I saw this all the time on reddit. Some people seem to have the need to be involved in conversations but don’t have anything worthwhile, intelligent, or even just interesting or entertaining to say. They instead tend to pick an aspect of a comment, often take it out of context, then shit all over it but not in a way that’s constructive, helpful, or insightful whatsoever. They often don’t seem to really even have a point other than telling you you’re wrong. I’m pretty sure that’s what we’re seeing here.
I suggest at most calling them out on their behavior but otherwise just not engaging. They’re basically trolls, even if they don’t realize it themselves, so it’s not worth the trouble and there’s no way to ‘win’.
In this sense they absolutely are. No different than Iraqis, Afghans, Panamanians, Vietnamese… etc.
In every other way, no - Putin can end this war any damn time he feels like. But that doesn’t mean the US military-industrial complex isn’t going to milk this for all it’s worth.
Nah, you just framed the Russians as victims equivalent to the Palestinians and now you just did a 180 to pretend you meant to frame Russia as the aggressor when you actually didn’t. You know we can read your text, right?
Killing the palestinians (and russians) don’t matter to them it’s just another funnel from our effort into their pockets.
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt with you shills, is it?
It’s not gonna work here, though. For all that Lemmy sucks ass, at least the users have a modicum of common sense. Good luck overcoming that. Dasvidaniya
To be fair, they were talking about war profiteering, not genocide. We are definitely happy with Ukraine being at war with Russia as far as war profiteering goes. And as much as Putin sucks, and any country may suck, it doesn’t mean their citizens should be killed endlessly. The people there are still human, even if their leaders are terrible. But rather than doing something to try and stop the war, the US would rather use it to funnel money to our arms dealers. Which is a problem, even if the enemy is bad, killing all the Russians should never be the goal. Stopping the war should.
I am not implying that at all obviously. No one is. In fact I don’t know a single pro-Ukraine person who can’t differentiate between Putin’s regime and the Russian people.
Ah, got you. Thanks for clarification. Yes, I agree. Gawd almighty absolutely forbids using our own tax dollars for such ungodly things like feeding the hungry, healing the sick, clothing the naked or looking out for prisoners.
It’s sort of like a “Bruce Wayne v. Court of Owls” situation. Bruce Wayne has his philanthropy actively countered by a group that’s basically the Illuminati, this “Court of Owls” because, I’m guessing there’s an Eldritch horror that slumbers so long as Gotham suffers, but would awaken if the rich actually did anything to help the poor.
EDIT: Okay, so I found out this “Court of Owls” not only doesn’t care about the poor, they don’t care about the world in general. They serve an evil Bat-God named Barbatos who wants to use Bruce Wayne as a conduit to emerge in the world.
Bruce Wayne would definitely make it into Murica heaven. Superman might make it into Jesus heaven (which I would assume would be loving yourself, if the Kingdom of heaven is actually within us, which it is, in my experience).
Yes but you shouldn’t bring up hypocrisy here. Stopping killing now is worthwhile regardless of what various countries have done years and decades ago.
That’s generally good advice, but on a broad level it’s completely impossible. There’s no way that everyone can know all of history. We all have to learn little parts at different times in our lives, according to our own priorities and values. Also, quite obviously, forgetting the past does not always lead to repeats.
Hamas fires thousands of rockets at Israeli, if it didn’t have iron dome they’d have to prevent Gaza from firing the missiles, which means bombing Hamas and the civilians they hide behind
Unfortunately, until we get money out of politics, voting doesn’t really matter.
The ruling class can just funnel more money to the opposing side to get them elected. They’ve already got it down to a science so they don’t spend more than they need to.
They haven’t even scratched the surface of how much money they can spend to control elections. It’s all just the bare-minimum to them, like maximizing profit.
Taxes aren’t what’s stopping us from having health care. We already spend more taxes on health care per capita than countries with single payer health care. (Not that changes that we could be using our taxes better, but the myth that we would spend more taxes to get single payer needs to be dispelled.)
The claim doesn’t seem right. We do spend far more on healthcare than other nations overall and our taxed spending on healthcare seems comparable to other rich nations like Japan, though that’s only a fraction of our total spending - most is private cost. Quick back of napkin math says taxes directly spend ~4k a year/capita on healthcare expenses, mostly Medicare, and single-payer systems tend to cost about ~6k total. Data is a little old. Correct me if I’m reading wrong.
Hold on. I am in complete agreement that US healthcare spending is batshit crazy. I was just doubtful that our TAXED healthcare spending was more than other countries with single payer. All our spending is private.
Some of the mandatory budget and discretionary non-defense budget can be directly or indirectly linked to military purposes, but regardless, the majority of the budget is social programs.
i have some idea. do I know where every cent goes? no. the government, most governments, are these giant ponderous masses of interwoven bureaucracy, striving to complete many diverse goals. the various goals are often at odds with each other.
Nope. It’s not. That money they hand Israel? Completely sucked out of their thumb - I literally use the massive handouts the US gives Israel as a way to debunk the “but printing money causes inflation!” crowd.
Btw, that is an actual example of a handout - ie, not the (alleged) “handouts” right-wing pundits start whining about whenever the issue of social services come up.
Of course, they could just as easily spend all that invented money to give you healthcare - but they won’t… that’s not how class warfare works.
Nope. Your taxes doesn’t even pay for the US military - it’s all just money they invent. Your taxes are spent by the state you live in - roads, hospitals… that kind of stuff.
When it comes to their precious military - and their precious neocolonialist shitfuckery they call “foreign policy” - they don’t rely on you.
ntg but can you point me in the direction of your sources for that? I’m kind of lazy and google/my google fu sucks for me recently. no big prob if you can’t though
Not “completely”. They spend into a deficit every year, which is partially financed with tax and partially financed with debt obligations. It’s more that any spending is paid for 50% tax and 50% “indirect inflation tax” later, or whatever the exact numbers are (I stopped keeping track).
I downvote that type of meme humor because I don’t find it adds to discussion. Even if I agree with the person, I downvote them every time.
Up/downvotes are meant for promoting relevant discussion and suppressing off-topic content, spam, trolls, and hate. They are not and were never intended to be dis/agreement buttons. People just misuse them.
I’m not convinced from that comment that the user they’re referring to is a tankie, but simply put, I’d describe a tankie as the alt-left equivalent of the alt-right.
They’re not quite as violent in my opinion, but they push pro-china/russia propoganda and misinformation, and are just as self-deluded and delusional as the alt-right. I’ve also seen tankies justify Hamas’ attack against Isreal, which I find inexcusable and morally reprehensible. The same can be said of the IDF’s genocide against innocent Palestinians.
Tankies are on the fringe and are just on the other end of the bell curve of the alt-right.
You forgot to mention IRGC propaganda and misinformation. The current Gaza conflict is, without a doubt, the biggest propaganda victory the IRGC has ever had. They’ve got the US left absolutely fractured. People were worried about 2024 elections? HAHAHAH just wait. We’re so fucked.
Sure, my point was that they didn't know. That they were just out here throwing out words they had no clue about and (in my and others opinion) doing it as an attempt to drive wedges in the community. That's literally the joke up the thread that the guy baited the moron in with. I've met some of these people in real life. They weren't violent. They absolutely we're deluded apologists, but outside of talking revolution in the streets (which I don't think is to imply violence either, Iceland for example) they we're very much passive folk that just got pulled into a lame MLM.
