The slow and steady strangulation of the entire population of Gaza, all two million of them, continues. Israel has cut off all water, food, medicines, and electricity, in addition to steadily bombing the area. What aid that has been allowed in has been tiny, nowhere near enough to meet the needs. Now the internet has also been cut off so that people cannot even call for help when they are injured or dying. Hospitals are suffering without power, with doctors having to perform surgeries by the light of their cell phones. The Gaza Ministry of Health reports that more than 7,000 Palestinians have been killed, including nearly 3,000 children.
In the US, to voice even the slightest concern for the lives of people in Gaza is to risk being condemned. Anything other than unequivocal support for anything and everything that Israel doses, however monstrous, is portrayed as making one a terrorist sympathizer, such is the powerful propaganda machine of the Israel lobby here. The political class in the US, including the Biden administration, has fallen in line, with only the mildest of calls for Israel to show restraint. The US and Israel were joined by only 12 other countries in voting against a UN resolution calling for a humanitarian truce.
The US has ended up looking quite badly isolated after only 12 countries joined Washington and Israel at the UN general assembly in opposing a motion calling for a sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities.
One hour after Israel had extended its offensive in Gaza, Jordan’s motion was passed in New York by 120 votes to 14, with 45 countries abstaining. The outcome was remarkable for showing the limited direct support for the world’s greatest superpower, with even France, Spain and the UK refusing to join the US in voting against the motion.
Israel is ignoring even those calls and seems intent to starving the people to death. Now they have even started casting doubts on the death tolls put out by the Gaza ministry of health, this being another way of making Gaza lives seem less valuable.
There are few voices in the mainstream media condemning the siege of Gaza and calling for a ceasefire and for the allowing of supplies that meet the basic human needs of the people to be met. Ryan Grim of The Intercept has managed to get an interview with someone in Gaza and it is sickening as he describes how they are expecting to die, they just don’t know when.
ISRAEL TURNED OFF the lights, cut the phone lines, and shut off the internet to Gaza on Friday night, plunging the region into darkness and isolation before launching a ground invasion. Only those inside know what’s happening there.
At the end of last week, I reached out to a source of mine from previous reporting, knowing that he was born and raised in Gaza, and I asked him how his family was managing in the face of the bombing campaign. He told me that so far, seven relatives on his father’s side, and 30 on his mother’s, had been killed. Those are numbers that we have no ability to comprehend. I told him that if he was able to, he was welcome to join our podcast, “Deconstructed” and tell their stories. After thinking about it for a few days, he decided to do it, and we spoke on Thursday evening, the night before he lost all contact with his family.
I first interviewed Maram for research I was doing for my new book on the Squad, the left, and their years-long fight with AIPAC over Israel–Palestine. That reporting turned into this feature published in the fall of 2022 on the distorting role of AIPAC and a related super PAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, in shaping and constraining the bounds of allowable discourse in Democratic primaries.
This week, that fight ratcheted up to unprecedented levels of animosity when nine Democrats voted against a resolution that condemned Hamas and defended Israel’s response, but which said nothing about Palestinian civilian lives lost. Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer, the Squad’s chief antagonist in the House, called them “despicable” in response. And President Joe Biden shockingly cast doubt on civilian casualty statistics put out by hospitals in Gaza because they run through the Ministry of Health, which is itself run by Hamas. In response, Hamas posted a public list of the names, ages, and ID numbers of 6,746 people who’ve died amid the bombing campaign. The list includes 2,664 children.
I’ve seen some people cast doubt on the reliability of the list, but Maram provided us a list of his relatives who’d been killed that was created before Hamas put its own data out, and those names all appear on the Ministry of Health list. (We did find one duplicate on the list, not a relative of Maram’s, a 14-year-old boy who appears twice on it. That’s why I say it’s a list of 6,746 people and not the number you’ve seen in public reporting, 6,747.) I asked Maram what he made of Biden’s dismissal of the accuracy of the numbers, and he said he agreed with Biden, but in the other direction: It’s not possible that the hospitals are capturing the extent of the slaughter, he said, because many of the people he knows who have died in bombings have not been able to get to a hospital or a morgue.
Deliberately leaving Palestinian lives out of a congressional resolution, or suggesting that the numbers from Gaza can’t be trusted because Hamas runs the Ministry of Health, riggs those numbers. In fact, it likely makes the situation on the ground considerably worse, giving the IDF a sense of impunity that comes from dismissing the deaths as a Hamas conspiracy or fake news.
