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Israel/Palestine - The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza - ICJ Orders Halt to Israeli Offensive on Rafah - See Staff Posts for Posting Guidelines
- Thread starter B-Dubs
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When someone is referencing this event and says they "support their right to resist," it certainly can come off as saying this event is a legitimate example of resistance and not terrorism and murder. While that certainly doesn't have to be the case, it's probably a good idea to be clear.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of small to medium sized "progressive" groups supporting Hamas by any means necessary. The BLM Chicago Twitter account posted an especially cruel and heinous post that I'm not even really comfortable sharing here.
These groups are then signal boosted by people without good intention to paint the left as a whole as blood thirsty for Jews or those in Israel.
The reality is, most of these accounts and groups are likely run by young, edgy, college-aged extremely online leftists who view the world as very binary. I know this because I've been a young, edgy, college aged leftist.
Are you an adult or a child? Because I assume people here are adults and can gleam context from words. If in the immediate aftermath of Hamas killing civilians by the hundreds you put up a statement defending Palestinians' rights to resist occupation by any means necessary, how do you take that to mean anything other than specific support for rape and murder? Don't be fucking dense, we're all grown ups here.
Ehh, I don't think anyone is keeping track of who and who doesn't get aid. In general lots of the concept of aid that gets thrown around is just reputational laundering. And historically, as been pointed out earlier, if you wanted to make an argument the west = bad this post isn't the worst place considering this conflict boils down to British Empire colonialism and shirking their responsibility to fixing the issues they helped cause by playing both sides. Then walking away when it got too hot to be someone else's problem.
From my limited understanding: The Palestinian Authority is basically an authoritarian regime. They haven't had elections in over a decade. So you have corrupt authoritarians on one side and extremist terrorists on the other. There is no real representation for the people there and I'm not sure what could change that at this point, given the continual boiling point the area is kept at.
Hamas won the last election in 2006. I doubt they'd just give up their power peacefully. Hamas would have to be forcibly removed, possibly the Fatah as well, before anyone even thought about credible democratic elections for a sovereign Palestinian State. Both those parties have a very firm grip on Palestine, in Gaza and the West Bank regions.
Actually, no, probably not. Like, even if you held elections in Gaza right now, the people probably re-elect Hamas.
The reason Hamas has the popular support they have can be boiled down to Israel's death grip on Gaza. Hamas has established a tunnel network that connects them with the outside world, making them basically the major source for anything that Israel is blockading. For example, Israel blockades concrete and other construction materials, which means that after the IDF's basically annual rounds of carpet bombs on Gaza, if you're looking to rebuild what Israel has destroyed, you're probably having to partner with Hamas to do it.
Which is why everyone continues to point out, if you want conditions to improve, Israel absolutely has to relinquish the multi-decade choke hold they've had on Gaza.
Thanks. The typical useful idiots for the far right then. And you're right, I guess a lot of us go through a similar phase at some point. I don't know, most of my friends are pro Palestine but the message is clear in that the solution is in the hands of Israel and the US, Palestine is powerless and the current situation will just keep breeding more and more extremism. It's just obvious.
Hadn't seen this in this thread, sorry if it's a repost. Nothing graphic but distressing nonetheless:
View: https://x.com/Channel4News/status/1711821708993126739?s=20
View: https://x.com/Channel4News/status/1711821708993126739?s=20
Damn this aint it. Isn't that how the massacre at the rave started?
i agree, but that aid has been earmarked for things like drug rehabilitation, homelessness, medicine, shelter, child education, etc iirc. i'm wondering why this aid counts as "never" supporting palestine but other aid around the world counts as aid? support of israel is a discerning factor but doesn't negate the aid and boils off any nuance or complicated history or current events around the region. unless some folks think aid from the west = nothing at all, in which case that is one heck of a statement to make that west = bad in all accounts. the nanosecond that aid is pulled, whomever does it would be labeled a monster and rightfully so (trump waving from the distance).
i missed this but i agree. really hope the nationalist fervor this foments doesn't spill over to a regional war. i appreciate the repeated clarifications here that palestinians =/= hamas and israel =/= idf. it needs to be printed across the sky at this point for the world to see.
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I also want to note that stuff like this:
Is itself very horrible and glib. It's rewriting the events that occurred right before our eyes, asking us to totally ignore the facts on the ground and essentially gaslighting us. They're asking us to ignore reality and whitewash what happened. We know civilians were the primary target and we know the towns attacked were not illegal under international law.
Supporting the Palestinian people is very important, but we shouldn't be whitewashing Hamas to do so. They're bastard coated bastards with bastard filling. Every time they've poke their heads up in the last week it seems like they are determined to make the situation worse and worse, to add to the volatility and get even more people killed.
