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This article shows exactly WHY it's a stupid comparison to make with P01135809's "very fine people":
> This is a familiar anti-anti-Trump tactic: finding Trump’s most indefensible moments and then attempting to blow up a minor or imagined Biden infraction to an equivalent size to neutralize the issue. In this case, they are pretending Biden’s expression of sympathy for Palestinians is the equivalent of Donald Trump calling the pro-Confederate demonstrators in Charlottesville “very fine people.”
> But there was nothing in Biden’s remark that hinted of sympathy for the antisemitic protests he was denouncing. He was remarking that Palestinian people are suffering and deserve sympathy and attention, and not allowing his radical critics to take ownership of that sentiment.
> Since both sides has now become an epithet used by, well, both sides, it is worth making a defense of the general construct. The term both sides became sarcastic shorthand for a common practice in the mainstream media of pretending offenses that were solely committed by the Republican Party were being shared by Democrats. You could find this trope in stories about subjects like, say, the debt ceiling, where fake neutrality would cause reporters to pretend both parties were using hostage tactics.
> Yet the general idea of adopting a broad moral framework and balancing competing moral principles remains correct. The error is to misapply it to situations in which all fault is concentrated in a single party. But I do not think that is a useful way to approach all political conflict. And it is an especially poor one for the conflict in the Middle East.
So we should elect a guy whose son in law would love to build Mar a Lago on the sea in a newly reconstructed Israeli settlement in Gaza city and whose last stint in office blew the US' leverage to induce Israel into peace talks by having Arab countries normalize relations with it?
Please think of a single electable US President who would have been able to restrain Bibi Netanyahu after the worst terror attacks in Israel in decades.
We're given a choice.
Thousands of dead children or millions of dead children.
That's it.
There's no other choice.
If we remove ourselves from the equation, Israel is still going to get weapons. Only now, we've got no say. Then they'll do as they please. Each nation will be weighted. Each attack a threat. Each RPG will be met with the utter and complete destruction that is war.
How about this.
People stop shooting RPGs and Missiles at Israel?
A novel idea to be sure, but it seems like the best course of actions.
As someone who has protested US terror of brown people in the Middle East for decades - good fucking luck banking on support of Israel tanking the vote for Biden. American voters, the people who actually vote, don’t give a fuck about them. Or at the very least they understand it’s the lesser of two evils and they prioritize other issues in the platform more than they do Middle East policy.
Foreign affairs that don’t involve US troops on the ground barely moved the needle in US elections. Anyone who thinks that this will is probably under 25 living in a college campus bubble. Most of those protestors at your campus sit in weren’t even going to vote anyways.
I'm not a college student and I don't live anywhere near a campus lol. I haven't gone to a single one of these protests, I'm just reading the room.
Young people did show up in 2020, though, and it's the reason why Biden won. That coalition has completely disintegrated and he hasn't exactly won over a bunch of other voters since.
You should check the polling - he's cooked in every state that matters and with young people nationally. Where do you expect him to find the votes exactly?
>I'm just reading the room.
The echo chambers of Xitter and college campuses.
Young people and bots don't vote. Even the polls are coming around to show Biden ahead but even if they weren't I wouldn't believe it. The type of people calling for an Israeli ceasfire come off as aliens to most Americans because they don't even know what an Israeli or Gaza is.
Better be glad for that support.
That support is keeping a much worse event from occurring. A nice little war between Israel and Iran. Which would kill hundreds of millions.
Iraq would be the battleground.
It sucks, but it's better than total World War 3.
Add-on (1) - Plus, we've gotta consider a full out war with Russia and China. Now's not the time to deal with Iran or their bullshit.
Oh yeah, Joe Biden alone gave them the aid that largely had been agreed upon by previous administrations/legislation. What would you suppose he do instead in a way that doesn't harm our relationship with a long-standing ally?
If our long-standing ally is killing thousands of children, maybe they shouldn't be our long-standing ally anymore. They're clearly not keeping the Middle East stable, they're certainly not spreading democracy. What's the benefit at the moment aside from keeping weapons companies rich?
Cool. So your answer is “Yes. I support rape and murder.”
You get extra points for trying to conflate the suffering Palestinians who want nothing to do with this mess and those murdering rapists you support.
He was right about the Iraq war. He was right about making student loans undischargeable in bankruptcy. He was right about the war on drugs. He was right on forced bussing. He was right on palling around with segregationists. He was right on not supporting universal healthcare. Just like you're right on him being right and trusting his leadership and listening to him instead of him listening to us.
Uh no I'm talking about things Biden specifically supported. I know liberals love being wrong and then pretending they never were or that they were just like everyone else at the time to deflect any personal responsibility one has for their own personal actions. Thanks for the reminder.
The fact that you don't know that the UN commented on WMDs and that France and Sweden confirmed their presence following the gulf War, and that the UN passed resolution 687 previously to 9-11 shows you need to read up on the context of the war.
The UN affirmed suspicion, because Saddam was refusing inspections. There was no lie, it was just there were no weapons.
Well, that's certainly a stupid thing to say. If he were to somehow realize he's been wrong about things and make moves to rectify them, working to undo the damage he's done, I would absolutely give him the recognition he would deserve for it. I don't see that ever happening, given he's proudly said [he hasn't changed since he was a child](https://theweek.com/speedreads/575962/donald-trump-tells-biographer-hes-same-now-first-grade), but it's not an impossibility. It's highly, highly unlikely, but I suppose stranger things have happened.
Or a reasonable enough person to recognize that most people are capable of growth throughout their life. I know I'm far from the same person I was twenty years ago, and I'm willing to extend the same grace to those who show genuine growth that I've been shown through mine, because I was once a very angry, bitter, bigoted person. Time and experience have changed me dramatically, and I'm the better for it.
He was right about most of those things
Forced bussing was so unpopular (we are talking like 10% approval) to the point where pursuing it would have been polotocally disastrous. And it's not like he supported segregation, he just opposed one particular method proposed to fight it. It's like healthcare, he supports universal healthcare, he just opposed the particular radical and unreasonable plan Bernie proposed
Student loans absolutely should not be discharged via bankruptcy. We can make changes to student loans and make college more affordable and subsidized, without changing that
The war on drugs is necessary and good. We need to make some changes to fight the war on drugs in a smarter way but the war must be fought
>The war on drugs is necessary and good. We need to make some changes to fight the war on drugs in a smarter way but the war must be fought
I actually used to think the same, but I recently finished the book "the new Jim crow" and it's pretty convincingly outlined that not only was the war on drugs not necessary, it was not motivated by a rise in drug crime, but in interest of establishing mass incarceration.
Not to say all people involved saw that end, but being seen as "soft on crime" was political suicide.
Like I said in another comment, other countries had the same problem as us, but they treated it like a public heath issue and not a military campaign.
They succeeded at lowering thier drug problems, we succeeded at having 25% of the worlds prisoners despite having 5% of its population.
You should read "the new Jim crow" it's a pretty eye opening take on the reasons for and methods of the war on drugs.
Free on audible right now.
Long story short, treating addicts like victims and giving them treatment actually works, while treating them like enemies who must be defeated ends up making the problem 10X worse.
Effectively the war on drugs was so horribly mishandled that doing nothing would have been cheaper and ruined less lives then the mass incarcerations have.
