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Comment by bsian | Hacker News Reader

Trump is completely torching his term for Israel.

Then you'll get your comments removed from this website if you mention the term "ZOG". If this is not ZOG, then what is it?

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"ZOG" claims way too much, is inactionable, and ultimately just feeds the reactionary dumpster fire that has created our current predicament. "Please don't release the real Epstein files Mr Bibi Sir" suffices.

Right? It's really concerning how much traction "ZOG" seems to be getting.

It's literally true that most of the US government is Zionist. But "Zionist-Occupied Government" is an antisemitic conspiracy theory used by white supremacists with specific and incorrect beliefs about how Zionism works in the US and how it formed into what we're all facing today.

At least flat-earthers get a useful locally-true approximation of the shape of the Earth from their conspiracy theory.

It's fucking heads they win, tails we lose. The only way we can win is to walk a narrow line, and in the presence of populism that is seemingly impossible. How much support for Grump was because "Biden supports genocide" ? Of course it's hard to tell how much was genuine grassroots vs dead Internet, but surely there were some voters that fell for it. Congratulations, you played yourself.

Is "ZOG" not a locally-true approximation of the shape of the USG?

"Locally true" doesn't help when you need to deal with a much larger-scoped problem, right?. "ZOG" locally suceeds at making you feel like you've got it all figured out, but it's self defeating in the bigger picture. Talk about AIPAC all day long. Talk about congress critters of all political stripes tacitly approving Grump's Iran debacle. Talk about how Epstein seems to have been a politically protected honey trap operation. Talk about Israeli intelligence's well established pattern of no-holds-barred meddling in other countries.

... but balling that all up into "ZOG" just gives one a simplistic rabbit hole where "everything clicks" (ie it proves too much), and mostly written off by anyone else. And if it were to start being widely accepted, it will just fuel a reactionary dumpster fire like every broad-brush populist message inevitably does.

The earth isn't locally flat either, because there are mountains. Nor is it a sphere, because there are mountains.

> Trump is completely torching his term for Israel.

That is utter bullshit and you know it.

The US government has always been deathly afraid of anything left of what would be "conservative social democrats" in Europe - remember McCarthyism? The US certainly does not need Israel to tell it to hunt down leftists.

> Then you'll get your comments removed from this website if you mention the term "ZOG".

Because it's a ridiculous antisemitic conspiracy myth.

The link makes it clear (at least to me) that they are looking for Palestine supporters and not leftists in general.

The disaster of the Iran war will be the legacy of Trump 2. A war that started because Netanyahu convinced Trump there was an imminent attack and fed us false intel on nuclear capabilities. That sounds like torching it to me.

ZOG as a conspiracy is nuts but you can’t deny the influence AIPAC has on Congress. Zionists have a very powerful lobby. Then you have guys like Fetterman who are making Israel their core issue.

> Because it's a ridiculous antisemitic conspiracy myth.

This perceived overlap of antisemitism and anti-zionism has been shown many times to be a false equivalence. It does nobody any good to conflate Zionism which is a very real fascist Israeli supremacy movement, with Semitism which refers to Jewishness regardless of culture or country.

As with many Fascist movements it is very much in the interest of those who follow the a Supremacy movement to conflate opposition of their movement with persecution of their culture.

> It does nobody any good to conflate Zionism which is a very real fascist Israeli supremacy movement, with Semitism which refers to Jewishness regardless of culture or country.

No. Zionism at its core is just the opinion that there needs to be a state of Israel, to serve as a "last safe haven" for all Jews in the world.

And what is "a state of Israel"? Obviously it needs to meet some criteria to count as a state of Israel. If I bought a farm and called it Israel it wouldn't meet the criteria.

Some of those criteria are that it must include Jerusalem, and it must be a Jewish ethnostate.

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