There's a reason one of the foundational rules in these threads was "don't conflate the average Israeli with the IDF and don't conflate the average Palestinian with Hamas" and it's because they're both horrible organizations.
I actually didn't even read that "letter". I'm not educated enough to participate in this debate so I'm mostly learning
Unfortunately as expected, the stories coming out of Gaza are equally horrifying. I really hope Egypt and/or other countries in the area are doing something to try to evacuate civilians from Gaza to Egypt, because it's clear that Israel doesn't give a fuck.
uhh... our response was the Iraq War. How fitting that Biden voted for it as well.
On the political aspect of it, there's been a big stink in France over the past few days because some leftist politicians had a hard time explicitly condemning Hamas and there was honestly an initial reaction where the Hamas attack was described as Palestine defending itself. And honestly, it shouldn't be hard to make a full throated declaration condemning attacks on civilian populations, like that's the basic fucking minimum of not dehumanizing other people. To be accurate, a large part of the left has more than distanced itself from these positions.
These people usually love citing Bernie as an inspiration, but his declaration was simple, clear and heartfelt. And you know what? He didn't even need to say "what about Gaza" in the same sentence because he's crystal clear about that too the rest of the time.
These people usually love citing Bernie as an inspiration, but his declaration was simple, clear and heartfelt. And you know what? He didn't even need to say "what about Gaza" in the same sentence because he's crystal clear about that too the rest of the time.
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No, the response to 9/11 was the invasion of Afghanistan and the hunt for Bin Laden. Iraq was a whole other thing.
Reading this tweet and then immediately seeing this headline over at ABC has given me whiplash:
Airstrikes kill 150 people in 22 families in Gaza, health ministry says
Ugh, this is reminding me of the blank check Germany gave Austria-Hungary to take action against Serbia
Yeah Iraq was mostly over Sadam Hussein's regime and the "WMD" lie. Not to mention it was two years after the attacks.
This is bad:
View: https://twitter.com/Beltrew/status/1711845178779029604
The assault on Gaza is going to be horrible with Ground Troops. Along with reports that Hezbollah and Iranian Militas want to join 'if' Gaza gets brutal is making this really serious shit.
View: https://twitter.com/Beltrew/status/1711845178779029604
The assault on Gaza is going to be horrible with Ground Troops. Along with reports that Hezbollah and Iranian Militas want to join 'if' Gaza gets brutal is making this really serious shit.
Well arguably Iraq was partially wanting to settle old scores. I mean the popular consicneous blamed "Bad Intelligence" but the Bush Admin was just intoxicated the idea they made shit up to justify their stance.
Right, although I thought war with Iraq was partially and falsely sold to the public as a country harboring al-Qaeda who did 9/11.
No it was all over WMD and the possibility they could give them to terrorists. BS stuff
That dumb as shit "war on terror" helped sell Iraq as part of a larger arc.
Yeah but they aren't completely disconnected. 9/11 is what enabled the Bush administration to easily build enough support to go in with the force they did. Without 9/11 and war on terror propaganda it becomes exponentinally harder to justify tearing up the Middle East with boots on the ground the way they did.
Why are they not seeing this? This is like thinking the Taliban is fighting for a free Afghanistan.
Yeah, according the ADL, there are celebrations and cheer across the US. The antisemetic rhetoric goes way beyond criticism of the Israeli state, and goes deep into dangerous genocidal stereotypes about Jewish people as a ethnicity.
AOC had a good response. You can be critical without doing this crap. This is just insane, on top of what has already in the past 5 years been a never ending surge of antisemitism. It increased under Trump, and then during Covid even more. Conspiracies and Tropes about Jews ruling the world etc are basically mainstream, even I. The western world.
Jews are not a monolith, but are treated as such by many. It's a nationality, an ethnicity and a religion. It gets bundled up and turned into resentment all the time.
Jeeez that is awful. They should come out and say with no wind-twisting that they support what Hamas is doing if that's what they believe instead of couching it in the entirety of the cause of Palestinian people. You can support the cause of Palestinians without supporting the methods of Hamas but by using that specific image it's not very ambiguous what they are doing even if they think it is. And I say "they" but for all I know it's one or a few people running that account, I have no idea. While it might be a fringe thing there are definitely levels to how fringe something is and it looks like this line of thinking is maybe more widespread than I thought even if it's still a small amount of people. These people can't actually care about the well-being of Palestinian people if they think killing civilians is going to have any positive effect.
There were people in the bush admin and allied to it directly after 9/11 pushing the conspiracy theory that Saddam and al Qaeda are linked.
