Open Mic for the week of 10/16/2023
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/16/politics/trump-gag-order-chutkan-hearing/index.htmlReport
No one ever said Trump was a paragon of decorum.Report
Stop or I shall say “Stop” again.Report
That does seem the extent of it, doesn’t it?Report
There is, and should be, a lot of lead up to the following.
That said, given Trump isn’t going to follow court orders, either you live with him trying to intimidate witness and members of the court, or you lock him up.Report
I can’t say I’m surprised…..
Actions have consequences.
“As Wall Street assails Harvard, students worry about their futures”
https://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-bill-ackman-wall-street-law-firms-growing-rift-2023-10Report
Sometimes, maybe speech does need to be controlled, and even suppressed.Report
Generally no. There’s an argument for really really bad speech, but even that, for me, is a tough sell.Report
Whenever I used to have these sorts of conversations, I always used Holocaust denial as the go-to example of why sometimes a civil society needs to define boundaries of protected speech and punish those who cross them.
From this point onward I will use the Hamas massacres as the example. While I confess to a bit of smugness seeing even the Free Speech! warriors like Bari Weiss join the party, I think it is all to the good that we take a more complex view of speech and what it means to consider some protected and some unprotected, and where and when that protection is extended and when it is not.Report
Would “rapped along with a Dr. Dre album in high school” similarly be a bridge too far, if “haggling” is what we’re doing?
Support for the occasional republican politician to be elected to office?Report
Holocaust denial is an actual statement of fact, or rather is a lie pretending to be fact.
The thing presented in that article is…not.
Although let’s pause for a second and notice this letter is often misrepresented in the quotes from it. It’s flatly impossible to find an _actual copy_ of this letter (Thanks, media, you useless imbeciles.), but if you read enough articles you will notice that the letter writers did not actually say ‘Israel was entirely responsible’. This would be an opinion, not a lie, but some people could try to pretend it was a statement of fact, of legal responsibility.
Instead, they appear to have actually said that that they were _holding_ Israel entirely responsibly. (Which cannot be interpreted as a statement of fact, it is merely how someone feels about a situation.)
But I notice you didn’t actually say what about the Hamas massacre would be outside the realm of unacceptable speech, and maybe it wouldn’t include this letter?Report
Picture some rogue cops in the US shooting some random black babies because they’re black. Now try to justify that so it’s the fault of the blacks as a whole.
Holding Jews responsible for their own murders takes us deep into Na.zi territory.Report
Hey, quick question: Who do you hold responsible for the Afghanistan invasion and any deaths of Afghanistans that happened as a result of that?Report
Do you have any examples of the US targeting civilians?
For the cases where that happened, the soldiers who did that are responsibly. If the forces we were fighting deliberately used civilians as human shields then they’re responsible. And if neither of those things happened then no one is at fault.
There are vast legal and ethical differences between “accidently killed in a war” and “deliberately killed in a war”.
911 gave us cause to go to war. War kills civilians.
We could easily see 100k civilians die in Gaza and have Israel be fine ethically. War is that nasty and the current situation is that much of a problem.Report
“We could easily see 100k civilians die in Gaza and have Israel be fine ethically.”
An ethical system which endorses each dead Israeli being avenged by the deaths of 70 Palestinians.Report
It’s not the “system” which is creating this mess. Typically governments protect their citizens rather than try to get them killed.
I don’t see why Hamas has no moral agency here.Report
Chip’s point is that the speech that Harvard and these students are suffering consequences for, is speech some people want to keep from happening in the first place.Report
Free speech is not now, and never has been, consequence-free speech. Even as a legal matter, our modern concept of free speech is largely the product of the second half of the 20th century. Even in my own lifetime, we have been a lot less free than we are now to say what we please and there are unpleasant signs that we may become less free again. Generally speaking, though, we are freer now than we have ever been to say what we damn please
But people who say unpopular things have always suffered socially and economically, even at the zenith of legally-free speech, and the only remedy for that is to use our own speech to call out what we think are inappropriate reactions to someone else’s free speech, even if those inappropriate reactions are themselves free speech. Any candid observer will have to acknowledge, however, that, for us flawed human beings, this is a largely unprincipled exercise and most of us operate on the basis of whose ox is gored. How else could someone be taken seriously as a paladin of free speech when she first came to public notice trying to get a faculty member fired because she did not like his views on middle eastern politics?
Modern technology, especially social media, has given people who were always free to make asses of themselves a chance to expose their assholery to a much larger audience, which, in turn, vastly increases the number of people who can, with the minimal investment of a few keystrokes, visit the kind of predictable and inevitable consequences of public assholery on strangers that was usually localized and limited to people who had reason to know or care. It can be ugly, but, publicity aside, it is nothing new.Report
This is a perfect encapsulation, well done.Report
Thank you.Report
At this point, I have to think it is bad-faith trolling to claim that free speech and the first amendment means “actions do not have consequences.”Report
well that’s a first for me – being accused of bad faith trolling. Thanks I guess?
Look, Free Speech is never free of consequences – like Chip says its why the alleged Free Speech Absolutists are so baffoonish. However, this reads as a situation where the aim is not to impose consequences, but to limit or suppress speech. As David pointed out elsewhere, Israel is in fact committing war crimes – openly, brazenly, and intentionally – in response to the horrors of Hamas’ latest attack. So people standing up for Palestinians (however inartfully) are being told they don’t get to speak out – even though they are speaking out against a nation state that is (again) openly intending to commit war crimes. Apparently I hold a minorty view on this here, but when people’s “consequences” drvie to actions intended to prevent others in the future form saying the same thing, that’s a bridge too far.Report
Not just in response to this. Pretty much literally their entire existence, including their creation. From beginning to end, every aspect of it is a war crime.
To be clear, that doesn’t mean we can undo it, the start of plenty of countries are war crimes, but we do actually need to acknowledge that. And, more to the point, make them stop doing _new_ ones.
But for some reason, our politic climate is that we can’t point it out. And we refuse to even vaguely do the slightest thing to try to reign them in in any manner whatsoever.
Incidentally, I want to remind people of BDS, and the _response_ to that. An individual movement of ‘Hey, we’re at least not going to invest our money there’, and the fact people _passed laws_ against this.Report
What should Israel do about Gaza?
Short term (the war) and long term.Report
Allegedly Mossad is great at picking off targets the world over. . .Report
Hamas’ military arm has something like 30k members. The Mossad has tried picking off various leaders and it’s like stepping on ants.Report
Israel should leave them alone. They should back off into their own country, no missiles or anything. They have a system that shoots down most of Hamas’ crap rockets anyway, and those rockets don’t go particularly far, so might I suggest _not living right up against Gaza_.
And Israel should do that with the West Bank, too, so all the settlements need to be immediately vacated. (And Israel should not be allowed to destroy them, as they did with Gaza…no, you illegally build nice houses in another country, you have to leave them for the actual legal residents when you leave. You can’t destroy them out of spite.)
And that should be it for _Israel_. Here’s what the rest of the world should do.
Some other force, perhaps Jordan or Egypt or some cross-country force, should step in, at least in Gaza, and rebuild infrastructure and eventually hold an election. If they won’t do it, I’m willing to see the US do it, but I would much rather Arab countries did it, there is way too much resentment against us for funding weapons that killed them for decades.
Hamas, meanwhile…we can either thinl of them as a terrorist organization that should be destroyed, or we can think of them as a ‘legitimate government’ that should be regime changed and charged with war crimes. However we want to do that. We give most of the low-level soldiers some sort of amnesty if they put down their weapons, we charge the ones we can directly link to war crimes with them, and the organization goes away.
I am actually not sure of the state of the West Bank’s government, and how much help they will need, but I am sure an election is way overdue. And after Israel leaves, the landscape looks much different.
Remember that both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are, in fact, still legally ‘occupied territories’, and any other government operating them is supposed to be a mere placeholder one that tries to set up a nation. (Like we did with Japan, and Germany, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and is actually how war is supposed to work now.) Israel was never an honest actor in this process, attempting to seize land as soon as possible.
We need to actually set up a country there…or two, I don’t know.
There is one remaining issue: Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa, a place that…probably neither country should be in control of. It is currently under control of a Jordanian appointed organization with Israeli security, so it’s not completely absurd some sort of agreement can be worked out.Report
Sorry, rereading that question, I guess my answer was technically ‘mid term and long term’, but not short term.
Uh, short term in the war…offer a cease fire, and negotiate to return the hostages, which it appears everyone has forgotten about? Like…Israel is supposedly just bombing a bunch of Hamas locations…they do remember that Hamas is holding _hostages_ somewhere, right? That’s supposedly the big deal. Those hostages are presumably in…Hamas locations, right? (Right?)
Do they think hostages are immune to bombs? It really looks like Israel is planning to…find some dead hostages. That’s the very obvious outcome that we are headed to. It’s really hard to figure out what other goal they could be attempting to reach here.
As for negotiation, as I’ve mentioned, what Hamas wants is the release of the massive amount of people, most of them innocent, that Israel is holding without charge. A huge amount of those are children, and a bunch of others were just arrested cause they were at a protest or wrote something critical of Israel. Probably 80% of them could easily be released.
…assuming Israel actually care about the hostages, which I think we just determined they don’t.Report
The good news is a hostage negotiator who had interacted with Hamas before largely said what you said. Trading the non-solders for non-solders might be possible.
The bad news is this sort of thing typically takes years.
The really bad news is at the moment, Israel is focused on showing that creating 1,400 dead Jews is a bad idea, not a good idea. Something that will get you punished, not rewarded.
Israel is going to try to destroy Hamas. Given the realities on the ground this will be very, very ugly.
Short term I think keeping the war crimes to a minimum is a good thing. So having Israel allow food and water be sent in to Gaza is reasonable (and seems to have happened).
Asking them to not go to war at all really isn’t.Report
Hamas will see this (correctly) as an attempt to remove them from power and will attack any force that is openly trying to take Gaza from them.
So they need to be removed in order to make this work. Which is basically what we’re seeing now.
Gaza’s rocket range is between 10 and 160 km. 160km covers the bulk of Israel. Hamas’ medium range rocket is 25 miles which gets to Tel Aviv’s suburbs.
To be fair I’ve suggested similar things. The idea is to make both sides normal countries… but normal countries go to war if their civilians are subjected to rocket attacks much less mass murder.
The part that makes me flinch is we got here by trying something close to this approach. Israel pulled out of Gaza, Hamas took over, and after that Israel went with a blockade to try to reduce the number of terror attacks.
Attacking Israel is so popular that I’m not sure Gaza can become a normal country. If a stronger, more prosperous Gaza results in more dead bodies and a nastier war, then I don’t see a good solution.Report
Yes.
That is not even _vaguely_ what is happening now. Israeli has specifically said it’s not what is happening now. YOU just said it was not what happened now, in literally the other post you just made!
You, above:
You are, flatly, saying the goal of this is _punish_ Hamas, not to remove it from power in any manner. I entirely agree, except this is not even aimed at Hamas, but at Palestine in general, you can’t drop a thousand bombs a day on a few hundred square miles in attempt to destroy an organization.
I said how to remove it from power: First turn the country over to people _not attempting to steal it_, which will in turn result in a bunch of soldiers laying down their arms.
How many of those rockets have actually made it to impact? Maybe a dozen, over the years. There are almost certainly individual Hamas soldiers who personally killed more Israelis during the recent attack than all Hamas rockets have _ever_ killed Israelis.
Israel has misbehaved for literal decades, oppressing an entire people, and sometimes a country that does that has to put up with a couple of attacks against it after it stops and backs off. There were, indeed, white slaveowners who got murdered by freed Black men.
The result of oppressing people, the risk they will do something in vengeance, is not an excuse to stop oppressing people, because that excuse is infinite.
A few Israeli civilians probably will die….and they also will die if the hostiles do not stop, and also will die if the immediate hostiles stop but this is not settled.
You know, LIKE THEY JUST DID.
Your knowledge of this conflict is incredibly full of holes, like almost everyone here.
The very first thing that happened after Israel ‘pulled out’ Gaza on September 21, 2005 and declared it ‘extraterritorial jurisdiction’…is that two days later Israel sent a helicopter into Gaza, which either did or did not do an airstrike that caused the explosion at Jabalia refugee camp…but let’s not talk about the airstrike, because, under the universe they supposedly had just sat up, they _shouldn’t have had a helicopter there at all_. (And I have to suggest the way to not get blamed for airstrikes in other countries is to not have armed helicopters flying around in other countries.)
The first thing that happened after Hamas was elected in January 2006 was…they followed the already-existing ceasefire until _Israel_ fired rockets and assassinated their Inspector General in the Ministry of the Interior, Jamal Abu Samhadana.
Again, we appear to exist in a universe where people only know things Hamas has done and literally nothing Israel has ever done can be recorded or talked about. It’s the most amazing form of gaslighting I’ve ever seen.Report
Last time Gaza had an election, Hamas won it. Latest opinion polls suggest Hamas is five times as popular as the other party. This strongly suggests your plan is to take over Gaza and then hand control back to Hamas.
The last time Hamas won the election, the world pointed out that Israel and its allies won’t pay to kill Jews so they need to decide whether they were a government or a terror group.
All of the pressure and incentives we put on them failed. After that yes, Israel eventually broke the cease fire to kill the number 2 wanted terrorist. However there’s a very strong argument that it was just a matter of time.
This line of thought assumes the Palestinians wouldn’t be genocidal without Israel’s oppression. As far as I can tell, the Palestinians are serious when they say that “oppression” means “the Jewish state exists”.
Their rhetoric and behavior is consistent with wanting to “drive the Jews into the sea”. We even hear various protesters in the US say that. This has been going on since the creation of Israel in 1949.
Expecting peace to come from Israel behaving better seems naïve.Report
Wall Street does not want to control or suppress that speech.
If you’re expressing support for a terror group committing mass murder, then, at best, your thinking is so bad a power Wall Street firm probably doesn’t want to hire you for your brains.
The other alternatives are worse, i.e. that you’re that anti-Semitic, which means they still don’t want you.Report
They are explicitly saying they want to punish people who openly voice support
for Hamas.
And I sincerely think this is an example of good suppression of speech which is outside the boundaries of protection.
I’m just trying to bury free speech absolutism in favor of a flexible set of agreed upon boundaries.
And who says callous disregard for the lives of others is equal to stupid? I would venture to say that it can form an integral part of a lucrative business career.Report
Punish?
Or just not extend privileges to?
A lot of people confuse not having a privilege with being punished.
If you’re used to privilege, equality is painful!Report
This, but unsarcastically.Report
Imagine, if you will, someone being upset about certain books not being in libraries, then.
How silly of them!
Oh, you can’t wear a certain kind of clothing? Hey, most people can’t!
The best part is you can extend privileges to the ingroup and withhold them from the outgroup and explain that, hey, life is like that!
WAIT WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY’RE DOING THAT TO USReport
Imagine, if you will, someone being upset about certain books being in libraries.
How silly of them!
Oh, you want to wear a certain kind of clothing? Hey, most people don’t.Report
If there’s anything I’ve learned about Morality, it’s that you can’t go wrong if you’re smack dab in the middle of the pack of what is currently fashionable.Report
Yes. And?Report
And Nothing.Report
Many of these businesses that are going after students who voiced support from Hamas have a lot of Jews in them. A lot of businesses with many Jewish employees are not going to want to hire people who cheered on the murder of Jews.Report
That may be true, but it doesn’t need to be. Ordinary people without any particular allegiance aren’t buying Hamas’ justification for the slaughter and we aren’t viewing positively those who do.Report
That’s good but I still see way too many activist types that started jumping on Israel too soon afterwards and are placing everything all on Israel. The constant invocation of “International Law” by some posters on the other blog is pissing me off. They can’t even bring themselves to say one sympathetic thing about the murdered Jews and I can’t stand it.Report
What gets to me is how many people want to engage in Revolutionary Cosplay but also go out and earn by megabucks on Wall Street, Big Law, or other areas. These areas tend to have a lot of Jews who really don’t like the fact that the new people might have cheered on as Jews were killed.Report
I remember a simpler time when the main goal of revolutionary cosplay was to get laid.Report
They’re bringing it back!
Sadly, I’m too old to play.Report
It looks like Polands Law and Justice party just lost an election and won’t form a majority government. This strikes me as both very big and very good news for liberals across the EU. You can bet that Orban is sweating up a storm right now.
