GrimTuesday

39 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yeah, I missed that.

@GrimTuesday Hamas is a widely-recognized terrorist organization that has used suicide bombers and deliberately targeted civilians for decades now. It also murders and tortures Palestinians, flings gay men from rooftops, and other unsavory things.

Yeah, no shit they are a terrorist organization, basically every single struggle for liberation has involved some level of violent resistance. As I said, I strongly disapprove of their methods and as a leftist, I am certainly opposed to the fact that they are right wing fundamentalists, but I recognize that the Palestinians have basically been backed into a corner where their only path forward is either violence or extinction. This is in no small part because Israel has set the conditions to ensure that Hamas is seen as the only avatar of Palestinian liberation.

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It doesn't matter "how they seem themselves", and valorizing them calls into question your moral compass, at the very least. You can detest Israel and still not give Hamas a pass.

Actually, it does matter how they see themselves. It matters because that is how you assess what their goals are and what it will take to deal with them. For example, ISIS was not a liberatory movement, they were religious fundamentalists who were seeking to create a global caliphate. Hamas on the other hand has more in common with the IRA, and the ANC were or the PKK are now, in so far as their aim is to create a state for a ethnic group who are currently occupied by a more powerful, oppressive state actor that is able to enact violence upon them with impunity. The only way to defeat a liberatory movement is through negotiation (it has to be good faith, which has almost never been the case here) and by addressing the oppression that they are resisting. Of course, the solution addressing their grievances cannot in any way mean that harm comes to Israelis including dispossession or expulsion much less violent ethnic cleansing as Hamas called for in their original charter,  and any solution must ensure a better future for both sides of this conflict.

My acknowledging of this does not in any way "give Hamas a pass". I was disgusted by their actions on October 7th, it was horrific and the brutality visited upon Israelis was inhuman. The loss of life on both sides is horrific and frankly, in fact I think every Hamas fighter should be imprisoned for the rest of their lives, and we should certainly take a good hard look at those who have overseen the Israeli operation and some of them should probably join the Hamas folks behind bars. While violent resistance is, according to the UN itself, permissible, that does not mean that those who perpetrate it should be immune from punishment after the fact.

Worry about your own moral compass, mine points true north.

1 hour ago, Ran said:

Hamas should lay down their arms, to end the ferocious fighting.

I also wish people listened when they were reportedly urged to get away from these hospitals. There are hospitals in the south that are not going to see Israeli troops on their doorsteps.

Whether you accept it or not, Haas sees themselves as being a liberatory movement seeking freedom for themselves and their countrymen, who have been brutalized, bombed, and robbed of all hope. They will never lay down their arms because to them, that is another step on the road to their extinction. You can talk about them being antisemitic or being Muslim fundamentalist all you want, but reality is that whatever crimes they have committed, the ones Israel is committing now are orders of magnitude worse and that is on top of living for the last the last 75 years under an apartheid in their own homeland which criminal in its own right. The fact that Israel maintains an apartheid state is provocation in and of itself, and while I wish they used different methods, Hamas is meeting violence with violence.

The lose of human life in any circumstance is awful, it doesn't matter on which side, but just putting the blame entirely on Hamas rather than the ones dropping bombs on what is overwhelmingly a civilian population is ghoulish. I said it once before, one day after all this is over, we will all say we were against this, and now I add to it that I hope the words you said here fester in your soul at the knowledge that you excused the murder of children and innocents.

22 minutes ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Scratch the surface of southern evangelical support for Israel and you find some pretty unsavoury stuff. 

And what do you think the consequences will be for a sitting state representative openly calling for genocide? I doubt her own party will even make her apologize. Even money says the state and national Democratic Party won’t even mention it. 

There have been numerous Republican politicians who have made genocidal statements regarding Palestinians, and literally the only person who is being rebuked for it is Rashida Talib, the only Palestinian in the legislature, who was censured by the House of Representatives the other day for using a slogan expressing the aspiration of Palestinian freedom and Israel and it's propaganda arms have decided to try and paint as antisemitic. Josh Gottheimer, a Democrat, even said that all Muslims are guilty for the October 7th attack and nobody did shit about it.

