you know I wish people would stop pussyfooting around the issue and just come out and say it: the israeli government is committing a genocide in gaza. if they're worried about being called antisemitic, don't. they're calling you that anyway and they throw that word around so much that the word has almost no shock value or meaning anymore.
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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Finding does not really support the Israel is doing genocide claim, but it can be argued that they did commit war crimes. Genocide is much higher bar to clear, but intentionally doing war crimes is arguable. And you're correct that criticism of Israel alone is not anti-semitic.
Genocide would look like carpet bombing Gaza with MOABs
Darn, if they had only built the tunnels, fired the rockets and stored the ammunition away from population centers before taking all those hostages...
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(17 replies)
Self-awareness in short supply:
The behavior of Netanyahu is, in my view, inexcusable in terms of how it has effected the collateral damage of children and families and the rest, but nobody can take away the right of any country to dEfEnd itSeLf
If something's inexcusable then don't make excuses.
TIL "dEfEnSE!!!" = Starving an entire ethnic group, blocking aid, enforcing apartheid, stealing land, executing civilians in the street with impunity, killing 30k mostly women and children, bombing hospitals, bombing refugee camps, bombing ambulances, torturing detainees, and committing genocide. Just like how those Nazis in the 40s were just defending Germany right?
More double speak from the "left" in the US.
More double speak from the “left” in the US.
The left certainly don't think any of those are defense. You're talking about centrists and right-wingers. Most of the democratic party are centrist, not leftist.
In his defense that's likely why he put left in quotation marks.
The right supports Israel's genocide too. It's a whole lot easier to count the handful of people in DC that don't support it.
Yeah agree, I just hate how frequently dems will call Israel's action "brutal", "inexcusable", or condem their settlers violence in one breath then vote to approve stand alone appropriations for their government in another.
What people forget too quickly is there is a populist candidate who would respond to pressure and apply it forcefully. The best example of this was the call for a bigger stimulus check, the average joe complained, the establishment ignored them and said it wasn’t gonna happen until Trump highlighted it and pushed the establishment to halfway allow it. A Trump political strategist could get Trump to start chanting Genocide Joe, it would force Biden to say he won’t stop or if he does stop, the ability to say he stopped it the wrong way (Too many deaths, not enough hostages released, poor bargaining, etc). This war really only seems popular with establishment players, the same types of folks who either hate Trump or fall in line for him anyway so it would only be positive points. The scary part is every side is essentially playing chicken with people’s futures and the market can stay illogical way longer than the average joe can be liquid.
It's lovely that Pelosi has more contempt for the anti-genocide protestors than the far-right extremist that broke into her house and beat her husband with a hammer.
What a wonderful world.
Wasn't she claiming that pro-Palestine demonstrators were Russian plants all of three weeks ago?
Maybe someone finally showed her a poll as to what fraction of the Democratic party opposes Israel's slaughter of Gazan children.
Current polling shows 61% of Democrats approve of how Joe Biden is handling the Israel-Hamas conflict.
I saw a poll last month that said 50% of Biden voters believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Either way, it's a substantial enough fraction to cause a notable change in messaging from Democratic leadership.
It's not inconsistent for Democrats to believe that Israel is committing genocide and approve of Biden's handling of the issue.
That just implies that Democrats don't hold Biden responsible for what Israel is doing.
I call those people gutless. They so scared of Republicans they wont dare utter any negativity toward the president even though they agree that a genocide is happening. He's been supplying weapons and vetoing ceasefires, I can't believe the majority of the crossover of those two ideas is dumb enough to not think any of it is Bidens fault. Its more likely they're scared.
UN resolutions won't change Israel's behavior. But there's an argument to be made that Biden is working behind the scenes to prevent the situation in Gaza from being even worse. Sometimes the carrot is more effective than the stick.
If the UN resolution wont change their behavior then Biden wouldn't have reason to veto it. But obviously it would change something he was not okay with changing.
It wouldn't change Israel's behavior, but it would make it more difficult for Biden to try to influence Israel.
