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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I hope I'm not considered a troll for asking this question; I will ask on my main account and hopefully people will check my comment history to understand I am not intending to be belligerent or intentionally dumb.

But why is it that rainbow flags (pride, et al) are considered the pro-Palestinian side in the conflict.

I might be old but I distinctly remember a humanitarian outcry in the 00's because Palestinians were murdering not only Jews and Christians but also homosexuals[0].

I'm not sure of the Israeli stance to be perfectly honest, but it's surprising to me that the only time I had ever heard of LGBTQ+ rights with relation to the Palestinian people it has been with a strikingly deadly tone, yet it seems that in the US the political divide has fallen such that LGBTQ+ people are almost forced to ally with Palestine.

I'm genuinely curious how this happened.

caveat: I'm not interested in emotional responses, if you feel emotional reading this then please just ignore the comment completely, I am not inviting a flame war, this is genuine ignorance and curiousity.

[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-5-2003-1346_...

EDIT: Added a citation for my apparently outlandish statement.

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It's about oppressed vs oppressor narratives. LGBTQ people tend to sympathize with the oppressed because most of them have memories of being oppressed themselves. Ive actually asked a few about this and they tend to agree that Hamas and palestinains in general would not form a government they would support, but theyre not willing to overlook how oppressed the palestinians have been for the past 80 years.

This oppressed ~= virtuous and support-worthy logic, whose mainstream popularity is a relatively new thing, frankly doesn't make much sense to me. IMO, if you are oppressed, you have a right to be not oppressed - and that is all. If you are oppressed and also jerk, you are a jerk and deserve to be treated accordingly, by which I do not mean the oppression, but whatever the usual consequences are for such behavior.

I also think there are a lot of LGBTQ people who support Israel, but are so warry about supporting oppression that they dont voice their opinion. I could go on and on psychoanalyzing the movement but at the end of the day Id say it makes sense that LGBTQ group seems to be so united behind the palestinian cause.

this stray quote on some thread struck a nerve and stuck with me:

"just because you are weak, doesn't mean you're a victim"

sometimes a tiger initiates a fight against a deer, and wins. sometimes it initiates a fight against another tiger, and loses.

the initiating tiger does not get to claim high moral ground in either case.

I have a hypothesis that a lot of the people on the "left" who will stridently defend gay rights (which I'm for, being a gay man myself) are in fact the same sort of bullies that in a previous generation would have bashed gay people. That is, being on "the right side" of a debate doesn't mean one is necessarily more enlightened nor empathetic.

Next, remember that not only are there reasonable people on the right that hate/fear the import of hegemonizing cultures into their own societies, but also plenty of bullies on the right who will hate somebody for having the wrong shade of skin.

Put the two together, and you get the meme where this guy has to pick one button out of two, one of them is labelled "gay" and the other one is "Islam".

That's how we end up in the situation where "queers for Palestine" get attacked at a pro-Hamas rally.

In general, the pro-palistinian side is favored by the progressive left, the same group who are also pro-gay/pro-trans etc.

In a lot of ways, the struggles are similar to BLM - there is a great injustice being done by a powerful force funded by the US government. Or again with opposing the US's global war on terror. The people in those groups aren't forced to be on the palenstinians side, but it is logically consistent with the other two.

Interesting.

I, uh, am not sure how a person can hold those views simultaneously.

Success of Palestine will mean oppression of the groups the cause seeks to protect (LGBTQ+ specifically).

Isn't this "paradox of tolerance"-esque, or is there a belief that if the Palestinian people were not being bombarded by an oppressive force: that they would be equitable to LGBTQ causes.

Or: does it not factor into it at all?

Posted a different comment further in, but in my opinion it doesn't factor much.

For example, right now the USA is quite progressive in general with gay rights compared to many places, which is great, but I would not support the US government invading other countries, or going back to colonization etc.

I can see those two might be opposed if what you wanted was LBGTQ rights at any cost. But for me at least war, and especially one-sided war, is the bigger injustice and other issues are secondary to that.

> Success of Palestine will mean oppression of the groups the cause seeks to protect (LGBTQ+ specifically).

That depends on what you mean by success of Palestine. Eg if all you're talking about is an end to the current war, that's not really true.