To your later point, personally I agree, that the attack Hamas carried out on people in Israel is inexcusable. I don't think that is ubiquitous on the left, nor should it be. It parallels quite clearly in the discussions we're all having as to the validity of attacks on civilian populations but to some it is also a question of self defense under the massively imbalanced power dynamic between the two countries. Not only are we talking about apartheid here, but what is clearly becoming erasure. The longer this madness goes on the more people are going to question the validity of that Oct 7 attack and as I see the atrocities carried out daily I wonder if that point will come for me as well.
That's the significance of this story. Wolf fucking Blitzer, is starting to question this shit. If you ever needed a warning that you are taking the lead in the "bad guy" race, this is a skull and bones in the tea leaves.
Not sure what tankies have to do with it, but I think everyone understands mocking text, and yes, there is a lot of pro-IDF astroturfing on all social media platforms currently.
Appeal to consensus is a fallacy. One that especially doesn’t work well on the internet, because platforms are generally quite able to be influenced by bots or by removal by moderation staff or platform owners.
Try browsing Reddit on this issue. Holy hell are bots gone all insane justifying that “Hamas needs to be crushed” on any civilian death. It’s a fascinating case study on how perceptions and narratives can be morphed and controlled.
Don’t have to go to reddit - you can just head on over to c/worldnews here on Lemmy to see the pro-Israeli hasbara narratives being allowed by the mods there.
If you exclude exclusively political lemmy instances like lemmygrad, lemmy is at most slightly more politically liberal than reddit, but without astroturfing racists being able to declare what makes it to the front page.
I don’t think it even breaks down to “liberal” or “conservative”. There’s an objective way of looking at what’s going on, the pro-Israel narrative is basically dependent on ignoring anything that happened before or after Oct. 7, omitting all other facts.
They did try. It was that there might be terrorist infrastructure there. They know there’s civilians there, but there might be infrastructure. They’re still looking into it, but they dropped that bomb, anyway.
It’s a perfect solution when all you need is a boogieman to “protect the nation” against. You get to show that you hurt the boogieman, and the wounds you inflict ensure the boogieman’s continuous survival.
It is wrong to kill people but we have the death penalty for killers.
It is wrong to imprison people but we have prisons for criminals
Any thinking person can see from the start that Muslims are not willing to live on peace with Jews or anywhere whereas Israel has always been willing to live in peace
Any thinking person can see from the start that Muslims are not willing to live on peace with Jews or anywhere whereas Israel has always been willing to live in peace
Israel’s “peace” is built upon land they violently seized from the Palestinians, from 1948 until today.
You can look up the 1948 partition plan for starters, which Israel accepted and arabs went to war over. Israel ‘violently seized’ the land by defending themselves.
Under the British mandate, the Ottoman empire there were caps and restrictions on how many Jews could live in Palestine while there were none on Muslims. In every Muslim country there were discriminatory laws against Jews.
The Jewish was position was that there is some state to which Jews are free to immigrate, ie the Jews fleeing Europe. There have always been Jews in Palestine, Jews are the natives, but not a state for 2000 years.
In the Jewish state arabs live freely and it was always the position of Jews that arabs can live freely in Israel and that there can be a Palestinian state (in addition to Jordan which was a part of Palestine)
The Arab position- based on islam- is there can be no Jewish state at all. They are fascist, they think the whole world should be Islamic. They launch terror attacks all over the world against non muslims- in India, armenia, Europe, the USA, Africa…
No pals were displaced before the war. The area in the south of israel- the negev- is a desert where very few people lived and no one lived at the time.
There have always been Jews in Palestine, your assumption is that vacant, uninhabited, never developed land is somehow reserved for arabs when Jews are the native people of the land.
The Jewish position is that there be some land for Jews in israel- the land to which they are native- and the Muslim position is that there be none, not 1 inch, that it is all a Muslim state like all the other Muslim states which have had discriminatory laws against Jews for centuries.
All the further partitions are in the context of Arab wars against Israel, until 1967 Jordan controlled the west bank, Egypt Gaza, yet they did not make a Palestinian state… They launched wars against Israel in 1956, 67, 73…
Yes inside israel arabs live freely and don’t want to leave are be a part of Palestine, pals have been offered states on the WB etc… Numerous times and have always rejected.
Israel has been doing this since 1949 - I think the Palestinians by now know the Israelis didn’t do white supremacist settler-colonialism in order to be their friends.
Oh poor Palestinians had no choice but to kidnap, rape and murder over a thousand people. Israel provoked them by bombing them, afterwards. Provocation in hindsight or something.
Oh, poor Israelis, all they were doing was conducting a genocide of an entire people for 75 years, all this death is totally unwarranted!
I refuse to feel sorry for any Israeli killed by anyone, so long as they’re hellbent on wiping Arabs off the planet. Those babies that were killed were just future IDF soldiers, waiting for their chance to put a boot on a Palestinian neck and a bullet in their brain.
I hope you see the irony of your comment. You do see it, right? I’m not gonna say you’re wrong, because you’re not. But you know what? Hurting your oppressors feels so good. And it’s better to die on your feet with a gun in your bloody hands, then laying on the ground with a boot on your neck.
I was going for a simple reply, that neither atrocity makes the other right, something which cuts both ways since historic times in this matter - but that statemrnt of yours, that’s off the deep end.
Frankly, the very notion of someone who “feels so good” killing babies, it disgusts me.
Israel is really in the drivers seat of this conflict though. You can imagine a reality where they had opened borders with Gaza and given them voices in the government. Where they’re all these foreign funds for to build schools and libraries and pumping in tvs and video games and internet and helping keep the streets safe, and where it’s much harder for a kid to say “I’m going to join a millitant groups” and where, even if Palestine is fighting it, we’re moving towards peace. There’s still violence from time to time, but it’s declining.
You cant imagine the same story with Palestine. They have no power in the current relationship to give anything to Israel afaik. They can’t build schools there even if they wanted to. So (to some extent, and acknowledging that it’s horrible horrible horrible for the people involved) the lashing out isn’t surprising there. It’s not good, but also not surprising. The two atrocities are very very different (imo).
I admire your optimism, I really do. When imagining a reality where Israel opens its borders to Gaza, what I see is Israel descended into a warzone - hundreds of thousands of dead Israelis, slaughtered in schools, homes, streets and hospitals in the name of muslim holy war, jewish genocide and the mantra of Palestine “from the river to the sea”.
It’s an entirely different situation in the West Bank, which some might consider odd, given that Gaza has essentially been a sovereign state, whilst the W.B has been under tight Israeli control. The W.B Palestinians have amongst the highest living standards in the entire Middle East, with schools, universities, internet and TVs. Indeed, it is quite possible that the situation in Gaza would’ve been far better had Israel not withdrawn in '05, but it is hard to make predictions about alternate timelines.
I think it has been very clear what Israel wants from peace, in fact they’ve already made it once, with Egypt. In exchange for recognition, the promise of peace and a few other concessions, they ceded an area of land larger than modern-day Israel.
That is the key point that palestinian leadership has never been willing to offer in negotiation - recognition of Israel (as rightful owner of its territories) and the promise of peace (officially renouncing any claims over those same territories).