Just now, Ran said:

Another loud-mouth Knesset guy who is saying things he has no ability to make reality.

It's amazing how all these elected members of the Israeli government are totally just irrelevant and not in any way representative of the Israeli government's policies.

2 minutes ago, House Balstroko said:

I think Israel needs to offer the  Palestinians an off-ramp in order to move forward. In exchange for Hamas leadership renouncing power, it dismantles all settlements in the West Bank. Merely trying to destroy Hamas is ultimately going to make the lives of Gaza’s citizens more miserable. That will just open the door for another organisation like Hamas to fill in the vacuum. 

If Israel dismantles the West Bank settlements, there will be a blood bath, this time perpetrated by the half a million Jewish settlers who inhabit those settlements.

2 hours ago, Ran said:

I read it, but the time she puts "terrorist" in quotes when anyone familiar with the PLO's modus operandi in the 70s included mass attacks against civilians knows they were, at the time, a terrorist organization, also caught my eye.

I think anyone who has convinced themselves of a one-state solution, whether a "democratic decolonized state" or a "binational state", is rather fooling themselves -- and also, for the most part, pretty much in the tank for Palestine.

There's one kind of huge reason a one-state solution will not take place: nuclear weapons, and the fact that Israel has them. I suspect this is a major reason why the US continues to push for a two-state solution, because a Muslim-majority nation where people affiliated with Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, etc. will likely have some governmental and military role is just a non-starter.

Of course those who are in favor of a single state are "in the tank for Palestine" because that is the side that doesn't have a state and what would be a theoretical  Palestinian state is so fragmented (which was a purposeful strategy on the part of Israel) that it would render it infeasible.

Israel is welcome to give up their nukes, just as South Africa did, and in that case, it would be equally as motivated by racism. The sheer amount of Islamophobia and anti-arab racism that just goes completely unexamined is so fucking gross. The vast majority of Muslims, just like people of every other race and religion, just want to live good lives of dignity, they're not some gang of genocidal psychos hellbent on killing Jews any more so than white Christians, and the reality is that in many cases, those who are like that are the direct result of American/western foreign policy that sought to empower the most radical/religious fundamentalist groups because they were opposed to communism during the cold war, and now those chickens have come home to roost.

4 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

But you do admit that Hamas regularly uses hospitals and civilian locations as cover from attack? So a large portion of blame should be aimed at Hamas for that you would also agree? 
 

If Hamas are routinely doing this, what is the proportionate response that would still lead to Hamas being defeated? It seems like it’s impossible to wipe them out without civilian loss while they continue to use human shields. 
 

So  where are the protests calling for Hamas to stop using civilians as shields? 

I would blame the Israeli state for creating a situation where 2.4 million people are trapped in a concentration camp and perpetually starved and brutalized thereby creating the conditions for a terrorist group and then assassinated/discredited all the leaders of the secular/left wing groups because it was harder to paint them as the bad guys to the western world and then actively supported said terrorist group behind the scenes to ensure they were the only group seen by the people of Gaza as being a liberatory force and thus they never had to worry about actually entering into peace talks to end the conflict.

Israel is the greatest recruiter Hamas has ever had.

39 minutes ago, Ran said:

Contextualize it and this particular atrocity is part of a pattern of mutual atrocity that escalated as the civil war broke out. I think Deir Yassin is the worst of the Jewish crimes, particularly with its massacre of captured civilians, but other more minor ones did happen. As they did against the Jews.

See here for a useful timeline, and keep in mind that while this civil war is taking place -- a civil war begun by Arabs, attacking Jewish buses -- the surrounding Arab nations have declared their intention to sweep Israel away as soon as the Mandate ends. So Israel's not just fighting in a civil war within the Mandate against Arabs who don't want to allow them a state, but it's trying to figure out how to also be in a position to withstand the promised attack of the Arab nations that intends to unmake the nation that the UN has resolved to give them. Hence Plan Dalet including the idea of capturing and holding territory earmarked for Palestine during the hostilities, as a way of creating buffers and more secure borders during the expected invasion.

