(((Qatar)))
Racial and Religious Supremacism for me, but not for thee
Everyone knows some variation of this meme and, if you don’t, while I commend you for your admirable ability not to waste time on the internet, I’m concerned that you lack quite a lot of necessary background to understand what I’m on about here, so you might just get confused and think I’m some kind of racist schizo. I suggest you click that thing that looks like a multiplication sign in the top-right corner.
For those who are left, I’ll briefly rehearse what’s wrong with this argument. The first thing is that it identifies hypocrisy because one group of Jews do x and another group of Jews do not-x. It’s not too hard to find data showing why this doesn’t make sense:
Back in 2017, when Trump was a lot less popular in Israel than today, Israelis were more sympathetic to his immigration crackdown that any European country, including Hungary. Their support for the demographically beleaguered heritage Americans was only outdone globally by Jordan [!]. So, the fact that Jews in America take a different opinion may mean they are wrong (which is my opinion), but it evinces no hypocrisy unless it can be demonstrated that American Jews have different views about immigration to Israel.
At this point, the debate is usually deliberately dragged down into nonsense, so we need to clarify. Israel has a wall keeping Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza out, as well as strict border security with Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. If American Jews were consistent, it is argued, they would advocate removing these restrictions to free movement so that Israel could be a terrorist free-for-all. However, these are obviously two different things and it is only outright hysteria about the effects of immigration that could make someone think otherwise. The real comparison here is not with Israel’s security policy, but with its immigration policy (duh!).
Here, we need a bit of nuance. Up until the 2000s, non-Jewish immigration to Israel was basically non-existent for two reasons. First, Israel was a relatively poor country, with a language that almost no-one knows, and widely considered dangerous. Secondly, the more or less open access of the Israeli market to Palestinian labour meant there weren’t many ‘jobs Israelis won’t do’ left to go round, especially given the steady flow of Jewish immigration, often from relatively poor countries. However, the liberalisation of the Israeli economy kicked off by Shimon Peres in 1985 and championed chiefly by our hero Bibi eventually led to rapid growth of the kind of capitalist economy that generates a cheap-labour lobby, whilst ever-increasing restrictions on Palestinian labour in response to terrorism made it necessary to turn further afield.
Immigration started to really take off from 2005, mostly from the really bottom-of-the-barrel countries, Sudan and Eritrea, but, from 2012 onwards, a series of restrictive measures, including the constructive of a border fence, and automatic internment in Holot swiftly cut numbers of asylum seekers back to near 0. The Supreme Court has successfully frustrated efforts to deport those who already here (and this would appear to be the only widely voiced criticism of the Court which isn’t just based on lies or derangement), and their origin countries are so bad that voluntary re-migration isn’t on the cards. However, while south Tel Aviv is a wreck, the rest of the country has been spared for the medium term at least. Israel still relies heavily on foreign labour in a number of sectors, but these are managed through strictly regulated and reasonably well enforced temporary visa programmes.
There are three factors explaining why Israel’s immigration policy has diverged so much from the western norm. The first is that, as we mentioned above, Israel only started to be hit by non-Jewish immigration many decades after most countries, meaning that there was no time for the early adopters to set up pilot colonies which then serve as a base for expansion through family re-unification and ethnic lobbying. The second is that Israel’s strong, security-based border security meant it was relatively easy to make some technical tweaks to physically stop immigration. However, the most important reason is certainly the sustained electoral dominance of the nationalist Right, with no opportunities for Leftists to create an unfixable problem as elsewhere.
To return to our topic, though, are American Jews who, for the most part certainly do not support Israeli-style immigration restrictions in America, hypocritical? Well, it kind of depends on what you should think they should do. Let’s say a random American Jew spends 2% of his non-eating, sleeping, and working time on ‘supporting Israel’ (almost certainly an over-estimate of the average). There’s probably a bunch of stuff he might ideally change about Israel, like its abortion laws, or absence of gay marriage (without going abroad to do it). How much of his ‘supporting Israel’ time should he devote to addressing these various issues? If you ask him ‘should Israel welcome immigrants’ he’ll probably say ‘yeah, I guess’. What more is he supposed to do? He can’t vote on it.
