When you don't know the history and don't care about minorities being decimated if they don't fit into your ideological matrix, you start spewing claptrap about "an essentialist racist “Clash-of-Civilisations-y” argument about the human condition" or "inherent Arab evilness." Alonso thinks it's racist to say the Arab world is in deep crisis. That literacy is declining in parts of it, that over 80% of Egyptian girls face female genital mutilation because of cultural shifts related to Islamism, that numerous genocides have taken place in the Arab world just in my own lifetime, that hundreds of thousands routinely die in wars that dwarf even the terrible suffering of Gaza, and that millions have been set to flight just in the past decade. Every word in that paragraph is covered extensively in UN human development reports about the Arab world, but I'm racist for pointing out that the Jews absolutely should not disarm and choose - as he demands of us - to go live in that civilizational space as a vulnerable minority. He also claims to be battling Zionism, but knows nothing about Zionism's basic argument. Zionism never argued there was such a thing as "inherent Arab evilness." Alonso wishes it had, because he needs me to be a racist to validate his own bigotry. Zionism argued something very big and very deep: that modernizing societies undergoing the deep structural identity shifts from localized and communal identities to mass-societies and the vast, imagined identities of nationalism would not be able to contain minorities, any minorities, and that they would turn on them with murderous impulses, that this process was inherent to modernization, and so unavoidable, and that the Jews therefore faced a "catastrophe" first in Europe (Zionism started as a warning about white European bigotry, for Pete's sake, not "Arab evilness"), and then would spread and cause antisemitic catastrophes everywhere else that was modernizing in similar ways. With the enormous and wonderful exception of the English-speaking world, this Zionist theory of modernization proved correct nearly everywhere. That's the great tragedy. And Alonso, who thinks I insult to distract, is an ignorant bigot who blames the great emptying of the Arab world of its Jews on the Jews. https://bird.makeup/@alonso_gd/1845154286004576715
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