Making it a Fandom is the Point
Fandom functions as a Faith-replacement for bullies and lonely/vulnerable people.
(Long post and sources incoming)
The objectives of these spaces are not to save Palestinians or anything like that. They are to perpetuate, radicalize vulnerable members, and marginalize and kill Jews as an outlet. That's what they do, that's all they do, and the consumerist fandom model works to help capture people into the Ziggurat of Zealotry. (From 2006, before NYT really shat the bed, and relevant from a recruitment and leveraging perspective via fandom and pop culture spaces:
A team of C.I.A. analysts, however, has devised a new, and possibly potent, way of looking at the problem. The agency's "Ziggurat of Zealotry" arrays Islamists into a pyramid in the Mesopotamian style, with each ascending level representing a leap in radicalization. At the bottom of the ziggurat are peaceful individuals who concern themselves with what some call the greater jihad, the personal struggle to be a dutiful and pious Muslim. Some of those individuals step up to join groups like Tablighi Jamaat -- a missionary organization founded in India -- that organize devout Muslims to effect change in their societies. Above that, you find groups with more radical political agendas, typically the overthrow or replacement of governments they regard as repressive and hostile to Islam as they believe it should be practiced. The next step abandons politics for violence exclusively. The top level covers only those who extend this mandate for violence globally and seek to destroy the Western nation-state system.
The ziggurat is said to be the brainchild of Cindy Storer, an analyst at the C.I.A.'s counterterror center, who presented it publicly at the University of Pennsylvania in March. The model usefully implies that recruiters from one level draw almost exclusively from the level directly beneath them. It also implies that radicalization is neither fluid nor inevitable; radical Muslims are not destined to become violent. The task for counterterrorism, then, is to disrupt the "elevators" that pull individuals and resources up the ziggurat without taking steps to incur the ire of lower levels and nudge them upward.
It's funny because of how many of them ID as secular socialists but the fandom framing of it all is incredibly consumerist and manifesting as a gamified Cult-Faith. You do the cosplay, you buy the merch, you add the omnicause, and the more you participate from safety, the more you level up.
Also, hamas/IRI/Qatar funded networks are heavily embedded into global pop culture and viral video spaces like "Publicfreakout" which keep surfacing (Not to mention the other "Pop Base" style twitter/social media accounts which seesaw between "WHIMSICAL CELEB/Blood libel Omnicause" shit.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/the-terrorist-propaganda-to-reddit-pipeline
But it bears repeating that it turns out if you displace all the evils of the world onto one group of people you've just created a belief system and cult wherein the only way to positively affect change in the world is to target, marginalize and eliminate that same group of people and not actually work towards the causes your organization ostensibly stands for. When doing that doesn't manifest Sparklemotion and a Clean Star Trek Federation Future, clearly it's because you missed a couple of the Evil Group of People.
“There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing, with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called 'the people'. Vimes had spent his life on the streets, and had met decent men and fools and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People. People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.” ― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
I wonder how many people drop this Pratchett quote and then scream about perfidious Jews 'zionists' It's probably a lot. And there's a reason I keep calling it a fandom-cult. Because it fucking is.
Gough says she doesn’t understand the analogy—she heard it from a friend with a stronger grasp of intergalactic space fables—but she gets the crux of it, which involves shooting Israel:
“Apparently the Death Star has a place in it that if you shoot through that specific place in the Death Star, you explode the entire Death Star, okay? And so somebody said Palestine is that place. And the construction of the Death Star is like all of it—Sudan, Congo, all of it everywhere, Nigeria now, everywhere. If we can free Palestine, it explodes everything.”
One can only imagine Gough trying to describe the concept of an Achilles’ heel.
I should note that for this conversation Gough is in costume—not a Star Wars costume but a Palestinian costume, a designer keffiyeh from an Instagram influencer.
Gough is promoting the idea that the Jews are responsible for all the remaining injustice in the world. Destroying the Death Star of David would liberate Congo, in her portrayal. Gough’s understanding of geopolitics is what things would look like if Carmen Sandiego worked for the NKVD.
Why is this interesting? Because Gough is describing the progressive obsession with Israel as a form of primitive religious fanaticism. And it is accurate.
Actors’ opinions on the Middle East are rarely interesting, but there are occasional exceptions. Denise Gough, a fairly generic actress from
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