> Saudi didn’t normalize because Hamas prevented it. October 7 was designed to radicalize and prevent normalization of relations
Hamas prevented it because Israel has no free will? Israel is doomed to only react to Hamas?
Israel had an option to preserve their normalization and gain and keep the sympathy of the entire world. Instead they prefered to do annihilation and genocide.
> But I’d hope you’d fight for the safety of your family and neighbors. Thats literally all it means to be in the idf for most.
This is a perpetual situation, given that Israel's pattern of territorial expansion is always military control over a new area, followed by settlement building. Since now there is a settlement with colonists living in it, now the same starting argument of "defending family and neighbours" applies, since you now need a "buffer zone" to keep the colonists safe, requiring more military control over a new area. Rinse and repeat, and Israelis are always in a situation to be forced to fight "for the safety of their family and neighbours". How convenient.
> when it comes to Israel, everything is to be distrusted
Correct, with a good reason for it. Israelis have been caught lying so many times that now when they make a claim, it is on them to prove that the claim is correct, rather than on others to prove that it is not. Just a few examples off the top of my head include:
- The killing of medical workers in a convoy of ambulances and burying them in shallow graves, then lying about doing it until someone dug the bodies up and found footage confirming that they lied on the phone of one of the buried aid workers. [1]
- The hunting down and killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers via multiple air strikes [2]. This was repeatedly denied by Israelis until too much evidence was stacked up and they settled for "it was a grave mistake".
- The high profile case of killing of Hind Rajab [3] who for a brief period of time was the sole survivor of a tank attack in a shelled vehicle filled with her dead family members. Aid workers were dispatched to rescue here, coordinated with Israelis. Neither the girl nor the aid workers were ever seen alive after that. Israelis repeatedly insisted that there were no troops in the area, until too much evidence was stacked again.
Hi there, I see you too trust Hamas sources (the origin of the Hind Rajab sotry) and not Israeli sources, so you too are in the camp of "believe hamas" and "doubt israel".
1. Hamas used World Central Kitchen vehicles, according even to the head of World Central Kitchen, who initially condemned the attack and then later admitted Hamas used WCK vehicles. You didn't know this, did you?
2. A few questions on the Hind Rajab incident:
Was the car stationary or moving? was it travelling north to a combat zone or south away from one? According to the original Arabic reports, did the family get out of the car or were they trapped inside? In the audio of this attack, was there any crossfire? When was Hind Rajab killed? Was it at 8:10am or at 2:30pm? What happened in those 6 hours? How can you be sure this was not a "fog of war" incident as opposed to a deliberate targeting of a civilian?
As per my previous assertion, it is now on Israel and their sympathizers to answer all those questions in a manner that leaves no doubt about their veracity. Watching what they are doing and what they are saying for two whole years, and the results of it all, leaves them with zero benefit of the doubt with the vast majority of people in the world.
Nothing's invented, what I listed are real events with extensive documentation and evidence behind them.
You are stating some questions which are supposedly going to lead to IDF's innocence in the matter if they are truthfully answered. The burden of that additional proof is now on you. Mere questions being enough to dispel a case against the IDF is a thing of the past. They worked very hard to earn such a reputation, and now there are consequences for it.
There's no burden of proof on me, it's all on you.
You're the one claiming Israel purposefully killed Hind Rajab and yet you refuse to answer the specific questions I asked you about the incident. You say this is because you answering is "going to lead to IDF's innocence." On this we agree. The facts of what actually happened matter.
In the case of Hind Rajab, I hope this does go to court so we can find out what happened in this tragic incident. If there were war crimes, I'd like to see the soldiers who committed them face legal justice. But I still believe in the concept of presumed innocence and the burden of proof.
You don't get to make up crimes and declare a party guilty of them, even if you're totally sure they're the baddies. That's what enlightenment thinking and four centuries of western jurisprudence teaches us. Innocent until proven guilty.
