Israel - Hamas War X

[Rippounet]

56 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I shouldn't even have to dignify this with a response, but just look at the history between WW1 and WW2 in the region. There's a long list of atrocities committed against Jews simply because they were Jewish, so yeah, obviously anti-Semitism long predates the establishment of Israel.

It seems you're talking about anti-Jewish hatred in the wake of Jewish emigration to Palestine - that was itself fueled by the rise of anti-semitism in Europe and Russia. There were also cases linked to pro-Nazi political movements.
It's far more difficult to find examples of anti-semitism in the Muslim world independent of European anti-semitism. Jews were discriminated against, but not more so than Christians. Historians like Shelomo Dov Goitein, Bernard Lewis, or Martin Kramer (all of them Jewish) have argued that anti-semitism in the Muslim world is originally a by-product of European anti-semitism, and was then fueled by the establishment of Israel. Lewis especially has gone as far as saying that anti-semitism as we know it was essentially absent from the Muslim world because Muslims do not base anti-Jewish sentiments on grand theories of evil like Christians can. Analyses of Islam point out that the Quran is ambiguous about Jews, saying that they are "treacherous" and infidels, but also clearing them of killing Jesus and preaching tolerance toward them ; one has to turn to the hadiths to find some truly hateful stuff (the Sahih Muslim hadiths especially).
I won't claim I've done anything more than a superficial check on this, but it seems anti-semitism (the deep, visceral hatred of Jews leading to pogroms and genocide) is essentially a Western creation, because Muslims ridiculed Jews more than hated them prior to the 20th century.
I'll confess this fits my own perspectives, that hatred mainly stems from political and socio-economic circumstances, with religion being a contributing factor rather than a determining one.
This may sound naive, and I remember Lewis being quite controversial a few years back (for obvious reasons). Yet, I don't believe it's accurate to argue that anti-semitism in the Muslim world long predates the establishment of Israel.

All this being said, it may be a moot point. While the anti-semitism in the hadiths may have been largely ignored for centuries, this may be a genie that can't be put back in the bottle at this point. Therefore, while I originally questioned the depth of Muslim anti-semitism (and hoped for a political solution), today's realities may mean that religion has in fact become a major and permanent obstacle to peace. This reinforces the depressing perspective that the damage done may be irreparable.
Fuck.
 

[Mudguard]

3 hours ago, Craving Peaches said:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-al-shifa-hospital.html

...

This analysis is very convincing to me.  I think though at least some of the attacks were probably accidental, like the illumination round.  Both the IDF and Hamas are engaging in a lot of propaganda, which makes it difficult to take anything said by either party at face value.  Everything needs to be checked and double checked.  

The NY Times also did a similar analysis on the rocket explosion at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital from a month ago using a similar type analysis to geolocate the trajectories of the various rockets that appeared.  It presents pretty convincing evidence that the rocket explosion in the Aljazeera video that almost everyone was relying on, actually was fired from Israel and most likely was an interceptor fired by the Iron Dome system.

Quote

To trace the object in the sky back to Israeli territory, The Times synchronized the Al Jazeera footage with five other videos filmed at the same time, including footage from an Israeli television station, Channel 12, and a CCTV camera in Tel Aviv. These different videos provided a view of the missile from north, south, east and west. Using satellite imagery to triangulate the launch point in those videos, The Times determined that the projectile was fired toward Gaza from near the Israeli town of Nahal Oz shortly before the deadly hospital blast. The findings match the conclusion reached by some online researchers.

To be clear, the NY Times article makes no conclusion about what actually hit the hospital.  It still could have been misfired rocket, or it could have been something else.  I still lean towards a misfired rocket that was fired from within Gaza as the likeliest explanation though, mainly because no fragments of the rocket were ever shown to my knowledge, unlike the fragments that were shown in the attacks on Al Shifa.

[TrueMetis]

16 hours ago, mormont said:

Experience suggests not. Or do you believe that such Palestinians have simply never existed?

I find this sort of sentiment, regularly expressed in these discussions, puzzling. Do people think that somehow, no Palestinian has ever pursued a non-violent, equal rights campaign?

