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Israel Attacked and its Response

Louis Gossett Jr said:
I don’t think it’s a talking point why care about one thing but not another should be asked. What makes one event necessary to protest and get fired up about but not another? If you have a truly good explanation I think it helps bring people to your cause and understand and if you just hand wave and dismiss it then it all seems very performative.
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who said they don't care? what makes you think they aren't doing other things in their life to combat, say, climate change?

affecting change requires a critical mass of people


post just reads like a justification of nihilism in a world where you're on the lucky side of things
 
Anyway, here is a response to people who believe that the Biden admin is actually pushing for the war to end without a Rafah invasion -

 
The Biden/US position hasn’t changed - they don’t support a cease fire with Hamas - they support a pause in the conflict for Hamas to relinquish their hostages, so they can then destroy Hamas completely. Where do you think the remaining civilians in Gaza fit into that scenario?
 
These fools really think that Dems are stupid enough to forget about the ongoing genocide that they are enabling.

I love these lectures from LGJ and Ph, while their guy is literally giving the electorate (not to mention Palestinians and anti-govt protesters in Israel) a middle finger
 
I suppose if you really believed that the protesters (or the media) were inventing lies about Jewish violence in order to incite violence against Jews, then that would follow a similar logic to blood libel discourses

But the Blood Libel is an actually historically specific thing, so deploying it rhetorically as a means of deflecting from demonstrable and horrific cruelty in Gaza (and without citing in the article any evidence of anti-Jewish violence arising from the protests) seems deeply problematic, for lack of a better word

She's basically saying that if you don't recognize Israel's state-sanctioned violence in Gaza as a "defensive war" then you're complicit in an ancient and insidious anti-Jewish conspiracy.
 
the logic falls apart, I think, because (with only a few exceptions) nobody is calling for violence against Jews as a result of protests.

Also, obviously, the gazans aren't mostly Christians and the child murder seems to be mostly perpetrated by Israeli rockets
 
wakephan09 said:
I suppose if you really believed that the protesters (or the media) were inventing lies about Jewish violence in order to incite violence against Jews, then that would follow a similar logic to blood libel discourses

But the Blood Libel is an actually historically specific thing, so deploying it rhetorically as a means of deflecting from demonstrable and horrific cruelty in Gaza (and without citing in the article any evidence of anti-Jewish violence arising from the protests) seems deeply problematic, for lack of a better word

She's basically saying that if you don't recognize Israel's state-sanctioned violence in Gaza as a "defensive war" then you're complicit in an ancient and insidious anti-Jewish conspiracy.
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I resonated less with the Blood Libel parts of the oped, and more with this, which is similar to many of the things I've noted over the past 7 months

Claims that Israel has been committing a genocide of Palestinians date to long before October 7. Yet the population of Gaza was estimated to be less than 400,000 when Israel captured the territory from Egypt in a war against multiple Arab countries in 1967. It’s now estimated at just over 2 million. Population growth of almost 600% would make it the most inept genocide in the history of the world.

What about now?

Those repeating the word genocide over and over, turning it into a mantra that penetrates the public consciousness, smearing Israel and anyone who supports it, ignore the facts of this war.

This is not an unprovoked war, like Russia’s against Ukraine. It’s not a civil war between rival militias, like the one raging in Sudan — which, by the way, is being ignored by almost everyone, even though the UN describes it as one of the “worst humanitarian crises in recent memory,” where a famine could kill 500,000 people.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/29/opinions/campus-protests-university-of-texas-israel-gaza-suri
No, Israel was attacked. On October 7, Hamas launched a gruesome assault on Israeli civilians, killing some 1,200 — including many women and children — and dragging hundreds of them as hostages into Gaza. Today dozens — including many women and children — remain in captivity.

Those who keep saying that Israel’s response is an act of revenge rather than the strategic, defensive war that most Israelis view as a fight for national survival against a determined enemy backed by a powerful country are deliberately distorting reality. In doing so, they are perversely evoking the same false blood lust and grotesqueness embedded in the blood libel archetype.