Yeah but pals have been offered peace and a state from the beginning. They are at war because they have declared war against the existence of Jews. They deserve to die at this point
So you don’t think there should be any Jewish state when they’re are dozens of Muslim states and are against Israelis defending themselves. You are a fascist
Don’t you dare blame the Jews for the actions of the Israeli government, you sick antisemitic fuck. Take that nazi propaganda out of here. The only good nazi is a dead nazi, and you and everyone who thinks like you should be lined up against a wall and shot.
All the people that never had a word to say in defense of Palestinians in the decades prior, who as of Oct 7 are experts on the region and know exactly how Hamas appeared out of the clear blue sky that very morning, while Israel was sending shipments of marshmallow dreams and unicorns to Palestine for the decades prior.
They were expelled because they started a war, Israel accepted the partition whereas pals did not. Israel was explicit they did not want to displace anyone. Many arabs live in Israel to this day. If there was no war there would have been no expulsion.
Pals have been offered states numerous times and even offered right of return for some refugees with compensation to the rest.
And even though you did not answer my question I will answer yours- no I do not think the arabs who were forced out in a war and who have been fighting a war since then should be allowed back en masse when they openly say they wish to destroy Israel. And if you want to re visit past injustices to say there are some arabs who should return, have land given back, then you also need to consider the Jews which were kicked out of the west bank like from Hebron and the Jews which were kicked out of Arab countries and of course the Jews which were kicked out of Europe. If you launch a war, lose , you can’t ask for a do ever where you get everything back and keep everything you took, it is ridiculous. At the outset the Jews were willing to accept a tiny state, that they were fleeing from the Holocaust, that Jews were living in refugee camps until 1948 when Israel was established. That Jews are the natives of the land, were making it prosperous, are integral to the history, and the arabs sided with the Nazis in WW2. They are truly disgusting, is it really so horrible to live around Jews , in their native land. You think the fact the pals had to move 50 miles down the road is some horrible injustice ?
From the start of the conflict and throughout the modern era Israel has always been willing to live in peace with the pals despite their belligerence making numerous offers. Jews never asked for welfare like the Muslim immigrants coming to Europe, they developed the land and caused many arabs to come. It is the pals who have belligerent, following fundamentalist islam saying there can be no Jewish state, everywhere has to be a Muslim state.
OK, so by your same logic, if Egypt had a huge turn of heart, suddenly plowed through Israel, expelled all its residents, they wouldn’t have a right to return either, right? Let’s even say Israel started a war first, and then that happened. That’d be OK by your standards, right?
Not to even imply your standards are correct, because they’re fucking horrific, you’re trying to justify ethnic cleansing.
and the arabs sided with the Nazis in WW2.
You might be thinking of Lehi, the pre-Israeli militant group that got incorporated into the IDF.
First of all Egypt has fought many wars against Israel… It is after Israel defeated them that they were willing to accept peace deals.
And what you fail to grasp is it is the arabs who started a war, tried to destroy Israel and kill Jews, and since they are dangerous were forced to leave and since they openly say they wish to destroy Israel are not allowed to return. Should Israel let them return to destroy Israel ?
You don’t seem able to accept the fact that from the outset Jews were willing to live in peace with arbas and the Muslims were not. No matter how far back you go- you can go back to 1948, you can go back the ottoman and Egyptian caliphates which had discriminatory laws against Jews. You can go back to ancient history and look at the fundamental aspects of the religion. Islam is a fascist religion, it says to conquer the entire world in the name of islam. That just like in Iran and Gaza that they kill gays, they kill a woman who doesn’t cover her head, that a small group fundamentalists control the entire economy and use every resource for terrorism, so to should it be in the rest of the world. The modem state of Israel is not government by religious Judaism and if it was, Judaism does not say the entire world needs to be Jewish.
Islam is fascist, that’s why there is this conflict along with all the other conflicts they have with many nations, with the west, with India etc… With themselves with shia and sunni…
Hey I appreciate you took the time to respond and at least make arguments, you have more intellect than 99% of the site which isn’t saying much
But you have far to go, if you want to increase your intellect you have to accept facts and truth even if it challenges what you have as an established belief. That is why you have a hard time to debate me, because I have heard the arguments and adjusted my views many times.
You should ask yourself why you are such an expert on the israeli-pal conflict and probably don’t know as much as the complex histories of Lebanon, syria, Iraq… All the sectarian violence, expulsions, terrorism, oppression etc… what happened in Lebanon when they tried a joint Muslim christian nation. Or the entire continent of Africa, you’ll find that the pals are really not the greatest tragedy of humanity and yet it is all the UN seems to be concerned about, all the slogan yelling mob cares about.
if the palestinian state ceases to exist, then they’re just back to being normal terrorists like hamas… presumably they’ll have to integrate into Egyptian society, etc
I no longer have the cognitive dissonance to condemn any Palestinian for resisting Israel.
If you fight against Israel, you’re called Hamas - No matter who you are or what your opinions are. I simply will not condemn Hamas knowing that most of the “Hamas” being targeted at actually children armed with nothing more than stones and grief. I won’t condemn people driven to violence and aggression by a regime that is a million times more violent and aggressive.
Hamas was a tool of Israel and the people who spend endless days arguing over Hamas are the victims of this tool - The only way to defeat the ghost of Hamas is to support them. Only then does the Israeli propaganda fall apart, and thus the necessity of Israel to maintain Hamas as a scapegoat for terror.
If you fight against Israel, you’re called Hamas - No matter who you are or what your opinions are. Now apply this to pretty much ANY social issue today and you’ve now understood how we got where we are.
I think Israel is losing the information war on this recent crisis. They’re trying to defend the indefensible. There’s no way to spin “we dropped a bomb on a refugee camp” into something acceptable. And people are seeing the bullshit for what it is.
They really screwed the pooch on this one from a messaging stance. Stepping back from the emotions and the war crimes and just looking at their propaganda, it’s just being handled sloppily. Propaganda has always been Israel’s superpower, and they’re doing a terrible job of it.
You don’t defend the bombing of a refugee camp by saying “There may have been tunnels or infrastructure.”
At this point you just lie and say you know there were military objectives. Or pull a play from the US and count the bodies and claim that any body of a “military-age male” was a combatant.
Admitting on international television that you knowingly and intentionally bombed a bunch of civilians you absolutely knew you were killing just in case there might be bad guys among them is a bad look.
Propaganda has always been Israel’s superpower, and they’re doing a terrible job of it.
They’re using the exact same kind of messaging they’re using internally to their own right-wing and scared centre, “tough guys making hard decisions to keep you safe” kind of stuff. To people who went on school trips to Auschwitz with armed Israeli security – not because visiting Poland wouldn’t be safe, but out of a mixture of security theatre and propaganda. It just doesn’t work if you aren’t part of that particular information bubble. They seem to have forgotten that it doesn’t even work on the Israeli left wing so why should it work on random people from elsewhere.
Also stunts like the yellow stars in the security council. Come the fuck on crocodile-teared self-victimisation can’t possibly be more blatant, and it’s fucking disgusting how they trivialise the Holocaust with that shit.
I think it’s a combination of pushing boundaries of tactics that were previously working well enough for them and not realising that over time, more and more people become aware that Israel is a present day colonial country still doing some of the evil shit we’re not proud of our own countries for doing in the past. And people are more willing to challenge the anti-semitism accusations because there’s a huge difference between hating people for existing and hating what an authoritarian power is doing to a population it hates for not quietly letting them take more and more of their land.