You can listen to the interview here.
“There are few voices in the mainstream media condemning the siege of Gaza and calling for a ceasefire”
Suggesting the mainstream media is “controlled by” Jews is virulent anti-semitism.
Noticing that it is ludicrously biased in favour of Israel is… what?
But how to explain the latter observable fact without suggesting the former? Tricky.
One thing that drives me nuts is how goddamn pervasive the linguistic minimization of Israel’s war crimes has become. Even reporters I consider fairly savvy and freethinking will say things like, “communications to Gaza are cut” as if that just sort of … happened by accident. Not “Israel cut all communications to Gaza.” It’s everywhere, “as she was going to the hospital, a building across the street was bombed.” Like, uh, hellooooo did it accidentally rain a bomb, or did Israeli jets drop a bomb on the building? Even people who you’d think are on the Palestinian’s side use these passive voice constructions. Yuck.
Trump said he wants to deport everyone who supports Palestine. Since I first donated to BDS back when the movement first started, I guess that means me.
Marcus Ranum: this is in fact the proper way to phrase it when you don’t know who cut the lines, or who dropped the bomb. This is called reporting.
When people say “black lives matter,” they actually mean it. When people say “all lives matter,” they DON’T actually mean it. It’s pretty clear that members of the latter group do not think Palestinian lives matter.
I don’t understand how someone could read this post, understand what’s going on, and want to water it all down. I would respectfully suggest that if the post were about the initial attack by Hamas and there were a bunch of quibbling in the comments about Israel being an apartheid state that they would be quite offended that others were ignoring the awful things that were going on.
Are your morals really so trivial that they change depending on which side’s civilians are being harmed? If your answer is “Yes!” then isn’t that sort of reasoning how we got a Holocaust and Israel to begin with?
If those questions offend you, don’t worry about it. I tend to think most people are generally pretty decent human beings but when a situation is very charged with emotion like this one is it can be easy to frame things poorly and fixate on the wrong ideas. The Israeli government and Hamas both want you to do just that. But it’s a bad argument. If you support horrors visited on civilians in return for horrors visited on other civilians then you end up in favor of terrorism everywhere forever. Because the people of Iraq might have something to say about Bush’s “oops.” The Native Americans whose ancestors were driven from or killed in the US might have something to say. Groups of people all over the world might have something to say because land transfers like the Louisiana Purchase or Alaska were not the common way such land transfers have happened.
Alexei Lebedev @3
We do know who has cut the water, fuel and food to Gaza, and who is bombing it, the Israeli government has said they have done the first three, and the IDF have said they’ve done the latter
Ianir @5
Who are you talking to? It is not entirely clear from your comment.
Yeah right. /s
Tell me again, how many nations have jet military planes in the air over Gaza and are dropping bombs on them?
Bonus question. For what reasons are these hypothetical other nations dropping bombs on Gaza?
raven, jazzlet: you are missing the point.
When you walk outside and the building has been bombed, you wrote “the building has been bombed”. Has IDF bombed buildings and cut water? Yes. But Hamas has also accidentally struck a Gaza hospital with a failed rocket, and then brought in the wounded and the dead from everywhere in order to claim higher casualties. Thus the cause for a particular instance perhaps has a higher probability to be X than Y, but you don’t know which it is until you do an investigation. That is why they send teams of inspectors who analyze blast site, collect rocket fragments and try to determine the source. In order for reporting to remain accurate, rather than turn into an opinion piece, it must be kept to observable facts.
Who knows, it might have been Hugo Chavez. He has been up to a lot of things after he died.
The Israeli Air Force is proud to keep a running tally of how many bombs they dropped on Gaza.
It was 6,000 two weeks ago.
I’m sure you could triple that number by now.
I suppose Alexei could point out that maybe the Israeli Air Force is taking credit for some other nation’s jet planes and bombs.
Greta Thunberg has been demonized after she called out support for the palestinians.
In a small part it was her organisation’s own fault, for using an image of a squid (an old anti-semitic symbol that may have passed by the editors of her site as they lack context beyond climate politics. They need to fire some incompetents who cut and pasted images from the internet) but she broke the first commandment: every criticism of the Israeli or American government must be prefaced by lenghty condemnations of the terrorists.
If you break this commandment (in regard to wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the middle east or various African countries) you will be assumed to be a card carrying terrorist sympathiser, especially in the Murdoch-owned media.