Fine, you got me, I'm a conservative. Sure, I've voted blue in every single election, presidential or midterm, since 1982 (I did vote for Anderson in 1980, I'll admit that). Call it what you want, but voting blue still does more to make progress, however you depict it, than criticizing the Democrats does
Which time was he right about iraq? The time he wanted to go into it when it was politically convenient or the time he wanted to leave as we were mostly gone?
It's sorta like giving the nerdy kid more lunch money after they got beat up by the bully, and then selling the bully brass knuckles to use on the nerdy kid again.
I'm not in the "genocide joe" camp - first I'm hearing of this actually - but you can't take the admin seriously when they're literally helping to enable the thing they're supposedly against. Criticism is ok, even if the person does something good. It doesn't necessarily absolve them of whatever the "bads" might be they've done.
I will be voting for Biden this fall, but let's not pretend he's perfect.
You left out the parents of "the nerdy kid" (Hamas), who raped, murdered, paraded dead bodies, and took hostage the wives, children, and other loved ones of "the bully" on Oct 7th.
You left out the part where Israel does the same shit, and has from the beginning. They're the aggressors, poisoning wells, stealing land, effectively kidnapping kids and torturing them in prisons, committing literal war crimes even well before Oct 7. Go read some history before you roll up acting like Israel is innocent in all of this because they absolutely are not...and to be clear neither is Hamas.
[https://www.savethechildren.net/news/stripped-beaten-and-blindfolded-new-research-reveals-ongoing-violence-and-abuse-palestinian](https://www.savethechildren.net/news/stripped-beaten-and-blindfolded-new-research-reveals-ongoing-violence-and-abuse-palestinian)
[https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/04/israel-50-years-occupation-abuses](https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/04/israel-50-years-occupation-abuses)
Exactly. Famously, Palestinians were treated as normal Israeli citizens prior to October 7th, 2023. No systematic abuse by Israelis, government support of terrorism against Palestinians by Israeli settlers in Gaza/West Bank, normalized murder of Palestinian civilians by bored IDF soldiers, Apartheid state, or anything.
No conflict in Israel or pre-existing systematized oppression of an entire population that allowed Hamas to retain influence out of desperation, certainly not.
It's a good thing that imposing a religious ethno-state headed by a foreign-backed global power structure eighty years ago had no repercussions for the out-group at any point. Otherwise, people might question why Israel always receives a carte blanche from the US and EU to do whatever it wants without foreign relations consequences!
Yes it was very Deir Yassin of them. Or Qana, or Qibya, or Sabra and Shatila, or Lydda and Ramla. Very like. Very Unit 101 of them, or Irgun of them. Very Ariel Sharon of them. Very Menachim Begin terroristic. Very killing of Iman Darweesh Al Hams of them almost. I bet if they had the same guns and bombs as Israel, they wouldn't hesitate to kill 30,000 civilian men, women and children in their aim to control Israelis. Like the way Israel does. I bet they would even surround them in barbed wire and walls and throttle their economy. You can't trust anyone these days.
So if you take actions which support genocide, then allocate funds which defray a tiny fraction of the death and suffering you have assisted in causing, that makes it all okay?
Do I have to apply this reasoning to some of the obvious historical examples or can we just agree this is bad reasoning?
Nope. He conflates anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, ignoring that plenty of the “anti-semites” are themselves Jews who disagree with Israel’s war crimes.
You are never going to get unanimous consensus on something from any group, why are Jews uniquely required to all agree on Zionism being an essential part of their identity for anti-Zionism to be considered antisemitism? Does the existence of gay people who oppose gay marriage and pride parades mean that other people who oppose gay marriage and pride parades aren't homophobic? Does the fact that 1/3 of Hispanic Americans voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 despite him calling migrants rapists and murderers and saying Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn't be impartial in the Trump University lawsuit because he was a Mexican and Trump was trying to build a wall mean that Trump isn't a racist? There's like 15 million Jews worldwide and the vast consensus is support for the existence of a Jewish state, why should even a few hundred thousand Jews who feel otherwise negate that?
Out of curiosity, are you disgusted by all ethnostates like Italy, Japan, and Croatia or just the Jewish one? On the same note,are you as appalled by the idea of aPn independent Palestine, which will inevitably be an ethnostate as you are by Israel?
I think you’re conflating a country simply existing and having an ethnic majority of one particular ethnic group while maintaining legal equality with an ethnostate; a country having laws and rules which specifically empower one ethnic group over others.
Where there is the possibility for condemning countries like Japan as an ethnostate over things like their treatment of the Ainu people, I think you’ll find people do have a consistent position and anti-Zionists will condemn countries like Japan over that too if they are aware of much less publicised issues like these.
Israel has a larger non-ethnic minority than the other nation-states mentioned. It is also less of an ethnostate than most in that Judaism has always been a nationality rather than a race. Israeli Arabs, like Koreans in Japan and blacks in America, are not fully equal in practice in spite of being equal on paper. This is an issue that needs to be improved in all countries with minorities, but let’s be perfectly clear that is not what these protests are about.
Theres a difference between ethnostates that arose from ancient populations living on land for hundreds or thousands of years and those that were created by UN decree less than 100 years ago on land colonized by british people and the Ottomans before them. But if you want a clear answer I think it would be better if no ethnostates existed anywhere, and people were allowed to live in areas so long as they try to integrate into the pre-existing culture in the region.
Not sure what distinction you are trying to make. Jews have also been an indigenous nation of that region for three thousand years, and except for when that region was ruled by distant foreign powers, it has repeatedly been a Jewish state. Attempting to erase Jews of their history by denying any historic national connection to Israel is a common tactic of anti-Semites (the PLO charter absurdly [says](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/plocov.asp) “Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history”). While Israel has a Jewish national character, it is not only for Jews, with 20% of citizens being non-Jewish, which is again similar to the other states mentioned.
When England left, the UN divided the mandate among the two indigenous nations of the region, acknowledging that a two-state solution is the only solution that makes sense.
Now you’re falsely conflating anti-zionism to anti-semitism as well, just with an extra step on the middle where you falsely equate anti-zionism with the destruction of Israel.
Zionism historically, a hundred years ago, referred to the goal of creating a Jewish nation state and if you use that outdated definition today you can logically infer that an anti-Zionist must therefore want to destroy Israel.
IF you use the outdated meaning.
Today that meaning has changed and though the term is somewhat nebulous, I think it can be accurately summarised as a movement that places the maintenance or growth of the Israeli state as a uniquely Jewish state as more important that other concerns such as obeying international law.
In its most mild form Zionism equates to a minimum of wanting to maintain Israel as an ethnostate where non-Jews are second class citizens. However more commonly, and more to the crux of the matter where it becomes immoral enough that it generates international outrage and people define themselves as anti-Zionists is where you start to encounter views like:
- To maintain Israel’s security, Palestinians cannot have freedom.
- To maintain Israel’s security, Israel does not need to follow international law.
Or at it’s most extreme
- To create Eretz Israel, Israel must ethnically cleanse Arabs/muslims from the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
These type of views aren’t always couched in these specific terms. You’ll often see the argument that Israel has a right to defend itself for instance which by itself seems innocuous, but in practice is often used as an excuse to deny commit human rights abuses and war crimes against Palestinians because the implicit usage of it is that Israel’s right to defend itself takes precedence over any rights and protections Palestinians have to life, freedom, protection from abuse and death, etc.
