Israel has continued bombarding Gaza’s south despite telling 1.1 million people in the north of the besieged enclave to relocate there ahead of an expected ground offensive.
“We were displaced from Tal al-Hawa to Rafah at the request of the Israeli army, and this is what happened to us. My son is a 3-month-old martyr,” the father of a child killed in an attack in Rafah told Al Jazeera.
Those same people don’t want children to die at either.
To militaries and the vast majority of western ethics… There’s a huge mental difference between terrorist attacks that discriminately shoot innocent children and families, from bombing those who are unlucky and happen to be near the bad guy.
Most armies would happily Dr. Manhattan just their enemy combatants out of existence if that were possible.
For places like this though, their hatred runs deep. Civilian casualties are part of the business when you’re packed that deep and using innocent people as shields.
Channel 5 news had a a couple of great segments with Israel/Palestine rallies which put this acceptance and manufactured outrage on display. It’s very much part of what both Israel and Hamas are accounting for.
Edit: Oh no! Reality in my public forum!? How dare he!
This sounds like apologia and the logic that will breed even more Hamas clones. Israel is the one committing this atrocity. They have the power to stop it. Don’t remove that responsibility from them by saying it’s just civilian casualties.
This sounds like apologia and the logic that will breed even more Hamas clones. Israel is the one committing this atrocity. They have the power to stop it. Don’t remove that responsibility from them by saying it’s just civilian casualties.
Did anything that you read register or did you just blindly imagine something defending Israel lol?
To militaries and the vast majority of western ethics… There’s a huge mental difference between terrorist attacks that discriminately shoot innocent children and families, from bombing those who are unlucky and happen to be near the bad guy.
You’re literally rationalizing Israel (and other countries like Russia and US) going in and killing children deliberately as unlucky. Israel knows they are killing children. The moment the fucking number of “casualties” is half children then they should fucking stop.
For places like this though, their hatred runs deep. Civilian casualties are part of the business when you’re packed that deep and using innocent people as shields.
But, no, you aren’t doing apologia. It’s just part of the business! So let’s turn around and ignore what’s happening 🙌
This is whataboutism but the same crowd has the opposite opinion when it come to Russia and Ukraine. And Ukraine didn’t even shoot missiles at Russia first.
So it just appears to be alignment with certain groups and countries rather than honest worry about anyone’s wellbeing.
I condemn both and I have written my representative that I wish my country had a more nuanced reaction to the current escalation. I wish we could sympathize with all civilians caught between two groups of murderous assholes.
Cryptofascists will cite dead children to justify slaughtering many times more children in retaliation, each and every time, because they see those that are killed in that retaliation as less than human. us-foreign-policy
I assume you’re joking but just in case you’re not (or for the sake of people reading this that didn’t catch it) by crypto- as a prefix I mean deceptively veiled fascist ideology that pretends to be something else or justified in some ostensibly politically acceptable way.
A Russian soldier who kills a child should be tried for war crimes. On June 1st, the UN said 525 children had been killed. The majority of those would have been killed by Ukrainian military, but it’s okay if you think Russia bares the responsibility for those as well, since Russia did invade the country. Though it would be misleading to not mention that the children killed by Ukraine in the civil war 2014-2022 is also around 525.
Russia invaded Feb 28, that’s 600 ish days ago, so on average one child dies as a result of this war every day. In the last 17 days, Israel has killed ‘nearly’ 2500 children. That’s ‘nearly’ 150 every single day. We’re outraged by both, but Israel’s slaughter needs to stop 150 times more urgently. Further, there is no argument, no security necessity, no motivation that can be attributed to Israel more convincing than pure hatred and a desire to steal land in order to explain why they are doing this. That means that the condemnation doesn’t deserve nuance. It needs to stop. Israel is the villain.
1.67 "9/11"s worth of death, in retaliation for 0.47 "9/11"s worth of dead on Oct 7th.