The big test, of course, will be to see if the new Polish administration can perform to the Poles satisfaction.Report
Whenever the reactionary centrists tell us they “just want to ask questions” about LGBTQ themed books in schools, or they merely want to “ush back against bad DEI”, you can always count on one of them to jump our from behind the curtains and scream “faggot”:
How conservatives are waging a coordinated, anti-LGBTQ+ culture war in California schools
Still, when the meeting ended, Milo and his mom said they were followed into the parking lot by people trying to intimidate them. One person who pursued them, according to video, was Adam Kiefer. He’s a far-right extremist who has marched with the Proud Boys wearing their insignia and colors, though he has denied membership in the group.
Kiefer was in Washington during the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has attended right-wing protests across Southern California for years and was filmed calling people “tranny-loving faggots” outside another recent school board meeting.
Kiefer could not be reached for comment, though on the video he and those he was with defended their actions outside the school board meeting as a response to Amber Easley taking their pictures.
FWIW, the person they were following was a 16 year old kid.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-10-15/how-a-raging-battle-over-lgbtq-issues-in-southern-california-schools-eruptedReport
Sometimes, maybe speech does need to be controlled, and even suppressed.Report
Yep.Report
This op-ed from Haaretz gets to something that has been bothering me for the last week. I have yet to have an important Muslim leader come out and give an unequivocal denunciation of Hamas’ Simchat Torah massacre. Instead the entire reaction from the Pro-Palestinian side both in the Muslim world and in the West was to blame everything on Israel from the Sunday after the massacre until now. On the other blog, there are posters invoking “International Law” to protest what Israel is doing in Gaza even though they can’t identify what international law in general that Israel is violating. No doubt if Israel decided to a pure ground invasion or a Munich Olympics style assassination of Hamas leadership, international law would also get invoked.
https://www.haaretz.com//opinion/2023-10-16/ty-article-opinion/.premium/we-jews-need-to-hear-muslim-leaders-denounce-hamas-atrocities/0000018b-3777-d450-a3af-7f7fc0660000?utm_source=Push_Notification&utm_medium=web_push&utm_campaign=General#P_3w9c_lbvnpC_3XF-1YjQum-Oz5ZS
The entire burden of resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict gets placed in the hands of Israelis. Jews must do all the work in maintaining positive relationships between Jews and Muslims. The Muslims? They get to hate and indulge in all sorts of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or just general anti-Jew bigotry. No matter how much evidence we produce it can’t be pointed out and nothing can be done. Their so called allies in the West indulge them on their most base desires in the way that the cry out against when Fox News does it with White Americans. It is gross and sick. I am tired of this.Report
Punching up is one thing, Lee.
Punching down is quite another.
The beauty of “decolonization” is that you can *ONLY* decolonize up!Report
Google is your friend. Bahrain and UAE condemned Hamas’ actions. The Saudis have been pretty silent, but have put talks with Israel on hold. Jordan has been mostly silent, but has suppressed Palestinian protests within its borders. The Egyptian regime has long openly hated Hamas, but they’re trying to act as a go-between for Israel and Hamas, since they have long-established lines of communication with both parties, and are almost certainly trying to negotiate a ceasefire, as they have done in the past. So they haven’t made any statements that might undermine their position as mediator. Qatar is effectively a Hamas ally, so they’re not going to condemn them.
Anyway, I’m amazed at the general ignorance and utter ridiculousness of the discussion of this issue on this blog. I remember, from discussions years ago (maybe the ’14 war?), thinking that the people here should read a book or two on the issue, but I refuse to believe the commentary back then was this bad, with people who know absolutely nothing about what’s going on or what has gone on just spouting ignorance and justifying strong opinions with it. Hell, up above, someone compares supporting Palestinians to Holocaust denial (one of the site’s “liberals,” no less). I’m just blown away, honestly. The moral compasses of the people here have been demagnetized.Report
Read a book! NO NOT THAT ONE NO NOT THAT ONE EITHERReport
Though also to your point, I have met folks who would benefit from reading something. *ANYTHING*.
“Yes. Harry Potter is a good start. Hamas is Slytherin.”
(butting in) “HOW DARE YOU ISRAEL IS SLYTHERIN!”Report
We don’t need a history lesson in order to ask the pertinent questions.
I fully support the right of the Palestinian people to have a homeland of their own.
I fully recognize that the Israeli government has done terrible things over its history.
So we’re done with that part of the discussion. We don’t need to reel off a list of massacres and attacks and crimes and atrocities.
The pertinent questions are these:
Is Hamas the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people?
Is there a realistic scenario in which Hamas or any other representative of the Palestinian people agree to live in peace with Israel?Report
How do you feel about the Kurds? The Catalans? The applied mathematicians?Report
As with the Palestinians, I don’t have a strong opinion other than a general support for the right of people to self-determination.
So I would pose the same questions- Are these people willing to live in peace with their neighbors, or are they agitating for the cleansing of an area of some hated outgroup?Report
That’s a really good line of questioning and a great set of posts.Report
The Kurds deserve their own state. The Catalans essentially have their own state – its the Basques who are coming down from the heady days of fight or flight at the moment.Report
Kurds == Gryffindor.
Catalans == Slytherin.
Applied Mathematicians == Ravenclaw.Report
Applied Mathematics professors == boggartsReport
The issue with the Kurdish state is that Kurdistan is basically divided between three countries, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, and all three of those countries don’t want to give up any territory.Report
A lot of people who support the Palestinians in the West have a hard time coming to grips that Hamas is being literal with their genocidal statements.Report
Do I need to copy and paste all of Article 51 and 52 of Protocol 1 of the Geneva convention again, or will linking to it suffice?
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Geneva_Convention/Protocol_I#Chapter_III._Civilian_objects
Addition: Before anyone asserts the attacks have not been indiscriminate, please do a _very_ quick check on the amount of strikes that Israel itself says it has done and ask yourself if they could have _conceivably_ been targeted at opposing forces. Just do a basic sanity check of the numbers, and look at the number of rockets going in the other direction if you think maybe Israel is just firing at launch sites, cause there simply can’t be enough of those.Report
There are 30k members of Hamas’ military wing. That’s 2+ percent of Gaza.
And Israel’s stated goal is to destroy Hamas totally so in theory all of it’s wings are viewed as supporting the military wing and could be targeted.
Given that Hamas is deliberately using civilians as shields, it’s expected that blowing up a building to kill a squad also kills civilians.
Israel has dropped about 6k bombs on Gaza (sources differ). If we believe Hamas then it’s killed about 3,500 people. Given how unlikely that Hospital was to have killed 500 then maybe we shouldn’t believe them.
Basic sanity check of the numbers suggests Israel isn’t deliberately targeting civilians but it’s gone a lot more tolerant of killing them.Report
Hamas throws the Palestinians under the tracks:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5fb52de05d8bf6646068bc9c7624b7582b657ea4c252e89cfdea68907e462561.jpgReport
Like most fanatics, they believe they are right, and that everyone supports them. In a sane world they’d be disowned by their own people, but as Israel is looking to level Gaza I suspect that won’t happen.Report
Israel’s current response has been very restrained so far compared to previous responses despite the level of the atrocity that Hamas did. The ground campaign has not even begun yet despite Israel saying it would have begun. Hamas committed an act of war despite not having the capacity to wage a real war. Israel is responding like any government would do when a neighboring state invades and kills way over a 1000 of its citizens. Many want a restraint that no other government would give.Report
I saw an interview with a Gazan journalist. The interviewer asked her what “a proportional response” would be to the mass murder. She couldn’t answer that question, it was too far off her script or worldview.Report
None of the people against Israeli military action can answer that.Report
The problem with that framing is Hamas is not a nation state as Israel is. its a political and terrorist entity WITIN Israel, since the Palestinians b do not enjoy autonomy or defined borders oar the ability to negotiate trade agreements or any other trapping of a nation state actor. Thus Israel’s response – whatever it ultimately is – is not state on state warfare. And again, as David pointed out elsewhere, Israel has openly announced that they will purposely violate several sections of the Geneva Convention in their response. As a nation state, they do actually have an obligation of restraint not to do that.Report
Hamas runs Gaza as a government, can win elections, and enjoys the popular will. They could trivially become a normal (if weak) nation state if they’d stop spending every dollar they can on murdering Jews.
As for breaking Geneva, If Hamas chooses to use it’s own civilians as human shields and they get killed, then that should be on them.
If we ignore that this is what Hamas is doing then we end up with where there’s nothing Israel can do to avoid breaking the law other than allowing it’s civilians to be killed. That’s a misuse of the law and a really bad idea because if everything is illegal then nothing is.
Cutting off power and fuel is a military necessity to cripple Hamas. That’s going to get a lot of people killed but I don’t see how to get away from it.
Cutting off water takes us into war crime territory if it continues for too long.Report
It’s less ‘Israel is looking to level Gaza” and more “Israel will need to level Gaza because Hamas is hiding behind their own people”.
Supposedly they’re trying to prevent civilians from fleeing the danger zones.Report
Per a poll from Marist:
1. 2/3rds of Americans think it is very important for Biden to speak strongly in support of Israel;
2. Slightly over half of Americans are critical of Biden’s statements on Israel (I assume this includes people who are sympathetic to the Gazans and die-hard Republicans who will never get a Democrat any credit);
Per a poll from Reuters/ISPOS:
3. An overwhelming majority of Americans want its diplomats to get Gazan civilians out of harm’s way and into some safe country (presumably not the U.S. though).
Conclusion: We are not a very serious people and our basic view on every issue is “I wanna unicorn and a pony.” Since this is a far away distant conflict, it gets to be sportsball.Report
Agreed.Report
Egypt is the obvious choice. They don’t want them and will refuse.
Putting “the Gazan civilians out of harm’s way and into some safe country” means that country gets to reenact Jordan and/or Lebanon’s experiences with Islamic fundamentalists. In 20 years that state will be going to war with them.Report
Just as SCOTUS had to tell Alabama it was serious about redrawing Congressional Districts, it has now had to tell it’s own Appeals Courts to stop being stupid about gun regulations:
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/16/1206245991/supreme-court-ghost-gunsReport
For anyone interested in going down the Jeffrey Epstein rat hole one more time:
https://www.aol.com/news/victim-jeffrey-epstein-she-testified-085900940.htmlReport
People die all the time. Indeed, it is the nature of people to die.
It’s when someone does not die that it becomes suspicious.Report
My impression is that the number of people involved in him (being a victim counts) was so high that it’s expected some of them die every year.
Similarly I predict that at least two dozen people from Star Trek will die this year. For perspective, 35 died last year.Report
Jim Jordan has lost his first ballot for House Speaker. The 20 GOP Congress people who told him they were going to oppose him did so on the record and publicly. ALl the Democrats voted for Hakim Jeffries.
Jordan – 200
Jeffries – 212
Other – 20
Present – 0Report
Those 20 Republicans are going to get the worst wedgies of their lives.Report
This was funny, you heathensReport
It’s a weird relief, really, to know that the kooks can’t elect a speaker either. But we’ll see if it holds- republican “moderates” are a lot more squishy than their rightier brethren.Report
I can see him picking up 2or 3 or maybe 4 votes next time. But all the Congress critters interviewed anonymously so far this after noon are sticking to the “his opposition was more then he expected.” line, which tells me he doesn’t have anything to offer the hold outs and can’t effectively count, much less whip, votes.Report
They’re in a lose lose situation.Report
Well his MO has been to put each one up on right wing media for ten minute hates until they fold. We’ll see if he can do this for the holdouts.Report
This is political theater.Report
With very serious real world consequences.Report
Adding a note that, overnight, the NO votes in the GOP may well have grown, in part because of anonymous texts and voicemails sent to the spouses of those already voting no. Plus Jordan apparently doesn’t have a plan to keep the government open after the CR expires (I’m totally unsurprised) and is being accused of being a sore looser. There is a second vote scheduled today, but when it goes down, the GOP apparently has no plan.
Turns out breaking things without a plan to fix them is not really a good idea.Report
Final Tally round 2:
Jordan – 198
Jefferies – 213
Other – 22
Present – 0Report
C-Span corrected their numbers:
Jordan – 100
Jeffries – 212
Other – 22Report
In the 19th century, when multi-ballot nominations were frequent, candidates focused on adding votes with each ballot, as a sign of momentum, in the hopes of setting off a bandwagon-jumping frenzy that would lead to victory. *Losing* votes between ballots was a catastrophic sign of weakness. Losing votes *while controlling the timing of the vote*…that’s just sheer amateurism.
We’ll find out soon whether the 19th century rules still apply in 2023.Report
This essay on how Diaspora Jews feel after the Simchat Torah massacre has been getting the rounds on social media:
https://joshgilmansblog.wordpress.com/2023/10/13/why-you-might-have-lost-all-your-jewish-friends-this-week-and-didnt-even-know-it/
Since two Jews, three opinions is still the rule I don’t want to say that every Diaspora Jew feels this way but my informal observations show that many Jews are really distressed at the inability of Pro-Palestinian activists in the West and the larger Muslim world to come out with a straight denunciation of what Hamas did. A teacher from my high school, who is pretty much a multicultural liberal squish, expressed anguished on how people he knows who express solidarity for the Jews in this case even for a day. It was just straight into rallies against Israel in many quarters when the blood was still fresh.Report
They aren’t going anywhere and they’ll still be just as fashionable in a month or two as they were two months ago.Report
Hamas has apparently offered to release all the civilian hostages if Israel stops attacking Gaza. IDF prisoners will be released for Palestinian prisoner exchanges. This is according to Haaretz. Probably about the best deal possible to be offered by Hamas.Report
Ignoring that Israel is too fired up to care, it’s not clear that they can do that.
The faction we’re likely talking to is probably not the faction that actually took prisoners.Report
A hospital in Gaza was bombed. At least 500 casualties. The IDF claims it comes from a mis-launch of a rocket by the Islamic Jihad. Critics of Israel are saying it was a deliberate attack by the IDF. Everybody is going to believe what they want evidence be damned.Report
And so the evidence is?Report
Team Good is saying that it’s the fault of Team Evil.
Team Evil is saying that it’s the fault of Team Good.
There’s footage, but we don’t know if the footage is from the event, from ARMA3, or from Syria.
Would you like links to press releases?Report
Break Glass In Case Of Emergency:
1) Well, I’m not saying that it was a good thing but Israel *DID* tell everybody to evacuate the hospital…
2) Well, I’m not saying that it was a good thing but Israel put them in a position where they had no choice but to fire missiles defensively and that means that their own hospitals were put in danger because of Israel’s actions…Report
Okay. Enough time has passed that actual evidence seems to have surfaced.
GeoConfirmed has put together a timeline from footage. This is a thread of about twenty tweets so click through and read all of them.
In the thread, he shows footage of the kinetic physics rapid local expansion event and puts together where the objects appear to have come from and geolocates buildings that show up in the footage and shows a map of the area and how it appears to have gone down:
Now the best arguments that I’ve seen that this can’t be a Palestinian rocket that caused the explosion is that Hamas rockets are puny and better at taking out, say, a house or a car than a freakin’ Hospital and since Israel is the only entity in the region capable of taking out a hospital then, Q.E.D., Israel took out the hospital.
Well, that argument has assumptions in it that I’m not entirely certain are true. It’s a solid argument. I just don’t know that it’s *SOUND*.
If you’re willing to accept circumstantial evidence, check out the evolution of this headline:
Report
I’m not on Twitter and have never heard of these people.
Are they a reliable source?Report
The New York Times? Obviously not.
GeoConfirmed? Looks like a bunch of anonymous autists. So I’d say “looks like a good shot at being accurate given the information they’ve got”.Report
If you want to see some randos on the internet and take them at face value without a shred of skepticism, be my guest.
I’ll wait until some fact are known.Report
“Facts”. Can anything ever be known?
All we have are narratives.
But you can note that there does seem to be the fact that the New York Times went from “THIS WAS AN ISRAELI STRIKE!” to “It was a strike of some kind” to “there was an explosion”.
The garden path of “active voice!” to “(passive voice)” is something that happened.Report
Here’s Al Jazeera showing the footage of the rocket failing live.
Not that Al Jazeera is particularly trustworthy either, of course.
What is “evidence” anyway?Report
I…don’t see how they can definitely say that video shows what GeoConfirmed say it shows. We pan _way_ up to look at the exploding rocket, it explodes, and then we see a flash that is clearly an explosion offscreen, and we pan down and see that explosion was _way_ back there, and then the hospital explosion happens.