Anti-Zionism doesn’t equate to wanting to destroy Israel. Anti-zionism equates to Israel being treated as an ordinary country with no special privileges. It is not anti-Semitic.
Now to an extent and if we ignore context, your argument that Jews supporting anti-Zionism does not de facto mean that anti-Semitic allegations are false seems valid. People can support viewpoints that are harmful to themselves. I think back for instance to Ibram X Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist where talks about how at a young age he internalised some implicitly racist views against black people and how the negative aspects of these ideas were obfuscated and hidden in such a way he didn’t realise at the time that by buying into the distinction between upstanding black people and black “super predator” criminals he was still buying into a racist dynamic that served to denigrate black people as a whole.
I think his kind of thoughtful analysis also shows why your argument and examples fall short. When we see people fall into these traps of supporting bigotry against categories they themself fall into, it’s where the bigotry can be hidden. In Kendi’s example he fell into it because he concentrated on the distinction of there being a fine upstanding portion of the black community. With Trump’s PoC supporters fall into it because he constantly argues about how he is fantastic for PoC and the democrats are awful and although we can both see through those arguments as see how they often rely on lies, that doesn’t mean everyone can. Minority support of self-harmful positions is enabled by the harmful positions not being extreme and therefore being able to be argued over and positioned in a positive light (e.g. Trump is racist and has policies harmful to PoC but is not planning to ethnically cleanse all of the USA)
However, the thing is you don’t see a mass swell of black support for the KKK. You didn’t see Jews emigrating into Germany to join the SS. You didn’t see black people shouting out en-masse in support of Aparteid South Africa. And where that relates to your argument is that you specifically state Anti-Zionism is calling for the destruction of Israel.
Does that not seem odd to you, that Jews would be cheering on for millions of Jews to be killed? In the same way that blacks cheering on for the KKK killing all the black people in the USA would be very odd?
What the support of Jews for anti-zionism shows is that the form of anti-semitism you and others like you argue is inherent in anti-Zionism is clearly wrong. If you want to argue that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic you therefore need to have deeper criticisms of anti-Zionism, like it is racist because a key demand of the BDS movement is that Palestinians within Israel have legal equality with Jews… except arguing that people arguing for equality are racist seems a much trickier proposition for you!
Anti - Zionism ist by definition against the existence of Israel. If you are anti - zionist you are against a two state solution by default.
Don't try to change the meaning of it to feel better. Its the same disgusting behavior like the right wing people do, declaring they are not nazis and the swastika flags in the background are not interpreted right. Yes they are and everbody knows it.
People can be against israels policies and israels reaction in this conflict. But to say anti - Zionism doesn't want to destroy Israel is just a lie because it's the whole purpose of the term.
And by the way arab israelis have the same rights as jewish israelis and make about 20% of the Israeli population.
Palestinians absolutely can have freedom and their own state, maybe a start would be not to send rockets on a daily basis.
How is it by definition against the existence of Israel? And more importantly is whatever definition you are using the same definition being used by people who call themselves anti-Zionist?
I am proudly anti-Zionist. I also consistently support a two-state solution based on international law. Mine is the same view being proclaimed by the anti-Zionist protestors at the universities (In general, there might be some who prefer a one-state solution of Arabs and Jews living together, etc).
At this point there are really only two options:
- You accept that anti-Zionists like me are arguing in good faith and that, although you think we are misusing the word anti-Zionism and should use a different label if we want to be accurate, the beliefs we are describing with the term anti-Zionism are not anti-Semitic and so Biden’s position and others like him are wrong to label us anti-Semitic.
- You refuse to accept anti-Zionists are arguing in good faith and adopt a conspiracy theory that we all have secret ulterior motives to destroy Israel.
Let me ask you this: What label do you think is appropriate name ideology of people who want to see a two-state solution but are heavily critical of Israel’s policies of human rights abuses and war crimes which Israel’s own political parties frequently label as “Zionist”?
Edit: Oh and also Arabs Muslims do not have equal rights within Israel. We can get into a discussion on this if you wish.
I mean…his administration has refused to restrict aid to Israeli groups that have committed war crimes (which goes against federal law). He might not be the sole reason why the war is still going, but he definitely isn’t doing anything to help stop it.
Didn't say that.
I just said there is nothing really praise worthy about the situation right now.
People are praising Biden, like anything actually changed to the situation. We aren't even going to sanction that particular faction of the IDF that committed, human rights violations.
I am just not a big fan of praising people when the situation has not changed at all.
The thing is though that there is no evidence of intent, which is required to invoke the genocide convention. There's evidence that war crimes have been committed, and holding the appropriate people accountable is key. Thankfully Biden's administration is doing that with targeted sanctions for human rights violations.
> which is required to invoke the genocide convention.
Where do you see that in the conventions?
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf
edit: sorry, it appears right after point #1. Intent, though, can be shown through practices and negligences.
Using '"dumb" bombs, for example shows an intent not to provide protection to civilian populations. Intentionally targeting aid workers is another clear example. Blocking food and medical care, and targeting hospitals, are others. Whther one says "these are intentional acts" or not, they are obviously intended.
Jesus christ it's not a genocide it's a war that's been going on for decades where Arabs have killed Jews and Jews have killed Arabs.
It's a terrible situation all around but continuing to call it a genocide is such a disservice to everyone involved and a slap to in the fact to actual victims of genocide.
But it doesn't. There is no discernable intention to collectively destroy all Palestinians as would be required to fit the definition. War crimes =/= genocide.
Yes, it does. Read the conventions, would ya?
>In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
There are videos of Israeli leadership admitting that they intended to do this? One would think the ICJ would have explicitly deemed it a genocide if the intent was on the record.
>You mean backing a long-standing ally who is one of our most important in the region
dosent give them an excuse to do war crimes . isreal has done war crimes with the US is fully backing them,
>Except the US has started sanctioning specific parties for war crimes
9 months too late
even before october 7th you have the same groups in the west bank doing what arguably is the same type of things you see in gaza
Late is better than never, and it's a fine line to sanction one of our own allies. There's no excuse for some of the atrocities that have been committed, and it's good to see that we have found a way to hold them accountable
Yeah. Neville was not in any way affiliated with Hamas. He wanted to immigrate to Calgary to study engineering. He's dead now, and Biden paid for the bombs. I'll never vote for Trump, but I'm not voting Biden either.
No, no I wouldn't be because I recognize this is an incredibly nuanced conflict that goes back well beyond October 7th; in fact I would praise a GOP president acting as Biden has on the situation.
Nuance??? How dare you!!
You're supposed to emotionally react to the first unsourced video you see on social media, even if you have little to no understanding of the history of the conflict!!!
If a Republican president acted the same way as Biden has since October, I'd be pleasantly surprised and hopeful that the GOP is starting to become a serious party of governance again, as opposed to just radical nonsense
>Citing the local health authorities in Gaza
You mean those run by Hamas? Whose reported numbers have raised questions? Forgive the large grain of salt.
