Fuck all you warmongering pieces of shit

The BBQ Pit
901

…you mean like: Israeli and American Intelligence?

Do you remember the time they claimed journalist Hossam Shabat was also doing super-secret double duty as a sniper? All based on :: checks notes :: a spreadsheet?

The IDF murdered him. Just like they’ve murdered hundreds of other journalists, all beautiful people, all based on lies.

Just like what he’s trying to do over in the discussion thread. Babale wants you to believe Israeli and American Intelligence over what every single humanitarian agency on the ground is saying: that food distribution wasn’t under Hamas’s control.

And here’s another one.

I want to make this crystal clear to everyone: talking points like this (and this is all Babale has, just talking points) are used for one thing only: to manufacture consent for this genocide.

They drop shit like this because they think they aren’t going to get challenged. Just like he dropped “that hospitals in Gaza were used as military bases of operations” line before.

But I’m going to challenge you on this. Prove it.

Just like the hospitals, if this were actually happening to any extent that it mattered, you would have dossiers on this. Mountains of evidence. We know who has been killed in Gaza, their ages, when and where they died. If some of them were being used as “human shields” it should be trivially easy to show it.

And I’m not talking about nonsense like the Henry Jackson Society report. I’m looking for actual, verified incidents where Hamas put civilians deliberately in harms way to protect themselves.

Because here’s the thing: manufacturing consent for this genocide worked. The hospital thing? It worked. Smart people like RitterSport gave Israel the benefit of the doubt right up until just a couple of months ago.

People actually believe the photos of starving children in Gaza are fake. They believe the narrative that the children who are dying had “pre-existing conditions”.

People believe the current narrative that starvation is being caused by the UN. They believe that “UNRWA is Hamas.” And they believe all of these lies because if anyone ever dares push back, they get accused of the most horrible of things.

What is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza is not “collateral damage.” I challenge Babale to tell me the names of the Hamas terrorists killed today. Or yesterday. On average 700-1000 Palestinians are killed by bombing or sniper fire every single week. If Hamas were actually the target, and those dead bodies of children that we are still seeing every single day were just “caught in the crossfire”, then tell us who the targets actually were.

As for the rest of you? You should stop believing this bullshit. Not until they let international reporters into Gaza. Not until they let the “evidence” be independently scrutinised.

902

Also - every accusation is a confession.

Because it’s no secret that human shields are being used in Gaza. By the Israelis..

903

I love how you immediately followed up the accusation of debating caricatures with a debate against a caricature.

But then given how you also parrot Israeli propaganda as if it’s the “literal word of God” while accusing others of supporting Hamas and Iran with no merit whatsoever, I guess we shouldn’t be surprising by the ongoing projection.

904

As I said willful ignorance. Everything anyone has posted in all these threads is “Hamas propaganda” “Anti-semitism” or – in the case where it’s Jewish people or Israeli Jews – “Self-hating Jews.” Only Babale’s version of truth is valid, only Babale’s sources are valid. I may mistaken, but I don’t seem to see a lot of support for his posturing even from @Alessan who is actually in Israel, not thousands of miles away in the peanut gallery, cheering genocide.

There are posters here, e.g. @iiandyiiii, who at the onset of this tragedy started a thread defending the existence of Israel. Posters were appalled at the initial Hamas attack Over time, more and more posters have come to the realization that there is no proportion in what the leaders and military of Israel is in fact doing in Gaza (and let’s not forget the West Bank) in response to that attack. The distinction between ethnic cleansing and genocide is moot by this point.

I saw a clip from the Guardian a while ago. A reporter was walking around in Jerusalem asking people about the Green Line. The responses was akin to Babale: “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” “There’s no such thing.”

When a poster alone is continuing this kind of quixotic ignorance, and actively denying what all independent sources say (Because they parrot Hamas propaganda) and the overwhelming majority of posters in this thread say that enough is enough, there’s a certainty that this poster will never ever back down, say “You know what” and admit that maybe they weren’t in the right. Again, willful ignorance or actual hatred of muslims disguising as wilfull ignorance.

It’s despicable.

905

Up until a week ago, I’d have agreed with you, largely because he’d been silent. Now, not so much.

Pretty much reading straight out of the Babale playbook.

906

That seems bit different than his view in May:

I pit Zionism - #50 by Alessan

I wonder what changed? Or am I misreading him?

