A Boring Dystopia

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Israel brands Palestinian detainees with numbers on their foreheads (www.middleeasteye.net)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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When Israel re-arrested Palestinian men in the occupied West Bank town of Dura, the detainees faced familiar treatment.

They were blindfolded, handcuffed, insulted and kept in inhumane conditions. More unusual was that each man had a number written on his forehead.

Osama Shaheen, who was released in August after 10 months of administrative detention, told Middle East Eye that soldiers brutally stormed his house, smashing his furniture.

"The soldiers turned us from names into numbers, and every detainee had a number that they used to provoke him during his arrest and call him by number instead of name. To them, we are just numbers."

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (14 children)

I think they're almost certainly deliberately using ambiguous language to push an agenda. (Either that or both the author and the editor are incompetent.) And I would add that the language isn't even actually ambiguous. It's simply deceptive. "Brand" in this context would be interpreted literally by a normal reader and claiming it's a metaphor is disingenuous.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (13 children)

Hmm

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/04/yellow-star-houses-budapest-hungarian-jews-nazis-holocaust

Branded with a yellow star: the Jewish houses marked for death by the Nazis

Just as an aside, even the Nazis had the decency to not tattoo the numbers on people's foreheads.

Pretending there's no dehumanisation or othering going on here is disingenuous.

https://museeholocauste.ca/en/resources-training/the-process-of-othering/

What is Othering?

Othering is a process whereby a group of people is made to seem fundamentally different, even to the point of making that group seem less than human. This process can trigger instinctive emotional reactions towards members of that group. In many instances, othering has been used to degrade, isolate, and render possible the discrimination, abuse, or persecution of a group.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (12 children)

A house can't literally be branded, so the use of "brand" in that context must be metaphorical. People, however, can and historically often have been branded quite literally.

As for othering: it is irrelevant to the point I was making, so your reference to it here is a good example of how people make a false and inflammatory statement, and then when challenged about it, those people retreat to a much weaker, uncontroversial claim. Meanwhile the public has seen the original, false, and inflammatory statement but not the challenge or the retreat.

No one would care if the headline said "Israelis see Palestinians as fundamentally different from themselves" or even "Israelis sometimes don't treat Palestinian prisoners with respect." However, what the headline does say is that Israelis physically mutilate Palestinian prisoners. Here in the comments you make a pitiful argument that the claim of physical mutilation is in fact just a metaphor, although even then you try to sneak in a comparison between Jews and Nazis. Jews aren't tattooing anything on anyone, but apparently they still have less decency than Nazis according to you.

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