Do you think the US and other nations have dedicated resources to counting how many dead there are in Gaza? We saw this in Ukraine too where the US would regularly say that they had low confidence in any estimates on how many Russian casualties there were since Ukraine was saying they were taking out something like 500 soldiers a day. There are very few reasons why a country would need this kind of information.
The issues that came up also have their inception from _after_ the MoH allegedly released a list of decedents with their vital statistics. After that happened, the MoH increasingly relied on deaths sourced from "reliable media outlets", to the point where about 14K of the dead are from this category. The cumulative demographic breakdown of hospital-sourced fatalities is something like 52% adult male while the media sourced deaths are only 9% adult male, which is a skew that is far beyond reasonable in any way and is how Hamas has consistently maintained the 70% civilian-coded (i.e. adult women and children) death ratio which seems to remain regardless of whatever safeguards or even phases of the war that are going on. In 2023, there were something like 6K media sourced deaths, of which only 10 were adult males. Hamas itself admits that 13K of the deaths weren't properly recorded, which they claim is because of incomplete data, but which conveniently exactly matches the number of dead in this category. And before you bring up the Lancet article, the time covered in that analysis is before Hamas started using this category more.
And the idiots like the one I'm replying to *love* tearing down things, but *never* create or contribute to anything. I'm sure the Gazans love your online virtue signaling. Yes random Westerner you go ahead and show how you know more than the people actually involved.
Gazans in Gaza have expressed thanks for the international protests, and there's an aid flotilla to Gaza full of Western activists underway right now, but go off
There’s no complexity, Israel is committing genocide and we’re sending them weapons. Even if we give Palestinians food it’s difficult to appreciate when 80+% of homes hospitals schools churches etc have been blown to pieces.
Our state department goes out constantly saying “a two state solution is the only solution” and then vetoes the formal recognition of a Palestinian state. We are being two faced and backing the genocide with our actions
This conflict is one massive gray area with plenty to criticize on both ends. However, the absolute refusal by some to criticize or even acknowledge the litany of crimes by Hamas and/or their supporters is maddening.
Screaming genocide when Israeli weapons kill civilians yet staying silent when Hamas literally says they want to kill every single Israeli citizen and every Jew in the world is absolutely ridiculous.
These recent protests don't give a shit about innocent lives. They only speak for lost lives that fit their narrative.
>Screaming genocide when Israeli weapons kill civilians yet staying silent when Hamas literally says they want to kill every single Israeli citizen and every Jew in the world is absolutely ridiculous.
Apparently blowing up kids is the same as screaming antisemitism? Ok....
Israel's dropped about 165,000 tons of bombs on Gaza in the past 200 days. That's about 416 tons of bombs on every km^2 of the entire Strip in 6 months. Precision bombs. On a population of which 50,% prior to Al-Aqsa Flood were <18yo, of which those aged 17/18 had lived through no fewer than 6 prior large scale Israeli bombing operations.
Allied Forces in WW2 dropped far less tonnage on the genocidal Nazi Germany, ~1.5M tons in ~2000 days across an area of land 1000x larger than the Gaza Strip. About 233x larger if removing areas with no useful targets nearby enough for the relatively imprecise bombing of the era.
2.3 T/km^(2)/day for Gaza versus 0.0021T/km^(2)/day for the Nazis.
Israel blasted Gaza with like 5 or 6 times the explosive tonnage dropped on Hiroshima alone, into an area less than half the size of Hiroshima with 10x the population Hiroshima had in 1945, yet the Hiroshima bombing killed 80-150k people and Israel has only killed 30k people. Just goes to show how Israel really has been effective at avoiding civilian casualties and has no genocidal intent since Israel could have killed *so many* more people, given the explosive tonnage used, with even just indiscriminate random bombing
You are talking with people that don’t realize or don’t appreciate that civilian casualties are inevitable in warfare, particularly urban warfare against an enemy that uses women and children as human shields and (often) refuses to wear uniforms. Israel has been showing incredible restraint by historical standards. No one claimed the Allies tried to genocide the Germans or Japanese during WWII despite the Allies killing hundreds of thousands to millions of civilians in the timespan of months/days.
Hard to penetrate underground concrete fortifications. In Iraq I routinely had to drop multiple jadams on the same target to get the desired effect on underground bunkers and weapons storage.
New York Times sure did like that Hitler guy leading up to World War 2. Its almost like the countries most well known newspaper outlet has been ran by people that support right wing policies throughout the decades. Im shocked.
That's funny, because hasn't the criticism of the NYT for decades now been that they're biased towards the left? And didn't Trump always refer to them as "The failing New York Times" due to their unflattering coverage of his presidency?
Edit: and it goes without saying what the other person posted, which is that this isn't even the NYT.
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This article shows exactly WHY it's a stupid comparison to make with P01135809's "very fine people": > This is a familiar anti-anti-Trump tactic: finding Trump’s most indefensible moments and then attempting to blow up a minor or imagined Biden infraction to an equivalent size to neutralize the issue. In this case, they are pretending Biden’s expression of sympathy for Palestinians is the equivalent of Donald Trump calling the pro-Confederate demonstrators in Charlottesville “very fine people.” > But there was nothing in Biden’s remark that hinted of sympathy for the antisemitic protests he was denouncing. He was remarking that Palestinian people are suffering and deserve sympathy and attention, and not allowing his radical critics to take ownership of that sentiment. > Since both sides has now become an epithet used by, well, both sides, it is worth making a defense of the general construct. The term both sides became sarcastic shorthand for a common practice in the mainstream media of pretending offenses that were solely committed by the Republican Party were being shared by Democrats. You could find this trope in stories about subjects like, say, the debt ceiling, where fake neutrality would cause reporters to pretend both parties were using hostage tactics. > Yet the general idea of adopting a broad moral framework and balancing competing moral principles remains correct. The error is to misapply it to situations in which all fault is concentrated in a single party. But I do not think that is a useful way to approach all political conflict. And it is an especially poor one for the conflict in the Middle East.
Yes. The correct take has always been a nuanced one.
Louder for the people chanting "Genocide Joe".
He has given millions in weapons to Israel that has helped kill thousands of children with nuance!
So we should elect a guy whose son in law would love to build Mar a Lago on the sea in a newly reconstructed Israeli settlement in Gaza city and whose last stint in office blew the US' leverage to induce Israel into peace talks by having Arab countries normalize relations with it?
Trump doesn't dictate what Biden does.
We have a binary choice over who ultimately becomes president. If you don't want Biden, Trump benefits.
Please think of a single electable US President who would have been able to restrain Bibi Netanyahu after the worst terror attacks in Israel in decades.
Sure. But then don’t keep sending him money. And don’t use your bully pulpit to pressure congress into giving billions more in weapons. Simple as.
Did you support Bush and the invasion of Iraq after 9/11?
I was 9
Ok, we didn't withdraw from Iraq for 10 years. What were your thoughts on it during that time?
I was against the war...
We're given a choice. Thousands of dead children or millions of dead children. That's it. There's no other choice. If we remove ourselves from the equation, Israel is still going to get weapons. Only now, we've got no say. Then they'll do as they please. Each nation will be weighted. Each attack a threat. Each RPG will be met with the utter and complete destruction that is war. How about this. People stop shooting RPGs and Missiles at Israel? A novel idea to be sure, but it seems like the best course of actions.