And I say this as a person who has loathed and despised islamic terror groups since the 1970s.
I can’t find any more recent tally of bombs dropped.
Probably it might have dawned on the IDF that bragging about dropping bombs on civilians isn’t their greatest idea.
That is a lot.
The US dropped less than that in most years they were in Afghanistan. “…there was no year between 2013 and 2018 where American forces dropped more than 4,400 bombs on the country (Afghanistan).”
A 1,000 a day is a plausible ball park figure.
That would put their total to date at around 20,000 bombs.
Alexei Lebedev @ # 8: Hamas has also accidentally struck a Gaza hospital with a failed rocket, and then brought in the wounded and the dead from everywhere in order to claim higher casualties.
The reports I’ve seen (tentatively) attribute that rocket to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, without explaining the relationship between PIJ & Hamas. No report I’ve seen has that “brought in the wounded and the dead from everywhere” part -- got a citation (from a non-Zionist source) for that?
Can’t hide what’s going on:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/27/gaza-before-and-after-satellite-images-show-destruction-after-israeli-airstrikes
Alexei Lebedev @8
Why should I disbelieve the Israeli government and air force when they are the ones claiming they did these things? It is well well known, and acknowledged as true by the Israeli government that they control power, internet, food and water (building materials etc etc) going into Gaza, have you any evidence this is not true? Who else has bombers flying over Gaza? You are soft soaping a journalistic habit of deference that is simply not warranted in this situation. Why are you doing that?
Jazzlet, you are again confusing a statistical picture with a single case. If the average temperature in a hospital is 36.6, you can’t infer that every patient has this temperature.
Alexei is just Palestinian hating creep defending Israel.
It’s a pure garbage argument made in bad faith.
There is one known probable case of an off course rocket hitting inside Gaza.
The Israelis admit that so far they have dropped around 20,000 bombs. These are large bombs weighing almost a ton.
I made that estimate based on old data but found updated data that confirms it, Time.com two days ago.
So the probability that any given bomb crater is Israeli Air Force is 19,999 to 1. Low enough that the news media isn’t going to bother with it.
Here is another example.
The Israelis are claiming 1,400 civilians killed by Hamas in that attack. It’s possible and even likely that some or many of those dead Israelis were…shot by the Israeli army instead. It was a chaotic scene and many of the first responders were just civilians with guns.
This in fact is almost certainly what happened. A Jewish woman who was there even made that claim.
You will note that whenever the media mentions all the Israeli victims, they never mention that some of them were likely collateral dead shot by the Israelis themselves by mistake.
While it is true or likely true, it doesn’t change the overall story that Hamas killed unarmed civilians.
Followed by the Israeli army killing…unarmed Palestinian civilians.
That one of their missiles went off course doesn’t change that either, not when the entire Israeli armed forces invades and dropped 20,000 bombs sp far.
The Israelis are ahead on the body counts as I predicted hours after the attack.
It was 7,000 dead Palestinians this morning to 1,400 dead Israelis. Israel is ahead 5:1.
Next milestone is 10:1.
The claim that the IDF killed their own people is apparently well supported by…Israeli sources.
This is one source of the claim that the IDF killed Israelis instead of Hamas.
The source is an Israeli woman who was held hostage by Hamas and interviewed on an Israeli radio station.
According to Alexei, this means we can’t claim that Hamas killed 1,400 people. Maybe they only killed 5 and the IDF killed the other 1,395 Israeli victims.
Or maybe Alexei is just an idiot troll who isn’t worth paying any more attention to.
Cthulhu.
We know where Alexei came from.
That is 5 minutes of my life I won’t ever get back.
Jazzlet #6: I was refering to the first and third comments. When I read those I interpreted them as ignoring the whole point of the post as they didn’t so much as mention it. The first comment does a “just asking questions” sort of antisemitism sideswipe. It’s not there in the text Mano wrote. You have to add it yourself when you interpret it. The third comment and the continued poorly thought out justifications for it that followed my post are some sort of ridiculous “who can ever really know anything?” nonsense.
I grew up reading Heinlein along with numerous other fantasy and sci-fi authors. I ran across his “fair witness” concept in grade school. It seemed like a great idea then. Now I think it’d be fun to run through one of Marcus’s argument clinics but otherwise it’s not much use. People have biases. And our culture sucks at teaching logic deliberately. Too many powerful people want gullible masses, and it’s not just the government either. Industry wants people they can lie to in advertisements so they don’t have to work to make better products. So the weird mental gymnastics Alexei is performing seem to me like stuff I mostly outgrew in grade school. And casually making a strawman argument like sonofrojblake did is something I learned about not too long after.
