Israel - Hamas war XIII

[polishgenius]

22 minutes ago, GrimTuesday said:

This idea that liberation can only be undertaken by perfect victims, needs to be dispelled

Good job I didn't say that then. The idea that it's a choice between peaceful victimhood and genocide is fucking wild. In fact the language you're using is the exact same as Israel is using to justify their atrocities- 'we have to do what we're doing. What, you expect us to do nothing?'. It's not either/or. You're selling us genocide propaganda.

 

Comparing Hamas to the South African fight against apartheid is just disturbing.

[Jace, Extat]

Dawg... 

I mean, really just 

But there it is, y'know? There. 

It.  

Is. 

And that's how liberals wrapped all the way around the political spectrosphere to emerge making defiant speeches on behalf of the dignity and defensibility of Hamas. 

Splendid. 

The kids aren't all right. 

[karaddin]

I could understand calling them "ostensibly liberator", or "supposedly", "theoretically" or any of a number of qualifiers that make it clear you're talking about the idea that's meant to be behind them rather than it being the idea that they actually serve.

It is what they are meant to be, and I think it's important to remember that when discussing any support they receive from regular civilians.

But it's not who or that they are, and they've had ample time as the government of Gaza (in as much as the Gazan government has been allowed to act as an actual government which is very limited) to demonstrate it's not who they are, that their priority is not the well being of the Palestinian people who are alive right now. The absolute best case interpretation is that they're sacrificing all the current living Palestinians for the "better future" they think they will have after an inexplicable total victory. And that best case is still fucking reprehensible.

So I can understand wanting baseline support for Hamas to be interpreted as "support for the idea of liberation", but I can't understand thinking it's actually what they are. I can definitely understand why framing them like that is offensive to some and seems counter productive to others.

[GrimTuesday]

15 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Good job I didn't say that then. The idea that it's a choice between peaceful victimhood and genocide is fucking wild. In fact the language you're using is the exact same as Israel is using to justify their atrocities- 'we have to do what we're doing. What, you expect us to do nothing?'. It's not either/or. You're selling us genocide propaganda.

 

Comparing Hamas to the South African fight against apartheid is just disturbing.

I'm not saying you said that, I'm explaining my thought process as to what language I use. I do not agree with the methods that Hamas uses, but I do believe that it has to be placed in to the proper context of a broader movement for liberation. Hamas and its violent actions are an inevitable and condemnable part of a liberatory movement, but it is an outgrowth of the suffering of Palestinians and the only way to stop it is to understand what is fueling the rage that drives people to commit acts of such inhumanity and addressing it.

As for this idea that I'm selling genocide propaganda, I (of course) disagree. No where have I ever said that Hamas should be allowed to conduct unlimited acts of violence on Israeli civilians, nor have I ever advocated for the removal of Jews from Israel. You are correct that it is not a binary between peaceful victimhood and genocide, but I don't believe I have advocated for such and if something I wrote came off as advocating for such a perspective, that was not my intention.  That said, I can admit that perhaps I am being a bit hard headed here. Seeing the ghoulish things coming from the pro-Israel side of things (not on here necessarily, even those I disagree with here pale in comparison) absolutely has me digging my heels in more so than I normally would lately.

South Africa obviously isn't a 1 to 1 comparison, my point is that once a liberatory/revolutionary movement has reached it's goals, the violence that was involved is forgotten. South Africa is a good example of one where basically everyone agrees that it was the right and just outcome, but some fucked up shit happened on the side of the ANC. Despite that, the broader popular memory only focuses on the fact that apartheid ended and never looks at what it took to end it.

[TheKitttenGuard]

4 hours ago, Jace, Extat said:

Dawg... 

I mean, really just 

But there it is, y'know? There. 

It.  

Is. 

And that's how liberals wrapped all the way around the political spectrosphere to emerge making defiant speeches on behalf of the dignity and defensibility of Hamas. 

Splendid. 