907

I think one difference is that he was speaking to you, not Bear. But I think the topics of the two conversations are different. Even Babale has said the current Israeli govt. is bad(while defending what they do).

908

I do not expect 100% consistency from posters, especially those in an active war zone such as @Alessan.

However, when a poster IS highly consistent, contrary to evidence, I begin to think their position is based on something other than reason.

909

Maybe. ISTM that the May post was much more hopeless about what the war is accomplishing, while the recent post was more “rah rah”.

“anything that happens until then is on them” is the kind of atrocity-excusing language that surprises me coming from @Alessan. Quite obviously, if soldiers are shooting unarmed crowds of civilians lining up for food, the fault lies with the soldiers and officials who put them in this position.

910

I like an admire you, @Alessan, but this is a copout. @MrDibble has admitted that, years ago, it was your arguments that convinced him (at least for a time) that Israel was not, in fact, an apartheid state (even if he’s since quite reasonably changed his mind, based on Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza since then) [correct me if I’m wrong, @MrDibble!]. If it’s just too depressing/demoralizing/frustrating/etc. to argue about this right now, then that’s okay, and you can admit it – you’re human, and we all have our limits. Especially for online arguing!

But minds have changed about this. My mind certainly did, as did many other Dopers I can see. If you don’t want to argue because it sucks, don’t argue… but it’s not because no one can be convinced, it’s because you’ve reached your limit. And that’s okay! I sympathize with Israelis these days – I’m sure it absolutely sucks living with that government (probably even more so than living in Washington DC with my government!), and seeing near-daily reports of atrocities by your countrymen.

And I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, but just so it’s clear to everyone, Gazans right now are suffering unimaginably right now, and for most of them it’s through absolutely no fault of their own. And anyone committing, ordering, or looking-the-other-way-at atrocities bears the responsibility for these actions themselves and can’t reasonably blame extremists from the other side.

911

In June, Haaretz published an investigation reporting that Israeli soldiers stationed around aid-distribution sites had been ordered to shoot at Palestinians “to drive them away or disperse them, even though it was clear they posed no threat.” The sources for the story were Israeli officers and soldiers. More than five hundred people had been killed near the aid centers and U.N. food trucks since late May, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. (It is unclear how many were killed by I.D.F. soldiers.) One soldier said, “It’s a killing field. Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force—no crowd-control measures, no tear gas—just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. . . . Our form of communication is gunfire.” Netanyahu and his Defense Minister dismissed the claims as a “blood libel.” No matter. In the weeks since the Haaretz article appeared, hundreds more have been killed.

Some commentators were quick to dismiss the investigation or shift the blame, saying that Hamas fighters had been stealing aid shipments and selling the food and medicine at wildly inflated prices, or claiming that Hamas had been firing on Palestinians. And yet one former security official I spoke to didn’t dispute the substance of the report; rather, he compared it to other instances in history of soldiers who were enraged, vengeful, afraid, exhausted, trapped in an aimless war. “They say Israel has ‘the most moral military in the world,’ ” he told me. “Bullshit. The way young soldiers and commanders sometimes use their weapons is terrible. They don’t care about the rules. They think, Kill them all! They deserve it after what they did to us, they are not human beings, don’t ask your commander.”

Soldiers are routinely shooting civilians who pose no threat, according to multiple reports from IDF soldiers themselves. This is what is happening in Gaza right now.

912

I’ll note that there is nothing special or unusual about these atrocities, or the IDF in general. I expect things like this happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and US leadership probably did their best to sweep it under the rug, only taking action when public pressure made it impossible not to. This is just what armies usually do when at war. And it’s one of the biggest reason why it’s almost always wrong to go to war.

In conclusion, fuck all the warmongering pieces of shit.

913

I told you at the time that there wasn’t some vast gulf of difference between what Alessan was saying and what I was, but you insisted on micro analyzing different individual words to conclude that we totally disagree.

I don’t see how what he said in those two posts is at all incompatible.

And I got a say, from when you were doing it to me a while back, the constant tagging and quoting of random posts from other threads to stick articles you think we should read in front of our noses is incredibly annoying.

If he wanted to talk to you about it, I’m sure the dozen times he’s already been tagged are enough to get his attention. And if he doesn’t, well, he’s clearly much smarter than I am.

