E.g. if you want to help starving children, does that mean you want to live in e.g. north Korea?
To me, it seems wanting to help e.g. starving north Korean children, without wanting/planning to get any reward like seeing less starving children on your way to the supermarket, makes you a better person.
Probably that they wouldn't want a life under Hamas which, yeah they probably won't but I don't think they're arguing that it's the best place to live to begin with.
This is an incredibly common thought among the reactionary right and I think it literally boils down to them thinking about everything like this like its a game or a sport, so when you support a side like palestine they can only comprehend that you think Palestine is a great country and you love everything about it and fully support all the people there and everything they do. Because they literally dont have the mental capacity to view things in anything other than the most binary black and white as possible.
My initial thought was “huh? Of course they wouldn’t want to go to school in Gaza…”
The most generous interpretation of her remark that I can come up with is that she’s saying all these kids want a free Palestine but wouldn’t be brave enough to do the freeing themselves.
Or she’s implying these kids wouldn’t want to go to school there even if it were free because, let’s face it, <something racist/classist/both>
But there are much clearer ways of expressing either thought, so it’s anyone’s guess.
I really don't understand what point she even thought she was making?? Of course they wouldn't, it's an active conflict area, and that conflict is what has people worked up....
She has a very poor understanding of what's happening in Gaza, and replaces the yawning chasm that is her factual understanding with a dim stereotype view that it's a bad place because the Palestinians are terrible people who don't pull themselves up by their bootstraps
I think it's that it's run by Hamas and that most Western/liberal minded university students wouldn't like to live in under Islamic rule. Which yeah probably, but also misses the point of the protests.
I think her point is that people would probably get hurt if they went there for a college semester even if it wasn't a conflict zone, maybe due to religious or gender discrimination.
Which might be right, as a society they still can improve, but it doesn't mean they deserve to be victims of a genocide. I think we're past religion here, we're just humans concerned for other humans.
The point she is trying to make, is that Hamas doesn’t grant the same freedoms to protest and accept criticism of the government that we claim to allow in the US.
Which is true.
But what she doesn’t get, is that religion, extremism and lack of education is the problem both in the Middle East and in her constituency in the US.
Tribalism is such a core component of the political Right that they can't really fathom how people on the rest of the spectrum can prefer nuance to orthodoxy.
I say this as a member of a leftwing party in my own country which could use a little more thinking and building politics up from principles and a lot less blind parroting of what the tribe's chiefs say.
(We also have a Communist Party around here and those are even worse).
There is quite a large overlap between leftwing and the highly educated (maybe even intellectuals) so leftwingers are thinkers rather than flag waving parrots much more often than rightwingers. However, humans being humans, even many of those can get a strong emotional bond with a party, by which point they become unchallenging and unskeptical tribalists.
The comment of @edgemaster72 just dovetails perfectly with this:
"Once again showing how empathy is a completely foreign concept to them"
Only somebody who thinks other people (including LGBT) are unable to feel bad for human suffering other than of the kind that affects or might affect them, would think that's a valid argument.
The whole idea that people might simply be against such extreme human suffering even amongst those one who would not see as friendly, completelly flies over their heads.
and thus she reveals how the conservative mind thinks: when recognizing that a place is being bombed to shit and she wouldn't want to go there, her reaction isn't to want that place to stop being bombed, but to avoid it entirely.
They just have no empathy whatsoever. The rest of us are normal and can understand the basics of the Golden Rule. Like I want sex pest pedophiles to stop jerking men off at musicals with children present. Even in a Repub area and even if I don't personally feel like watching Beetlejuice.
But they can't get on a plane fast enough for an official government visit to Israel. They love hanging out with Israeli government officials at Mediterranean resorts...
She's right that I don't want to go to Gaza. But the question is WHY don't I want to go to Gaza? Hint: it's something that's been in the news recently.
I wouldn't have wanted to go in the first place, before the October attacks, which I think is the point this airhead is trying to make. As a bisexual genderfluid bottom that presents femme, the Palestinian regime would be hostile towards me. Realistically, I will never have any interest in traveling to any theocratic country.
What Boebert actually doesn't understand is that I don't fucking care. I don't care if Palestinians would accept me, or if I'd get stoned to death if I made the mistake of going. What Israel is doing is wrong, and I am morally opposed to it. The fact that I don't really care about the tenets of the group that is being slaughtered, that I don't have a ton of respect for the communities being forced from their homes, none of it is going to prevent me from supporting Palestine through this and demanding Israel stop their senseless violence. Genocide is wrong, end of story. That Boebert thinks you need any more reason to protest is the real story here.
U.S. citizens could learn a lot by spending the equivalent of a semester in Gaza. For instance, Lauren, you could learn that they are people and not savage monsters.
Different - not less. Universities are nice and they often are their own ecosystem. More people need emersion into the actual cultures that differ from their own.
What's even the point she's trying to make? I'm somewhat certain that I wouldn't have a great opinion of the average citizen of Saudi Arabia if I were to meet them all one by one, but if they were being the victims of a genocide, I'd still be against the aggressors. Does she understand that someone might be opposed to crimes even when they don't like their victims, or has the brain of the fascist not reached that developmental stage yet?
You could ask this about anything regarding her and the answer would still be no.
She got a GED in her 30s and only because she was going to run for office. She married a guy who exposed himself to her and her friends in a bowling alley while she was a teenager and he was already an adult.
She's not dumb because she got her GED late in life, she's dumb because she's a racist fascist. I know people who have gotten their GED later in life due to various circumstances ... when you make criticisms like this you are throwing random people under the bus. Critique the things she says and does, not the GED.
All Repubs value white supremacist hierarchy more than they value truth or integrity. You are having a hard time understanding because your values are not delusional racist fascism.
These are the same people that want to wrap Mexicans in barbed wire and drown them in the Rio Grande. They love genocide when it is happening to a group they hate. Muslims are a group they hate.
So here's the thing; even if Gaza wasn't under constant assault from a brutal genocidal occupation, I still wouldn't want to spend any amount of time there, because I'm a queer person and that's definitely not an environment that I'd feel safe or comfortable in.
And I still say Free Palestine.
The fact that I wouldn't want to live there doesn't change the fundamental human rights of the people who do live there. They're not any less human just because a sizable chunk of them hate me for existing.
A decent chunk of North America hates me for existing too. There are plenty of US states I wouldn't feel comfortable visiting. Doesn't mean I'd be happy to see a genocide in Texas.
Plenty of Jewish people don't like the fact that I exist either. Doesn't mean Hitler was right. He threw queers into the camps right alongside the Jews who hated us. And sometimes the Jews and the queers were the same people, because life is complicated like that. Just like there are queer people in Palestine being murdered right alongside everyone else.
Life isn't easy or simple, but some things are; genocide is bad, even when it's done to people you don't like, or people who don't like you.
It's less that it's something they believe and more that it's the only thing they can imagine. They literally can't picture doing something for someone else without gaining something themselves. There is no good in their hearts, minds and souls that make it possible for them to imagine a person helping others just because they can.
Hell, even setting aside all that. Imagine if I told you that one of the hottest tourist destination of the 1980s was Beruit.
You can be an entirely selfish prick and still not want to see the pristine beaches of Gaza and Lebanon ruthlessly carpet bombed by bloodthirsty bigots and greedy arms dealers.
The wink-wink nudge-nudge of Israeli-friendly politicians is always "Yeah sure you say you support Palestinians, but if you ever had to live next door to one you'd hate them as much as we do".
And if you apply this to how these same politicians see migrant, poc, lgbt, and any other resident who isn't sporting an American Eagle face tattoo, you begin to understand conservative politics a little better.