danhakimi

danhakimi, 7 months ago

There's got to be a way to remove Hamas without killing everyone in Gaza. I hope the international community can come together to find a way. I definitely wouldn't leave it to Israel lol.

Israel is going to try its best. Nobody else is going to touch this with a ten foot pole. Most of the international community isn't even willing to condemn Hamas, let alone go in there and get rid of them. Israel literally calls them up in the buildings they're going to bomb and says "please evacuate this building by this time!" You can't make that shit up.

If Egypt or the UN wants to take care of Gaza after the war, and actually make sure they don't get weapons, and actually de-radicalize them (current schools in Gaza are not great at deradicalization), you name it, I'm sure Israel would be on board with that. They didn't blockade Gaza for fun, blockades are expensive. But burying the dead from the constant attacks of a Hamas with infinite weaponry is fucking worse.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

There are no settlements in Gaza. In 2005, there were no settlements, there was no blockade, there was nothing but an opportunity for peace, and then, they elected Hamas.

If you're afraid that Egypt or the UN is going to invite settlers in, that Egyptian police or the UN police are going to attack them, you might want to reevaluate your world view.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

• Israel has killed dozens of Hamas leaders, but way more fighters. There's no way to know exactly how many, since Hamas doesn't even pretend to put out numbers that separate civilians from combatants.
• The 8k number also comes from Hamas, the same people who said that 500 people died in the hospital explosion (and blamed it on Israel). Go see the estimates literally anybody else made. All of these numbers come from Hamas.
• That 8k number also includes all deaths, not just at the hands of Israel, but at the hands of PIJ and Hamas themselves. Hundreds of their rockets have landed in Gaza, and they've been known to execute their own. They really love to blame Israel for these deaths, though—not just in the case of the hospital when they can make up a specific cause, but in the cases you've never heard of where, oh, there's rubble, what caused it, don't worry.

The death of each Palestinian civilian is a tragedy. Hamas provoked the war, Hamas is killing as many of them as anybody. Israel is engaged in remarkably precise targeting of enemy combatants and places an entirely unprecedented effort into warning them when they're about to strike.

This is urban warfare. This is what Hamas called for.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

but the truth is that they don’t actually care about Palestinians either.

They sure do. They care about keeping them in refugee camps, using Israel as a scapegoat for their own war crimes and other bullshit, refusing to let them work, often revoking their citizenship in the rare cases it's been granted! Heaven forbid a third-generation descendant of a Palestinian immigrant be allowed to work in Jordan, or own a permanent home.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

The current indiscriminate bombing of Palestinians

The only people indiscriminately bombing Palestinians are PIJ and Hamas. They spray and pray with rockets, hundreds of them have landed in Gaza.

Israel's strikes are the most targeted fucking strikes you've ever seen a military do, and they actively warn the people in those buildings with everything from roof knocking to a phone call.

for all the parroting of Israel’s “human shields” propaganda, what the people there see is Israel choosing to bomb and kill their family, so even those who detest Hamas will detest Israel much much more and with good reason.

You call it propaganda, but it's exactly what Hamas is doing, isn't it?

When Israel calls you and tells you they're going to bomb the building you're in, and when, and Hamas tells you not to leave, how are you going to come away from that hating Israel more than Hamas?

When Hamas steals and hoards gasoline that it could use to run the power plant, the hospital generators, the desalination plants... when they dig up water pipes to fire as bombs... when PIJ fires a rocket that hits a hospital parking lot killing hundreds, you think they're too stupid to follow that?

You think they don't blame them for causing this war? They had a ceasefire and then they invaded Israel killing thousands of civilians, and they brought back hundreds of civilian hostages, you don't think they can tell that's an obvious casus belli?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

The 8k number is confirmed by many organizations.

name one.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

No, I know what it means, I'm accusing you of straight up lying. It's true in every sense of the word truth, it is an accurate characterization of Hamas's actions, you have no reason to doubt it, you just don't like it because it's an uncomfortable phrase. You prefer to call them "martyrs," don't you?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Openly antisemitic, Hitler-loving, pro-Hamas propagandists proudly declare how much they love it when Palestinians die. This is not uncommon on Memri TV.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

if that were true, it would be very easy to actually respond to me instead of just flatly calling me a liar, right?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

You're dramatically oversimplifying the West Bank. It's a military occupation, I'm not going to pretend it's going well, but it's going much better than Gaza, and peace talks there have been far more serious. The Olmert proposal was an exceedingly generous proposal, and the reason Abbas didn't engage because, knowing that Hamas still had enough power that he couldn't promise peace, not even with East Jerusalem, and especially not with any kind of land swaps. The core problem right now is just that Netanyahu's government doesn't actually want to make the situation better (and a lot of his —but that problem will resolve itself by Israel's next election. His already low approval ratings have hit the gutter, and his coalition might not last much longer, although they might stick together while the war is going on.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

You said "human shields" is propaganda, without explaining how you thought it was false.

