They don’t really care about that unless it’s organized. A few fires here and there is handled by insurance and poses no threat to capital. All the more reason to get organized!

Be afraid so that we can cut your benefits and you’ll forgive us due to nationalism.

The Global South is far more developed in this regard and is consequently where most of the action is in the class war. They fight against comprador governments, anti-indigenous oppression, anti-worker policies with far more militancy and organization and popularity than anything in any OECD country. Of course, the people of the Global South are not politically monolithic and they also have liberals, monarchists, fascists, etc.

All correct opinions are heavily biased.

You are wrong both semantically and in emphasis. I have had to say this 3 times already. I pointed out that it’s wrong to put so much emphasis on the former, it is distracting from the injustice, and your response was to be contrarian while ignoring what I’ve argued.

Do some self-criticism.

If you think just a bit harder about what it means for cops to be in on lynchings you will realize that you are drawing attention to an ahistorical and false semantics debate rather than keeping focus on the injustice posted. Just like these Reddit liberals trying to split hairs.

Ask yourself whether it was normal for cops to be at lynchings, then re-read my previous comment.

Reddit liberals are in here trying to make this about their own misunderstanding if a term.

If this was your first response to hearing about occupiers attacking and disappearing someone, reconsider your priorities.

This is the kind of red scare sinophobia that liberals are all complicit in as well. This is why there have been anti-China propaganda pushes: so that you will accept and maybe even help implement siniphobic policies.

Do you believe an invasion is well-supported by very slow, large, connected barges? Militarily this would only make sense for slightly more efficiently supplying an occupation.

I think you mean something different from this, but there were actual Jewish Nazis during the (thankfully short-lived) Third Reich. And the Zionists that act like Nazis today sometimes consider themselves Jewish, though I question the compatibility of ethnic cleansing settler colonialism and Judaism.

The US is a white supremacist, xenophobic state. Those in power actively promote this, they think it is good to give “Israel” (brown) baby killing missiles. “Israel” is their “friend”, you see, just like apartheid South Africa, but far more useful for destroying “enemies” (brown children in other countries) due to its location.

The US itself was founded on settler colonial genocide and chattel slavery. The only reckoning it has evet had about this was its civil war, but this process was left incomplete. It retains most of its settler culture.

HTS and those in their orbit are derived from ISIS and similar groups, itself drawing radicalized fighters from around the world to do heinous things to people. And in Syria/Iraq, funded by the US to destabilize inconvenient governments. Like that of Assad.

It is not entirely surprising that fellow imperialist attack dogs are not first on their list to attack. They are also trying to court “the international community” (OECD) by privatizing (read: scrapping for parts) industry and services. Going after Israel would disrupt that angle. But attacking countries and people that the US has already been helping kill? No worries of retaliation from the “international community”.

Before I respond to anything in this comment, I want to make a note about its nature and content.

It does not, in fact, address basically anything I said. Rather than address what I said, 90% of your comment is just an attempt to rehash pieces the history of “Israel” and Hamas, with some true elements, some misleading elements, and some outright false elements. It is unclear why you wrote most of it and its presentation is incoherent, without clear connection between paragraphs or points. It’s like you are summarizing bits and pieces of Wikipedia and injecting your own takes every so often.

Anyways. I will simply repeat myself where necessary, which is to say, repeat most of my previous comment in one way or another.

In my last comment, I took issue with your presentation of Hamas as terrorist. You claimed, “Using indiscriminate armed violence against civilians for political goals or under political pretenses is about the most reasonable definition of terrorism I can come up with.” and I responded to this with two paragraphs explaining how this is misleading at best and is itself deployed in a racist way via its inconsistent application. I made note of how it is used inconsistently repeatedly and challenged you to consider your own use of the term. In your reply, you did not engage with any of this. Instead, you wrote this:

Yes, plenty of other people perform indiscriminate attacks upon civilians, and many states, including in the west use arbitrary violence against other civilians or even their own. I’m sure people are aware that they are terrorists outside of Hamas.

You are right, plenty of people use the label to further their own goals and the ‘terrorist’ label is mostly used if not misused to discredit groups of people or political movements. Since it doesn’t really seem like the term is going to go anywhere soon, I think it is important to give a precise meaning to the term for this very reason.