Or, with 9/11= 2977 and the Iraq war killing 187,000 civilians, we get a ~63:1 misplaced retaliation vs. initial attack ratio. So the one could extrapolate from the 1400 dead on Oct 7th that 88,200 innocent people in Gaza will need to be killed to quench the IDF’s rage.
You missed something in your math there. IDF is considering the October 7th attack as “10 time worse than 9/11” so up those numbers close to 900,000. Maybe make it 911,911 for the fun propaganda value. With more than half of the 2.2 million Gaza population (although maybe we should start counting the West Bank killings as it is ramping up, too) being children and seeing how Israeli government doesn’t discriminate , maybe they can quench their bloodthrist with young blood alone, even.
America has a population that is 35 larger than Israel. If America had lost the same percentage of their population as Israel did on Oct 7th, it would be ~49,420 dead, or the equivalence of 16 "9/11"s. That is why Biden said 10 times worse than 9/11.
Iraq currently has a population of 43.5 million. 187k is 0.42% of it’s population. If we do it by percent of population, Gaza has 2 million people, so the retaliation would kill “only” 8,600.
Why would you calculate this as a percentage of population? Do you really think the population numbers of a nation have any relevance to the value of a human life?
Biden called it “Ten 9/11s” because of percent of population. I would have called it “0.47 9/11s”, as each human life is equally valid. But as impact on the whole, Oct 7th was a larger percent of the population of the country than 9/11, so it is having a much larger impact with only half as many dead.
I also hope that the numbers that die in retaliation are as low as possible, and percent population numbers gave a smaller needed “revenge” killing. Wish it was zero, but we are, underneath it all, rage-full apes with explosives.
Why not count the Afghans too? People keep forgetting that happened for some reason… Which is weird considering they were the first ones to be attacked in retaliation and Iraq wasn’t an answer to 9/11…
Nothing will ever quench their rage. It’s all they have.
Equally importantly, they never cared about the lives of people in Gaza. We see this all the time in war… If killing 63 number of enemies will save even 1 of our own lives, we’ll do it. Doesn’t matter if it’s 63, or 6,300, or 630,000, because the enemies’ lives aren’t worth anything to them.
Israel has been governed by far right ultra-nationalist racists for decades now and Arabs are üntermensch in their eyes, especially Palestinians, hency why they have an Arab Israeli Citizenship separate from the Jewish Israeli Citizenship and with fewer rights and why they have very openly called them “human animals”.
It’s a class of people, so in the singular (i.e. “Subhuman”), though the correct way to do it in German would be Untermensch (i.e. first letter capitalized). This is consistent with how racial superiority mindsets dehumanize the “other” so they don’t address them as individuals and instead will describe then as type of people hence singular (the type) not plural (multiple individuals).
If you look up the Nazi version of how they describe those they saw as inferior races, it’s Der Untermensch, not Die untermenschen.
(Cheers for correcting my spelling, by the way).
The inherent racial superiority of one’s own ethnic group is a common theme in far-right ideologies and the use of Untermensch by the Nazis was most definitelly not limited to Jews (ask any Slav or, even better, Roma).
Most definitelly from the outside the de facto behaviour of those in the Israeli government (and in other groups’ such as the military and colonists) seems rooted in the broader feeling of cultural and racial superiority, transcending the “mere” religious kind, so in my opinion the use of Subhuman (or Untermensch, to show the cross-cultural ressonances) rather than merely “Gentile” or “Infidel” seems appropriate.
That said, whilst the rabid racism in Israel does ressonate with that in Nazi Germany, the broader expression of the far-right in the former is most definitelly not the same as in that historical latter and not just because the racial group they treat as superior, and those they treat as inferior, are different: so far Appartheid is the more correct form of describing the expression of racism through the machine of the State and Civil Society in Israel, IMHO, even if the underlying mindset when it comes to beliefs of inherent racial superiority is the same, because its’ expression has been mainly through second class citizen treatment, bullying by the State or with endorsement of the State and frequent closing of eyes by the Authorities to murders across racial lines one way (but not the other) like in Appartheid, not outright extermination like in Nazism.