Not to mention I don’t think the response to 9/11 was a good one either and evoking that seems to be one of the prongs of their propaganda attack. There’s a comment a bit higher up doing that exactly, but it’s kinda funny because in the first paragraph it sounds like it’s making a 9/11 reference ironically, but then the 2nd paragraph shows it was serious.
At this point you just lie and say you know there were military objectives. Or pull a play from the US and count the bodies and claim that any body of a “military-age male” was a combatant.
One of them tried that same claim in an interview yesterday. Not Hecht, but an older guy - he said, seeing the video of the cleanup effort (men sorting through rubble), “a lot of those look like military age males”.
They’ve been doing that for years. They shot Shireen Abu Akleh, showed up at her funeral to beat the shit out of the people carrying her coffin, and then just recently bulldozed the memorial to her.
Posted this above but I’ll copy here, since you seem to be making the same mistake as Wolf.
Friendly reminder this is an urban center with 50k people normally living in it, with permanent concrete buildings. This is not a bunch of tents and soup pots.
I’m not the one you responded to, I don’t hate Jews. What I do hate is people like you excusing the killing of civilians as acceptable collateral for the greater good. Fuck off!
I suppose if you hate Jews enough anything can look like anything.
If you think that one being able make bombing a refugee camp that was known to be populated “look” like genocide proves that person hates Jews, then I don’t know what to tell you.
They did not kill a battalion. Not even Israel is claiming that. They may have killed a battalion commander. And Israel still isn’t letting refugees flee through their lines so that’s still a terroristic threat not a warning.
Israel’s military has been calling for civilians to leave northern Gaza since airstrikes began. But some are too old or ill to travel. Others have weighed up dangers including attacks on convoys heading south and airstrikes in areas in the south that Israel designated “safer” zones, and decided to stay.
they might be losing the information war but they’ll always have the support of the governments of the english speaking world and they don’t actually need to win the information war. they’re winning the kill-the-other-guys war and no one who can do anything about it wants to.
Even Western governments are getting uncomfortable about this. I think Israel overestimates just how far they can go before the West starts to consider pulling their support.
Even if the West “starts to consider” maybe not wholeheartedly backing Israel’s brutal actions, it will be some time before they do anything about it, if they ever do. Until then Israel will continue killing.
LoL. Western governments still aren’t even saying “please stop” let alone pulling the billions in funding that’s being used to do this.
I expect Israel just out and out kill everyone is Gaza this time and take the land thinking it will end this problem forever. I expect in 10 years they’ll figure out they failed when another attack happens.
How will that be a failure? They’ll have finished the ethnic cleansing of the region and added more land. Another terrorist attack that kills a few people will just give them another casus belli to do another genocide somewhere else, probably in the west bank next.
They are only winning if killing civilians is winning. It isn’t, France killed tens of thousands of Algerians before being promptly defeated and expelled. Same thing happened in Vietnam. The Palestinian resistance is inflicting huge losses in the Israeli army. Scores of destroyed tanks and dead israeli soldiers every day
They will literally want a blood price measured in tens of thousands of bodies. At the funeral of mass murderer Baruch Goldstein a Rabby famously said “one million Arabs are not worth one Jewish fingernail”
I’m not downplaying the deaths of 10,000 people or that 30,000 have been injured. There are over a million displaced and over 2 million Palestinians live in Gaza, more in the West Bank and more in the surrounding countries.
Israel cannot win this. It is impossible to accomplish their genocide. That’s after weeks of bombing spending who knows how much on munitions. Logistically it’s impossible.
They can’t genocide the entire Palestinian people and they are not going to be able to expel the gazans. They think that murdering thousands will deter Palestinians from resisting, but that’s hugely incorrect. We can, as colonized people have shown before us, withstand huge bloodshed. Colonizers cannot. The scale of resistance is only increasing, and once it reaches the tipping point of inflicting what the Israelis can’t endure, this occupation will be over.
Yeah, but it’s pretty damning to see all the astroturfing on social media, blacklisting from companies, and crackdowns on peaceful protests by governments.
I think we’re witnessing one big Streisand-effect here where people are fed up at having others choose what they can see and what they can say.
I’m very proud at how the narrative didn’t snowball in Israel’s favor. If anything, this caused people who blindly supported Israel to learn more about the history of the region and why there is conflict in the first place.
If you weren’t anti-Zionist before, you’re probably one now.
Frankly I don’t know which words are powerful enough to describe this and condemn it. I don’t think the right words exist to explain how bad it is.
This logic is just… If it’s justified to blow up a refugee camp to kill a senior leader of Hamas, then by that same logic, Hamas would be justified in blowing up Israel’s capitol buildings to kill Netanyahu.
Fucking hell, not only that, but this logic defends the Hamas attack on Israel too. There could have been IDF members there or government officials.
I don’t see how anybody condemning Hamas’ terrorist attack could not condemn this. It’s the same picture.
More like it would be justified for Hamas to blow up Netanyahu’s neighborhood to try to kill him. Even then, it’s not even a fair comparison. These are refugees who have already lost their homes and families to Israel’s attacks and now they’re being targeted directly as a group. It’s about as high as war crimes go.
Yeah the whole argument skates over the question of why they were in a refugee camp in the first place. Probably a tree feel over and damaged their apartment building or something.
as was to be expected. :( I am 99.9% convinced Netanyahu was just waiting for Hamas to give him an excuse to escalate. They turned out to be the useful idiots (in the form of raping mass-murdering f*ckheads) that he needed.
I have been thinking about this for the last several years. We have grown our technology but are still basically angry monkeys flinging poo. Until we can evolve our own base instincts to match our reality, then nonsense like this will continue.
then by that same logic, Hamas would be justified in blowing up Israel’s capitol buildings to kill Netanyahu.
As this is a war (started by Hamas, but still a war), then yes, of course they would be “justified” in doing that. And Israel would then be justified in reacting to that. I’m sure they would do that if they were able to.
Fucking hell, not only that, but this logic defends the Hamas attack on Israel too.
Now it does, but not before the war was on. There’s however the subtle difference that Hamas primarily targets civilians. They attack soldiers only as self-defence or when the soldiers are in the way of murdering civilians. Israel works in an opposite way, they only target Hamas soldiers. Given how they don’t give much of a fuck for collateral damage, the end result looks similar, but intentions do matter. It implies that when Israel wins this, almost all gazans are still alive. If Hamas won this, Israel would vanish.
Bro you have no clue what you’re talking about. Hamas is the victims of attempted genocide. They do not target civilians, they launch rockets they aren’t able to aim (because of the attempted genocide preventing them having anything Israel doesn’t approve) at Israel.
Israel is the bad guy in this conflict, not Hamas.
This was was started by Israel decades ago through their apartheid actions. This was always going to happen. Until these millions of people are allowed to be free, this will continue.
No it’s worse. It would be like bombing a school or hospital while Netanyahu was visiting it. The Capitol building(s) are arguably a valid military target.
