Polling shows:
•66% of Americans & 80% of Democrats demand ceasefire—yet they aren’t being listened to.
•73% of Palestinians in Gaza demand peaceful resolution contrary to Hamas—yet they aren’t being listened to.
•76% of Israelis demand Netanyahu resign—yet they aren’t being listened to
John Oliver perhaps said it best in his last episode—we need new leadership if we expect peace and Justice to prevail over war and death.
@Alon@QasimRashid that's shockingly high, considering Hamas has promised to repeat its attacks every chance it gets and that it will not abide a ceasefire.
@Jonathanglick@Alon@QasimRashid And anyway the people calling out have no way to force Bibi to resign. The default assumption is he hangs on till next Election Day, no?
@QasimRashid All governments suck nowadays. In the United States all they want is money and complete control, aka Communism. Our Constitution starts with We the People for a reason!
@QasimRashid "And here let me emphasize the fact—and it cannot be repeated too often—that the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace." Eugene V. Debs #IWW
@QasimRashid WHAT CEASEFIRE? OUR BABIES ARE STILL IN THE HANDS OF HAMAS. OUR CHILDREN THAT THEY SLAUGHTERED THEIR PARENTS IN FRONT OF THEM ARE HELD BY HAMAS. WOMEN THEY RAPED ARE STILL IN THE HANDS OF HAMAS. STOP ASKING FOR A CEASEFIRE. START ASKING FOR HAMAS TO SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES. BRING MY FAMILY HOME.
This shithole country doesn’t give a rats ass about its citizens.
Every single thing that’s ever been done to benefit anyone except the rich, has been something they’ve had to be dragged kicking and screaming before anything happened.
@QasimRashid
Public sentiment didn't stop the US from avenging 9/11 and it lasted 20 yrs. Over 1200 Israelis were not just killed, but brutally slaughtered by Hamas and hostages taken. I think some of the Gaza bombing is overkill but does anyone really expect them to stop trying to avenge that attack and recover the hostages. Would we??
@72mz@QasimRashid collective punishment is a war crime. If they were just killing Hamas terrorists no one would fault them. But thousands of children dead is not a mistake. It’s an intentional disregard for innocent human life. Do I expect them to stop? No. But that doesn’t make these acts any less war crimes.
@FortuitousMess@72mz@QasimRashid they're targeting terrorists. Collateral damage is not a war crime. It's a tragedy. I wish it weren't happening. I wish they were able to evacuate. But there is no war crime happening.
Note that the numbers come from Hamas, and they have not claimed that any of the victims were civilians. When they say "children," they mean people under 18, but they recruit terrorists much younger than that. Younger than 15, even—which is a war crime.
No harm to one person can justify harming an unrelated, and therefore innocent, person.
If Israelis earned the right to kill innocent Palestinians in self-defense Hamas, then those Palestinians earn a commensurate right to kill innocent Israelis in return.
That kind of madness is why we’re in this situation now.
I understand your euphemism, I just reject its validity.
Setting aside the fact that the Israeli state does deliberately target civilians, the argument that killing civilians is required by the security situation is both Hamas’ and the Israeli state’s argument.
The horrors of 7 October no more justify what Israel is doing now than the horrors of the occupation justified what Hamas did on 7 October.
Hamas doesn't pretend that their targeting civilians is necessary for or has anything to do with security, they just want to instill terror in Israelis and bring about compromise through fear.
Israel does not target civilians, but Hamas embeds itself within the population while firing rockets. How should Israel fight back?
The Israeli state does, in fact, target civilians both directly and collectively.
That aside, the Israeli state has also killed 10,000 civilians in the last few weeks. A policy that reliably and predictably produces civilian casualties—especially mass civilian casualties—is indistinguishable from a policy of deliberately attacking them, for anyone who isn’t a sophist.
I am not a military tactician; I can’t offer more specific military advice than “don’t murder children.”
Nobody in Gaza or elsewhere has claimed that Israel has killed 10,000 civilians since 10/7. Hamas has claimed that Israel has killed 10,000 people. Let's pretend we believe the number. They have not claimed that any of those people are civilians—it does not even pretend to delineate. We also know that some of those people were, in fact, not killed by Israel, but by stray Palestinian rockets or other Palestinian murderers.
Mmmm my favorite kind of equivocation, quibbling over the exact number of thousands of innocent people murdered.
Without a doubt, amidst the 25,000 tons of ordinance the IDF has dropped on the 141 square miles of the Gaza Strip, some Palestinians have been killed by Hamas too. They should also not murder innocent people.
@HeavenlyPossum@72mz@QasimRashid@FortuitousMess 10,000 people died, some of them innocent, some of them by Israel's hand, and, you argue, a few in attacks that actually meant to kill those innocents. You still don't seem to have any evidence, though. You should still not repeat numbers that aren't remotely based in reality.
OHCR has corroborated reporting that more than 4,000 children have been killed. Are they sufficiently innocent enough? What rough percentage of those 4,000 do you imagine were killed by Hamas rockets vs the IDF’s 12,000+ air and artillery strikes? Trying to get a sense for what actually counts for “evidence” in your reality.
@HeavenlyPossum@72mz@QasimRashid@FortuitousMess the only vaguely OHCR statement I've been able to find specifically quotes Hamas. Do you have a source on where OHCR did an independent report?
Hamas does not argue that any of those children were innocent. Once again, Hamas recruits child soldiers to commit acts of terror.
Hamas not only uses children as human shields, it indoctrinates them as soldiers. Again, how the fuck do you want Israel to respond, just accept the rocket fire?
@HeavenlyPossum@72mz@QasimRashid@FortuitousMessthe air strikes target the rockets. There are no air strikes in the West Bank because there are no rockets in the West Bank. If they stop firing rockets haphazardly towards Israeli civilians, they won't have any air strikes to worry about. Really easy solution.
No, there are just pogroms in the West Bank. In Gaza, airstrikes have “targeted” individual Hamas leaders in crowded and dense civilian infrastructure, such as schools and hospitals, but we can’t be sure if any of the civilians incidentally killed were bad so let’s withhold judgement.
@HeavenlyPossum@QasimRashid@72mz@FortuitousMess yes, some innocents have died. But there's no evidence that Israel targeted innocents. Israel has been evacuating the war zone. And every time it takes out a target, it goes through effort to warn any civilians who might be near them to evacuate that specific building. No other army calls targets in advance.
And your attempt to pretend that "targeting" is not a real concept by putting it in quotes is pathetic anti-intellectual bullshit.
@QasimRashid What I don't fully understand is, if 76% of Israelis oppose Netanyahu, why do they keep voting in Knesset members from parties that are putting him in leadership? And why are those parties doing it, too?
@ssfckdt@QasimRashid Netanyahu's support has plummeted since the last election. The next scheduled election isn't scheduled for a while, but his coalition could fall apart before then which would prompt a new election, and such an election would strongly favor parties that no longer support Netanyahu. (IIRC, one of the moderate parties recently moved to the coalition to balance out extremists, but they'll leave as soon as they get a chance).
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