cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17956865
‘It is time for this war to end,’ Harris tells Netanyahu; ‘I will not be silent’ on Palestinian suffering
After a public letter condemning all protesters.
It’s almost as if politicians (particularly at this level) often need to walk a rhetorical tightrope so as to avoid alienating large swathes of voters. Crazy.
It’s almost as if politicians (particularly at this level) often need to walk a rhetorical tightrope so as to avoid alienating
large swathes of voters[small set of powerful donors]. Crazy.FIFY
The majority of the Democrat voterbase opposes genocide. She is continuing to drive Democrat voters to third parties by not taking a strong anti-genocide stance.
I love how simple people here think this is. Just say fuck Israel, go full force against them and when Trump wins we will… Wait, what?oh yeah, now we don’t get the votes we need to win and now Trump wins and now Trump will make it exponentially worse for Gaza and Ukraine and the entire fucking world.
It. Is. Not. That. Easy.
Let her win first, shall we, please? Pretty please? Once she wins you can throw all this anti genocide stuff on her head but until then please realize that she’ll have to appease large groups of people who are so pro Israel that they ignore the genocide.
Exactly. Also, it’s interesting that these people are nowhere to be found at primary time, nor do they ever seem to give a shit about anything below Presidential election.
If they actually give a shit about electing progressives, they wouldn’t disappear for four years.
Its almost as if the person you’re responding to is saying that public letter condemning all protestors is alienating them. Crazy.
alienating them
You mean SOME, not all. That is the tight rope. You’re not everyone
“them” was referring to the person who wrote the message
Yes, that is what they said. And…?
I believe the point they’re making is that she alienated more voters condemning the protests than she would have by refusing to.
Are those voters likely to vote for Trump instead? Or do you think the centrists that Democrats tiptoe around during election years are?
Once she’s in, once the immediate danger to the basic functioning of our government is over, I’ll be interested to see how she handles it. Right now though? She seems to be providing criticism while walking a careful line and trying to play it safe.
If she doesn’t come firmly down on refusing to materially support the IDF after the election, I’ll be first in line to start making noise about it. But at the moment? We need to secure our ability to have future elections first or it’s going to get a whole lot worse. I get it.
This. I say this every time and somehow it doesn’t help, nobody gets it. Politics, any politics, is walking tightropes. Even dictators have to walk certain tightropes to not get toppled within minutes. Democracies are so much worse (and thus better, in the end) when it comes to tightropes everywhere
So, this “tightrope walk” gives politicians a free pass to lie to voters about what they intend to do once they’re in office? How is that fair? No one is able to make an informed decision that way.
How can deceiving citizens possibly improve the quality of leadership in any country, democratic or otherwise? It’s called manipulation and that’s what you do when you don’t want the other party to have a choice in the matter. It’s what you do when you want to seize control.
I’m not saying it’s good, I’m saying that that’s unfortunately how politics works
Read it again. It didn’t say all protesters. No need to make shit up.
When I read the article it didn’t seem like all, it was the violent ones and the ones who were tagging about Hamas on near/on government property (which like, kinda whatever to that one).
In that same article she condemned Hamas while talking about the lives of Gazans. I feel like people have been talking about the difference between Gaza and Hamas here on Lemmy, but when it’s talked about by VP/Presidential Candidate it’s suddenly not possible to have that be distinguished?
The only thing that she’s missing here is our perspective, which overall seems to come down to, “yes the actions of Hamas are abhorrent and terroristic, however they also are doing so somewhat out of necessity due to the Israeli state working so hard to kill them. That doesn’t make the actions of Hamas okay, it simply makes the citizens of Palestine stuck between two organizations.” Hence our support for Palestine, because what are they going to do? It’s death either direction, and at least one is wanting to give them statehood and the other wants them extinct.
She is partway there. She has recognized a difference between Gaza and Hamas, she has condemned the death put forth by both Hamas and Israel, while also speaking out against violent protesters and flag burners. Obviously, she is missing the fact that Israel wants Palestine the way Russia wants Ukraine the way China wants Taiwan. And that U.S. citizens are against that. Hence our protests.
So frustrating.
Same excuse Biden used to condemn the student protesters.
God damn she might actually start to regain the trust of the Arab American Midwest communities that have recently been crucial to winning the election. It’s nice to have someone with a more modern and balanced stance. It’s not perfect, but it’s a LOT further in the direction of good than Biden on that point.
