this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
236 points (98.4% liked)
World News
32501 readers
739 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As a Chinese person, when I was very young, I learned from books that "the Jewish people are a wise people; they put honey on books to let children know that knowledge is sweet." Before I went to university at 18, I believed that Jews were very smart, like Einstein. All my knowledge came from books. After I started university, I got my first mobile phone, and then I started accessing the internet. This led to a collapse of my worldview, as some things I had firmly believed in began to be questioned by myself. My perception of Jews was just one of many aspects that changed.
Chinese people do not discriminate against Jews. As I experienced, due to widespread propaganda, Jews have a generally positive and subtle reputation in China. The situation is more like a backlash caused by a mismatch between the promotional image and the actual product. Previously, Jews were portrayed as very wise and polite, but when the reality turned out to be different, people felt deceived, which led to what the article calls "anti-Semitism." However, in fact, on the Chinese internet, people are just bringing up the wrongdoings that some Jews have done.
Among Jews, there are both good and bad people. I support Jewish Voice for Peace and believe that a wandering people should not be discriminated against anywhere. However, Zionists want to hijack all Jews, using the concentration camps from World War II as an emotional card to coerce everyone onto their bandwagon. When the actions of Israel in Gaza reach China, almost all Chinese people are reminded of the atrocities committed by Japanese fascists in China, treating Chinese people like livestock for slaughter. The suffering of the Palestinians makes us empathize deeply. When their homes are destroyed and their relatives killed, it is reminiscent of our past. I saw a group of Israelis holding hands and dancing in front of UN emergency relief supplies to block the aid. It tore my heart apart. I don't know what to say, I can only say that the Palestinians are incredibly enduring. If it were me and most Chinese people, we simply couldn't endure it.
China has never oppressed or persecuted Jews. China even sheltered Jews in Shanghai, and the current Prime Minister of Israel has praised this. But ironically, it seems that now China still does not compare to Germany in the eyes of Israel.
Israel isn't Judaism.
Israel claims to be a secular state but also a state for Jews but also Palestinians are welcome but also Palestinians are not allowed to get an Israeli passport but also they can get a passport if they are Jewish.
Israel the quantum physics of countries. In a superposition until whatever is convenient needs to be observed.
And also, even if they are a Jewish Palestinian they can still be murdered with absolute impunity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_David_Ben_Avraham
Indeed, I did not intend to equate Israel with all Jewish people or make it representative of Judaism as a whole. If it came across that way, I apologize. Labeling all peace-loving individuals with the actions of those who engage in war due to their ethnicity is similar to the wrongdoings of Germany in the past. Such thinking is almost nonexistent in China. As Mao once said, "Make as many friends as possible and as few enemies as possible." 😆
It seems pretty clear that they understand this. It looks like there’s just a little bit of a language barrier here, is all.
Israel is a country and Jews' a racial group.
Jew is a religion. Ashkenazi, Sefardi, Mizrahi are racial groups perhaps.
Jews are also considered an ethnicity, not only a religion. There are nonreligious ethnic Jews and there are people who follow Judaism but who are not ethnic Jews.
I wouldn't consider "Jew" an ethnicity more than "Asian" -- several different ethnicities under one label.
Fair enough. Point is, it's not only a religious label
The popular view of Israel is as a modern state created with the backing of powerful western allies. This may be true of the current iteration of the state of Israel but the history is much older.
Jews have been living in Israel for thousands of years dating back to the Iron Age Kingdom of Israel, though for much of the intervening time the area was called Palestine (or other names). Owing to its long history of conquests and migration, many Jews left Palestine and migrated throughout Europe, forming diaspora communities (and frequently subject to antisemitism and violent pogroms).
Back in the 1500s the Ottoman Empire conquered Palestine and considered it part of Ottoman Syria. This lasted for centuries until the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
What Zionists want is the same thing that Palestinians want and the same thing that Chinese people already have (and Japanese and Korean and many other groups have): a homeland. Zionism as an idea goes back centuries, to the original departure of Jews and forming diaspora communities. The conflicts between Jews and other groups in Palestine (including Christians who migrated there in the Middle Ages) goes back centuries.
The main difference now is that Israel has an enormous amount of power due to their alliance with the UK and the US. The US in particular has a sizeable Jewish diaspora community that grew dramatically during the Holocaust. The cities of New York and Los Angeles are home to sizeable and highly influential Jewish communities, and many Hollywood executives, producers, actors, and comedians are Jewish. Jewish culture therefore forms a very substantial part of American culture (through TV shows like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm and many movies) and many American non-Jews are politically friendly to the Zionist cause.
I, personally, don’t have a stake in the outcome. I want the violence to stop but I have no idea how that’s going to happen. The most recent conflict really has been going on for over a century. At one time even Nazi Germany had a side in it, supporting Arabic Palestinians. There have been many pogroms and genocides over the centuries, targeting both Jews and other groups. The Ottoman Empire committed genocides as well. It’s horrific but it’s so difficult to imagine a scenario where it will stop.
I wish people would explain their downvotes for this post. It has more information and nuance than 99% of the posts on lemmy. I guess because it doesn't fit whatever rage they are currently entertaining.
Nuance isn't required here. Zionists want a theocratic apartheid state, Palestinians want a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state.
It's not Hamas bombing churches in Gaza. It wasn't Hamas who bombed Bethlehem and burned down the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve.
Oh goodness.