The point here is that when you get into the weeds, what at first seems such a devastating dunk is actually just kind of lame. ‘You don’t dedicate your life to making sure all your opinions are in perfect consonance and that your actions reflect them in a weighted fashion. Just like moustache-man said all along!’ Rescuing this critique requires engaging in quasi metaphysical speculation about the actions of Jews as some kind of collective with multiple layers of Occam’s Butterknife logic to plug the holes. Nevertheless, there is a grain of truth here, and, as I have pointed out with anti-Jewish memes in general, admitting this grain of truth effectively deflates the critique, but Jews don’t want to do it anyway because they are messed up by too many wedgies.
The truth is that the average Jew is a bit more right wing on Israel than he is on domestic politics. If we take a simple model where 1 is far Left and 10 is far Right, a Jew who is holding at 3 generally will probably be a 4 or a 5 on Israel. If he’s a 6, on Israel he’ll likely be an 8. Unless you search for a very long time, you’re not going to find a Democrat who’s a Kahanist, but you won’t find it too hard to find a Democrat who thinks Benny Ganz is a-OK, or a mainstream Trumpist who supports Ben Gvir.
This is a special case of a more general phenomenon, which is that pretty much everyone has up to half a dozen issues where they are more right-wing than their general political inclination would dictate. As a rule, these are things that they care about a bit more than other issues. So, a lot of rich liberals are suddenly moderates on the upper end of income tax, or poorer liberals are more concerned about the effect of immigration on wages. This is similar to Conquest's 1st law, but without the self-flattering assumption that inconsistency is principally based on knowledge, rather than self interest or affection. Egalitarianism is the ocean in which we all swim, and we apply it more consistently in line with a lack of incentive to do otherwise One example that sticks in my mind was back at university a very proper and respectable lefty in a state of great anguish that the Eye of Sauron had turned on the remaining all-male chapel choirs. Who could possibly be so boorish as not to understand that a contralto is not an adequate substitute for a tenor? I asked him if he also thought it was OK to have all-male golf clubs and he looked at me like I puked up on his shoes.
This effect is then magnified within Jewish organisations that aspire or pretend to be representative of a broad Jewish community. Those within the organisation who have a more leftist orientation will be primarily concerned with domestic politics, whereas those with a bit more of that red-beef spirit will be more animated by Israeli affairs. Thus policy on the first is skewed a bit to the left, relative to the overall membership, and the policy on the second to the right. The resulting unprincipled exception thus grows from 1-2 to 3-4 points. Any fool can read, for example, the Board of Deputies Jewish Manifesto and see that the immigration and Israel sections are not coming from quite the same place, but nor do they embody a dual morality. If you know who wrote which bits and who had to edit them together for coherence, then it all makes sense.
I hope that clarifies things a bit. However, it’s not our topic today. If you want an example of an entity that can be shown without recourse to elaborate theorising to promote pozzed liberalism for others while maintaining strict traditionalism and authoritarianism at home, I’ve got one. Here are some things about the State of Qatar:
Qatar is a hereditary monarchy. It used to be that the Emir appointed 1/3 of the legislative council, and could dismiss it and rule by decree, but now he can just appoint all the members.
Islam is the state religion, and the state maintains a list of other tolerated religions, which is limited to Islamic and Christian denominations.
Family law is governed by shariah, with all that obviously entails, and much of criminal law is too.
It is essentially impossible for non-natives to get Qatari citizenship, with naturalisation capped to 50 a year and contingent on onerous conditions.
Qatari citizens are entitled to perhaps as much as $7000 dollars a month, coming from revenues extracted from the population of non citizens who cannot vote or influence policy in any way.
