C. This brings us to "unjust". Why are you making an issue of whether I am appealing to emotion? Don't you use words to appeal to emotions?
I often do. But I don't create eccentric definitions for words to make my arguments more emotionally resonant at the cost of being accurate.
Excuse me?!? Where the bejesus did you see me "create eccentric definitions for words"?!? I have systematically stuck strictly to the definition of oppression
that you posted upthread. If you've now decided the definition is eccentric,
that's on you.
Whether what Palestinians have done was unjust is a moral question. All moral arguments are appeals to emotion. "Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions". Do you disagree with Hume about that -- do you think you know a way to tell right from wrong without applying your emotional moral sense? Or do you have a general objection to moral arguments -- are you suggesting we should decide what people should do without consideration of morality? Or do you perhaps disagree with my moral claims? Do you disagree that raping is unjust? Do you disagree that kidnapping noncombatants is unjust? Do you disagree that targeting noncombatants for death or grievous bodily harm is unjust?
Is there anyone here who thinks what Hamas has done was morally righteous? I certainly don't.
I have no idea where you got the idea I might disagree with Hume,
I told you where: I got it from the fact that you accused me of "an appeal to emotion".
or that I think kidnapping and raping is justified, or anything of the sort.
Are you unfamiliar with how logical argument works? I was doing a case analysis -- I was systematically going through all the possibilities for why you could reject the deduction that Palestinian behavior satisfies the definition of "oppression" you posted. I did not suspect you think kidnapping and raping is justified -- it seems obvious that your error is elsewhere -- but I included that possibility for the sake of completeness.
D. That leaves us with abuse. "1. the improper use of something. 2. cruel and violent treatment of a person or animal." Take your pick. That what Palestinians did to Israelis was cruel and violent is a plain fact. See A. Whether it was improper use of their power is a moral question. See C. I claim the attackers used their power improperly. Do you disagree?
Assuming your moral judgments on the above questions are not psychopathic, we should now be in agreement that the Palestinians and Israelis are in a two-way mutual-oppression relation, going by your definition of "oppression"...
That is not my definition of oppression.
Then why did you post it? Post #1786. "The term oppression is used to indicate an exercise of unjust and abusive power or authority by one person or group over another."
My definition aligns with the one in the
Cambridge dictionary. What dictionary are you using?
I'm not using a dictionary; I'm using the definition you posted and I accepted as fitting common usage. Why would I want to go dictionary shopping with you when the technicalities of whether "oppression" is the right word are immaterial to the fundamental issue: the cycle of revenge the Israelis and Palestinians are caught in is deeply misrepresented by equating it with Afrikaaners mistreating black South Africans without provocation. If you win a dictionary shopping contest you'll no doubt score a rhetorical point, but it will have no substance. If that's the discussion you want suit yourself but I'm sticking to substance.
If the person who raped or kidnapped me was an authority figure of some sort, like a police officer or county commissioner, and I had no recourse to justice as was the case for black women living in the South during the Jim Crow era, then yes, I would feel oppressed. Likewise, if people I loved were being threatened or murdered by authority figures like police officers or by vigilantes protected by authority figures (the KKK comes to mind, but the Oath Keepers run a close second), then I would feel oppressed. Once again, it would be people with some authority in society doing it which would make it oppression.
... unless you decided to walk back your definition of "oppression" ten seconds after you typed it. You appear to be trying to disappear the "power or" part out of your definition and throw it down the memory hole. You're now implying people need to have "authority" to qualify as oppressors and having power is not enough. So that's a great big "Yes", you do want to bandy words over technicalities about the definition of "oppression".
No.
I want to use the words that provide the most accurate descriptions of things, not the ones people like to throw down because they like the sound of them.
Well then, what makes the "power or" part of the definition you posted inaccurate? Why is an exercise of unjust and abusive power by one person or group over another unoppressive merely because the powerful unjust abuser is unauthorized?