Deaths and destruction in wars against significantly weaker countries are never for nothing, as certain well-connected people always get filthy rich, regardless of the end result. The ones who make the decisions, they always get their share, whether through the war hardware industry, mercenary business, the reconstruction industry, the resource exploitation industry, or something else. The wider population might end up worse off and poorer, but who has ever asked them about anything when there is so much money to be made by their ''democratic representatives'' if they play along?
Additionally, it assumes that the Irish, who broadly as a people support national liberation movements, would even want to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding, even if they could.
> Hamas started a war with Israel by invading it, slaughtering and raping hundreds of civilians at the music festival and in their homes
Could you provide conclusive evidence for that? Could you provide even cases of formally filed rape allegations? [1] Yes I know that a lot of Israeli media people made the accusation, but there's no reason to repeat something that no proof was given for.
I find middleeastmonitor.com an extremely biased anti-israeli propaganda piece that makes BBC seem like an unbiased news organization.
If you search for the name "Moran Gaz" used in this article to conclude
that "Gaz stated that her department has found no evidence of sexual violence" is actually not true and is Moran's statements were quite nuanced:
"
In the end, we have no complainants. What was presented in the media compared to what will ultimately emerge will be completely different. Either because the victims were murdered, or because the women who were raped by them are not prepared to reveal it. We contacted women's rights organizations and asked for cooperation. They told us that they simply did not contact them. There were parents who contacted the organizations and asked what to do if something happened to their daughter, but they did not disclose the abuse...I know there is public expectation and understand the need to address the horrific sexual crimes and sexual assaults that have been committed, but the vast majority of them will not be able to meet the threshold of proof in court, and the criticism will ultimately come to the prosecutor's office – unjustly.
"
>> Either because the victims were murdered, or because the women who were raped by them are not prepared to reveal it.
>> We contacted women's rights organizations and asked for cooperation. They told us that they simply did not contact them.
This reads entirely different that what that article from MiddleEastMonitor.com leads you to believe. The way its titled and the way you interpreted is there were no sexual assaults, only slaughter, only murders.
Im not going to engage in "Hamas slaughered festival goers on camera, killed a father in front of his kids, while blowing out one their eyes and kidnapped toddlers, but we will question the sex crimes being committed".
Is protecting the killers of families, babies and kidnappers of toddlers from accusations of sexual assault really the proverbial "hill you want to die on"?
Lets focus on order of operatons:
1) Hamas started a war
2) Israel responded in order to free its citizens and protect from future attacks.
> Could you provide conclusive evidence for that? Could you provide even cases of formally filed rape allegations?
It's pretty crazy how far the Overton Window has shifted on Jews. We went from it being prima facie evidence of antisemitism to even "notice" their disproportionate influence on, or over-representation in, certain American institutions, like the Supreme Court--as shown when Pat Buchanan got soft-canceled for noting that Kagan's confirmation would make Jews a full 1/3 of Justices, despite being only 2% of the population--to it now being acceptable to outright deny war crimes committed against Israelis.
It is important to distinguish between Jews and Israelis, as there is a significant portion of Jewish people who are leading the fight for truth about what Israel is and what Israel does.
To address your comment, Israelis have been caught lying so many times that now when they make a claim, it is on them to prove that the claim is correct, rather than on others to prove that it is not. Just a few examples off the top of my head include:
- The killing of medical workers in a convoy of ambulances and burying them in shallow graves, then lying about doing it until someone dug the bodies up and found footage confirming that they lied on the phone of one of the buried aid workers. [1]
- The hunting down and killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers via multiple air strikes [2]. This was repeatedly denied by Israelis until too much evidence was stacked up and they settled for "it was a grave mistake".
- The high profile case of killing of Hind Rajab [3] who for a brief period of time was the sole survivor of a tank attack in a shelled vehicle filled with her dead family members. Aid workers were dispatched to rescue here, coordinated with Israelis. Neither the girl nor the aid workers were ever seen alive after that. Israelis repeatedly insisted that there were no troops in the area, until too much evidence was stacked again.
Asking why there are no filled allegation is as ignorant as suggesting that no Palestinian home was destroyed because no Palestinian appealed to Palestinian court suing Israeli soldiers for destroying their home. You clearly don't understand how the system works.