@birgerjohansson, #11:
The stuffed toy octopus that was near Thunberg is a tool widely used by the autistic community for years now to help them manage their emotions and feelings. A family member of mine on the autism spectrum has had one for years. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar and I think people are desperately looking for reasons to be offended on behalf of Israel.
Alexei Lebedev @16
You have that the wrong way round, in the specific instances of the cutting off of food, water, fuel, and internet access to the whole of Gaza the Israeli government said they were going to do and did it, repeatedly; who caused any specific damage to those things within Gaza is irrelevant if they aren’t coming in in the first place. Raven has covered the bombs so I won’t elaborate on that. I will add that this has been a pattern for decades, so we can at this time say that the claims are both general* and specific.
* I am using “general” where you use “statistical” because it is not clear what you mean by that adjective.
@Jazzlet, 22: yes, Israel has a history of bombing the Palestinians, knocking down their homes and their olive trees, cutting off their water. They’ve even killed American citizens (Americans of Palestinian descent in Gaza, reporter for Al Jazeerah and American citizen Shireen Abu Akleh who had a blue Press vest on at the time, Rachel Corrie for protesting Israel destruction of Palestinian homes, the sailors on the USS Liberty who were in international waters, spying on behalf of Israel). They’ve been caught numerous times spying on the US or paying others to spy on the US. Yet we give them billions of dollars in aid every year.
But to point these things out gets a screaming, hysterical response from the usual suspects.
UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell briefs UN Security Council on humanitarian situation in Gaza (as delivered)
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unicef-executive-director-catherine-russell-briefs-un-security-council-humanitarian
Close to 10,000 Palestinians bombed into dust, including newborns, children, women, and the elderly. I saw a news report of an Israeli woman, in a colorful and pristine apartment, complaining that her son wanted to do nothing but snack in front of the television as he watched cartoons…and realized that 2 million Palestinians don’t have snacks, clean water, electricity, or even buildings. 10,000 of them don’t even have life.
And the USA is arming this genocide.
Suggesting the mainstream media is “controlled by” Jews is virulent anti-semitism.
Has anyone really “suggested” that? Or are pro-Israel propagandists doing a Bill Donahue and lying about what Israel’s critics are saying in order to portray them as the liars?
The US has ended up looking quite badly isolated…
Yep, that’s the objective of Hamas and whoever’s supporting them. We need to strongly and honestly criticize BOTH sides in this stupid butchery, Israel and Hamas, with this always in mind. Hamas and the Likudniks are using each other to stay in power over their respective peoples, Iran is using both of them to drag America into a war that will divide us and drain our resources, Russia is almost surely using Iran to further their own anti-Western agenda, and US Republicans are using this to divide the rest of us and return to power.
The best thing American do, for ourselves and for the Palestinians, is to honestly admit that both sides are wrong in this war, and bring our own people together by sticking up for the ordinary decent people suffering and dying on both sides of the line.
I was surprised and relieved to see Australia was not among the nations objecting to the resolution / supporting Israel, so deferential has our leadership been towards USA’s wants. I could wish they actually supported the resolution, but I will still call abstention a victory.
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Seems like stating the latter while omitting the former does the job reasonably well. Anyone that says the one implies the other is stating their own inference.
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Sure, who can tell. Maybe England did it!
More seriously, you are using the doubt surrounding one explosion to pretend there is doubt about the others. And there is no doubt surrounding who cut Gaza’s communications, yet you throw that in with the other as if there was.
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This reminds me of the old arguments back when Trump and Clinton were still presidential hopefuls. Even when pointing out blatant reasons not to vote for A Fuckface Orange, there was always that goddamn appeasement mantra “now, I’m no supporter of Hillary or anything, but…”
@ ^
Believe it or not my dear Holms, there are people who believe if you support a minority having equal rights, you must first condemn every isolated example of a criminal within said minority, no matter how extraordinarily rare.
But I’m sure you’ve never encountered or indulged in anything like that.
Correct
@Raging Bee; you’re omitting the fact that Hamas was barely elected (with a very slim margin) back in January 2006, and there have been no elections since. The vast majority of Palestinian citizens is too young to even have voted for them.