I broke down the actual truth in a fair bit of detail.

You just said "nope, propaganda stupid!"

So no, I was pretty fair with you. If you still don't have anything substantive to say, you can fuck off now.

danhakimi, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

You still won't respond to the point that Hamas is, in fact using Palestinians as human shields. you still just abstractly insist that believing that makes me a dumbass and is nothing but Israeli propaganda. But you don't have anything substantive to say.

You condemn terrorism, except on the internet, where you defend it. You don't want people to die, unless Hamas also wants them to die, in which case you'll divert and deflect all you want.

The original aggressor in the current conflict is Hamas. The original aggressor in the region is a complex, hazy question, but it very obviously predates the 1948 date people just love to focus on. Edit: Here's a starting point, if you need one

danhakimi, 7 months ago

This is a tragedy, but I just want to get a few things straight:

• The numbers regarding Palestinian victims come exclusively from Hamas.
• Hamas has been caught lying about these numbers before. Often, and with no shame. And they're a terrorist group. I'm sure the truth is still tragic, but the specific numbers cannot be trusted to the point where you can compare them to anybody else. The death toll is certainly lower than Hamas says it is, the number of dead children is a smaller proportion than they say it is, and they have no interest in separating civilians from combatants for their BS statistics anyway.
• Hundreds of rockets from PIJ and Hamas have fallen short of their targets, landing in Gaza, most famously causing the Al-Ahli hospital explosion. Again, although Hamas estimated 500 dead (a number it somehow put out within 20 minutes of the explosion), independent estimates are that roughly 200 people died—which is still 200 too many.
• Hamas is refusing to allow civilians to evacuate because its goal is, in no small part, to "martyr" as many children as possible in the hopes that these statistics will turn you against Israel. It uses roadblocks and misinformation to prevent civilians from evacuating to the South. It is, in fact, using civilians as human shields.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Is there a format in which you think these facts would be less inconvenient for you?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

There is, unfortunately, no organization able to provide an accurate number. Whatever the number is, it is tragic.

Did I say something that's not completely accurate?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I'm not sure I follow here....

danhakimi, 7 months ago

how does it feel to not have anything to say in response to a well-thought-out point, but be incapable of leaving it alone, so you just have to say "boo, you're on the other side as me!" and leave a downvote.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I'm with you on this, I feel bad for what I suspect is a majority of Gazans who fear Hamas too much to speak up against them. That's the biggest issue with OP's argument.

But Israel isn't targeting them. Israel is doing everything it can to warn them of the exact buildings it's targeting, and Hamas is doing everything it can to keep them in the warzones and in the buildings, because it wants them to die, it wants them to be "martyrs" Its leaders have made this clear in many interviews. They talk about how they have six kids in the hopes that three of them die.

War is hell. Nobody is taking this lightly. There will be civilian casualties. That's a terrible thing. Allowing Hamas to continue its control and its rampage is worse.

Allowing them to continue to oppress Palestinians, target Israeli civilians, fire rockets (more rockets have landed in Gaza than in Israel!)... They dig up water pipes to turn into rockets. They steal fuel from power plants that could be used to power hospitals and desalination plants. They set up their bases and fire rockets from schools, hospitals, mosques, and residences. They are demanding war. Their founding charter entirely rejects any kind of peace at all. It's not an accident.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Hamas has never focused on military targets. Their founding charter specifically calls for the death of all Jews worldwide and forbids any conception of peace.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

The western media interviewed her in English instead of making up some bullshit translation.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/10/24/hostage-hamas-released-israel-ebof-sot-vpx.cnn

danhakimi, 7 months ago

The quote is from a news site you've never heard of. Here she is speaking in English on CNN.

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/10/24/hostage-hamas-released-israel-ebof-sot-vpx.cnn

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Well no, not really, the thread is about Hamas and you are the first one to bring up Israeli terrorism.

But it's not like Jewish violence in the region predates Muslim violence. The pogroms have been going since at least the 1920s. Things escalated. Nobody is saying Hamas was the start, but Hamas is the biggest problem right now.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Well, ideally by the electoral process, but absolutely. I personally think the Olmert proposal would have been fantastic, but Abbas knew that Hamas would never let him get away with it.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I'm not OP, and OP said:

Because as we know, cowardly Hamas terrorists only use civilians as shields. Hamas are scum.

