• 0 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 4th, 2023

help-circle




  • Hamas is the elected government, one which has openly stated that its aim is to wipe the jews out of the Middle East completely. It enjoys broad support among the population in Gaza, despite having demonstrated on October 7 that it has no qualms about shooting teenagers with assault rifles at a peace rave. We saw the footage that they themselves took; no doubt there. They own it. That’s the goal. Many Palestinians who were not members of Hamas appear to have streamed across the border to take part on that day, too.

    And, yes, Hamas, as the government in Gaza, also happens to be tallying casualty figures that Lemmy eats up without question.


  • I have come to dislike snappy one-liner responses in these posts, as well as the quick judgments based on uninformed opinions. Back in January, Brett Stephens, a journalist currently with the New York Times who lived and covered stories in Israel for years, had this to say about UNRWA :

    "Last Friday, Israeli officials presented the U.S. government with an intelligence dossier detailing the involvement of 12 UNRWA employees, seven of them schoolteachers, in the massacre of Oct. 7. As reported by The Times’s Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley, the charges range from kidnapping an Israeli woman to storing rocket-propelled grenades to murdering civilians in a kibbutz.

    Awful enough — and the U.N. rightly moved swiftly to terminate the employment of nine of those identified by the dossier. But that may be the least of it. “Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that around 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

    The figures are worth bearing in mind the next time you weigh the credibility of information about Gaza sourced to the U.N. Also worth bearing in mind is that this has been going on for years. As Bassam Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group noted over a decade ago, “In order for UNRWA to survive, they accept [Hamas’s] conditions because they want to continue their activities.”

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/opinion/unrwa-un-palestine-agency.html




  • Israeli jews are indigenous to the Middle East, many expelled from their homelands in places like Iraq, Egypt, and Yemen. Your claim of “colonialism” (the word you’re looking for here) may be a common view in the West, but it’s an outright misconception.

    The wars you’re talking about: the big ones in 1948 and 1967 were started by groups of Arab states attacking Israel for declaring their independence. Israel defended itself.

    Most importantly, October 7 of this year was an absolutely brutal bloodbath perpetrated against women, children, elderly people – civilians. Twenty-year-olds dancing for peace. Residents of left-leaning Kibbutzes, many of whom were outspoken supporters of Palestinian rights. Members of Hamas and other Palestinians streamed across the border and shot civilians, beheaded them, lit their houses on fire, killed their children with grenades, tied women and girls to trees and raped them.

    The next day, before a single Israeli bomb had fallen in Gaza, there were demonstrations in the West against Israel.



  • Okay, but do you acknowledge that Hamas has a great deal of responsibility for the lack of infrastructure for civilians in the Gaza Strip, of which they are the government? That Hamas spends literally billions of aid money toward building a vast system of tunnels from which they fire rockets at Israel, attempting to kill jews, because it's in their mission statement?

    Can you see that it's a little more nuanced of than simply "Hamas good, Israel bad"?