Hopefully it will not go beyond that, though once this new invasion of Gaza really gets going, it might very well be that we get a genocide of historical proportions, at which point merelly describing it as Appartheid will not be enough.
If I translated your sentence to German, I would either use Untermenschen or untermenschlich. Referring to a group of people with a singular noun feels weird. But then again, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the point and is thus the correct usage.
Well, after reading your previous post I looked it up and there is literally a book called “Der Untermensch” and that’s described as “how the Nazis described the Jews, Slavs and Roma” (all of which were persecuted by them).
I am not fluent in German and didn’t live in Germany long enough to pick up that kind of subtle language rules, so wasn’t aware that it sounds really wierd in German. It would also sound really wierd in my own motherthougue, Portuguese, and we would be using the equivalents of the words you used in German, though using the singular form is gramatically valid and definitelly carries an old-fashioned racist tone.
I suspect that using that form (at least as a book title) was most definitelly purposeful and for maximum distancing from the target group, a bit like an 18th century racist might title a book “The African”.
Absolutely disgusting in every way. War is the product of infantile minds and sick abusive hearts. These kids did not deserve to die for the stupidity and perverse beliefs of the adults surrounding them. Shame on Israel for this murderous atrocity and shame on Hamas for engaging in warlike acts of child murder as well. NO ONE is above blame for this horrendous show of inhumane and despicable sickness.
The consequences of a “western democracy” in which critical thinking is systematically genocided so that the masses always stay individualist neutered puppets of state…
Get the fuck outta here you terrorist apologist fucking scumbag. PALESTINIANS have the right to self defense, but Hamas is a terrorist group that murders civilians. They can all burn in hell with Isreal’s leaders.
Palestinians are just civilians, they aren’t armed, they are not an army, they are just citizens getting murdered by a terrorist state that has been invading them from more than 70 years. HAMAS was voted by Palestine citizens, and it’s the only defense they have. The attack that HAMAS did was mainly because Israel was already invading and killing a ratio or 200/400 citizens each year, while stealing their farms, and land, that’s why HAMAS attacked the territory that in the past was just Palestine.
I said “HAMAS has the right to self-defense” as everyone is just saying “Israel has the right to self-defense” which is super unfair as Israel is the one invading and attacking from years passively and injuring Palestinians.
Again, Palestinians are mostly citizens, they aren’t armed to be able to defend themselves, they almost can’t have a voice.
Hamas has been firing thousands of rockets at Isreali cities every single year since they came into existence, and Hamas’ stated goal is the eradication of Jews. The only reason Isreali casualties aren’t higher than Palestines is Isreal has the iron dome.
In early February 2006, Hamas offered Israel a ten-year truce “in return for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories: the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem,”[183] and recognition of Palestinian rights including the “right of return”.
Israel gave land back to the Palestinians before, and the Palestinians just used that to attack from closer to Israeli cities. The Palestinians have never wanted peace.
Nevertheless, there is a range of ulterior motives for Israel’s denial of Palestinian statehood. If Palestine were declared a state, then immediately, Israel, by its present occupation of the West Bank will be in breach of the United Nations Charter. Palestine, as a state, could legitimately call upon the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense under Article 51 of the Charter to remove Israel from the occupied territories. Palestine, as a state, would be able to accede to international conventions and bring legal action against Israel on various matters. Palestine could accede to various international human rights instruments, such as the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It could even join the International Criminal Court and file cases against Israel for war crimes. It would be a tinderbox of a situation that is highly likely to precipitate conflict in the Middle East.[27]
There is a lively debate around the shape that a lasting peace settlement would take (see for example the One-state solution and Two-state solution). Authors like Cook have argued that the one-state solution is opposed by Israel because the very nature of Zionism and Jewish nationalism calls for a Jewish majority state, whilst the two-state solution would require the difficult relocation of half a million Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.[28] The Palestinian leaders such as Salam Fayyad have rejected calls for a binational state or unilateral declaration of statehood. As of 2010, only a minority of Palestinians and Israelis support the one-state solution.[29] Interest in a one-state solution is growing, however, as the two-state approach fails to accomplish a final agreement.[30][31]
That’s why Israel will never make peace.