I got the skinhead implication, but...

Oh! I see! I thought rafa was saying that rafa was a supporter of Ukraine and Israel, that's the logic I missed. Yeah, I'm familiar with the old trope of accusing Jews of being Nazis.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

It's funny how every country that has to deal with terrorism is opposed to terrorism.

It's funny how Muslim-majority nations are quick to praise China because it's plan for countering Muslim extremists was literal concentration camps followed by forced labor.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

What does Arabic have to do with the source you posted?

You know that language wasn't Arabic, right?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

I cannot find any sign of Yasmin Porat's name on Haaretz, at least not in their English site. Can you link to the report you're talking about?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

What? I don't speak enough Hebrew to understand her interview in Hebrew, which is why I provided her testimony in English, which you can understand without a need of a Translation, and which also addressed your confused question of why Western media wasn't reporting on it—it was.

And then you went on to tell the stupidest fucking lie in this thread.

So what are you bitching about?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Comfortable with? Zero. None of this is comfortable. Nobody is happy right now. It's not like 10/7, when people went around rejoicing in Jewish suffering—now that the war is on, everybody is upset.

I've yet to hear a serious alternative.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Jewish violence in the region literally predates Muslim violence, Judaism came hundreds of years before Islam.

Alright, I guess we're being pedantic now.

Jews got expelled from the region and kept out of it by various European and Arab powers until they started buying land back in the late 1800s. From that point on, Jewish violence was not the start of violence in the region, it was Muslim violence and Muslim unwillingness to coexist with Jews. It ramped up well before 1987, well before 1948.

The biggest problem right now is Israel. step one is for them to stop murdering thousands of children.

Israel is not targeting children. Hamas is using them as human shields. The "3000" number is from Hamas—it includes victims of rocket misfires, and also is a straight up lie, just like their count of the victims at Al-Ahli hospital was a lie. Yes, there are still too many children dying, and yes, too many of them still die as a result of Israeli air strikes. This is the main reason Israel wanted them to be evacuated. Every other country evacuates civilians from war zones, but Hamas cannot allow that, or else the statistics might not favor them. They use propaganda and physical force to keep Palestinian children in buildings that are specifically targets for bombs.

Hamas is, by far, the biggest problem in the region.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Especially after the ‘parking lot’ comment and the harassment and killing of Palestinians on the West bank, oh I forgot about the 'if Israel was really targeting civilians why are there not more dead Palestinians than just 7000 and raising?

Who the fuck do you think you're replying to, troll?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

Yes, because Jews value human life, asshole. Israel has been trying a variety of solutions. The occupation of Gaza wasn't working too well in 2003, Hamas had been starting to fire rockets. So Israel hoped that, by unilaterally withdrawing Gaza, allowing them to hold elections, wishing that democracy might establish a Palestinian partner for peace, and they literally elected Hamas to their government.

They are entering the tunnels, stupid. Even though they're long and winding and loaded with booby traps, they are going into the tunnels, they are doing everything they can to target Hamas.

Israel does use drones. It does work to keep civilian casualties to a minimum, but Gaza city is densely populated and Hamas refuses to let civilians evacuate.

And I'm not going to engage with anybody who pulls the "Jews are Nazis" trope out. Man, you have no idea what a Nazi is. You think the Nazis suffered an attack on their civilians in the middle of a ceasefire, called the attacker, and politely asked them to evacuate the base they attacked from before striking back? No, you just wanted the world to know how antisemitic you were.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

For what it's worth, a large portion of Zionist—I'd wager a majority of those in Israel, and a very large majority elsewhere in the world—think that settlements suck and Israel needs to work much harder to stop their expansion. And Netanyahu is extremely unpopular internationally, and there's no way he'll win another election in Israel. But there's some context—on the practical level and on the political level—that might be helpful to understand why this problem persists.

First, why is Netanyahu prime minister again? His second real rise to power occurred in 2009. Back in 2005, Netanyahu advocated against Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. The Sharon government went ahead with it, but terrorism in Gaza skyrocketed as a result. So Netanyahu was seen by many as the conservative who was right all along, the only one who really wanted to keep Israelis safe from terrorists. But over time, Israelis slowly realized that his way was somehow just as shitty, and also that he was a corrupt piece of shit.

So Netanyahu was brought on criminal charges for corruption.

Israel had like 87 elections, and kept trying to form a majority coalition in its government. It kind of did a couple of times, but it fell apart fast, until Netanyahu managed to form a coalition again. Except now, his main goal was to not go to prison, so he was pretty fucking desperate. He cozied up to far-right nuts and made a really strange government. Their actions led to massive protests in Israel, and they didn't feel like negotiating with the opposition or listening to protestors. They made judicial reforms, they engaged in harsher / anti-Palestinian / super-fucking-racist policies, and made other changes to Israeli law that generally just sucked.