Colin Powell in addressing the U.N. Security Council he made several claims about Iraq's ties to terrorist and later Powell acknowledged in January 2004 that the speech presented no hard evidence of collaboration between Saddam and al-Qaeda; he told reporters at a State Department press conference that
"I have not seen smoking gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I do believe the connections existed"
Stephen F Hayes wrote a book called "The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America"
Colin Powell in addressing the U.N. Security Council he made several claims about Iraq's ties to terrorist and later Powell acknowledged in January 2004 that the speech presented no hard evidence of collaboration between Saddam and al-Qaeda; he told reporters at a State Department press conference that
"I have not seen smoking gun, concrete evidence about the connection, but I do believe the connections existed"
Stephen F Hayes wrote a book called "The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America"
The West made this offer in 2006. Palestine held a democratic election. The underlying system was a parliamentary republic with parallel voting (used in countries like Japan and Italy). International observers widely concluded that it was a reasonably fair and open election. Hamas won a commanding majority in the legislature with a plurality (44%) of the popular vote. That is comparable to the government's popular vote percentage in Italy's last general election (43%) and vastly more than Japan's (35%).
The US and Israel immediately sponsored a coup against the Hamas government, which drove them out of the West Bank.
Iran will not get involved officially (only through proxy) because they risk the ire of the US.
Yeah it sounds like the breach was more "successful" than they anticipated and the lack of resistance from IDF meant no inhibitions
This are ignorant kids. Hamas is a tool of Israeli's far right used to help ensure that Palestinian's are never free. Netanyahu is getting what he paid for.
I can see why ignorant college kids might think that this is a step towards a free Palestine- because violence is a factor in EVERY successful freedom movement. But Hamas has inarguably pushed the finish line much further away than it would have been otherwise.
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I hope there is shred of rationality left. War between Iran and Israel would have been devastating for the whole region.
In a strictly Israrel vs Iran context, it would be an air war only, since you have to pass through two other countries to travel between them. Israel has done limited airstrikes in Iran before but even that is a bit tricky to perform logistically.
Escalation is a risk so long as the siege/occupation/purging of Gaza continues, hard to say if Iran would get directly involved but it may not have to.
Israel has already killed 260 children and 230 women, a number will likely be 10s of thousands by the time these butchers are done. Good thing Biden and the rest of the west are willing to rubberstamp what's going to be a massacre that puts anything Hamas has ever done to shame by the time Israel is satisfied.
Unlikely at the start due to the two American carriers in the area whose whole purpose is to deter that.
It takes a special type of derangement to conflate freedom fighting and liberation with authoritarian bigots who just murdered, raped, and mutilated a heap of innocents.
Take a look at Gaza on Google maps. It's ridiculously densely populated - any ground incursion there by Israel is going to be an absolute bloodbath. There is no way they can go in there and meaningfully achieve any goals beyond indiscriminate massacre...which I fear is their aim.
Speaking of academia and supporting Hamas - this tweet is so spot on for me
View: https://twitter.com/MeyerLabin/status/1711787697868595347?t=G849JD8cWvXXX4Wi9Ihvsw&s=19
View: https://twitter.com/MeyerLabin/status/1711787697868595347?t=G849JD8cWvXXX4Wi9Ihvsw&s=19
Likely didn't put a ton of thought into it, or maybe they did and they were getting the reaction they wanted?
Part of the reason there isn't a viable alternative in Gaza is the failure of the peace process in the early 2000s to achieve a two state solution. As far as the international community was concerned, the whole thing was to be put into the "too hard" basket after that.
Fatah, the party who has control in the West Bank today, was once the authority for all the Palestinian territories. But it was undermined by the failure of this peace process (as well as their own incompetence and corruption) and Hamas rose because they had an alternative vision of violent resistance and retaliation against Israel.
This also sort of suited Israel since they made a good boogeyman (check out reporting this week from Israel papers like Haaretz on how Netanyahu and Likud viewed Hamas as useful foils as they were so radical) and because Israel believed it could keep them weak enough to stop them from doing any real damage.
I think the de facto plan from the international community post 2006 that was to let Israel do what it wanted; keep Gaza bottled up and slowly assimilate the West Bank via settlements, and the problem would somehow work itself out even though millions of Palestinians were left in legal and political limbo as stateless, dispossessed refugees.
But as it turns out, Israel did not have as good a handle on the situation as everyone thought. Hamas was stronger than they thought. Israel was fragmented and unprepared.
So now Israel is striking back against Gaza because of Hamas' slaughter of its civilians, and part of the rage and fury here is the frustration that the issue isn't solved at all, the Palestinian political issue is still live and nobody with any power anywhere in the world is articulating an actual way to end the conflict, they are caught up in the escalation of violence that follows a surprise terror attack.
I'm reading up on the latest before I sleep.
I'm seeing truly awful tweets stating reports of horrific acts on babies.
...are there and credence to these reports?
I'm seeing truly awful tweets stating reports of horrific acts on babies.
...are there and credence to these reports?