Your insistence on excusing ethnic cleansing is as impressive as it is disturbing. If you do even the tiniest bit digging you will find the bus attack in question is thought to have been a response to the assassination of five members of a Palestinian family that Lehi (You know, the guys who tried to ally with the Nazis) suspected of being informants for the British (You know, the folks governing the provience) 10 days prior. It should also be noted that the place where the attack too place was in Fajja, which had largely significantly depopulated by that point due to attacks from the Zionist paramilitary groups that started as early as May 1947.

Here is video of Al-Azhar University being destroyed, there is now no longer any institutions of higher learning in Gaza.

1 hour ago, House Balstroko said:

There was another major Pro-Palestinian protest in Melbourne, Australia. After the main event had ended people started going their own way, I saw 2 girls with By The River to the Sea posters. I was tempted to confront them and ask them to voluntarily dispose of those posters, otherwise I’d involve the police. Then I decided to just move along. 
 

It’s one thing to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause, but this is a direct attack against the existence of the state of Israel. That is not acceptable. 

Alright, I'm sick of this bullshit, "From the River to the Sea" is not hate speech and it is not inherently a Hamas slogan. It was created as a slogan by the PLO to express a yearning for freedom that the Palestinians might live between the river and the sea, which they did prior to the creation of the state of Israel. It is also a call for a single state, and it has genocidal implications if you assume that the only way that a Palestinian state can exist is through the genocide of the Jews, which despite how people paint Hamas as being the singular representation of the Palestinian struggle (As Bibi and the Israeli government sought to do), is not the aim expressed by most Palestinians.

Of course, this assumption of genocide is the same justification that was used in South Africa, where no such thing happened, and in the American south, where southerners were convinced that in the event the slaves were freed, they would enact vengeance upon them. In both cases, what happened was people were freed, and they moved on and tried to live their lives the best they could. That said, there will need to be some some level of reconciliation where leaders on both sides are made to answer for their crimes.

5 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Swing and a miss, plus you're massively overlooking how ignorant younger folks are about just the Holocaust itself, let alone about anti-Semitism in general. I'd get asked the weirdest questions about Jews when I was in HS and college and the polling indicates it's gotten worse in the last decade.

You say that as if knowledge of the holocaust in any way should inform the reactions to Israel's apartheid state.

23 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Yeah, it's real shocking that some Americans would want to have jews die.

I think y'all might be a bit confused about why those people picked hamas, and what political alignment they have.

Obviously there are plenty of Nazi shitlords who want to see the murder of Jews, but in the instance of that specific poll, your only options are Israel, which at the time of the poll had already been bombing the shit out of Gaza, and Hamas, which is being presented as the only option to express support for the Palestinian people who have been subjected to Israel's apartheid state for 75 years. 

18 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Politics makes strange bedfellows. That said, the gap between the overall sample and young people is a bit alarming. 

I'm sure if you rephrased it from Hamas to Palestinians you would be even more alarmed. Young people are being exposed the realities of life as a Palestinian and Israel's propaganda is losing it's potency as a result.

35 minutes ago, Altherion said:

It's not just a few college kids, professors and youtubers. Even the in the immediate wake of the Hamas attacks (i.e. on October 19th), 16% of American voters side with Hamas over Israel (see page 42 of this survey). That is, when the question was, "In general in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?", 16% of the population (including 48% of 18-24 year olds) answered Hamas. Notice it's not a generic question about Palestinians; this is about 1 in 6 people who support an organization that the US government designates as terrorist and which clearly has no problem murdering civilians.

