this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 136 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's heartbreaking seeing shell shocked children covered in dust and blood or parents weeping for their dead kids. There is no sanctuary for these people. Then Israelis call them "human animals" while claiming to be the "most moral army in the world" without any sense of shame. They are depraved.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (15 children)

You saw the shell shocked kid? That was horrific. If you watch that video and still support Israel you are a sociopath. Here is the kid.

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[–] [email protected] 131 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yes, its quite obvious to everyone that has no power in the world.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (2 children)

With how often we, the United States, shove our fingers into every whisper of a conflict I'm shocked that we're not only involved in this conflict (by proxy, not for reals, take that international courts) but somehow ended up on the wrong side of it. It's like it wasn't enough to just be helpless, we had to add a whole extra layer.

[–] Grandwolf319 21 points 10 months ago (4 children)

It’s really weird when considering the Ukraine situation. For a moment I thought US was just doing the right thing. Nope, they just are anti Russian, not necessarily pro Ukraine.

[–] SuddenDownpour 17 points 10 months ago

Use the opportunity to take this lesson to heart: the vast majority of governments only choose their geopolitical behavior depending on their own self-interest. The cases where countries sacrifice anything remotely significant for the sake of taking ethical decisions are rare and few. They will only change this attitude if the general public demands it to the point of them risking losing power.

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[–] [email protected] 112 points 10 months ago (17 children)

The only thing I think of with this conflict is the Doctor Who speech on war:

Because it's not a game, Kate. This is a scale model of war. Every war ever fought right there in front of you. Because it's always the same. When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who's going to die. You don't know who's children are going to scream and burn. How many hearts will be broken! How many lives shattered! How much blood will spill until everybody does what they're always going to have to do from the very beginning -- sit down and talk! 

[–] Ashyr 26 points 10 months ago (2 children)

A beautiful sentiment, but sometimes it's about forcing people to sit and talk who wouldn't otherwise do so. It's rare, but the US civil war was an unfortunate necessity.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Everybody just needs to sit in a room and do Molly together. No war. Just massage.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Yes; Ultimately, there will be an agreement at the negotiation table.

But as long as there is a disagreement over where that final line will be drawn ...

As long as one party thinks they can get a better result on the battlefield ...

The fighting will continue.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:


An Israeli historian and Holocaust scholar has called how Israel is treating Palestinians in Gaza "a textbook case of genocide."

Israel's official account on X, formerly known as Twitter, said: "Unlike the barbaric enemy we are fighting, we do everything we can to keep innocent civilians safe."

"This dehumanizing language is clearly calculated to justify the wide scale destruction of Palestinian lives; the assertion of 'evil,' in its absolutism, elides distinctions between Hamas militants and Gazan civilians, and occludes the broader context of colonization and occupation," he wrote.

that the attack by Hamas was "a horrendous war crime," but using the term "evil" to describe the militant group is to "decontextualize" and "enhance the widespread fantasies of Israelis today that they're fighting Nazis."

He referred to a recent television interview where former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett lashed out at an anchor for asking about the Palestinian civilians suffering in Gaza by declaring, "We're fighting Nazis."

There is a "long history" of this "shameful use of Holocaust memory, which Israeli politicians have used to justify, rationalize, deny, distort, disavow mass violence against Palestinians," Segal said.


The original article contains 795 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 49 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 66 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] can 48 points 10 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 36 points 10 months ago (25 children)

How quickly we forget history. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself come a villain.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 10 months ago

That quote is so stupid. Not everyone is inevitably fated to turn to evil. Sure, humanity is inherently evil, but we can make the choice to be better than that.

And that's assuming heroism is morally good and villainy bad anyway, and I have serious beef with that assumption.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I'm really impressed that Newsweek would publish thi.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 10 months ago (1 children)

They only could publish it because the Holocaust scholar is Jewish. In the current media zeitgeist the only people who can criticize the Israeli government are Jews. Nobody else can say anything. Which is part of the current problem, nobody's able to critique or criticize the actions of the Israeli government without being labeled as anti-Semitic in the West.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

I think a lot of people are going to wake up to this hypocrisy. I've seen more open criticism of Israel during this conflict than at any time before, which is quite surprising.

Turns out that in the 24/7 media ecosystem we now live in, it has become much more difficult to frame yourself as a permanent victim class while also commiting heinous atrocities in an asymmetrical fashion.

Plus after the "War on Terror" the appetite for another Middle Eastern quagmire is quite limited. The backlash from the general public if the United States were to be dragged into this conflict, beyond throwing money at it as a show of diplomatic support, would be swift and severe.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It went a similar way with South African apartheid. It took decades of things getting worse before the rest of the world even took notice - the first segregation laws were passed in 1908. It was first 40 years later the official Apartheid laws came into force. In the 1960's, more than half a century after segregation started, the ANC gave up being peaceful. In the late 70's they went from sabotage to starting to kill people. In the 1980's ANC was consider a terrorist organization by the US and UK governments, and in 1987 Mandela was explicitly called a terrorist by Thatcher.

In 1990 the regime gave in.

Because the pressure had finally built to an unsustainable level, despite the fact that just a few years prior some of the most powerful countries in the world were still calling their main opponents terrorists.

This, by the way, is not intended to compare Hamas with ANC; ANC did also carry out terror, but not at nearly that scale, and of what they did carry out it's unclear which parts of the leadership approved what

The point is the timescale. How long it took before people started giving more than lip service to turning their back to an Apartheid regime that had gotten worse for their entire lives while they ignored the oppression, and how rapidly it snowballed once it first became accepted to turn your back on the regime, and then expected, and then a necessity to prevent people from turning their backs on you.

I agree with you there's more open criticism of Israel this time. In part, I think because there's been a slow drip of increasingly prominent organisations applying the Apartheid label in recent years from sources that are harder and harder to dismiss, and particularly the slowly growing acceptance that Gaza and the West Bank functions as bantustans. It makes it harder to just shout down critics.

And this can, and likely will, turn really fast once things truly starts to accelerate. A couple of big PR missteps and Israel will risk the opposition to BDS crumbling as well, and then the regime will be well and truly fucked.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (19 children)
The people in charge of both sides are evil.
Picking sides in this fight is like
    picking sides in fucking Game of Thrones.
[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (13 children)

It's not a complex argument. Israel is an apartheid, Jews only state, set up on land stolen from its indigenous people. Nothing equivocal about it. And they have been terrorizing, murdering, torturing, starving, imprisoning and humiliating them ever since. And there is a huge extremely well funded lobby in the US ensuring that things like what just happened, with Biden pledging 100 billion dollars of taxpayer money to Israel to keep doing what they are doing, which is genocide, keep happening.

Zero equivalence, the basic concept of Israel is pure, 100% apartheid. Don't you dare say "six of one, half a dozen of the other," not close at all, not even in the same universe!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And Hamas is a peaceful group of protestors that totally didn't invade Israel with the sole purpose of slaughtering as many civilians as possible.

Both sides suck in this conflict, and the civilians suffer for it.

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[–] Grandwolf319 11 points 10 months ago

Idk man, I think hot pie should have been king.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (8 children)

I fucking hate that argument. It's the same kind of mentality that says there is a 50% change of raining tomorrow, because either it rains, or it doesn't.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

This is a continuation of the crusades to 75% of those involved. I'm surprised nobody is framing it universally like that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

It's the #AllLivesMatter take for the middle east

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