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Comment by unshavedyak | Hacker News Reader

Yea, as a quite left leaning person i'd be curious to hear how i or anyone i know (who is on the left) marginalizes a group of people.

The worst i can think of is wanting more equal rights for religious groups rather than special treatment of the primary group (in the USA) - which is seen as an attack by much of the right. Likewise i am concerned by the strong emphasis of rural over urban with respect to voting power and representation. Though i have no easy answer here, so i'm pretty unopinionated - just concerned.

I'd be really curious where i and the folks i know and discuss with marginalize other groups; as i want to correct that, if we do. Obviously no one here can answer that with specificity to my beliefs but.. my curiosity exists nonetheless heh.

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The left's support for Islam directly marginalizes minorities within Islamic countries as well as women and gays fighting for their rights there.

I'm kinda of undecided on Islam, fwiw. A bit above my pay grade, as i'm rather unsure how we objectively classify religion. There's plenty of Christian sects in the US that actively fight against gay rights/etc here too (though obviously to a far lesser degree in the common case), so it feels like we need some way to classify specific doctrine.

With my own lack of doctrine classification i am unsure how to view them. So i tend not to take a stance on it, just like i don't with Christianity.

I'm not sure what support you think the left commonly believes in for Islam. Everyone i know is not a fan of most religions, Christianity included. I view self rights far more important, and many religions or denominations directly challenge that.

Do you believe most leftists are campaigning for Islamic support? This has not been my experience.

Successor ideology is fast becoming a religion, if isn't already.

The concern is stuff like this:

https://www.secularism.org.uk/news/2015/12/islamist-students...

Islam: famous left-wing religion.

Christianity: notoriously tolerant of minorities, supportive of the equality of women, and gay friendly.

I mean, you can distort/twist an ostensibly peaceful religion like Christianity into something insidious and outright evil. A lot of atrocities have been committed by devout and pious leaders who claimed to follow a deity/prophet with a peaceful/loving message, so it's unsurprising that it's still a feature of modern religions.

There was a point in time where the Islamic world was a world leader in math, science, and technology. Of course, like with anything, time and money corrupts all things. Oil especially taints everything it touches.

Thank you for providing an excellent example of how this support works.

The "left," is a truly nebulous concept if you observe leftist discourse online, where circular firing squads are writ large.

I think you are conflating the left's support for minority groups who are demonized and targeted by society for support of the tenets of their respective religions. After 9/11, Muslims were a significant target of hatred and violence. The left, which again is not a monolithic entity, doesn't support islam anymore than it supports judaism or any other religion, it supports people who happen to follow that religion. It's based around humanist tendencies, which the right often doesn't understand. You can hate aspects of a religion while also being against any dehumanization and hatred against people who follow said religion.

Like the other 2 major Abrahamic religions, Islam has some good and some bad tenets. At least in the US, there are some extremely conservative muslims and some - perhaps shockingly - liberal muslims. Being that they are such a small percentage of the US population, there is a lot of misunderstanding and stereotyping of people who follow Islam.

> .. it supports people who happen to follow that religion. It's based around humanist tendencies, which the right often doesn't understand. You can hate aspects of a religion while also being against any dehumanization and hatred against people who follow said religion.

I quite agree with this statement in the context of what i believe. Which is to say i tend to dislike religions and personally i dislike Islam more than most (based on what i observe), but above all i don't want to target people, Muslim or otherwise, based on their religion.

I think this also supports a sister comment i made where i describe being unsure what my stance is relative to Islam. Observationally it doesn't seem "good" to me, but its people are also target of a lot of hate in this country (USA). It makes it difficult to discuss objective qualities of a religion without it bleeding into racism or bigotry against those who practice said religion.

It makes sense if you are an informed, educated person, that organized religion isn't a palatable thing. But neither is our society's obsession with money, and I'd argue many of the problems we have with religions come down to how money and power is wielded, not a few sentences in a very old book. I also find a lot of what conservative christian evangelicals believe to be indistinguishable from wahhabist islam. They seem to hate each other for reasons other than what they actually believe.

I'm a person that isn't active on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. so I don't see the crazy fringe stuff (usually). For what it's worth, it doesn't seem that the mainstream left (or Democrats, or whatever the term I'm looking for is) really supports or opposes religion in general. They seem to support the person in a "Muslim people are not bad or dangerous" way but don't address the religion. I do see the mainstream right (again, don't know the correct term) support Christianity and oppose both Muslims and Islam itself.

I'm not trying to give an opinion, just stating what I see as a person who doesn't interact with the online political sphere at all.

Jews on college campuses [1] and jews in the black lives matter movement [2] come to mind.

[1] https://www.frc.org/antisemitism [2] https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/black-lives-matters-jewish-p...

