Merrick Garland, somehow

He’s a weird fucker.

+1 for barefoot shoes for lifting and just chilling

Does Hamas try to contact civilians who live in harm’s way to leave targeted areas? Nope, that’s the IDF.

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

Came looking for this in comments

They intentionally break the government so they can campaign on how broken the government is. And their constituents eat it up, because it’s mostly like rooting for sports teams.

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.

I am a Gen-Xer who was raised Catholic in America. The old-school church values of my childhood in the 1970s were mostly liberal democratic, promoting humility, circumspection, and Golden Rule, love-thy-neighbor attitudes. (Setting aside the entire organization’s liability for the systematic raping of children, that is, which is a lot to ask.)

But with the more extreme politics of groups like Opus Dei, the modern Catholic Church in America, by contrast, has become a right-wing propaganda machine. It promotes a noxious brand of pseudo-religious pomposity and holier-than-thou windbaggery, practiced by preening, empty-headed bigots and jackasses who couldn’t find real spirituality if it bit them in the ass.*

*Just my opinion, but I’m fucking right.

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"?

To your response, "no they are not lol":

[Jews, Like Palestinians, Are 'Indigenous' to the Middle East

](https://reason.com/2023/10/18/jews-like-palestinians-are-indigenous-to-the-middle-east/)

I don't agree with IDF's plan. But nobody's acknowledging that Israeli jews are a constant target.

I suggest you learn more

Referring to the murders by Hamas and other Palestinians on October 7. That has everything to do with the current conflict, right?

Jews in the Middle East are indigenous people, too. So you're saying it's okay to massacre them?

…after jihadists go on killing spree and cut the heads off innocent civilians, throw grenades at children, dismember people while forcing their families to watch. All in the name of their supposed god,

Aiming guns at soft targets and slaughtering them makes them, by definition, terrorists.

Brilliant game

Jesus, what an absurd, chickenshit take.

I hate to rain on this parade, but there’s no guarantee Biden will pull it off in a rematch with Trump. It was way too damn close in 2020, and the MAGA base is as fired up as ever these days. The “sane middle,” if it still exists, needs to turn out hard, because if Trump wins this thing, I for one our democracy is freakin’ toast.