It's proving impossible to influence them outside of revoking funding, so why make yourself responsible for genocide, multiple times, for the dipomacy of someone who publicly says hes not going to listen to you. During an election year even, it makes Biden look weak and guilty. He can't even reign in someone dependent on his cash.
We don't know if Israel is impossible to influence, because we don't know if they were originally planning something different.
And trying to influence Israel does not necessarily make Biden responsible for what Israel does.
But providing weapons and vetoing ceasefires absolutely makes him responsible. He went out of his way to aide and abed someone whos comitting crimes. Thats responsibility.
He provided anti-missile defenses, which makes him responsible for shooting down rockets launched by Hamas. And he provided JDAM kits, which are used to convert dumb bombs (that Israel already owns and is perfectly willing to use) into precision guided bombs.
Neither of these make him responsible for genocide, if anything they might help to reduce the scale of civilian deaths.
As for ceasefires: the US vetoed a ceasefire without release of hostages, but then proposed a ceasefire with release of hostages. Israel is much more likely to accept the latter.
Isreal keeps killing its own hostages, I can't fathom thats whats stopping Netenyahu from agreeing to a ceasfire. And I got bridges for sale for people who do think that.
If you think Netanyahu won't agree to this ceasefire proposal, then he surely wouldn't have agreed to the prior proposals. And if so, then calling for a ceasefire would have been a waste of time.
Pressure is pressure, not abiding a UN resolution is a bad look and allows for further pressure to be put on Israel. Biden has continually kept away Israel away from that pressure while funding them. He's got his hands dirty. The fact is they're delaying for time, they don't care about the hostages, they care about how much time they can use to inflict the maximum amount of suffering on gaza before they're cast of of international society. Thats it, and Biden is giving them the time and space to do so.
Uncompromising pressure is exactly the approach taken by Trump and the GOP against Iran, in contrast to the olive branch offered by Obama. It's also the approach taken by multiple presidents against Cuba and North Korea.
It's not an effective way to get a regime to change its behavior. It doesn't cast countries out of international society, it simply realigns them with countries like China.
Who said anything about uncompromising? Almost all the member states agreed on it save 2. The two with the most to gain from this conflict. Compromise would be to go with the consensus. Really weird to paint a joint UN resolution as 'uncompromising pressure' in line with Trump on Iran, he literally assassinated their top military general. What part of that is like a UN resolution with a majority approval?
It doesn't matter what you want to call it. You want to try to isolate Israel, but isolating a country won't change its behavior. It will change its allies.
And what does funding and delaying for them do?
Sometimes it allows a degree of influence.
For example, the US has given a lot of funds to Ukraine. But the US does not want Ukrainian troops on Russian soil, and this may be one of the reasons Ukrainians haven't done so.
Well we stopped funding Ukraine, so no wonder they gotta listen to us, clearly their funding isn't secure. The fact that netanyahu publicly goes against biden is because he knows that'll never happen to him. You want to influence him, but there's no incentive for him to listen, he knows no one will stop funding him. Give him incentive to listen, yank his funding his statements make it clear he doesn't think that's a possibility.
No to mention if you suggesting the funding and delaying, the abeding of genocide, is to get influence that we can't use to stop the genocide well Ill let you figure out how that's the same thing as complicity. But the type of complicity where you're also paying for it.
That's not what I meant. The US asked Ukraine not to cross the border with Russia early in the war, it was a particular concern when Ukrainians were making rapid gains throughout Kharkiv. Now that our Ukrainian funding has stopped, our influence is also decreasing. Hopefully that's just temporary.
Regardless, sending money to Israel is not the same as being complicit in genocide. If that were true, then pretty much everyone with a smartphone is complicit in China's genocide of Uyghirs and every European who buys Russian gas is complicit in Russia's genocide of Ukraine.
Very great question on the reporter's part.
“There’s nothing that we have sent since Oct. 7 that has contributed to this brutality,” she said.
'Not sure about that but absolutely the US has done nothing to stop it.
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