The kids aren't all right. 

No, Liberals are cheering Israel's Right to Defense, reaffirming, and redouble every tenant of the War on Terror and Gaza will be the new standard.

The problem is not Hamas whether is a Terrorist or Liberation organization, there is a quote for that, it is after 20 years does merely stating something is a terror organization permit to ignore all International and Human Rights Laws. How long will Liberals be affirming it. For some it but for most it has not.

 

[mormont]

2 hours ago, GrimTuesday said:

South Africa obviously isn't a 1 to 1 comparison, my point is that once a liberatory/revolutionary movement has reached it's goals, the violence that was involved is forgotten. South Africa is a good example of one where basically everyone agrees that it was the right and just outcome, but some fucked up shit happened on the side of the ANC. Despite that, the broader popular memory only focuses on the fact that apartheid ended and never looks at what it took to end it.

I've said before that South Africa is an extremely poor comparison, in fact. But it's worse when you elide the sequence of events. Because the ANC did indeed do some fucked up shit, but they stopped doing that before the struggle ended. In fact it was a key part of their success. The 'fucked up shit' was not 'what it took' to end apartheid in South Africa. The reverse is true.

[GrimTuesday]

6 minutes ago, mormont said:

I've said before that South Africa is an extremely poor comparison, in fact. But it's worse when you elide the sequence of events. Because the ANC did indeed do some fucked up shit, but they stopped doing that before the struggle ended. In fact it was a key part of their success. The 'fucked up shit' was not 'what it took' to end apartheid in South Africa. The reverse is true.

You're right, I should have something more in line with "the broader popular memory only focuses on the fact that apartheid ended and never looks at the horrible things that those we consider to be the good guys did as part of the struggle to end it". This does not mean violence was vital to the struggle, but it was undeniably part of it.

Of course, I also want to make it clear that I don't think violence can ever achieve a lasting peace. At some point, Hamas and the other Palestinian groups will have to lay down their arms and diplomacy must be the path forward, but we all know that will never happen so long as Israel continues on as it has not just for the last two months, but for at least the last 25 years or so.

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

13 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

We have seen basically every member of the current government of Gaza calling for the ethnic cleansing of Israel, but of course, they're not fringe figures like this random person who represents no one. 

The small figures in the far right U.S. were being openly enabled by many public figures. It would be foolish, IMHO, to ignore how the right wing Israeli coalition government, which includes far right parties, is likewise enabling this sort of rhetoric and behavior.  

Edited December 22, 2023 by Matrim Fox Cauthon

[Jace, Extat]

2 hours ago, TheKitttenGuard said:

 

The problem is not Hamas whether is a Terrorist or Liberation organization, 

 

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doctor-who-treated-freed-hamas-hostages-describes-physical-sexual-and-psychological-abuse/

[Jace, Extat]

Grim, for God's sake listen to yourself! You are literally arguing that ends justify means, and if not nobody will remember anyway. Dude, that's your argument! The classic argument of those who engage in political violence. 

 

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

3 minutes ago, Jace, Extat said:

You are literally arguing that ends justify means, and if not nobody will remember anyway. Dude, that's your argument! The classic argument of those who engage in political violence. 

Ironic. This is precisely the problematic tone and rhetoric of people who seem unperturbed and dismissive by the mass political violence that the IDF is committing against Palestinian civilians. There are a people here who regard the disproportionately high civilian death toll as a justifiable means to their ends of defeating Hamas. Palestinian civilians are treated as sub-humans whose expendable lives are not worth preserving in the interest of achieving "greater ends." 

[Jace, Extat]

The deaths of non-combatants is not a means to Israel, it is an unfortunate byproduct of modern weapons of war in dense population centers. 

You've lost or ignored the ability to see the difference between organized barbarism and collateral damage.

[kissdbyfire]

23 minutes ago, Jace, Extat said:

Grim, for God's sake listen to yourself! You are literally arguing that ends justify means, and if not nobody will remember anyway. Dude, that's your argument! The classic argument of those who engage in political violence. 