Hi, your mention of the UN report made me look at the actual report in an effort to find the truth of the matter. So let's go deeper into the UN report as it's often cited as a proof of rape, but as we'll see by the end of it, there isn't actually any evidence for it other than "people said" (for more context of why I'm dismissing this, look at the points below and especially at the end of this post). Please do double-check and correct me if I reach a wrong conclusion somewhere. Here's the link to the full report by Pramila Patten published around early March 2024: [1].
The key points based on which I say that there is no proper evidence are the following:
> 34. The mission team, specifically the forensic pathologist and the digital analyst, reviewed over 5,000 photos, around 50 hours and several audio files of footage of the attacks, provided partly by various state agencies and through an independent online review of various open sources, to identify potential instances and indications of conflict-related sexual violence.
So there is plenty of photo and video material from surveillance devices. Good. But, we have a few lines mentioning something very similar to this:
> 16. [...] With respect to the latter instance, while the forensic analysis reviewed injuries to intimate body parts, no discernible pattern could be identified, against either female or male soldiers.
Further searching of the word "forensic" reveals nothing conclusive about rape. Just notes that there were injuries to intimate body parts, which is expected when bodies are blown up by tank and helicopter fire (which was confirmed to have happened during the fighting). The report does not comment whether the injuries were inflicted specifically by hand-to-hand combat weapons and small personal arms.
Now, searching for the word rape, it appears throughout the report, but only ever to point out that "there are reasons to believe that it happened", but no proof is ever given, only statements by other people. A reminder that there is a lot of surveillance photo and video material, but none of it supported the claims. For example:
> 74. In the medicolegal assessment of available photos and videos, no tangible indications of rape could be identified. Further investigation may alter this assessment in the future.
And an example of rescue teams' statements that are used as sources for the accusations:
> 13. At the Nova music festival and its surroundings, there are reasonable grounds to believe that multiple incidents of sexual violence took place with victims being subjected to rape and/or gang rape and then killed or killed while being raped. Credible sources described finding 5 murdered individuals, mostly women, whose bodies were naked from their waist down – and some totally naked – tied with their hands behind their backs, many of whom were shot in the head.
Please let me know if you find something in the report that represents credible evidence of rape. I'd like to see it because I care about the truth. We know that Israel rapes Palestinians in their torture prisons because we have not only victim testimonies (that we ultimately cannot take as solid proof even if they are true), but we have actual video evidence that was released of them doing that to a prisoner on surveillance camera footage. And there is an ongoing trial where the rapists are parading around the media in Israel and proudly defending their rights to torture prisoners, including via rape. And unfortunately they have a lot of support in the country. So if Palestinian resistance fighters did the same, I want to know. But we'll need proper evidence.
One final question remains to be answered here -- why don't I think that Israelis making these claims should simply be believed? Because they lied so many times that now when Israelis make a claim, it is on them to prove that the claim is correct, rather than on others to prove that it is not. Just a few examples off the top of my head include:
- The killing of medical workers in a convoy of ambulances and burying them in shallow graves, then lying about doing it until someone dug the bodies up and found footage confirming that they lied on the phone of one of the buried aid workers. [2]
- The hunting down and killing of World Central Kitchen aid workers via multiple air strikes [3]. This was repeatedly denied by Israelis until too much evidence was stacked up and they settled for "it was a grave mistake".
- The high profile case of killing of Hind Rajab [4] who for a brief period of time was the sole survivor of a tank attack in a shelled vehicle filled with her dead family members. Aid workers were dispatched to rescue here, coordinated with Israelis. Neither the girl nor the aid workers were ever seen alive after that. Israelis repeatedly insisted that there were no troops in the area, until too much evidence was stacked again.
As for your video of an alleged pPlestinian fighter admitting to atrocities with an Israeli flag behind him, we obviously cannot take seriously a statement made in imprisonment, highly likely obtained under torture, given the vast evidence of torture (including actual rape) being conducted in Israeli prisons.