I am baffled as to how we get _any_ conclusions from that. It’s pretty clear any hypothetical shrapnel couldn’t have cause _both_ explosions, and I see no sign of any shrapnel anyway. And considering that after the rocket explodes, there is clearly a giant zoom out (They are still zooming out when they come back down to the buildings, and we can’t tell when that started), so we have absolutely no way to mentally tell if that rocket exploded above the hospital…not that we could very well anyway, but that zoom makes it impossible.
What I do see is…no one shooting at the hospital, on either side. We have a clear view of it right before and during the explosion, and no rockets.
Which makes it somewhat clear this was a gas explosion, as that’s about all it could be. Was it caused by rocket debris? Maybe. Or…just a fire.Report
Sounds like we’re in “bet on stupid” territory, so how about “Ammo dump”.Report
Sometimes things blow up in the Middle East. That’s for damn sure.Report
Here is a photo of the aftermath.
Explosion was in the parking lot.
No damage in the surrounding buildings, like no broken windows.
No crater.
If you were in a car a few car lengths away you could probably survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HCgJMQhKvE
It was a small attack. Highly likely Hamas is lying about how many people were killed or claiming every corpse in the hospital is on that attack.Report
So, evidence I have at this point:
1) IDF warned hospitals in general, including this one, to evacuate days earlier, as they would be bombed.
2) IDF actually shot at this hospital as a warning back then. ( https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-news-hamas-war-10-18-23/h_51878e2473a9230dd05f29b15c13abf9 )
…or they were lying and hit it accidentally, and then _claimed_ it was a warning shot, which is also possible, but not really helpful here.
3) The IDF spokepeople took credit for the hospital attack in the immediate aftermath. Yes, they really did. They said they did it straight away, blaming the hospital for harboring terrorists, and only backed off later.
This fact weirdly isn’t as useful as you might think in determining guilt, as the IDF lies continually about everything they do, so it is entirely possible that part of the IDF was lying to justify the attack under the premise it was their airstrike when it actually wasn’t on purpose or even them doing it! (And I want people to think about that fact the _next_ time the IDF claims there were terrorists while we’re looking at a bunch of dead civilians.)
But one of the unnoticed facts, that I think is really important, is:
4) The US government has been _incredibly_ mealy-mouthed when asked about this. Biden has said he has seen intelligence that leads him to believe it wasn’t Israel, but they are being very right lipped.
And now the evidence towards Islamic Jihad, a lot who which is…a really dumb:
5) The aforementioned video, which I not only can’t see how it proves anything, I can’t even see how anyone _thinks_ it proves anything, unless it’s ‘Things that happen close in time must be related’.
6) A claim the blast wasn’t big enough to be an IDF missile, which is…really dumb, because the IDF has a lot of different sized missile, and those missiles can explode at different heights. It’s not big enough to be their biggest missile, that is correct.
7) A call from two Islamic Jihad, a call which makes…no sense. Literally listen to that call. At the start, #1 is confused, and #2 person is ‘They are saying these things, that we did this’, and by the end #1 is confidently saying where it was shot from the cemetery and #2 is trying to figure out where the cemetery is. What is this even supposed to be? Assuming this is real, this is two very confused people trying to make sense of news reports, not relying any actual knowledge.
And it’s worth pointing out: The conclusion they come to is that ‘it came from the cemetery behind the hospital’, is…not what the supposedly misfire shrapnel video shows, at all. That shot came from way the hell back, not literally next door. So you can’t actually believe that theory _and_ this phone call…if that theory is right, these people are massively uninformed, and if the phone call is right, that video shows nothing relevant.
—
And there’s one important fact being left out: It didn’t actually strike the hospital. It struck the parking lot. Which does change the calculations a bit as to whether or not Israel would do it…go look at #1 and #2 above. I don’t think they are at the point of deliberately bombing hospital, but the IDF is known for firing ‘warning shots’ like this.
And that’s what I actually think happened: the IDF shot another ‘warning shot’ near the hospital. Low yield, not going to damage the building, which is indeed fine and still standing.
It goes off, and Hamas (Who are exactly the same sort of pathological liars as the IDF), produces an over-inflated death count of 500 or sometimes even 900 people. The IDF takes credit for this…
…and then everyone realizes…oh, the strike actually did kill a bunch of people.
Because, unfortunately, the parking lot had a lot of refugees in it, who were standing near the hospital under the idea it wouldn’t get hit. They are the ones that died, not the ones in the hospital. 500 does actually seem like too large a number, 200 seems more reasonable. But still a lot.
And unfortunately for Israel, that sort of technical quibbling that ‘We didn’t attack a hospital per se, as in the place that medical personal were treating people, we just attacked hospital grounds that happened have a lot of civilians standing on them’ doesn’t really play in the media.Report
Here’s what Biden has said.
Maybe the DoD is lying and maybe Biden is lying. Maybe he’s senile and just reading off of a card!Report
Yeah, the New York Times isn’t really helping either.
Report
Yes, the US has since firmed up a little in asserting it was Islamic Jihad. Their first completely ridiculous statement was something along the lines of ‘Israel strongly believes it was not them who did the attack’, which honestly sounds like someone saying ‘I know they are lying, but will not call them out’.
But they are now saying it clearer.
Which I guess slightly moves the dial back towards that side…except I have absolutely no idea what sort of evidence Biden is looking at, because it’s possible by ‘evidence’, Biden means ‘things provided by the IDF’. And, I cannot possibly emphasis this enough, the IDF has absolutely no credibility.
So the question is: Does the US have some evidence that isn’t from the IDF, and also…isn’t these incredibly vague public videos and phone calls that don’t even work together?
It’s certainly possible they do, the US has crazy weird and secret intelligence capabilities. And I don’t expect them to reveal that, but I do, at least, expect them to say ‘Our own intelligence has produced evidence’ instead of just vague unsourced ‘evidence’ in general. Literally, that’s the sentence I want, that _we_ produced the evidence. If we did, then I will assume it’s true, but until then…we still have very little idea.Report
Let’s back up just a hair.
Was the hospital destroyed?Report
Far as we can tell, the hospital wasn’t damaged. There was an explosion in the parking lot. It destroyed a few cars and damaged another dozen.
If it was standing room only next to the cars you still wouldn’t get 500 people dead.Report
I think we can all agree that if Israel weren’t acting aggressively then the hospital wouldn’t have been put at risk, and therefore this whole thing is Israel’s fault really, right?Report
No, the parking lot was hit, the hospital appears only slightly damaged, although honestly it might have just started out that way.
The problem is, of course, is that there apparently were a lot of people standing around in the parking lot, presumably to avoid the bombardment campaign as hospitals are supposed to be safe, and they got killed and injured, as has been confirmed by doctors in the hospital who had to deal with the aftermath. The best estimates I have been able to find are somewhere around 200, not the 500 given to start with.
…why would we start over on this discussion rehashing things we already know and have talked about?
Is this the part of the discussion where we pretend I believe anything _Hamas_ says, and I have to deny that? Hamas are almost as bad liars as the IDF, and I only put ‘almost’ in there because the IDF tries to make up excuses for doing horrific things, whereas Hamas often admits doing them.
But they both lie equally as much about each other, and we should not trust a single thing either of them say about this.Report
So, scrolling up, I realize I literally said all this already in a parent post, that this hospital was not hit. Which raises the question of why the hell you’d ask me again?Report
Oh, I didn’t see this question.
It has to do with the emphasis on stuff like how Israel shot at the hospital and how Israel has hit this hospital before.
It’s like the emphasis is on how reasonable it was to believe that Israel would have done the acts described in the initial headlines and how *THAT* is what needs to be addressed…
Rather than what actually, technically, happened.
Like, Israel needs to be condemned for how they would have done what we said they did.
Which, I suppose, is an argument that is kind of interesting. It’s a standard that I might be willing to use… if we agree to use it, that is.Report
If we’re going with “what they would do” then Hamas is openly genocidal and only lacks the power.Report
…and there’s no reason to believe they will ever get the power.
The last time Hamas and Israel had a major conflict, 30 Palestinians died for every Israeli death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Gaza_War
What we have here is a situation where one side is “openly genocidal” while the other side is doing the vast majority of the killing.Report
This is true. However how relevant is it?
Was the United States justified in going to war with Afghanistan? The power imbalance and the troop death ratios were the same or worse.
Normal countries go to war in this situation. Sane countries don’t fire up wars when they’re going to face these kinds of death ratios.
Is the expectation that Israel should just ignore the occasional 911 because they’re Jews?Report
The relevance is that to make a credible argument that Hamas poses an imminent threat to Israel’s very existence requires (1) giving a realistic scenario of how that would happen; and, (2) explaining what has changed so radically from the time nine years ago when Israel inflicted 30 deaths for every one it suffered.
People here are reiterating over and over and over that Hamas has a motive. OK. Now what’s their means and opportunity?
Also…let’s face it: A group of people who suffer 30 deaths for every one it inflicts just isn’t very competent at being “genocidal”, is it?Report
They lack the power to kill every single Jew. However they just showcased that they’re serious about trying to.
So that’s where their heads are at. That should frame a bunch of issues. Everything from complaints that Gaza is an open air prison to it’s Israel’s fault for not making peace.
Further 30 deaths for one in the context of a country that’s out numbered 200 to one might not be that reassuring.Report
Again, on the subject of Hamas, you’re focusing purely on motive without discussing means and opportunity. How much does it matter what they want if they have no means of getting it? What they just “showcased” is *the best they could do*, and the best they could do was to kill 0.0014 million of Israel’s 9.5 million people.
Also…if Hamas is so wildly and overwhelmingly popular in the open air prison of Gaza–if everyone locked in there is a blood-thirsty Jew hater–then how is it that only about 4% of the men of the Gaza Strip are Hamas fighters?
Also…exactly *who* outnumbers Israel 200 to 1?Report
I’m not sure what you’re trying to argue here.
With only 1400 dead bodies, Israel shouldn’t be doing anything?
Or are you claiming that I’m misusing the word? That we should only be using “genocidal” for groups that have successfully done that rather than those which openly proclaim they want to?
I guess I could describe them as a “hate” group but that seems a little soft peddling with the number of dead people and how big a problem for peace this is.
The typical pro-Palestinian way to describe them would be as a “resistance” group but imho that’s extremely soft peddling.Report
They mumble about this and usually just talk about disproportionate responses but a lot of Pro-Palestinian advocates in the West do believe that Israel should do nothing. Take it on the chin. Respond to this act of war by donning sackcloth and ashes and repenting for their sins to the Palestinians.Report
Before I start, let me make a Jaybird call.
That should get his attention. He likes to talk about narratives.
The credibility of a narrative is based its ability to include and explain the relevant facts.
The narratives here about Israel, the Palestinians, and the broader Muslim world cannot account for certain facts. I’m pointing that out in case people want to re-think those narratives.Report
The credibility of a narrative is based its ability to include and explain the relevant facts.
No, it’s not.
The credibility of a narrative is based on its truthyness.
It’s why some narratives are self-evident to you but absurd to me and vice-versa.Report
The bait worked!
We have a semantic issue.
*I* use credibility to mean how believable a narrative is once it has been subjected to the toughest questions that can be thrown at it.
As far as I can tell, *you* use credibility to mean whether someone is willing to believe the narrative.
So we’re not defining the key word in the debate in the same way.
Anyway…
If you have any interest in the question: How would you define the credibility of Fox News’ narrative about Dominion Voting Systems in November and December 2020, versus the credibility of that narrative in April 2023?Report
Yeah, yeah. I’m not going to play the “whatabout” game.
If we want to explore a narrative, let’s explore one on the topic that we’re actually discussing.
Is Israel the underdog in the region?
There are two narratives, of course.
The first is something like “the Palestinians are the underdogs because of X, and Y, and Z.”
The second is something like “Israel are the underdogs because of P, and Q, and R.”
And you know what? Both of those are believable.
*I* use credibility to mean how believable a narrative is once it has been subjected to the toughest questions that can be thrown at it.
I’ve done the thing where I’ve asked fairly tough questions and, lemme tell ya, narrative-havers are *GREAT* at just letting them roll off their back like water off a duck. You can ask the question three or four times in a row and they refuse to answer. Sometimes they refuse to acknowledge that they’ve been asked a question!Report
And here I had been, thinking you enjoyed media criticism! I will have to revisit my priors now.
The Fox News / Dominion Voting Systems case is a great one for highlighting the semantic difference between us on “credibility”.
In December 2020, the Fox News narrative about Dominion Voting Systems illustrated your kind of credibility: A lot of people believed it, and that was profitable (at the time) for Fox News.
In April 2023, the Fox News narrative about Dominion Voting Systems illustrated my kind of credibility: It crumbled under scrutiny, and cost Fox News $787 million.Report
I dislike narratives that oppose facts.Report
Why would the question be “Is Israel the underdog in the region?” rather than, say, “Is Israel able to defend its borders?” The latter question is tangible and meaningful.Report
To everyone’s surprise, judging from what Hamas did, we just found the answer is “no”.Report
I’m withholding judgment on that until Israel does its post-mortem of what went wrong. Was it inability or was it significant human error?Report
Does it matter?
Short of the Israeli government knowing this was going to happen and enabling it, they’ve had a massive border failure by an armed group that targeted, and can be expected to target, civilians.
In a democracy where civilians control the gov and the army, that massively means “something must be done”.
We’re in “ugly war” territory. The alternative would be Hamas releases the hostages and hands over the militants to face a criminal justice system.
Hamas is the defacto gov of Gaza. Ergo Gaza has decided to go to war with Israel. If they don’t actually want that then they can surrender.
I see no chance that they’ll surrender. I don’t even see that the Palestinians want them to.
For all the talk about “collective punishment” and “innocent civilians”, far as I can tell the people of Gaza still support Hamas. When I goggle for calls for Hamas to surrender or even just hand back the hostages, I get nothing.Report
You’re absolutely right, Jaybird, that narrative-havers can deflect counterpoints and ignore inconvenient facts in the most jaw-dropping ways.
And that’s okay! We’re just here discussing the issues we choose to discuss, not selecting people for re-education camp. A person is free to choose to cling to a narrative. Onlookers are free to note that that person is blinkered on that topic, and rate the person accordingly. (Or, to bring in the Word of the Weekend, a person is free to believe a narrative to be credible, even if it does not hold up to the scrutiny that would make it credible to a skeptic.)
And, to be properly charitable to the credulous, changing a narrative in one’s mind takes time and energy and a willingness to admit that one was wrong. Sometimes that’s more than a person can spare.Report
The meta-problem is that we don’t really have a good way to tell the difference between you saying “No! Your narrative is not as accurate as my narrative” and you saying “I shall cling to my narrative in the face of a better one!”
Is “you shouldn’t ask your question, you should be asking *MY* question!” a tell?Report
The problem here is both narratives start with “God gave me this land”.Report
Eh. Both narratives could start with “I have a right to live here; my ancestors did!” and we’d still have the same problem.
Listening to John Lennon’s “Imagine” would not, in fact, fix this.Report
Without the religious aspects the conflict would have long been resolved, or even not exist.
The surrounding states wouldn’t care.
Resisting Israel is popular in the surrounding states and that keeps the conflict going. Thus the UN, thus treating the refugees special (the son of a refugee is a refugee), thus the right to return, thus various states funding terror groups, and so on.
The Jews wouldn’t be hell bent on taking that specific land. I can see a strong argument for them to create a country (England telling them to stay in Germany during the Holocaust kind of showcases that). However since they do have a nation state, they want a Jewish one. That implies not doing this “GO” (the game) tactic of surrounding places.Report
“What they just “showcased” is *the best they could do*, and the best they could do was to kill 0.0014 million of Israel’s 9.5 million people.”
Then Hamas still needs to be destroyed as a functioning entity.
No nation anywhere in the world has ever been asked to endure repeated attacks like this.
If we were talking about IRA attacks in London or Catalan attacks in Madrid or ISIS attacks in Dubai or any similar event, the entire world would agree that the nation attacked had the right to eliminate the threat.
The Palestinian people have the right to self-determination and as I already mentioned, I stipulate to all the charges of colonialism leveled at the Israeli government.
None of that changes the fact that Hamas cannot be allowed to continue operating.Report
“Then Hamas still needs to be destroyed as a functioning entity.”
Yes. *Hamas* needs to be destroyed, because *Hamas* as an organization is responsible. Not all Gaza residents, not all Palestinians, not all Arabs, not all Shiites, not all Muslims. *Hamas*.