I was confused for years about the history of the conflict. I had heard “Israel was there 2,000 years ago”, and just had this blurry idea of “Israel was full of Jewish people at some point and there were also Arabs at some point”. But the second you actually double down and go, OK, what were the actual demographics in this region, every year in the last 200 years:
Jewish population in the region - 2.5% as of 1800 - didn’t even break 16% until WWI and hadn’t even been a majority since the 4th century. The influx of Jewish migrants into the region was spurred by post-1880s Zionism, which specifically sought to reclaim Palestine as a Jewish territory. And now, besides the Gaza strip and the constantly shrinking West Bank, they control the entire area of Mandatory Palestine, and then some. You keep looking into it and realize, yes, there was actually a forced expulsion of the Palestinian population, the Nakba, in 1948 - 700k Palestinians expelled, 500 villages destroyed, and the renaming of the former towns and cities to have Jewish names. Have you ever heard that word used by someone from Israel, or someone in Western media? “Nakba”? This huge act of ethnic cleansing, central to explaining this entire conflict, and it’s just completely brushed aside, as if the civilization never existed.
You look at videos of interviews about the conflict from the 1980s, they’re using the exact same language about “Israel’s right to exist”, “Israel’s right to self defense”. How long does it take after you violently expel a population for your “right to exist” on the land to take effect, exactly? What is the mathematical formula for reparations and Palestinian right to return here? Nobody is even asking these questions, rather, the remaining Palestinian population in its entirety is being sidelined as a “problem” and “terrorists” - it’s literally the language of Nazi Germany being rehashed by the Israeli state, under its (false) pretense to represent the Jewish people, while the existence of this other population they displaced is just erased. I’m just speechless to witness it. The entire discourse about this conflict is inherently racist, to such an extreme degree.
Most of what I looked into was trying to find the source of it all, so I didn’t look that much into the more modern history, but you’re absolutely right. The British and Zionists made a deal to grow the Jewish population in the region to grow British influence. Israel as a state isn’t even a hundred years old I think.
It is disgusting how between the Balfour Declaration and present the narrative has dehumanized Palestinians and stripped them of their cultural identity – which is genocide through and through. What’s worse is that I think they’ve been kicked down by everyone. In the first Arab Israeli War, the Arab nations occupied Palestine during the war. When they lost, the land was either ceded to or taken by Israel. Now, after decades of using the Palestinians, the neighboring Arab nations won’t take Palestinian refugees. Some have accepted Israel.
And then there’s Hamas, who effectively occupies part of the region and launches attacks from civilian areas. Once again, using Palestinians to their own ends. They have their stockpiles of water and medicine and food, and they aren’t sharing. They anticipated Israel collectively punishing (genociding) all of Palestine in response to their attacks. The radicals are also part of why the neighboring countries aren’t taking in Palestinians. When they did in the past, radicals like Hamas took advantage of it to cause civil strife and conflict. It’s all such a mess. Everyone’s using Palestinians for their own ends while Israel continues their genocide.
At this point, I think Israel has been around long enough that you’d just be punishing children for the sins of their fathers if the state was to be dissolved. By no means though does that mean the borders should stay the same. It should return to the original demarcation, and a state of Palestine, or perhaps Nakba, should be established next to them. Or maybe Israel can treat everyone within their borders and colonies as citizens with equal rights. I know neither are realistic. The latter is impossible with the IDF and conservative government. The former is impossible because of Hamas. They refuse a two state solution, and reiterated the other day that they would continue to do attacks like the first one until everyone there was dead.
Feel free to correct me if anything I’ve said is wrong, like I said I looked into the early history a lot more than the recent. I don’t know what can be done. You have the IDF hellbent on bombing all of Gaza, and you have Hamas hellbent on killing everyone in Israel.
Hung, drawn and quatered - “To be hanged, drawn and quartered became a statutory penalty for men convicted of high treason in the Kingdom of England from 1352 under King Edward III (1327–1377)…The convicted traitor was fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn by horse to the place of execution, where he was then hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, disembowelled, beheaded, and quartered. His remains would then often be displayed in prominent places across the country, such as London Bridge”
Truth is dying, as well. You get to choose what to believe during and long after the fog of war. One wonders why the US supports Israel so much throughout this level of shit if it’s actually this bad.
The US has been propping up Israel as a glorified military base since 1948. America’s politicians do not need to be bought by AIPAC because Israel is crucial to US imperial interests. The influence flows in the opposite direction to what your statement suggests.
The US has a vested interest in Israel and their sustained conflict since the MIC has been major industry in the US since WW2.
Israel pays into a lobby to ensure that otherwise on-the-fence politicians, who’s consituents otherwise don’t care much for Israel one way or the other, or ar evenly split both ways, continue to vote in favor of Israeli-favored spending.
It’s a mutualistic relationship that both sides feed in to to keep the tie strong.
You can even think of it in the reverse.
Without Israeli spending, there’s a chance our nearly broken democracy works and enough anti-Israeli or Israel-skeptic reps get elected that their spending doesn’t go where it needs.
The fact that this post could easily get me called an antisemite us sad. Zionism, and all religious extremism, is a fucking curse.
It’s more like the NRA. The “you’re racist of you don’t support Israel” line was highly effective. So like the NRA they can end your political career in large swathes of the country. Of course you can get endorsements and things too if you play ball.
I have always heard they will come to new politicians and ask for loyalty while offering money. If you agreed you could go forward. If not, they would fund an opponent
Yup it’s all carrot and stick. I just want to be clear it’s not just some back room thing. There’s been major PR campaigns and everything. They’re very much the liberal version of the NRA.
For those of you who are likely imagining a haphazard refugee camp of tents in a field set up for the people fleeing the city of Gaza during this war (that’s certainly what I was imagining), in reality it’s a heavily urbanized area (essentially just another city next to Gaza at this point).
It gets its name because it’s the original spot of a refugee camp in the 1948 war, something like 100,000 people live in the area now, it is also one of Hamas’ strongholds and where the First Intifada of the 1980s began
They are posting Internet messages warning people to get out of a place where they have cut electricity and communications, think about that for a second. Those messages aren’t for the Palestinians, they are for ignorant people like you to defend them in the US.
It’s textbook genocide. They’ve seen they can get away with anything under the guise of war, so why not just solve all their issues and make sure no one’s alive to return to their homes?
The origin of that (specifically “Kill Them All and Let God Sort It Out”) is way older than that, back all the way to the 13th century and the Cruzades.
I vaguelly remembered it being from a source older than that so I went and looked it up.
There’s no guise. This is the way war has been prosecuted for millennia. The Geneva Convention, UNHRC, etc. are blips. War is genocide and always has been. Only in the late modern to post-modern era has war been something other than the complete annihilation of your enemies and their culture, including all the infanticide and rape that implies. If you’re, for instance, the US prosecuting a war for nebulous geopolitical reasons, then you can slap up a veneer of rules and conduct. If it’s a war of territorial expansion, on the other hand, you’d better be prepared to do what it takes to stamp out any trace of the people who originally lived there, or at least leave those who remain so broken and disempowered that they’ll never pose a threat.
Expect more like Ukraine & Palestine as the US’s grip on hegemony slips, and as we continue to slowly forget the lessons of the World Wars.
Not quite true. While there were many wars of cultural genocide, (culture is a great control tool), wars of physical genocide were largely reserved for religious wars and punishment wars. Not gonna pay that tithe or surrender the second you see us? Congratulations, you’re an example. Espouse a different religious truth? You’re a threat that must be made an example.
For the most part they understood the value of human capital and didn’t want to destroy it if they didn’t have to.