Hamas’ massacre, its wide-ranging sexual violence, its burning of entire families in their homes, its vow to do it again — these and other serious threats that the group poses to Israelis get ignored in the characterizations of the Israel Defense Forces as pursuing only vengeance by killing Gazan civilians.
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Indeed, Hamas’ actions, which precipitated this war, don’t seem to exist in the minds of ostensibly humanitarian-minded protesters. Nor even the fate of the hostages, still captive in Hamas tunnels.

Although the campus protests vary in their message and actions from school to school, we never hear protesters chant that Hamas should release the hostages or accept a ceasefire. Quite the contrary. Accusations against Israel at times include praise for Hamas, one of whose aims — the end of the Jewish state — is shared by some key organizers of the student protests. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently said, “It remains astounding to me that the world is almost deafeningly silent when it comes to Hamas.”

Accusing Israel of genocide and putting the entire onus for stopping the war, putting all the blame for the deaths, on the Jewish state is even more astounding because Hamas — designated a terrorist organization by the US, the European Union and many other countries — is a group whose explicit goal, according to its founding charter, is not just to destroy Israel, but to kill Jews. That is the definition of genocide.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/26/opinions/opinion-the-cause-of-campus-chaos-zakaria
Yet the casualty figures from Gaza are produced by people who report to Hamas, which has ruled Gaza as a dictatorship for nearly two decades. They are repeated regularly, without noticeable skepticism, often without specific attribution to Hamas as the source. I don’t know how many people have died. But it’s reasonable to believe that Hamas has an incentive to inflate the numbers.

Still, the death toll, even by the Hamas count, does not in any way suggest a genocidal campaign. The terror organization puts the total at about 35,000. The figure, disputed by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy among other think tanks and researchers, includes Hamas fighters. That means the number of civilians killed, whatever the total, is actually lower.

Compare that to the death toll in Mosul, Iraq, where coalition forces uprooted ISIS from a city that had some 600,000 people at the time. Estimates of the exact number of deaths vary, ranging from 9,000 to 40,000 (the latter is the estimate of Kurdish intelligence). The lowest figure is on par with the rate of total deaths reported by Hamas authorities in Gaza that does not distinguish civilians from Hamas fighters, while the highest is four times greater.

I don’t recall hearing the term genocide used there, or in any of the battles that led to more than half a million people being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq during America’s wars there. And yet, Israel has been repeatedly smeared with this damning accusation.
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Do you even know what blood libel is plama?

Speaking of phrases that are used too much, used incorrectly, and used in ways that trivialize the victims of Eastern European antisemitism…

Phan, is that ironic?
 
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This shit is exhausting.

Another ten thousand Palestinians are gonna get killed bc Biden can’t stand up to Netanyahu, and the international community has been exposed as a fraud.

Hundreds of hostages won’t be released because of the hubris of an old man whose only way to avoid prosecution is to prolong a war that nobody will win.
 
I think it’s fair to analyze — even criticize — the protestors actions and their attitudes toward Hamas

but the claim that a critical mass of people have been claiming genocide for years before October 7 feels like a stretch — people have been claiming apartheid, inhumane treatment, land grabbing, etc. for a long time but the article doesn’t seem to want to confront that what is happening now is horrific and that most people are making a distinction between now and before
 
I think part of the problem is that lots of people these days genuinely cannot consider or hold multiple complex ideas at once

Idk if it's the brain-rotting of internet culture or our single-minded obsession with STEM-centered positivism
 
wakephan09 said:
I think part of the problem is that lots of people these days genuinely cannot consider or hold multiple complex ideas at once

Idk if it's the brain-rotting of internet culture or our single-minded obsession with STEM-centered positivism
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agreed, and here is where I think there is a little bit of “both sides” at play

I think there is also a marketing-like component to things, where ideas need to be reduced to simple, repeatable slogans that can gain widespread support

there is also a sense that acknowledging complexity is a sign of a position’s weakness — purely one thing or it’s nothing at all
 
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