I think LGBT people might be against mass slaughter of civilians via bombing campaigns of areas heavily populated by civilians. I don't the the various conservative views held by those civilians matters too much in terms of them being slaughtered.

I think this is especially the case when their tax dollars are used for this bombing.

I think because those who perceive themselves with the minority view support others who they perceive to be the minority.

There are vanishingly few people from Gaza living in the west, which makes them the minority.

You see similar support between the LGBT community and communities of disabilities.

> But why is it that rainbow flags (pride, et al) are considered the pro-Palestinian side in the conflict.

FWIW in the German speaking countries it's the opposite (for obvious historical reasons).

Generally, I think it's ok to demonstrate against atrocities even if the victims are not your "friends". What I do find disturbing is when progressives try to justify the Hamas terror as an act of "resistance" (one famous example being Judith Butler). That is truely fucked up.

>... the political divide has fallen such that LGBTQ+ people are almost forced to ally with Palestine.

Short answer: they are often one and the same people - leftist activists who have opinions on more than one subject.

I'm sorry but I don't understand and I think I need a longer answer.

I could interpret this three ways:

1) "Leftist Activists"; are a mixed group with some supporting pro-LGBTQ rights and others supporting Palestine.

2) "Leftist Activists"; are a homogenous group, including LGBTQ people, of which they support Palestine (and thus, support a regime that would wish them harm)

3) "Leftist Activists"; are a homogenous group, including LGBTQ people, who will always attempt to ally to the downtrodden, even in cases where the downtrodden would wish them to not exist.

Are any of these correct or is there another interpretation I missed?

I think you are mistaken that you cannot logically support both LGBT rights and Palestine. For example, I support LBGTQ+ rights and would not want people who opposed them in America to be treated the way Palestinians are.

OK, I see.

I suppose my next question would be why we are somehow stoic on the Uyghur issue.

But I would guess that the reason is that the US sends support to Israel while actively cutting ties (or going to war economically) with China.

Exactly, yeah. What's happening there is awful and very sad, but there's almost nothing I can do about it, whereas our government provides billions in weapons to Israel

... and trillions in trade to China. US could cut trade ties with China.

This seems to apply to many conflicts, e.g. Sudan. The US could intervene. Now you might say "US tried something similar and that was not exactly a good experience", but the US certainly can intervene. Or, in Lebanon the US, and all countries in the UN security council promised to intervene (and disarm Hezbollah), but just don't do it.

Not intervening is different than actively supporting. We have given ~ a hundred billion and are about to give tens of billions more in no strings attached military aid. We used our UN Veto dozens of times to prevent calling for a ceasefire

Should we intervene for the Uyghurs? Maybe! But this one seems way more obvious

If that were truly the reason there are protests there wouldn't be any support in Europe, when in reality the movements there are far bigger than in the US.

I mean, sorry, but the black flags and open hostility towards Jews shows what at least a large percentage of the movement is really about. Especially in Europe.

The rest of the movement is the same as leftist movements, imho. It's also not about supporting Palestinians it's about fighting the power, ie. attempting to have political impact by "campaigning" for something SO immoral, unacceptable and unrealistic that there is bound to be a fight. It's about the fight, NOT about a solution. And by campaigning I don't mean campaigning in the sense of political campaigning, or even the vitriol spouting semi-threatening Trump is doing, but being so in the way, sabotaging people's lives, that normal people pretty much have to react with violence (because that's the point of blocking, for example, the Golden Gate bridge: to threaten people's livelihoods, and get a strong reaction that way).

It's not about saving tax dollars ... Yes, there's 1% fringe rightists in there. But seriously? It's not about that.

you are like a third right-

First, no its not about tax dollars, you're right. It's about the US actively participating. Its something we have the power to easily stop doing. If what's happening in Palestine is comparable to the Uyghurs you're conceding that there are human rights problems.

As for antisemitism is Europe, I can't say. You might be right there. But in the US, most of it as far as I can tell is being horrified at pictures and videos of what's happening and feeling responsible. A lot of people hate what happened in the global war on terror and this is very comparable. I won't say that there is Nobody in it for antisemitic reasons here but I think that's a terrible awful reason, I disavow any antisemitism, and i believe that the vast majority of US people in the movement aren't.