I think Ukraine has reestablished American hegemony. It’s showcased how powerful it is to have American support, and galvanized NATO once more.
I honestly don’t think you can tie Palestine into this. This conflict has never been indicative of any global influence. This is where global influence does nothing in the face of intense hatred.
This is not true. There are hundreds of cultures around today who were conquered and just left to live until their conquerors eventually moved out. The Jews themselves have literally been conquered a dozen times.
I have one of Mahmoud Darwish’s books right here, goes into pretty significant detail about Israel’s attempts to stamp out Palestinian culture in the earliest years:
I admit, I’ve been skeptical of this for a while because I couldn’t think of a reason why they’d want to do this.
And I realized today. There doesn’t have to be some grand reason. Killing them all ensures Hamas is killed too. They’ll destroy Palestine because it’s easier and safer for them to indiscriminately bomb the place. That’s reason enough. :/
“But you know that there are a lot of refugees, a lot of innocent civilians—men, women, and children—in that refugee camp as well, right?” Blitzer asked again.
“This is the tragedy of war, Wolf. We as you know, we’ve been saying for days, move south. Civilians who are not involved with Hamas, please move south.”
Holy shit, Wolf is getting trolled on just as hard as us, but on live TV... I hate the future.
Doesn’t matter whether this is real or not, it’s far from a new concept, and the experiment of Palestinian refugee camps in Egypt was a lesson that Egypt has zero desire to repeat. Hell, Egypt now is only considering allowing wounded Palestinians into Sinai after massive international pressure. The plain truth of the matter is that Egypt has NO interest in admitting any Palestinians. No Arab country does. Hell, it’s amazing that there hasn’t been a successful Palestinian revolution in Jordan, since they’re in the majority. The Arab strategy for decades has been to push anti-Jewish (not merely anti-Israeli) propaganda to redirect popular discontent from domestic politics to “the plight of their Muslim brethren,” which also has the knock-on effect of redirecting a fair amount of domestic terrorism to international terrorism; while also not allowing additional Palestinian refugees into the country because the Palestinians have a history of actively destabilizing Arab nations they’re admitted to.
The US fucked up hard on its killing of civilians, but MODT of the time it was at least a result of supporting direct ground combat where friendly forces were engaged. At least that was true from weeks after the initial invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Israel is tossing bombs at targets, using the most advanced aircraft in the world… and their ground forces are not within 10 miles of the site.
That’s what makes this inexcusable. They had time. They didn’t have ground forces under threat. Every vehicle isn’t an IED waiting to happen yet. They have the time to check for authorization before letting a JDAM off the rails.
The right to defend has to come with purse string implications if they use it as right to kill without mercy. They do this, we cut funding. They do it more, in clearly not accidental strikes, we impose sanctions. The purse will hurt enough due to their reliance on western arms, that they change lest they not be able to drop bombs at all.
It’s one thing to have a legit terror target and mistake the building or some freak accident. It’s another to drop a bomb on a refugee camp and then simply shrug.
The video of the car being shot by the tank is a clear example of their actions. If anyone hasn’t seen it, there was a tank parked on a road sort of hidden from sight, in a ‘safe area’ in central Gaza, outside of the evacuation zone. A car didn’t see it at first, noticed and turned around still a bit away from the tank, as it begins to drive away the tank fires on them and kills them. If you look at the strikes going on now this is what it is, it isn’t a ‘Hamas rocket position’ or other BS, there hasn’t been a shred of verifiable evidence for any target that it was a legitimate military target.
That somehow because it lacks tents this makes it any different?
Point A.) They acknowledged it was a known refugee camp. A known collection of civilians gathering after being displaced. They knew these people were there.
Point B.) Knowing point A, they dropped a JDAM on it.
What the actual fuck does it matter if they had tents or not?
. You asked why it matters and it matters because this statement is 100% incorrect.
Point A.) They acknowledged it was a known refugee camp. A known collection of civilians gathering after being displaced. They knew these people were there.
It is not a current refugee camp. It is in the North, where they told people to evacuate from. It is not a “collection of civilians gathering” - the city is mostly abandoned. These aren’t even the first bombs dropped there, by a long shot
This sort of misunderstanding lets people bring this up as if Israel is currently bombing refugees, which is a significant lie.
They did know there were people here that were migrants from the displacing area. It is north, but millions do not just all move in unison away from a war zone that is obviously not contained to just one area.
The bombing map of strikes since the start of this campaign goes from the northern border to the southern one with Egypt. Having bombs fall a place is not significant to migrating people. They fall the breadth of Gaza.
These people were there, they knew they were there, and they dropped a bomb anyway. Call it anything if you don’t like refugees, though that is the apt term when they are fleeing their homes without a place long term to go. It is a collection of people that was known to NOT be fighters, and they were bombed anyway.
I have fought an insurgency. I have been shot at and lost friends and pulled brain matter out of my hair belonging to a lieutenant. I have picked up my friends in charred pieces following IEDs and suicide bombs.
I know more than most the difficulty of spending all day making infrastructure, giving cooking oil, clean water, and food to the people… only to have them turn around at night and attempt to kill us with bombs and rockets.
There is no justifying this action. I do not condemn all of Israel’s actions. We have to hold them to a standard of not INTENTIONALLY lobbing JDAMs at a mass of civilians with no threat to ground troops, and all the time in the world to wait on a strike at that target.
This standard must be held so that we avoid funding war criminals, and also so that the rest of what is left of their rough tips cause can be maintained. They cannot win on that PR front if they fail to be just in their cause. The most righteous of causes is ruined by committing the same crimes against civilians they say motivate their actions.
It’s fascinating. Every war has collateral damage and Hamas deliberately hides behind civilians- a war crime- and Israel gives them opportunity to leave
And hamas deliberately targets civilians and you say nothing
"There could be infrastructure there, there could be tunnels there. We’re still looking into it.”
So… you bombed this refugee area, didn’t give a fuck… you got the target you wanted along with a bunch of civilians. Now, after the fact, you are searching for more justifications than you had before the attack was sanctioned.
What the fuck. They may as well just say “tell us what you need to hear for this to be okay, and we’ll say it”.
Memba when the cops broke into Bo Jean’s apartment, shot him in the face while he was sitting on his couch eating ice cream, then searched the apartment they broke into and had a big press conference about how he had <1 gram of marijuana?
Y’all know how american cops and the IDF trade people, training and techniques back and forth all the time?
I can imagine the news host already, “we don’t know what could have happened if we didn’t shoot this guy for <1 gram of hardcore addictive cannabis. Anything could have happened, just imagine, kids walking the streets, high as a kite, completely oblivious to how smelly and antisocial they would be. But only that, but they could be run over if I were to drink drive. If not me, someone else could, absolutely incredibly dangerous substances out there I tell you”
Less openly opinionated, more clinical and detached.
An officer-adjacent ballistic event resulted in a cessation of vitality in a known drug offender. No further details have been released at this time.
Think about how George Floyd was just ‘a counterfeiting suspect who overdosed on fentanyl’ until we saw the video where they knelt on his neck for minutes after he’s gone limp. The state uses passive, detached, clinical language to create distance between situations and the people responsible for creating them, and the news is an extension of the state.
There’s no surprise. Nobody is. Place has been a warzone since before I was born, and will be long after I’m dead.
They’re just getting all the juicy pictures of dead kids to sell their papers.