914

No, this was spot on. I had come around to thinking Israel’s situation wasn’t apartheid by 2014, and that was still my stance in 2021, and then, with more data on the situation especially around settlements, came back to seeing that it definitely was. Subsequent events are showing the situation there is now so much worse than mere Apartheid.

915

…this is what trying to get aid from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation looks like.

If you are still defending this: if you are “blaming Hamas”, then you don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt.

Here is a BBC reporter explaining that he isn’t allowed to film the ground outside the plane, but he was seeing communities that he knew well, and they were flat. Nothing left of them.

Here is Sky News with much the same messaging, with the added threat that if they did film Gaza, food drops could either be delayed or cancelled.

916

Shaiel ben Ephraim is an excellent Substacker (who isn’t a racist weirdo), who writes eloquently about the heartbreak and trauma so many Jews and friends of Israel have experienced in the last couple years, as the evidence of genocide has increased to the point of being undeniable and we have been forced to rethink our relationships with Israel and Zionism. Highly recommended.

Here’s the conclusion of his latest essay:

I clung to denial for months. Not because I was blind to suffering, but because it was heartbreaking. Israel committing genocide was a rupture in the story I had lived by. It was a betrayal of the refuge built from the ashes of the Holocaust. Of my grandmother who survived Auschwitz. To admit it was to confront a shattering paradox: that the sanctuary promised to us might now be the source of unspeakable harm.

Now everything must change. The Holocaust taught us to be vigilant victims. Now that vigilance demands we look inward. It is the hardest reckoning. It forces us to hold the unbearable tension of being survivors and perpetrators.

Yet, this rupture is also an opening. By facing the full complexity of our history and present, we reclaim the power to define our identity not solely as victims, but as agents of justice, empathy, and change. It means cultivating a love for our people that is fierce enough to hold them accountable. An identity with a commitment to humanity broad enough to include the Palestinians. We are no longer the victims. It is time we internalized that. We are just people like everyone else. Capable of incredible cruelty.

917

This is great (and heartbreaking). Thanks for sharing.

918

In a similar vein:

Dear Mom,

It’s time for us to talk about Israel.
(snip)
Growing up, every aspect of my Jewish identity was connected to the Holocaust: through stories we were told by Grandpa about his childhood in Germany; the trip we took with him to Treblinka and Auschwitz; books we read like Maus and The Diary of Anne Frank; movies we watched like Schindler’s List and Life Is Beautiful; songs we sang like “Ani Ma’amin” and “I Still Believe”; visits we made to the Holocaust Museum and Yad Vashem; and a million other everyday comments at Sunday School, Hebrew School, Passover, family get-togethers, and more. In so many ways, it was instilled in me that there’s nothing worse than supporting the perpetrators of genocide, nothing more cowardly than staying silent in the face of genocide, and nothing more virtuous than standing up against genocide.

So when we see those same parents, the people we love most in the world, fail in this most elemental task—to clearly and unequivocally and loudly oppose a genocide (or even, if you still can’t accept that terminology, an “indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians” that strongly rhymes with genocide), let alone one being done in our name—that is not something we can agree to disagree about. When I look at my two sons, I can’t not see the children of Gaza—scared, orphaned, disfigured, and now literally starving to death—and feel profound shame that I have not done more over these past two years to stand against these crimes. Mom, you are a beautifully kind and empathetic person in so many ways. And yet, I don’t believe that when you look at your grandsons, you have ever pictured them similarly.

But I need you to try. I need you to step out of your echo chamber for a moment. I need you to at least consider the possibility that what Israel is doing to Gaza is, in practice if not scale, what was done to our ancestors. In short, I need you to be the parent I have always looked up to. The role model who taught me right from wrong. The mother who taught me to say “Never Again.”

Love,
Aaron

919

I seem to recall @Alessan stating he had actually been in the IDF in the past and presumably at the time he found them reasonably professional and not genocidal.

920

Supporters of Israel and the IDF today really, really need to check themselves, because it may be a lot harder than they realized to recognize your fellows and countrymen tolerating, ordering, or committing atrocities (whether or not you call it genocide) than you previously thought. Are you absolutely certain, 100%, that you’re not going to be in position of those Germans in 1946 who looked back at their rhetoric and actions of the last decade with terrible shame and guilt, even if they didn’t directly participate in the Holocaust?