With regards to settlements... This is going to be a dramatically oversimplified take, and some portion of settlements are on disputed territory, but let's focus on the straight up West Bank territory... basically, the usual pattern is, Israelis building in Palestine is generally against Israeli law, but some developers do it anyway, and the government generally punishes them, but also doesn't condone bombing settlements or murdering Israeli civilians because they moved into those settlements (they usually move there because they can't afford to live in more expensive parts of Israel, or because they work in the West Bank, but sometimes because they're assholes who want to expand Israeli territory for some dumb religious reason). And basically, the far right is less interested in punishing, more interested in protecting. And there's also some licensing thing I don't really understand... And freedom of movement issues, and a whole lot of other pieces, but yeah, there are a lot of complicated factors. But some of the real nutjobs in Netanyahu's coalition are actually pro-settlement, so... that sucks.

Also, people now blame him for mistakes surrounding the attack, which... We're not going to dig into, because people are going to make it something it isn't.

danhakimi, 7 months ago

people who hate trump almost as much as they hate gay people

danhakimi, 7 months ago

... they did?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

That sucks. I think it's worse when they're doing it to capitalize off violence, especially when they're taking money that dumb people assume might go towards some cause.

danhakimi, 8 months ago

Lol, yeah, this sociopath is going to develop a full suite of banking services and software in a year while laying off employees, sure.

danhakimi, 8 months ago

you can't?

danhakimi, 7 months ago

not in a million years. Not with FDIC insurance or open-source non-custodial crypto wallets or anything like that.

danhakimi, 8 months ago

But not in the same way that it's on them if they don't know that when they post a post to facebook, facebook has the post.

one of these things is sheer vapid stupidity, one of them is a failure of extreme vigilance in a modern nightmare society.

danhakimi, 8 months ago

You are suggesting they essentially listen in on every conversation or message sent on the service

I'm not suggesting that!

They don't need to listen to private chats to see what Hamas is doing, it's open, it's public, they're not being subtle, and Pavel Durov himself has publicly commented on it. He just doesn't give a fuck.

danhakimi, 8 months ago

First off, let me just say that I am not quite sure how telegram works. So far I know it’s just a far saver WhatsApp that guarantees that your info isn’t being sold.

None of that is true. Telegram is Open Source, but is not safer than WhatsApp in any way. Telegram messages are not e2ee by default, and group chats can not be e2ee, unlike Whatsapp which encrypts all messages end-to-end, always.

There's no real safeguard in place to prevent telegram from selling your data. It probably isn't doing it for now, it claims that it doesn't sell your data, but so does facebook. Their privacy policies aren't that different. Telegram does have your data, it could sell your data, it just doesn't. Note that telegram is not a nonprofit.

Second, most of my issues with your ideas of censoring content is meant in a more general sense.

I'm not calling for "more general" censorship, I've been quite specific.

You mean apart from the fact they can just hop over to some other platform?

How is that not an inconvenience? Moving your entire. organization, finding a platform that won't ban you, finding a platform that will host unlimited beheading videos at high resolution, finding a platform with the same broadcast feature so they can spread propaganda to hundreds of millions of people, finding that all for free... What part of that is just as convenient as continuing to do what they're doing?

Also I am not quite sure how you imagine telegram to actually do something against terrorists while also guaranteeing the privacy aspect of the service they are providing.

Telegram is literally already aware of which accounts belong to Hamas, Pavel Durov has publicly commented on why he doesn't feel like Hamas is a problem, this is not a question of discovering terrorism on the platform, this is a question of figuring out what to do about it.

That’s literally their whole thing, privacy.

Privacy is aggressively not a thing Telegram is about. You seem to have fallen for some of their weird marketing. The only things about Telegram that might preserve your privacy are the option to sign up anonymously (a lot of messaging apps have this, and it's not necessarily a good thing), and the fact that it isn't owned by facebook (most messaging apps aren't).

This is especially true of broadcast channels, which any schmuck can view without installing the app or having an account at all.

I am not even going to bother with all these other straw man fallacies. If you can’t have a civil discussion without putting words in my mouth and twisting the meaning of them we are done here.

But that's what I'm talking about. I said Telegram shouldn't provide terrorists with a means to share videos of beheadings, and you have a problem with the freedom-related implications of that, I'm really not sure what your point was.

danhakimi, 8 months ago

You can make a private group on Facebook where you can exchange messages without anyone who lacks system access being able to view them. That’s how CP rings hide what they’re doing. And Facebook allows it until someone reports it or the cops subpoena that data.

