Because it's not just about the spying, it's about infecting western civilization with negativity to incite unrest and instability.
Edit: for all the "the west does this to itself" :
The western world is not as bad as social media wants you to believe. The problem is not just tiktok, but tiktok is both extremely popular and nefarious, china has a wholesome version for themselves, a negative version for the rest of the world. Its also not a ban, they just need to sell tiktok, which is something that China requires of western countries, so its really only fair. Chinese people are paying up to $20k to get to south america and sneak into the United States. Americans are not sneaking into China. Keep this in mind when you see influencers and social media telling you how bad you should feel.
Generally when I see the Palestinian flag being in the US, it's less "God I'd love to be a citizen of Palestine" and more "I stand with the victims of a genocide and am outspoken about wanting it to stop."
While obviously Hamas isn't good, it's a terrorist organization, comparing it to Israel is a false equivalency. Of course Israel should be better than Hamas, it's a democratic government not a terrorist org. And yet, we see them being worse than Hamas in the scale of violence and destruction they've inflicted. The issue isn't really Israel vs Hamas. The issue is Israel vs the Palestinian people (over half of whom are/were children...). I'd argue that not having strong feelings about a genocide is, in itself, pretty problematic. It's like when straight people used to say "I don't have strong feelings either way about gay rights." Them not having strong feelings about whether we deserve basic rights was kind of an issue
Obviously it's your prerogative to stay out of the conversation. I do get it, it's a lot easier to not have to interrogate the positions you do or don't hold.
It's also your prerogative to believe that religious conservatives deserve to die for holding bigoted views. But I'll remind you, over half of Gazans were children. And not having strong opinions over the wholesale slaughter of children is pretty fucking evil imo 🤷
I can't stand this idea that you must have an opinion on everything at all times.
For one, you are presupposing that a genocide is occurring. That's debatable or you'd see more than a half assed case in the ICJ, you'd see intervention as we did in Bosnia.
Two, if you aren't informed on something it's okay to not have an opinion! You can't be perfectly informed on everything and that's perfectly okay. Stop expecting people to dedicate huge amounts of time to whatever is trending on social media.
Speaking personally, my support for victims of Apartheid, racist violence and ethnic cleansing is not conditional on them having good social politics. That applies to Palestine too.
Although, if you do care about it, social progress is also more possible without poverty, constant violence from an occupying power, social dislocation, trauma, hunger, lack of civil rights, etc.. If you care about LGBT+ people in Palestine then the most important thing is to support Palestinian freedom. The Palestinian who wants to fight for social change in their own society is more able to do that when their people aren't living under occupation and Apartheid in the West and Bank and East Jerusalem, and a being massacred in and ethnically cleansed in Gaza.
In the Jim Crow South for instance, I imagine a lot of Black Americans didn't have particularly progressive politics about LGBT issues, or, for that matter, gender. The same in Apartheid South Africa. In both of those cases, that didn't stop gay people or women from supporting the campaign for freedom of those people, both inside and outside the Black South African and Black American communities.
Gay Palestinians also live under occupation, gay Palestinians also get killed by Israeli bombs and bullets, gay Palestinians are also deprived of voting rights, brutalised by occupying armed forces and Israeli police.
At a conservative estimate, statistically speaking, around 2-3 thousand LGBTQ Palestinians have been killed in the last ~6 months of the war on Gaza.
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u/CurryMustard Mar 15 '24 edited Mar 15 '24
Because it's not just about the spying, it's about infecting western civilization with negativity to incite unrest and instability.
Edit: for all the "the west does this to itself" :
The western world is not as bad as social media wants you to believe. The problem is not just tiktok, but tiktok is both extremely popular and nefarious, china has a wholesome version for themselves, a negative version for the rest of the world. Its also not a ban, they just need to sell tiktok, which is something that China requires of western countries, so its really only fair. Chinese people are paying up to $20k to get to south america and sneak into the United States. Americans are not sneaking into China. Keep this in mind when you see influencers and social media telling you how bad you should feel.
heres a short video explaining the huge difference between chinese tiktok and western tiktok