To take your first example, 30 years of IRA terrorism never gave the English the ethical authority to even kill Sinn Fein politicians, much less kill uninvolved Catholic Irishmen by the thousands.Report
If a ground invasion is needed to destroy Hamas, then that’s a very nasty package that includes the deaths of (tens? hundreds?) of thousands of uninvolved civilians.
I don’t like that logic, but there it is.
The alternatives are…
1) Hamas cooperates with it’s own destruction.
Doesn’t use human shields or agrees to leave.
2) The Israeli army is much better and more precise at doing this than they have shown.
3) Israel backs down and accepts the occasional 911.
Does anyone see any other alternatives to this train wreck?Report
I see an alternative. It was the alternative President Biden advocated to Prime Minister Netanyahu: Slow down.
Israel has time on its side. It has Gaza blockaded. It is getting stronger with each passing day, while Hamas is getting weaker. It can continue to pick off Hamas’ leadership one-by-one. It can talk to Qatar about providing a comfortable confinement for life to any Hamas leaders who want to lay down their arms.
If the Israeli people end Netanyahu’s political career, then they have even more options, but I’ll believe that when I see it.Report
Very good idea. Thank you.
Hmm… of course that means the hostages are stuck, maybe being tortured, for years.
I have to admit this is a better idea and more realistic than my alternatives and better than what we’re likely to see.
Israel has an overwhelming level of political pressure to “do something” right now.
I think in about 10 years everyone on all sides will wish they’d gone slower.Report
OK so if we are all in agreement that Hamas needs to be destroyed, the obvious next question is how, and what steps are legitimate in order to do it.
Then the biggest question is the one I asked in my very first comment on the issue, which is what the end goal looks like- Two states, one state, or some other variation.
But notice what is assumed in that question- a Palestinian population which accepts Israel’s right to exist and refrains from further attacks.Report
That. That exactly.
Let’s drill down to what that would mean.
Do the Palestinians accept that there is no serious “Right to Return”? That they’ve put their lives on hold for generations for nothing?
The world (and especially the surrounding countries who run the refugee camps) could help a lot by closing the camps.Report
“Their first completely ridiculous statement was something along the lines of ‘Israel strongly believes it was not them who did the attack’, which honestly sounds like someone saying ‘I know they are lying, but will not call them out’.”
lol
tired: “we should conduct ourselves with nuance and caution in the first few hours following an apparent atrocity in a contentious warzone, because the facts often take a while to come out and making conclusive statements early risks false accusations.”
wired: “because they didn’t immediately and unequivocally say It Was Hamas then it means they thought it was Israel!”Report
If you get asked about what other people did, talking about what they _believe_ is not saying ‘I do not know’, it is saying ‘I have opinions about this that I do not wish to make public so I will instead talk about someone’ else’s opinions’. It is perfectly reasonable to say ‘We do not know’ or ‘The scant evidence we have does not point that way and is still very inconclusive’…or, hell, even ‘The evidence is not in yet, but we don’t believe they would do that, and the evidence will show that.’
If someone asks me ‘Do you think the US government landed on the moon?’, and my response is ‘The US government strongly believes they landed on the moon.’, I think most people would believe that I, at minimum, _doubted_ they did.Report
It’s confused and basic facts are not clear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahli_Arab_Hospital_explosionReport
The thread is up to 39 tweets now.
Report
https://twitter.com/MalcolmNance/status/1714578755203793125?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1714578755203793125%7Ctwgr%5Ec7e38543bc42eff05a38a4ab9dc3f5fbfb277d58%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Dlawyersgunsmoneyblog-comt_i%3D13645920https3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F3Fp3D136459t_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fwww.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com2F20232F102Fcasualties-of-war-4t_e%3DCasualties20of20wart_d%3DCasualties20of20war20-20Lawyers2C20Guns202620Moneyt_t%3DCasualties20of20wars_o%3Ddescversion%3D4699de2a86f3c790aa59c8d1312129e4Report
Very easy to picture Islamic Jihad using a hospital as a rocket launch pad.
Or Israel returning fire. Or just screwing up.Report
How good is the IDF’s counter-battery fire? What I’m reading about Ukraine these days is that their counter-battery fire with western gear has made being a Russian artilleryman a very, very dangerous job.Report
Counter-battery margin of error could be 10 meters and that still might put it inside the building.
For that matter even 1 meter might do that.
Ideally you-a-rocket-launcher find a spot where Israel can’t respond.Report
The first casualty of war is the truth.Report
Picked up my Novavax earlier today. Insurance covered it so it was “free”.
Novavax is a protein-based vaccine and those things have been around since the 80’s. I wanna say that instead of targeting the spike proteins, it targets the center mass.
I got my shot at 11:30, had a weird taste in my mouth starting around 12:15, and now I am beginning to succumb to brain fog and I’m going to go take a nap.
But if you want a vaccine but are irritated that the mRNA shots may have been a hair oversold at the beginning of the pandemic, well… this is a more traditional vaccine that is more like a flu shot.
Ask your pharmacist if Novavax is right for you.Report
The 2022 crime stats have just been released. I have not yet looked at them.
HOWEVER. I have seen tweets like this one:
That tells me that the info is not good.Report
Let’s check it out… FBI Releases 2022 Crime in the Nation Statistics
Huh. It’s not *THAT* bad.
Regression to the mean everywhere but robbery.Report
More people seem to have had their letters of employment rescinded.
Report
They can do what they want of course but I still think it would be interesting to conduct a comparative analysis of what sorts of things associates from the classes of about 2017-2021 said while marinating in our modern ivy league divinity programs without jeopardizing their jobs. Doubtless it was all totally non-controversial and there is an obvious line that has now been crossed.Report
What *I* find interesting is the fact that I know about it!
If a guy had his offer of employment rescinded because they found out that he did blackface a lot in college, would we find out about it?
I don’t mean if he was a liberal politician.
I mean, like… just a guy. Would this be a story covered by NBC news? I sincerely doubt that these are the first rescinded letters of employment in the last decade. I’m sure that there’s one every year or so.Report
I’m sure we would rescind an offer for blackface or being a neo-na.zi.
We’ve fired people for doing equiv things and I’d think rescinding is easier.Report
I’m not sure blackface is really the right comparison. I mean, do we maybe think there are a number of associates out there in that time period who expressed the idea that words are violence, and perhaps involved themselves in various incidents of intimidating or banning speakers they disagreed with? What about endorsing various Kendian ideas on race, like that the entire structure of the state needs to be inverted into a racial spoils system that favors specific groups? What have they said about white, Asian, or even black and hispanic people that disagree with them in these
endorsements? Have they expressed the belief that there is a magical thing called gender identity and that some women have penises? And what have they said about women who disagree? Is having an aggressively dumb take on a far away war about which most Americans know little about, really worse than the above? It’s hard for me to see how.
The real issue is that the top tiers of Big Law have a lot of people who see themselves as really progressive, but there is also a not insignificant chunk of them that really found themselves on a sponsored trip to an Israeli kibbutz one summer in their 20s.
Now, I am firmly on team push back on the illiberal leftist insanity on universities. Normally I am a fan of experiencing natural consequences (within reason) in hopes that the adults at these institutions can do a better job running them. But this isn’t that. It’s just people having their feelings hurt by the same vitriol they happily allow college students to unleash on others.Report
I mean had their offer rescinded for *ANYTHING*.
These law offices are making a big deal and sending out press releases saying “We yanked our offer!” and those press releases are being passed to editors and the editors are yelling “PRINT IT!”
And now here we are reading them!Report
A lot of big law firms and big corporations especially in major metro areas are going to have very diverse employee pools these days with a wide-variety of laws. Lawyers of all types, especially in and near big cities, lean heavily Democratic because Trump turns them off so much. Romney received a fair number of donations from BigLaw and BigLaw lawyers. I don’t know if he was on parity with Obama but IIRC it was much closer. Trump received much less than HRC and Biden.
So you will have firms, especially in their New York or LA offices, that can be anywhere between 20-50 percent Jewish, and then people who are much more sympathetic to the Palestinians and recent events made sparks fly.Report
Signing a statement that blames a pogrom on the victims of a pogrom and basically celebrates the mass murder of somewhere between 1300 to 1400 Jews by a genocidal anti-Semitic terrorist group is a bit much.Report
Why I would not have used “pogrom” as an analogy here:
1. In the Russian pogroms, the victims were people confined to a legally mandated area. In the Hamas attacks, the attackers were people confined to a legally mandated area.
2. In the Russian pogroms, the victims had few options for retaliation. In the Hamas attacks, the victims have already killed more people than the original attackers did.Report
In terms of the destruction at the Hospital:
1. The IDF released audio of Islamic Jihad that admitted liability: https://twitter.com/MalcolmNance/status/1714578755203793125
2. Twitter is deeming this a deep fake of course.
3. A former NSA agent turned security talking head guy named Malcolm Nance stated: ANALYSIS: I wore headphones for @NSAGov
for nearly 2 decades. This @IDF
Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) is a telephone voice intercept between two individuals. “It is the exact conversation (called Hot Copy) any SIGINT team would have been furiously searching for b/c we know senior terrorists MUST be discussing it. But for Israel to release this raw SIGINT shows how serious the damage the explosion has done to its narrative of professionalism.”Report
Nathan Russer from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute also thinks it was an inadvertent Islamic Jihad rocket and the death toll/damage is far less than reported: https://nitter.net/Nrg8000/status/1714535497958334678#mReport
Pictures of the Hospital are showing up today. As it turns out, the explosion was in a parking lot and it hit people in the parking lot.
I was thinking of stuff like this:
What’s your first thought when you see that headline? That we’re seeing a picture of the hospital? Well, we ain’t! That’s somewhere else.
Here’s a picture of the hospital parking lot:
Report
So King Hussein of Jordan called off a summit designed to figure out how to aid and protect the Palestinians of Gaza as Hamas gets routed out over a parking lot destroyed by Islamic Jihad making a mistake. Good move.Report
Islamic Jihad: Screwing up the peace process since 2005.Report
Dead Body Mistaken For Halloween Decoration, Worker Mowed Around It
https://www.dailywire.com/news/dead-body-mistaken-for-halloween-decoration-worker-mowed-around-itReport
Ironic.
A carjacker in Louisiana got arrested after allegedly carjacking the DA.
Apparently, he had 3 warrants out for auto theft.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that the alleged carjacker got arrested.
I do think that the optics of the arrest only happening after the DA was allegedly affected look tacky.
Like, the problem isn’t what he allegedly did, but who he allegedly did it to.Report
“Like, the problem isn’t what he allegedly did, but who he allegedly did it to.”
Right. The commoners? Nah, but he stole “an important person”‘s car. He must pay.Report
“[A] predictable rhetorical patterning […] haunts not just American but global discussions of Israel and Palestine. There are people wholly devoted to one side or the other who are essentially tu quoque machines who go into particular overdrive when they’re sure that their own side is morally less odious in the wake of a particular event or incident. They issue endless demands for statements that align behind their side, demanding that everyone else feel the exact same outrage in the exact same words […].” — Timothy Burke
“Tu quoque machines” is an inspired phrase.Report
Biden’s still got it:
Report
This guy collected all of the bad reporting in the early hours following the destruction of the hospital, wait, the attack at the hospital, wait, the blast in the parking lot of the hospital.
After reading that, I have a lot more sympathy for the folks who concluded that Israel attacked the hospital.
That was *ALL* of the information that they were getting with very little to argue against it.Report
The Free Beacon is wrong. The coverage I saw pretty much stated Hamas blames Israel, Israel blames Islamic Jihad. Anyway, the errant bombing did its job and now the Muslim world thinks the IDF did it evidence be damned.Report
I suggest reading the thread.
It contains examples of headlines such as this:
This:
And This:
He shows the stuff that the news organizations were actually saying.
Would that it were only the Muslim world.Report
A known right-wing troll from an organization with a decades long history of axes to grind against what it perceives to be the “mainstream media” in the name of partisan warfare.Report
He also has receipts, Saul. These headlines actually, you know, were released.
Look at the moon. Don’t look at the finger pointing to the moon. Look at the moon.
I know that it sucks that tons of news organizations were bad. I wish they weren’t.
But saying “bad people are pointing this out!” will not change what they are pointing out.Report
The New York Times is so reliable that only a bad-faith troll would say otherwise. How do we know it’s so reliable? Only bad-faith trolls are saying otherwise!Report
There has been violence in response to Israel destroying the hospital and killing 500 people.
The fact that the hospital was not destroyed and the death toll was not 500 (and may be in the single digits)… let alone that the rocket may be a misfire fired from ground controlled by the Palestinians…
Well, that doesn’t matter, does it?
Let’s face it. If the hospital was destroyed, Israel is the only country with weaponry powerful enough to destroy it.Report
As much as I hate to say this, a lot of the press needs to take back a lot of what they said yesterday and they are not. The best we get seems to be here what we know now rather than we posted this story blaming Israel for bombing 500 people that turned out to be totally wrong and taking responsibility for that. They need to do this on the front page and they are not. They are being incredibly mealy-mouthed about this subject and doing basically BSDI or in this case both sides say. Fish them.Report
This is no longer a problem of which facts are true or false. We’re past that.
Report
Ah, the psychology of the event means that Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims get to maintain a false narrative about the Demon Jew being out to get you forever. We are truly in a post-truth world.Report
He’s saying basically the same thing you said under the Cheering the Murders thread, right?Report
Yeah. Pretty much.
I think he’s doing it while still holding on to the moral high ground, though.Report
No amount of evidence will ever get the Muslims to blame their fellow Muslim when they can run about screaming about the Jews.Report
“The Muslims”. All 2 billion of them.Report
1 billion, not 2 billion and yes. Sure you might find a few dissidents but generally they seem to form very close ranks when dealing without outside criticism. All evidence suggests that a rocket mislaunch by Islamic Jihad destroyed a hospital parket lot, that the number killed is much closer to zero than 500, and the entirety of the Arab and Muslim world is still sticking to the story of an Israeli bomb killing 500 people at a hospital because the “Demon Jew is out to get you.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/18/middleeast/gaza-hospital-explosion-israel-wwk-explainer-intl/index.htmlReport
The four countries with the largest number of Muslim citizens are neither Arab nor in the Middle East, those being Pakistan, Indonesia, India, and Bangladesh.
The CNN article you shared reported protests by “thousands” in seven countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Egypt, Tunisia, and Palestine. Those seven countries contain about 150 million Muslims, which is about 8% of the world’s Muslim population.Report
I recognize that the countries with the largest number of Muslims are not Arab or in the Middle East. That doesn’t mean they don’t follow the lead of the Middle East when it comes to Jew-hatred or their opinions on Israel. You are engaging in sophistry.
https://global100.adl.org/country/indonesia/2014
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/21/world/pakistan-diplomat-gaza-interview-intl/index.htmlReport
I presume that Muslims, just like Christians, are inclined to support their co-religionists in a conflict with people of another religion, and that they are inclined to think the best of their co-religionists. That’s human nature. You’ll find that almost anywhere.
The idea that all Muslims are “screaming about the Jews” or are obsessed with “the Demon Jew” or “Jew-hatred”, though…well…extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
A recent anti-Israeli protest in Kuala Lumpur drew about 15,000 Muslims. The Muslim population of that territory of Indonesia is about 900,000. Two percent.
There were anti-Israeli protests after Friday prayers last week in several cities in Bangladesh. I could find no reports on size, but also no reports that any were particularly large or disruptive.
There are reports that the Modi government in India is suppressing Muslim protests, so it’s hard to say what the strength of the sentiment is there.
In Pakistan, the government fears that anti-Israeli protests are providing a cover for what are really anti-government protests, again making it hard to gauge the strength of the sentiment.
A guideline I use in life is “there’s always that five percent”. Collect a large enough group of people, and you can count on about five percent of them to be actively destructive. Drawing conclusions about an entire group from its five percent is a mistake.Report
Look at where Kuala Lumpur is on a map and tell me it makes sense that 15,000 people rallied against Israel.Report
According to Wolfram Alpha:
Kuala Lumpur is 4,777 miles from Gaza.
New York City is 5,688 miles from GazaReport
New York City is the largest Jewish city in the world, one of two alpha++ global cities, and the headquarters of the UN. Do the citizens of Kuala Lumpur have so many day-to-day problems with their Jewish neighbors that the rally size seems proportionate?Report
About 1.6 million Jews live in New York City.
About 0.9 million Muslims live in Kuala Lumpur.