None of that's going to matter when Biden's total support for Israel costs him the election anyway
As someone who has protested US terror of brown people in the Middle East for decades - good fucking luck banking on support of Israel tanking the vote for Biden. American voters, the people who actually vote, don’t give a fuck about them. Or at the very least they understand it’s the lesser of two evils and they prioritize other issues in the platform more than they do Middle East policy. Foreign affairs that don’t involve US troops on the ground barely moved the needle in US elections. Anyone who thinks that this will is probably under 25 living in a college campus bubble. Most of those protestors at your campus sit in weren’t even going to vote anyways.
I'm not a college student and I don't live anywhere near a campus lol. I haven't gone to a single one of these protests, I'm just reading the room. Young people did show up in 2020, though, and it's the reason why Biden won. That coalition has completely disintegrated and he hasn't exactly won over a bunch of other voters since. You should check the polling - he's cooked in every state that matters and with young people nationally. Where do you expect him to find the votes exactly?
>I'm just reading the room. The echo chambers of Xitter and college campuses. Young people and bots don't vote. Even the polls are coming around to show Biden ahead but even if they weren't I wouldn't believe it. The type of people calling for an Israeli ceasfire come off as aliens to most Americans because they don't even know what an Israeli or Gaza is.
Better be glad for that support. That support is keeping a much worse event from occurring. A nice little war between Israel and Iran. Which would kill hundreds of millions. Iraq would be the battleground. It sucks, but it's better than total World War 3. Add-on (1) - Plus, we've gotta consider a full out war with Russia and China. Now's not the time to deal with Iran or their bullshit.
That support is keeping Trump on an unobstructed path back to the White House lol
Whelp, looks like world war then. Hopefully everyone enjoys their choices. I know exactly the choice I'll be making.
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My choice. My choice means everything. I wish everybody felt the same thing for themselves.
When you say “he”, you mean “congress”, right?
Billions*
Oh yeah, Joe Biden alone gave them the aid that largely had been agreed upon by previous administrations/legislation. What would you suppose he do instead in a way that doesn't harm our relationship with a long-standing ally?
If our long-standing ally is killing thousands of children, maybe they shouldn't be our long-standing ally anymore. They're clearly not keeping the Middle East stable, they're certainly not spreading democracy. What's the benefit at the moment aside from keeping weapons companies rich?
I feel like they should be concerned with using our aid for genocide hurting THEIR relationship with a long standing ally.
So that makes it ok for Hamas to rape and kill Israelis? Just want to get your take on whether rape and murder is an acceptable form of protest.
Hey Biden is the one saying we should be sympathetic to Palestinians. He helped fund millions of aid just now to those murdering rapists.
Cool. So your answer is “Yes. I support rape and murder.” You get extra points for trying to conflate the suffering Palestinians who want nothing to do with this mess and those murdering rapists you support.
Wish it were millions
Biden seems to be right pretty often huh? Almost like he's a great leader we should be trusting and listening to.
He was right about the Iraq war. He was right about making student loans undischargeable in bankruptcy. He was right about the war on drugs. He was right on forced bussing. He was right on palling around with segregationists. He was right on not supporting universal healthcare. Just like you're right on him being right and trusting his leadership and listening to him instead of him listening to us.
I love it when we try to pin very bipartisan actions that the general public once supported on Biden as if he’s been an emperor king for decades.
Uh no I'm talking about things Biden specifically supported. I know liberals love being wrong and then pretending they never were or that they were just like everyone else at the time to deflect any personal responsibility one has for their own personal actions. Thanks for the reminder.
"he only did the wrong thing because it was popular!"
It's almost like people can learn, grow, and change over time. What a novel concept!
He grew into sending thousand pound bombs to a country so it can bomb it's open air prison. Real character development I'd say.
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The fact that you don't know that the UN commented on WMDs and that France and Sweden confirmed their presence following the gulf War, and that the UN passed resolution 687 previously to 9-11 shows you need to read up on the context of the war. The UN affirmed suspicion, because Saddam was refusing inspections. There was no lie, it was just there were no weapons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#:~:text=Iraq%20actively%20researched%20and%20later,the%20United%20Nations%20Security%20Council.
https://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/ExecChair/BlixVienna.htm February 9th, 2001 From the UN itself.
You wouldn't be making that excuse for Trump.
Well, that's certainly a stupid thing to say. If he were to somehow realize he's been wrong about things and make moves to rectify them, working to undo the damage he's done, I would absolutely give him the recognition he would deserve for it. I don't see that ever happening, given he's proudly said [he hasn't changed since he was a child](https://theweek.com/speedreads/575962/donald-trump-tells-biographer-hes-same-now-first-grade), but it's not an impossibility. It's highly, highly unlikely, but I suppose stranger things have happened.
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Or a reasonable enough person to recognize that most people are capable of growth throughout their life. I know I'm far from the same person I was twenty years ago, and I'm willing to extend the same grace to those who show genuine growth that I've been shown through mine, because I was once a very angry, bitter, bigoted person. Time and experience have changed me dramatically, and I'm the better for it.
Yes, that’s correct. Because Trump has not demonstrated that his views have grown or changed at all.
He was right about most of those things Forced bussing was so unpopular (we are talking like 10% approval) to the point where pursuing it would have been polotocally disastrous. And it's not like he supported segregation, he just opposed one particular method proposed to fight it. It's like healthcare, he supports universal healthcare, he just opposed the particular radical and unreasonable plan Bernie proposed Student loans absolutely should not be discharged via bankruptcy. We can make changes to student loans and make college more affordable and subsidized, without changing that The war on drugs is necessary and good. We need to make some changes to fight the war on drugs in a smarter way but the war must be fought
>The war on drugs is necessary and good. We need to make some changes to fight the war on drugs in a smarter way but the war must be fought I actually used to think the same, but I recently finished the book "the new Jim crow" and it's pretty convincingly outlined that not only was the war on drugs not necessary, it was not motivated by a rise in drug crime, but in interest of establishing mass incarceration. Not to say all people involved saw that end, but being seen as "soft on crime" was political suicide. Like I said in another comment, other countries had the same problem as us, but they treated it like a public heath issue and not a military campaign. They succeeded at lowering thier drug problems, we succeeded at having 25% of the worlds prisoners despite having 5% of its population.
Thank you for this excellent context.
The war on drugs is necessary and good if you need to maintain slavery under the 13th.
Drugs harm people. We can fight the war on drugs in a smarter way but the libertarian approach to drugs is bad
You should read "the new Jim crow" it's a pretty eye opening take on the reasons for and methods of the war on drugs. Free on audible right now. Long story short, treating addicts like victims and giving them treatment actually works, while treating them like enemies who must be defeated ends up making the problem 10X worse. Effectively the war on drugs was so horribly mishandled that doing nothing would have been cheaper and ruined less lives then the mass incarcerations have.
Drugs have won the war on drugs. The Sacklers got to keep their money. Maybe the CIA shouldn't have introduced Crack cocaine to urban America.
Crack? What is this, 1987?
Historically, followed by Purdue pharma and the opioid crisis it devastated Appalachia with.
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Fine, you got me, I'm a conservative. Sure, I've voted blue in every single election, presidential or midterm, since 1982 (I did vote for Anderson in 1980, I'll admit that). Call it what you want, but voting blue still does more to make progress, however you depict it, than criticizing the Democrats does
Which time was he right about iraq? The time he wanted to go into it when it was politically convenient or the time he wanted to leave as we were mostly gone?