This does not address what I said or how I challenged you. I did not ask “how is the term used?” I gave you plenty of direction: it is used inconsistently and in a racist manner. I asked you what function that serves. Is, “discredit” the entirety of your thought process for why a colonized people would be targeted with demonizing language applied inconsistently? You should spend more time thinking about it. I’m not exactly being subtle, here.

Re: precision, that is actually what I am pointing out to you. The term is not applied consistently, i.e. it has more meaning than what you might go and try to look up in a dictionary. You are actually being less precise, using a false facade of semantics, missing the actual semantics going on here. And still trying to push back despite conciliatory language.

I next responded to your boorish claims about Hamas doing lots and lots of terrorism, saying: “Such as? How does this compare to “Israel”? The surrounding comprador states? The US? Canada? Do you apply this logic and labeling frequency consistently or as suggested by dominant propaganda?”

The entirety of your response to that appears to be:

Do we really need to mention every single act of terror committed by the Hamas or otherwise since the dawn of time? This is just shitty rhetoric, the same kind that Zionists use all the time.

This is childish behavior. You claimed, “Hamas have carried far too many terrorist attacks over a far too long period for us to have any doubts that they are indeed ‘terroristic’ as our friend put it”. (PS this chauvinist is not my friend). I asked you to back up your false claim (because we both know you can’t) with examples and to critically examine what you are saying by comparison to relevant countries, including the occupying power and its imperial backer. Rather than do so, you are pretending I have asked the world of you, to name every single “terrorist attack” (you named zero). This is dishonest and bad faith behavior and unless you are literally a child you should know better.

Answer the question or just be honest that you can’t.

I then challenged you to contextualize this in terms of settler colonial genocide, of which there are many precedents following similar models, also with the same kinds of backers from what is now the OECD. The absurdity would be clear if you were honest about this and actually tried to answer. I stated, “When First Nations fought against settlers, were they terrorists and similarly illegitimate? What would you think of someone who watched their genocide and spent their focus on villifying militant groups and alleged specific acts with racialized language while using no such emphasis for the much greater volume of such violence to enact genocide? Many indigenous groups have recognized the need to oppose settlers themselves and settlerdom, the people who stole their and their parents’ land and houses and killed their relatives. You simply dismiss such people as terrorists? Without chauvinist glasses of the oppressor you would probably call them freedom fighters.”

You simply ignored this in its entirety.

The rest of my comment was similarly ignored. Repeating it,

While it is nice to keep it mind, the fact that they also do other things besides terrorism is not an argument.

Of course it is when the absurd premise is to ignorantly broad brush them with the label. The vast, vast majority of the activities of Hamas cannot be described as terroristic, much more so than their accusers.

Or should we also refrain from calling the Israeli state terrorist because it also does other stuff besides indiscriminately and arbitrarily targeting Palestinians?

Do you call “Israel”, which is infinitely more guilty of this and is itself the settler colonial occupier, a terrorist state at its every mention? Do you jump into conversations to ensure it is understood as such?

“Israel” engages in a genocidal campaign of land theft and ethnic subjugation. Describe the actual acts and see how much value your attempt at labeling possesses in terns of delegitimation.

Instead, you populated the rest of your response with an uninvited and, as stated before, problematic attempt to summarize Hamas. The point of doing so is not clear. You explicitly say what you claim it to be, i.e.,

But you do make some good points. Although I understand why you might have thought otherwise, I do think that Hamas needs to be portrayed fairly which indeed we haven’t done so far. Leaving it that way doesn’t do Palestinians, which overall greatly require our support and help, any good.

So for anyone else who would, per chance, stumble upon here, I’d like humbly submit my own personal presentation of Hamas, not-so-highly condensed for your own benefit:

You might have noticed that I don’t require nor did I ask for a meandering and confused history lesson. I am not bumbling around here like you are, throwing around settler language and dancing around questions and challenges. I have been quite direct and plain in what I am saying and you are avoiding it, which I suppose is an admission in its own way that you are not up to the task of honestly responding.

Because you have dumped a confused and meandering history lesson and then immediately ran away, there isn’t much reason to go through it point by point and it would take up way too much space. I will poke at a couple things stated just because I can, but if anyone is particularly enamored with any sections I would be happy to tear through them. Feel free to ask. I do want to again emphasize how strangely written this is, making allusions to people you could simply name and making seemingly disconnected points that jump around in time.