Why is it odd that either group is concerned about a war involving its co-religionists, however far away?Report
Between 1.8 and 2.0 Billion (sources vary).Report
OK, I’m always up for bashing the NYT, and I don’t think I’m just trying to pick a fight with you, but…”confirmed truth within 48 hours” has never been our standard, and it can never be, particularly in a time of war. No increase in communication speed can get past that. Were some people too eager for a narrative to counter the current sympathy toward Israel? Probably. It’s worth keeping an eye on. But total error is always possible with breaking stories.Report
TIL, Aruba and Curacao are constituent countries of the Kingdom of the NetherlandsReport
An examination on why so many on the Left can’t bring themselves to condemn Hamas by Yascha Mounk
https://www.persuasion.community/p/yascha-the-deep-roots-of-the-lefts?r=fa6sg&fbclid=IwAR0xsrRA9X9xxpXR11tKnxYj9MxeZndCxTThog7qfeBlmBieIoweP3o4hYkReport
This is the greatest use of the passive voice in a headline that I have ever seen.
Report
The beauty of it is that it’s an article about manipulation of / with words.Report
All of which suggests that maybe its wise to wait a few days before delivering hot takes and assigning guilt.
In this case, all the information we have, even now, is coming to us from highly partisan sources with powerful incentives to lie.
Remember, the media sources have almost no personnel of their own in Gaza and are relying on government sources, political actors and independent media feeds with unknown biases.
The takes I’m seeing are really just people choosing which source they take without skepticism.Report
The market rewards being first to release a sensationalist story rather than patience. This has been true since the Maine’s boilers exploded.Report
It’s important to have skepticism.
I just didn’t think that “hospital levelled, 500 killed” needed to have skepticism over whether the hospital was hit at all. I thought it would be limited to whether it was closer to 200 or 800.Report
If we all waited until we had some basis for what we were saying, it would be awfully quiet around here.Report
What do you mean “some basis”?
I have 20 headlines explaining that the Israelis destroyed a hospital and 500 are dead!!!!Report
Case in point.Report
I’m going to need to have it explained where “some” begins.Report
“Some” means not just quoting some internet randos verbatim and pointing the finger of blame without a trace of critical thinking.Report
How about quoting Reuters, the AP, or the NYT?
Does that get you to “some”?Report
Hey, how about refraining from issuing scorching hot takes before all the facts are known?
Is that possible?
What the ever-shifting headlines prove is that no one really knows anything yet and even the media are just quoting unreliable sources.
Both you and the angry shouting guy on the street in Bahrain are just displaying for us what your priors are.Report
So we need “all” of the facts and no longer “some”?Report
To accuse someone of the deaths of hundreds of people?
Um, I’m gonna go with “yes” on that one.Report
Do you think that it’s odd that Reuters, the AP, and the NYT accused “someone” of the deaths of hundreds of people?
Do you think that they have lost any credibility as a result of these accusations?Report
The articles I read (and the ones you publish here) were careful to point out that the information was not corroborated and framed it as “Something happened, ACCORDING TO [SOURCE]”
They aren’t blameless, but at least have that excuse.
What’s your excuse?Report
I can only say something like “the random internet autists that I pointed to were accurate”.Report
First of all, you still have no idea if their information is accurate.
You’re still just using someone elses’ assertions as a fact without doing any critical thinking of your own.
Do you think you have lost credibility by quoting unknown sources uncritically?Report
Well, for one thing, it turns out that the explosion in the parking lot of the hospital was somewhere around the size we’d expect from a Hamas rocket falling short.
Their work showing that it was likely a Hamas rocket falling short is relevant to that fact.
Compared to the 500 dead due to the destroyed hospital.
On top of that, the random anonymous internet autists I pointed to showed their work. Like, they explained why they thought what they thought because of the pictures they showed, the footage they showed, and the maps they showed.
They were not merely acting as stenographers for Hamas.
I think that those reasons alone are reasons to give them “some” credence for next time.
Certainly more than Reuters, the AP, and the NYT have earned.
Would you like me to post excerpts from their twitter thread when they explain their reasoning? It’s no problem for me to do so and it will give you the opportunity to explain that you don’t have any reason to believe that they’re telling the truth.Report
“They showed their work”…JFC
You don’t even understand their work!
You can’t evaluate their work with anything more than “Hey, they use sciency sounding words like a Tom Clancy novel” level.
Of course their reasoning sounds convincing because you have no independent body of knowledge to judge it against. You’re like some Stone Age tribesman listening to a lecture on phrenology. Anything they say, even if it is wrong, will sound convincing to you.
You have absolutely no flipping idea what “we’d expect from a Hamas rocket falling short” because everything you know about Hamas rockets you learned from these same sources.
You can’t read it critically and spot any errors or suggest an alternate theory because again, like any layperson, you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
Someone else could put together a bunch of photos and charts and cool mil-tech words showing it was in fact a consortium of Zionist bankers and it would sound just as convincing.
You are literally just swallowing everything they show you credulously without any sort of caution.
If you just said “I trust the White House and the IDF more than Hamas sources” you would have more credibility.
But right now you’re hanging up your “Epidemiology expert” hat and putting on the “Military Munitions Expert” hat and throwing a dart at a spinning wheel and hitting “Hamas done it!”
Tomorrow it could just as easily be “The Illuminati did it!”Report
And yet, their analysis of the situation ended up being in the ballpark of what actually happened.
While the stenographers for Hamas ought to have egg on their faces but, for some reason, you’re saving your eggs for the random anonymous internet autists who happened to get it right.
You can’t make an omelet.Report
Once again-
Everything you think you know about the “ballpark of what really happened” is coming from questionable sources.
But even if your dart hit the right spot on the spinning wheel Its still just a dart tossed at random.
A little caution would go a long way to rebuilding your credibility.Report
A little caution would go a long way to rebuilding your credibility.
So it is possible to need to rebuild credibility.
We’ve got that much going on, at least.
Does that need apply to the stenographers?Report
Plenty of people are still pushing the Israeli bombed a hospital and killed 500 innocent people despite this not being true.Report
I said “Case in point” and you missed the point. Or act as if you did. If you had gotten the point, you’d see that “some” wasn’t it.Report
And I’m still going to need to have it explained where “some” begins.Report
Not from me, because it wasn’t my point. Since you still don’t get it, though, I’ll explain.
You frequently complain that I prefer to talk about you than talk about what you’re talking about. While it’s not what I prefer, it does happen a lot because you and your style of discourse are, generally speaking, more interesting than the substance of what you have to say.
But it’s not always about you, no matter how much you try to make it about you. And it wasn’t about you here. FWIW, you had plenty of receipts to make some kind of point about changing accounts of events in the fog of war. I’m not sure what your point was, if you had one, because I wasn’t interested in following that particular discussion. What I was interested in is the far more general phenomenon of spouting off premature hot takes based on obviously iffy or otherwise meager information. If your point is that the major media were guilty of that in this case, I might agree with you, depending on how well-hedged the reporting was. I didn’t look into it at the time because I was quite confident that whatever people thought they knew Monday would turn out to be very different by Wednesday, and I am patient enough to await developments before spouting off.
But if more people waited to see how things develop before spouting off, it would be awfully quiet around here.Report
Oh! Well, I probably agree with your amended statement.
As for my point, it was just the usual. MSM acts as stenographers when they shouldn’t and while “changing accounts of events in the fog of war” is to be expected, acting like a stenographer for Hamas, of all organizations, will result in a *LOT* of changing accounts as more facts come to light.
But if news organizations waited to see how things developed before spouting off, it’d be awfully quiet.Report
Sidney The Kraken Powell has copped a plea days before she was to go on trial in Georgia and agreed to flip on Trump:
https://www.aol.com/news/sidney-powell-pleads-guilty-deal-140555672.html
I wonder if Trump was current on his legal bills?Report
She’s not going to be the last one to make that choice. At least with this plea she remains out of jail.Report
Ah, high school.
It should be reiterated that “from the river to the sea” is the area that they want to be peaceful.
You know what they say: If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.Report
There is no way to teach these people about Jewish history and the causes that led up to the Zionist movement. They just wont’ have it and are closed before the listen begins. They will just be “Jews be evil settler-colonialist wypipo while the Palestinians are brave indigenous people fighting colonization.” Despite the fact that if you put an Israeli and Palestinian next to each other without markers nobody would be able to tell the difference at a glance.
And genocide in Gaza? People who say things like that in total seriousness need to have their faced punched in. Hamas slaughtered 1400 Israeli Jews for no reason besides the fact that they are Israeli. This is what you would call and act of law and like any state Israel responded with an invitation to a war by waging war. The response of the Pro-Palestinian idiots, anything Israel does is a violation of “international law.” Aerial bombing? War crime. Ground invasion? War crime. Munich style take down? Against international law. Israel has no defense because apparently anything Israel or really Jews does is an act of genocide against the Palestinians. Bar Mitzvah at the Western Wall? Genocide. Lighting Shabbat candles? An insult to Islam.Report
Why do you care? They’re just high school students. High school students are dumb. That’s why they’re in high school. Relax. Touch grass. Once they get out into the real world and have jobs at newspapers and restaurants and have to start paying bills, they’ll calm down.Report
I do not care if the anti-Semite is young or old or middle aged, on the Left or on the Right, white or of color, religious or irreligious. These people are cheering on the murder of Jews and I can’t stand it.Report
Well, as one of the pipo who happens to be wy, I have some sympathy for what it’s like to be opposed by dumbbells.
Just take comfort in the fact that this doesn’t affect you personally.Report
They are dumb HS students. Putting them on blast is being as dumb as they are. I completely agree about anti-semitsm but FFS these dopes are a waste of time. Dont’ spend time fussing about HS kids even when they are dopes. There are always more HS dopes out there. Gosh knows there are plenty of adults with power being Anti Semitic or Anti Muslim to talk about.Report
I generally agree but I think a lot of people are overestimating about how American Jews are really worked up about the Simchas Torah massacre. Terrorism in Israel and against Israelis is nothing new and it has been a slow boil for years. The attack which is less than a month old at this point has shaken up American Jews like nothing I have never seen including people I have never seen comment on Israel/Palestinian stuff or Jewish stuff in general.Report
I agree and Jews are up in arms for good reason. Yet ranting about HS students is a waste. We get real grown up anti semite’s instead of giving more time and attention to leftie aesthetics and HS kids.Report
I think you mean underestimating not overestimating but otherwise correct. Many American Jews are deeply angry and upset at all the Pro-Hamas and to some extent Pro-Palestinian rallies going on the progressive side. Many feel that Jews are being signaled out rather than an anti-Semitic massacre being rallied against. Lots of mainstream publication and newspapers writing articles like this:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/hamas-jews-illiberal-left-progressive-israel-terrorism.htmlReport
A girl we went to synagogue with as a kid decided to form a messenger group for people who were kids in our synagogue out of nowhere because of the events.
One member called us and somebody else too far left for the group. Make of that what we will.Report
“But we’re the furthest right not-online people that we know!”Report
I’m pretty sure that if were a bunch of Far Right leaning kids from some Evangelical school, we wouldn’t be using the dumb high school kid defense but talking about how they need a correction before growing into even worse adults.Report
But we should be using on dumb HS kids. FFS conservatives have spent decades going off about every ditzy thing said by a college kid. Tell me there antisemitism is bad: yeah, sure. We should be sending that message. But dancing around a HS. Worthless. They are thrilled, i’m sure, at the attention. This Streisand Effects HS kids. We got plenty of grown up issues to deal with grown ups.
And my god, the HS kids are doing leftie aesthetics. Ignore and move on to adults. Heritage went full racist on Palestinians and the Libertarian Party is lovingly hugging Anti Semitic stereotypes.Report
President Biden was on his way back from a high-stakes diplomatic mission to Israel on Wednesday night when a reporter on Air Force One asked him if he had any thoughts about Representative Jim Jordan’s predicament in the House.
“I ache for him,” Mr. Biden said, putting his hand on his heart.
Really?
“Noooo,” he said with a laugh.
No sympathy there. “Zero,” he said. “None.”Report
Attn Chip, I know your position on whatever happened on the hospital should be to avoid hot takes and everybody should keep a cooler head until things prevail but that isn’t what is happening. Israel pretty much knew it was an Islamic Jihad rocket misfired and did some damage in a parking lot . This was quickly confirmed the next day. The Pro-Palestinian side isn’t having any of this truth though but are still insisting a dastardly Israeli bomb destroyed a hospital in Gaza and killed 500 people despite it not happening.
Your cooler heads and avoid hot takes routine doesn’t work when it comes to any misinformation about what Israeli Jews or Diaspora Jews did or did not do because the anti-Semites do not care. They will just go on and on and on no matter what. These aren’t trivial small numbers of people but tens or even hundreds of millions of people who hate Jews and will tell the most dastardly lies about us no matter how much evidence we produce to show it is not true.Report
Gavin Newsom avoids making a dozen enemies and one ingrate:
https://www.aol.com/news/sen-laphonza-butler-not-running-205100026.htmlReport
Vox and Slate’s interpretations of the Israel-Hamas War is interesting. Slate is basically entirely against Israel and is one of the factions calling for an immediate ceasefire before any military action. Also lots of treacherous anti-Zionist Jews posting articles on how “Judaism can’t justify what Israel is doing.” Vox is very sympathetic towards the Palestinians and doesn’t like the current Israel-Hamas War but can’t quite bring themselves to cry out against it totally like Slate is doing because it probably just sounds too much to them in their more technocratic mind frame.
One of the things that I don’t like about how the Further Left or even much of the Center Left treats that Israeli-Palestinian Conflict or even broader Jewish-Muslim relationship is that there seems to be a version of Murc’s Law operating where only Israeli and Jews have agency. Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims do not. So Israel has to do all the heavy lifting in coming to a just conclusion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian themselves plus their allies get to remain obstinate hardliners rejecting everything and coming up with no constructive proposals under all conditions. Likewise, Jews have to do the heavy lifting in ecumenical relationships with Muslims with our Rabbis finding so many noble things to say about Islam while their Imams get to piss on Judaism and Jews in their sermons while generally spreading anti-Semitism. You can’t point this out. No matter how much evidence we produce, it can’t ever ever be pointed out. Nothing will be done.Report
I can only find confirmation from very right-leaning sources online, meaning that they have an ax to grind against academia, in general but a UC Davis professor has apparently been fired for tweeting a threat to Zionist journalists and their families.
https://www.mediaite.com/online/uc-davis-professor-under-fire-over-posts-threatening-zionist-journalists-and-their-families/
The number of people unable to adjust their priors is really astounding. Hamas is a genocidal anti-Semitic organization, always presented itself as such, committed a mass slaughter of Jews in Israel, and then threw the Palestinians in Gaza under a bus repeatedly. Despite this their fanboys and fangirls in the West and in the Muslim world are still presenting them as brave freedom fighters against the Demon Jews out to get you. On the other blog one of the few people who are readjusting their priors said one of the reasons he is doing so was that their don’t seem to be any reprisals against Israeli-Arabs in the aftermath of the fact despite the fact that this would be really normal in the situation.Report
Mediaite is not right-leaning I believeReport
That’s why I selected it as the link.Report
Just to be clear: a trans assistant professor of African American studies. At what point do you start to question *your* priors, Lee?Report
There is a bitter and dark humor in so many LGBT people being against the one state in the Middle East where they won’t be killed outright or doing so much to piss off one of their biggest ally groups in the United States.Report
That not true.
Cyprus even allows same-sex marriage, which Israel does not, although it’s possible argue that that is not truly in the Middle East, although it is normally considered so.
More to the point, not only does Jordon and many other countries not criminalize it (Much less put people to death), but _the West Bank_ follows that Jordonian law and does not criminalize it.
Gaza, of course, still _technically_ follows the British Mandate Criminal Code Ordinance from 1936 (Yes, seriously.), so…homosexuality is illegal, although not death penalty. Although Hamas would probably have made it illegal anyway, which is what happens when religious fanatics take over a country.
People who are conditionally your allies in the struggle for your rights only because they like your group, and withdrawal support of your rights if you step out of line, are not actually allies at all.
See, I don’t actually ‘like’ Palestinians. I don’t really know any Palestinians to like, and the people there, when polled, of them say things and have opinions that I strongly disagree with. I don’t actually like a lot of what I know about that society. (Granted, I feel the same way about Texas, so…)
And it doesn’t matter. To quote MLK Jr., ‘No one is free until we are all free.’ It’s not ‘The people I like should be free’. It’s not ‘The people who think I should be free and support my cause to do so, should be free’. It’s _everyone_ who should be free.Report
Man, why does this keep happening?*
Franklin’s MAGA mayoral candidate Gabrielle Hanson poses with self-proclaimed neo-Na.zi in new post
https://www.newschannel5.com/news/newschannel-5-investigates/franklins-maga-mayoral-candidate-gabrielle-hanson-poses-with-self-proclaimed-neo-na.zi-in-new-post
I’d like to know his thoughts on Gaza.