This is so fucking pathetic. That is a bullshit poll because it is only setting it up as the two answers being Israel and Hamas. Basically, you're forcing people to answer that you either support Israel, who at that point had already killed thousands of Palestinians in the bombardment that commenced almost immediately after October 7th or Hamas. That is an incredibly loaded question that I would have refused to answer but completely understand why someone would say Hamas.

When people in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks were celebrating, it was wrong and I certainly wasn't excited at the prospect of that operation because I knew what was coming no matter how successful it was. That said, when you watch a people get brutalized and humiliated for decades, there is something exhilarating in seeing them finally get a chance to strike back in a meaningful way outside of just fruitlessly lobbing rockets in the direction of their oppressors. Doesn't mean it is right, but that is a very human reaction. It is also worth noting that much of the celebrations took place prior to the exact extent and brutality of the Hamas attack became clear, that shit went away really quick once we got details abut what was happening in the kibbutzim.

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Posters saying Jews should have found somewhere else to try and create a state pretty much says as much and again, glosses over how Jews in the region after WW2 did try to make a good faith effort to create something more workable while Palestinians and surrounding Arab states did not and immediately called for their destruction right after the Holocaust happened. When you look at it through that lens how could you not expect them to be incredibly defensive, especially when the conflict has never been resolved.

Just for example, the Hamas representative linked in the last thread did another interview recently with NBC and said the hostages are fair negotiating chips, a ceasefire must happen before their release can even be discussed and Hamas has every right to keep attacking Israel while they can't attack back. 

At some point you have to recognize the situation is a heads you win, tails I lose scenario. 

Yeah, these guys really seem to have been making a good faith effort to create something more workable. Bear in mind Deir Yassin took place in April 1948, a month prior to Israel being given statehood.

11 minutes ago, Bael's Bastard said:

If you expect to be taken seriously don't suggest Jews are colonizers in their own indigenous homeland.

Numerous members of the Zionist project described it as a colonial project, Herzl himself said as much.

Beyond that, stop pretending that the Palestinians aren't indigenous to that land, 50% of Palestinians and 70% of Jews share a common male ancestor 3000 years ago, they're literally cousins.

Europeans and Americans are so desperate to absolve themselves of their historic antisemitism that they project it onto the middle east. For example, The Ottoman Empire actively attempted to rescue Sephardic Jews from the Spanish Inquisition and granted them the right to settle in the empire. It got to the point that the Greeks started resenting the status that was given to the Jews within the empire because of the informal pecking order that they had seen themselves as being at the top of. Which of course lead to pogroms in the European part of the empire.

The fact of the matter is that while certainly things weren't all sunshine, buttercups, and rainbows, prior to the colonization of the middle east by Europeans powers, the actual historical record shows that Muslim lands were seen as a refuge for Jews.

1 minute ago, Craving Peaches said:

Even if you believe (with no evidence) that the hospital and the fishing boats (really no evidence) were being used by Hamas, the water tank was just a water tank to supply civilians.

Do you know how many people are killed by H20 every year? Truly a fearsome weapon.

1 hour ago, Craving Peaches said:

Reports from Gaza that Israeli forces attacked a water tank, solar panels, fishing boats and a generator for a hospital. I am unsure what the 'military justification' for these strikes would be, or how it would be proportionate in terms of harm inflicted on Civilians.

Edit: Both the solar panels and the generator appear to have been supplying the same hospital, Al-Wafaa hospital, which from what I can tell is for the elderly and disabled. The hospital has been attacked by Israel in the past. Unsurprisingly, Israel claimed then that it was a Hamas command centre, and they apparently used falsified or misleading images to try and back up this claim, according to the Doctor in charge.

I think you find those were dangerous H2O chemicals used in the process of developing a drug meant to create Hamas super soldiers, the start of a Hamas doomsday device that harnessed the power of the sun, ships belonging to the fearsome Hamas Navy, and well, the generator was just a generator that was keeping retired Hamas fighters alive so that obviously had to go.

Drake called for a cease fire before Bernie Sanders, what a dark timeline we live in.

I highly recommend this podcast with Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.

