“I Ain’t Reading All That; Free Palestine”
The meme enrages Israel supporters because Israel apologia depends on mountains of verbiage to spin obvious atrocities as reasonable and appropriate. At some point the kids noticed this was happening, and started dismissing all the narratives.
…Without mountains of narrative, all you’ve got is a nonstop deluge of raw video footage depicting the blatant genocidal criminality of Israel. No narrative overlay is required atop a video of a baby beheaded by Israeli military explosives. It stands on its own. You’d only need narrative to explain why the footage of the headless baby doesn’t say bad things about the side that’s dropping the bombs.
…Manipulators understand that they can use narrative to promote material agendas if they can get people to believe those narratives, and it enrages them when people handwave away the narrative and stick solely with the raw data of material reality. If you’ve based your life around trading empty narrative fluff for real material resources and gains, having your narratives dismissed can feel like holding a huge pile of currency that suddenly got devalued to zero. Of course the manipulators would be upset about this.
Israel is a country so I don’t know how one could sympathize with such a conceptual idea. But I generally try to sympathize everyone who is negatively affected by a conflict and there certainly are some Israelis who have been (hostages for example). But of course, in the current moment, that is a distraction from the primary issue of ongoing ethnic cleansing by the IDF.
I don’t know what that has to do with what I’m saying though. Ignorant people can still be on the right side of an issue by chance. But I don’t think we should be celebrating willful ignorance like this.
They didn’t flip a quarter, they’ve made up their minds having seen the atrocities. Ignoring hasbara is a critical reaction.
Instead of a quarter they trust information from their peers and the media they happen to consume. Through the same uninformed process, many people also support Israel. This is why genocide happens, and if you navigate the world in willful ignorance, you will find yourself on the wrong side of a future issue.
Do you take an hour out of your day to engage with every video a flat-earther makes? Will people take you seriously if you don’t?
Did the comment in question take an hour or did it take ten seconds? There is a big difference.
The preceding comment is deliberately omitted here, I assume because it wasn’t even particularly long (when I see responses like this it’s usually to comments that are fairly short).
But even if it was long, if someone took the time out of their day to write up something to me personally I think it’s not that hard to at least read it. Even some people who I initially wrote off as bad faith have sometimes surprised me with good points about a topic.
That said, if it’s some low effort thing like a link to a two hour long video or read this 200 page book I would typically ask them to summarize the key points to see whether it is worth my time. But simply saying “this is too long for me” to a short comment sets a very low bar for your intellectual curiosity. People who feel this way are likely very ignorant.
The report by B’TSelem and their quick Explainer do a great job summarizing the situation. But you should also at least skim the other reports.
Amnesty International Report
Human Rights Watch Report
The situation in Palestine? I am familiar already. That’s not what any of my comments here have been about. The fact that people keep assuming I’m some apologist for Israel shows how shallow the discourse on this topic is. Like it’s literally unthinkable that someone from the same side of this issue would post a criticism of it this meme. Because “if you’re not with us you’re against us!”, to quite a very wise and reasonable man.
But yeah I mean free Palestinian. That wasn’t the part I was objecting to lol.
With your last paragraph in particular, no that wasn’t clear but I’m glad to hear it. I don’t think this meme is about the quarter of people genuinely asking questions. Instead, I think it’s about the Zionists who spread multiple points of misinformation. And when someone responds with sources to debunk those claims, they simply ignore, deflect, and spread other points of misinformation.
I can’t blame people for wanting to tune those people out, they are exhausting. I still think it’s helpful to reply with sources so the people reading have a better idea
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