These. People. Are. Motherfarking. CRAZY!!!

I've learned that the moment I hear the words 'Israeli genocide' come out of someone's mouth, I need to leave the conversation immediately.

Image by Petr Kratochvil at Public Images

(May 12th) What began as a lovely conversation with a fellow tourist on a Barbados beach ended in sheer ideological nutbaggery.

It was early evening and I was trying to work off a poorly-chosen milkshake consumed earlier that afternoon that came to me larger than advertised. I strolled down to a public beach and passed the pool to which I had access with my Vrbo cottage.

An older woman was standing near the rail so I called out, “Excuse me, do you know how late the pool is open?”

“I’m not sure,” she said Britishly. “I was here the other night and the fellow was cleaning out the pool at 7pm, but I don’t know if you can swim afterwards.”

So we started chatting the usual tourist banter, I asked where she was from in England and I said I was from Toronto, and later it came into the conversation that I was American by birth, and of course as soon as you say ‘American’ the talk turns to You-Know-Who and how he’s ruining everything. Lovely little fellow liberal conversation until, trusting me too much apparently, she proudly flashed a sticker on the back of her mobile that said STOP ISRAELI GENOCIDE.

Gulp.

I hadn’t said a thing about Israel or anything remotely related to it. She just thought I must be a fellow—antisemite.

She started going on about Israeli genocide and I said, “Wait! What about Palestinian and Hamas genocide?”

“What Palestinian genocide?”

“Ever heard of the 1929 Hebron Massacre?”

“The what?” I could make a snarky comment about her ignorance but it’s not the best-known massacre even today. Still, someone who had just revealed herself as a freaking far-left lunatic invested in the current conflict should have at least heard about it. To her credit, she pulled out her mobile. “What was it again?”

“1929 Hebron Massacre,” I said, spelling Hebron in case I’d mispronounced it. “The description reads very similar to the October 7th attack except without the hang gliders.”

She’d started entering it into Google but then went off on a tear about Israeli genocide and what’s been visited on the Palestinians and what about the 1947 Israeli—"

“Wait a minute,” I said, "let’s go back to 1929, before the creation of the Israeli state.” She still had her mobile in hand. I don’t know if she ever completed the search. I started telling her about it and she interrupted to rant.

“And then there’s Hamas and the October 7th attack—”

“That wasn’t genocide!”

“It was a good start. Genocide is in their charter.”

“No it’s not.”

“They’ve watered down the language in their newer charter but it’s still there. It was quite explicit in the original charter.”

“That’s not true,” she said. I guess she hadn’t read it. Or Googled it. Or even heard of it.

And she started going on about Israeli settlers and colonization of Palestine and no right to the land and I said, “Wait! They both have a right to the land!”

“The Jews are COLONIZERS!”

“So are the Palestinians! Their ancestors invaded in the seventh century!”

At some point shortly after, she put her mobile away and said, “That’s it! Stop! I can’t talk to you anymore! Genocidist! Murderer! Israeli killer!” She turned on her heel.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I said, loud enough for her to overhear. “Fucking fanatic.”

I strolled down the boardwalk, a lot less triggered than she.

It had been such a nice, lovely conversation, two tourists exchanging information and chatting about our respective countries and then she brought Israel into it and I knew at that very moment, as soon as she flashed her mobile sticker, that this wasn’t going to end well.

I could have turned and walked away, but honestly, it didn’t occur to me. I could have tried to change the subject but it’s hard to do when someone does a 180 on you by dragging the world’s most toxic topic into the conversation.

And me, always trying to educate, challenged her. I was polite, I injected facts where I could into her one-sided near-hysterical blindness. She turned from a sweet old British lady into a freaking antisemitic Tyrannosaurus Rex with a Keffiyeh Klan hate sticker.

The people who think they know the most about this tediously perpetual conflict are almost always those who know the least.

God, Goddess and Darwin knows I’m no expert on the Middle East nor the latest war in a region that will probably never stop fighting each other until the sun goes white dwarf. There’s plenty of blame on both sides and what the Israeli government, for all its faults and flaws, has done is appalling but I still find myself falling more on their side, because it’s the only democracy that has ever survived in the Middle East. Every other country in the region is a theocratic autocracy and human rights abrogation mess to one degree or another, and we all remember George Bush’s experimental failure in Iraq.

I believe many Afghans wanted democracy but too many did not. At least too many in power. I’m sorry: Muslims just don’t do democracy.

Today’s Gazans and their ancestors have a long ugly history of antisemitism dating back before Islam to Biblical times. Islam is rooted in it. The Koran is clear that Jews must all die. Along with conflicting verses as well, as many have pointed out, that expresses brotherhood to all people, and doesn’t add “…except for the Jews.” But today’s Islamic states clearly adhere far too dearly to the former interpretation of What To Do About The Jews. As though they had the right to determine the fate of others.

Here’s an article I wish I’d read before I encountered ideologically constipated British woman.

Update - The Ugly Truth About Palestinian Violence - by David Josef Volodzko at The Radicalist.

What the ‘Stop Israeli Genocide’ set would rather not think about is that as of late 2024, 90% of Gazans believe no atrocities were committed by Hamas on October 7th. The article further notes that the father of Palestinianism was a Hitler-loving card-carrying Nazi and calls the Gazans out for being among the most hateful, intolerant people on the planet. They’re a weird bunch to support by a batshit-crazy left that thinks one should never say No to a transperson.

It still doesn’t mean I approve of the way Israel is handling this war, and Netanyahu simply gives me the willies.