The fight vs solution thing, I'm a little baffled by. Yeah the point of blocking the golden gate bridge is to show that things aren't stable in the status quo, that's how protests work. But it sounds like you're saying that getting a reaction is the entire goal and that's uncharitable and untrue

> It's about the US actively participating. Its something we have the power to easily stop doing.

The same goes for the Syrian massacres. US was very clearly providing support for one side of the conflict.

No protests.

Central Africa. Same.

No protests.

Nigeria. Same.

No protests.

Or how about a HUGE ongoing us involvement resulting in lots of dead? Ukraine.

No protests. (and, no, Minimal Thinking Girl protesting by herself doesn't count)

Lebanon. Yemen. Kashmir. Hungary. Finland ... the list goes on and on. What makes this case of support different? We all know what makes it different ...

The difference is extremely clear: Israel is viewed as a key US ally. We give them more foreign aid than any other nation. We got to bat for them very frequently, and almost all of our UN Vetos have been used preventing things from being said to them. The two countries are very connected. When Nigeria eg. does something, we don't rush to approve more weapons immediately.

The closest equivalent imo is South Africa, which the US government was similarly close with and people were Very Mad in almost the exact same way.

& Finally, I truly do not understand the viewpoint that we should give aid to Israel and not Ukraine. I can see the arguments for both or neither or for just Ukraine but this one's baffling. They are currently being invaded by a much bigger power. They are required to use the weapons they get purely defensively.

No offence, there's 2 big differences:

1) they're Jewish

2) they actually defend themselves

Armenia and Lebanon have the same problem in the UN, but it only lasts weeks, and then they fail to defend themselves, and the muslim voting block in the UN is happy when they're militarily defeated, and they just don't care about themselves: not about human rights violations by muslims against anyone else. Not even about disgusting human rights violations by muslims against muslims. Look how much effort people put into getting attention for Sudan, and it's just not getting anywhere, and it won't.

> It's not about saving tax dollars ... Yes, there's 1% fringe rightists in there. But seriously? It's not about that.

That's missing the point about money. Buying the murder weapon is not in the same category as all the inactions that may go into knowing a murder will happen and not ultimately stopping it.

30,000 Uyghur women and children weren’t indiscriminately bombed to death via advanced drones, nor were hundreds of innocent civilians massacred at hospitals in China and buried in mass graves. It’s happening in Palestine as we type.

Instead over 1 million of them are sent to concentration camps, abused and killed to harvest their organs. It's genocide eitherway. The issue isn't covered is really the difference here.

A million killed to harvest their organs? You sure about that? Or was that a rhetorical thing.

Can't find a reliable source right now but the report was from U.N's Gay McDougall

A million people chopped up for organs would presumably leave some significant evidence.

Beware that reasoning. We only knew about the holocaust very late into the war and there were denials just as you claim right now.

And indeed, when the Nazi's were losing they tried quite hard to hide the evidence, however it was so total and immutable in many cases that it could not be hidden, mostly because the allied powers controlled their lands and had free access to their previously governed population..

Without such access proof rarely escapes and when it does the total brutality is considered impossible; this is exactly what happened during world war 2.

> you cannot logically support both LGBT rights and Palestine.

You can support LGBTQ rights AND support Palestinian children not being killed by Israel.

yeah I agree, I think you misread the comment

It's mostly 2. The harder point to prove, though I think it's true, that much of the pro-Palestinian rhetoric is as much anti-Israel, i.e anti-Semetic. It's hard to discuss subjects like this without nuance so most of my observations/opinions tend to be around trends. But a good comparison could be Ukraine and Russia. Much of the US widely supports Ukraine's plight and fully believe that Russia is a belligerent, colonialist nation fully at fault for the war. Nothing gray about it compared to the Israel/Palestine conflict. And yet you don't widespread hate and mistreatment of ethnic Russians in the US. You can't say the same about the treatment Jews, even those born and raised in the US.

> The harder point to prove, though I think it's true, that much of the pro-Palestinian rhetoric is as much anti-Israel, i.e anti-Semetic.

