I see this become apparent on social media every so often and it's really just depressing how widespread the misunderstanding is. [51% of Americans who were polled in a 2021 survey agreed](https://www.credello.com/financial-resources/consumer-insights/millennials-and-taxes-survey/) with the statement that "You pay your marginal tax rate on all of your income".

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If so, what did you think of it? I'm curious about it, but I have too much other stuff I want to read first.

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Yassine Meskhout is a Moroccan-American lawyer who works primarily as a public defender. He also writes a blog on the side. As far as I can tell, he is an ex-Muslim, and he used to be some sort of leftist when he was younger, but now has receded to being more of a centrist liberal. He mentioned in a post written in 2019 that he "used to be part of a leftwing gun rights group". Since October 7th of last year, he's posted the following pieces: Nov 1st, 2023: [The Jewish Conspiracy to Change My Mind](https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/the-jewish-conspiracy-to-change-my) Dec 22nd, 2023: [Follow-Up On That Jewish Conspiracy](https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/follow-up-on-that-jewish-conspiracy) Jul 21st, 2024: [I don't know if it's really antisemitism, but I have nothing else](https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/i-dont-know-if-its-really-antisemitism) I've copy-pasted some of the more salient passages below (FYI, there are a lot of hyperlinks in the original posts that I did not copy over, so you should check the original posts): > Motte-and-Bailey: I admit, I never knew what ‘Zionist’ meant except as a grave denunciation yet the Zionist movement has been fairly transparent about its goals from its beginning in the 19th century. You could categorize its aim across a spectrum, simplified from least to most radical: 1) Jewish homeland *somewhere*, 2) Jewish homeland somewhere in the Levant, and 3) Exclusive and total Jewish domination of the entire Holy Land. Both pro & anti-Zionism labels have a strategic ambiguity that can be intentionally levered by any extremist wishing to blend in the crowd. There’s a similar dynamic with the Palestinian chant ‘From the river to the sea’, because is it calling for totally and completely erasing Israel from the map? Or is it simply advocating for a coexisting independent Palestine in both the West Bank (river) and Gaza (sea)? Whatever you want! > Orthogonal Violence: I’m not a pacifist, but anyone who decides to deploy violence as a tool should be *extremely* careful they’re not simply succumbing towards quenching a primeval bloodthirst. Any application of violence should be oriented towards a specific goal, proportional to the objective, and carried out with humility... In contrast, I find no justification for indiscriminate attacks on orthogonal targets. What exactly is the objective and how does murdering Olympic athletes, or bombing a discotheque, or bombing a pizzeria, or murdering bus passengers, or sniping a baby in a stroller get anyone closer to it? > No matter how righteous a cause might be, it will never be worth having [this as one of its Wikipedia pages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_child_suicide_bombers_by_Palestinian_militant_groups). > I don’t believe I’ve encountered anyone directly defending the strategic merits of indiscriminate unguided rocket attacks, or music festival mass shootings. Instead, I see either excuses about how we outsiders shouldn’t cast judgement upon the anguished and desperate actions of an oppressed populace, or affirmative declarations that “resistance” is justified through “any means necessary”. Hamas leadership parrot this argument, as seen in this rare moment where Ghazi Hamad breaks into English to say that as the victims in this conflict, anything they do is by definition justified. This view is beyond heinous, *because it has no bounds*. It posits an insane moral outlook that once someone is anointed as sufficiently oppressed, their actions — no matter what! — are indefinitely beyond reproach or scrutiny. > Israel has demonstrated a broader commitment to cosmopolitan multiculturalism, as illustrated by how the Temple Mount is governed. It’s the former site of the destroyed Second Temple (Judaism’s holiest site) which was later replaced by the Al-Aqsa Mosque (Islam’s third holiest site) and despite its central importance within Jewish lore, I was surprised to find out that Israel has prohibited all Jewish prayer since its takeover of the area in 1967 after the Six Day War. The Temple Mount area is governed by a religious committee composed only of Muslims members. I can’t fathom the countervailing scenario where Muslims are willing to prohibit prayers at Al-Aqsa. > Previously, I would roll my eyes at the reflexive refrain that any criticism of Israel is driven by anti-Jewish bigotry. I was generally skeptical of bare allegations of bigotry in any context (as a baseline), but particularly within Israeli discourse given the potential for nationalistic motives to skew reasoning. Some of my skepticism remains warranted, but I readily admit I had *seriously* underestimated the ambient level of anti-Jewish bigotry. > I feel like I’m insulting everyone’s intelligence here because they’re not even trying to hide it, otherwise why would anyone cite the [expulsion of the Khaybar Jewish community](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khaybar#Modern_usage_in_the_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_conflict) by the Muslims in 628 CE supposedly to [protest a country](https://twitter.com/hurryupharry/status/1718287119452663969) founded in 1948? > The Hamas-run show Tomorrow’s Pioneers aired the [most deranged children’s television segment I have ever seen](https://youtu.be/9qklT3hYcr4?t=4133). In one episode, children sang about how qualified they are for martyrdom (can you believe it gets worse?) and in another, the actual children of Reem Riyashi are invited to sing a song written from their perspectives, about how it’s ok their mom couldn’t hug them on the last day they saw her…because her arm was too busy holding a bomb. What’s the counter-argument here? Is the homicidal propaganda taken out of context? Is the claim that it’s not representative? Maybe that’s true, but how can you tell? > It’s baffling that anyone seriously believes the Palestinian cause is primarily motivated by someone’s great-great-grandparent losing their farm 75 years ago. Al-Aqsa Mosque imagery is inextricably linked with the broader messaging. Hamas names everything after it (TV, brigades, floods, etc.), and Israel’s administration of the Mosque itself remains a point of serious contention. > I did not revisit some personal interactions until recent events prompted otherwise. Whenever I visited my family back home in Morocco, no other topic generated as much acrimony as Israel. It’s a common trope for home families to worry their emigrated members will be brainwashed into secularism, and bizarrely the most scrutiny I ever received from them about my life in the United States wasn’t about whether I ate bacon or drank alcohol, but whether I was friends with any Jews. > Amnesty International is a widely respected international human rights advocacy organization that issued a fucking 280-page novel in 2022 lamenting the injustices of Israel's security barriers. They outline scores of legitimate concerns (which I’ll get to later) but across those hundreds of pages, *not once* does the report say anything about the rash of suicide bombings that prompted construction of the barriers and checkpoints. The only reference I could find was near the end on page 263 where they obliquely mention Israel justifies its policies on unspecified “security grounds”. Amnesty International can’t pretend to be ignorant here, as they already condemned the practice of Palestinian child suicide bombers in 2005... > Anyone who reads *only *this report (all 280 pages!) to educate themselves about the topic would be left with the bizarre and misleading impression that Israel chose to dedicate immense resources into building up an elaborate security apparatus because…they’re mean I guess? > I was shocked to find out that everyone’s favorite geographic chant has a *completely *different meaning in the original Arabic, conveniently transmogrifying “Palestine will be free” from the far less palatable “Palestine is Arab” in the original.

