70 years of propaganda has its roots deep in generational beliefs that any criticism of Israel’s actions as a nation state could only be rooted in their ethnicity and religion and therefore must be countered.

No one wants to criticize privacy-invading “think of the children” laws for fear of being seen as a pedo or pedo-enabler, and likewise no one wants to stand up against Israel for fear of being seen as a Jew-hating antisemite.

The Germans are perhaps still motivated by guilt over the Holocaust

Honestly I'm not entirely convinced the Germans ARE motivated by guilt; it seems to me more that they're not happy with the image they created among their (perceived) peers and are now trying to create a new image to be seen by. They want TO BE SEEN as having overcome their past and become better for it, but the idea that they've fundamentally changed is a joke. They committed atrocities in Namibia for example but have never paid reparations to the people there, and of course why should they? Other European countries rag on Germany for the holocaust, none of them give a damn about the atrocities committed against the Herero people.

They bend over backwards for Israel because they don't want to be mocked as Nazis; they want to continue viewing themselves in the same lofty position they see other Western European countries in.

It's partly because of the guit of holocaust, but also because they just don't personally want to lift a finger regarding Palestine. It's a toxic mixture of inbred zionism, cold geopolitical calculus, appeasing the US in trying time in transatlantic relations, and neocon hubris. They maybe can bend to appease their own populations, but they really are not prepared to stop Israel and they would much rather help them. They just want the genocide to happen, but quietly and out of sight and no protests.

But it's not really just Gaza. They do this because of Ukraine, rising cost of living, European humiliation in from of Trump, falling economy, their own unpopularity, etc.... They are fearing the upheaval and people getting ideas when Brussels doesn't seem to have any of it's own. Remember that these are the same people who though that the end of the soviet union was the end of history and they are the culmination of humanity. They cannon accept being wrong or stepping down at this point.

Does Israel have that much sway over Europe?

It's not so much that Isreal does, but for all intents and purposes Israel = America. It's our colonial outpost in the Middle East, an "unsinkable aircraft carrier", and as Joe Biden said, "if Isreal didn't exist, we would have to invent it". And as much as Europeans don't want to believe it, most European countries are American vassal states. Look at the pictures of all of your leaders gravelling at Trump's feet and literally calling him "Daddy".

Gaza is only the beginning. They are also preparing for mass unrest at home as standards of living worsen. Just this week the German chancellor said Germany "can no longer afford the welfare state", meanwhile they are spending record amounts on arms. They are preparing for millions of climate refugees at their borders.

You should expect and prepare for a lot more Gazas all over the world in the future. Your leaders are.

My signal chats will all start with:

-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

Soon, I'm guessing.

are you antisemitism concern trolling or new?

Even if our elections were "democratic" (they aren't), there is absolutely no chance of voting this shit away before it is foisted onto the population.

I think if you asked the people whattl they voted for none of them would say it was this. And yet it is still set to roll out.

Makes you wonder what liberal democracy really means doesn't it?

Sometimes policy issues arise after an election cycle, in which case the voters didn't have an opportunity to vote for or against the candidates based on their position on the policy issue. Was that the case with age verification in the UK?

In a healthy democracy, future elections decide the fate of these policies, which can be reverted. Even the USA's complete prohibition on recreational alcohol, which was popular with voters at the time, and codified into the constitution itself, later became unpopular with voters, and was repealed. So as long as the democracy remains healthy, there is always an opportunity for bad policies to be repealed.

You should read the rest of the thread to get an understanding of why surveillance and deanonymization is being pushed. It is not to solve some real issue to the benefit of the public, it is a response to the failure of the media systems of control to control narratives.

Your claims about a "healthy democracy" are fairy tales. That's propaganda about how it works, not how it works in practice. The UK has its current Prime Minister due to a series of coordinated media campaigns against the previous leader of Labour, for examlle, with an internal purge using bad faith claims following his removal. No element of that was democratic and none of the UK governments have been popular for ages.

Question why so-called democracies only produce unpopular governments. Why don't the parties align with popular interests in reality? Whose interests do they align with?

Media companies oppose left candidates. Left candidates threaten the material interests of the owners of these companies, the ad buyers, the people who fund think tanks and establish or otherwise embed in academic programs like journalism schools.

The remainder is non-left candidates. These are people who work in those interests and therefore receive media support. For example, Reform UK gets inordinate neuteal or positive media coverage as well as volume compared to even the greens who are not much of a threat to capital.

These mass surveillance laws are a reaction to an failure in this overall apparatus to control thought and speech re: Gaza. They want to track and suppress and oppress information and speech that runs contrary to ruling class interests. The ruling class is heavily invested in the genocidal settler colonial project of "Israel" both literally with piles of cash and politically-strategically as a means by which to control and profit from political destabilization in parts of the Middle East.

Their explicit statements about why they want to do this are just a lie, a pretext. They are not personally or politically invested in protecting kids, lol. These are the people that protected Jimmy Saville and impoverished and made food insecure huge percentages of UK children.