What? My view is totally different.

Most of the pro-Palestinian people intersect with the same anti-fascists under fire from newly pro-Israel people that previously criticized anti-fascists for punching Nazis.

When alt-right people defaced Jewish synagogues before this conflict I find the people arguing for it to be publicly acknowledged as a hate crime are the exact same people that are pro-Palestine now.

> that previously criticized anti-fascists for punching Nazis

For punching people they called Nazis.

Accurate or not, the perception of someone being a Nazi made them punchable. It's not hard to argue people desiring to punch Nazis are probably not anti-Semetic.

Of course it's hard to argue that. Nazis are the great bogeymen right now, wanting to punch them might have little to do with feelings about Jews, and everything to do with just looking for an outlet to attack "the bad people" however defined.

When we read historical cases of witch trials or executing "demons" or "possessed people", it's the same thing.

This goes back to the oppressors and the oppressed. In the case of Punching Nazis, the way I read it is the meme of the anti-fascist that punched Richard Spencer during an ABC interview in 2017[1][2]. The post-modernis in me also like to point out that before then Punching Nazis was endorsed by Steven Spielberg when he directed Harrison Ford to do that as Indiana Jones[3]. And—of course—the supreme glorifies of violence against Nazis Quentin Tarantino who doesn’t let a movie go by unless a Nazi, a rapist, KKK members, etc. get severely tortured, bombed, burned with flamethrowers, etc.

Back to 2017, Richard Spencer is an actually nazi. He is a white supremacist that routinely spouts hate speech against Jewish people. In the case of the ABC interview the oppressed were Jewish people, and the oppressor was Richard Spencer. The Anti-facist very much cared about the Jewish people when he punched Richard Spencer. If Richard Spencer weren’t an oppressor of Jewish People, he wouldn’t have gotten punched.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFh08JEKDYk

2: https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2017/jan/...

3: https://gizmodo.com/indiana-jones-punching-nazis-harrison-fo...

great source lol

Israel seems content to keep Palestine as a ghettoized territory, leaving local administrative matters to Palestinians. How will an Israeli victory, no matter how complete, lead to LGBT Palestinians gaining more rights?

> Israel seems content to keep Palestine as a ghettoized territory, leaving local administrative matters to Palestinians

I don't understand this. Are you saying that without Israel in charge, Palestine is and will stay a ghetto?

What I'm referring to is that Israel is both "in charge" and "not in charge" of Gaza. They control Gaza's borders and move their troops into Gaza at will. On the other hand of course Gazans do not enjoy Israel's constitutional protections, etc.

Israel didn't "move their troops into Gaza at will", not until this current war. After Israel's disengagement from Gaza, it had no soldiers in Gaza at all.

It also doesn't "control Gaza's borders" alone, fwiw.

> On the other hand of course Gazans do not enjoy Israel's constitutional protections, etc.

Not sure what this is "on the other hand" of exactly. Palestinian's want self-determination, Gaza was an incomplete, one-sided and limited form of that, but a form of that. When you're talking about them enjoying Israeli constitutional protections, you're talking about the opposite - Israel essentially conquering Gaza and annexing it officially, turning Gazans into Israeli citizens. Not an outcome that Israel wants and also not an outcome that Gazans want.

And in the context of LGBT rights, that's an outcome that is almost guaranteed to lead to a huge erosion of LGBT rights in Israel, as it'd be adding millions of voters who currently live in a place and culture in which homosexuals are ilterally thrown off rooftops.

> who currently live in a place and culture in which homosexuals are ilterally thrown off rooftops

You seem to be confusing Hamas with ISIS; yes, ISIS did that in Iraq and Syria; not aware that’s happened in Gaza, although there have been false claims to that effect - https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/video-people-thrown-roof-...

Not denying that bad stuff happens to gay people in Gaza (such as extrajudicial honour killings) but not aware that it happens like that

You're right! Thanks for correcting me. I indeed saw that video that was apparently incorrectly attributed to Hamas, when in fact it was Isis.

(Btw, I wasn't "confusing" Hamas with ISIS, I was intentionally misled by that video. I usually try to fact check anything I post but obviously some things get through, so again, thanks for correcting me. I hate disinformation.)