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Is it bad that I don’t hate Israelis?
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    Indeed, by the time we get to today, it would turn out that having ancestors who fled from the same persecution is much less meaningful a similarity than what the people alive today actually make of that history.

    Fair point

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  • I was raised reform Jewish and am half Jewish by family history. I have ancestors who were victims of the pogroms in the Russian pale of settlement – specifically, all four of my great-grandparents on my father’s side, along with their parents (my great-great-grandparents). When they were children their families fled and eventually resettled in the USA. There is another place that they could have gone instead: Palestine. At that time it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, and some of the displaced Jews of that time did elect to go to Palestine. As it happens, my ancestors chose the US, but they could have gone to Palestine if they’d wanted to. The fashionable posture on the left to take towards Israeli Jews recently has basically been a combination of glibness and vitriolic hatred, often reaching the point of wishing death upon them (examples: [1](https://hexbear.net/post/1107196) [2](https://x.com/hurryupharry/status/1718287119452663969)). I don’t know… I just can’t really feel good about stuff like that. The fact that my family ended up in the US and not Palestine is really just a quirk of fate. I don’t think that my ancestors were, like, morally better people for choosing the US over Ottoman-era Palestine. (And given the recent uptick in “Turtle Island” discourse, it seems like a fair number of leftists believe my ancestors shouldn’t have been allowed to resettle in the US either.) I think that Zionism (with the possible exception of [cultural Zionism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Zionism)) has generally been a noxious idea throughout its history. I don’t think the state of Israel should continue to exist as it is currently constituted, and I think the near-ubiquitous racism among Israelis is shameful. But I also don't think that every Jewish person who moved to Palestine in the last 150 years was a bad person for doing that, and I’m not prepared to circle-jerk over the deaths of people that I have a fair amount in common with historically. Am I missing something? Have I been hoodwinked by Zionist propaganda?

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    Tribute to Thomas Matthew Crooks
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    This is probably far-fetched, but I'd like to think that Crooks was the first republican to actually be intellectually honest about Trump's connections to Jeffrey Epstein, and decided to take "kill your local pedophile" to its logical conclusion

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  • https://nitter.poast.org/MattWalshBlog/status/1812601707806757235

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    https://www.jta.org/archive/ben-gurion-reveals-suggestion-of-north-vietnams-communist-leader https://www.jta.org/2014/11/02/culture/from-the-archive-israels-friend-in-hanoi https://richardpollock.substack.com/p/two-unlikely-national-liberation (pro-Israel blog) This seems kind of disappointing.

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    Shit, it doesn't even seem like we can end Israeli apartheid without fighting a world war over it

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    I increasingly feel like in the west everyone is ideologically "locked in"
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    Yeah I've been having similar thoughts.

