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Comment by lalaland1125 | Hacker News Reader

The main thing I find odd about that person's blog post (https://web.archive.org/web/20210601160519/https://www.kamau...) is that it also doesn't really make any sense mechanically.

The first five paragraphs are all comments on how it must be difficult for a progressive Jew to simultaneously support progressive values and Israel

> If I were a Jew today, my sensibilities would be tormented. I would find it increasingly difficult to reconcile the long cycles of oppression that Jewish people have endured and the insatiable appetite for vengeful violence that Israel, my homeland, has now acquired.

It's only in the last paragraph that the author goes to a different place and starts blaming Jews directly.

> If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself.

I wonder what the author was thinking when he was writing it as it doesn't make much sense to me.

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> I wonder what the author was thinking when he was writing it as it doesn't make much sense to me.

Quite possibly not much. As someone who has hundreds of blog posts under his belt from a similar time period, a lot of it is just about churning out posts. Start with a thesis, write five or more paragraphs with little planning, do a quick scan for errors, then hit publish. I suspect we're looking at someone who's having their career heavily affected by a quick piece they dashed off in 30 minutes or less a decade and a half ago without even thinking about it too much at the time.

My blog is no longer up and running, and maybe that's now a good thing.

Now would someone coming from his ideology have the same reasoned approached to being young and dumb?

Or even well educated but ill-informed about some subjects.

Or part of an organization/group/etc that has some negative public positions or legacy but is not the uniform agreement among the entire group or evolved entirely over the years?

I personally see every election as choosing between lesser evils. Yet some groups see voting for any party as full agreement with everything the political party says and has done.

There is so much context and grey area that modern diversity or social justice groups are (or act?) completely ignorant of. So does it make it rational to put them to their own garbage public trials, or give them a pass like mature rational individuals - also to a certain degree filled with it's own grey areas?

> My blog is no longer up and running, and maybe that's now a good thing.

Instead they can just troll you over some random wikipedia edit war you were in 13 years ago... you can take your blog offline but not Wikipedia. :-/

Now that is so inside baseball I'm struggling to imagine how you'd ever get anyone to care about it. First you'd have to spend an hour explaining what userboxes are, by which point everyone would already be bored to tears.

I'm subject to pretty regular trolling because I got blocked once for being overly aggressive and editwarry about removing some rule violating images.

Actually the inside baseball plays in the trolls favor because they go dig up some quotes and false accusations from some histrionic commenter calling me a malicious vandal and what not, which anyone on WP at the time took in the context of the speaker (e.g. not worth much), and then try passing it off as some kind of official finding.

It's pretty nuts. Basically the only thing that protect anyone is either having something more substantive to whine about when targeted, to have no online history, or to just never be targeted.

He was angry. Feeling the injustice of what was happening in Lebanon at that time.

I wish this part would get more attention. People say and do stupid shit when they're highly emotional & vulnerable. Everybody has "wrong" feelings and thoughts now and then. You wouldn't be human if you didn't. Sometimes people vent those thoughts/feelings, and that can hurt other people's feelings. We should obviously deal with that and take responsibility for that, but then the other side needs to accept that apology so both can reconcile. Otherwise everybody stays hurt.

After the bombs on Lebanon I was mainly angry at myself. I overheard the news during dinner - "Beirut has been bombed" - and kept eating. Somehow growing up I ended up in a mental state where bombs being dropped on Beirut was 'normal'. It bothered me to no end: it would have been a completely different reaction if I heard "Paris has been bombed".

I ended up taking up an international cooperation job in Beirut, worked there for about three years. I danced, drank, worked, ate, drove around and enjoyed time with people that to this date consider very close friends.

I guess I just suck at blogging.

Thank you for sharing the full post. It indeed does have a different tone when taken as a whole. It's far too common for people to dig out half a sentence from hundreds of blog posts you've written over a decade ago, intentionally omitting everything else.

This is what was weird to me. The article title and contents didn't appear to match for me

> If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself.

This is the only line in the blog post that can be construed as antisemitic rather than a criticism of Israel. It would not be antisemitic if he had stated the opinion: "Israel has an insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of itself."

I used to be involved in the Palestine Liberation movement and we always complained about people conflating Jews with Israel. Just because someone criticizes Israel does not mean they are antisemitic. Those who support Israel use the conflation to further their cause. In this sentence, the author does it on his own and screwed himself.

Yep, and it's clearly echoing the second sentence of the piece, "the insatiable appetite for vengeful violence that Israel, my homeland, has now acquired."

Perhaps it's a deliberate conflation of Jews and Israel, or perhaps it's thoughtless writing when trying to echo & rephrase the opening/title.

"Why were you fired?"

"I used the wrong word once in a deleted personal blog post from 14 years ago."

He wasn’t fired, and the entire point of that job is to provide leadership on that topic. You can’t be a figurehead against racism after having publicly been racist.

Wonder how many exit interviews he sat through, smugly grinning at someone who did something similar...

I think he must have established by the end the Jews he is referring to are those who support Israeli aggression. Not all Jews.

This is how I read it as well, although some are less charitable with how they interpret actions in the moment -- people mis speak all the time and are heavily criticized for it. As another commentor suggested, this was probably not a carefully thought through thesis but more of a thought piece put together in a short time frame and meant more as an expression than some hill to die on. My charitable reading is that the last section (and title) perhaps carry the piece too far away from nationalist Jew and into ethnic Jew which aren't quite the same. Perhaps if the Author had thought through their goal and audience more thoroughly they might have re-worded it. Hard to tell. I think it is otherwise a thought provoking piece.

Replace the word "Jews" with "men" and gauge the reaction of those in the modern diversity movement. Either it's ok to say "not all <group>", or it isn't.

They wouldn't bat an eye.

That doesn’t fit what I have observed[0] at all.

[0]: https://time.com/79357/not-all-men-a-brief-history-of-every-...

The reason it doesn't make sense is that I think everyone (even his defenders) are misreading the offending sentence.

"If I were a Jew" is meant to inform his "concern" not his "appetite".

The insatiable appetite for violent self-defense is obviously universal (he mentions Palestinian animus). What is unique to Jewish identity are the lessons of the Holocaust, which he thinks would make him more afraid of allowing instincts of self-defense to overwhelm sensitivity to the suffering of others. It's perfectly consonant with his previous paragraphs.

Right-wing media isolated the sentence from context and framed it as saying Jewish people have an insatiable appetite for violence. The phrasing was ambiguous enough to plausibly support that interpretation, and people saw what they were primed to detect. Helps that he chose not to publicly defend himself, and media generally don't like to scrutinize claims of bigotry/racism. Reminds me a bit of the Shirley Sherrod firing.

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