dolomite wrote: ↑Mon Nov 06, 2023 7:31 pm
Are we keeping score?
Israel 10,000+ killed mercifully
Hamas 1400+ raped then shot, beheaded, dismembered, butchered, and if need be, burned.
Bump
Cross-post in the FAFO thread?
There are no good answers to the question of what Israel should do, or is justified in doing, here. Only varying degrees of bad.
But I would ask - if Mexico harbored Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda killed thousands of citizens in Houston, what would the US be justified in doing?
And then I would ask the harder question: if local government within a US state or city harbored a terrorist organization, and that terrorist organization killed thousands of citizens in a different state or city, what would the federal government be justified in doing? What would we consider the federal government to be obligated to do?
I am quite afraid - and quite certain - that this is something we're going to find out.
dolomite wrote: ↑Mon Nov 06, 2023 7:31 pm
Are we keeping score?
Israel 10,000+ killed mercifully
Hamas 1400+ raped then shot, beheaded, dismembered, butchered, and if need be, burned.
Bump
Cross-post in the FAFO thread?
There are no good answers to the question of what Israel should do, or is justified in doing, here. Only varying degrees of bad.
But I would ask - if Mexico harbored Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda killed thousands of citizens in Houston, what would the US be justified in doing?
And then I would ask the harder question: if local government within a US state or city harbored a terrorist organization, and that terrorist organization killed thousands of citizens in a different state or city, what would the federal government be justified in doing? What would we consider the federal government to be obligated to do?
I am quite afraid - and quite certain - that this is something we're going to find out.
Yep - but to expand on that - just about every Jewish Israeli adult knows someone captured or killed. It's more personal than if it were an attack on Houston.
I'm not saying it's worse. Moreso that everyone is even more pissed off than what they would be in that hypothetical. The people would have risen up and taken things into their own hands if there had been a weak response. (As a few bad apple settlers have done anyway, and again, absolutely needs to stop, but the scale is nowhere near what I'm talking about)
There are no good answers to the question of what Israel should do, or is justified in doing, here. Only varying degrees of bad.
But I would ask - if Mexico harbored Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda killed thousands of citizens in Houston, what would the US be justified in doing?
And then I would ask the harder question: if local government within a US state or city harbored a terrorist organization, and that terrorist organization killed thousands of citizens in a different state or city, what would the federal government be justified in doing? What would we consider the federal government to be obligated to do?
I am quite afraid - and quite certain - that this is something we're going to find out.
Yep - but to expand on that - just about every Jewish Israeli adult knows someone captured or killed. It's more personal than if it were an attack on Houston.
I'm not saying it's worse. Moreso that everyone is even more pissed off than what they would be in that hypothetical. The people would have risen up and taken things into their own hands if there had been a weak response. (As a few bad apple settlers have done anyway, and again, absolutely needs to stop, but the scale is nowhere near what I'm talking about)
Not to mention that pesky unpleasantness from, you know, eighty-ish years ago. Which far far FAR too many people want to paper over as if it didn't happen. To people who are STILL ALIVE TODAY. At the hands of people who talk A WHOLE LOT LIKE how some people talk today.
All I'm trying to say is (1) there's an element here of Israel being held to standards that we wouldn't hold ourselves to, and (2) we're not NEARLY as insulated from this sort of thing as we'd like to think...and I think we'll have to confront, soon, large-scale domestic terrorism that is very much NOT lone-wolf, fringe stuff.
But instead is tacitly - or overtly - supported by massively influential idiots like MTG and her slobbering horde.
Israel is in a tough spot because World War II did not neatly end. Colonialism, genocide, a gutless UN, are all concentrating themselves on a region they have set fire to since forever really. At least Fish's 80 years. There are organizations like Hamas whose charter is perpetual chaos. So, let the dogs out. But I wish they had been restrained by better international action in vitro. No comity in error.
Sparko wrote: ↑Tue Nov 07, 2023 2:59 pm
Israel is in a tough spot because World War II did not neatly end. Colonialism, genocide, a gutless UN, are all concentrating themselves on a region they have set fire to since forever really. At least Fish's 80 years. There are organizations like Hamas whose charter is perpetual chaos. So, let the dogs out. But I wish they had been restrained by better international action in vitro. No comity in error.
Tlaib censured for calling for ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. I'm actually surprised only 10 of the 24 Jewish Democrats voted in favor.
I'm glad my representative was one of those. Not to go all Gutter with name-dropping, but saw him at shul a few weeks ago, thanked him for his support - now I get to pretend my words made a difference.
mjl2 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 07, 2023 11:16 pm
Tlaib censured for calling for ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. I'm actually surprised only 10 of the 24 Jewish Democrats voted in favor.