No, wait. On second thought, no, I really don’t want to hear his thoughts on anything.
*Narrator voice:* Chip knows perfectly well why this keeps happening.Report
Chip, there have been several members of the Left in America and Europe who have been caught engaging cheerleading Hamas on in their blood thirsty murder of Jews. Many are still pushing the hospital destruction blood libel lie against all evidence. They have been egging on the Palestinian in their worst instincts. The relentless focus on MAGA and Neo-Na.zis comes across as telling Jews need to take one for the team rather than deal with these academic and activist scoundrels.Report
Can you follow on the actual politics of the moment? Yes, a MAGA politician appears with a white supremacist. We know that will always happen. However, we have several activists and academics on our side of the aisle that are basically putting their foot in their mouths and coming out in support of Hamas murdering 1400 Jews or pushing the lies about the hospital in Gaza long after it has been disproven. You might view these as minor threats and utterly powerless people but a lot of American Jews see this as rank betrayal because Jews have been stalwart supporters of liberal and left causes but many on the Left seem to love them some murder of Jews.Report
I see this as chewing gum and walking at the same time.
I can criticize leftists for being authoritarians and Republicans for being authoritarians at the same time.
I just don’t want anyone to overlook the fact that there is a about a 50% chance that in January 2025, a confirmed goosestepping Na.zi will be sitting in the Oval Office giving policy advice to the incoming President.Report
Well you aren’t asking to be part of an alliance with people who can’t stand your guts and are engaging in the worst form of anti-Semitic rhetoric in order to defeat Trump and MAGATs. From my Jewish point of view, it seems that Jews globally are stuck between two very large and aggressive idiot armies that are completely hostile to us. On the Right you have the Proud Boys chanting the Jews will not replace us. On the Left you have people who decided that Jews are not and can not be part of the Sacred Circle of Oppression (TM, David Baddiel) and that we are part of the evil white oppressor group. They can not bother to learn anything about the history of the Zionist movement or really Jewish history. All that matters is their cosmology and they will even engage in revisionism to avoid mentioning Jews or Anti-Semitism like the fact that mentions of the Charlottesville tend to exclude any mention of anti-Semitism on their part despite the literal chants of “the Jews will not replace us.”Report
Don’t lose sight of the very large army of liberals like me, Biden and the Democratic mainstream who very much allied with you.Report
Dang. This is how bad the media screwed up the story about the destroyed hospital/500 dead. Brian Freakin’ Stelter is talking about how bad they screwed it up.
Report
TIL, Brian Stelter is only 38 years oldReport
Stay hydrated. Drink more water.Report
We are blessed with luxurious full heads of hair.Report
2 Kings 2:23-25Report
If you pay attention to his skin, it checks out, but hair loss and fat can really skew the first impression.
Jason Alexander turned 30 during the first season of Seinfeld.Report
If you were wondering if Climate Justice has a favored side in the region, you can exhale safe in the knowledge that it does.
Report
She’s deleted the tweet!
It contained a person with a blue octopus stuffie.
Apparently the blue octopus has a bit of a history.
But sometimes a stuffed animal is just a stuffed animal.Report
She has addressed the controversy!
See also: “From the River to the Sea” means “I just want everyone to live in peace”.Report
“The toy in the picture is a tool often used by autistic people as a way to communicate feelings.”
It would seem so.Report
She cared enough about the charge of anti-Semitism to play the I’m Obviously A Fool And No One Should Have Ever Listened To Me card, so I’ll respect her for that.Report
There is a lot of misleading information out there, and that image is one of them.
The blue octopus in that image is Britain/Winston Churchill. (It’s kinda obvious when you look at the facial features and know what year it is from.) And it’s actually a squid, but whatever. Squids and octopuses wrapped around the world have a long history of being used to represent Britain in anti-British content because…British Empire.
Now, the cartoon is antisemetic, because it is saying that the Jews _control_ Britain, hence the Star of David above it…but the octopus is not the Jews.
And, of course, I’m sure Jews have sometimes been represented by an octopus, but there’s no particular association with that vs. anything else, octopuses are _incredibly common_ in all sorts of motifies, and there’s also no particular association with particularly _blue_ octopuses, as people are trying to imply by this comic of, again, Winston Churchill.Report
Well, whether the Holocaust Encyclopedia is misleading is one of those conversations I’m not ready to have (someone else pointed out that there are apparently a *LOT* of stuffed animals that could have showed up on that knee and been a dog whistle. “A dog! WHAT THE HELL!” and so on. “A rhinoceros! THAT’S ANTISEMITIC!” and whatnot).
I will say that after years of hearing that “The Circle Game” was a secret symbol of white supremacy, it’s kinda funny to see that everybody’s hearing dog whistles in the current year. (And they’re doing this at the exact same time that we’re having nuanced conversations about how “from the river to the sea!” is *REALLY* a chant about the area where they want everybody to get along.)
But my original post, believe it or not, was posted when I thought that all they were doing was pointing out that the child who is the face of modern environmental justice has picked a side in the region… and it was from there that all the other (really funny!) stuff happened.Report
I want to stress, the Holocaust Encyclopedia is _entirely correct_, that is an antisemitic image. It is implying that the Jews (represented by the Star of David) control the British Empire (represented by a Winston Churchill octopus).
As it literally says ‘The cartoon shows British politician, Winston Churchill, as the octopus.’. And we know that face is not supposed to be a Jewish person, Jewish depiction in antisemetic 1940 cartoons are…uh…very very VERY distinctive.
And then people reposted this image over the internet, labeled it as if the _blue octopus_ was the Jews, which…it is not. And also tried to make it out as if that was some sort of common depiction of Jews, which…I mean, Jews get depicted as all sorts of animals, as you pointed out. And octopuses are used in all sorts of depictions.
It’s not a secret symbol of white supremacy, it’s a deliberately trolling symbol of white supremacy, exactly designed to make people react like you are right now to people who point it out, so white supremacists can trollingly include it in pictures and act offended when called out, and also sometimes get people called out who innocently shape their hands like that.
The people calling it out need to stop participating in this trolling, and _so do the people complaining about it getting called out_. The sort of people who do this crap can usually just…like, you can just look at their Twitter and point out their white supremacy, it works a lot better than trying to make something out of the deliberate troll they are doing to people to point it out and get Jaybirds everywhere to act like the people pointing it out are crazy.Report
Jaybird seems to be completely right about aesthetics being the main determination of whether you support Israel or Palestine in this conflict. One reason why I think that aerial bombardment was not a good choice optic wise for Israel is that it looks too much like David vs. Goliath. Although well armed IDF soldiers vs not so well equipped Hamas soldiers/fighters doesn’t have that great optics either and a pure ground invasion Fallujah style could be worse in terms of fatalities and casualties.
On the other blog somebody mentioned that the Western Left in general and American Left has basically is very pro-multicultural. This is not a bad thing but when they are sympathetic to group they impute their beliefs on multiculturalism into the group even if that group does not come anywhere close to using the language of multiculturalism. Because Muslims in the West are in the multicultural group than Muslims in Muslim majority places are also de facto multicultural even if using exclusivist language. Lots of people can’t seem to make the jump and see Hamas as what it is.
In the vein of David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count or Dara Horn’s Everybody Loves Dead Jews thesis, a lot of people in the West seem to have a hard time grasping that Jews are collective group and might have collective needs the same way that LGBT people, African-Americans, or whatever else is also a real true collective group. Instead we are bunch of atomistic individuals who do Jewish things individually with no collective needs while Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims are true collective groups with real communal identities and needs.Report
You’re allowed to punch up. Or, at least, it can be excused.
Attacking a dance party held on the border of an open-air prison? How is this not a deliberate provocation against the prisoners? Look at us having fun! Look at us dance! Look at us eat whatever we want!
How do you *NOT* punch someone like that in the face?
It’s all about how you spin it. You can make any fight David vs. Goliath if you have the right video packages and background music.
But Pro Wrestling has discovered that you can only make the World Heavyweight Champion an underdog once or twice for a title defense. Once he’s held the belt for a while, he ain’t the underdog anymore.
Eventually, you need a better storyline than “who is the underdog?”
In pro wrestling, anyway.Report
Focusing things on the Palestinians was the most brilliant tactical moves made by the Arab and Muslim worlds in their war against Israel. When it was the Arab-Israel conflict, it was one small Jewish state versus a dozen Arab countries. See it as a broader Israeli-Muslims or even Jewish-Muslim conflict pits 16 million Jews against 2 billion Muslims. A pure focus on the Palestinians makes it much more difficult to put Israel in the underdog position.Report
The old Arab-Israel conflict did a *GREAT* set-up of the underdog versus the monster heel.
And then Israel won a downright squash in six freakin’ days.
Six Days, Bitch! Buy the t-shirt! Makes a great gift!
But after you win a squash match, you don’t get to be the underdog anymore.
You ever hear CM Punk’s greatest promo against John Cena?
Israel is the New York Yankees.
You’re going to need a better video package than the David/Goliath/Root For The Underdog one, at this point.Report
I keep bringing up the Allied bombing in WWII because I think it has largely been airbrushed from Boomer history.
Not Hiroshima but the firebombings of Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo and others.
I recently read a wonderful novel called “Mercury Pictures Presents” by Anthony Marra, which had as part of its plot, German Village.
German Village was an actual thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Village_(Dugway_Proving_Ground)#:~:text=German%20Village%20was%20the%20nickname,the%20bombing%20of%20Nazi%20Germany.
During WWII, the US Army constructed a replica of a portion of residential homes and apartments in Berlin in the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.
The buildings were repeatedly bombed and rebuilt for purpose of the learning how to create firestorms in cities for maximum destruction.
Pause and let this sink in.
No, these were not bombing raids on tank factories or railyards. No, the goal was not to kill wicked SS soldiers. The goal was to create uncontrollable firestorms in residential neighborhoods in cities packed with women and children.
The techniques learned at Dugway were put to use in the bombing raids in Germany and Japan and ended up killing more people than Hiroshima.
Once more in case anyone missed it.
The American government deliberately targeted and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in a mass slaughter. This is not an accusation, not an opinion, but an objective fact not in dispute.
Was it justified as part of the struggle against genocide, or are Truman and the generals guilty of war crimes for which they should have been hanged?
That, dear reader, is for you to decide.Report
I thought you already said that it was okay because the US did it in WWII.
It it your new position that you won’t say whether or not you’re okay with this but other people have the obligation to decide for themselves?Report
The US military built similar villages at the start of the Iraq war to train on how to find and flush the opposition. It’s now a fairly standard tactic.Report
“Was it justified as part of the struggle against genocide, or are Truman and the generals guilty of war crimes for which they should have been hanged”
Winners (or those who write the history books) are not punished for alleged crimes. Also, given that the only likely way the Americana public would learn of such things would be years later after the war, and that the press was actively controlled by the military, there’s no way there would be any consequences.Report
There are really no good options for a military response from Israel in terms of minimalizing civilian casualties. Bomb raids cause a lot of damage and kill a lot of people. An urban siege would be a giant Fallujah even with evacuations, etc. A blockade is inhumane.Report
Agreed, and when the consequence of losing the war is genocidal extermination, even awful tactics are, in my view, justified.Report
What seems to be driving some of the Left to embrace Hamas is an inability to see it for what it is or believing that the killing of Israeli Jews is good because they are all colonial-settlers.Report
Chip, do you consider Israel losing the war to Hamas to be even remotely close to a probability?
And, if so, by what means do you foresee that loss being inflicted?Report
Hamas committed an act of war against Israel and Israel is responding as any other country would under the circumstances. The chances or likelihood of a Hamas victory do not matter. What Hamas and the Palestinians generally seem to hope will happen is that something will cause the entire Muslim world to either rise up against Israel or for the West to impose a harsh solution on Israel. Maybe both.Report
Yes, it could happen.
Barring the use of its nuclear weapon, Israel only exists by the grace of its global support network.
A combination of Hamas/ Hezbollah/ Iran and any other assorted allies they can put together could easily accomplish the goal of “From the River To The Sea”.
Every Israeli citizen lives within range of a violent death at the hands of forces who have demonstrated the will and ability to wage war for over half a century without pause and who openly declare genocide to be their goal.
When I walked through East Berlin in 1987 the USSR and the East Boc seemed impregnable, and within 5 years of my visit it was all gone.
Things can change much faster than people think.Report
The Realist school of Anti-Israeli foreign policy recognizes this and basically decides that Israel is more trouble than it is worth for the West. Better to let go and hopefully calm down Israel’s enemies some.Report
By what means do you foresee “Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran” “easily accomplishing” the sweeping of the State of Israel into the sea? What forces do they have, how do those forces match what the Israelis have, and how can they project their force into Israeli territory?
Hamas just took the best shot it’s going to get any time soon, and it killed about 0.0014 million of Israel’s 9.5 million people.Report
First, conquering land doesn’t take killing all its people, just inflicting enough damage to make them surrender or flee.
Gaza itself is evidence of that; Israel, for all its might, can’t actually occupy and hold Gaza, but it can make the people’s lives there miserable and cause them to flee to safer territory.
The combination of radical forces could easily make continued life for Israelis untenable.
Second I find this metric sort of weird- Like, a nation being attacked is somehow required to what, accept a continuing threat just because genocide is statistically unlikely?
By that metric, the United States had no moral right to go to war against the Axis powers since there was no chance of them actually conquering us.
Hamas has proven itself capable of inflicting continuing and serious destruction on the nation of Israel- the reality of daily violence is something we would never ask of any nation anywhere.
Until Hamas agrees to recognize Israel’s right to exist, it needs to be neutralized as a threat. This is the fundamental right of any nation.Report
In the message of yours that I first responded to, Chip, you wrote:
“when the consequence of losing the war is genocidal extermination, even awful tactics are, in my view, justified.”
…and that willingness to justify “awful tactics” is why I’m asking how likely a loss is.Report
From what I can tell, lots of people do expect Israel to take these things on the chin because it is Israel.Report
For example, if someone does something like this: https://www.commondreams.org/news/netanyahu-map
As I have repeatedly pointed out, Israel and Israeli politicians have often made the exact sort of rhetoric that is called eliminationist on the other side. It’s gotten far worse recently, with Netanyahu just openly saying it on the world stage (Because he needs an external enemy to remain in power.), but that sort of sentiment has existed in internal Israeli politics for decades, especially on the far-right, which Israeli has been governed by for quite some time.
And weird, no one ever says ‘Palestine has a right to defend itself’. Please note that is not me saying Palestine has a right to commit war crimes, but we just don’t ever hear that as a general statement.
Addition: Incidentally, this is why Palestine was so worried about the new stuff with Saudi Arabia…because the worry is that if Israel is able to make nice with enough of them, they will just…allow Israel to destroy Palestine. At least, that’s what both Israel and Palestine think…no idea if it’s true, but they both seem to think it.Report
Notice I haven’t defended any actions by Israel, only its right to defend itself.
Yes, we should demand they recognize the right of Palestinians to self-determination, just as vice versa.
Notice again, there is no “but” here.
The right to self defense and self determination isn’t lessened by bad behavior on anyone’s part.
So I keep coming back to my first question: What is the desired end game?Report
Two States, side by side, respecting each other boarders.
The current Israeli gov isn’t willing to do that but sometimes they’ve been willing.
This would involve:
1) Setting boarders, probably with land swaps.
2) Ripping out some of the more problematic settlements.
3) Making some sort of compromise on the holiest of sites.
Kicking Netanyahu out of power would be useful but doing so in the context of even the “peace” faction in Israel wanting to wage all out war with Gaza probably isn’t.
The Palestinians have never been willing to do this, but it would involve:
1) Watering down the Right to Return to non-existence.
2) Accepting that there will be a Jewish state.
3) Giving up terrorism.
4) Any Palestinian leader who actually goes forward and signs off on this will likely be murdered.
By implication it would also mean the refugees who have put their lives on hold for generations have wasted their time. By implication if they’d accepted any of the various peace offers before they’d be better off now.