No, you are spreading lies. I won't engage any further but I'll just say that there is absolutely no video evidence, not even one, showing a rape of a Palestinian by Israeli soldiers. What there is is a video that shows Israeli soldiers standing around and beating a Palestinian prisoner, that happened to be a Hamas police-officer. The video is very unclear.
The vast majority of the discussion in Israel isn't around the the right to torture prisoners (I have actually never heard anyone argue that). That's also a lie. The discussion is around whether or not it happened.
The main difference is that in Israel, people who are suspected in doing such things would be trialed, and if found guilty, sent to jail. That's true by the way not specifically for rape, but also for harming a Palestinian in any other ways. Trails against settlers violence, for example, take place all the time. Yes, much more needs to be done, but it happens. On the Palestinian side, however, I cannot recall a single case of Palestinian facing legal charges for ever harming a Jew, and it's not because it never happens.
Does Israel have a perfect legal system? Absolutely not. But it has a system that has put many Israelis behind bars, while the Palestinian Authority usually pays compensation for those who blew up civilian buses when I was child.
> Even here on Earth, in the, what, 4 billion years history of the planet, humans are the only evolved creatures with intelligence as defined here. Maybe intelligence doesn't always occur.
It is unlikely that other beings becoming intelligent enough to rival us and deny us the supremacy over the planet would ever be allowed. Homo sapiens are believed to have "contributed to" the extinction of several other modern-human-like species (one of them being the Neanderthals). How many other times before could something similar have happened, perhaps far earlier in the evolutionary timeline?
The only way we would allow sufficiently highly intelligent life to develop and flourish is if it is completely subservient to us.
Scandinavian countries are commonly listed as a counter-example to what you say. Those countries have strong social safety nets for everyone, and their citizens' basic needs are covered. Child care costs are not an issue for them. Yet, their fertility rates are also too low.
Thus, to the extent that costs and money play a role, it does not seem to be a decisive one. There is something else going on.
Does that include housing? I went and read the Swedish Wikipedia birth rate article (Födelsetal), but couldn't find any clues. Social norms, that's about all.
Presumably the worrying thing here is a possible boom-and-bust cycle. In the long view it should be self-limiting, if a small population with lots of space tends to fill it with a larger future population that then reproduces less. It's just unpleasant to be caught at the declining stage of that cycle, with abundant old people.
He continuously armed the direct perpetrators of the genocide; supported them financially, with logistics, and intelligence; threatened their adversaries from getting involved; vetoed multiple UN security council resolutions that attempted to impose a ceasefire.
He was a direct participant in the genocide. If you're murdering someone on the street and I am standing next to you watching your back, fighting off anyone who tries to stop you, I am an accomplice in that murder, and an active participant, even if it's not my hands that are around the victim's neck, but yours. I am what enables your hands to be on their neck instead of being used to defend you from others trying to help the victim.
All ensuing crimes of Israel are thus also crimes of Joe Biden, and that's A LOT of war crimes; a clear-cut for ICC.
Before making a case for accessory to genocide, they'd first need a binding judgement that it is a genocide, presumably. I agree it probably isn't as clear cut, or at least not as simple.
The problem is a decision it is plausible it is one isn't a ruling that it is one. There is no legal basis for deciding someone is an accessory just because it is plausible. Personally I consider it a genocide, and wish there was a legal basis for going after people as accessories, but there just isn't yet.
> tourists often are very visible and tend to make a bad impression, as most haven't studied the language or learned the numerous behaviour expectations
Tourists are short-term visitors who are there exclusively to spend their money in Japan and leave it with its citizens. If the Japanese do not want that because the tourists don't come fully prepared for living in Japan, then you should just deny tourist entries to the country. It would be win-win for everyone, because there are plenty of other countries who would gladly take those tourists instead.
I'm sure the Sanseito party would be happy to add your proposal to their platform. I doubt the people who work in the tourism industry are voting for them anyway, and the people who benefit indirectly from tourism probably aren't aware enough of the dependency to care about it.
Hamas prevented it because Israel has no free will? Israel is doomed to only react to Hamas?
Israel had an option to preserve their normalization and gain and keep the sympathy of the entire world. Instead they prefered to do annihilation and genocide.