That’s an odd response to what I wrote…what I said is that the two choices are becoming more and more evil, not that they are evil in the first place. Which is not how that phrase has typically been used (to justify selecting the lesser of the two evils).
Which, side note, may make sense in the context of, there are actually only two choices. But what we do is collectively lock ourselves into those two choices and then choose between them, when there are not only other parties and independent candidates we could support, but entirely separate political systems we could move to.
Source? Last video I watched he was giving the “I don’t see the point of a ceasefire” line.
Don’t confuse “humanitarian pause” with “ceasefire”, they’re completely different - “humanitarian pause” means a few hours/days off, and then starting it right back up.
I don’t think it’s just a matter of age. Plenty of old people don’t support genocide or fascism.
And Obama isn’t a point in favor of that, because he also kept arming Israel, exercising PATRIOT Act powers, kept up all the U.S.'s wars as long as possible, and killing people by the thousands with drone strikes.
We have a problem with authoritarianism. Call it like it is. The 30-50 year old representatives support it, the 70 year old representatives support it.
Honestly, I saw his most recent interview, he was supporting the continuation of hostilities (urging restraint and all that) until Hamas was removed. Then I watched the hour long Norman Finkelstein response to it, going over his premises in excruciating detail - www.indybay.org/newsitems/2023/11/…/18860126.php I don’t think your portrayal of his statements is accurate.
With citizens, ignorance can be an excuse. With politicians, it’s their job to know, and if they’re on the wrong side that pretty much means they’re complicit.
Recognize your behavioral triggers. Could be anxiety, stress, etc. Try to actively recognize how you’re feeling before you engage in an addictive behavior, and then either do a substitute activity or find ways to (calmly) move your thoughts or feelings to a different place. The key concept is to divert your thinking that produces the addictive behavior.
Just my two cents, not a doctor but have broken an addiction or two.
Not about wimpiness or grimacing at the picture. More about gradually recognizing that you’re just eating pieces of animal flesh. For me, that went hand in hand with studying biology & med textbooks, about a decade ago. Not irrational, I’m not going “it’s icky”, it’s me knowing what the chemical composition is, where it came from, what it is, and going, “yeah this is fucking nasty”.
Startling quote from the beginning of the documentary:
Aug 11, 1919 - Lord Balfour (author of the Balfour Declaration, the original British declaration of intent to create Israel) to his successor, George Curzon:
In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are […]
The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
The more I read up on the history, the more I understand Israel’s “right to exist” took a huge bite out of Palestine’s “right to exist”. The Nakba in 1948 most prominently, and annexations in Gaza, Sinai, West Bank and Golan Heights ever since (some temporary - Sinai and former settlements in Gaza - and the rest very much permanent).
It’s one thing to say an annexation of land is ancient history, but there are people alive who were displaced by Israel 75 years ago and are still living in refugee camps. We have two very incompatible things going on right now - Israel is basically screaming for blood because of Oct 7, and they are also living on recently stolen land that calls for reparations to be made to the Palestinian people - if you brought up the latter in this environment, you’d probably be accused of “supporting Hamas”, but it’s something that’s been true for decades. Really exhausting dynamic.
Norway has succeeded in getting the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) to make permanent and extend across Europe its ban on Meta (Facebook’s parent company) harvesting user data for targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram.
Honestly thinking this all week - pretty much every country in the world either voted yes or abstained on the Gaza/Israel ceasefire resolution, except for the U.S. (and a handful of others), who just coincidentally happens to have billions of dollars earmarked every year to go to Israel on the condition they spend it on arms from U.S. companies. That, and its strategic use in the region (access to fossil fuel resources), probably the whole reason.
Al Jazeera is condemning threats by the Israeli army against the family of its Gaza correspondent Youmna ElSayed. On Monday, ElSayed’s husband received a call from Israeli forces warning family members to immediately leave their home or be killed in a bombardment. The threat comes just days after an Israeli strike killed 12...
"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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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).
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely killing me right now to watch what’s going on in /r/worldnews re: the Gaza Strip. Absolute echo chamber of reposted IDF propaganda, genocidal rhetoric against Palestinians - all calls for peace, any contextualization or describing the history of the conflict get permabanned and muted, appeals to admins are denied as usual. Meanwhile, international observers describing the situation as an ongoing genocide. What do you call censoring a community to support that, besides “incitement to genocide”?
Site should be forever abandoned, they have lost every last shred of credibility.
Biden administration staff sign open letter demanding cease-fire in Israel-Hamas war (www.nbcnews.com)
Muslimgauze - Every Grain Of Palestinian Sand (1998, electronic/industrial) (www.youtube.com)
House Republicans Introduce Bill to Expel Palestinians From the Country (newrepublic.com)
Republicans have a racist new idea amid the war on Gaza.
Young Activists to Biden: Change Course on Gaza — or Lose in 2024 (www.rollingstone.com)
RollingStone.com
Israel admits airstrike on ambulance near hospital that witnesses say killed and wounded dozens | CNN (edition.cnn.com)
What did Canada do? (startrek.website)
how to break an addiction?
hey i’m not sure the title is accurate but i couldn’t think of anything better...
I'm too high for this (i.imgflip.com)
Documentary on the Palestinian academic Edward Said (1988) (www.youtube.com)
Top UN official in New York steps down citing ‘genocide’ of Palestinian civilians (www.theguardian.com)
Craig Mokhiber, director of human rights body, accuses the US, UK and much of Europe as ‘wholly complicit in the horrific assault’
Stop using Fandom (www.youtube.com)
Meta faces permanent ban on targeted ads across Europe (stackdiary.com)
Norway has succeeded in getting the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) to make permanent and extend across Europe its ban on Meta (Facebook’s parent company) harvesting user data for targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram.
Israeli Military Warns Al Jazeera Correspondent in Gaza to Leave Home or Die (www.democracynow.org)
Al Jazeera is condemning threats by the Israeli army against the family of its Gaza correspondent Youmna ElSayed. On Monday, ElSayed’s husband received a call from Israeli forces warning family members to immediately leave their home or be killed in a bombardment. The threat comes just days after an Israeli strike killed 12...
CNN Host Left Stunned As IDF Confirms Israel Hit Refugee Camp With Airstrike (newrepublic.com)
NewRepublic.com
Tried joining Reddit again because of lack of activity in very niche communities, got banned again ,_, (lemmy.world)
Reddit improved their anti-ban evasion system, cuz it’s the sixth or more failed attempt at evading a permanent ban. Never more, I am staying here....