You are absolutely correct, and my snarky reply leads toward this tendency to call an organization as a monolithic entity that has agendas when the actual issue could be any number of other things, probably all of them, in a quagmire together:
Resistance to change and outside pressure, factionialization within the group that leads to the request being impeded, corruption, organized crime, institutional failure, racism, nationalism, cronyism, outdated training, lack of training in general…
There could be a good number of people trying to comply with the policy and simply failing. We just don’t know the full truth.
Agreed. I do not excuse him for his crimes in the least. I do again apologize for not seeing which community I was responding in. Nor have I ever seen one of Polanski’s movies, for what tiny bit that’s worth.
In that sense it was a bad comparison to the Woody Allen example. I’m not trying to exonerate Polanski in anyone’s estimation.
I have similar feelings about Polanski’s fleeing the country.
He was to be acquitted, then had drinks with the judge and told him exactly what happened, whereupon the judge takes the acquittal off the table.
That’s improper behavior on the judge’s part in my book. Maybe he should’ve served his time, but I understand why he chose to flee after that treatment.
Edit: Also same, I certainly wasn’t insinuating that Polanski is innocent or anything of the sort. Didn’t see the community at all.
Because the entire world watched and stood by mostly silently as the Jewish people were eradicated in Europe and only stepped up when they became personally threatened.
Then they decided to return the Jewish people to their homeland because 1) it wasn’t theirs to give so it was easy and 2) it wasn’t in their land so they didn’t have to host them.
That is of course a vast oversimplification, but the spoils of past policies have come to roost.
Israel is surrounded by enemies and its currently elected leaders, paranoid beyond reason. Most see the Palestinians as largely innocent bystanders in a war between Israel and Hamas, not true targets, so they don’t support the idea of genocide.
But many of us see Netanyahu as someone who will not stop with eradicating Hamas as that was never his goal, and to pretend that all of these accidental strikes are indeed accidental is infuriatingly insulting.
It’s so difficult to thread the needle that both the Jewish people and Palestinians are embattled in a hostile region. There are good and innocent people there.
And those people are losing.
Edit because I stopped before truly answering: The world has been supporting Israel out of guilt after WWII and undoing that framework of support will take time, and of course Israel is trying to keep that support.