Of the two groups, I’d say the biggest challenges are on the Palestinian side, i.e. they’re further away from where they’d need to be to have peace in the region than Israel is.Report
Reading up on the “Right to Return”, it’s an individual right. If we assume that it’s not generational, then we wait for all of the refugees to die off and then maybe we can do something.Report
Eh, it’s not quite are stark as you present it. You can square the “right of return” circle by making it a right to “return” to current Palestine rather than to current Israel. It’s a big climb down but it’s slightly more palatable than simply “make your host country accept you”.Report
That works as “a watered down” version of RoR.
Of course that might also be what Arafat disliked so much he couldn’t make counter offers. That or the whole “will likely be killed for accepting Israel”.
If the only acceptable RoR is to undo the war of 1949, then I don’t see how that’s different from Israel can’t exist.Report
Arafat disliked it so much because A) he was a snivelling, corrupt, cowardly crook and had sort of fumbled his way into the position he was in and B) he found himself facing a deal that he could plausibly be expected to accept and push on his people at a risk to his own life and power and, facing that task, he flinched.
Arafat hated the modified Ror and the overall deal because it was a workable deal. If the Israeli’s had stuck to demanding that the ROR was dead letter from jump then he’d have been in a much more comfortable position. The settlement loons in Israel hated the deal for the same reason. It could have worked. They were running terrified from that point on.
But we agree that the unalloyed RoR will never, ever, happen. There’s no way to force the Israeli’s to accept it even if it were somehow a moral thing to do, so they won’t.Report
They get a lot of aid, but their GDP is massive compared to that aid.
Something like 0.6% of their GDP is aid from the US.Report
Aid is one thing, but if they got cut of from trade Israel would go back to being desert and semi desert in relatively short order (as would most countries in the middle east) which is why its global support network is vital.Report
The only country we’ve cut off is Russia and even they aren’t cut off totally.
This is one of those solutions that doesn’t work if we consider Israel a normal country.
For that matter we’d need to consider them an enemy of the planet to ban them importing food and such. We don’t do that for really nasty governments.Report
Russia is a lot bigger and a lot more self sufficient. Israel is a modern western country in more ways than not and it’s very dependent on trade networks for its money. Russia is basically a primary resource extraction camp sprawled over north Eurasia, Israel is as close to the opposite of Russia as you can get economically. If the world imposed trade embargos on Israel, even short of food, water and energy embargos, a lot of Israeli society would pack up shop and leave for elsewhere. I don’t know if I’d say Israel would necessarily implode but I would be confident in saying Israel would regress incredibly and the lopsided imbalance of power between it and its neighbors would decline a lot.
My point is that while direct aid is a small fraction of their GDP their “global support network” accounts for an overwhelming preponderance of their GDP if you factor in trade.Report
Here is Israeli’s trade profile: https://globaledge.msu.edu/countries/israel/tradestats
You’re not wrong, but their Importer Rank is 42 (out of 138) and their Exporter Rank is 48.
I think you’re suggesting something which would wreck most countries.
And I’m not sure why Israel should be singled out for this. We trade with nasty dictatorships.Report
By WW2 standards Israel’s bomb raids are done in terms of minimizing civilian casualties.
In WW2 we fire bombed Tokyo in a grid pattern with the outside done first to prevent civilians from fleeing.Report
I know that, you know that but the world has changed.Report
Vox has an article about how the mainstream left critics of Israel at the current moment. They do acknowledge but try try to reduce the number of Pro-Hamas leftists.
https://www.vox.com/politics/23924254/israel-palestine-hamas-american-left-wing-democrats-progressive
People on the Left that don’t want to side with Hamas but also aren’t in favor of a military response are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Hamas is the government of Gaza and any political solution will require negotiating with Hamas. They are also a sincerely genocidal anti-Semitic organization, so they are never going to enter more than a temporary ceasefire with Israel and will never give up the goal of a Jew free Middle East.Report
No one got to a majority in the third round of voting for Speaker. The “other” category had 25 votes, so Jordan lost some more ground. House is in recess pending a call by the Chair. Republicans have a conference meeting scheduled for 1:00 pm eastern time.Report
Yeah this is getting uglier. I’m sure the credible death threats aren’t helping his cause any.Report
Mike Collins tweeted out a banger:
Report
Scalise announced that they dropped Jordan as their candidate and will return Monday to “start over”. Sorry that it’s not looking good for your paycheck after mid-November.Report
Reminder that it would take only 5 of the so-called “moderate” Republicans to elect Hakeem Jeffries and restore a functioning government.
But they refuse because they prefer the collapse of our economy to cooperating with a Democrat.
All Republicans Are Insurrectionists, a continuing series.Report
I have seen a couple of rumors that some of the chairs of the House committees that do the biggest appropriations bills have very quietly approached Jeffries about a temporary power-sharing agreement for long enough to take care of the budget and Israel/Ukraine aid.
These are people who put some time and effort into getting positions that come with a pile of perks. Given House Republican rules on how long a member can hold a particular chair, they are also some of the members who have the least to lose if they get turned out of office in 2024.Report
I think that would be great.
However, I’ve been seeing these sorts of “Responsible Republicans have been quietly working behind the scenes” stories since 2016 and they all fall apart like cotton candy in a hurricane.
The operative word here is “quietly”- Why do they need to be “quiet” about avoiding the collapse of our economy?
Like its some shameful act done by consenting adults behind closed doors?
Well, actually it is at least as far as the Republican voting base is concerned.
Would the average Republican voter really prefer economic calamity to Speaker Hakeem Jeffries?
YES THEY FLIPPING DO AND THATS WHY ANY REPUBLICAN WHO VOTES FOR JEFFRIES WILL FACE DEATH THREATS
Everyone who votes Republican is an insurrectionist. There are no exceptions.Report
The problem isn’t “they want the collapse of our economy”.
The problem is they’re so economically ignorant they don’t have any idea what is at stake.
Team Blue rank and file is like that too.
If you view your own priorities as VERY IMPORTANT AND CAN’T BE COMPROMISED, then someone compromising on them needs to be done in the backroom.
It doesn’t need to be the economically ignorant doing this either. Every member of the Fortune 500 have serious interests that Congress MUST NOT TOUCH.
Those interests conflict.Report
The Republicans aren’t unified by what they want, but what they don’t want.
They don’t want to live in the same civic space as Democrats or to be more blunt, they refuse to live in a world where the elements of the Democratic coalition- queer people, “urban” people, women who are single or childless by choice- are given cultural equality.
This is why they would sooner put the realm to the torch than share power with the likes of Nancy Pelosi or Hakeem Jeffries.Report
What is “cultural equality”?Report
Cultural equality is the state of being regard as a fully equal and welcomed member of society.
Like, say, if a beer company had images of white people and black people, Asians and Hispanics, men and women, gays and straights, and their loyal customers accepted this and continued to buy their product, that would show that these people are all culturally equal.Report
Are you measuring “equality” by inputs or outcomes?Report
“Equality” as in “Would you refuse to buy a beer if the company featured this person in their ads”?Report
And Republicans control this? I don’t remember voting on that.Report
Are you sure?
How did your local Congressperson, state legislator or senator, city councilperson or school board member vote on any of the anti-trans bills and book bans?Report
A Bud advertising spokesperson is supposed to be someone we want to be. Football player. Model. Actor. Ideally someone young, fit, rich, famous, attractive, and A-list popular.
We’re supposed to look at them and say “I want that life, Bud is part of that life, drinking Bud makes me like them”.
If you present to me a Black Football player then you’re not trying to get me to want to be Black. You’re trying to get me to want to be a young, fit, rich, famous, football player by drinking Bud. Often he’ll be surrounded by sexy women and expensive cars just to drive the point home.
Selecting someone whose only claim to fame is being trans is trying to get me to want to be trans. This point was driven home by not surrounding her with the kind of lifestyle I previously described, it was just her talking about her journey.
That seems like a risky choice for a ten billion dollar brand that is trying to appeal to everyone.Report
They person they chose was in fact “young, fit, rich, famous, attractive, and A-list popular.”
But you’re not being honest with us here.
The Republicans have made it crystal clear that they refuse to accept trans people as their equals and that trans itself is some sort of mental disorder unworthy of respect.
The same goes for assertive independent women who want to control their own reproductive choices.
And it is this sort of cultural resentment that binds together the various members of the conservative coalition who might otherwise have nothing in common.Report
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/chicago-lgbtq-bars-anheuser-busch-dylan-mulvaney/
So now Team Blue is dropping Bud because they’re not trans affirming enough.
Showcasing why Billion plus dollar brands don’t like controversy.Report
I’m aware. And I eagerly await the apologies of my conservative interlocutors here for all the damage to our national image their party is currently doing. To say nothing of their contributions to my mortgage through mutual aid when the time comes.Report
You’re smearing stuff that probably oughtn’t be smeared.
I’m still registered (D) (an artifact from my yute) so are the Democrats “my” party?
In 2008, I voted Boston Tea. In 2012, I voted either Libertarian or Prohibition. I can’t remember. In 2016, I voted Libertarian.
Which of those would be “my” party?
Lemme guess… Republicans?Report
Are the conservatives here in the room with us now?
I think the only regular commenter here who’s actually a conservative is Pinky, and I don’t think anyone here would be sad to see the handful of holdouts in Congress go. Personally, I only see Republicans, in their current state, as useful for preventing Democrats from enacting their sh*t-for-brains agenda.
Keep in mind, also, that it takes two. At any time, a handful of Democrats could end this by voting for the candidate supported by 90% of House Republicans. They know they’re not going to get their guy in. This continues because 10% of House Republicans and at least 90% of House Democrats want it to continue.Report
There’s “Conservative” as in “Gets called Conservative in Real Life” and there’s “Conservative” as in “Conservative compared to Internet Progressives”.
We have a handful of the latter (and I am among them).
But, in my real life at work and among friends, I’m the degenerate liberal atheist.Report
“Conservative compared to Internet Progressives”
The term for that is “alt-Right”.Report
I thought it would be something closer to “83% of the country.”Report
I’m a conservative and Republican. I often say that there’s a small number of Republicans who act as badly as Democrats, and here’s a perfect example. Over 200 Republicans have voted to protect your mortgage, and over 200 Democrats against it, and yet you point your finger at the, whatever it is, less than a dozen Republicans.
To be fair, the Democrat have had just as slim a majority as the Republicans do now, and held it together. Pelosi was good at that. They also had the benefit of starting with a larger majority. They had 235-200 in 2019, then 222-213 in 2021. Republicans went straight into 222-213 in 2023. Harder, but it still should have been manageable.
I should note that I live in Maryland, which means I may know more federal workers than you do. I don’t wish any of them ill. They have some benefits and drawbacks to their terms of employment. One benefit and drawback is “always get paid except for stupid reasons”. I don’t want to phrase this callously or incorrectly, but…there’s no time when federal civilian paychecks are in danger and the most important thing going on is federal civilian paychecks being in danger.Report
Reading now that Jordan has dropped out of the Speaker race.Report
BTW, while we were all arguing who hit a hospital, an IDF air strike has, and I want to word this carefully, accidentally caused the meeting hall of one of the oldest Christian churches in Gaza to collapse. The general facts do not appear to be under dispute, Israel was targeting a nearby Hamas post across the street, missed it, instead hitting a house that was directly adjacent to the church (possibly part of the church compound?), and the damage to that caused a shared wall to collapse, bringing down the roof. The church was, at the time, housing a bunch of displaced people in said meeting hall.
Hamas’ has said (and obviously this is just Hamas saying it so believe if you want to), that at least 16 people’s bodies have been recovered.Report
And, having said the facts there, now we get to my opinion: if Israel is going to invade, it is absolutely immoral for them to continue the airstrikes. We can argue about whether those are moral normally some other time, but if they are going to invade on land, that means they can take out Hamas without this risk of killing civilians.
It would put their own soldiers at more risk, but that’s actually how war is supposed to work, soldiers are supposed to be at more risk than civilians! You don’t get to just ignore your responsibility to protect civilians cuz you’re worried your own soldiers might get shot at.
Please note that this does not mean I’m actually in favor of an Israeli invasion, but what I am saying is if there is one that is going to happen, it is utterly immoral to continue air strikes that risk civilians instead of just doing that right now. (In addition to, as I pointed out, being completely absurd with regard to their supposed objective of rescuing hostages.)Report
If Gaza is very very lucky air strikes is all that will happen because a ground invasion would be so much worse.Report
Excuse me? If they’re going to move in on the ground, it’s immoral to launch airstrikes first? Why?Report
… Because the air strikes are killing civilians, as literally described in the actual reasoning I just gave in the post you responded to. Really not sure what part of that is confusing.
Wait, is your assortation that Israeli soldiers on the ground would kill as many Palestinian civilians?Report
1) It is acceptable and expected for the military to use multiple tools.
2) While minimizing civilian deaths is a concern, it’s hardly the only concern.
3) Israel has hundreds of thousands of troops massing. I think a ground invasion results in a lot more civilian deaths. Like, hundreds of thousands of deaths.
There are 30k Hamas fighters. With their habit of using human shields and how dense things are, “only” be 3 civilians dead for every fighter takes us into 6 figures.
Egypt and Jordan have said they’re not taking Gazan refugees. We might see a war where the civilians aren’t allowed to flee.
4) Delaying the ground invasion while the diplomats try to defuse things seems a really good idea.
5) We might actually be seeing sane voices at work here or at least Hamas starting to understand that they’ve painted themselves into a corner. Hamas just released two American women.Report
What are the _other_ concerns you have about this war?
The only other concern I have besides ‘dead civilians’ is ‘dead non-civilians’ and ‘Israel has already bombed Syria and started kidnapping Palestinians from the West Bank, so clearly plans to expand this war’.
…so we’re just openly assuming Israel troops are going to commit a bunch of war crimes.
Hmm, interesting.
But anyway, I feel you missed the ‘Israel is very clearly indicating they are going to invade’ part of my post. So…that’s going to happen anyway.
What I am objecting to is doing civilian-killing airstrikes _first_, which can’t possibly have any moral justification if the invasion is already going to happen.Report
Me? I have no dog in this race. No relatives or concerns at all.
I’m simply talking about military theory. And in military theory (and ethics), civilian deaths is one concern of many.
You also have the cost in resources, the cost in troops, political issues, the military gain, various risks, and all of that needs to be balanced against everything else you’re doing.
The death of every civilian is not a war crime.
IMHO, if hundreds of thousands of heavily armed Israelis do a house to house, building by building search for members of Hamas to kill and assets of Hamas to destroy, this will cost a lot more civilian blood than anything we’ve seen thus far.
You seem to be presenting this as the better, less bloody, alternative than air strikes. I think that’s not the way to bet.
FAICT this type of fighting is the most brutal and nasty that we have short of WMD.Report
The airstrikes are killing civilians. The airstrikes are not *for* killing civilians. I don’t know if troops would kill more or fewer civilians. If you’re in a war, as long as you’ve made good faith efforts to reduce civilian deaths, such as warning when an area will get hit, then your math probably has to be about military success.Report
The airstrikes are about destroying civilian infrastructure, which _also_ kills civilians…it just kills them slower. We’ve known that, we’ve always known that, destroying the ability for a country to feed or cloth or house itself is a great way to cause large amounts of deaths and weaken it.
That’s why it _also_ is in the Geneva convention. Seems weird, doesn’t it, that the Geneva convention would ban destroying physical objects that don’t involve loss of life…and it’s because we have all of human history to look at and realize that _it does_.
Which has been how Israel has operated for decades. Slowly, inextricably, cutting the country off so the infrastructure decays…but blowing it up is faster.Report
Holy cow, if the IDF hit a building that contained a Hamas command and control center and the explosion took out a church that shared a wall with it, that’s a war crime!Report
No, their target was actually across the street, they literally missed where they were aiming and hit a house that was part of a church, because buildings are often built against each other.
And it is not a war crime. Accidentally killing civilians with bad aim while attacking military targets is not a war crime, at least not automatically, there are a bunch of different factors that have to be weighed against each other, like how important was the military target, How likely was it that the civilians were going to get killed, and was there any other way to do the strike that wouldn’t have done that. Additionally, special care is supposed to be taken around religious institutions and known refugee sites, which this should have been regarded as both.
This sort of accidental killing is generally regarded via… A gestalt, or maybe a statistical average. Everyone understands that will be individual instances of it, the question is how many are there.
This is unlike things that are always war crimes and easy to point at because they are not against legal targets.
I’vd actually already pointed out war crimes like that done by Israel (and just in case it’s not clear, Hamas is committing the exact same war crime) in the bombardment, things like taking down apartment buildings, which are not only a violation of international law because they have good odds to kill civilians and have no military object, but also because destroying civilian infrastructure is itself a war crime, even with no casualties. And the attacks often get announced as reprisals, which are additionally illegal under international law.