    2014-2020 or so was a period of significant ideological change & realignment in the US in a number of ways, but now things have kind of reached a new equilibrium, so the current ideological terrain is probably what we're going to have for a while. I think this is mostly because the internet & social media reached maximum penetration around 2014, and the 2014-2020 period was just the US's ideological terrain adjusting to that step change.

    (Admittedly, I also might be biased because 2014-2020 is also basically the period when I was 18-25 years old, so of course it seemed to me like a lot of things were in flux)

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  • aeon.co

    I found this article to be pretty interesting. > Modern nationalism valorises a people’s deep, primordial relationship with land. It also depends on enemies, outsiders and foreigners to help unite the members of the nation... > For much of Western history, however, claiming foreign ancestry was the key to political legitimacy. From the Roman Empire to the Renaissance, noble families across Europe insisted that they were not related to the populations they ruled. They traced their ancestry back to illustrious foreign powers, including figures of myth and legend. Among the most popular were the protagonists of the Trojan War.... > ...from the long view of European history, nationalist myths about indigenous peoples are a recent invention, a response to elites’ emphasis on their foreign origins. The article doesn't mention it, but I think another good example of this would probably be the Jewish origin myth of the Exodus. The archaeological consensus is that it never happened, there was never any mass migration from Egypt to Palestine, nor was there any overthrow & expulsion of Canaanites. What most likely happened is that at some point, the Canaanite society experienced a political collapse, the local population started self-identifying differently, and a cohort of self-identified "Israelites" successfully took up the vacuum of power and formed a government. Then they invented an origin myth about how they were actually from the exotic land of the Nile, even though they were really just the same ethnicity as the Canaanite rulers of a generation or two earlier.

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    In September 1935, the Nazi government in Germany passed two laws, the "Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour" and the "Reich Citizenship Law", that are together commonly known as the [Nuremberg Laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws). These laws are most well-known for forbidding marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and "Aryan" Germans; forbidding the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and declaring that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens, with Jews reclassified as merely "state subjects" without any citizenship rights. There is another thing that these laws did that has been less discussed, but really ought to be given more attention, especially in light of events that have transpired in the past year. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour banned Jews in Germany from flying or displaying the National flag (meaning the Nazi flag), but stated they were "permitted to display the Jewish colors". Several months later, the Nazi government issued a further statement clarifying that this language refers to the flag used by the Zionist movement at the time. [Per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on January 2nd, 1936](https://www.jta.org/archive/zionist-banner-decreed-official-jewish-flag-by-nazis): > “It is up to the Jewish nation,” the decree states, “to decide for itself which are to be the colors of the Jewish national flag, but until then the Zionists’ blue-white flag, together with the symbols of all the different Zionist groups, is valid in the Reich as the Jewish flag and as such will be enjoying State protection.” The "Zionists' blue-white flag" referenced here featured a white background with two blue stripes and a Star of David in between them. It is the same flag that is now used as the [flag of Israel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Israel). I learned this from reading [*Zionism During the Holocaust*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91184209-zionism-during-the-holocaust) by Tony Greenstein. Positively eye-opening. (edit: corrected a grammatical error)

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    Do Americans realize that the majority of people ruled over by Israel are not Jewish?
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    That’s not what I was getting at. I was assuming that people who come across this post would already know that Israel oppresses non-Jews. My point is that it gets even worse than that: the non-Jews are the numerical majority, so the whole thing is more egregious than many Americans might be aware.

    I guess I do think a numerical majority being subjugated is more noteworthy in some ways than a numerical minority.

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  • Do Americans realize that the majority of people ruled over by Israel are not Jewish?
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    I brought it up because it kind of disproves the idea that “Jews have a special relationship with that region and/or are uniquely entitled to it.” They’re not even the majority there currently! And they weren’t in 1948 either.

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  • guy who thinks the Jews run all of the banks and media and is grateful for it because that sounds really hard and he's glad someone is taking responsibility
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    lol that's pretty close to Richard Hanania's position:

    Those on the right who are prone towards white identitarianism or Christian nationalism might sulk about Jewish influence in their movement. To me, this is just as pathetic as black activists on college campuses complaining that physics departments are too white. In a free society, groups that are successful and interested in politics will naturally have an outsized role to play...From my perspective, Jewish power on the right shouldn’t just be accepted, but actively celebrated, since the two main problems with American conservatism is that it has too few smart people and too many theocrats. Jews becoming more influential in the movement helps on both these fronts.

    https://archive.ph/jtZWT

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  • FACT: The US cares deeply about the safety of Uyghur Muslims. FACT: The US cares deeply about the safety of Jews.
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    What the hell does “self-determination” even mean? I feel like since 10/7 we’ve all been gaslit into the idea that “self-determination” is some obvious, uncontroversial thing

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