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I appreciate your effort, but I am citing him because he's put it very succinctly. As I said, that unrolls to many other people saying the same or worse things,
by johnnyworker 3y ago
I appreciate your effort, but I am citing him because he's put it very succinctly. As I said, that unrolls to many other people saying the same or worse things, many of them in the government.
And their words match the current military actions, the flattening of villages, the religious zealotry, the wanton attacks on civilians. When I referred to Abu Ghraib I wasn't trying to be polemic, that's just the best one-phrase description I can give of all the shit I've seen and read and seen justified.
> There's probably no side of this debate that thinks Smotrich is anything less than a monster
When it comes to Israel itself, thinking that these people are "monsters" isn't enough under the convention against Genocide. As for the rest, where are the calls to stop this? Where is even honest reporting on it? NYT is currently lying about "Israel scaling back the war", meanwhile:
https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1744326462449029399 https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/17443264624490293...
https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1744351540435935525 https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1744351540435935525
Again, just the tip of the ice berg. Videos chosen for not being very graphic. Just enough to realize that the convenient, clean narrative put forward can't possibly be correct.
And the people who watch in horror and watch how it's swept under the rug, how the people scratch each other's back while having "concerns" (say, Biden delivering weapons, saying no to a ceasefire, while paying some lip service to being a nice human because that's all he has against Trump), how Palestinians are just treated as non-persons, vermin to be exterminated to take their land, while that is glorified with sombre references to the Holocaust, will never forget it.
Every time there is something about, say, the atrocity that was putting Japanese Americans into camps during WW2 (which it was), they will think back on how Palestinian children and civilians were blown to bits, starved to death, in the ten thousands currently, with the declared target being hundreds of thousands if not millions, and how their neighbors, friends and family, shrugged and said "their fault for voting Hamas 2006", and how the connection they felt to that person died that day. That's not an argument, but that's what will happen. It already happened. We don't know why people do this or that, just like we never will fully understand the Holocaust, but we know what they did, and that will have to do.
I'm not saying this to convince anyone. I can't convince anyone who isn't shocked about what I already posted and looking into it themselves. I try to stay on top of it, and I pass on some of the things I saw I see nowhere outside of the sources I stumbled onto by caring about and researching the issue. I like to think that makes it valuable enough, certainly as valuable something that contains no quotes and just rephrases justifications that are well known. When I reply to a person I haven't talked to before in a thread I haven't posted in yet, I might repeat a quote or a link, obviously. I don't have the time to come up with something fresh every time.
- tptacek 3y agoRespectfully, there aren't a lot of new facts here, just a more impassioned restatement of the argument you've already made. But I'm not here to convince you of anything. You don't have to fend me off! To the extent we're having these discussions on HN (which I think are largely cursed), I'm interested in the facts being on the table: that Gaza isn't somehow an independent territory Israel can wash its hands of, that Israel is not in fact populated mostly with Europeans and Americans, that everybody from Hezbollah to the IDF has used the "river to the sea" slogan, and so forth. I meant what I said in my preceding comment. I'm not suggesting to you that because Smotrich is a fringe figure, you should recalculate your opinions about Israeli leadership. I'm literally telling you that you can make a better, more succinct, and more persuasive case by relying less on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Assume the persuadable audience for what you're writing already reviles both of those characters, and avoid giving your readers an excuse to stop reading by make them load-bearing parts of your argument. Alternatively: stop having an argument at all! It's extraordinarily unlikely that you will ever on HN have a "debate" with a counterparty on the other side of this issue that ends in you somehow "winning". And as these "debates" progress, they get less compelling, more tedious, and more damaging to everybody's case. Apathy could have no better advocate than a 30-comment-deep HN thread. Instead, just wait for things to appear that are contrary to the facts, and calmly correct the record.
- johnnyworker 3y agoFair enough, and point taken. Thanks for taking the time to re-iterate it.