EndemicEarthling

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

@davidtoddmccarty If it's not worth disagreeing over, then it's not worth posting about.

You posted. I'm with @lakelady on this.

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

@Extra_Special_Carbon @PeachMcD @KawaTora @Mlobbes

I think you're stigmatising neurodivergent people. It's there in the name: Hat AuDHD cat. If you want to know why this individual is naming Biden as supporting a genocide in Gaza, and naming him as undermining public health during an ongoing crisis caused by a brain-damaging virus it's because both those claims are simply true.

Neurodivergent people are generally more willing than average to dive down rabbit holes of research to understand such things, and more willing to speak up honestly about them, despite being ostracised as a result.

If you're looking for a slightly more nuanced expression, see the comment by @JessTheUnstill above: Biden is both supporting a genocide and yet still qualitatively far better than Trump, who wouldn't just support this genocide. (I guessed Jess was herself likely neurodivergent from her handle ('unstill'), and then confirmed on her profile)

Trolls and bots and sockpuppets definitely exist. But if you immediately label/block everyone who disagrees with you as one, you're likely to rapidly end up in a pretty unhealthy info bubble, and you'll further stigmatise people who already often find themselves pushed to the margins and mocked for having brains wired differently.

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

• Hundreds of thousands of #Palestinians are forced to rely (even more than previously) on the trickle of food, water and supplies brought in by the UN aid organisation #UNRWA. UNRWA is the largest employer in Gaza, with around 13,000 employees (out of 30,000 employees globally). Since the 7th Oct an unprecedented number of UN employees (152 of them working for UNRWA) have been killed by the Israeli military, who had already slain a record number of UN personnel within the first month of the escalation.

• Members of the Israeli government and parliament publicly identify UNRWA as an enemy that must be ‘destroyed’: “It will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA” said Noga Arbell, member of the Israeli parliament on 6th January, one call amongst many for the targeting of the organisation.

2/10

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

• Every nation that is a signatory to the 1948 #GenocideConvention has a binding legal obligation to do everything in their power to prevent genocide.

• The International Court of Justice finds it plausible that the state of Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and orders them to stop: to refrain from genocidal activities, to prevent their commission, punish their incitement, and avoid destroying evidence of those already committed. It also orders Israel to ensure access to adequate humanitarian assistance.

• Israel has been thwarting the delivery and distribution of such assistance for sixteen weeks and had already been throttling it for sixteen years prior to the current escalation. Even now, it tolerates Israeli citizens blockading the movement of aid into Gaza.

• The #ICJ ruling is decisive, with 15 judges in favour of most of South Africa’s claims and only 2 opposed (one of whom is the Israeli justice on the ICJ).

• The Israeli government immediately thumbs its nose at the ICJ, with a government minister posting a childish piece of mockery on social media just minutes later. Israel’s rejection of the ICJ is consistent with a long history of ignoring and/or denigrating international law and the United Nations.

3/10

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

• Israel takes this moment, within 24 hours of losing the #ICJ case, to air allegations against a small number of UNRWA employees. An Israeli intelligence dossier names twelve UNRWA employees that are alleged to have participated (directly or indirectly) in the Palestinian attack on the 7th October that precipitated the current escalation.

• During the hostilities on that day, 695 Israeli civilians were killed along with numerous civilians of other nationalities, over 100 were taken hostage and many more injured.

• Only ten of the twelve accused UNRWA employees are able to be located (one had already been killed by the #Israeli military).

• From what I have read, only two of the twelve are alleged to have been present and armed in locations were civilians were killed on the 7th Oct. Others are accused of various other supporting roles.

• #UNRWA immediately fires those nine employees, apparently depriving them of due process (which would have been to suspend them while the allegations are independently investigated).

4/10

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

• It is important to note that the #Israeli government has propagated an enormous number of falsehoods in the last sixteen weeks, too numerous to list (as is typical of governments engaged in widespread war crimes: cf. #Russia). The allegations were made on the basis of interrogations of #Palestinians held by the Israeli military. The subjects of previous such interrogations have frequently made allegations that they use #torture, and shown evidence in support. And torture allegations were widespread even before the Israeli Defence minister declared at the start of the present escalation that all restraints on Israeli armed forces have been lifted.

5/10

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

• Nonetheless, within 48 hours, nine pro-Israel imperial core nations (#USA, #UK, #Germany, #Australia, #Canada, #Italy, the #Netherlands, #Switzerland and #Finland) decide to withdraw funding to #UNRWA, despite its immediate action against those nine, despite its launching of an investigation, despite the nine not stating what UNRWA would need to do to avoid this situation, despite the lack of independent verification of the claims, despite the twelve accused employees forming such a tiny proportion of a critically important humanitarian organisation, and despite all nine nations being signatories to the Genocide Convention and thus under a legal obligation to prevent #Israel from perpetrating #genocide (an accusation that the #ICJ has now ruled plausible). The Australian government decision was announced less than 18 hours after the ICJ ruling was released (as were those from Canada and the US).

