POTF 7 - Winner and Runner-Up

[Aexodus]

The winner of POTF 7 was sumskilz, earning 1 competition point and 5 rep points. Well done!

Winning Post

Israel elections April 2019

The president of Israel knows Hebrew. And no, he isn't talking about the settlements. As I said, Rivlin is quite clearly referring to community settlements in that quote. Section 7b of the Nation-State Law is even specifically referenced. This is exactly what you posted: are we willing to support discrimination and exclusion of men and women based on their ethnic origin? this clause (7b) would essentially allow any community to establish residential communities that exclude Sephardic Jews, ultra-Orthodox people, Druze, LGBT people. Is that what the Zionist vision means? However, section 7b was removed from the text before it passed, as you can see: https://knesset.gov.il/laws/special/...ationState.pdf In a religious state, everything is religious...as the Haaretz put it, .n Israel, Charlie Hebdo would not have even had the right to exist ...and don't blame the British. Speaking of incoherent. Are you claiming that the law against religious incitement doesn't date to the British Mandate? Are you claiming that said law is somehow responsible for a private entity firing an employee over drawing a cartoon unrelated to religion or religious figures? According to Kretzmer, the racist nation-state law is an insult to the Arab "citizens" of Israel. Okay, so your point is that some guy has an opinion. Many Israelis have the same opinion, and most Arabs did see it as insulting. The law was meant to be divisive, but as a bit of political theater it wasn't directed at Arab citizens, it was meant to divide the supposedly true Zionist politicians from those politicians who are allegedly only Zionist in name. The Arab parties were completely irrelevant in this decision, since they refuse to sit in a coalition with any Zionist party, they are politically irrelevant. The reason Netanyahu brought it up now, and made a social media scene in a very Trump-like maneuver, is the same reason. His party is trying paint Gantz and Lapid as not true Zionists, but leftists in disguise in order to discredit them. You can see this clearly in Miri Regev's response to Rotem Sela over the issue: “Rotem, we have no problem with the Arabs,” she wrote on Facebook. “We have in our party many Arab, Druze and Christian members. We have a problem with the hypocrisy and the masquerade ball of Lapid and Gantz, who are trying with all their might to hide from the public the fact that they’re left-wing, and are dressing up as centrists.” Regev added that Matsliah “didn’t stop me because it’s the truth. It’s either Bibi or Tibi.” Anyway, seems like you're getting distraught about a situation you have no control over, rather than trying acquire a deeper understanding of the context. Simply put, the law declares that the state is only the state of its Jewish residents. This is the misunderstanding I tried to explain to you. It doesn't refer to individual rights. It refers to the self-determination of national identities within the state. I think you would still disagree with it even if you understood it and still consider it discriminatory, but that's neither here nor there to me. I consider the law to have been pointless from a legal standpoint. The first time I filled out a visa application to enter Israel, I was confused that the English/Hebrew form asked me to fill in my "nationality" (אזרחי) and then in the very next box asked for my "nationality" (לאומי). The first is nationality in more of a sense of citizenship, the second is nationality in the sense of deep community ties and culture. Even knowing this, I still didn't know what to put for the second box, because it doesn't exactly make sense in English, and I'm not either American or Jewish, or even Jewish vs non-Jewish. The form also asked for "religion", so a person could put Jewish as their religion, independent of whether or not they put Jewish as their "nationality". Israeli is not a "nationality" in the sense it is being used in the nation-state law. It is uncontroversial among Israeli citizens that the state contains members of multiple "nations". These "nations" are also not exactly synonymous with "ethnicities" in Hebrew either, before someone gets that notion. Sephardi is an ethnicity, Jewish is a "nationality". Naturally this concept is foreign to assimilated Jews in Western countries, who mostly see their nationality and citizenship as synonymous. Netanyahu has really gone too far here, he sounds like a racial nationalist. Israel has the complication of multiple indigenous "nations" in one state which makes things different, but as an example of how this is conceived of in Hebrew: What nationalities other than English do you think England is the nation-state of? Picking an example... Do Pakistanis in England have the right to self-determination since they are a different nationality? Do Pakistanis have the right to have English symbols removed from all government buildings, forms, and currency because such symbols are not inclusive of their separate Pakistani identity? The solution in England has been to try to make a civil English identity independent of other identities, but in Israel, neither the bulk of majority nor the minorities wish to create a civil Israeli identity independent of their community identities. In fact, a good portion of the minorities would be violently opposed to such an effort. What they want is an equal claim to the state by their own "nation". So the question arises, is Israel also a nation-state of the Arab people? Most Israeli Jews say no.