Various “transfers of power and responsibilities” in the Gaza Strip and West Bank from Israel to the Palestinians took place in the mid-1990s.[39] The Palestinians achieved self-governance of major cities in the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip. Israel maintained and continues to maintain a presence in the West Bank for security reasons. In 2013 Israel still had control of 61% of the West Bank, while the Palestinians had control of civic functions for most of the Palestinian population.
So they never wanted to give back the Palestine territory.
The Arab states. And said Arab states and Palestine have continually attacked Israel since. Hamas is the latest in a long line of Arab aggressors, and have been firing rockets at Israel for decades.
Ignoring the decades of Arab aggression as a direct cause of the current conflict is idiotic at best.
Portraying the Arabs as aggressors in the genocidal colonial project undertaken in occupied Palestine during the last 8 decades is racist and dishonest at best
Any person from Israel from age 16 up to 70 are forced to be listed on the army as reservist, Israel citizens are part of their army (as reservists) while Palestine citizens aren’t, at least not those 2000 children. Hamas was voted by Palestine in 2006, so yeah. washingtonpost.com/…/israel-military-draft-reserv…
“By a jew organization”. Racist loaded fucking language there, buddy. You clearly hsve some biases yourself. And remind me of when Nelson Mandela murdered people fleeing for their lives?
You probably want to say Israeli or zionist not Jewish. There are a large minority of Jewish folks who want Israel to stop existing or at least stop existing as an apartheid state
I just wanted to point this. As they seem to call terrorist only because of some misinformation on news, Israel and Hamas are both bad but Israel people aren’t terrified like Palestine is with the attacks of the other side.
Irgun committed acts of terrorism and assassination against the British, whom it regarded as illegal occupiers, and it was also violently anti-Arab. Irgun participated in the organization of illegal immigration into Palestine after the publication of the British White Paper on Palestine (1939), which severely limited immigration. Irgun’s violent activities led to execution of many of its members by the British; in retaliation, Irgun executed British army hostages. www.britannica.com/topic/Irgun-Zvai-Leumi
I’m not racist, being racist is pretty stupid at my point of view. Thanks to clarify.
The EU just confirmed that they are fine with this as well. Apparently they see no problem as long as Israel says they are trying to hit terrorists. Un-f*cking-believable!
The previous mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, ended their status as sister city with Tel Aviv over the systematic crimes from the state of Israel against Palestinians. The immediate reaction of the Israeli embassy was denouncing her as antisemitic, both in the media and in courts, which recently found her innocent.
The position that denouncing Israeli crimes is antisemitic has been the official position of Israel for decades, and that’s a very dangerous game for the well-being of Jews in a world where actual nazis are slowly gaining power, because once you’re run the term down through the ground, calling actual hate crimes against Jews “antisemitic” will no longer have any meaning.
The position that denouncing Israeli crimes is antisemitic has been the official position of Israel for decades,
At this point, that’s just a template answer, not different than the template answers China delivers everytime someone says something about the Uygur genocide, the Hong Kong occupation, or claims over Taiwan.
If people want to tie their religious identity to a nation state and call me antisemetic when I criticize that nation state – the same as I criticize any other nation state – they are in fact trivializing the experience of those who experience actual antisemitism.
I’m sure they don’t see it that way, but it’s hard for me to see such an attitude as anything other than disrespectful of one’s own history.
Israel humiliated Biden during Obama’s term when Biden went to visit Israel and suggested in soft words that they don’t expand illegal settlements. Israel basically said screw you in the press conference, and Biden took it like an obedient slave. Really showed the world who holds his leash.
I’m German, it’s so depressing that our nation’s stance on this will always be: We stand 100% behind Israel.