Like his far-right cohort-in-crime, he manhandles the current conflict with a chainsaw. He’s a crazy-ass right-winger, not the normal centrist kind, which is why Donald Trump loves him so much. He tried to seize the Israeli court system in 2023 (sound weirdly familiar?). He’s led one of the most destructive defensive campaigns in history, and while it’s hard to determine even roughly how many Gazans have died, since the numbers tend to come from IDF- or Hamas-supporting sources, one of whom shrinks the figures, the other inflates them, Gaza has suffered many times over the deaths of October 7th. If some experts are to be believed (is there even any such thing here?), they’ve allegedly killed more than died in Ukraine’s Mariupol, or even the WWII Allied bombing of Nazi Germany.

Gaza looks like what I find when I Google ‘post-apocalyptic future’. The starving Gaza kids are real. The wholesale destruction of hospitals is also real. The Gazan (or maybe they’re Israeli) kids held prisoner in chicken cages are not.

Israel has a lot of answer for. There are some voices in Israel calling for the complete destruction of Gaza, which does sound pretty genocidal. It doesn’t account for all Israelis, though, especially the over 70% who want Netanyahu to resign, any more than MAGA insanity represents all Americans. Even a lot of Republican voters, and a growing number of their politicians, don’t feel represented by Trump’s America.

Israel occupies some land it shouldn’t, it bulldozes Gazan houses, and it has been blockading food and other humanitarian assistance to whatever Gazans are left. It’s committed post-October 7th war crimes. Then again, so has Hamas, including plenty against the Gazans, which people like the British nutbag either ignore or remain blissfully ignorant about. That’s Hamas’s whole reason for being: Terrorism and power-mongering. How are they ‘resisting’ the ‘Israeli occupiers’ when they divert hunger relief and other humanitarian aid from the Gazans to themselves?

Israel, right now, is certifiably insane. So is Hamas and so too are the Gazans, at least when they’re not being leveled back to the Stone Age.

So, too, is all of the Middle East.

When there’s clearly so much violence, justified and not, on both sides, and political extremism, and yes, voices on both sides encouraging genocide (although lopsidedly Muslim) I understand why the crazy British Gaza cultist is furious about what’s being done to Gaza, but I’m also furious that these people are so blindly one-sided. Palestinians are angels. Palestinians aren’t genocidal. Hamas are freedom fighters.

Like hell. Like hell. Like bloody hell.

Zero sympathy for the other side, which makes them no better than their adversaries.

We all think we understand what’s going on there and we don’t. None of us do. Even people who’ve made it their life’s work to understand the conflict and perhaps offer solutions don’t completely understand it. Maybe they’re experts in their tiny little sliver of it, but there’s something so primal, so tribal, so indefinably neolithic about the conflict, that maybe none of us in the modern world can truly comprehend it. Many of us have moved beyond the traditional historical lifestyle in which everyone who isn’t part of your tribe is an enemy and must be eliminated. Genocide has been part of the human psyche at least since we climbed down from the trees. Modern humans didn’t even recognize it as a problem until the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

The crazy Brit, and everyone like her—the Kiddie Keffiyeh Klan on the college campuses, the hatemongers in Canada and the United States who’ve targeted violence against Jews (670% rise in Canada, a world record in antisemitism), the vicious little merdes that have made Montreal the most antisemitic city in North America—when you only see half the problem, you are the problem.

Gazans and Israelis are human beings, some honorable, all imperfect. Democracy germinated and developed the radical notion that all human beings are equals, a liberal idea that dispenses with the notion that whoever has the gold makes the rules, or that might makes right, that some are naturally inferior, or that some people are more equal than others. It’s why women, children, gays, transfolk and even animals have greater protections, and greater than in any Islamic country. Whose misogyny, homophobia and genuine transphobia is far higher.

Someone I know who considers herself fair and egalitarian got testy with me a few months ago because I kept calling out campus protester antisemites and Nazis. “Why don’t you ever criticize the right-wing Nazis?” she asked, finger-pointing elsewhere in a fit of whataboutist pique.

“Because they’re not abusing, harassing, attacking and vilifying Jews on college campuses,” I said. “It’s our antisemites and Nazis.” I emphasized the our. “Aren’t you anti-antisemitic?”

“Of course I am!” she replied indignantly.

“Then why aren’t you happy I’m condemning ours?” I asked. “You are against all antisemites, correct? Or only right-wing ones?”

Of course she has no use for any of them, she assured me, but I knew it made her uncomfortable that I was pointing out the many, many equally morally flawed individuals on our own side. Some Nazis wave the keffiyeh rather than the swastika. She, like the British woman, would rather point fingers at the hate and violence on the other side while ignoring the same on her own.

This acquaintance isn’t a Jew-hater. She’s one of the best people I’ve ever known, but she, like so many, is afraid to turn over her own shiny sun-dappled liberal rock to see what slimes around underneath.

She didn’t turn into a monster, like the crazy Brit who I swear in a heartbeat was about to open a giant maw like a Dune sandworm and swallow me whole.

But, for now, she simply can’t see the other side, with that one-sided moral blindness. On some level, both these people prefer a safer ignorance.

The moment the words ‘Israeli genocide’ crawl out of someone’s mouth, the moment to leave is right fucking now.

I have this: The crazy Brit has now heard the words 1929 Hebron massacre. Maybe she Googled it later, or will in the future. Maybe she won’t, out of fear of what might tarnish her rose-colored view of the Gazans. But I have planted a seed she will not easily dislodge.

What has been heard cannot be unheard.

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