I am fucking sick of junior highschool takes on complex geopolitical situations. OP thinks Hamas using civilians as human shields is a funny meme and not actual, grim reality.
Israel gets it’s weapons from America. They are the best weapons in the world. The americans killed Ayman al-Zawahiri with a RX9 hellfire missle with no collateral damage. Are you saying that the idf can shoot straight or that humans keep getting in the way?
You don’t get to measure one against the other and then, if the other side turns out to have done “more war crimes” then you’re exonerated. That’s not how that works.
International law seems to disagree with this. If you use a civilian building to perform military actions, you make it a military building. Not saying that the situation is not messed up, I also think Isreals response is is disproportionate. But how crazy does one have to be to use their own women and children as meat shields?
War crimes don’t cancel each other out or something. You don’t add up the war crimes each side has committed and then if they’re equal everyone calls it fair game.
I wouldn’t pretend it’s not something terrorists would do. I think what people are upset about is more like: let’s assume that there is a terrorist HQ being run in a school. Let’s also assume their are innocent people of any and all ages in that same school. Finally, let’s assume there are only two options to deal with the terrorist HQ (there could be others in reality but for this exercise there are only two options).
Option a) bomb the school, injuring and killing everyone inside. Option b) a specialized operation that will only target the terrorists but may result in casualties to your army.
People, and myself, are upset that the option being chosen seems to overwhelmingly be option a, the indiscriminate injury and death of everyone in the building whether innocent or terrorist. No judge and no jury for anyone involved, only death.
For me at least, this cartoon is not pointing out that terrorists would run an HQ in a school. It’s pointing out that currently the IDF cannot, or will not, see past the fact that this is still a picture of a school. It may contain a terrorist HQ, but it’s not a building labeled “terrorist HQ” with the sole function of being a terrorist HQ. This is a picture of a school that may also house a terrorist HQ. And that is a very very important distinction that seems to be wildly ignored.
Hamas wants to lure them into a ground war where they can also ensure the maximum amount of martyred. Hamas is causing these deaths. No one is safe either way. It’s a war zone. Hamas is shooting people that are fleeing.
What tells you that option b wouldn’t bring even more death and destruction? Special operations like black hawk down and the storm on faluja were some of the bloodiest parts of the respective wars.
For option b) you have to get your army to the target. Through terrorists hiding among civilians, through ide’s that are hidden along the way, through civilians that do not like you. And if you miraculously survive this march without heavy casualties the Hamas is already gone and hide somewhere else…not to forget the civilian casualties that would happen on the way…
The problem with this: Option b is not realistically an option. The whole point of Hamas hiding in civilian infrastructure and mingling with civilians is disguise. Or to put it another way: to make option b completely unfeasible. How would you identify Hamas members? Do they wear their bright orange terrorist uniform? Can you spot them by their mean facial expressions? And there is another problem with option b. Civilians in the building naturally do not see the IDF as their saviors from Hamas oppression, so there is a high chance that some of them will suddenly turn into non-civilians. Which leads to an out of control scenario and resulting bloodbath.
Disclaimer: This is not meant as a justification of option a. I’m just pointing out that option b is not a realistic option.
Equally, are we going to pretend that bombing a school which is not a Hamas HQ and then, after the news comes out that they killed 10s of children, telling us it was a Hamas HQ is not something the IDF would do?
Does it really makes sense to trust the guys who chose to blow up a building full of children when they give us an unverifiable self-serving justification for their action?!
Even if you are partisan and in your heart of hearts feel deeply that Israel are the good guys, how can you be sure they’ve investigate enough and know with enough certainty that that’s a Hamas HQ to take a decision that they know is highly likely to result in dead children as collateral damage (assuming you are unable to question the morality of those who think dead children as collateral is acceptable)?
The Death Penalty in the the US has a huge system in place not just to judge a possible perpetrator but also of appeals to try and make sure a single person is not executed if he or she turns out to be innocent and even then death is a highly exceptional and rare penalty, so how would it be fine to kill a bunch of innocent children on a non-existent standard of proof (the killers are judge, jury and executioner) that their school contains a Hamas HQ, with no appeals, no independent verification, no nothing but the word of the very people who think dead children is morally accepetable as collateral.
The point being the implied extraordinary difference in the value of innocent human life under even the American system in States that have the Death Penalty (who value it less that most of the Western World which does not have the Death Penalty in great part because even in the best system with such penaly innocents die) and that of the IDF which will blow up Palestinian children and then state it was a Hamas target, the system for determining that being opaque and without independent oversight (i.e. they care very little with avoiding taking innocent lives).
And my argument is even assuming the claims of those places being high value Hamas targets are believed genuine by those making them rather than the claims being just “easy excuses” used quite independent of reality: I’m merely just pointing that if you genuinelly want to avoid kill innocents whilst trying to get the guilty you have quite a complex process to avoid as much as possible that errors happen, and external oversight to avoid that bad people bypass or abuse the power to kill innocents.
I dont trust either of them. Honestly if there werent us citizens their we should probably just stay out of it. On one side you have the oppressive idf and on the other you have people who are not just trying to liberate Palestinians but are also killing people regardless of their copability in their oppression. Why cant we just agree that both are bad?
You’re right, trust the Islamic jihadists who have stolen so much aid from their own people that the UN had to step in and stop providing.
The leadership of Hamas was on Lebanese TV the other day saying they know civilians will die because of their actions, they intend on attacking again and again regardless of that. I’m paraphrasing but it was pretty wild to see.
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