Discussions exist and it’s being debated a lot on TV. People are pretty much appalled, with what Israel is doing.
Anyone, that feels the least amount of compassion towards other people, is not ok with this. Disregarding religion, nationality, race or whatever community they belong to. There’s no way to justify this, no way at all.
Edit: 5000 dead and they haven’t even sent in any troops yet.
Does the UN or some other more neutral org have numbers? I mean, the Gaza Ministry of Health kinda has incentive to exaggerate civilian casualties, just like the IDF has incentive to say “everyone in that playground we hit with that airstrike was an Islamic Jihad Terrorist”.
While I definitely kind of agree with the sentiment. Just statistically. It would be hard for this to not be true. The numbers overall might be a little different. But considering the average person in Palestine is 18 to 19 years old. Age groups over that rapidly dwindling. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that at least half, if not more, would be children.
Yes 5000 is horrifically high. And if there’s anything we’ve learned from watching the atrocities unfold over the last 70 years. Is that you don’t believe either side without evidence.
Thats not even unrealistic to me when I remember the fact Gazas been bombed more in two weeks that Afghanistan ever got in a full years time. Afghanistan has a land area of a quarter of a million square miles and Gaza has an area of under 150 square miles.
You’ll never see exact numbers. Some people don’t have anyone to report them missing, some bodies are never identified, and some are never found or completely destroyed.
You’re absolutely right that there will be variance, and that each side has incentive to inflate death counts, etc. Other orgs will likely not produce their own numbers until after this mess is over. Check the Wiki pages or B’Tselem pages on previous assaults on Gaza to see how the numbers can vary, that’ll give you an idea at least.
it is such a weird angle to take, since the Gaza concentration camp is shut off from the rest of the world, without power. Journalists are not allowed in, neither are any and all humanitarian organizations.
Until the apartheid state open up the Gaza concentration camp, we will just have to take their word for it.
When Israel makes any claims, the outside world can in one way or another visit, inspect and verify.
If Israel wants more certainty on statistics of innocent dead people, they should end their siege.
Which is why war is the ultimate atrocity that humans can commit. Worse than child abuse, worse than rape - war is the result of sick minds corrupted beyond any hope of redemption.
I feel like war can be explained better than just the result of bad people doing bad things, and more so about contradictions. If, after all is said and done in this genocide, we are only able to deduce that the cause was bad people doing bad things, we aren’t doing our due diligence. We’d be better off trying to understand how the contradictions between Israel and Palestine such as religion, material conditions, age, ethnicity, geopolitical stances… made genocide the only solution for Israel. And more importantly, how to avoid it. Theres too much history here for me to wave my hand and blame some enigmatic force of “evil”.
I'm fairly confident that the Palestinian Authority has no real control of anything in Gaza. Fatah and Hamas literally had a minor civil war over the issue in 2006 and 2007.
Nope. None of this is acceptable. At the same time, I don’t like people just passing on figures from Hamas that are questionable at best. Facts matter.
Ah, only Hamas has an agenda huh. IDF doesn’t have an agenda, Netanyahu doesn’t have an agenda, the US government and associated media organizations don’t have an agenda…only Hamas has the agenda huh.
Well yea, it’s only propaganda when the people I don’t like do it. Just because what I believe and what I question lines up perfectly with us-foreign-policy doesn’t mean anything!
Do you think this is outside of the expected number of deaths at this point?
Israel usually kills 10-20 Palestinians for every Israeli killed, so we can expect about 15-30k total Palestinian deaths from this, most of whom will be civilians.
I expect the number of deaths per day is going to ramp up once the hospitals and food centers run out of resources.
No see it’s not literally exactly 100 years or greater so you can’t use a world like century long because that would be inaccurate. I’m going to ignore literally everything else about the post and just focus on the fact that you used one slightly exaggerated word instead because I have no other leg to stand on smuglord
Gaza’s population is near 40 % children (people under 18). Israel has lobbed thousands of bombs at an urban area with population density comparable to New York. What part of this do you find hard to believe?
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