They have. But Israel is not interested in engaging with them, and nor is Hamas or the PA (nor their supporters, from the US to Arab countries). In fact both sides tend to ignore them at best, actively harass them at worst. 

It makes no sense to believe that no Palestinian has ever tried the MLK road. The question you should be asking yourself is not why that hasn't happened, but why you've never heard of it happening. 

TBF they do engage with them, via bullet.

8 hours ago, Altherion said:

Ah, but do you really think that other modern Western States which have committed war crimes in the past are held to the same moral standard? I can think of at least one that definitely is not...

People get angry, yell, but ultimately nothing actually happens? Because that's how it typically works to my knowledge.

8 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I need to share this:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/11/13/cnn-inside-gaza-hospital-israel-defense-forces-hamas-robertson-pkg-src-vpx.cnn

This is an embedded CNN journalist going through one of the hospitals and showing some things.  Some thoughts here:

- the devastation is pretty insane

- the 'armory' for the hospital is kind of pathetic - 4 rusting AKs is not what I'd call amazing, and in the US that'd be just some guy's house

- there is a kitty at 6 minutes in and I love that in the middle of this a random cat is just chilling in the suspected Hamas terrorist armory

AND THE KITTY COMES BACK AT 8 minutes! 

Well, at least they were smart enough to edit out him pointing to a calendar on the wall and claiming it was a terrorist guard roster, because Arabic speakers who saw it pointed out it just said the days of the week.

Idk, I think the standard of evidence for taking away the protections on hospitals should be higher than "we found a random assortment of crap in a hospital hundreds of people have been sheltering in." Not that there seems to be much protections on these hospital.

Has Israels propaganda game always been this garbage? A few days ago their Israel Arabic account tweeted out a video of a "nurse" in very clean clothes claiming Hamas had seized Al Shifa hospital she was in and was stealing supplies. Immediately Arabic speakers claimed her accent wasn't right and someone claiming to have gotten into contact with hospital staff said none of them knew who she was. The tweet has since been deleted. Unfortunately no mainstream sources seem to have picked up on this so who knows if we'll get a proper investigation in to what the hell that was.

Edited November 15, 2023 by TrueMetis

[Mudguard]

Looks like the IDF is raiding Al Shifa, so we should hopefully get some closure on this without any more significant casualties.  If Hamas isn't there, is should be bloodless.  If Hamas is actually holed up there, then it could get ugly.  

[Kalbear]

19 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Well, at least they were smart enough to edit out him pointing to a calenda on the wall and claiming it was a terrorist guard roster, because Arabic speakers who saw it pointed out it just said the days of the week.

Okay, that's pretty funny. Do you have a link to that? I'd love to see it.

19 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Idk, I think the standard of evidence for taking away the protections on hospitals should be higher than "we found a random assortment of crap in a hospital hundreds of people have been sheltering in." Not that there seems to be much protections on these hospital.

Has Israels propaganda game always been this garbage? A few days ago their Israel Arabic account tweeted out a video of a "nurse" in very clean clothes claiming Hamas had seized Al Shifa hospital she was in and was stealing supplies. Immediately Arabic speakers claimed her accent wasn't right and someone claiming to have gotten into contact with hospital staff said none of them knew who she was. The tweet has since been deleted. Unfortunately no mainstream sources seem to have picked up on this so who knows if we'll get a proper investigation in to what the hell that was.

This is interesting to me because one of the things Israel's intelligence agency and agents have been very well-known for is having absolutely perfect, region-specific Arabic. Doesn't mean that their propaganda people are the same folks, mind you, but I'd expect fairly good production values from them if they're trying at all. I'd personally bet on another group trying to sow discord and chaos; this would be a very good operation for Russia to be doing right now, as an example. 

[GrimTuesday]

43 minutes ago, TrueMetis said:

Has Israels propaganda game always been this garbage? A few days ago their Israel Arabic account tweeted out a video of a "nurse" in very clean clothes claiming Hamas had seized Al Shifa hospital she was in and was stealing supplies. Immediately Arabic speakers claimed her accent wasn't right and someone claiming to have gotten into contact with hospital staff said none of them knew who she was. The tweet has since been deleted. Unfortunately no mainstream sources seem to have picked up on this so who knows if we'll get a proper investigation in to what the hell that was.