I'm glad my representative was one of those. Not to go all Gutter with name-dropping, but saw him at shul a few weeks ago, thanked him for his support - now I get to pretend my words made a difference.
I like to think your words mean/meant more to Brad Schneider than money does/did.
You thanked him for his support? I assume you thanked him for his support of Israel.
My hope is he thanked you for your support - of him.
Gutter wrote: Fri Nov 8th 2:16pm
New President - New Gutter. I am going to pledge my allegiance to Donald J. Trump and for the next 4 years I am going to be an even bigger asshole than I already am.
mjl2 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 07, 2023 11:16 pm
Tlaib censured for calling for ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. I'm actually surprised only 10 of the 24 Jewish Democrats voted in favor.
I'm glad my representative was one of those. Not to go all Gutter with name-dropping, but saw him at shul a few weeks ago, thanked him for his support - now I get to pretend my words made a difference.
Note' bien: Gutter is connected.
“The Electoral College is DEI for rural white folks.”
Derek Cressman
mjl2 wrote: ↑Tue Nov 07, 2023 11:16 pm
Tlaib censured for calling for ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. I'm actually surprised only 10 of the 24 Jewish Democrats voted in favor.
I'm glad my representative was one of those. Not to go all Gutter with name-dropping, but saw him at shul a few weeks ago, thanked him for his support - now I get to pretend my words made a difference.
I like to think your words mean/meant more to Brad Schneider than money does/did.
You thanked him for his support? I assume you thanked him for his support of Israel.
My hope is he thanked you for your support - of him.
I guess the “from the river to the sea” rhetoric is what mjl counts as “calling for ethnic cleansing”
maybe that counts. maybe it’s debatable, too, considering only 10 of 24 Jewish Democrats voted in favor of censuring for it. It was a 234-188 vote, largely along party lines, so by mjl logic I guess there’s 188 total congressfolk who want to, um, ethnically cleanse Israelis too? As they’ve also armed Israel to the tune of how many bajillions worth of weapons. (Oh, and the whole recent trend of censuring…)
Tlaib has family in the West Bank, and has articulated that she’s criticizing the militant right-wing Israeli gummint, rather than the the Jewish people as a whole…not that that matters.
But, speaking of ethnic cleaning, consider the poster here: mjl is the same dood who has gloated about what he perceives as “big potential upside” to depriving millions of brown folks (roughly half of whom are kids) of water, food, shelter, energy, medical care; not to mention bombing them while they’re effectively trapped in a cage.
And consider, once again, the selective outrage displayed: yea Hamas is terrorists, but if Hamas was a few shades lighter, and/or trying to strike Russi…um, some imperial adversary instead, plenty of posters would be calling them not terrorists but “freedom fighters,” applauding their bravery, and stubbornly insisting upon the “from river to the sea” as some “not one inch” sort of rhetoric.
Frankly, I’m surprised how much pro-Palestinian support has surfaced throughout the US, and the world - and how much we’ve more and more heard about it, too, despite being so at odds with the “WMDs in Iraq”-style western imperial “consensus opinions.”
It’s almost like much of the world perceives the Israeli treatment of Palestinians as a humanitarian crisis that is material to the problem at hand to day, instead of the problem at hand just…sorta…happening….
My father was one of 10 siblings from a rural village in the West Bank. As a 6-year-old, he hid with his family in a cave during the Six-Day War, the start of 16 years spent under military occupation. Once, when my father was passing through a checkpoint as an undergraduate, a soldier noticed an astrophysics textbook under his arm. He told my father that Arabs were too stupid for the subject, but that only hardened his resolve to keep learning. By the time he met my English mother, he was in America studying for a Ph.D.
I grew up between two worlds, spending most of my life in England, and most of my summers immersed in Palestinian culture with my family in California.
In my father’s home, we ate maqluba, a cinnamon-infused upside-down chicken, vegetable, and rice dish. We drank Arabic coffee—thick and black and mixed with cardamom. We talked in a jumbled hybrid of Arabic and English, starting a sentence in one language and finishing in the other. I read Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said. We got our news from Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. My best instrument was the electric guitar, but I could also play the darbouka, a goblet drum, as well as the oud, a kind of lute. I mixed Arabic sounds with Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd.
I’ve always felt like a part of the Palestinian community. But as I heard the responses of so many Palestinians to Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel last month, I felt alone.
In New York, a protester at a pro-Palestinian rally held up a swastika. In Sydney, a pro-Palestinian group screamed, “Gas the Jews.” Others justified murder as an act of “resistance” and “decolonization.” Thousands gathered on streets and campuses calling for the state of Israel to be dismantled. I saw this kind of rhetoric across my Facebook and Instagram feeds, even from my friends and family.