7 hours ago, Ran said:

Ah, so the Jewish conspiracy is not a conspiracy because actually it's a nation-wide conspiracy of "brainwashing" that somehow fails to touch all the peace activists and people who want peace who are in the service.

Time to reacquaint myself with Протоколы сионских мудрецов to put my mind right, I guess?

 

Jesus fucking Christ, way to completely take what I said in the least charitable way possible. I especially enjoyed the part where you referenced one of the Ur texts of antisemitic books as if I was somehow endorsing that perspective.

The reality is that countries of all types engage in brainwashing their population, it is just how nationalism works. I think In addition, we have Jewish folks in these threads who have spoken about how, as Jews, they are always cognizant of the fact that there are people out there who wish them harm simply for the fact that they are Jewish, and I am sure that goes doubly so for people in Israel who are told from the day they are born that they are surrounded on all sides by enemies who are actively plotting to do them harm. Of course there are those who the propaganda doesn't take hold as deeply, there are many groups within Israel that oppose the actions of the state and see Palestinians as full people, but just like in America, those people are generally the exception.

7 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

I feel I must say I personally know left wingers who furiously protested the judicial overhaul and did care for the abuses of Palestinians by Israel.

Though for many protesters yeah they wanted liberal democracy for domestic ly and fascist rule for everyone else.

Obviously There are exceptions, I saw a video that Vice (if I remember correctly, might have been Abby Martin) put out and part of it was following an Israeli peace activist who would take a Palestinian flag to the protests and he was talking about how he was actively harassed by other protesters for it. There are a lot of wonderful, kind people in Israel who do not agree with the government and it's actions, it is certainly not monolithic.

35 minutes ago, Ran said:

"Of course an IDF officer will say that," but I don't know, it seems to me like to sustain the idea that it's all bad faith requires believing in a vast conspiracy of silence in the military. But this is the same military whose pilot corps were about ready to go on strike to protest Netanyahu's attack on the judiciary, so I don't think it very likely at all that the IDF only pays lip service to the laws of armed combat, because otherwise I expect it would leak and the left-wing press in Israel would eat it up.

It isn't a vast conspiracy when you have an army made up of people who are brainwashed from birth to believe that every action Israel takes is necessary in the defense of the Jewish race and are compelled to serve in the military, therefore forcing people to rationalize the crimes that they are forced to be complicate it if not directly, than certainly those done by their friends and family.

I would also add that citing the protests in Israel regarding the attacks on the judiciary is not really a good argument to show how moral or upstanding Israelis are. Those protests were never even remotely considering the treatment of Palestinians either in Gaza or the West Bank. It was exactly like the Trump voters from desperately poor areas in West Virginia who were mad that the abuses of the state were also now being done to them rather than just those they considered the rightful recipients of that abuse. There was never a notion of shared struggle, it was always about the privileged being worried about suddenly potentially being demoted to the same status as they see as beneath them.

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Gross. 

Way to leave out the fact that I said I do not necessarily agree with Hamas' actions. The fact is that Hamas uses certain truths and liberatory language to justify their unjustifiable actions but that does not delegitimize the Palestinian struggle as a whole no matter how much you parrot Hasbara talking points..

27 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Idk if you're reading what you're writing then...

Frankly I'm disinclined to accept your interpretation of my statements.

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You said Israel needs to make peace with Hamas. Pretty weird to say a country should make peace with a group who openly says they want to destroy them.

Iran regularly calls for death to America, do you think I give a shit about that? Power is what matters, it is the only thing that matters, and only one side of this actually has the power to achieve it's goals.

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You explained why a terrorist group felt it needed to slaughter and kidnap innocent civilians. Pretty weird.

Yes, I did explain that, I did not endorse them. Refusing to understand why things are happening is a key method of dehumanization of an enemy, you don't want to see them as humans because then you would have to acknowledge that what has happened to the Palestinians is criminal and unconscionable.

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You've been openly using their talking points. Pretty weird. 

