Yeah I’m happy to say that I’m currently representing more or less exactly the views of my very jewish grandfather. The man went to demonstrations in the 40’s-60’s against zionism and it’s looking increasing like he was entirely right.
I got news amongst reform Jews Israel causes some very very mixed feelings. You ain’t gonna play that anti semitic shit with me. Anti semitic is carrying out a genocide and calling anyone who calls you out on it an anti semite. The actual anti semites love what you’re doing though!
So the frustrating thing to me is that Israel gets held to this standard while y’all regurgitate Hamas’ total deaths numbers as civilian deaths and make awful trolley metaphors about it.
The standards here are astronomically different. Hamas gets judged to a standard of a murderous terrorist organization when it’s effectively a government. It’s maddening. There’s only criticism from a lot of y’all when Israel legitimately attempted a narrow rescue mission.
It’s almost like it’s an asymmetrical conflict where one side receives unlimited military aid from the wealthiest and most powerful country in human history.
…and where one side controls the other’s borders, and steals more bits and pieces of the other every year, and treats their people like Black citizens under Jim Crow (at least, that’s the West Bank, the ones in Gaza are treated as less than human), and propped up the very terrorists they now use as their excuse for carrying out a campaign of ethnic cleansing
I held the United States to higher standards than fucking Al Qaeda too (or Saddam, or the Taliban) if you were somehow born yesterday and think this is a radical, novel principle people invented only as an excuse to criticize Israel. Like I don’t know how well you remember the stuff we argued about on 2+2 but I was very mad about shit like this:
What a fucking deplorable statement, blaming the kid’s father (who was not there) for this kid being present at a drone strike intended to kill a wholly unrelated target who also was not there (though the U.S. claimed they did get their man at the time; instructive!).
Any of the people posting bravely on Twitter about “the only democracy in the Middle East” or “the most moral army in the world” are kinda giving the game away when they’re like “but really, how can you expect Israel to not drag itself down to the level of the terrorists they’re fighting, they have no other choice, Hamas made them do all of this”. I mean how many mental gymnastics must one perform to post this:
(and yes I recall your post explaining this above - Hamas made Israel flatten a residential block in a refugee camp, forcing them to engage in “support airstrikes” in response to the outcome no Israeli planners could possibly have predicted might result from their actions: Hamas fought back against invading soldiers)
And the other obvious thing here that I’m shocked I even need to state is that this generosity you extend only goes one way. Any Palestinian incursion into Israeli territory to attempt to free Palestinian prisoners in Israel would be met with harsh condemnation from you & others simply for violating Israel’s territory, on top of any deaths that followed, no matter how many people were freed or how many deaths there were or how many of those deaths were military vs. civilian. So please spare us this charade where you pretend like you give a shit about any of these principles when the only underlying rule that matters to you is that no one criticize Israel.
Again, nobody supports Hamas. Everyone considers them a terror organization that has control of a government. There’s nothing worth discussing regarding that on a daily basis because we all more or less agree.
The only disagreement is over the disproportionate response from Israel, and the Israeli government’s apparent position that unlimited collateral damage is justified as thousands of civilians are slaughtered. This is abhorrent given their extreme military superiority. Like their victory is inevitable, it’s just a matter of three variables: how long it takes, how much collateral damage there is among civilians, and whether they’re going to take more land away.
The proper course of action is to minimize civilian death, even if it takes longer, and not to either annex land or intentionally render it uninhabitable. They should be as surgical as possible, but instead they’re taking out charity aid workers and leveling city blocks.
This a US centric discussion board. The US isn’t shipping Hamas weapons, if we were there would be a ton of discussion about it I’m sure. Pointing out that Hamas doing terror attacks is bad just doesn’t require discussion/debate, it’s self evident.
50% of the media target audience (USA) supports Trump so it’s problematic for media to not talk about his issues.
But there is not a sizable contingent of the target audience of this forum (our posters) who support Hamas doing terror attacks so it just isn’t something that leads to continued discussion because there is nothing much to discuss in that regard as there already consensus that Hamas doing terror attacks is bad
I once again implore everyone to please stop attacking each other. Everyone is posting in good faith based upon sincerely held beliefs. Challenge those beliefs. Don’t challenge each other’s motivations, or mental state etc etc.
There does come a point where your beliefs are odious enough that they inform my opinion of your character. Aggressively defending an active genocide being one of those points shouldn’t be controversial on a left wing board. The fact that we have Israel slappies in here is weird/concerning honestly and the fact that neither one of them, to the best of my knowledge, is even Israeli (which is pretty much the only reason I’d ever give someone a pass for this) makes it worse not better.
We should shut this entire thread down for the good of the site. This isn’t a subject reasonable people can disagree about anymore and I don’t know how to be nice about it. I’m actively trying not to look at this thread and will probably put it in on mute.
But yeah if you don’t want me to talk to you like you’re the government of Israel maybe don’t take their absolutely nazi party line.
Sure, but a sizable portion of this forum tries to pretend that when 200 deaths are reported by hamas its all civilians and Israel’s fault, so you’ll have to excuse me while I think we should have a higher standard
This is at least the second time you’ve remarked that someone who supports Israel MUST have strong ties to an Israeli person. It’s disgustingly anti-semitic and myopic to repeatedly suggest that only Israeli “slappies” care about the plight of Israeli Jews.
in this case “Hamas” reported 270+ deaths, it’s very plausible 200 are civilians, and I think you just invented the idea that your opponents assume they’re all civilians; I don’t hold this belief but Israel does mostly kill civilians
Israel planned an operation with a contingency to light up a fucking busy residential area with bombs, and did so, and it’s really sad to be in here like “how dare Hamas force them to bomb all these people”
First off, you were the one who conflated total number dead with civilians.
Also, why were there civilian deaths goofy? Because any answer that isn’t “hamas took hostages, hid them in a civilian area, then started shooting rpgs at retreating vehicles” is utter horseshit
Ok I ignored that the first time. But ok motherfucker, why did Israel call in air support? Like what the fuck are they supposed to do?
Like I really try to just let some of you guys have your feelings, but fuck you make it hard. Criticizing israel for the result of this raid is only possible if you’ve lost the plot
