Comment by richardfeynman
1 day ago
Thanks for finally stating your epistemic standard out loud: “credible hearsay and correlating patterns” is enough for you to accuse Jews of trying to assassinate a U.S. president. That is not “knowing history.” That is how conspiracy theories work. "Quite obvious" and "no reason to think false" don’t count as proof. You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling. That's bad faith discussion and against HN rules. I’m not playing “atrocity analogy” whack-a-mole as you pivot to minimizing the Holodomor to cover for a claim you cannot document. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence.
I didn't accuse "Jews" of trying to assassinate a US president, I accused Israel of doing so.
>You started with a claim you probably genuinely believed in, realized there was no evidence for it, and instead of admitting to that, reverted to trolling.
I still believe it, as the claim was from Margaret Truman Daniel, who had first hand knowledge of what happened to her parents. You clearly don't agree, despite Israel having done the same thing at the same time to other Western politicians. There's no "trolling" or violation of "HN rules" going on, other than perhaps the antisemitic conflation of Jewishness with Israel, particularly when it comes to who is blamed for the terrorism committed by the latter. It is a form of ethnoracial essentialism and bigotry that also impacts Muslims in the US and other ethnic and racial groups (such as the targeting of Chinese citizens in Indonesia as a form of blame for the country of China's actions).
Nice dodge, but switching from “Jews” to “Israel” does not make you more precise. It makes you chronologically wrong. Israel did not exist in 1947.
And the sermon about “conflating Jewishness with Israel” is rich coming from the person who already declared that Irgun and Lehi represent “the nature and spirit of the Israeli people today.” You do not get to smear an entire people, then clutch pearls about conflation when the smear gets noticed.
Also, Margaret Truman Daniel is not “first-hand evidence” of a 1947 mail bomb plot. First-hand evidence would be a Secret Service or FBI file with a case number, a White House mailroom log, the device itself, lab reports, arrests, indictments, or any archival record from the time tying a specific package to a specific group. You have produced none. A biography written decades later, with no citations, is hearsay until it is anchored to contemporaneous documentation.
“No reason to think it was false” is not how history works. Post a primary document or retract the claim. Everything else here, including your sophomoric word games, is noise.
>Israel did not exist in 1947.
Doing the pushes up glasses "Ahem well ackshully it was Mandatory Palestine" shtick doesn't really give your terrorism apologia narrative any more legitimacy.
>First-hand evidence would be a Secret Service or FBI file with a case number, a White House mailroom log, the device itself, lab reports, arrests, indictments, or any archival record from the time tying a specific package to a specific group
Which would certainly be classified.
Frankly, this is all just a diversion. Classic Z tactic. I really don't care if someone believes that (the future) Israel's paramilitary terrorists, out of their extensive mailbombing campaign against Western politicians, did or didn't target one specific person. It's really tangential to my point that Israel is a terror state that was born of a campaign of death and atrocities against not only the original inhabitants of the land they stole, but also against Western victims whose only crime was not helping the genocidal Zionist project enthusiastically enough.
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