 

I didn’t take @GrimTuesday’s argument to be a defence of the ends justifying the means, but more a statement of fact, as in, violence does happen often not only within what are clearly terrorist organisations but also in movements that, at certain points, engaged in violence but that, with time, were not remembered for the violent acts of their past. I’m not sure I understood them correctly, but that was what I took from what they said. 

12 minutes ago, Matrim Fox Cauthon said:

Ironic. This is precisely the problematic tone and rhetoric of people who seem unperturbed and dismissive by the mass political violence that the IDF is committing against Palestinian civilians. There are a people here who regard the disproportionately high civilian death toll as a justifiable means to their ends of defeating Hamas. Palestinian civilians are treated as sub-humans whose expendable lives are not worth preserving in the interest of achieving "greater ends." 

This. And whenever it is called out, it immediately becomes “oh you’re defending Hamas”. It’s incomprehensible to be that so many who can see clearly the danger Hamas poses not only to Jews and Israelis but also Palestinians seem to be incapable of seeing how this Israeli government poses just as much of a threat for its own people and Palestinians and the stability of the whole Middle East b/c of how Netanyahu & co. are conducting this war. They are, as Hayes said, applying the type of moral logic that one would expect from a terrorist organisation, not a legitimate democracy. Netanyahu and his far-right goons are conducting this war as if their main goal is the suffering of Palestinians, when it should be the safety and well-being of Israelis.

[mormont]

2 hours ago, GrimTuesday said:

You're right, I should have something more in line with "the broader popular memory only focuses on the fact that apartheid ended and never looks at the horrible things that those we consider to be the good guys did as part of the struggle to end it". This does not mean violence was vital to the struggle, but it was undeniably part of it.

Of course, I also want to make it clear that I don't think violence can ever achieve a lasting peace. At some point, Hamas and the other Palestinian groups will have to lay down their arms and diplomacy must be the path forward, but we all know that will never happen so long as Israel continues on as it has not just for the last two months, but for at least the last 25 years or so.

This is better but still flawed.

The fact is, the ANC made serious progress only when they laid down their arms. Every time you bring up South Africa, what you're actually doing is supporting the case of those who say that Hamas should do the same.

Now, I think they should, but I also understand that this is, for the hundredth time, not South Africa. The ANC (and the IRA in the UK) had to disarm as a prerequisite to engaging in diplomacy. But they could do that because those who saw that this was the path, could see potential partners in the other camp who would work with them if they disarmed. And they could use that as a lever to get their colleagues to agree to disarm.

No such situation exists in Israel. There is no reason to believe that any Israeli politician will treat in good faith with Hamas or any other Palestinian group whether or not they disarm, even behind the scenes. We can get into the reasons for that, and they are many and include but are not limited to what happened on October 7th: this was the case even before that atrocity. But my time is limited so I'll skip it. The point is, diplomacy isn't on the table right now, so the analogy to the ANC is not just flawed but actively harmful.

[polishgenius]

1 hour ago, GrimTuesday said:

You're right, I should have something more in line with "the broader popular memory only focuses on the fact that apartheid ended and never looks at the horrible things that those we consider to be the good guys did as part of the struggle to end it". This does not mean violence was vital to the struggle, but it was undeniably part of it.

 

 

The main problem with the comparison, for me, is that the ANC and Mandela were never about throwing all the white people out of South Africa, or killing them all. I mean, I'm sure you could find someone saying that, but it wasn't anything like an aim or policy of theirs even in their violence. 

 

The issue people are having with claiming Hamas are freedom fighters is that that is not their aim. It's pushing all the Jews out, or killing them. Sure, that will have the effect of independence, but if they got independence that meant they still shared the land with the Israelis that would not fulfill their aim. That is why their attacks are not things that might materially damage Israel-the-nation - they're just to kill people.

