This is going to be a bit of a shaggy dog post, wandering over different things seen on social media, all fairly recently.
Here is one from about ten days ago:
https://x.com/ShahzadYounas_/status/1792535412444975486
Initially I clicked on a quote tweet, where someone had added that this is why you need to make seventy excuses before judging someone, a reference to a Muslim adage.
There are other mentions of this in the replies, and it was new to me, so that is why I mention it.
The replies to the initial tweet are the main point of this post, but it started with an article about a panel of experts, including Amal Clooney, recommending that the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants for crimes in both Israel and Gaza. The author of the tweet referred to people attacking Clooney's previous silence on the issue.
First of all, let me say that if anything drives me off of social media, it will be the crisis in Gaza, which has been bringing out the worst in people who had not clearly showed that they had this level of "worst" in them.
In terms of the replies here, from a bunch of strangers, those are not surprising. There are people applauding her, and people angry at her for defending Hamas. The report seems to recommend arrests on both the Israeli and the Palestinian side, allowing everyone to be angry, but there are people also praising her and scorning how wrong all of those complainers were.
At this point, finding anger, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia is standard.
(Questions about whether the recommendations will be effective do concern me, but that doesn't mean that establishing the legal issues has no value.)
There were a few replies that surprised me more.
- It only takes a minute to speak up; she should have said something sooner.
- She turned down a position ten years ago that shows she does not really care about Palestinian people.
- She should be speaking about Lebanon, not Palestine.
These stood out to me due to the apparent absence of logic. There can be many reasons for taking or not taking a job at one time or another, and while working on a report you might be well-advised to maintain confidentiality, if not absolutely required to. (Lawyers are very sensitive to that.)
Certainly, you should be able to care about multiple things, and multiple people at the same time, though you cannot do everything at once.
I am writing because of that determination to find fault, to cling to that fault against all reason, and even to find praise primarily as a way of judging others.
Those can certainly be aspects of dominator culture, but let us not forget that a big part of it is choosing sides.
One illustration of that is reactions to news of Jerry Seinfeld attending an IDF "fantasy" camp, where you get to train to shoot "terrorists":
Here's the way in which I will be mean: it seemed really weird that Seinfeld has recently been lamenting the demise of masculinity. Learning he recently fired a gun and got to feel all macho... of course. Got it.
What I have seen on Twitter is various people talking about how Seinfeld himself was never really that funny, but the humor of Seinfeld the show was all because of Larry David.
I'm sure David was a huge influence on the show and its humor, but what that exchange is doing is trying to switch allegiance from one person to another, assuming that the other is going to be a better person.
Larry David is not necessarily a good person. You get sexist and racist and apparently even Islamophobic humor in some episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm, even quite recently. That's not saying he has no redeeming qualities, and he might have more redeeming qualities than Jerry Seinfeld, but this often becomes just a matter of splitting hairs.
Look, if you loved the show Seinfeld, and you didn't mind the star dating a teenage girl and breaking up a marriage and complaining about political correctness killing comedy, but supporting Palestinian genocide is a bridge too far... I get that. Searching for a new person you can be loyal to is probably not the answer.
Does it help that he was the good one in a conversation between Seinfeld, Ricky Gervais, Chris Rock, and Louis C.K.?
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/25/opinions/louis-ck-chris-rock-n-word-debate-love/index.html
Granted, the bar was set pretty low.
You can try separating the art and artist. Personally, the less I can like someone as a person, the less I enjoy their work. There is also a lot of entertainment out there, and I get by.
There are worse problems in life than realizing that a lot of the people who have entertained you were not that great. Given our overall past history, you should expect that. I'm sorry if it's disappointing.
Finally, is one of those worse things having a crude nickname?
Pro-Israel writer Eve Barlow keeps complaining about the "hate name" she has received -- designed to silence her -- "Eve Fartlow":
There were 1139 people killed in the October 7th attack. That is horrible.
Since then there have been 36430 Palestinians killed, and a lot of starvation and maiming. That is worse.
Historically, there has always been that overkill on the Israeli side. It should be possible to understand that without making it a referendum on Jewish people or religion or ethnicity.
Barlow's tweets have been about a friend seeing a "Free Parking" sign and panicking because she thought it said "Free Palestine" and about understanding how Germans could support Nazis but not how anyone can support Palestine because what do they have to offer?
And she feels like a martyr for being called "Fartlow".
That of course reminds me that when you are accustomed to privilege, criticism can feel like oppression.
The bigger problem is how many people gravitate toward being able to oppress, or at least are okay with oppression that does not affect them.
That's what we need to root out.
Related posts:
No comments:
Post a Comment