Berlin’s backing for Israel in the current context has irrevocably ruined Germany’s international standing.
At the same time, as a result of Germany’s neoliberal restructuring, processes of de-democratisation have been ongoing for years.
The deliberate erosion of democracy has paved the way not only for the selective application of international law, but also for the restriction of fundamental rights within Germany itself.
The German population is firmly against their country’s participation in the extermination of the Palestinian people. In a recent poll, 73 percent said they had a negative view of Israel, while 80 percent have rejected further weapons exports to Israel. Despite this, German arms export licenses to Israel have surged, enabling the state to continue committing war crimes.
While the German government’s blatant disregard for the will of its own people already points to a process of de-democratisation, this is exacerbated by domestic restrictions on fundamental rights, including freedom of assembly, freedom of opinion and speech, and academic freedom, alongside violations of due process - all in the service of the Zionist slaughterers.
Israel is antisemetic
It seems to me a whole lot of really smart, amazing jewish scholars over generations and generations of jews have established a pretty rigorous body of knowledge and wisdom about how to integrate as a potentially targeted minority into society and how to immunize that society against being manipulated into xenophobia and racism/religious discrimination.
What is happening in Gaza and the West Bank… and Lebanon… as confident as I am there are no words to describe what is happening, I am confident there is no god that would ever call for that in their name, I guess that is not a statement I can prove or disprove… but at the same time I feel entirely sure any god that would demand that would be an abomination… so what else can this genocide occurring be, other than first and foremost a betrayal of judaism at a basic level? An insult to god, whoever and whatever you identify god as?
If you think god is a many armed spaghetti ball floating in the ether and I think god is a giant spacecrab, we can disagree about a whole lot in how those two beliefs intersect in political and real world ways, but on the other hand it is pretty easy to establish that whether god is a many armed spaghetti ball or a giant spacecrab, god made the universe and thus doing something that feels needlessly violent and destructive clearly can’t be something god desires to be done, in general… Would the spaghetti ball really want you to do needless violence upon the spacecrab heretics even if they worship forbidden beliefs? Vice versa would the spacecrab desire their followers to obliterate followers of the flying spaghetti monster just because their path to worshiping god erred in the details?
What is happening now goes beyond any distinction between one human and another you can possibly draw, it goes beyond any single evil act anybody or anything could commit to deserve an equally evil response, it is an atrocity and it threatens to drag us into WW3 :(
Their god is not a kind one. The xtians literally rebranded him with the whole big j loves you schtick because the old testament god was so brutal.
It didn’t make them any better as a people though, and other religions haven’t faired so great in the ‘be good to each other’ department either, so maybe it’s a problem with the source material and most humans just suck.
I am not religious and I am not here to claim that religion has been a net good, but on the other hand many aspects of modern ethics and philosophy that are unarguably good came out of religious schools of thought, or perhaps to put it another way most of what we all accept as ethical and what we frequently point to as philosophical standpoints to begin difficult negotiation (i.e. “we can all agree human beings are all created equal even if we disagree on…”) has come out of or been heavily influenced by religion… which isn’t to argue that these ideas should have stayed confined within one particular religion’s school of thought but rather to point out the opposite.
No religion was the sole source for this logic and development of thought around human rights and the human condition and there is no reason to believe religion was a necessary precursor for these things to form, rather I mean to say our knowledge of these things came as a dawning awareness that the good aspects of disparate religions and ideologies could be connected and translated via shared universal statements of solidarity like “treat others as you want to be treated” and “tolerate your neighbor”. The details might not agree, but it is easy to do the math, draw the shared connections out and confidently say “yeah, they both pretty much think you should be a decent person and try to pursue happiness in a way that doesn’t hurt others”.
I am not saying religion isn’t dangerous however, and in particular I think religion becomes exceedingly dangerous when the followers of that religion become convinced the structures of their formal religious institutions are not inherently political the same way any power structure composed of humans unavoidably is… which is why the separation of church and state (and the associated freedom to practice or not practice whatever religion you so choose so long as it does not hurt others) in a free society is existentially necessary.
All hail his noodle-y appendage! ;)