Punishing the Palestinians by dropping 8,000 bombs on a 10-mile stretch of land in a week is just about as stupid as starting a war in Iraq in 2003 because 15 out of 19 terrorists who attacked the USA were Saudi.
Hospitals are screaming out for help because fragile newborns in the NICU on oxygen will die when the hospitals run out of fuel for the generators. Are you blaming the newborns for taking hostages in Israel? Stupid newborns--suffocating slowly is a fit punishment for their war crimes!
SailorStar: I’m not omitting that fact; I just don’t see how it invalidates anything I’ve said.
I also don’t see how anything I said constitutes anything remotely close to “blaming the newborns for taking hostages in Israel.” I just reread my own comment, and I did clearly say we should criticize “Israel and Hamas,” not “Israel and the Palestinians.” In the interest of clarity, though, I will reword my last sentence to read: “The best thing American do, for ourselves and for the Palestinians, is to honestly admit that both
sidesbelligerent parties are wrong in this war…”Apologies, Raging Bee, I read this: “The best thing American do, for ourselves and for the Palestinians, is to honestly admit that both sides are wrong in this war” as conflating the average everyday Palestinian with Hamas. Upon re-reading it, I see I was wrong.
And where it gets tricky: in many cases, Hamas has been the only one providing aid to the Palestinians. The Israelis shut down the shipping lanes, cut power and water…and Hamas has provided these things. So, Hamas gives and it takes.
No worries, Sailor, you weren’t wrong, I was unclear.
And yes, Hamas has been providing necessary services that no one else has been providing to Palestinians. And Israel wonders why so many Palestinians support them? As I’ve said before, terrorist groups like Hamas sometimes function like your neighborhood organized crime family: violent selfish parasites who help at least enough people in need that no one wants to fight them.
Yeah, but:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/hamas-cash-to-crypto-global-finance-maze-israels-sights-2023-10-16/
The Israelis cut the lights and water, and bomb the hospitals, “In addition to its militant activity, Hamas provides social services for people in Gaza, such as education and medical care.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/hamas-know-group-deadliest-attack-israel-decades-rcna119628
@Raging Bee, 26:
Are you serious? It’s anti-semitic trope number 1, isn’t it? Are you honestly trying to pretend that nobody has said or is saying that? smh
@Holms, 27:
Stating that the media is ludicrously biased in favour of Israel explains why the media is ludicrously biased in favour of Israel?
Really? smh again.
On this planet there are many, many ethnic groups with no sovereign land. Each and every Arab country, non-Arab Muslim country has many ethnic groups lorded over by one particular group. Look at Syria: civil war. Look at Lebanon: civil war. Look at Libya: civil war. Look at Turkey: civil war against the Kurds (looking at you, Cenk Uygur). Etc., etc., etc..
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If every ethnic group exercises their right (god given right?) to their own sovereign land, there will be no end of wars on this Planet. But then human history is mostly a recollection of wars.
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There is nothing special about the Palestinians, an invented group designated by Arab and Muslim countries to be used as cannon fodder in the war of the Extermination of Israel. The Palestinians are late immigrants whose tribal affiliations are all derived from surrounding countries whose boundaries are themselves artificialities created by colonial powers (Turkey, England, France).
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But, but, but Jews are not an ethnic group! They do NOT deserve a nation! Well, the Jews identify themselves as a people yearning for a nation. The Jews fought and won and thus earned the nation of Israel through War. Life is unfair. History is unfair. Look at the bloody USA: it was founded by White Bigoted Racist Men who were SLAVE OWNERS (the horror!!!)!!! G-D DAMMIT!!! Jihad against Big and Small Satans!!!
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Times have changed. Arab countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria have pressing domestic problems to attend; fighting Israel is not going to feed the peoples of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria, etc.. Meanwhile Israel is building itself to be an ever growing asset to other nations in the world. Israel can help feed the peoples of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria, etc.. Israel has visa-free agreements with 156 nations; Palestine has visa-free agreements with 37 nations. The Trump Doctrine: Peace through Business not through War. The Abraham Accords. Hamas and the PA may not be able to wash off the stench of gunpowder. A stench unwelcome on the Train of Progress.
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Hamas and the P.A. have lived way past their expiration date. Hamas and the P.A. have become noxious to their own people they are supposed to guide to prosperous and peaceful times. Yes, the palestinian people voted for the PA and Hamas. Time for the palestinian people to clean their own room, like Jordan Peterson recommends. Unfortunately the palestinian people is cursed with a kakistocratic leadership.
