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Comment by fakedang | Hacker News Reader

As a Muslim who also spends considerable time in the Middle East, I am so totally confused by how America decided that wokism and pro-Palestinianism go together. I mean, literally one is in support of a proposed country where they kill gays or throw them off of rooftops, not to mention the religious backdrop that encourages them to carry out such shit. The other is a movement in outwardly strong support for those gays. Like how?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_the_State_of_...

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Israeli atrocities against Palestinians are something that one can criticize independently of Palestinian atrocities against other Palestinians.

Thinking Palestinians should be freed from Israeli oppression does not necessarily mean one agrees with every part of their culture or everything their government does.

The US has got into a place where for most people political opinions are a package deal that you get shipped to you in a box from a major political party. You don't think through each issue and come to a conclusion, that takes too much time, you just subscribe to the bundle of your choosing and accept everything they offer.

Are you strongly pro-life? Well, that comes bundled with an isolationist foreign policy these days, so let's just check that box for you while we're at it.

Are you in favor of gay rights? Well, that comes bundled with opposition to Israel and support of Palestine.

It's not about what makes coherent sense, it's about groupthink.

No major political party in the US is pro-Palestinian or anti-Israeli. The democrats are moderately pro-Israel and the republicans are extremely pro-Israel. The pro-Palestinian consensus among young people on social media is almost totally unrepresented in mainstream politics.

Palestinians, both gay and straight, are being carpet bombed in Gaza. The Western left tends to support the weak and oppressed. Being carpet bombed is a form of being weak and oppressed.

Also, very strange for you to claim to be a Muslim and then write a searing critique of Islam that would seem to dismiss the humanity of a group (approving of mass killing by bombing) of Muslims because of their religion of Islam.

Supporting my viewpoint with factual statements about my religion, even if they are a criticism of my faith, is not strange at all. There are a large number of Muslims who live with a "live and let live" approach towards the faith and its dictates, especially with respect to the LGBT question. But on the whole, yes, we are surpassed by an even larger majority who believe that the LGBT community should be oppressed because that's God's will. It's wholly rational in my view to criticize that aspect of the faith (even if the hardline Muslims will disagree with me), lest we end up like some lobotomized sheep with no function of thought.

Also, I never criticized the Palestinian community on the whole. I interact with Palestinian diaspora on an almost daily basis, many of whom scoff at the current sad state of affairs in Palestinian governance even internally. Many of them support LGBT rights and scoff at the current state of affairs as run by either Hamas or Fatah.

But that's exactly the point I was making. The liberal west has stupidly (and Hamas successfully) pushed for the equation of Hamas/Fatah representation as the rule of the Palestinian people (and not of the Palestinian state). It's the same as how any criticism of Zionism is basically called anti-Semitism these days (as Israel has successfully done).

Lastly nowhere did I support the bombing of Palestinians in Gaza, or the Shia in Lebanon. In fact, I would say that Israel's pager move was especially genius because it limited damage to specifically the Hezbollah operatives - hard to be more precise than that on that scale.

Just to state the obvious as it seems it’s necessary Islam is 1400 years old. Despite what the Saudi would like you to believe, there is no such thing as a one and only heterodoxy that everyone agrees about and people have widely different relationship with the faith.

but all Muslims have the concept of the Ummah, the collective group of all Muslims, and it seems unlikely to me that any Muslim would approve of the dehumanization of Muslims as the OP had done. In fact it was the OP that projected an assumed belief onto all of the Palestinians. He seems more like yet another Israeli posting on the internet pretending to be a Muslim.

HN is not the place to be making weird assumptions and accusations of bad faith. See the site guidelines.

HN, increasingly, seems like a space where free discourse is not allowed.

First, "Muslim" is a very broad category. For some it's a pious belief, for others less so, for others a cultural marker and nothing more. I don't see much value in the commenter's rant about "pro-Palestinianism" either (as it basically seems to be crude smear against this group for exactly the reasons you state), but ironically, it seems that you're guilty of projecting assumed beliefs here also, to some degree.

For another, if the commenter is trolling about their Muslim identity, then it would appear to be a highly cultivated effort, not limited to this post -- see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41028368 -- so Occam's Razor suggests that they most likely are not.

Make of that what you will. I personally don't care about anyone's identity, religion or lack thereof. In any case, the commenter is definitely riffing on a basically pretty lame stereotype about Palestinians, and seems highly indifferent to their plight as a group (on top peddling another stereotype that seems to consider all those who have strong concerns about the issue as being "woke"), so whatever motivations they may have for cultivating this nonsense are immaterial, in my book.

Implying that the way Palestinian authorities use Sharia to persecute some minorities is not a dehumanisation of a group. That’s the truth. That’s not approving what Israel is doing either. Please don’t deform what’s being say to suit your agenda. It doesn’t help your argument.

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