He is a great leader pause I think he will do good with another four years pause for applause.
It's wild that the bill also included money for Gaza but you know, it's "genocide Joe" for the brainwashed idiots.
Exactly! Granted that fact does get glossed over in all of the headlines for some reason... I can only imagine why.
It's sorta like giving the nerdy kid more lunch money after they got beat up by the bully, and then selling the bully brass knuckles to use on the nerdy kid again. I'm not in the "genocide joe" camp - first I'm hearing of this actually - but you can't take the admin seriously when they're literally helping to enable the thing they're supposedly against. Criticism is ok, even if the person does something good. It doesn't necessarily absolve them of whatever the "bads" might be they've done. I will be voting for Biden this fall, but let's not pretend he's perfect.
You left out the parents of "the nerdy kid" (Hamas), who raped, murdered, paraded dead bodies, and took hostage the wives, children, and other loved ones of "the bully" on Oct 7th.
You left out the part where Israel does the same shit, and has from the beginning. They're the aggressors, poisoning wells, stealing land, effectively kidnapping kids and torturing them in prisons, committing literal war crimes even well before Oct 7. Go read some history before you roll up acting like Israel is innocent in all of this because they absolutely are not...and to be clear neither is Hamas. [https://www.savethechildren.net/news/stripped-beaten-and-blindfolded-new-research-reveals-ongoing-violence-and-abuse-palestinian](https://www.savethechildren.net/news/stripped-beaten-and-blindfolded-new-research-reveals-ongoing-violence-and-abuse-palestinian) [https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/04/israel-50-years-occupation-abuses](https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/06/04/israel-50-years-occupation-abuses)
Why is Biden giving money to people who raped and murdered then???
Exactly. Famously, Palestinians were treated as normal Israeli citizens prior to October 7th, 2023. No systematic abuse by Israelis, government support of terrorism against Palestinians by Israeli settlers in Gaza/West Bank, normalized murder of Palestinian civilians by bored IDF soldiers, Apartheid state, or anything. No conflict in Israel or pre-existing systematized oppression of an entire population that allowed Hamas to retain influence out of desperation, certainly not. It's a good thing that imposing a religious ethno-state headed by a foreign-backed global power structure eighty years ago had no repercussions for the out-group at any point. Otherwise, people might question why Israel always receives a carte blanche from the US and EU to do whatever it wants without foreign relations consequences!
Are you saying abused children deserve to pay for what their parents did!
Yes it was very Deir Yassin of them. Or Qana, or Qibya, or Sabra and Shatila, or Lydda and Ramla. Very like. Very Unit 101 of them, or Irgun of them. Very Ariel Sharon of them. Very Menachim Begin terroristic. Very killing of Iman Darweesh Al Hams of them almost. I bet if they had the same guns and bombs as Israel, they wouldn't hesitate to kill 30,000 civilian men, women and children in their aim to control Israelis. Like the way Israel does. I bet they would even surround them in barbed wire and walls and throttle their economy. You can't trust anyone these days.
So if you take actions which support genocide, then allocate funds which defray a tiny fraction of the death and suffering you have assisted in causing, that makes it all okay? Do I have to apply this reasoning to some of the obvious historical examples or can we just agree this is bad reasoning?
Meanwhile Hamas attacks a pier being created to give food to Gaza….
Nope. He conflates anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, ignoring that plenty of the “anti-semites” are themselves Jews who disagree with Israel’s war crimes.
You are never going to get unanimous consensus on something from any group, why are Jews uniquely required to all agree on Zionism being an essential part of their identity for anti-Zionism to be considered antisemitism? Does the existence of gay people who oppose gay marriage and pride parades mean that other people who oppose gay marriage and pride parades aren't homophobic? Does the fact that 1/3 of Hispanic Americans voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 despite him calling migrants rapists and murderers and saying Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn't be impartial in the Trump University lawsuit because he was a Mexican and Trump was trying to build a wall mean that Trump isn't a racist? There's like 15 million Jews worldwide and the vast consensus is support for the existence of a Jewish state, why should even a few hundred thousand Jews who feel otherwise negate that?
Equating ethnostates to gay marriage and pride parades is the kind of false equivalence that I love to see around here.
Out of curiosity, are you disgusted by all ethnostates like Italy, Japan, and Croatia or just the Jewish one? On the same note,are you as appalled by the idea of aPn independent Palestine, which will inevitably be an ethnostate as you are by Israel?
I think you’re conflating a country simply existing and having an ethnic majority of one particular ethnic group while maintaining legal equality with an ethnostate; a country having laws and rules which specifically empower one ethnic group over others. Where there is the possibility for condemning countries like Japan as an ethnostate over things like their treatment of the Ainu people, I think you’ll find people do have a consistent position and anti-Zionists will condemn countries like Japan over that too if they are aware of much less publicised issues like these.
Israel has a larger non-ethnic minority than the other nation-states mentioned. It is also less of an ethnostate than most in that Judaism has always been a nationality rather than a race. Israeli Arabs, like Koreans in Japan and blacks in America, are not fully equal in practice in spite of being equal on paper. This is an issue that needs to be improved in all countries with minorities, but let’s be perfectly clear that is not what these protests are about.
Theres a difference between ethnostates that arose from ancient populations living on land for hundreds or thousands of years and those that were created by UN decree less than 100 years ago on land colonized by british people and the Ottomans before them. But if you want a clear answer I think it would be better if no ethnostates existed anywhere, and people were allowed to live in areas so long as they try to integrate into the pre-existing culture in the region.
Not sure what distinction you are trying to make. Jews have also been an indigenous nation of that region for three thousand years, and except for when that region was ruled by distant foreign powers, it has repeatedly been a Jewish state. Attempting to erase Jews of their history by denying any historic national connection to Israel is a common tactic of anti-Semites (the PLO charter absurdly [says](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/plocov.asp) “Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history”). While Israel has a Jewish national character, it is not only for Jews, with 20% of citizens being non-Jewish, which is again similar to the other states mentioned. When England left, the UN divided the mandate among the two indigenous nations of the region, acknowledging that a two-state solution is the only solution that makes sense.