Give it a week and they’ll be a massive flood in Bangladesh or somewhere, and they’ll forget all about dead Israelis and Palestinians, and we can have a good old look at a load of water bloated brown corpses instead.
That’s not how colonialist warfare - oops, sorry, I meant to say “counter-terrorism” - works. You don’t wage “counter-terrorism” against the people actively resisting the colonialist power - that’s ineffective - instead, you wage war against the people the resistance originates from and exists within. That’s the part of “people’s war” that gets left unsaid - it works both ways. That is the reason why so much “counter-terrorism” looks no different than genocide - genocide is the only true effective means of dealing with stubborn and organised anti-colonial resistance.
edit: I have to add - this is the reason why talk of “civilians” is mere propaganda and little else - the nature of colonialist warfare fundamentally rejects concepts such as “civilian” and “combatant.” You are either a member of the “other” or you are not - it’s the reason why white supremacism is such a usefult ideology for colonizers.
Civillians exist and the majority in Gaza do not support Hamas as of their most recent election, probably even less now. You know that unless you actually adhere to the self identifying white supremacist philosophy you just spouted, so I don’t see any point in your comment.
As I have already explained to you… white supremacist settler-colonialist states do not distinguish between civilians and combatants - the enemy is a racialized other who must either be enslaved, repressed and/or exterminated. That is it. End of story - white supremacism doesn’t work any other way and never has.
If you live in the US, you should have no trouble understanding this - unless your history teachers fell down on the job or had a good reason to misinform you.
majority in Gaza do not support Hamas
Most people in Vietnam did not support Ho Chi Minh - but they sure as hell knew who it was that was handing out AKs when colonizers started indiscriminately napalming their villages, didn’t they?
As I have already explained to you… white supremacist settler-colonialist states do not distinguish between civilians and combatants - the enemy is a racialized other who must either be enslaved, repressed and/or exterminated. That is it. End of story - white supremacism doesn’t work any other way and never has.
As I have already explained to you, I don’t give a fuck what white supremacist settler-colonialist states think about the existence of civilians, nobody asked, and neither should you.
When terrorist infrastructure is homes, roads, utilities, and hospitals where attacking kills thousands of children and innocent civilians, then yes. That is the exact definition of indiscriminate: it kills everyone without consideration.
Well, I mean, to be fair, Hamas frequently does actually use hospitals and refugee camps as human shields. It doesn’t make blowing up thousands of innocent people okay, but don’t act like Israel is blowing up camps for no reason. They’re doing it because Hamas are cowardly pieces of shit who hide behind children and sick people. Everyone is horrible in this except the innocent people dying in the crossfire.
Blitzer pressed Hecht on the logic involved in Israel’s decision to target the refugee camp.
“This is the tragedy of war, Wolf. We as you know, we’ve been saying for days, move south. Civilians who are not involved with Hamas, please move south.”
They’re saying that they consider all Palestinians to be terrorists.
Gee… it’s almost like “counter-terrorism” is just the politically correct term the propaganda-peddlers these days use so that they don’t have to call it colonialist warfare.
Greta Thunberg posed with a "Free Palestine" sign after the retaliation started. The IDF complained that she wasn't telling their side, that Israel had just been attached. Therefore, she was labeled a terrorist sympathizer. That really boils down their mentality.
BBC Verify has analysed the Israeli strike locations and found that they are indeed striking ‘safety zones’ where IDF instructed Gazaans to take shelter. www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67264703
Yet here we are with everyone calling it a war crime, then when they are shown it’s in fact not, they just plug their ears and go on with their narrative.
narratives dont work when you’re exposed to factual information - but if you willingly disbelieve and remain intentionally ignorant then all the factual information in the world wont change your belief. aka this thread and others like it for the last few weeks.
narratives dont work when you’re exposed to factual information - but if you willingly disbelieve and remain intentionally ignorant then all the factual information in the world wont change your belief.
Agreed, the amount of people throwing words around like “genocide” and “carpet bombing” have long detached from reality.
Zionist? Closest I’ve come to being Jewish was a girl friend I had in high school. Been to Israel on business, but been a lot of places. What’s your problem?
Zionism isn’t being Jewish, it’s being pro-Israel and its intentions of establishing a unified control of the area. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are Zionists, neither are Jewish in faith or ethnicity. Bernie Sanders is Jewish, but against Israel’s expansion of the borders and acts it does.
It’s like how you can be against Israel and not be Antisemetic, or be Antisemetic and be pro-Israel for reasons from “I want them exported to there” to “They will allow the Kingdom of God to come to Earth”.
I am against Israel’s apartheid state, and I am against it’s ethnic cleaning of the area. Just as I am for any nation who aims to do that, like Turkey and Russia. But I don’t explicitly hate Turkish or Russian or Israeli citizens blindly because their government that they don’t have direct control over does horrible acts.
Actually Zionism originated in the early 1900’s and had to do with establishing a homeland for Jewish people.
I dislike Israel’s heavy handed approach, but I understand it. I dislike Bibi, because he never really stopped being a New Jersey bar bouncer (yeah he was, look it up). I also understood exactly the outcome of the Hamas attacks, and can understand the resulting war. I can also understand that civilians will be killed in this war as long as they are around Hamas.
How are they supposed to not be around Hamas? They aren’t allowed to leave Gaza (whether it’s the IDF or Hamas preventing their departure doesn’t matter that much here). Even if they were allowed to leave Gaza, what money would they use to do it? Where would they go? How will they rebuild their lives away from the family and social network that they already have established with limited mobility, immigration options, or money?
The Israeli government could fix the problem by putting an end to the settler attacks in the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza in pursuit of a true two-state solution. The easiest way to isolate Hamas would be to fully and properly recognize and protect the rights of Palestinian civilians in a way that would offer them a better life away from Hamas influence. All they’re doing right now is a massive recruiting campaign for Hamas.
Even if they were allowed to leave Gaza, what money would they use to do it? Where would they go? How will they rebuild their lives away from the family and social network that they already have established with limited mobility, immigration options, or money?
Maybe using international aid that isn’t being stolen by Hamas and used to make rockets.
And nothing’s ever going to change if we don’t do anything.
So think about the question; “well what can I do?”
We can’t do shit because we are owned and overpowered by nation-gangs. We are helpless, because the most conniving people at the perfect time in the past made it that way.
We might be helpless to stop it this second, but there are actions we can take to slow the support for this down and stop it in the future hopefully. Even little things can help, we are owned and overpowered by nation-gangs but they are always outnumbered by their pawns.
Who comes up with these headlines?? Certainly not someone who based it off the video used to support their claim.
This bullshit dilutes real news stories. Headline should read; “IDF bombs refugee camp in attempt to kill Hamas terrorist, knowing it was full of civilians.” That’s the story and it’s fucked alone as it is. Why sensationalize this and make up shit that is objectively untrue??
By delivering highly personalized news content, social media can have an isolating effect, causing people to “increasingly live online — and perhaps in real life — in closed systems of political consensus and like-minded thinking,”
This is the guy who went on record claiming that it is somehow NATO’s fault for Putin’s Russia invading Ukraine. Do not trust him with anything related to politics, he is out of his mind.