But _this_ was not illegal, this was an accident, and is also a good example of why arial bombardment is considered one of the most dangerous kinds of war for civilians, and why Protocol 1 was added to the Geneva convention to address this in the 1970s. (I’m on my phone, I’m not going to look up the exact date)Report
If any of the rooms are being used for military purposes, then the apartment building is a military structure.
Or alternatively, any bets that some Hamas fighter lived in that apartment building?
More than 2% of the Gaza population are Hamas fighters. If 50 people lived in the building, then there’s a 63% chance that one or more of them was a Hamas fighter. Then the question becomes whether or not Israel knows he’s home and how important is he.
And it’s Israel making these judgements and their view of what is a high value target and an acceptable number of civilians killed has shifted.
If Israel is doing everything by the book, and they may not considering what has happened, then we’d still expect to see the odd apartment building taken down simply because of the situation.Report
Oh good, we’re back to defending Israeli war crimes by suggesting that they are, in fact, actually things that are war crimes.
You do not get to destroy civilian housing simply because members of the military live there.
I wonder percentage of Israelis are in the military, if that’s how that work. Let’s check.. I’m not going to figure out accurate numbers, but it’s somewhere around 8%. Wow. I wonder if any of those people killed on the attack of the music festival where military, because I guess that would make it a military target.
Oh wait, that’s obviously not how that works.
Yes, if the situation was very different from what is happening, we would still expect a very small percentage of what is happening to occasionally happen.
You walking into a room with dozens of corpses and someone standing over them with a knife: Look, we can’t assume this guy is a murderer, even if he wasn’t a murderer their occasionally would be dead people in this room.
Yes sir, in a hypothetical world, sometimes apartment buildings can be military targets, if military attacks are being launched from them. However that wouldn’t be entire sections, multiple city blocks, that have all been flattened. A thing that has actually happenedReport
When the US was considering blowing up Osama Bin Laden’s home, we took the opposite view.
The reason we didn’t just drop a bomb on his house wasn’t that his family lived there, it was that we wanted to be sure and prove it to the world.
The attackers attacked because they were civilians. If they managed to kill any off duty military it was purely by accident.
The White House is a military target. OBL worked from home, i.e. planned attacks from his house. Hamas deliberately mixes it’s military with it’s civilians, so presumably it does the same.
We, on this board, literally can’t tell if blowing up an apartment building is a war crime. If Israel is targeting civilians then it is. If there’s a Hamas solider who sometimes works from home there then it’s not.
And I get just how nasty and toxic that is.Report
I feel I should I should first remind you that a lot of those apartment have warning shots fired at them so they evacuate, so Israel is clearly not attempting to kill the residents, just destroy civilian infrastructure (Which is a war crime). So that justification is nonsense to start.
Moreover, it’s nonsense anyway. International law about behavior during combat has an incredibly important principle called proportionality, which is where you keep getting tripped up, thinking ‘a war crime’ is some binary thing. It is not.
Military actions that risk killing civilians must _weigh_ that risk with the military objective achieved, and also weigh that against accomplishing that in some other way.
And while this is a somewhat vague rule, it does not allow ‘Risking killing a civilian to get one random military personal who is not currently engaged in hostilities’, aka, someone who is at home. It certainly doesn’t allow you to kill a whole building of civilians to kill a random military personal!
And the reason I say random is because high value military objectives, like _the leader of the entire military_, can indeed justify more civilian deaths, but, again, only if there is not some other way to do it…which it turns out there was WRT bin Laden, so, blowing up the house would be been disproportional, and tilted into being a war crime.
But it’s still not ‘a’ war crime, because, as I have mentioned before, there’s not some absolute line where things are war crime WRT to incidental civilian deaths as part of a legitimate military objective. But this does not mean we can’t look at what Israel is doing and point out it is _way past_ what is generally accepted in civilian deaths.
Meanwhile, there are absolute crimes, like deliberately targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure for no military purpose, and Israel is doing the latter also.
Oh, now the Hamas member that you’ve statistically assume might live in an apartment is _planning attacks_, huh? Should I point out that in a military, 95% of people do not ‘plan attacks’, so your numbers are way off?
Here is the actual rules:
And ‘an effective contribution to military action’ is not ‘sketched out a plan on a kitchen table’.
Even bin Laden’s house wouldn’t have counted as a military objective, because his _house_ was not contributing to anything. It would be illegitimate for the US military, knowing bin Laden’s house was currently empty because he and everyone else were on vacation, to destroy it. Because it is not a military objective. _He_ was the military objective, and if, while attempting to kill him, his house was damaged, that is fine…if it is proportional damage.
To simplify: The Geneva conventions define things that can be legitimate targets, certain people and objects, and nothing else can be _targeted_. Any damage or death to non-targets, or even risk of that, must be _proportional_ to any military gains, with the least amount of harm done as possible. (And in reality, no one actually cares about an individual house…the rules about civilian infrastructure are intended about stopping things that harm entire populations, like causing housing shortages and homeless people, and bridges being destroyed and whatnot. Not, like, one house.)
The White House _is_ a legitimate military objective, by itself, even assuming the President was not currently there, because it actually can operate command and control for the US military.Report
If the military is trying to destroy it, and claiming it’s military infrastructure, and warning the civilians to leave, and Hamas mixes their infrastructure with the civilians, why are you assuming that it’s purely civilian infrastructure?
What is a “proportional” response for what Hamas did?
This is the really important question.
The “other way”, which we may see, would be a ground invasion. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli troops going street to street, building to building.
If you’re suggesting that will create less blood and create fewer problems then you should spell out the reasoning because I don’t see it.
If you have something else you want Israel to do less than that, then put that on the table.
The plan was to turn the house and everything inside the walls into a smoking crater.
The “proportionality” aspect to this is “proportional to the amount of military gain”. With OBL, the gain would be a lot. Ergo a dozen or a few dozen civilians dying because they’re in the way would be acceptable.
A fuel air bomb (i.e. a non-nuclear nuke) would not be acceptable because we can get the job done with less destruction and fewer civilian deaths.
Turning back to Gaza, the definition of “military gain” has been changed radically. Israel has decided to utterly destroy Hamas. Ergo what was a low value target before is now a high value target, and what was a high value target is now even more so.
If they have started to consider every member of Hamas to be OBL, then it will get interesting. More likely they’ve done something saner than that but still in that flavor.Report
Literally in the text: In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.
The destruction of a place that someone sleeps or writes down places accomplishes nothing…they will simply sleep somewhere else, and make plans somewhere else. It offers no military advantage in any sense whatsoever.
That is not even vaguely the ‘important question’ at all, and is in fact another entirely different thing called retailiation which is ILLEGAL against civilian and civilian objects under international law. We are still at the point where you keep asserting Israel is committing war crimes, and don’t seem to understand you are doing that.
Proportionality is weighing the military advantage of an attack against the civilian death and damages of the same attack.
It will create less blood of Palestinian civilians, yes.
You are still confusing the idea of targeting bin Laden and incidentally destroying his house with the idea of targeting his house.
Targeting bin Laden is acceptable. An attack on him that destroys his house, when judged via proportionality, is certainly acceptable (As I said, while civilian objects are ‘bad’ to destroy, no one cares if you destroy a single house in a military operation, ever. The problem is destroy huge amounts of housing, not ‘that guy’s house’.) An attack on him that kills civilians would also have to be weighed, but probably be fine, he was an extremely important military target.
Destroying civilian objects, and even killing civilians, as part of an attack on a legitimate military target, is not the same as _targeting_ civilian objects or civilians. What you are trying to do matters.
And then, even after you have an acceptable military target, you have to ask yourself before any attack on that target how much that specific attack risks civilians vs. how much that attack will actually help the war effort, which is why sending an airstrike to the apartment building of some random soldier is not acceptable either…one soldier is not worth the dead civilians. But if it is instead the person in charge of the military, an argument can be made.
And _then_, if you suspect it is going to cause civilian deaths or damages, even ‘acceptable for the military result’, you have to ask yourself if there is perhaps some other way you could do it, or some way to reduce the risk.
For example, sending in a ground force to take a Hamas base instead of an airstrike. Or to evacuate and clear the area around that base and then doing the airstrike.
The laws of war do not change because someone is really mad. You can’t just assert that everyone is infinitely important to the war effort so you are allowed to cause infinite harm to kill them.Report
“The laws of war do not change because someone is really mad.”
mmhmm, and that goes both ways, wouldn’t you say?Report
Speaking as a devout Christian, I’d consider the damage to the church to be a tragedy, but not in the top thousand of the current month. We sadly lose churches all the time. Notre Dame in Paris was gutted a few years ago. Italy, Greece, and the Holy Land are all in a large earthquake zone. It happens. It’s our duty to preserve such sites as we can, and also to create more. It’s also very important for Israel to damage Hamas.Report
Well, don’t worry Pinky, it actually wasn’t the historic part of the building, the part constructed over eight hundred years ago, that collapsed on people, killing them. That was not damaged. The important building is fine.
What collapsed was just a much more recent meeting hall, full of a bunch of people who had fled their homes because of bombing, inside it.
And I’m glad you made that list, because when I think back to all the other horrific disasters that happened in a church, I realize how lucky we were! An actual irreplaceable church could have been destroyed, not just human beings!Report
What do you think I meant by the thousand-plus greater tragedies? other buildings? I meant the dead people. But you brought the whole thing up (admittedly, probably for dramatic effect) in terms of the church being damaged, so I addressed that too.
I dearly wish that Hamas hadn’t created the current war. My second preference would have been for the Israeli bomb to have hit its intended target. What happened is worse. But it was Hamas that woke up one recent morning and decided to endanger hundreds of thousands of people, and in wartime, bombs hit churches.Report
I agree with this sentiment. There’s also an irony to it, people killed inside of a church showcases that it’s not safer there.Report
The funny thing is, Jesus discussed people dying in a tower collapse about an hour away from this Gaza church, and he didn’t say anything about them being safer inside a church. Quite the opposite, in fact. I know you hate this religion you’re always talking about, but it has nothing to do with Christianity.Report
The part I dislike is the basic concept that supernatural assistance exists.
The people hiding in the church probably thought god would protect them. They would have been better off finding a building with stronger walls.
The claim that it’s not offered on tap is opposed by every congregation praying for a real world thing to happen and most stories in the Bible.Report
I think G-d *may* help me, and of course I’m going to ask Him to, but it’s not a mechanical pay in / pay out thing. Luke 12-13 (which includes the passage about the tower in Siloam) talks about this very subject. You can find some “prosperity Gospel” preachers who make claims like you’re talking about, but they’re a blip. Christianity promises as easy a life as Jesus had.
I think you confuse “possible” and “reliable”. You can’t criticize claims of the supernatural for not being natural, because they’re not claiming to be.Report
Hamas freed two Americans. A woman and her mother.
https://news.yahoo.com/israel-pounds-gaza-evacuates-town-064058108.htmlReport
To be a successful columnist does not require knowing what you’re talking about. It just requires knowing what your audience wants to hear.Report
“Israel bombing hospitals and killing hundreds and hundreds of people cannot be countenanced!”Report
It’s always other people who have the problem.Report
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!Report
On a side note from everything else going on, when there was the announcement of increased IRS funding, there was a bunch of people saying all that it’d be used for would be going after lower income people because they’re easier to go after.
Well –
https://twitter.com/AshleySchapitl/status/1715354124064088300
“A month after announcing it would crack down on 1,600 millionaires who were far behind on their taxes, the IRS said Friday it has collected $122 million from 100 of these cases.”
I’ll accept the apologies for those supporters of Defunding the Tax Police, anytime.Report
You know what?
It’s good that they did that and had I suspected that they’d do that, I’d have been a bigger supporter.
Good for them.
Those who said “the IRS will go after millionaires more than the middle class” were right and I was wrong.Report
That’s very very gratifying news.Report
… Am I missing something?
This isn’t talking about tax evasion, it seems to be literally talking about people who didn’t file taxes, or who did file them but didn’t pay them.
It is truly astonishing that the IRS had to announce they were doing anything about that, and that was a process that they did, instead of it jus being built into the IRS.
It really is amazing how much millionaires get away with just flagrantly breaking the law. What were they doing here? Having lawyers file things that said ‘no, not paying taxes’, and somehow that worked for years until he IRS decided otherwise?Report
Are you sure the IRS had the staffing and the money to have done what you’re saying they should have done?Report
They have always had that staffing and resource base – it was also intentionally points at people who generally didn’t lawyer up. By adding staff and resources they could do both.Report
1200 rich people? Wow, that’s a big number! Except we’re still auditing four hundred thousand poor people every year:
Despite race-blind audit
selection, we find that Black taxpayers are audited at 2.9 to 4.7 times the rate of
non-Black taxpayers. The main source of the disparity is differing audit rates by race
among taxpayers claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). (see Table A.1 for the number of audits).
Oh, that study is from back in 2014? The reporting from this year includes many statements of the form “we’re going to try very hard to put rules into place that make EITC audits less likely”, so it doesn’t sound like they’ve got that sorted out yet.
So, hey, they’re going after rich jerks who cheat on their taxes? Great, keep at that, but it doesn’t sound like “the burden of increased enforcement will fall mostly on those who haven’t the resources or education to experience it as anything but a hardship” has been disproven just yet.Report
So apparently a piece of jewelry that was formerly associated with Jews/Israel is being repurposed as a pro-Palestinian piece of jewelry.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/949048448/israel-map-necklace-eretz-israel?gpla=1&gao=1&&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping_us_b-jewelry-necklaces-other&utm_custom1=_k_CjwKCAjw7c2pBhAZEiwA88pOF-SxhQz0LKV-fKxv_9I4TGsEzGIbNBhs4GDfjpPpBmfF6L7v9KtCXRoCp6gQAvD_BwE_k_&utm_content=go_12570712464_121181995882_507439364333_pla-307090668619_c__949048448_246036574&utm_custom2=12570712464&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw7c2pBhAZEiwA88pOF-SxhQz0LKV-fKxv_9I4TGsEzGIbNBhs4GDfjpPpBmfF6L7v9KtCXRoCp6gQAvD_BwE
This is supposed to be a neckless ornament representing all of Eretz Israel. I’ve now seen it also being sold to represent all Palestine. A capitalist is somebody who will sell you the rope you use to hang them as someone said.Report
My brother alluded to this above but a lot of people really don’t seem to get how deeply shaken many Jews around the world are to the Simchat Torah massacre in general and the reaction of many Western progressives to it in general. It’s one thing to be Pro-Palestinian but it is another thing to see the mass murder of 1,400 Jews, and probably the Israeli Jews most likely to be sympathetic towards the Palestinians, lauded as a brave act of resistance and what “decolonization looks like.” A lot of Jews that I know from real life who never really posted about Israel or being Jewish before or who previously saw themselves as good progressives are feeling betrayed. Previously stalwart anti-Zionist Jews are being more muddled in what they say about Israel. I’m sure the progressives celebrating Hamas really don’t care about this though.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/american-antisemitism-jewish-left-rcna121397Report
The “What did you think decolonization meant?” guy wasn’t wrong. The woke left have been telling us exactly who they were all along, and most American Jews haven’t been listening. Antisemitism is baked into the core dogma of woke ideology: The people who think that the only way one ethnic group can have higher SES than another is through oppression and exploitation were never going to give a pass to the highest-SES ethnic group of all. You might have been their allies, but they were never yours.Report
I think it’s better to be careful about terminology, to improve the chances of actually changing a few minds. There are many on the Left who have an anti-Israel bias and who may overall lump Jews in the “white” bucket as privileged people not deserving any consideration, but this is a different phenomenon than the “Jews control the world” people. If you call the anti-Israel lefties “antisemitic”, they’ll confidently reject it because they know they’re not in the latter group.Report
Some of this is fuzzy thinking. After Israel stops oppressing people it will be puppies and kittens. Hamas was provoked and will be nicer if they have less oppression. There should be a right of return because crimes should be undone.
The brutal mechanics of how all this would work aren’t fully thought through nor do they understand that the Palestinians aren’t Disney liberals.
Having said that, what I’m saying isn’t really disagreeing with what you are saying.Report
From The Business Insider: Israel did not bomb that hospital, according to the latest intelligence. It’s a reminder that in war, all sides engage in propaganda.
How true that is.Report
Eric Levitz provides a very important clarification on the infants who may or may not have had heads.
Report