People are quick to tie the name of a country or nationality directly with the culture/peoples that said name was derived from (or vice versa). Unfortunately to many people, “Chinese” as a nationality is the same as “Chinese” as an ethnicity/culture/language (rather, a group of ethnicities/cultures/languages since “Chinese” is used for many groups, though it’s mostly Han and relatively closely related groups), and their logic is criticizing or denouncing China is an attack on Chinese nationals, which is equivalent to attacking ethnic Chinese.
Sometimes their logic is – actions against China are meant as a way to undermine Chinese influence for the purpose of committing hate crimes or genocide against Chinese (China is totally the protector of ethnic Chinese in this case). Basically similar to Russian bots’ favorite excuse but rebranded.
With Israel it’s a lot easier for them to separate “Israeli” (the nationality) from “Jewish” (the ethnicity & religion) because (in English) they’re completely different words, so it’s a lot easier for them to tell “Israeli ≠ Jewish”, as opposed to their head exploding when they think “Chinese ≠ Chinese”. It’s easy for the uninformed and malinformed (and those who benefit from such a viewpoint) to rationalize the sentence “attacks against Chinese are discriminatory against Chinese” but less so of “attacks against Israeli are discriminatory against Jewish”, even though in both the first term is a nation or nationality and the second term is for a variety of ethnic groups that isn’t necessarily tied to the nation and describes many peoples who have no connection to the nationality.
In Chinese you may call someone of Chinese descent huaren, but you generally use zhongguoren for both Chinese nationality and ethnicity (with zhongguo being “China”, essentially “China people”), while Israeli is yiselie and Jewish is youtai with no chance to conflate the two. The Chinese bots get confused by the same language issue too.
Calling it logic is insincere. They’re just shuffling cards.
Zionists also make the problem clearer by denouncing assumptions about Jews supporting Israel… when it suits them. Anyone suggesting American Jews have some automatic loyalty to Israel is being prejudiced at best and outright bigoted at worst. You can watch people insist on this, immediately after treating criticism of the Israeli government as a personal attack. The contradiction is so much worse than hypocrisy. People in this mode do not care what is true. They reject the concept. It’s reality as a team sport.
They are performing loyalty in a way that resembles argument.
Recognizing this in action changes how the conversation can go. You can keep making sincere efforts they’ll ignore as motivated plausible nonsense… like they’re doing. Or you can explain to them that it’s what they’re doing, and tell them, possibly for the first time, there are other options. You can tell them some folks mean things when they say words. This is genuinely news to people.
The clearest example might be conservatives scoffing at condemnation of their own hypocrisy… because they think us reminding them of their own arguments, is us adopting their arguments. I’ve had people express, in shockingly plain English, that they don’t know the difference. And why would they? It’s not like they believed it, when they said it.
Criticism of China is not anti-Chinese.
Criticism of Israel is not antisemitic.
People are quick to tie the name of a country or nationality directly with the culture/peoples that said name was derived from (or vice versa). Unfortunately to many people, “Chinese” as a nationality is the same as “Chinese” as an ethnicity/culture/language (rather, a group of ethnicities/cultures/languages since “Chinese” is used for many groups, though it’s mostly Han and relatively closely related groups), and their logic is criticizing or denouncing China is an attack on Chinese nationals, which is equivalent to attacking ethnic Chinese.
Sometimes their logic is – actions against China are meant as a way to undermine Chinese influence for the purpose of committing hate crimes or genocide against Chinese (China is totally the protector of ethnic Chinese in this case). Basically similar to Russian bots’ favorite excuse but rebranded.
With Israel it’s a lot easier for them to separate “Israeli” (the nationality) from “Jewish” (the ethnicity & religion) because (in English) they’re completely different words, so it’s a lot easier for them to tell “Israeli ≠ Jewish”, as opposed to their head exploding when they think “Chinese ≠ Chinese”. It’s easy for the uninformed and malinformed (and those who benefit from such a viewpoint) to rationalize the sentence “attacks against Chinese are discriminatory against Chinese” but less so of “attacks against Israeli are discriminatory against Jewish”, even though in both the first term is a nation or nationality and the second term is for a variety of ethnic groups that isn’t necessarily tied to the nation and describes many peoples who have no connection to the nationality.
In Chinese you may call someone of Chinese descent
huaren, but you generally usezhongguorenfor both Chinese nationality and ethnicity (withzhongguobeing “China”, essentially “China people”), while Israeli isyiselieand Jewish isyoutaiwith no chance to conflate the two. The Chinese bots get confused by the same language issue too.Calling it logic is insincere. They’re just shuffling cards.
Zionists also make the problem clearer by denouncing assumptions about Jews supporting Israel… when it suits them. Anyone suggesting American Jews have some automatic loyalty to Israel is being prejudiced at best and outright bigoted at worst. You can watch people insist on this, immediately after treating criticism of the Israeli government as a personal attack. The contradiction is so much worse than hypocrisy. People in this mode do not care what is true. They reject the concept. It’s reality as a team sport.
They are performing loyalty in a way that resembles argument.
Recognizing this in action changes how the conversation can go. You can keep making sincere efforts they’ll ignore as motivated plausible nonsense… like they’re doing. Or you can explain to them that it’s what they’re doing, and tell them, possibly for the first time, there are other options. You can tell them some folks mean things when they say words. This is genuinely news to people.
The clearest example might be conservatives scoffing at condemnation of their own hypocrisy… because they think us reminding them of their own arguments, is us adopting their arguments. I’ve had people express, in shockingly plain English, that they don’t know the difference. And why would they? It’s not like they believed it, when they said it.