Hacker News Reader

Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't really seem that weird, Mosul is in Iraqi Kurdistan. It's a lot more like referring to some as specifically Basque or Catalonian rather than Spanish. Kurds have a language and culture that is very distinct from their Arab neighbors. Unlike your example, Iraqi Kurds have had their own constitutionally defined regional, semi-autonomous government.

View on HN

> It doesn't really seem that weird, Mosul is in Iraqi Kurdistan

Mosul is most definitely not inside Iraqi Kurdistan, which actually serves the point that this is article pointlessly political.

I'd like to see the day that a University publication refers to Spanish researcher constantly and explicitly as Basque.

I've noticed many comments on HN of late have tilted radical right-wing. I only mention this because for many many years I have never had any feeling of political leanings on HN.

This is silly. There aren't any radical right-wing comments in this thread, and such comments are routinely (and IMO rightly) downvoted into oblivion. Calling out suspicious ethnic subtext is still very much the purview of liberals and progressives--if it feels "radical right wing" to you, I suspect (and hope!) the explanation is that your bubble is far to the left of the broader population.

Suspicious ethnic subtext?

Can you say more about why you think this article has suspicious ethnic subtext?

I don't think it has suspicious ethnic subtext, but the OP clearly did and left an explanation as to why (although it seems to have been flagged now).

I guess I should have been more specific and a bit less sloppy. Mosul is directly adjacent to Iraqi Kurdistan in the disputed region and the majority of the population is Kurdish. However Kemune, the site, and Duhok where the team is based are in the undisputed part of Kurdistan. It seems like an odd nit to pick, I imagine the researcher just requested to be identified as Kurdish, he is after all the head of the Kurdistan Archaeology Organization. It isn't that odd, I've seen publications refer to a researcher as Catalonian or Scottish in the past, I'm not sure about Basque with respect to science but it pops up in the arts.

So this was the impetus for your original comment. You just wanted to point out that Mosul didn’t belong to the Kurds. What a waste of time and energy and it’s very transparent and counter productive.

Nothing belongs to “the Kurds” — this isn’t the 13th century, we don’t assign land to ethnic groups?

I feel like I’m in the twilight zone. Would anybody in the right mind say that Ohio belongs to the Whites? Or Chicago belongs to the Blacks? Yet somehow you’ve managed to completely misread my post, ignored the fact that the first mention of Mosul was in a reply, and then made a reference to a region “belonging” to an ethnic group.

It’s probably why hopelessly racist, hyper political publications like this one get a pass.

Outside the Middle East: “we’re all one!! Undivided!”

Inside the Middle East: “if you’re not divided on racial, religious and ethnic groups then you’re unhappy!”

The article definitely goes out of its way to point out that the researchers were Kurds, which if you know anything about the region makes complete sense: Catalan researchers would insist on being identified as Catalan researchers and not Spanish. Scottish researchers might reasonably insist on not being identified as English. This identification was almost certainly requested by the Kurish researchers themselves.

The only thing odd here is your taking umbrage at someone else's need for visible political identity, which makes you seem reactionary or at best naive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com