That's definitely an interesting one. Not shared in my group, nor would i understand what "the left" would have against Jews, especially in a religious context. They seem rather innocuous when compared to the more vocal and physical religions.

Do you honestly believe most left leaning individuals have something against the Jews?

> Do you honestly believe most left leaning individuals have something against the Jews?

Antisemitism is more common among left wingers than right wingers, so yes. Or alternatively you could say "do you honestly believe most right leaving individuals have something against X" for so many topics, X could be black people etc. Right wingers are more likely to be against those things, but it isn't like all of them are evil, similarly there is more Jew hate among left wingers, but it isn't like most of them hate Jews either.

Most Jew hate today has to do with Israel, right wing is mostly pro Istrael, so most Jew hate comes from the left.

That's interesting. I can understand being reasonably anti-Israel, but i'm suspicious that many people take the leap from being anti-Israel to being anti-Jew. Especially when you consider how many people of both the Jewish faith and/or ethnicity live within the United States. Tbh it feels like a straw man, but we're speculating anyway, so i can't fault you for it.

I appreciate the discussion nonetheless. I'll definitely be curious to talk to people i know (when politics comes up) to see their thoughts on Jews and Islam (as a different commenter pointed out). I suspect that no one i know will be anti-Jew or radically pro-Islam.

Appreciate the points of discussion/anecdotes. I can't say i agree with them, but they were certainly a surprise. Far from what i expected.

> While antisemitism in the U.S. is often written about through a “both sides” lens, our evidence — the first of its kind in testing hypotheses through experiments on a large repre- sentative sample — suggests the problem of antisemitism is much more serious on the right than the left. This evidence confirms that the antisemitism that has been on prominent display in white nationalist protests is not merely confined to a tiny group of extremists; antisemitic attitudes appear quite common among young conservatives, and much more so than among older conservatives or among liberals of any age.

* https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_roy...

> I can understand being reasonably anti-Israel

Pretty much all "I'm only against Israel's policies" is shy Antisemitism. You can easily test this by asking them about other countries that have similar (or much harsher) policies as Israel and see whether the "no no, it's not about being Jewish, not at all" person is similarly upset about those and demands Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. 99% aren't and it really is only about the Jews - the Antizionism is just a cloak over the Antisemitism because the pure stuff doesn't fly in polite society, but if you pretend that it's not about the Jews then you can go at it.

Not sure i follow, are you assuming i'm in favor of other countries policies that match Israel?

To be fair i know little on the subject, and don't claim to. The only reason i said "i can understand .." is that i know it's a hot-button topic. Israel is often portrayed in the west as being overly militaristic towards neighboring areas. The United States itself does similar, depending on who you ask.

I judge both quite harshly on this front. I also know very little about world politics. Both in ignorance and on purpose, heh.

No, I don't mean you personally, I mean the people you might talk to in your circles.

Test them by pointing out behavior that they find abhorrent when done by Israel, and see whether they react similarly (by demanding action against them, denying them a right to nationhood etc). If they do: good. If they don't: it's about the Jews, not about the behavior. And from my experience, they almost always don't, and you really need to press them on the issue until they'll halfheartedly agree that yeah, that is also not good what the non-jewish country does. Case in point: the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" tried to sail from Turkey to Gaza to protest Israel. It's like starting a Journey in the Third Reich towards Stalin's Russia to protest the inhumanity of Finnish policies.

I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of "Driving While Black". Israel is "Being A Country While Jewish". Some cops will pull over Black people all day long and claim that the color of their skin has nothing to do with it, it's just about how they drive. But you'll see them letting white drivers do all kinds of stunts and will quickly understand what the deciding factor is. You can do the same with people's opinions on Israel.

Fwiw i bet you'd call me anti-Jewish in this context. Not because i believe it more strongly against Israel, but because i'm uneducated on this front and the big countries like Israel make the news more frequently. So if i was to have any opinion at all it's more likely involving Israel than other similar countries.

I suspect that's true for most people.

A better analogy for the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” would be Americans sending supplies to Ukraine. As , Israel is violently stealing neighboring land.

And yes, you hear much about Israel, and less about other barbaric conflicts, but how does this prove antisemitism?

Those acts are horrific too, but that doesn’t minimize the acts Israel is committing.

Personally, it seems absurd in the extreme to think the lefts ideas concerning Israel have anything to do with antisemitism. Anecdotally, I have never encountered it, and my Jewish friends find this idea absurd as well.

> And yes, you hear much about Israel, and less about other barbaric conflicts, but how does this prove antisemitism?

Every BDS-supporter is aware of all the other conflicts, they just don't care because no Jews involved. Hell, they'll happily ally with Erdogan and support his regime.