Indeed, I don't know how to stop it either. If saving the Palestinians leads to another massacre of Jews, then as a proverb says, "An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind." “冤冤相报何时了。”It will only result in more bloodshed and cries of anguish. The Chinese government has consistently supported the 1967 two-state solution; I have seen this mentioned many times in official news. Perhaps what we need is an "Israeli-Palestinian Mandela." 😢
A 2 state solution was never realistic. Throwing out unworkable peace solutions or quibbling over details instead of outright saying they're not ready for peace so that they can continue violence is a US (and israeli) tactic you'll see over and over.
The US and Israel both knew Palestine was never gonna give up its best land to hostile invaders, as the borders would make their economy entirely dependent on Israel, and Israel media made it very clear that such a state would only be temporary.
your entire 3 day old post history is entirely 'as a chinese person...' it just reeks of cosplay honestly. Nobody interacts like this, it just reads like propaganda. Super weird.
I apologize if I caused you any discomfort. About a month ago, I learned about Lemmy, and I was quietly observing, like a crab blowing bubbles in the water. Then, a few days ago, I saw a post asking, "Is Lemmy banned in China?" That sparked a thought in me: "Hey, why not register and communicate with everyone to share some real information about China?" So, I submitted an application to the admins and joined the Lemmy community. It's like a little crab suddenly swimming up from the riverbed to the surface, announcing its presence to every passing fish. This might indeed annoy the fish. As time goes by, I might become like one of the small fish, blowing bubbles together with you all in a friendly way on some issues. Or perhaps, I will return to the riverbed, continuing to be a quiet crab blowing bubbles. 😂
You don’t interact with many ESL people, do you?
What a strange strange comment. Why are you talking about how "Jews" were "portrayed" to be "wise" but then "the promotional image didn't match the product"?
Which should go entirely without saying, which is why your comment is so strange. You keep talking about "Jews" as an entity that has a "promotional image" and that you perceive collectively as "smart like Einstein", or not.
This is a difference between China and foreign countries. Let me explain:
I was born in 2001. When I started school, it was around 2008 in elementary school until 2019 when I finished high school. Many students didn't have mobile phones, and the internet was often seen by parents as something that affected our studies. The limited computer time we had was almost entirely used for playing video games. Apart from learning about pre-2000 foreign history in school, my main sources of external information were from newsstands outside the school and magazines bought by my parents. In these magazines, the images of foreigners were constructed: I believed Americans were innovative, Germans were rigorous, British were gentlemanly, French were romantic, Russians were bold, and Jews were wise. Due to the actions of parents and schools, education in China before high school was quite closed off. It wasn't until 2015, when I had to memorize Xi Jinping's new thoughts on green development in politics class, that I realized the current leader of China was no longer Hu Jintao. For those of us who had only study on our minds before entering college, there is a specific term in China: "small-town exam-takers."
When I got to college and had my own mobile phone, being able to browse the internet without a very purposeful mindset, it coincided with a "major upheaval." The rhetoric in those magazines that deliberately praised foreigners was heavily criticized in 2019. It was seen as deliberately arguing for the inferiority of Chinese people. Let me give you a few examples so you can understand what I saw as a child:
The sewage system in the former German-leased area of Qingdao had been operating efficiently for over a century. When some parts needed replacement, the original company no longer existed. A German company sent an email saying that, according to their construction standards, there should be a small storage room within three meters of the worn-out parts where spare parts could be found. The urban construction company found the small storage room in the sewer, and inside, the spare parts were still shiny and new, wrapped in oilcloth.
During a summer camp between Japanese and Chinese children, each child had to carry a 20kg backpack for a 50km hike. The Chinese children soon gave up, but the Japanese children persevered. The Chinese children couldn't endure the hardship and were not as tough as the Japanese children (my teacher even told us to learn from the Japanese children).
Once in America, a sparrow got tangled in an exposed high-voltage wire by the roadside. Its distressing cries caught the attention of passersby, who immediately called for help. After multiple levels of authorization, the rescue workers eventually got approval from the President within half an hour to send a special plane to cut the national power line in Washington, causing a temporary blackout across the U.S. to save the sparrow.
I learned all three of these from books. Of course, you might say, what kind of nonsense is this, it's completely fabricated. This rhetoric wasn't meant for foreigners; it was actually used as internal propaganda within China. Afterward, it was tied together with the "toxic textbooks" incident (where illustrations in elementary school textbooks deliberately depicted Chinese children as ugly and foreigners as attractive), which was believed to be a deliberate attempt by some foreign enemies and domestic traitors to prove that Chinese people couldn't achieve the same accomplishments as foreigners, thereby belittling Chinese people. This is why I mentioned that Jews indeed have a "promotional image" in China.
In 2019, the Chinese internet was like a chaotic battlefield with all sorts of ideas, from the most peaceful to the most extreme, from the far left to the far right. I once received very hurtful insults for expressing left-wing views on a Chinese platform called Zhihu (similar to Quora). Mutual personal attacks are not uncommon.Now the Chinese internet is still influenced by this, which is why I find Lemmy to be a great environment. At least here, we are having discussions instead of cursing each other with voodoo dolls. 😆
In the US, there are positive and negative stereotypes, too. German efficiency and Japanese perfectionism and perseverance are among them. Jewish intelligence and commitment to education, too. These things have a basis in reality, of course, but they shouldn't be mistaken for reality itself. It seems to me these things appearing in your textbooks were probably attempts by your own government to get its people to emulate what it sees as positive traits in other cultures, rather than an attempt by foreign adversaries to paint Chinese people as inferior. Of course, when the message was a little too unclear or negative as in the "toxic textbooks" incident, your government deflected blame.
English is a second language to them clearly. Cut them some slack.