Where were the Palestinian voices condemning Hamas, expressing solidarity with the victims, and demanding the release of the Israelis who were kidnapped?
I understand our grievances with Israel. In 1948, during a war between Zionist and Arab armies, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes and became refugees in what our community calls the Nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe.” Their descendants have never been permanently settled.
Ever since, conflict with Israel never really ceased. Palestinians feel it every day. They see their olive groves burned by settlers. They lose their children, brothers, sisters, and parents to violence. They watch Israeli warplanes fly above them, a constant reminder of how fragile their home is. And now, amid the steady beat of air strikes, they mourn their dead.
Living under military occupation is an ugly thing. I got a small taste of it on my trips to the West Bank. Every encounter with an armed soldier or armed settler makes you feel like your life is in danger. It’s natural to resent and delegitimize the other side.
Like many Palestinians, I was brought up by my father to think that Zionism is nothing more than settler colonialism, and that Israel is a racist apartheid regime imposed on Palestinians. I was brought up to believe that our hope as Palestinians was not only to end the military occupation in the West Bank, but to end the existence of Israel altogether. Although my father taught me to be respectful of and kind toward Jews and Israelis as individuals, he also taught me that our political ambition as Palestinians was not civil rights, peace, or compromise. It was taking back the land.
But as I grew up and read more widely, I began to admire peaceful humanists such as Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela. They showed me that compassion and humanity can lead to freedom.
All my life, I’ve watched violence fail the Palestinian cause. Rocket attacks and terrorism never seemed to expand our territory or improve our political or economic situation. Violence just encouraged Israel to build more walls between us and them.
I didn’t learn until later how much Jews had suffered—persecutions and pogroms that culminated in the Holocaust and their mass expulsion from the Islamic world. I learned that Zionism had developed as a defense mechanism, a way to grant Jews a homeland where they could protect themselves from people who wanted to kill them—indeed, to protect themselves from the kind of attack we just witnessed. Humanism helped me recognize that both the Palestinian and Zionist causes had some legitimacy. Humanism led me to believe that we should seek compromise.
In the days following the attack, I felt hopeless. Hamas’s brutality was not just an assault on Israel; it was an assault on the very notion of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. But when I posted on social media about my feelings of isolation and my desire for peace, I received enormous support from both Palestinians and Jews. I got messages from Israelis whose friends and family had been kidnapped and murdered by Hamas. They told me that my words gave them hope that compromise is still possible.
I learned that in spite of the horrors of recent weeks—or perhaps because of them—many Jews and Palestinians want peace more than ever. But Palestinians need more than peace. They need leaders who will serve their interests instead of persecuting those—including the LGBTQ and non-Muslim communities—who exist on the margins of society. They need jobs and economic investment, not fortified tunnels and unwinnable wars. They need free speech and the right to criticize their government. They need the freedom to determine their future.
I know solving this conflict won’t be easy. Many more people—mostly Palestinians—will die, and each death will make peace harder to achieve. Hope can’t end a war.
But hope still matters. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, a historian, once compared Israelis and Palestinians to two goats on a bridge. The goats, he thought, would ram their heads together until one of them fell into the water below. After this war is over, I dream that Israelis and Palestinians will have the opportunity to choose a better path.
per the Atlantic
(a reasonable person might expect our elected leaders to echo such sentiments, rather than stoke the flames of hatred)
Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?
Are there pictures or vids of these swastikas or “gas the Jews” chants at pro-Palestine protests?
Not that I doubt it!
But, considering how aggressively the they/them types condemn the Nazis in Ukraine that you guys insisted was propaganda, and considering how many pro-Palestinian protestors are the same they/thems as they/them, I just kinda doubt many of they/them would tolerate actual antisemitism at a liberation protest.
The Media: Enemies of the People, Jewish People, in particular:
On October 7, Hamas terrorists were not the only ones who documented the war crimes they had committed during their deadly rampage across southern Israel. Some of their atrocities were captured by Gaza-based photojournalists working for the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies whose early morning presence at the breached border area raises serious ethical questions.
Sparko wrote: ↑Tue Nov 07, 2023 2:59 pm
Israel is in a tough spot because World War II did not neatly end. Colonialism, genocide, a gutless UN, are all concentrating themselves on a region they have set fire to since forever really. At least Fish's 80 years. There are organizations like Hamas whose charter is perpetual chaos. So, let the dogs out. But I wish they had been restrained by better international action in vitro. No comity in error.