An estimated 20,000 people in Qatar today live in conditions that are tantamount to slavery.
It is illegal to criticise the Emir or Islam.
Homosexuality and extra-marital sex are illegal, as is abortion under most circumstances.
Alcohol can only be bought with a permit from a state-controlled shop.
Based! In all seriousness, good for them. However, the Al-Jazeera media network is, while formally independent, controlled by the Qatari royal family, and Al Jazeera is not based, it is pozzed, way pozzed.
How pozzed is Al Jazeera? Well, it’s pozzed about immigration, it’s pozzed about black crime, it’s pozzed about welfare, it’s pozzed about systemic racism, it’s pozzed about transing kids, it’s pozzed about abortion, it’s pozzed about reparations. Whatever your pet issue is, Al Jazeera is on hand to promote degeneracy, dysfunction and delinquency.
What is Qatar’s angle in all this? The paranoid take is that they want to promote weakness and degradation in the West, so that it will take more Muslim immigrants and allow them to take over. This might actually be somewhat true about the equally woke Turkish organ, TRT World, the organ of the Turkish state that is fairly open about seeing its expat population as a tool to promote Islamism in Europe. However, in the case of Qatar, it is probably more pragmatic. They saw that promoting a left-liberalism that was a bit ahead of the curve was a way to build a large audience, which means both money and influence. What do they use this influence for? Well, banging the drum about Israel, of course, but also some other stuff. For example, on Qatar’s second channel Middle East Eye, which is basically just Al Jazeera with even more Israel coverage, one of the most popular videos is a guy from the UAE holding workers in a cage.
Deplorable, no doubt, but probably Qatari concern was not unrelated to the fact that, at the time of the video, the UAE had broken off diplomatic relations, was imposing a blockade, and was mulling over a joint invasion with Saudi Arabia.
Whatever the motives, though, it’s not kosher. Famously, Tucker Carlson had an interview with the Qatari Prime Minister 8 months ago in which he asked probing questions like ‘why are you unfairly maligned?’ and ‘can I have another cookie please?’. Why didn’t he ask why Qatar is constantly promoting all the things destroying America that Carlson rails about in other weeks? You can ponder that question, but, given the Trump administration’s famously transactional approach to foreign relations, it would seem a trivially obvious move to tell the Qataris to knock it off in return for all the goodies they are getting. Tell the junior Republican staffer in your life to suggest it.
I think something you left out, probably because it is largely unknown amongst non-Arabs is the major, major role Al-Jazeera had during the Arab spring and how for decades it basically was the “free news” of the Arabic world, as free as that can be. Basically Al-Jazeera was a major condition of the fact that the Arab spring became a revolution in the whole Middle East and it was, the major reason the Gulf States broke contact with Qatar a few years ago.
Saudi Arabia had as a precondition to close Al-Jazeera before any normalisation.
Al-Jazeera is a huge asset of the Qataru regime and it has used it as a weapon for a long time, it surprises me it took them that long to create the woke AJ+
I think this is a misunderstanding of the criticism. The anger on the "for thee but not for me" meme is almost entirely direct at the liberal American Zionists. The abstract opinion of Israel's citizens is a moot point since it doesn't effect American politics that directly. What does effect American politics is the many American Zionists both, Jew and gentile, who will view any Israeli policy in the most sympathetic possible light which if done by any other government including their own for any reason they would call fascist. There isn't quite the same powerful ethno narcissistic Muslim lobby in the US like exists in most of Western Europe (although we sure are trying to import enough "skilled immigrants" to rectify that) so the Al Jazeera point is gonna fall flat with most people. Almost any politically engaged American has at some point encountered this hypocrisy first hand and its simply not sustainable.
If American Jews went all in bush era Neoconservatism plus hostility to non western immigration their position would at least be coherent but its more likely that most Secular American Jewry if forced to choose between post 60s race communism and Zionism are gonna pick post 60s race communism.