Not only was it called out as probably faked at the time, but people have found the woman from the video. She's an Israeli TV actress turned tiktoker. It's pretty insane that Israel has the nerve to spread Pallywood conspiracies while signal boosting this shit.

Edited November 15, 2023 by GrimTuesday

[TrueMetis]

28 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

Okay, that's pretty funny. Do you have a link to that? I'd love to see it.

See ~6:30. Though I admit I'd like broader confirmation on what it says than people on twitter, but if you look at the closeup at 6:35 you'll see that the words repeat every 7 days, at least I think, I am trying to decipher handwriting in a foreign language. Honestly the only thing really noteworthy is the top which looks like it says October 7th and "Battle of Al-Aqsa Flood" or "Flood Dance Movement" or "Movement of the Al-Aqsa Flood" IDK google translate isn't very useful here.

[Crixus]

19 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Heads up, their hatred of Jews predates the establishment of Israel. The argument that the current hatred stems from that point is simply not accurate. 

Some members earlier also shared several detailed examples of Jewish people co-existing with Muslims relatively peacefully at various points in history, and you said that was the past and hence there was no point citing it. So should we cite the past, or not? 

Anyway, sure, it predates it, as does the historical hatred spewed by other communities. I may have mis-stated, sorry. I meant it has clearly grown substantially for specific reasons since 1948. And it isn't accurate to imply anti-Semitism is confined to Muslims, and that it magically disappeared everywhere else after Israel was created, because it didn't. 

Also, right now there is plenty of hatred both ways: 

Montgomery County, Maryland . As vile as the pro-Hamas cunts who help label mostly peaceful protests calling for ceasefires as 'hate marches'. 

Palestinian American visits West Bank

We're talking about more than 500,000 settlers in the West Bank, and I think it's fair to say a majority of them are perfectly happy with how things are - or they might have, I don't know, not settled there in such conditions? It is absolutely appalling to see some of that footage, where settlers throw trash at Palestinians and inside their homes, people are literally not allowed to be in certain streets, are questioned daily outside their own homes, and young children taken away by the IDF with no pretext. 

We can dismiss this lot as extremists - albeit extremists who are aided and abetted by the current government. And if that's the case, we should be able to do the same to Muslim extremists, because like the settlers, they are a small minority of more than 1.8 billion Muslims globally. 

[Crixus]

17 hours ago, Craving Peaches said:

Source: Guardian

I find it quite odd how some keep insisting that these are extremist, fringe people. This is the finance minister on the cabinet, with official legitimacy and authority. If he's making statements, it's fairly obvious he's been given an ok to do so. Or are we supposed to believe the government is overrun by rogue nutters outside of any official control?

Comparing someone like him and Dichter, people with actual cabinet positions, to someone like MTG or Tlaib doesn't work precisely because of that reason. A comparison to Yellen or Vilsack would be more accurate, and I doubt they'd make statements without WH approval. 

[Craving Peaches]

Just now, Crixus said:

I find it quite odd how some keep insisting that these are extremist, fringe people

Yes, as I pointed out before, the Prime Minister, President, Minister of Defence, Minister of Agriculture, and a minister in the Emergency Cabinet all made statements that sounded like support for ethnic cleansing. We can now add the Finance Minister to this list. So I think it is impossible to maintain the position that this is just a fringe/extremist view.

[Craving Peaches]

Quote

Andreas Krieg, a professor of security studies at King’s College London, says Israel’s allegations of al-Shifa Hospital being a Hamas command centre have been “going around for a decade”.

“Israel has always pushed that narrative and now it’s the time of truth. They have boots on the ground and now they have to come up with evidence that this is actually true,” Krieg told Al Jazeera.

“Evidence presented over the last couple days from other hospitals has not only been inconclusive but to a great deal has been inconsistent and showed a lot of flaws and misinformation, which also makes it difficult to trust their word.