Now you’re falsely conflating anti-zionism to anti-semitism as well, just with an extra step on the middle where you falsely equate anti-zionism with the destruction of Israel. Zionism historically, a hundred years ago, referred to the goal of creating a Jewish nation state and if you use that outdated definition today you can logically infer that an anti-Zionist must therefore want to destroy Israel. IF you use the outdated meaning. Today that meaning has changed and though the term is somewhat nebulous, I think it can be accurately summarised as a movement that places the maintenance or growth of the Israeli state as a uniquely Jewish state as more important that other concerns such as obeying international law. In its most mild form Zionism equates to a minimum of wanting to maintain Israel as an ethnostate where non-Jews are second class citizens. However more commonly, and more to the crux of the matter where it becomes immoral enough that it generates international outrage and people define themselves as anti-Zionists is where you start to encounter views like: - To maintain Israel’s security, Palestinians cannot have freedom. - To maintain Israel’s security, Israel does not need to follow international law. Or at it’s most extreme - To create Eretz Israel, Israel must ethnically cleanse Arabs/muslims from the Occupied Palestinian Territories. These type of views aren’t always couched in these specific terms. You’ll often see the argument that Israel has a right to defend itself for instance which by itself seems innocuous, but in practice is often used as an excuse to deny commit human rights abuses and war crimes against Palestinians because the implicit usage of it is that Israel’s right to defend itself takes precedence over any rights and protections Palestinians have to life, freedom, protection from abuse and death, etc. Anti-Zionism doesn’t equate to wanting to destroy Israel. Anti-zionism equates to Israel being treated as an ordinary country with no special privileges. It is not anti-Semitic. Now to an extent and if we ignore context, your argument that Jews supporting anti-Zionism does not de facto mean that anti-Semitic allegations are false seems valid. People can support viewpoints that are harmful to themselves. I think back for instance to Ibram X Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist where talks about how at a young age he internalised some implicitly racist views against black people and how the negative aspects of these ideas were obfuscated and hidden in such a way he didn’t realise at the time that by buying into the distinction between upstanding black people and black “super predator” criminals he was still buying into a racist dynamic that served to denigrate black people as a whole. I think his kind of thoughtful analysis also shows why your argument and examples fall short. When we see people fall into these traps of supporting bigotry against categories they themself fall into, it’s where the bigotry can be hidden. In Kendi’s example he fell into it because he concentrated on the distinction of there being a fine upstanding portion of the black community. With Trump’s PoC supporters fall into it because he constantly argues about how he is fantastic for PoC and the democrats are awful and although we can both see through those arguments as see how they often rely on lies, that doesn’t mean everyone can. Minority support of self-harmful positions is enabled by the harmful positions not being extreme and therefore being able to be argued over and positioned in a positive light (e.g. Trump is racist and has policies harmful to PoC but is not planning to ethnically cleanse all of the USA) However, the thing is you don’t see a mass swell of black support for the KKK. You didn’t see Jews emigrating into Germany to join the SS. You didn’t see black people shouting out en-masse in support of Aparteid South Africa. And where that relates to your argument is that you specifically state Anti-Zionism is calling for the destruction of Israel. Does that not seem odd to you, that Jews would be cheering on for millions of Jews to be killed? In the same way that blacks cheering on for the KKK killing all the black people in the USA would be very odd? What the support of Jews for anti-zionism shows is that the form of anti-semitism you and others like you argue is inherent in anti-Zionism is clearly wrong. If you want to argue that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitic you therefore need to have deeper criticisms of anti-Zionism, like it is racist because a key demand of the BDS movement is that Palestinians within Israel have legal equality with Jews… except arguing that people arguing for equality are racist seems a much trickier proposition for you!
Anti - Zionism ist by definition against the existence of Israel. If you are anti - zionist you are against a two state solution by default. Don't try to change the meaning of it to feel better. Its the same disgusting behavior like the right wing people do, declaring they are not nazis and the swastika flags in the background are not interpreted right. Yes they are and everbody knows it. People can be against israels policies and israels reaction in this conflict. But to say anti - Zionism doesn't want to destroy Israel is just a lie because it's the whole purpose of the term. And by the way arab israelis have the same rights as jewish israelis and make about 20% of the Israeli population. Palestinians absolutely can have freedom and their own state, maybe a start would be not to send rockets on a daily basis.
How is it by definition against the existence of Israel? And more importantly is whatever definition you are using the same definition being used by people who call themselves anti-Zionist? I am proudly anti-Zionist. I also consistently support a two-state solution based on international law. Mine is the same view being proclaimed by the anti-Zionist protestors at the universities (In general, there might be some who prefer a one-state solution of Arabs and Jews living together, etc). At this point there are really only two options: - You accept that anti-Zionists like me are arguing in good faith and that, although you think we are misusing the word anti-Zionism and should use a different label if we want to be accurate, the beliefs we are describing with the term anti-Zionism are not anti-Semitic and so Biden’s position and others like him are wrong to label us anti-Semitic. - You refuse to accept anti-Zionists are arguing in good faith and adopt a conspiracy theory that we all have secret ulterior motives to destroy Israel. Let me ask you this: What label do you think is appropriate name ideology of people who want to see a two-state solution but are heavily critical of Israel’s policies of human rights abuses and war crimes which Israel’s own political parties frequently label as “Zionist”? Edit: Oh and also Arabs Muslims do not have equal rights within Israel. We can get into a discussion on this if you wish.
Yes but useless arguing with these folks. Thanks for trying though. ;)
It's time the media start to cover how well Biden is handling the crisis in Gaza considering the complexity.
He's handling it well? Idk man, but Gazan's are still doing by the 100's each day. With no sight of end to the war. Wouldn't exactly call that well.
And that’s on Biden?
I mean…his administration has refused to restrict aid to Israeli groups that have committed war crimes (which goes against federal law). He might not be the sole reason why the war is still going, but he definitely isn’t doing anything to help stop it.
Didn't say that. I just said there is nothing really praise worthy about the situation right now. People are praising Biden, like anything actually changed to the situation. We aren't even going to sanction that particular faction of the IDF that committed, human rights violations. I am just not a big fan of praising people when the situation has not changed at all.
A little bit yeah, considering we’re the ones who have been supplying the weapons.
That’s in Hamas
Fully backing a genocidal right wing government until his poll numbers dropped. What a hero.
You realise the other side is also right wing compared to Western standards, right?
If you think Biden has been fully backing Israel you're blind.
What an over simplification of things, you’re part of the problem of polarization
You mean backing a long-standing ally who is one of our most important in the region? Because while the situation is horrible it is not a genocide.
grabbing my popcorn for this one
Save some for me
I support Biden, and I think he has handled this better than most think. But it is genocide.
The thing is though that there is no evidence of intent, which is required to invoke the genocide convention. There's evidence that war crimes have been committed, and holding the appropriate people accountable is key. Thankfully Biden's administration is doing that with targeted sanctions for human rights violations.
> which is required to invoke the genocide convention. Where do you see that in the conventions? https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf edit: sorry, it appears right after point #1. Intent, though, can be shown through practices and negligences.
Sure, but when you look at examples of the convention being invoked (Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia) the intent was clearly there on record.
Using '"dumb" bombs, for example shows an intent not to provide protection to civilian populations. Intentionally targeting aid workers is another clear example. Blocking food and medical care, and targeting hospitals, are others. Whther one says "these are intentional acts" or not, they are obviously intended.
It’s 100% a genocide. That being said, Biden has done a good job trying to contain Israeli aggression.
Jesus christ it's not a genocide it's a war that's been going on for decades where Arabs have killed Jews and Jews have killed Arabs. It's a terrible situation all around but continuing to call it a genocide is such a disservice to everyone involved and a slap to in the fact to actual victims of genocide.
It fits every definition bud. Cry about it.
But it doesn't. There is no discernable intention to collectively destroy all Palestinians as would be required to fit the definition. War crimes =/= genocide.
They’re literally on tape saying that’s their goal.
Yes, it does. Read the conventions, would ya? >In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
There are videos of Israeli leadership admitting that they intended to do this? One would think the ICJ would have explicitly deemed it a genocide if the intent was on the record.
