CONGRESSMAN JAMES RASKIN, who is a Jewish and is one of the prosecutors of Trump's first impeachment, has written the closest any American politician will come to saying FU to both Netanyahu & Hamas
THIS 👇🏾
"Contempt for civilian life is the hallmark of terrorist regimes and actors, not liberal democracies. Unlike the terrorists, we reject all notions of mass guilt, collective punishment and deliberate sacrifice of civilian life for military or ideological purposes."
@blogdiva naive question by someone who does not understand the discurse in US: would a Republican see the word "liberal" here as a positive value?
@ingo_wichmann @blogdiva Yes, absolutely.
In US politics, "liberal" usually means relatively Left (at least, compared to center-of-US politically 😂 ) So, Republicans are not for that...
But Raskin here is not using that meaning of the term. He's talking about like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism – equal treatment under the law, private property, consent of the governed, freedom of press/speech/etc, and so on. Most Republicans (and most Democrats, I think) are definitely for that kind of "liberal".
@ingo_wichmann @blogdiva Although, I suppose it is probably true in the US that because of ignorance, a good chunk of people are only thinking of "liberal" as in left, so if you use the word liberal to mean the other meaning, it could cause confusion: I'm sure there's someone in the US who would read Raskin's statement as talking about leftist democracies. 😂
@ingo_wichmann @blogdiva Also, worth noting there are some illiberal movements in US politics: see, equal treatment under the law ends up being not so equal sometimes, so instead of trying to fix that, maybe instead we should enforce equal outcomes in some ways. Ibram Kendi's "anti-racism" and related political ideas is an example of this. If you've heard conservatives rail against "Critical Race Theory", this is what the "critical" means: analyzing ways that US Law and "liberal" institutions have failed us.
Conservatives/Republicans are generally opposed to these political movements, so in that sense especially they're positively predisposed to "liberal democracies".