Comment by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF

1 day ago

I appreciate the answer. I guess "attending a protest" falls under "public awareness" or "cultural legitimacy" if the protest is specifically about the organization being unpopular or demonized. Sticking with the Gaza situation example, most protests are along the lines of "Israel shouldn't do that" and not "Hamas needs more support". Claiming otherwise seems massively disingenuous; it's obvious that people oppose terrorism and Israel's actions for largely the same reasons.

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lcnPylGDnU4H9OF

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andsoitis  1 day ago

> Sticking with the Gaza situation example, most protests are along the lines of "Israel shouldn't do that" and not "Hamas needs more support".

Yes, here is the nuance, which I concur with and I would hope most reasonable people could agree on.

In practice, protests are a mix of people but onlookers take a binary stance. It is not going to be difficult to see at protest a poster or cameras capture someone shouting something like "globalize the infitada! or or death to America".

Complicating matters further, protest organizers and the protesters themselves have more of a fluid behavior and motivations - it is not a club where membership is controlled and patrolled, a protest's mission is usually a little vague and fluid, etc.

And that is, I think, where the real risk lies - you are at a protest and you can find yourself surrounded by others who ARE supporting Hamas even if you're not and you get lumped together.

This happens on "the right" as well. You'll have some Neo-Nazi's in a conservative protest against XYZ, and now all of a sudden they're all Nazi's.

It is deeply unfortunate.

  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF  1 day ago

    > And that is, I think, where the real risk lies - you are at a protest and you can find yourself surrounded by others who ARE supporting Hamas even if you're not and you get lumped together.

    This is incredibly dubious. Not only the idea that I would find myself around any number of people explicitly supporting Hamas but also the idea that I would be confused as being part of them. (Like, I can just walk away and tell others that I disagree with the dumb shit they're saying.) People are told not to say dumb shit at the protests I go to; anyone saying something explicitly pro-violence is an obvious agitator.

    > This happens on "the right" as well. You'll have some Neo-Nazi's in a conservative protest against XYZ, and now all of a sudden they're all Nazi's.

    This is not an equivalent comparison. It's not like there's a grassroots movement of Hamas sympathizers in America that have inspired songs to be written about them. But neo-Nazis... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYKAQZUAbHU

    But don't you think it's at least a little bit telling that you automatically jump to neo-Nazis showing up at "conservative protests"? What makes the protest "conservative" and why do you present it as a truism that such an event would appeal to neo-Nazis? One might assume that the neo-Nazis are loudly told to FUCK OFF when they show up... well, anywhere, a "conservative protest" included, but one would also imagine that they'd eventually stop showing up to such events, at least not openly as neo-Nazis. It seems like they keep showing up to them because they are welcome at them.