Tensions spill across universities like Columbia and Harvard as students on each side accuse the other of a kind of bloodlust
To one side, Columbia students stood silently, wrapped in the blue and white of Israel as they gripped pictures of the murdered and abducted. Across the grass and brick divide, a slightly larger cohort of students chanted “Free, free Palestine.”
The faultline between the two ran along the claim by each that the other was pursuing a kind of bloodlust – a charge that has divided university campuses across America in the wake of the bloody Hamas attack on Israeli communities and Israel’s ongoing military assault on Gaza.
Reactions within US universities to the killing of at least 1,300 Israelis and the abduction of about 100 more have swung from celebration of the Hamas assault as a legitimate act of resistance to occupation to condemnation along with a demand that it not be used to ignore the deaths of Palestinians killed in Israel’s retaliation on Gaza.
What flag do I wave for “both sides are terrible and neither deserves the religious sites, just nuke the entire area”? /s
How the fuck did Jerusalem became the epicenter of all major monotheist religion in the first place? Delete the fucking city if nobody wants peace
Jews and Arabs share common ancestry in the Canaanites and the original Christians were a heretical Jewish sect. It’s all the same religion.
Jews build temple, Romans come in and raze it, Muslims decide to move in, Christians simping. That’s how.
Papal decree
Jerusalem has been a significant city of the eastern Mediterranean world for thousands of years, so multiple religions with eastern Mediterranean roots sharing significance for that city is hardly surprising.
IIRC a similar coincidence has formed in SEA where a particular mountain has gained religious significance for local Christians Muslims and Buddhists, although with much less international controversy over it.
The case of the temple mount in particular is especially weird since it’s a part of zealous Christian and Jewish prophetic narratives (despite revelations saying getting the rapture to happen by checking a list is a fool’s errand and non zionist consensus among jews agreeing that the “third temple” is the state of internationalization and diaspora which the destruction of the second temple initiated) and also being a major site of religious history to Muslims, with the site apparently being where Mohammed ascended to heaven at the end of his life.
There’s a church in Jerusalem with a ladder still left up there from the 1800s because all christian denominations that share control over the site can’t agree to remove the ladder, so you can imagine how hard the squabbling goes when not even the base religion is held in common.
A bunch of dudes realized they could gain power, land, wealth, and sexual access by peddling fairy tales to the masses. Not surprising that this happened many times, in many places, over the early historic record, primarily at population centers located relatively close to the river deltas that gave rise to the first cities. You know, just human shit. Same as it ever was.
You’ll be called a asshole by the “Free Palestine” folks for not supporting them.
The “Support Israel” people never say shit to me.
I’m surprised, both have pretty loud online cheerleaders
…and I’m pretty sure “nuke all of ‘Holy Land’ so hard the desert becomes a large, flat lump of glass” would not go over well with them. Not with the Muslims, either.
Might be best in the long run tho
Yeah, religion is a plague and makes Middle East a hotbed of conflict… I added the “/s” to avoid hate speech reports; I would obviously first depopulate the area (migrate both nations very far apart) before using WMDs. Neither nation deserves the Holy Land if they cannot coexist and behave in it.
I’ve been called an evil monster by both sides