"Terrorist’, “in attempt” are both editorialized in their own sense. “Terrorist” is a biased term in a conflict like this, which basically pick sides between two actors, both of which use genocidal rhetoric, target civilians, and want the annihilation of the other (but, bears mentioning, one is a U.S. backed nuclear power, one definitely isn’t). “In attempt” subjectively presents a claimed motive as fact, which doesn’t belong in journalism. An impartial one would read something like, “IDF airstrikes refugee camp in Jabalia, claiming to target Hamas leader, acknowledges civilian presence was known”.
Hamas is an internationally recognized terrorist organization, which just executed a bunch of civilians on a music fest. There is no grey area and no room for interpretation.
Make no mistake, I denounce their violence and targeting of civilians without a second thought. The same criteria I apply to anyone. But to portray only them as “terrorists” - while Israel enjoys designations like “democracy” - is not based in reality. Israel has taken more lives by an order of magnitude, aired equally horrific genocidal rhetoric on public TV in the last month alone, and stolen the land of the Palestinian people in what I can only describe as a psychotically self-centered and racist act of ethnic cleansing. One rooted in deep trauma, but nonetheless. And not in some trivial way, but literally to bring the modern state of Israel into existence.
To use a term like that, given the history of Palestinians being dispossessed of their land, shoved into ghettos and starved of all resources, for the “crimes” of existing and of self-defense, or because finally a tiny contingent of them use the very same rhetoric of genocide as the nation extinguishing their civilization, and applied the same indiscriminate targeting of civilians that they had experienced done to them their entire lives - I can only call that racism. You apply the term “terrorist” to the historical victims, but not to the victimizers.
For the record, here’s the actual list of designators of Hamas as a “terrorist” group:
Hamas European Union,[109][150] Australia,[151] Canada,[7] Israel,[152] Japan,[51][17] Paraguay,[54] United Kingdom,[153] United States,[15] Organization of American States[154]
Hamas – Al-Qassam Brigades[L] European Union,[109] Australia,[16] Canada,[7] Israel,[155] Japan,[17] New Zealand,[113] United Kingdom,[14] United States[15]Organization of American States[154]
Notice the entire world outside of the sphere of Western states doesn’t even participate in this. This is a political term, a stereotype that’s used against Muslims, it’s never accurately applied objectively in terms of what organizations cause destruction and death for political aims.
To tack on to all of that - the word has pejoratively being used in the last month to describe the entire population of the Gaza Strip. In the same way we stopped using the various “n” words because people had been beaten to death or hung behind them, we should not be using terminology that’s actively being weaponized in service of genocide. It’s an extremely dangerous thing to participate in.
I literally don’t understand why people have a hard time with this.
Israel has organized, funded armed forces wearing uniforms. Hamas has teenagers in street clothes hiding in hospitals, schools, and houses.
Israel attempts to protect it’s citizens, Hamas uses human shields.
If you agree with the actions of Hamas, which are designed to maximize fear and force Israeli troops to make hard decisions during combat, you support terrorists. Just admit it. Calling Hamas a terrorist organization isn’t necessarily perjorative. But it is perfectly descriptive.
If you don’t like that you support terrorists, then you have some deep reflecting to do.
It’s so hard to response to comments like this, because honestly your whole perspective is so out of whack. Let’s start from the top -
Israel has organized, funded armed forces wearing uniforms. Hamas has teenagers in street clothes hiding in hospitals, schools, and houses.
Israel has a modern army, U.S. supplied munitions to the tunes of billions of dollars a year, war planes, nuclear bombs, that it uses against teenagers in street clothes. Not in an effort to deescalate violence, but in an effort to deal retribution for it 10 times over each time, which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict#/media/File:Israel-Palestine_conflict_deaths_per_month.png.
Israel attempts to protect it’s citizens, Hamas uses human shields.
First, Haaretz reported the IDF fired on Israeli citizens on Oct. 7 to take out the Hamas militants.
Second, the Israeli state and military - to whatever extent they actually care about their own citizen’s lives - does not care about the lives of Palestinians. You state that Hamas “uses human shields”. First, in a military situation, when you don’t have air superiority or arms superiority, or really any other advantage, there is no other choice. If you have standalone military facilities, they’ll just be destroyed. Second, Israel, in response to whatever degree they’re actually “using human shields”, just kills everyone. See OP. Take this same example - if they killed 50 civilians to kill one Hamas member, multiply that by 25,000 Hamas members and you would end up with 1,250,000 casualties. That is “terrorism”, if anything is. Rather, the term would be “genocide” - something Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu himself, have openly been signalling to the public. Both sides of this conflict, at the extremes, are indeed calling for the genocide of the other side - but one has killed 6 times more than the other.
If you agree with the actions of Hamas, which are designed to maximize fear and force Israeli troops to make hard decisions during combat, you support terrorists.
I get how people think explanations like this are about “justification”, or even “support”. They are not. I’m a pacifist.
The exercise here is to fully understand the circumstances, and why people actually behave in the ways they do, and how they actually fare on objective, universally applied moral standards. It is enough to say that Israel does not come out ahead.
It is also impossible not to apply the same logic to dropping 25,000 bombs on a city, to order a forced evacuation and displace a million people, something which was immediately denounced internationally as a war crime. It boggles my mind how people don’t think that “terrorizes” people - but people with these perspectives have rarely considered the actual experience of somebody who’s made to live in an active warzone.
That was a really long post. Nothing you said refuted anything I said. You’re literally doing the thing I’m talking about.
Do you support Hamas? Just admit it.
After a decade of near-zero conflict Hamas unilaterally launched the largest offensive between the two states in a decade. They murdered babies and tortured and paraded civilian hostages around. They can’t be trusted and should be destroyed.
In the last decade since the last Israel/Palestine “war” in 2014 Israel has had barely any military action against Palestine. It’s not like there’s some kind of genocide happening - if Israel wanted genocide Gaza could be wiped from the planet overnight.
Gaza has no democracy, no legitimate government, no industry, no trade. So no hope for the future. Countries don’t want to take Palestinian refugees because they attempt coups and threaten to destabilize regions.
The instant that Gaza forms a legitimate democratic government the attacks would stop. The moment that Gazans formed a non military state, the conflict stops.
Don’t get me wrong here - the situation for non-radicalized Palestinians is total dog shit. They are the biggest victims here but the blame falls on Hamas in my view.
Well, right off, I don’t appreciate writing a long comment for someone for them to just ignore it.
It’s not like there’s some kind of genocide happening - if Israel wanted genocide Gaza could be wiped from the planet overnight.
It is specifically like there’s some kind of genocide happening. The Israeli government has been openly calling for the destruction of Palestine, displaying maps with Palestine erased to the UN, comparing the Palestinian population to “human animals”, Netanyahu bringing up the biblical “Amalek” which the Old Testament commands the complete destruction of, men, women, children, and farm animals. Half a percent of the population of Gaza is already dead. It’s like you people are waiting for it to be 20% before you say anything.
People like you have no idea what the Israeli right-wing is like. It is the exact same thing as the American evangelicals calling to nuke Iraq or Afghanistan, just Jewish instead of Christian. They are extremely racist and genocidal, and they have a green light.
Comparing both, Israel is a ton worse. Doesn’t matter that they can budget for fancy equipment. And if anything, Israel should know better because of the holocaust.
True, there is no grey area, because Israel is a genocidal state attempting to steal palestine’s land. Quit reading nothing except US/Israeli propaganda and educate yourself.
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