Jews have some kind of holy right to land occupied by other people, yes, things are goig to be complicated because you also want to protect your ability to think of yourself as a good person, and that precludes you from supporting ethnic cleansing and genocide
If, on the other hand, you see Israel as a settler-colonial project no morally different than the Dutch in South Africa or the British in North America or the Spanish is South America or the Belgians in the Congo, it becomes a much easier ethical calculus.
There are plenty of Jews who view Israel as the latter, and the fact an identity "makes things complicated," points to self-interested decision. Just like being white makes the concept of removing barriers to employment by black people "complicated", or being a man might make supporting female rape victims "complicated." The fact that a choice might not benefit a group you identify with is not an argument in favor.
And, yeah, nobody should listen to "as a mischling jew." That's 1/4th Jewish.
Personally speaking they should pave over the entire ME. No one is showing they have the maturity to live there so take it away from everyone.
That said, not possible lol
Plenty of Jewish people interpret the slogan and promise Never again to refer to all genocide, not just that committed against Jews. Israel has been committing human atrocities for a while now, but under the authoritarian Netanyahu administration, they've burned the nuance right out.
Israel has become the monster it was once afraid of, and once promised never to be.
I am sorry to inform you that it never promised that. On the contrary, from its outset Zionism has been a colonial project fundamentally premised on the displacement, dispossession, and ultimately genocide of the Palestinian people.
The language of colonialism hadn't gone out of style yet when they started, so Zionist writing in the 19th and first half of the 20th century was much clearer about it:
See also Jewish Colonisation Association, Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, Jewish Colonial Trust, Zionism as settler colonialism, ...
Note also that from the beginning there has been strong Jewish opposition to Zionism, starting with opposition by Jews who were living peacefully there and wanted nothing to do with the project.
The situation in Gaza is not nuanced. There's a genocide happening there - the single worst crime possible. There's no nuance, it's as extreme and clear cut as it is possible to be.
Talking about it on the internet is important, because ideas can spread.
This isn't about Jewish identity. It's about a state committing genocide on another state.
Sorry to fire back at you like this, but I really don't know what you're trying to achieve with your comment, and it didn't make sense to me.
What is nuanced about shooting starving children in bread lines and bombing hospitals? Please enlighten me.
There are many, many, many Jews that feel their culture and their right to exist is under attack and the actions are justified and those walls they have built are there for good reason and exist over hundreds if not thousands of years of persecution.
This in no way makes it right and I agree with you, but we need to acknowledge the conversation comes with a history that is extremely loaded and I'd argue many of us are not in a position to fully cover the nuance.
I love the anger I get back for simply stating this.
That's fair, and I'm sympathetic to that fear and that concern, but for all the nuance of how it got to this point and why there's still too much support, I do think that the reality as it has become has removed all nuance from the situation as it currently stands.
Israeli soldiers are engaging in genocide with all the gleeful torture and killing that is associated with the crime. They need to be stopped, leadership needs to be punished, and the everyday people need to be deradicalized.
A lot of people's anger at the calls for nuance comes from the fact that we keep being told there's nuance and that we need to be sympathetic to israel as they commit horrifying crimes and not only is nothing done to stop them, people in western nations are being prevented from stopping our governments and institutions' assistance to them.
And I feel like I deserve a harem that sucks my dick every hour. That doesn’t make me nuanced, it makes me a dumbass. Pretending like the history matters at all is just a way of justifying evil actions to yourself.
Why is it impossible to discuss important things with people who act like fucking children? Maybe because they are? 🤷♂️
Anyways neither of us are solving this problem so I'm dipping out of trying to have a discussion with a dumbass. Your words not mine.