this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
37 points (100.0% liked)
Politics
10705 readers
234 users here now
In-depth political discussion from around the world; if it's a political happening, you can post it here.
Guidelines for submissions:
- Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
- Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
- Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
- Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
- Social media should be a source of last resort.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean you're not wrong. Every single person in American politics, with a handful of scattered exceptions, has been in favor of Israel's genocide for decades.
It's not because it was Joe doing it, though. They're just fine with pretty much all of it, pretty much all of them. But yes, they (along with a bunch of European governments) are all of a sudden pretending they discovered it's a big huge problem and they're extremely concerned, when the starvation has been going on for months and the broader genocide project for a lot longer than that. The newspapers are confused about it (or pretending to be, on purpose), and have just now worked themselves around now that it's fully undeniable, but these guys have intelligence agencies and they're not naive, I can't believe that they are equally ignorant about it.
And yes, they'll go back to not caring in the slightest once it slips out of the news cycle in a might-hurt-me-in-the-election type of way again.
Well, yes. But that was rather my point. It's not specific to Biden—the idea is that they're all fine with it so long as their personal political capital benefits from agreeing with it, which it did, so long as a Democrat was in the White House. It's two-faced. We agree on this.
I mention Joe specifically because he was in office when this particular era of the genocide started, and so there was a lot of people (not just politicians, either) who were perfectly comfortable backing his support of human rights violations for over a year. Does it need him to happen? No. But he was there, and he made things worse, so he is who gets called out.
On an optimistic note, however: I don't remember specifically what article it was, but I do distinctly remember support for Israel has been dropping slowly over the last couple years, even before Trump started taking shits on everything. So not all the change in sentiment is temporary, thankfully.
My point is, I don't think there are very many people at all who were fine when it was Joe doing it. I think there are people outraged and horrified that it's happening in the first place, whoever's in offce, and I think there are people who think it's "antisemitism" and just some crazy protestors, and I don't think there are too many people who are conditionally in one camp or another.
Like who are you thinking of, that's suddenly speaking out against it when they were silent about it before? Who can you point to (a public figure or a person on Lemmy)?
I think in many ways it’s a matter of poltical survival and optics. Many politicians were terrified that it would be political suicide to say anything negative, to give any notion that they weren’t “supporting an alley”. They were targeted directly by propaganda campaigns to convince them that what was going on was good and that the public and media were on board. Convinced that important media outlets could dogpile and demolish their public support if they did anything to go against the consensus.
But the propaganda campaign has failed to convince significant segments of the public, and media pushing it is actually hurting its credibility and viewership. Finally politicians are realizing that the threat of political destruction over the issue is largely non-existent and that there is actual public good will to be earned.
Yeah.
For one thing, public opinion really is changing, and just like for the Iraq War or the attitude towards police in the country, the people who are behind the curve are totally lost as to how things are shifting, and just assume they're in the majority as they've always been. You don't know what you don't know.
One of the absolutely predictable failure modes of propaganda-driven empires is that the stuff that gets generated to get printed in the papers to fool the proles, winds up getting read by the leaders, and fools them too. I don't get how people are accusing the Democrats of losing votes on purpose in the election because they love Israel. I think they (almost all of them, certainly the DNC segment) are absolutely convinced that it's a tiny scattered handful of people who are "antisemitic" or whatever, and most people support what they're doing, and so of course they're going to stand behind our wonderful ally Israel, although they're upset about civilian casualties during the war as anybody would be.