[…] in the nineties […] they started launching suicide bombings […]

I will note that you do not actually go over how this is terrorism, but leave it implied by the form of resistance, relying on the audience’s familiarity with islamophobic tropes. I invite you to list the bombings, their targets, and their locations. Re: location, here is a hint: they are nearly all in the West Bank, i.e. demarcated Palestinian territory. You may wish to ask yourself why, say, blowing up a military vehicle (like in Mehola Junction) is not a direct act of resistance against oppressing occupiers and not terrorism. You may wish to ask yourself how much you have internalized islamophobia by the form of weapon used. The occupiers use planes, missiles, and tanks, and kill in far greater volumes, and target civilians to a staggeringly greater degree. I challenge you to, again, go through your own references to “Israel” and ask whether you always call it, “the illegitimate terrorist so-called state of ‘Israel’”, as your knee-jerk response to Hamas is to go into such invective.

other legitimate or terror attacks where committed and directed by Hamas members

Such as? I’ve already asked you to back up your claim that they have committed, “so many” that it justifies saying Hamas, “have carried far too many terrorist attacks over a far too long period for us to have any doubts that they are indeed ‘terroristic’ as our friend put it”

Hamas being largely considered at this point by the Israelis as a mortal enemy of Israel and of the Jewish people

“Israelis” already considered all Palestinians to be such, particularly any that formed any kind of militant resistance to genocidal settler colonial occupation and oppression. They are extraordinarily racist, as in old-timey racist (because they are settlers), and they conflate Judaism with their own violent and horrific projects - itself one of the most antisemitic programs in existence. Your claim here was simply left to fester, unchallenged. Oh good, the “Israeli” settler point of view. Funny how others are not given the same weight.

Israel blockaded the Gaza strip in return

Is it in return? Or was it simply another excuse to escalate and oppress, same as the status quo for decades?

Anyways, I’m out of space.

Sure. When’s the last time they’ve allowed elections to occur, though?

When have you ever tried educating yourself on this topic outside of accepting and repeating the propaganda of those who genocide Palestinians?

Palestine and Palestinians are not permitted a functioning state, including the so-called Palestinian Authority. There was exactly one round of questionable “elections” in the late 2000s following the failed Camp David agreements, the electoral process dictated to Gaza by the UN, but not one allowed to be executed in any remotely fair way due to meddling and destabilization by the occupiers, “Israel”, including wars and invasions during the process. The people of Gaza are refugees and their government, such as it is, is a collaborative relationship between the UN and Hamas, a relationship established by Hamas de facto winning a small guerilla civil war with Fatah with the election they won as words to be misunderstood by Western chauvinists. This is why “Israel”'s genocidal campaign in Gaza heavily targeted UN workers alongside hospitals and schools: they are part of the normal civilian infrastructure responsible for healthcare, aid distribution, etc, and they work alongside Hamas members doing the exact same things but more closely to the people on the ground. There is no process or even just basic societal basis for elections. This is a factionalized struggle for survival. Their democratic progress has been to form solid alliances with other anti-comprador groups and to involve them in governance. And to organize against their occupiers.

Calling them terrorists is using racial “Israeli” propaganda directed at all Palestinians

Nope.

Yep.

You can clearly see I differentiated Hamas from Palestinians.

And “Israel” propaganda also waffles on that line as needed, broad brushing when they can get away with it and being slightly more specific when it suits them. When making a case to, say, Western governments, it will call Hamas, specifically, terrorists. It is intended to be a selectively-applied delegitimizing label. But in casual conversions and domestically, it is used much more broadly and causally but to the same effect. And always racially.

If we go through your comment section, will we find the same knee-jerk labeling of “Israel”, which is infinitely more guilty and more is an occupying oppressor? How about your own country, which likely supports the genocide?

Yes, the Israelis look at all Palestinians as Hamas

The “Israelis” look at Palestinians as subhumans just like other Western settler colonists did to their targets. You are seeing an ongoing settler colonial genocide and following the propaganda of the genociders. Would you have called the Sioux terrorists for opposing their own genocide, fighting the settlers occupying their lands? I think so. Rather than recognize the dramatic difference between the actions and basis for them, the violences at hand, you are allowing yourself to be persuaded by the inconsistent, flattening application of settler propaganda, persuaded to repeat it even while feeling that you’re doing the opposite. This is common with a lack of investigation.

as do many people in the West, but I’m not Israeli nor do I care what they think - so what they think doesn’t matter. There’s no Israeli propaganda in my comment, that’s your assumption based on…?