My point here was that people would be stupid to expect that their information is private from facebook.

I also have to imagine that you're wrong, I'm sure they have proactive means to scan for CP and ban it whenever they become aware of it, and just don't have the means to always ban CP groups immediately. Like, knowing your company controls child porn and allowing it to remain in control is a great way to end up in prison, most corporate douchebags prefer to avoid prison if they can. Like, Zuckerberg does not want to go to jail just so he can get a few more ad bucks from pedos.

I feel very weird defending Facebook, they're quite evil, but your conspiracy theory is silly.

So what was it you wanted them (Facebook, or WhatsApp, or signal or telegram) to do?

You seem like you're focused on private groups, which I think are still problematic on Telegram as they are on Facebook, but you're really neglecting the issue of the fully public broadcast groups Hamas is known for, and known for engaging in terrorist activity on, including the al-Qassam Brigades! Why can't Telegram ban the fucking public channel for the al-Qassam Brigades? Doesn't that just make the issue so obvious?

Delete the accounts or known terrorists whether they are or aren’t using the platform for terrorist activities?

That would be good, but also, if you know somebody is a terrorist, isn't that at least enough cause to look through their non-encrypted chats to see if they really are or are not using the platform for terrorist activities?

You appear to very much be advocating for people’s private messages to be scanned and possibly read by a human being if they trip the algorithm. So yes. You are advocating for an invasion of privacy.

Meh. If your public messages and stories and large group messages (which are really not private in any meaningful sense) trip an algorithm with high confidence, then scanning your unencrypted kinda-private-ish messages after that doesn't seem like a big problem, and human review after a high-confidence trip there doesn't seem too bad either.

danhakimi, 8 months ago

Did you read the article? Do you know what broadcast channels are?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/25/23931710/telegram-android-block-hamas-channels-google-play-guidelines-war-israel

danhakimi, 7 months ago

So I did read the article. But telegram as a service allows users (some of whom are just civilians with no ties to Hamas) to warn people of imminent attack. That’s in the article. They (that channel admins) still have to add subscribers.

It's a Hamas channel! They're not warnings, they're threats! And they're recruiting! And they know those users are sharing video of their attrocities in other Hamas groups! And the al-Qassam Brigades have a public channel too!

The thing is though, for telegram and messaging apps like it this is basically playing whack a mole. I know I said that before, but what I meant by it is that it’s better for the purposes of building intelligence and or sending their geolocation data to relevant authorities. If they close one channel more will pop up. IP bans and even device bans will not stop this from happening. You can create a telegram bot in like 10 minutes.

The mole is out in the open, sticking its fingers in its ears, and laughing at us, and Durov is saying "yeah, that's a fine mole, no idea why I'd whack it." It's gaining steam! They're openly using the names of terrorist organizations and recruiting new members constantly and telegram isn't even considering a response.

But deleting certain channels will detrimentally affect the civilians caught in the cross fire.

No, it absolutely will not.

"Telegram CEO Pavel Durov wrote that he was hesitant to shut down Hamas-used channels in a post on October 13th, saying that “tackling war-related coverage is seldom obvious” and writing that Hamas had used Telegram a few days prior to warn civilians to evacuate an area before the attacked it " < from your article.

He referenced Ashkelon. There are zero Israelis in Ashkelon following Hamas on Telegram. Israel knows when to evacuate its citizens, and unlike Hamas, actually does so when necessary. Hamas is a terrorist organization. Hamas is threatening Israeli civilians before targeting those civilians. THE THREAT IS THE FIRST CAUSE OF THE TERROR. This is what terrorism is! They threaten violence on civilians, they do the violence they threatened, and then they celebrate it by sharing videos! They threaten, plan, and celebrate on telegram, out in the open!

It’s the same thing with scammers. Most telegram scammers are using private messages that have encryption. So you absolutely are suggesting the telegram snoop through private messages.

There's a funnel. They start on twitter, just kind of innocently saying "follow me on Telegram." Then they say "alright, this broadcast channel will tell you exactly what token to buy, and when! Do exactly that!" It's a pump and dump scheme, some people fall for it. And then the real rubes get into those 1-on-1 secret chats with the scammers where they go ahead and give out their private info.

A tech company like Telegram could, in theory follow this funnel through the unencrypted channels. It's obvious enough from the information you and I have.

These channels are all operating openly. You know they're all pump and dump scams, right? They're not in secret chats, they're huge channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

So can we stop pretending that this is simply an easy fix?

Can we stop pretending that ignoring the problem is a better solution?