Hamas uses the the language of liberation and use facts to justify their actions. Just because we use the same language and cite the same events, it does not mean that we agree upon what actions must be taken to address the situation in Israel.

9 minutes ago, Bael's Bastard said:

I don't know about you, but I am and come from a family that pushed for a Palestinian state during a decade where family and friends were being blown to pieces on buses and in restaurants believing that Arafat would ultimately make peace. The Jews in this thread despise Netanyahu, reject the settlements amd violent Hilltop Youth, and push for a Palestinian state, only to be smeared as hawks who support apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide by people comparing Israel to the fucking Nazis. We and our families and friends have paid the price to support two states and continue to do so believing it is the only answer. More than can be said for people parroting Hamas and engaging in Holocaust inversion.

If you don't want people to accuse you of supporting ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide maybe don't do that. Defending the Zionist project is to defend those actions.

Also you're delusion if you think a two state solution is still possible. Israel has made sure that it is impossible to disentangle Israel from a theoretical Palestinian state, and have actively been undermining groups that are more amiable to peace, this has been state policy for decades. The only viable solution at this point is a single state where all people are afforded the same rights and given a right to return. Sorry if that doesn't allow for an ethnostate, but thems the breaks.

1 minute ago, Tywin et al. said:

Are you just pro Hamas at this point? 

The only way you could read everything I've said in the course of this discussion over the last three weeks and come to that conclusion is if you are either acting in bad faith, or you're just so indoctrinated by Israeli propaganda, you've completely lost the plot.

Explaining something is not the same as endorsing it. But by all means, keep defending your beloved apartheid state. History will remember people like you the same as those who supported South Africa.

52 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

No, you are. Again, Hamas wants every Jew dead. Israeli has never said they want to kill every Palestinian in anyway that's remotely comparable. But you still feel the need to say up is down and black is white. 

Israeli leaders have, since the beginning advocated for the forced removal of Palestinians, the entire nation was founded on it. in the 75 years since then, those polices have continued unabated. That is why Hamas says what it does. Palestinians aren't born hating Israel, it is the result of systemic violence that empowers the most extreme right wing  elements and has been supported and enabled by Israel to undermine the secular left wing Palestinians that were harder to demonize.

39 minutes ago, Bael's Bastard said:

You are engaging in literal antisemitic Holocaust inversion.

I don't give a shit if you or the ADL or some other Israeli propaganda cutout consider it antisemitic, Israel is committing if not genocide, then certainty ethnic cleansing and that is unacceptable. Keep defending your apartheid state though, I'm sure dismissing criticism of Israel as simply being antisemitic allows you to ignore the crimes being committed against a people that have been declared as subhuman by the state of Israel.

45 minutes ago, Bael's Bastard said:

Substitute Hamas with Nazis and you might begin to understand how absolute full of shit it is to say this to Jews.

Pretty laughable that the person who is defending ethnic cleansing is accusing others of being Nazis. The fascist, genocidal Israeli state has more in common with Nazi Germany than Hamas does. You're neck deep in Hasbara propaganda, and it's pretty fucking pathetic.

28 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Also like, once the Nazis where beaten Billions of dollars were poured into rebuilding Germany and making sure it could become a successful independent state once again, which seems pretty peace and reconciliation to me, but idk.

Except for all the Nazis that were left in positions of power in West Germany. Of course, I guess if you consider the formation of West Germany a good thing, it kind of undermines the idea that there is no way to proceed with Hamas figures in a governing capacity as part of a peace process.

26 minutes ago, Ran said:

It justifies appropriate uses of military force according to the laws of armed conflict that furthers the strategic goals Israel has set forth.

Israel is already committing war crimes, they exceeded the "law of Armed Conflict" on day one with their utilization of collective punishment. Hamas cannot be defeated with bombs, the only option is peace and reconciliation.

Turns out it may not have been The Gaza Health Ministry that lied about the hospital bombing death toll, it seems to be a mistranslation by the media