Talk is cheap. Do something to show you really mean it.
And what would that be?
get in front of a camera and say “what israel is doing is wrong. when I am president I will ban all weapons deliveries to israel.”
That just sounds like more talk. Your standard of comparison isn’t talk vs action, it’s talk vs more blunt talk. Not really saying you’re wrong, but wouldn’t somebody be able to comment on an article reporting your ideal headline “talk is cheap”?
It commits her to a specific action
I mean, talk that puts something of hers at stake, theoretically (hardline “we must support israel” voters, which I don’t think really exist in the democratic party, israeli funding, military industrial complex funding, etc.), is talk that is, in and of itself, an action. It could still be a lie, sure, but then it’s a lie that she’s gonna get called out on later and then that’s politically damaging, at least theoretically, especially because it ostracizes her from both the hardline group that wants to support israel and it ostracizes her from the people that actually wanted to do that. Most politicians won’t lie so handily unless they’re real pieces of shit, or unless they think people will just forget. Most politicians will instead try to waffle and weasel and say that oh well I tried to do that guys but it was just too hard! I tried but I couldn’t do it! They try to save face. Taking a hard stance, making a strong commitment, that ensure that you’re sacrificing your ability to save face later on to your voter base, which indicates that you might actually do something.
And that would likely severely impact her chances at the presidency. The attack ads practically write themselves. Trump would just bring up the October 7 attacks, opine that how dare she side with Hamas, and promise to not to abandon Israel. As horrified as many people are by the current war, most aren’t ready to completely cut Israel off, especially if it can be framed against Hamas.
One of the reasons Biden was losing was his support for Israel. Supporting Israel does not win elections.
No, politicians have to walk a fine line. Biden hadn’t put much of a restriction on use of US weapons and his sanctions against violent settlers in the West Bank are ineffective. Israel has mostly ignored efforts to reign it in. Kamala could lay out some far more concrete measures that would get certain weapons revoked if civilian deaths remain high. At the same time, keeping Patriot missiles well stocked would not impact Palestinians at all.
Bullshit. America holds Israel’s leash. Israel would be nothing without American weapons.
Kamala also has to win an election. Straight up abandoning Israel is nowhere near as popular as Lemmy’s echo chamber would have you think.
Arrest Netanyahu while he’s in America.
That would be great, but she doesn’t have the power to do that.
They could if they wanted to
Stop finding Israel and sending them weapons would be a great start!
Talk is cheap. Prove it and earn voters.
Protests are wrong. Genocide is complicated.
One liners are
In the past she had also wanted to be more vocal in previous speeches but it had seen it get watered down by the Biden administration. I think she will push for more than Biden ever did/will
Oh wow… ngl I am looking forward to hearing more from her. I know this is partially me being silly, but my vibe is weirdly slightly similar to 2008? Like, I know I’m probably just being overly optimistic, but at the same time… if she is now taking the gloves off because she’s gonna be the top dog… this is gonna be really interesting and potentially awesome to watch.
Fuck em up
Its glorious to see Bibi fly all the way here for the dems to turn him into a basket for Kamala to dunk on.
I’m sure he’ll think real hard about what he’s done on the way home. Maybe even dry his tears with the truckloads of money and munitions Harris is complicit in handing him without reservation to commit genocide with.
How is Harris complicit? A VP can’t control whether or not Israel gets funded.
She was silent, the ENTIRE TIME on the issue. Her and Aubrey Graham, sitting in the same silence on the matters we’re just supposed to believe out of whole cloth that they gave any kind of a damn about. Just sitting on her hands like nothing was wrong; then CONFIRMED that collaboration by condemning the protestors that were violently locked up by Capitol Hill police. You count too, based on your carrying her water.
I was going to vote Dem no matter what.
But I have multiple friends who weren’t, solely because of Israel-Palestine (they weren’t voting trump either, they were either going to abstain or write-in…useless)
But this has turned them around and, at least in my small circle, is meaningful.
Fingers crossed.
They got dissuaded just hours after the news released and only platitudes given? Yikes
Yeah, no one had ever even heard of Kamala Harris before a week ago, and she has no track record to speak of, so all we know about her are platitudes from the past few days /s
“Plz maybe stop the genocide, anyway here’s a bunch more bombs and some public diplomatic cover”
Lol mixed messaging. You literally just condemned people protesting him coming to the US
Do you think we’re this stupid?