What the Afrikaaners did to the black South Africans wasn't an outrage merely because they used their "authority" unjustly. It was an outrage because they used their power unjustly. People who equate Israelis with Afrikaaners are trying to misrepresent the two-way relation of the current conflict as a one-way relation such as the one in apartheid South Africa. It's disinformation, intellectually dishonesty, cheap propaganda -- regardless of what clauses they include or exclude from their definition of "oppression".
Apartheid is a government-enforced system of segregation and discrimination. Classification of citizens into categories that determine their treatment under the law is a basic feature. So is forcing people to live where the state dictates they must live.
Israel fits the description of an apartheid state, which is why people call it one.
Who are you talking about, Israeli Arabs or Palestinians? Israeli Arabs have the vote and civil rights, unlike apartheid-era black South Africans. The Palestinians aren't citizens; they're enemy aliens. Did Allied treatment of Germans in occupied parts of 1945 Germany make America, France and Britain "apartheid states"? The people who call Israel an "apartheid state" are in effect demanding that Israel be at peace with Palestine while simultaneously Palestine is at war with Israel.
If the person(s) doing the raping, kidnapping, or murdering was some random asshole or I was not living under an unjust system that protected the abuser, then I would feel threatened, endangered, attacked, or something similar.
And a system where terrorists can prepare their crimes in peace, and cross the border to rape, kidnap and murder, and then go back to Gaza and parade their success and not be arrested by the local authorities is a just system, is it?
WTF are you talking about?
The only people here who have ever attempted to justify cross-border murders and rapes are Derec and Loren. Didn't you notice?
I'm talking about applying logic to your statements. Why do you keep mistaking cross-examination questions for accusations? The way this works is, opposing counsel asks you a question, you answer truthfully, and then he reasons from your answer to deduce a conclusion. The truthful answer to my question is "No, a system where terrorists can prepare their crimes in peace, and cross the border to rape, kidnap and murder, and then go back to Gaza and parade their success and not be arrested by the local authorities is NOT a just system." But a system where terrorists can prepare their crimes in peace, and cross the border to rape, kidnap and murder, and then go back to Gaza and parade their success and not be arrested by the local authorities
is the system that Israelis were living under. Since you agree that that's an unjust system, your "if I was not living under an unjust system that protected the abuser" condition was not satisfied. Therefore your argument for why the Israelis weren't being oppressed fails.
Warring states do not oppress each other.
Of course they do, going by your own definition. Show me any war that didn't have unjust and abusive exercises of power perpetrated by both sides.
But have it your way. Assuming warring states do not oppress each other, that immediately settles the oppression issue and the apartheid issue -- Israel cannot be oppressing the Palestinians because the Israelis and Palestinians are at war.
Hold your horses.
Israel and the PA are not at war. Israel is at war with Hamas, because Israel has recognized Hamas as the de facto government in Gaza. The West Bank remains under the (very limited) governmental authority of the PA, which is currently led by Abbas and the Fatah faction of the PLO.
Neither the PA nor Hamas abuses their governmental power over Israelis because they don't have any.
The Afrikaaners and the black South Africans were not at war. If the Palestinians want their accusations of oppression to have any truth they need to sign a peace treaty.
They did.
Look up the Oslo Accords sometime. Check out the signatures at the bottom.
Check out the terms of the agreement. That is not a peace treaty. That is a ceasefire.
Then look up the peace process in the 1990s and see just how far along things went before Rabin was murdered.
And then check out the current peace offers Abbas and the PA have been working on.
Yes, Rabin was the best hope for peace and the guy who murdered him deserves a special place in purgatory whenever his life sentence ends. And good for Abbas and the PA for trying to resurrect the process. And shame on Hamas for disrupting them. But working toward a peace treaty is not the same as reaching one.
Governments, especially the ones that have control over the lives of people they do not recognize as citizens or full members of society, can be very oppressive.
Hamas had total control over the lives of the people they raped, kidnapped and murdered, and they certainly don't recognize them as citizens or full members of society.
Kidnappers usually have that kind of control unless their victims can escape. That doesn't make what they do something other than kidnapping.
Kidnapping doesn't need to be something other than kidnapping to be oppression. The categories are not mutually exclusive.
