[tptacek]

See, you're implicitly asking me here to defend Netanyahu. I believe Netanyahu to be among the very worst leaders of the last 75 years, a world-historically bad prime minister who has done more than almost anybody to heighten the intractability and human tragedy of the Israel/Palestine conflict. If you think the "Amalek" speech is irrelevant to that analysis, I agree.

What I object to is the deployment of religious tropes that essentialize Netanyahu-ism or Kahanism into Israel, or, worse still, Judaism as a whole. If you're going to get into this "Amalek" stuff, get it right.

If not, it's not like you needed it to take shots at Netanyahu. There is a decent chance that when he is ultimately ousted, he's going to be imprisoned by the Israelis.

[khokhol]

What I object to is the deployment of religious tropes that essentialize Netanyahu-ism or Kahanism into Israel, or, worse still, Judaism as a whole.

Which absolutely no one is doing here.

With the statement above the discussion has been formally pushed into the deep end, so I agree we can wrap up.

[runarberg]

I just want to clarify that I didn’t mean the Amalek speech is irrelevant, but rather whether he originally meant Hamas or the Palestinian people in this speech. Whichever he was originally referring to is irrelevant, if he meant Hamas, the term has grown to mean the Palestinian People, and is being used to pump up the genocide.

Likewise Trump also claims his speech didn’t mean to start an insurrection, however, it did to so, and whatever he originally meant became irrelevant as soon as the insurrectionists started, and he didn’t order them to back down.