> Those acts are horrific too, but that doesn’t minimize the acts Israel is committing.

Of course, and pulling over Black drivers is perfectly reasonable. But if you concentrate only on Black drivers, it's not their driving that you have a problem with, that's just the excuse you make.

Sounds like more conspiracy theories. It simply is people having empathy for Palestinians. Wouldn’t matter if Israel was Jewish or Christian or Wiccan etc…

>Antisemitism is more common among left wingers than right wingers

Yes, I remember that left wing protest where people chanted "Jews will not replace us". Remind me, which president was it that said there were "good people" in that crowd?

Here's a transcript that seems fairly accurate to the video interview I saw contemporaneously: https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/15/full-text-trump-co...

His own words: "you had people – and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally – but you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats – you had a lot of bad people in the other group too."

There are many good reasons to dislike Trump but you weaken them by association when you repeat the false accusations and misrepresentations.

"Once you let a nazi in your bar, it becomes a nazi bar."

It was a protest in a park, nobody could keep anyone else out.

And does that apply equally to Antifa?

Are we really comparing people burning ATMs with nazis now?

Beating reporters, pulling motorists out of their vehicles, throwing molotov cocktails at occupied buildings, etc. All politically motivated violence aka terrorism.

Are you really defending that based on who does it?

No, I’m just saying that there are grades of malice, and I put nazis on the top, with a comfortable margin over any second.

Because their motivation is to remove any “undesirable” from their sight, and their definition of “undesirable” is wide and expanding and imminent, at least in the US [0]

In contrast, there has been one single murder in the past 26 years, where a far left activist was charged in the US, although subsequently shot and killed by the police [1].

So, I’m evaluating motivation here.

There’s no such thing as “both sides are bad”. Centrism is a lazy and uninformed view of the world.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_right-wing_terrorist_a...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_an...

> There’s no such thing as “both sides are bad”. Centrism is a lazy and uninformed view of the world.

No, there's no such thing as "your side is also bad so my side therefore is not".

But both sides can easily be wrong. You don't need to draw false equivalences to condemn two sets of people at once.

Do you have ANY evidence to back up these claims?

This view isn't supported by studies in this area. They do find antisemitism on the left and the center of the US political spectrum - just more on the right.

* https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_roy...

I live in Europe, things are very different here. ChatGPT is a global program so I'm not sure why we should talk about USA specifically. Antisemitism is on the rise in Europe due to Muslim immigration, and the left supports or downplays those acts while the right tries to take it seriously.

So like how Trump said there were fine people among that crowd, the left in Europe says there are fine people among the crowds that goes and harasses and murders Jews. You shouldn't judge individuals for being from a group, but that isn't what is happening here, they are trying to downplay the acts of individuals just because they belong to a specific group.

From what I have seen and observed, I wouldn't be surprised if things aren't that different in Europe from the US, just somewhat worse on the whole. That is, antisemitism is found on all sides of the political spectrum including in the center. Also, that antisemitism is most common, and often most overt, on the right / far right. Share any studies you have supporting or refuting that though.

This covers many countries, and does have multiple years in many of them, but it doesn't distinguish by political views. Just gender, age, and religious affiliation by country.

https://global100.adl.org/map

> They do find antisemitism on the left and the center of the US political spectrum - just more on the right.

You know who says that? The same US intelligence agencies that conspired to censor twitter and who said the hunter biden laptop wasn't real. Who actually supports Israel? Consistently the US right and the Republicans.

The Canadian government leaned heavily into this fabrication early in 2022 for the trucker protest. They called it white-supremacist (despite videos of the crowd dancing to Banghra with visibly Sikh truckers - one of the largest minorities in Canadian shipping) and accused the event of being anti semitic because one of the organizers blogged something silly about Jews in banking years before. During this time a leftist government consultant tweeted “You know all those loud mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists; when we liberate Palestine and they have to go back to where they come from, they will return to being low voiced bitches of thier (sic) Christian/Secular White Supremacist Masters.” and it was ignored until the prime minister was finally forced to acknowledge it.

The are thousands of calls on Twitter for the jews the be pushed into the sea and none of them are from conservatives.

"Far right" has become a term for things the left says but doesn't want to own.

>> They do find antisemitism on the left and the center of the US political spectrum - just more on the right. > >You know who says that?

Academics looking at data: https://www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_roy...

> it was ignored until the prime minister was finally forced to acknowledge it.

Appropriate responses should happen the moment these things come to light.

The cited examples are just criticism of Israel and support for Palestine labeled as antisemitism. This is really weak stuff.

if after reading those things you honestly can't see the difference then you are definitely part of the problem.

You've entered a bad faith argument by accepting the premise as a given. These political threads seem to be full them.

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