The school district my son is at has hired a leftist organization to make anti-Israel curriculum. The board and staff told us to eat *sugar* and die when we protested. The community did jack to support us. I'm not some moron reading newsmax and stroking his guns. You need to stop believing everything you're told to believe in the NYT.
In the last year the only time I've looked at anything put out by the NYT has been either looking up some election results (they do have good election coverage if you just want the raw data) and a few links posted in threads here on this forum. Otherwise I never read anything there.
I assume you're talking about this
Castro Valley schools approve 'liberated' ethnic studies curriculum – J.
It looks like they took a well intended curriculum directive from the state and ran to an extremist end. Unfortunately I have seen that sort of thing happen in the Bay Area a number of times. My sister is not on board with the current state of the Republican party but is vehemently anti-Democrats because of some of the extreme leftist positions the Bay Area Democrats take and their heavy influence on Sacramento politics. She votes straight line Republican because ot it. I haven't manage to get it through to her that other blue states have a different type of Democrat.
15 years ago, there were plenty of hate crimes against Jews in America. Today, there are more. Your anecdotal evidence is just that, anecdotal evidence. You want some anecdotes back at you? I got plenty. Go look at the FBI statistics. Per capita, Jews get hate crimes worse than the blacks. Your understanding of reality is inaccurate.
I did some exploration of the statistics. Finding comprehensive statistics in one place is not easy.
This site has a history of hate crimes against Jewish and Islamic people by year
Statistics on Religious Hate Crimes
This has numbers against all groups in a given year, but you have to keep changing the year to build up numbers for all groups like the site above
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime
The total incidents against black people are around 3X those against Jewish people, but if you are going per-capita there are more incidents against Jewish people. Blacks make up about 13.6% of the US population, Jewish people 2.4%. Out gay men are only 1.8%, but have numbers almost as high as anti-Jewish incidents. So per-capita incidents against gay men are more common.
You are correct that incidents against Jewish people have stayed relatively steady over time. But usually only the hard core haters commit violence and I did say the hard core have always been there and haven't changed. The amount of hate speech online and in person has increased. I've seen it anecdotally and many news sources have reported on it, but there is probably some organization tracking it. The hard core are contributing, but the increase is from the softer support for these positions.
The increase in hate isn't just Jewish people. Hate talk has increased against a lot of groups. The soft support seems to follow whatever trends are in the news. When the previous president was ranting about Hispanic immigration, my partner, who is Mexican, got attacked online frequently. Now that immigration is out of the mainstream news and replaced with other issues, she gets attacked a lot less.
Hate talk against both the Jewish community and the Arab/Muslim community are up because of this war. Though the anti-Jewish talk is getting more attention and is probably more widespread.
Israelis of Arab descent have full rights and don't go through checkpoints. There's racism? Sure. Of course. Where isn't there racism? Better than some places and worse than others But these people have the right to vote, etc. I wonder why people like you are so focused on Israel. Oh, wait. No, I don't wonder that.
You are misinterpreting what I said. I know a lot of information has flown by in this thread, but I have talked about Arab and Muslims who are Israeli citizens being treated equally as Jewish Israelis. And I said on the
surface the Palestinians are treated like black people in South Africa were under Apartheid. I also said the reasons for the treatment are different than they were in South Africa.
The point is that most people don't understand subtlety in why things happen. And the types of people jumping on the pro-Palestinian band wagon are the same who jumped on the anti-Apartheid bandwagon in the 80s. I agreed with the anti-Apartheid movement in the 80s, Apartheid was straight up racism created by a tiny minority trying to hold onto power.
I have never agreed with the pro-Palestinian people because the reasons for the treatment are different. I don't like the way that Palestinians are treated, but the core reason is not racism, it's Israel trying to protect itself from terrorists and the Palestinians are where the terrorists are coming from and where they are hiding.
Israel has been a bit harsh in their security measures and the Palestinians are living in deep poverty in a corner of the land their families used to inhabit. They were never a prosperous population. That region is not high on natural resources, but their poverty is in sharp contrast with what the Israelis have done with the same land thanks to outside investment and 1st world immigrants moving in.
I have said in this thread, I think both sides have done things wrong and I don't support either side's political group. I personally have no issue with either ethnic group. A two state solution is the best answer, but convincing enough people on both sides to go with that is difficult. All it takes is a few people willing to do something big to disrupt progress towards a 2 state solution. That's what Hamas has done every time steps have been taken in that direction.
What Hamas did to start this conflict was horrific. I knew Israel has to respond, and they should have, but I also knew that Israel's response was going to stir up resentment against Israel because:
1) Israel is a first world army against a rag tag insurgency army
2) Hamas ensures maximum civilian casualties because they position all their assets within the civilian population
3) Israel was going to use their first world weapons to bomb Hamas targets which was going to cause guaranteed civilian casualties
4) The optics are bad Israel taking about 1100 dead and inflicting 11,000 Palestinian dead
5) Every Palestinian killed recruits several more people into Hamas
I'm not coming at this from a pro-Palestinian point of view. I have tried to remain objective throughout this war. Israel was going to cause a lot more Palestinian casualties than they suffered themselves because of the nature of Hamas' defense. But it doesn't play well within the greater world where there are a lot of Palestinian sympathizers.
The Palestinian sympathy movement has been cultivated by the PR wing of the Palestinian organizations, and they do have some points. People in power in Israel have been sabotaging the two state movement for years. Hamas set things up to make Israel look as bad as possible on the world stage.