“From an intelligence point of view, I’d say the Americans are just copying the Israelis instead of actually presenting their own evidence. So there isn’t a lot out there.”

Source: Al Jazeera, see also:

Andreas Krieg - King's College London (kcl.ac.uk)

Dr Andreas Krieg - Gulf Expert

[Crixus]

On 11/14/2023 at 7:44 PM, Bael's Bastard said:

Yeah, this is painting a bullseye around an arrow.

Can you elaborate? 

Also, your posts have indicated pretty negative, blanket opinions about Arabs - didn't you write earlier on the lines of 'Arabs always elect terrorists' or something to that effect (forgive the para-phasing)? Seems rather bigoted. 

I confess, I find it hard to take neutrally or seriously any comments from someone who wrote this. I mean, one can easily extrapolate such a prejudiced statement onto the past and current governments of Israel too, and make statements like 'Israelis elect corrupt/right-wing/extremist governments' given leaders like Sharon who encouraged settlements and was found responsible for Sabra and Shatila among other things, Netanyahu, Smotrich, Dichter and more. Or is saying this anti-Semitic too? Out of curiousity, what do you call Jewish people who criticise Israel (I have a Jewish colleague and friend in the US who has been quite vociferous lately)? 

Re Sharon, it's quite telling how many Israelis still regard him as a war hero despite incontrovertible evidence of his less than savoury deeds. But I guess such evidence comes from 'supposed human rights organisations' who are all liars, so fuck it. Would be interesting to see the same organisations cited for Ukraine, for instance. 

 

 

Edited November 16, 2023 by Crixus

[Daeron the Daring]

11 hours ago, TrueMetis said:

People get angry, yell, but ultimately nothing actually happens? Because that's how it typically works to my knowledge.

Don't you understand it?

Israel had their own 9/11, now they get to do their own Iraq War, just like America was 'allowed' to do it.

[mormont]

That analogy isn't at all reasonable. For a start, Hamas actually were the folks who committed the October attacks.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, Crixus said:

Some members earlier also shared several detailed examples of Jewish people co-existing with Muslims relatively peacefully at various points in history, and you said that was the past and hence there was no point citing it. So should we cite the past, or not? 

I think we should look at the last 100 years or start at the beginning of the 20th century. Otherwise there's the endless game of finding another example of something slightly older than the last one mentioned.

Quote

Anyway, sure, it predates it, as does the historical hatred spewed by other communities. I may have mis-stated, sorry. I meant it has clearly grown substantially for specific reasons since 1948. And it isn't accurate to imply anti-Semitism is confined to Muslims, and that it magically disappeared everywhere else after Israel was created, because it didn't. 

Obviously it's not. Anti-Semitism has been deeply rooted in cultures all over the world for a long time. That said, I don't think the establishment of Israel as a state dramatically increased anti-Semitic views, just the violence motivated by them, and to be fair, Israel has not done itself a lot of favors of the years to decrease said violence.

[Daeron the Daring]

4 hours ago, mormont said:

That analogy isn't at all reasonable. For a start, Hamas actually were the folks who committed the October attacks.

It wasn't necesarilly what I referred to.

While it is true that there's no ambiguity behind who is responsible for October 7 (Hamas), but that the principal goals behind it are similar (Iraq had multiple, among them the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction): Dismantling the opressive regime and disarming said opresisve regime both for the safety of Israel (USA) and the palestinians in Gaza (iraqis). It's a war against terrorism and the state structure supporting it, in both cases.

But the basis of the comparison was more that the current criticism of the intervention is received in a similar fashion and that we will see this ongoing conflict, say, 20 years, in a light similar to that of the Iraq War. Once the fog of war settles/blows away.

It's more of a prediction than the reflection to what already happened.

[Zorral]

THE MONEY KINGS: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America (2023) | By Daniel Schulman

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/books/review/the-money-kings-daniel-schulman.html

Over the years I've read many histories and biographies of these very successful families, as part of history generally and economic history -- not only in 'modern' history, but in the Middle Ages. And, horribly, it happens often in history, success is reacted to by

Quote

 

.... Near the end of the book, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” re-emerges from the muck to inspire an American wave of antisemitic conspiracy theorizing bankrolled by Henry Ford, the great industrial innovator and classic Jew hater.