 

 

On the other hand: 

 

5 minutes ago, Jace, Extat said:

The deaths of non-combatants is not a means to Israel, it is an unfortunate byproduct of modern weapons of war in dense population centers. 

 

Nah, I cannot buy that the amount of civilian casualties we're seeing is the only possible way to approach this. No, Israel officially doesn't want to wipe the Palestinians out of Gaza, but not all of them give a shit if they do.

[Zorral]

The majority women and children.  The majority Hamas leadership is just fine though, so it might just be said this was for nothing except, well cruelty, perhaps, in order to force who ever remains living of the Palestinians to go somewhere, anywhere else, even, as even within Gaza itself, there is nowhere for them to go. Kind of a good reason that Palestinians might think of themselves as needing 'liberation" perhaps.

More than 20,000 dead in Gaza, a historic human toll

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/22/gaza-israel-war-20000-dead/

Quote

 

.... The Gaza Health Ministry said early Friday that 20,057 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli strikes since Oct. 7.

The number of deaths is far higher than in any conflict in Gaza in recent history. And it is higher than the estimated 15,000 Palestinians killed in the violence that followed the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Palestinians call that mass displacement the Nakba, or “the catastrophe.” ....

.... War makes counting the dead difficult. The Gaza Health Ministry paused its death toll updates last month, citing communication outages and a lack of access to besieged hospitals, but later resumed counting.

While the United Nations often releases its own counts after a conflict, in Gaza it is relying for now on numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry, given the information available. U.N. officials have said they see no reason to doubt the figures, but acknowledge that the numbers could prove inaccurate for practical reasons.

At a meeting of the World Health Organization’s executive board, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus cited the Gaza Health Ministry figures and suggested they could actually be an undercount.

“We don’t know how many are buried under the rubble of their homes,” said Tedros, who leads a U.N. agency that works directly with the Gaza Health Ministry.

The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, has seen 134 members of its staff working in Gaza killed since Oct. 7, said William Deere, the agency’s representative in Washington.

A team of academic experts in health data at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health studied the number of deaths of U.N. staff in Gaza and used the data to estimate whether the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll was being inflated.

They found “no evidence” of inflated mortality in the data, the experts wrote in a letter published in the Lancet medical journal earlier this month. ....

 

 

[Matrim Fox Cauthon]

8 minutes ago, Zorral said:

The majority women and children.  The majority Hamas leadership is just fine though, so it might just be said this was for nothing except, well cruelty, perhaps, in order to force who ever remains living of the Palestinians to go somewhere, anywhere else, even, as even within Gaza itself, there is nowhere for them to go. Kind of a good reason that Palestinians might think of themselves as needing 'liberation" perhaps.

More than 20,000 dead in Gaza, a historic human toll

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/22/gaza-israel-war-20000-dead/

This is the part of the song and dance routine where people dismiss these numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry as Hamas-run propaganda. 

[Rippounet]

43 minutes ago, Jace, Extat said:

You've lost or ignored the ability to see the difference between organized barbarism and collateral damage.

Yes, some people here definitely have.

[Zorral]

War crimes, babee, war crimes.

During the first six weeks of the war in Gaza, Israel routinely used one of its biggest and most destructive bombs in areas it designated safe for civilians, according to an analysis of visual evidence by The New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-bomb-investigation.html

Quote

.... The video investigation focuses on the use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area of southern Gaza where Israel had ordered civilians to move for safety. While bombs of that size are used by several Western militaries, munitions experts say they are almost never dropped by U.S. forces in densely populated areas anymore. ....

 

[TheKitttenGuard]

2 hours ago, Jace, Extat said:

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/doctor-who-treated-freed-hamas-hostages-describes-physical-sexual-and-psychological-abuse/

None of which, in the end, justify what Israel is doing throughout Gaza. 

The gunning down of three hostages by the IDF is the most recent example that the hostages more important for propaganda purposes then being any actually priority.