In military parlance, there is something an army can do called a shaping operation. Ukraine has been doing them on Russia for over a year. In a shaping operation one side (usually the weaker side) makes particular moves that cause a reaction from the enemy. Each move nudges the enemy a little bit so they are faced with ever increasingly bad choices. A shaping operation's ultimate goal is to put the enemy into a position where all choices are bad ones.
Hamas has done that with Israel here. No matter how Israel chose to respond to the attack by Hamas, they were going to be in a worse position. Israel has become a pariah among many in the west because Hamas engineered it.
If you don't want snark, don't speak with such blatantly offensive ignorance mixed with certainty. You're not close enough.
"From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" is a direct call for a race war. The Chinese dictatorship government is carrying out a race war against the Uighyars. They're a communist party, so I guess that qualifies as left too.
Communism is supposed to be a leftist movement, but wherever communism took power it ruled conservatively. Palestine is a cause celeb for a lot of liberals in the west, but the Islamic terrorist groups are all quite conservative in nature.
Al Quaeda was supplanted by ISIS. The fact that AQ weakened didn't really matter. AQ, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthis are all the same where it counts. These are all factions in the same religious war. They all want to establish a caliphate and take over the world, no matter ho much blood is spilled, and preferably all Jewish blood. You're a target almost as much as I am.
Al Qaeda was Osama bin Laden's organization. That organization was weakened by the time he was taken out to a point where it was not significant. The other organizations were run by other people. bin Laden was essentially a retiree at that point with him and his organization mostly put out to pasture. Other leaders were running the other organizations at that point and were much more dangerous.
Killing bin Laden was akin to catching another SS death camp guard who escaped and lived a different life after the war. It's bringing some form of justice, but the perp is not and has not been a serious threat by the time they were caught.
This is a problem of the far left and the far right... and the not so far left and far right.
To quote rick and Morty:
Nazis?
That's... everywhere.
I have said for years that the far left and far right end up meeting on the backside when they get extreme enough. Technically the USSR was liberal and Nazi Germany was conservative, but the way Stalin and Hitler behaved was not much different.
A healthy political system is one where the bulk of the participants are around the center. Sometimes good ideas come out of the extremes and they change society in healthy ways as they move towards the center. Allowing women to vote, decriminalizing homosexuality, breaking down forms of official racism, etc. Most of these movements started as far left movements. In a healthy democracy the right serves as a brake tap to slow down progressive movements from going too far or too fast.
Sure - but the data clearly suggests that there is not an "Islamophobia" problem in the US.
Yet the President and VP are out there touting a "National Strategy to Combat Islamophobia" just a few days after 10/7 and worldwide anti-Semitic marches calling for genocide and "gas the Jews"?
Are these people running the Biden administration this extremely tone deaf or just absolutely ignorant of the data? Or is it something worse?
Anti-Muslim violence in the US is less common than anti-Jewish violence, but Muslims are also about 1/2 the population of Jewish people in the US.
This war in Israel is a no win situation for Israel, but it's also a no win situation for Biden. A lot of younger Democrats are pro-Palestine while a lot of older Democrats are pro-Israel. And while being sympathetic to the humanitarian cause in Palestine is good, there is also a terrorist organization tied to them. Supporting Palestine too much leads to supporting terrorists which the US does not want to do.
And it doesn't help that the government running Israel right now are a bunch of reprehensible people.
There are hate crimes against Muslims. Any number of hate crimes is a problem. I believe that the Biden administration is trying to run a narrow path between pleasing Muslims who hate Jews and Israel and being supportive of Israel. That's an impossible path to stay on, so perhaps they're being a bit stupid, but I see what they're up to. I don't blame all Muslims for hatred by some Muslims. I haven't seen the polls, but I'm betting there's a lot of support from American Muslims for Hamas. Doesn't mean I want hate crimes against American Muslims.
One can have a favorable view of a group and still feel hate. I've met people who speak positively of Jews wanting to be educated and so on then negatively of how greedy Jews are. This poll is useless because it doesn't capture how people really are.
Biden has to walk a tightrope here. He has been active in supporting the Palestinian people while condemning Hamas. In the $106 billion he requested for foreign aid he asked for $10 billion to help displaced people around the world, including Palestinians who have become refugees because of this war. That's the proper thing to be doing.
The problem with those kind of polls...is that the people who wish to see Jews harmed or planing to do it, don’t really respond to pollsters
The actual people who act out and perform hate crimes is always a tiny minority. There are about 8 million people of Jewish descent in the US, about 45 million people of African descent, about 4.3 million Muslim Americans (including people who are Muslim but no Arab), only about 2.1 million Arab Americans, and about 6 million out gay men. The recorded acts of violence against all these groups is well below 10,000 incidents a year. The highest is against blacks and it runs around 3000 a year. In an ideal world it would be 0, but we don't live in that world.
The actual acts of violence are out on the fringe, but because they are easily recordable, they make the statistics. What flies under the radar of the statistics are things like the antisemitism going on Twitter/X right now which are more difficult to record.
After 9/11 incidents of anti-Muslim/anti-Arab hate skyrocketed, but the actual physical assaults on Muslims did not go up by much. Same thing with Asians during the pandemic. Incidents of physical violence went up, but not anywhere near as much as anti-Asian rhetoric online and in person.
The war in Israel is a very deeply divisive subject with people on both sides getting worked up. Both anti-Mulsim/anti-Arab sentiment and anti-Jewish sentiment are up in discussions online and elsewhere. Technically anti-Arab and anti-Jewish sentiment are both antisemitism since both people are considered Semitic, but the term is usually only reserved for anti-Jewish attitudes.
www.pewresearch.org