In May 1920, The Dearborn Independent, a newspaper that was owned by Ford and circulated via Ford dealers around the country, launched a series titled “The International Jew.” It cited “The Protocols,” and advanced the plot: Schiff and the Warburgs, in this telling, had not just brought down the Russian Empire; they had also conspired to bring the Bolsheviks to power in 1917. (Unsurprisingly, these rich bankers did not in fact support the Bolsheviks.) International Jews, Ford’s paper said, were the “conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization.”

The newspaper series was a crisis for American Jews. But Schiff, uncharacteristically, advised restraint. “If we get into a controversy we shall light a fire, which no one can foretell how it will become extinguished,” he wrote to a group of Jewish leaders in June. “I would strongly advise therefore that no notice be taken of these articles and the attack will soon be forgotten.”

Schiff died that September, so he did not live to see himself proved catastrophically wrong.

Ford turned “The International Jew” into a book (subtitle: “The World’s Foremost Problem”) and printed millions of copies. In 1922, The New York Times reported that Adolf Hitler, the leader of a growing group of Bavarian reactionaries, had a portrait of Ford on his office wall in Munich. On a table in Hitler’s anteroom, Schulman writes, there was a stack of copies of “The International Jew,” translated into German.

 

It's like being women.  You can never win -- always damned if you're poor and unsuccessful, damned if you're monied and successful -- while African Americans are simply prohibited from being monied and successful at all, until very recently, which has sent white people literally around the bend, as with the 1921 destruction and massacre of Black Tulsa -- and Native Americans and their casinos are kept penned on the res.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

‘Erase Gaza’: War Unleashes Incendiary Rhetoric in Israel
Experts say that inflammatory statements by prominent Israelis are normalizing ideas like the killing of civilians and mass deportations.  

We recognize immediately this language as the same as the fascist here in the US use.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-war-rhetoric.html

Quote

... The cumulative effect, experts say, has been to normalize public discussion of ideas that would have been considered off limits before Oct. 7: talk of “erasing” the people of Gaza, ethnic cleansing, and the nuclear annihilation of the territory.

Incendiary statements are not limited to Israel, of course. Ghazi Hamad, a senior leader of Hamas, vowed on Oct. 24 that the group would wipe out Israel as a country, and appeared to exult in the barbaric acts that his militants had carried out against Israeli civilians. “We are not ashamed to say it with full force,” he said. “We have to teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it again and again.”

But the proliferation of such language by Israelis has opened a debate in Israel, where far-right and ultranationalist politicians were testing the boundaries of acceptable speech even before Oct. 7. Itamar Ben-Gvir, a right-wing settler who went from fringe figure to minister of national security in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet, has a long history of making incendiary remarks about Palestinians. He said in a recent TV interview that anyone who supports Hamas should be “eliminated.”

Concerns about the spread of extremist rhetoric are an extension of a political battle within Israel that has been raging all year between Mr. Netanyahu’s ultraright government and a civic opposition, some of whom now worry that it will inure Israelis to the civilian toll in Gaza as the war goes on.

The idea of a nuclear strike on Gaza was raised last week by another right-wing minister, Amichay Eliyahu, who told a Hebrew radio station that there was no such thing as noncombatants in Gaza. Mr. Netanyahu suspended Mr. Eliyahu, saying that his comments were “disconnected from reality.”

Mr. Netanyahu says that the Israeli military is trying to prevent harm to civilians. But with the death toll rising to more than 11,000, according to the Gaza health ministry, those claims are being met with skepticism, even in the United States, which has pressed Israel to allow daily four-hour humanitarian pauses in the combat.

Such reassurances are also belied by the language Mr. Netanyahu uses with audiences in Israel. His reference to Amalek came in a speech delivered in Hebrew on Oct. 28 as Israel was launching the ground invasion. While some Jewish scholars argue that the scripture’s message is metaphoric not literal, his words resonated widely, as video of his speech was shared on social media, often by critics.