> Not denying that bad stuff happens to gay people in Gaza (such as extrajudicial honour killings) but not aware that it happens like that

Yes, despite me getting this detail wrong, bad things really do happen to gay people in Gaza, as can be found in multiple places. Still, not quite that bad.

I don't think we are in any kind of deep disagreement here on the facts.

* Gaza is a semi-autonomous area

* local government in Gaza is much less LGBT-friendly than Israel's government.

* Israel has no intention of changing Gaza's semi-autonomous status.

But again my question is: given the above, how would an Israeli victory, no matter how complete, improve things for LGBT Palestinians?

You're right, I think we agree on the facts.

> But again my question is: given the above, how would an Israeli victory, no matter how complete, improve things for LGBT Palestinians?

Ah, I was confused why you asked this until I saw this is where the thread started (not by me).

No, you're right, an Israeli victory probably won't help improve things for LGBT Palestinians at all, unless Israel takes over Gaza entirely and starts running it according to more liberal laws. A very unlikely prospect.

anti-Semitic progressives see Jews as White and the Arabs there as people of color.

Look for people talking about Europeans, Settler's (i.e) every Jew in Mandatory Palestine is a settler. People that ignore that the war that gained them the land was a final solution attempt and the only embarrassment (nabka) is the failure to succeed at taht

There's the idea, that TBH I don't fully subscribe, that solidarity is not transactional. But what I do subscribe is that little kids don't bear the blame of what people do against LGBTQ+ communities.

Some people consider LGBT+ to be a persecuted minority. They also consider the Palestinians to be a persecuted minority.

It is about helping those who are a persecuted minority even if one of the groups wants to kill everybody in the other group.

> why is it that rainbow flags (pride, et al) are considered the pro-Palestinian side in the conflict

Source? This is the first I’m hearing of this.

Uh, first thing I could come up with at short notice: https://19thnews.org/2024/03/lgbtq-americans-gaza-israel-pro...

I hope that's enough, there's a lot of documented evidence of pride flags and watermelons in the bio of pro-Palestinian people, almost to the point where many online forums treat it like a meme.

> I might be old but I distinctly remember a humanitarian outcry in the 00's because Palestinians were murdering not only Jews and Christians but also homosexuals[0].

Just because there are anti-lgbt elements in Palestinian society and politics LGBT people wont be pro-genocide and side with Israel.

The proposition defies description no sane person who is not a psychoapath will say "Oh, are they anti-LGBT and they may kill LGBT people? I guess its okay for Israel to murder their children then..."

> I'm not interested in emotional responses

The murder of children cant be reacted to with any other response than an emotional one.

> no sane person who is not a psychoapath will say "Oh, are they anti-LGBT and they may kill LGBT people? I guess its okay for Israel to murder their children then..."

I'd like to strip that sentence of the LGBT context, and point out that the general line of thinking (that there are legitimate reasons for wanting to kill a group of people's children) is actually popular enough to drive major policy. For example, given the historical record, Israeli society has been conditioned to be okay with murdered children and applying disproportionate and devastating force [0]. That state of mind is achieved through diverting the blame for one's atrocities entirely on the other party, and decrying their insanity and evilness for "making you do that" [2], as if one is not responsible for one's own actions, but is entirely reacting to another's action with no capability to alter course. Think this is far fetched and out of the line? There are 14000 children accounted for as dead as the result of current offensive that strongly suggest otherwise, and the killing is not even over yet.

Murdering children does not require an active war against a territory either [1]. It is simply how things are done in their society.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/23/israel...

[2] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2014-07-28/ty-article/we...

> I'd like to strip that sentence of the LGBT context, and point out that the general line of thinking (that there are legitimate reasons for wanting to kill a group of people's children) is actually popular enough to drive major policy. For example, given the historical record, Israeli society has been conditioned to be okay with murdered children and applying disproportionate and devastating force

Yes, Im aware that this 'Kill their mothers/children' thing was brought to top-level public policy by their recent foreign affairs minister who for the first time publicly and openly used that rhetoric and it helped her career a lot. After this, their prominent politicians seem to have stopped hesitating from openly calling for it and this is the result.

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