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War is very bloody business. War is very serious business. The Palestinian Leadership (Hamas, PA) is a feckless and unserious lot. A moral, responsible leadership prioritizes the welfare of the people over ideology. Hamas et al. are blind to the welfare of their own people for the blind and strict adherence and allegiance to the Islamist Ideology and to the destruction of Israel. Golda Meir is correct: peace will arrive when Arabs love their children more than they hate jewish children. Hamas et al. are feckless. War is not golf; there is no mulligan in War. And yet the feckless UN and EU keep giving mulligans to the Islamists. William Tecumseh Sherman is correct: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” Israel needs to make war as cruel as it can get, more cruel than the sadistic islamists can bear. War is quite a serious business.
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War is very serious business. War happens when peace talks fail, when court procedures fail, when diplomacy fails. War is the Court of Last Recourse. War makes final decision. Yes, Israel earned by blood the lands won by war. The Ancient Romans were correct: si vis pacem para bellum. Wars have been instigated by the Arabs (Palestinian and others) and these instigators refused with very bad grace the consequences of war (sorry Palestinians). The losers cry “International Law! International Law! International Law!” but said losers keep restarting hostilities stating the failure of International Law as casus belli. The Losers are stuck on Stupid.
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General Lee at Appomattox; all around he sees a sea of blue. General Lee did the rational and compassionate thing for his soldiers (and their families and communities): he surrendered. Hamas and the PA should also surrender. The gig is up. Der Krieg ist verloren. Hamas and the PA have no regard for their own people. Hamas and the PA are eager to sacrifice the blood of their own people as a price for their own virtue signaling. War after war has been lost. Intifada after intifada have failed. Hamas and the PA are just dead-enders, imitating the Nazi Werwolfs.
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Since Hamas started the Oct 7, 2023 attacks, it is Hamas’ responsibility (not Israel, not the USA, not the EU, not the UN) to have beforehand shelter, food, fuel, sanitation for the people of Gaza. Is Oct 17 a case of Hamas premature ejaculation?
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Hamas and the PA need to clean up their act; the Nazis did not use german civilians as shields. In WW2 the Japanese did not use japanese civilians as shields. Suggestion to Hamas and the PA: go ahead and be wicked and evil but at least attempt to be as classy as the Nazis.
I note Israel has now killed roughly as many civilians in Gaza as Russia has killed in Ukraine; thing is, Israel has managed that in under a month, whereas Russia took over 20 months to achieve that.
Classy.
NHK Japan had a snippet on their news program from a Japanese woman doctor with Doctors Without Borders. She spoke about the absolute war crimes against the Palestinians, including children and babies. The news show also showed clips of the violence being done. You don’t see much of that in USA news.
Another bit of news that didn’t make the USA news: Israel admits to bombing an ambulance that had requested permission ahead of time to evacuate severely wounded patients. 15 people were killed, 60 were injured. This is yet another in a series of war crimes Israel is inflicting on non-combatants. As Al Jazeera reports,
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/3/several-killled-in-israeli-attack-on-ambulance-convoy-gaza-health-ministry
#36 sonof
You misunderstood my post, or it was unclear thanks to its brevity.
You had said in #1 that saying the media is controlled by jews is virulent anti-semitism, and also mentioned that there is a blatant pro-Israel bias in media. You wondered how to recognise the latter (media being pro-Israel) without suggesting the former (jews control the media). My response was simply that stating the latter alone, without bringing up the former, “does the job reasonably well.” The “job” being ‘stating the latter without suggesting the former’.
To put it another way, if you want to state one thing without invoking another thing, simply state the thing you want to state and leave the other unsaid. Leave it to someone else to bring up if they wish, because then you can point out it is their own inference and not something you said.
Are you serious? It’s anti-semitic trope number 1, isn’t it? Are you honestly trying to pretend that nobody has said or is saying that? smh
Actually, I haven’t heard anyone saying that. I’ve heard some people say the media are controlled by the Israel lobby, which is not the same as saying they’re controlled by Jews (just for starters, not everyone in what we generally call “the Israel lobby” are Jews — lots of them are reich-wing Christian bigots who don’t really care for Jews any more than Hamas does). I’ve also heard people say the media are heavily biased toward Israel, and/or failing/refusing to pass on information from other sources; but again, that’s not the same as “controlled by Jews.”