“These are not just one-off statements, made in the heat of the moment,” said Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer and author of “The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine and the Legal Battle for Human Rights.”

But it also might explain why the disinformation is getting more sinister. On Nov. 12 the IDF claimed to have found an annotated and pristine copy of Mein Kampf in a child’s bedroom in Gaza. This came shortly after the Israel account also posted a cartoon showing how Israel brings up its babies with love while Gazans are brought up on hate.

All this on the back of Netanyahu’s now-infamous deleted tweet, where he stated that the current war was one between “the children of light and the children of darkness.”

A worrying aspect of though is how it seeks to dehumanize Palestinian children. Afterall, if you can’t deny killing them, maybe try and portray them as children worth killing.

In Israel’s increasingly desperate disinformation, we can see the foundations of a disturbing campaign attempting to try and justify or legitimize an impossible-to-justify statistic—that of the over 11,000 civilians killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Ministry of Health, over 4,500 are children.

~~~~~~~~~

Jerusalem Letter / Viewpoints

No. 487     9-26 Heshvan 5763 / 15 October-1 November 2002

WHY ARE ISRAEL'S PUBLIC RELATIONS SO POOR? Dan Diker

https://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp487.htmI

~~~~~~~~~

Israel’s Comically Bad Disinfo Proves They’re Losing the PR War

https://www.thedailybeast.com/israels-comically-bad-disinfo-proves-theyre-losing-pr-war

~~~~~~~~~~

One must inquire, if it is true, that Israel has not ever and does not now, depend for its safety on the US and the other Powers, why is Bibi&co desperate to have positive PR here in the US and elsewhere?  Why are there mobilizations in the streets, the protests, the demonstrations to put pressure on the US, for one, to Do Something about the hostages held by Hamas?  Why is the US promising / sending billions in military and financial aid to Israel?  

Also, have not learned whether or not any babies have been taken to promised safety from any of these hospitals?  (See, babies are always the best propaganda from whichever side, right?  One would think that babies removed to safety would be covered by All the Media up front and center. We all care about babies -- unless a rethug forced birth type, but that's another thread.)

[Fragile Bird]

I came across the story of Ford’s virulent anti-semitism a few years ago and was just stunned. It’s not something they usually mention in stories about manufacturers in the US.

[Mudguard]

OK, I just watched the video posted on the IDF english twitter page on what they claimed to have found in the hospital, and so far it's laughable.  Only thing that is shown is the first floor of a building with some MRI machines.  Several grab bags with weapons were allegedly found stashed in random places, like behind the MRI machines, on a random shelf, and in an electrical maintenance closet.  They also claimed to find a Hamas laptop with a stack of CDs in a backpack.  All of this was just randomly found among what looked to be legitimate medical equipment and supplies.  

It's hard to believe that this paltry amount of weapons would be stashed so randomly like that.  It's also hard to believe that anyone would stash metal weapons behind an MRI machine, because as soon as that MRI machine was used, all that metal is going flying.  Obviously, the bags were stashed there after the MRI machine was last used.  Probably all the supplies they found were very recently stashed there.  I would like to see some interviews with the staff of the MRI facilities by a news organization.

I would have thought it would make the most sense leading with the most convincing evidence.  Where are videos of the HQ located in the basement that is connected with the extensive tunnel system?  They claimed they found a command center, which is a big downgrade from an HQ.  Are they calling the MRI building a command center because they found a laptop in a backpack?

 

[Kalbear]

More to the point for me at least - if this is what the IDF is using as justification for bombing places in terms of their legal framework then it is really, really bad. If 4 rusty guns constitutes an armory, if a laptop is a command center, and that is how they can justify targets that kill civilians - that is a massive failure of proportionality. 

Note that this has never been my argument against Israel's bombing campaign, but I know that whether or not something is legal from a warfare is a really important thing for some people.

This, of course, we will almost certainly never actually know. But @Ran, now that you have seen evidence of what Israel is calling armories - have you changed your mind on if their prior behavior should be considered reasonable?