The misleading and false characterizations of Hamas as simply terrorist. This is an easily recognizable trope.

If your entire argument boils down to “Well you’re saying the same stuff as Israel is so you’re just spreading propaganda” then maybe you don’t have thoughts of your own, it’s all just the opposite of what Israel says.

This is just projection. You’re clearly recycling the logic of (racist) Zionist settler propaganda, I am simply recognizing it for what it is.

Israel is a terrorist state but that doesn’t mean every single thing they say is wrong. Hamas are terrorists, plain and simple. They invoke fear through violence.

All substantial violence invokes fear but somehow you don’t seem to consistently use the language that way. Do some self-interrogation on why that is and what purpose this label is serving in your mind on this topic.

Let me know of all the benefits Hamas has brought to the Palestinian people and educate me.

This is asking me to write quite a bit more than I already have. It would be many comments long. Hamas is the governing body of Gaza, it works with UN aid distribution and expertise to manage the infrastructure of Gaza. The people of Gaza had hospitals and doctors due to Hamas via this system, for example. In addition, Hamas is the only ruling Palestinian body that does not function as compradors like the PA, who assists “Israel” in their oppressions. The existence of a militant resistance to the occupation is in many ways thanks to Hamas - along with smaller militant factions, of course. Imagine how much could be listed re: all aid dispersal, all governance of infrastructure, bureaucratic necessities, militant organizing.

I’m not going to write up this comprehensive history for someone who is not only uncurious, but actively resistant to humility and education. That would be silly. If you are curious you can read books yourself and learn the same things.

Nothing you wrote was educational or convincing.

I do not set my bar for educational or convincing based on your responses so that’s okay. You are already aware that you have not actually investigated this topic and this is just disssembling. I did not have high hopes for you being open about this.

Hamas are still terrorists who are holding their own people hostage.

It’s really funny that you claim to not be blindly repeating Zionist propaganda and then say things like this.

Using indiscriminate armed violence against civilians for political goals or under political pretenses is about the most reasonable definition of terrorism I can come up with.

That is not what Hamas does. And by that definition, applied consistently, you would actually need to include most of the groups that Hamas does fight, including “Israel” and its supporting states like the US and Canada. And yet they are rarely named terrorist states, whereas Hamas routinely receives this association by those who live in those countries and help build their materials of oppression. What function do you believe this selective use of language serves?

The application of the label has been racist and chauvinist for ages. Most pick it up by cultural osmosis, not seeing reason to question or investigate it. Now is your opportunity!

I agree that the Palestinians are fully legitimate in taking up arms to fight against the occupier but the Hamas have carried far too many terrorist attacks over a far too long period for us to have any doubts that they are indeed ‘terroristic’ as our friend put it

Such as? How does this compare to “Israel”? The surrounding comprador states? The US? Canada? Do you apply this logic and labeling frequency consistently or as suggested by dominant propaganda?

When First Nations fought against settlers, were they terrorists and similarly illegitimate? What would you think of someone who watched their genocide and spent their focus on villifying militant groups and alleged specific acts with racialized language while using no such emphasis for the much greater volume of such violence to enact genocide? Many indigenous groups have recognized the need to oppose settlers themselves and settlerdom, the people who stole their and their parents’ land and houses and killed their relatives. You simply dismiss such people as terrorists? Without chauvinist glasses of the oppressor you would probably call them freedom fighters.

While it is nice to keep it mind, the fact that they also do other things besides terrorism is not an argument.

Of course it is when the absurd premise is to ignorantly broad brush them with the label. The vast, vast majority of the activities of Hamas cannot be described as terroristic, much more so than their accusers.

Or should we also refrain from calling the Israeli state terrorist because it also does other stuff besides indiscriminately and arbitrarily targeting Palestinians?

Do you call “Israel”, which is infinitely more guilty of this and is itself the settler colonial occupier, a terrorist state at its every mention? Do you jump into conversations to ensure it is understood as such?

“Israel” engages in a genocidal campaign of land theft and ethnic subjugation. Describe the actual acts and see how much value your attempt at labeling possesses in terns of delegitimation.