Protests themselves often tend to be less popular than the causes they promote. Politically it can make sense to distance from a protest, but still align with a cause itself that is more popular
It’s strange, but ultimately the cause itself is what matters here
She’s lying to both parties. This is hypocrisy, and its discrediting.
Unless you only hear the lie intended for you. Trump is a master at this sort of thing. Maybe Harris is a better politician than we think.
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She has no power over that as vice president.
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Ok genocide supporter
Are you responding to the wrong comment?
She could’ve easily just ignored that protest, because it doesn’t have anything at all to do with her. The only reason this is still getting democratic backing is because of institutional reasons. The rhetoric about, desert rose, shining star of democracy in the middle east, rings hollow when israel has done jack shit as a strategic ally for us for the past 70+ years other than get us wrapped up in multiple conflicts, use us as a weapons manufacturing base to keep the military industrial complex spinning constantly, and train our cops more and more poorly. I don’t think your average democratic voter wants to keep hearing about this shit, I think your average voter wants to ignore this, or has bigger fish to fry in their immediate future, and I don’t think outside of the republican party, which is swamped by doomsday cult evangelical zionists, there are any real hardline make or break “support israel or bust” guys in the democratic voter base. Maybe your super extremist brainbroken libs, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to have their vote anyways, I think. It’s that phantomic undecided voter that they always come back to. Real Hotelling’s law shit, but they’re like, stuck in a fucked up version of the centrism from the 80’s, eternally, only changing the window dressing.
This is purely an institutional concern, and the more this comes up, the less time she has to actually show anything substantive to people. She doesn’t understand how tenuous and ethereal her meme momentum is. People are satisfied with her now because she’s not joe biden, and because she actually has a chance to beat trump, maybe, but after that satisfaction evaporates and the coconut tree and brat memes fall off with their half life of like, probably two weeks or less, she’s gonna need something better than just “vote blue no matter who or else fascism will destroy democracy”, or else it’s just going to fucking beam us with the exact cynicism that’s been the case for like the last two elections. She could even just fucking lie, and say as president she’ll appoint more people to the supreme court, and reverse the reversal of roe v. wade, and even if she doesn’t do that, the issue would probably still be a huge winner for her and help get her elected. But the more time she spends on israel’s fuckups the more she’s going to tread water, and if you’re not moving forwards, you’re sliding backwards.
Do you agree with her condemnation of hamas, and support for netanyahu?
I’m committed to posting this MLK quote as often as it is relevant:
First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I’m at the point that I find this quote whenever I need it by opening my profile and sorting by controversial.
i hope you’re right.
i haven’t been able to vote democrat since obama’s 2nd term and kamala seemed like it was possible again until i saw that distancing yesterday.
i also hope that it’s not just lip service; but there’s no way to know.
This is the equivalent of condemning the police officer who killed George Floyd, but also condemning the George Floyd protests.
And the message is also equivalent:
Please murder more people, but do it more silently so we don’t have to pretend to care.
Correct.
Stop sending them the munitions and money that cause the suffering and maybe we’ll believe you
That reminds me of one interview with a random Israeli, I think a politician. Her attitude toward the US was one of “stop telling us what to do big guy.” It was so utterly bizarre to read that. Yeah, don’t tell us what to do, but do give us the weapons to do it with! Also, constantly shield us for any consequences from the international community!
to all the people saying talk is cheap, calm down champs. she is not the president yet, she is still a part of the Biden administration and anything she does likely needs to be vetted by them. by saying such she accepts losing the support of certain lobbies which will give her more independence and leeway during her presidency I think. words matter more than you think, especially at the brink of an election, when pretty powerful organizations expect you to say things in a certain way.
calm down champs
🙄
This has Mueller energy.
No, fuck that. Words have been wind for four fucking years on this matter and she’s inheriting the seat that the LAST genocider-in-chief had. If you curry favor from genocidal lobbies, you’re a collaborator too, fuck off.
When it comes to a high ranking member of the administration that’s enabled this genocide, I’ll believe it when I see it
She didn’t attend Bibi’s Congressional political rally (it was mainly for the majority of Israelis who want Bibi gone), which is unusual for her. Then she punctuates her meeting with Bibi with this. Maybe it’s just rhetoric. She will need to outline what sorts of consequences she’s willing to impose on Israel.