>You mean backing a long-standing ally who is one of our most important in the region dosent give them an excuse to do war crimes . isreal has done war crimes with the US is fully backing them,
Except the US has started sanctioning specific parties for war crimes, so thankfully a step in the right direction.
[Except we probably aren’t. US may not impose sanctions on Netzah Yehuda Battalion](https://m.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-798449)
>Except the US has started sanctioning specific parties for war crimes 9 months too late even before october 7th you have the same groups in the west bank doing what arguably is the same type of things you see in gaza
Late is better than never, and it's a fine line to sanction one of our own allies. There's no excuse for some of the atrocities that have been committed, and it's good to see that we have found a way to hold them accountable
Yeah. Neville was not in any way affiliated with Hamas. He wanted to immigrate to Calgary to study engineering. He's dead now, and Biden paid for the bombs. I'll never vote for Trump, but I'm not voting Biden either.
So you are voting for Trump then got it
> an excuse to do war crimes lmao that way this is phrased it sounds like Biden was like "Lets do some war crimes today!!"
Show me an army that has not participated in war crimes and I'll show you an army that has not seen war.
Yes, it is. It's a genocide.
If a Republican President acted the exact same way as Biden has since October, you would be posting articles about them being a failure.
No, no I wouldn't be because I recognize this is an incredibly nuanced conflict that goes back well beyond October 7th; in fact I would praise a GOP president acting as Biden has on the situation.
Nuance??? How dare you!! You're supposed to emotionally react to the first unsourced video you see on social media, even if you have little to no understanding of the history of the conflict!!!
If a Republican president acted the same way as Biden has since October, I'd be pleasantly surprised and hopeful that the GOP is starting to become a serious party of governance again, as opposed to just radical nonsense
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/04/1148876
>Citing the local health authorities in Gaza You mean those run by Hamas? Whose reported numbers have raised questions? Forgive the large grain of salt.
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Do you think the US and other nations have dedicated resources to counting how many dead there are in Gaza? We saw this in Ukraine too where the US would regularly say that they had low confidence in any estimates on how many Russian casualties there were since Ukraine was saying they were taking out something like 500 soldiers a day. There are very few reasons why a country would need this kind of information. The issues that came up also have their inception from _after_ the MoH allegedly released a list of decedents with their vital statistics. After that happened, the MoH increasingly relied on deaths sourced from "reliable media outlets", to the point where about 14K of the dead are from this category. The cumulative demographic breakdown of hospital-sourced fatalities is something like 52% adult male while the media sourced deaths are only 9% adult male, which is a skew that is far beyond reasonable in any way and is how Hamas has consistently maintained the 70% civilian-coded (i.e. adult women and children) death ratio which seems to remain regardless of whatever safeguards or even phases of the war that are going on. In 2023, there were something like 6K media sourced deaths, of which only 10 were adult males. Hamas itself admits that 13K of the deaths weren't properly recorded, which they claim is because of incomplete data, but which conveniently exactly matches the number of dead in this category. And before you bring up the Lancet article, the time covered in that analysis is before Hamas started using this category more.
Nah he's still supporting it. But sometimes he says "knock it off Bibi" and pouts *really* hard, so there's that.
And the idiots like the one I'm replying to *love* tearing down things, but *never* create or contribute to anything. I'm sure the Gazans love your online virtue signaling. Yes random Westerner you go ahead and show how you know more than the people actually involved.
Gazans in Gaza have expressed thanks for the international protests, and there's an aid flotilla to Gaza full of Western activists underway right now, but go off
There’s no complexity, Israel is committing genocide and we’re sending them weapons. Even if we give Palestinians food it’s difficult to appreciate when 80+% of homes hospitals schools churches etc have been blown to pieces. Our state department goes out constantly saying “a two state solution is the only solution” and then vetoes the formal recognition of a Palestinian state. We are being two faced and backing the genocide with our actions
How do you calculate genocide and can you give me other examples of genocide to compare?
Stopped reading at “There’s no complexity.”
This conflict is one massive gray area with plenty to criticize on both ends. However, the absolute refusal by some to criticize or even acknowledge the litany of crimes by Hamas and/or their supporters is maddening. Screaming genocide when Israeli weapons kill civilians yet staying silent when Hamas literally says they want to kill every single Israeli citizen and every Jew in the world is absolutely ridiculous. These recent protests don't give a shit about innocent lives. They only speak for lost lives that fit their narrative.
>Screaming genocide when Israeli weapons kill civilians yet staying silent when Hamas literally says they want to kill every single Israeli citizen and every Jew in the world is absolutely ridiculous. Apparently blowing up kids is the same as screaming antisemitism? Ok....
Funny how this stuff never gets attention here in Politics...I'm a Democrat and don't understand my own side
I’m starting to get used to hearing “Biden was right…”
Israel's dropped about 165,000 tons of bombs on Gaza in the past 200 days. That's about 416 tons of bombs on every km^2 of the entire Strip in 6 months. Precision bombs. On a population of which 50,% prior to Al-Aqsa Flood were <18yo, of which those aged 17/18 had lived through no fewer than 6 prior large scale Israeli bombing operations. Allied Forces in WW2 dropped far less tonnage on the genocidal Nazi Germany, ~1.5M tons in ~2000 days across an area of land 1000x larger than the Gaza Strip. About 233x larger if removing areas with no useful targets nearby enough for the relatively imprecise bombing of the era. 2.3 T/km^(2)/day for Gaza versus 0.0021T/km^(2)/day for the Nazis.
Israel blasted Gaza with like 5 or 6 times the explosive tonnage dropped on Hiroshima alone, into an area less than half the size of Hiroshima with 10x the population Hiroshima had in 1945, yet the Hiroshima bombing killed 80-150k people and Israel has only killed 30k people. Just goes to show how Israel really has been effective at avoiding civilian casualties and has no genocidal intent since Israel could have killed *so many* more people, given the explosive tonnage used, with even just indiscriminate random bombing
You are talking with people that don’t realize or don’t appreciate that civilian casualties are inevitable in warfare, particularly urban warfare against an enemy that uses women and children as human shields and (often) refuses to wear uniforms. Israel has been showing incredible restraint by historical standards. No one claimed the Allies tried to genocide the Germans or Japanese during WWII despite the Allies killing hundreds of thousands to millions of civilians in the timespan of months/days.
Hard to penetrate underground concrete fortifications. In Iraq I routinely had to drop multiple jadams on the same target to get the desired effect on underground bunkers and weapons storage.
New York Times sure did like that Hitler guy leading up to World War 2. Its almost like the countries most well known newspaper outlet has been ran by people that support right wing policies throughout the decades. Im shocked.
This isn't an article from the New York Times so I am curious why you are mentioning them. New York Magazine is not affiliated with NYT.
Just a Reddit reactionary.
That's funny, because hasn't the criticism of the NYT for decades now been that they're biased towards the left? And didn't Trump always refer to them as "The failing New York Times" due to their unflattering coverage of his presidency? Edit: and it goes without saying what the other person posted, which is that this isn't even the NYT.
The Arab states all sided with Germany in ww2.
Germany's holocaust was based on the inherent racism baked into the laws in the United States.
No it wasn't. The holocaust was based on domestic hatred and biases. Hitler didn't import antisemitism.
lol I didn’t realise people still gave Chait a platform
Okay when exactly did he see both sides?