Runner-up this week is Abdülmecid I. See you next time!

Runner Up Post

The double standards of progressives in the West

I am not sure how many useful conclusions we can extract from the reference to a couple of unlinked incidents. Even the most innocent child can observe that politics are marked by partiality, hypocrisy and insincerity. Perhaps a flawlessly designed scientific research can shed some light on this phenomenon, by examining wider social trends, but the controversies mentioned in the original post certainly do not suffice for anything more valuable than arbitrary generalisations. My social media are flooded by Islamists, who simultaneously criticise Israel and American warhawks for their hostility against Arabs and then complain why neither of them invades Syria and ethnically cleanse the country's religious minorities. Not to mention the innumerable conservatives who mock the leftists for being sentitive snowflakes and then get immediately triggered, when the protagonist role of a blockbuster is given to a female or when a Democrat populist dares to endorse the most moderate parts of the social-democratic doctrine. And yet, singling out Sunni extremist and the right-wing for being exceptionally insincere would seem very unfair and biased to me. Moreover, I have my reservations about the examples you used, alhoon. For instance, your own source admits that there are two stories about the destroyed cement cross in the island of Lesbos. The first one (about the cross being erected in the honour of whoever lost his life swimming there) seems rather weird and is not supported by any other source I looked for. The only English-speaking article I managed to detect was published by Breitbart (surprise, surprise), whose original source leaves no doubt about what really happened*. Namely, ultra-nationalist groups exploited the tensions created by the presence of a great number of refugees to call for some sort of beach Apartheid, where the local swimmers would not mix with "brown and black subhumans". As a result, the cross was constructed at night and illegally, in order to provoke the immigrants, which explains why it was promptly destroyed by activists who disagreed with its reactionary and reactionary message. *The fact that the cross-controversy is probably a product of fake-news makes me also skeptical about the halal story, given that the Middle East Forum is a conservative think tank, generously paid to propagate a certain agenda. Therefore, given the truth about the event, I can easily reverse your conclusions and blame the conservatives for inconsistency. Given that the cement cross was erected without building permit in private or public land (with probably negative repercussions to the natural landscape and environment), protesting its demolition means that there is zero respect for the "holy right of property" for the sake of religious intolerance, so we could assume that "conservatives" are deeply hypocritical and it is quite a surprise why the public has not already shifted to voting the much more sincere and honest "progressives". Of course, I'm being ironical, but I think it is obvious how easily fragile argumentation like this can be distorted. After all, to be frank, in a country where the Constitution openly confirms the privileged position of Orthodox Christianity, at the expense of secularism, while blasphemy laws are still enforced, Christianity is not justified to complain about harsh treatment. In general, I would say that, thanks to the victory of Donald Trump, there is now more anecdotal evidence of "conservative" lack of credibility than the opposite, since the current administration is inevitably undermined by the contradictions between its rosy promises and actual reality: From the President's dubious stance on the Electoral College to its most dedicated fandom bashing Hillary Clinton as a warmonger and a Saudi puppet and fruitlessly trying to defend their Messiah's crystal ball dance and numerous bombing attacks against the sovereign Syrian Republic. Quite the spectacle, but as I underlined previously, focusing on a specific side of the political spectrum is usually indicative of bias and is unsupported by the necessary data.