Hamas is the government of Gaza and a large portion of the armed resistance against “Israeli” occupiers. Calling them terrorists is using racist “Israeli” propaganda directed at all Palestinians and cynically leveraged by imperialist countries - like the kind you probably live in and whose politicians you probably provide support - to assist in the systemic violent oppression and displacement of Palestinians. In fact, your entire line could be lifted from bog standard “Israeli” propaganda takes, including the perpetrators of genocide.

Please educate yourself before sharing opinions.

This video has some nice sentiments but it is also rife with inaccuracies and misleads. Of course, dividing and conquering is a core reason for marginalization, but who drives it? With whom did Nazis or the KKK find purchase? Why were they not suppressed? The deeper social forces, those with power, did not really oppose them, and in fact, they created or leveraged them as needed for their own purposes. Namely in response to the conditions they had already created - and the “they” were the liberal bourgeoisie and capitalism itself.

The Nazis built their ranks largely from the petty bourgeoisie and their children. The people that were beating up communists and lgbtq people were the sons of shop owners during a time of economic downturn. That downturn was itself created by the forces of imperialism and therefore capitalism: Germany had fought in an imperialist war (WWI) to stake a claim in the imperial core and lost. Its new position was that of an imperialized country in capitalist mode of production, stuck with infinite foreign debt, decreasing wages, and spiraling unemployment. In this context, there were backlashes and attempts to organize. The social democrats gained some power but repeatedly entrenched themselves in the liberal system, reinforcing it and therefore continuing its failures and oppressions. The communists broke with this and took more direct action, taking towns and cities through orgsnizational prowess. The socdems threw the police at them over things like this as well as the proto-fascist jackboots that would become the Nazi Party base, those sons of shop owners. In addition, there were monarchists, liberals, conservative nationalists, and fascists.

It is in this context that the fascists rose. Not simply by “dividing”, but by reacting to the social forces that threatened a vulnerable bourgeoisie: the communists above all. They absolutely scapegoated minorities, yes, but the social function of the fascists and how they grew was actually their anticommunism. This is why they were funded and why they were tolerated, just like how the cops protect Proud Boys and fight BLM protesters. They serve to protect a subset of private property and are funded to do so. The Nazis did things not dissimilar to the cryptofascists taking their guns to “protect businesses” against BLM-adjascent property damage. But they operated over years of unrest from liberal (capitalist) policies and where it was largely communists that threatened capital.

The Nazis’ rise shortly before Hitler became chancellor corresponded to two major kinds of events: first, economic downturn and therefore displeasure at the consequences if the capitalist status quo (with which most parties had associated themselves) and repeated decisions to build rightward coalitions against communists and, ultimately, simply give the position of chancellor to Hitler in order to expediently resolve a weak coalition.

So, when watching this video, literally a propaganda film from the US government’s war department(s), ask whether there is any discussion of the material forces at hand, of political struggle, of anticommunism, of capitalism, of the reasons for economic decay, of who funded and worked with Nazis, and why. They tell a story of the “Aryan German” being taken in by the Nazis because his identity matched their propaganda. But there were many who supported or tolerated Nazis that did not match their propaganda and were even targets of it! They tended to be petty bourgeois or the children of them. The film says normal Germans asked themselves how this happened as if it were a surprise. This is a lie: these were open political developments spanning decades at the forefront of everyone’s minds and were part of active and highly local political struggle. The film peddles the many falsehoods of American mythmaking about freedom and empty ripe land, lies to hide the reality of a country built on settler colonial genocide and racialized chattel slavery. There were people on that “empty” land already, they were killed or driven off by the same governmental organizations that commissioned this film. The film says the land is free and skin color doesn’t matter even while at the same time Jim Crow waa in effect. The film says Nazis outlawed speech and that in America you can say your politics without such retribution and then America launched hard into the Cold War and an anticommunist, anti-black purge. The film says that what made Nazis wrong was race hate and militarism and then just a few yeara after thia film bombed out every population center in the north of Korea directly killing 20% of the population while constantly publishing racist claims against Koreans.

So yes, absolutely oppose Nazis and race hate. But don’t trust a film like this for a valuable history lesson. You will be unable to recognize the patterns and harma that are currently right in front od you.

The Germans? Helping a racial supremacist settler colonist enacting a genocide? But they’re usually so cuddly and empathetic!

Which is the correct take from them. Having others dependent on them is a modicum of protection from simply being a pawn for imperialists. They still mostly are, but this provides a little sovereignty.