Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a message of support Thursday for Elon Musk after the world’s richest man was accused of making a Nazi salute.

Musk “is being falsely smeared,” Netanyahu wrote on X, the social media platform owned by Musk. “Elon is a great friend of Israel. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre… [and] has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s right to defend itself against genocidal terrorists and regimes who seek to annihilate the one and only Jewish state.”

Musk later thanked Netanyahu.

  • Lauchs@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Nazis were also famously fascist, had no elections, had a strong security system to squash internal dissent and brooked no protest, none of which apply to Israel.

    I get the appeal of labelling things you oppose as nazis but you can’t just pick and choose what aspects fit and then apply the term nazi, it just makes us look dumb.

    When someone gets banned from a site and complains that site is run by nazis, if we’re using your standard of picking and choosing then that person is as correct as you are as the site is allowing no dissent and removing those who do. But in reality (I pray) we both look at that person and think less of their complaint because of the silliness of their comparison.

    • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      If you think what Israel does (genocide, expansionism, racism, building an ethnostate… you know, objectively the actions of a fascist government) is tantamount to banning someone from a website then you are so far gone that it’s pointless even trying to reason with you, so I won’t bother.

      Goodbye.

      • Lauchs@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        You are so close to getting it. Yes, comparing the Nazis to banning someone from a website is fucking dumb and makes the person making the comparison look silly.

        Using nazi as a perjorative for any group committing an act of genocide is the same.

        Comparing what is happening in Gaza with the Holocaust (which is the implicit association you are making when you call groups nazis) is fucking stupid. One was arguably the worst thing in human history whereas what’s happening in Gaza is the same sort of thing that’s been happening constantly across the globe for decades and is happening in three different places right fucking now.

        And the sense of scale is insane. Including all Palestinean deaths, 45k in ~ 15 months of fighting (including civilian and Hamas fighters) you could run these casualty rates for **25 years **and not match the deaths in Auschwitz alone (more than a million, almost entirely civilians.)

        Labelling Netenyahu as a nazi demonstrates you are either woefully ignorant of the world beyond your social media feed, or have a literally childlike understanding of relative magnitudes, same way my friend’s toddler cries at horrific injustices like bedtime and no candy for dinner, to her these may actually be the worst things she recalls but that’s part of being a child.

        And of course there’s the delightful soupcon of stupidity in calling the leader of the Jewish state a person that literally most famously hates Jews. Just, you look so stupid on so many levels that it makes all us adults who oppose the war look dumber by association. That’s why it is infuriating; not only is it a foolish comparison but it makes everyone who is against the war look like a similarly ignorant goof.