this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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For #1 I laugh at them and ask them if they really expect me to take them seriously when they're presuming that I can just catch a passenger flight to Gaza (you can't) to land in the Gaza strip on an airport (there isn't one) and to get Israel's permission to cross the complete military blockade they have imposed in Gaza (they won't let you). I usually throw a dig in about how they might think it's neat to base their politics on fantasy but it's a completely different thing to do that while demanding that people should take your politics seriously.
For #2 it's just simple - you can equate them having a home and only allowing certain people in with Apartheid or segregation etc., or you can get them to describe what they see as the parallel between a protest blockade and what Israel is doing then ask them if they think the thing that protesters are opposed to is walls or if they think they are protesting things like imposed starvation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. It's usually good to ridicule them by telling them that with this level of insight they must think that people are opposed to the Nazi concentration camps because they don't like fences, then laugh in their face about it.
Don't bother debating with them, just draw them out into a position and mock their terrible takes.
An example of this is that elsewhere on social media there's a diasporic Ukrainian nationalist in their 20s dissing "tankies" and saying that they don't know shit about Ukraine under the USSR. I refuted this on the basis that they weren't there and they don't know shit about what they're presuming to talk about either, knowing exactly what would come next. And of course it did: "She has grandparents who lived in Ukraine under the USSR!!" in my replies. So my response was something along the lines of "My grandparents lived in Nazi Germany and they supported the Nazis, can you tell me why you think I should believe what they tell me about Nazi Germany and why you think I should adopt their politics exactly? After all, I wasn't there but they were so I should defer to their expertise in the matter - that's what you're arguing for, right?"
Godwin's speedrun and all that but the point stands - I'm not going to take the grandpa who is an OUN sympathiser seriously and I'm going to laugh at the person who takes the OUN sympathiser seriously just on the basis of the fact that they lived it.