6/10

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

• It seems to me that the governments of these nine nations, who were already deficient in failing to take action to prevent this #genocide, and for some of them, already complicit in continuing to arm the #Israeli military, may now have become directly co-perpetrators of genocidal acts through the deliberate deprivation of the necessities of life from a civilian population. This is life-or-death #CollectivePunishment of the #Palestinian population for the unproven crimes of twelve people.

• Many legal experts agree with this perspective (that defunding #UNRWA at this point amounts to a genocidal activity), including #FrancescaAlbanese, the UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories; US #HumanRights lawyer and professor of #InternationalLaw, #FrancisBoyle (one of a very small number of lawyers to have successfully prosecuted a genocide case in the ICJ). And it is a point that has been made by multiple international aid organisations, as well as members of at least two #Labor branches in NSW, who voted a day or two ago to warn their federal MPs (both government ministers) that they are at risk of contributing to genocidal activities.

7/10

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

• The cynical PR move by #Israel in releasing this dossier has been incredibly successful in shaping western #media narratives, which immediately dropped the (already inadequate and often misleading) coverage of the #ICJ ruling, in order to focus instead on unproven allegations against a dozen ex-employees of a widely-praised and crucial humanitarian aid organisation, in the context of ongoing genocidal acts against their people, in a story that is being used to justify further actions with genocidal implications.

8/10

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

• Compare the extensive media coverage of these UNRWA allegations with the very limited coverage of (yet more) actual footage of fresh #WarCrimes in the #WestBank as a dozen #Israeli agents, illegally dressed as medical personnel and civilians, stormed into a Palestinian hospital and assassinated three patients. Or with the limited coverage of the fact that a third of Israel government ministers attended a conference last weekend whose explicit agenda was the complete #EthnicCleansing of #Gaza and its annexation by Israeli settlers. Or with the relative lack of coverage on the fact that the #IDF say they are continuing to pump sea water into the tunnels under Gaza, a move contributing to the permanent erasure of the habitability of the area by contaminating the last vestiges of (semi)potable groundwater (as well as likely endangering Israeli #hostages): another war crime.

9/10

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

And if all this somehow feels too distant to you, if you'd prefer to avoid all news about Middle East politics because it makes you uncomfortable, if you're already so cynical that the blatant double standards just mentioned leave you unmoved, then perhaps remember this quote from Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson (often misattributed to former UK Labour MP Tony Benn):

"The way a state treats its aliens is the way it would treat its own subjects if it dared”.

In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.

10/10

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

@sister_ratched Puppetry didn't begin with AUKUS. Name a major point of Oz foreign policy taken in direct opposition to US interests since WWII.

I can think of only one, really. The proposed closure of Pine Gap in 1973. Something else happened that year...

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

@ridicol For me, it's only on the phone app, and it's not that some things load and others don't, but that it simply won't refresh for multiple minutes at a time.

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

@Kon Were Scott Morrison not an officer of the Commonwealth at the time, every single mandatory reporter in Australia (there are at least tens of thousands) had a legal obligation to report him to the relevant authorities for covering up child abuse.

When he was Minister for Immigration, he was legally responsible for the well-being of unaccompanied minors in offshore detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island (the former had most of the children but some of the male asylum seekers and refugees detained indefinitely without trial on Manus were also minors). It is well established that he received multiple credible reports of child abuse occurring within the detention centres. His response was to try to cover up these allegations, and persecute those sharing them.

Imagine the outcry if any other person in authority over children was shown to have responded in this way to reports of abuse.

EndemicEarthling, 4 months ago

@BigJesusTrashcan it's from a parody account

EndemicEarthling, 4 months ago

@ChrisMayLA6 Will post-Brexit Tories gut environmental regulations to make a quick and dirty quid wherever they can?

Does a bear defecate in woodlands?

The woods have all been sacrificed on the bonfire of regulations, so Boris the Bear's shit is just all out in the open now.

EndemicEarthling, 4 months ago

@GreenFire @nicholas_saunders @w7voa You are literally blaming a genocide on someone other than the people committing it.

EndemicEarthling, 4 months ago

@SocialistStan @gwensnyder While people can argue over whether this is technically correct, I don't think it's a very helpful point to make, since it feels like a too-easy dismissal/side-stepping of a serious problem (systemic racism targeting Jewish people).

In my experience there also seems to be a significant overlap between those repeat this point and those whose other comments express various antisemitic tropes.

EndemicEarthling, 4 months ago

@RadicalGraffiti
Chant often heard at local rallies (call/response):
Too many coppers/not enough justice!

EndemicEarthling, 3 months ago

@JessTheUnstill Appreciated your answer on another thread. Thought I'd come and say hi.