I knew that would bring you out of your shell.
…people don’t deserve credit for saying the absolute bare minimum in the face of overwhelming video evidence. Of course rapists caught on camera should be in jail.
But this isn’t just about a few “bad apples”. The video had to be leaked before anyone paid it any attention to it. If it hadn’t been leaked, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. Babale didn’t condemn the system or the process which ultimately led to these soldiers walking free. That’s the important part.
And Babale has denied in the past all of the reports of systematic abuse, torture, sexual assault and humilation in Isreali prisons holding Palestinians. Here is just a fraction of the evidence that shows this is actually happening.
https://www.btselem.org/publications/202408_welcome_to_hell
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/03/un-expert-warns-torture-has-become-state-doctrine-israel-making-prisons
https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s171
The evidence is overwhelming. But that simply isn’t enough. They even beat and humiliated Greta Thunberg. She is no stranger to being arrested and detained around the world but she never described anything like this happening anywhere else.
"She described being dragged across a paved area with an Israeli flag pressed against her and repeatedly being kicked. Her hands were tightly bound, and guards lined up to take selfies while she sat humiliated.
“I was dragged to a paved area fenced in with iron, and they hit and kicked me while an Israeli flag touched me. They ripped off my frog hat, threw it on the ground, stomped it, and yelled insults in Swedish,” Thunberg said.
“They moved me very brutally to a corner … ‘A special place for a special lady,’ they said. And then they had learned (the phrases) ‘Lilla hora’ (Little wore) and ‘Hora Greta’ (Wore Greta) in Swedish, which they repeated all the time.”"
This is real. This is happening. And people that do this are not the good guys.
Israel is the biggest threat to peace and stability in the Middle East. They have a network of torture camps. They have nukes. They have, generously funded by the US taxpayer, a “defensive shield”. They are committing genocide in Gaza, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, they are occupying some parts of Sryia, they are attempting to annex Southern Lebanon and trying to bomb Iran back to the stone age.
Typical Israeli military tactics include blowing up entire villages with controlled explosives; targeted killings of journalists, paramedics, police, and academics; and destroying historic buildings, churches, mosques and even synagogues. They have Gaza under siege, allowing in only a bare minimum amount of food and aid but not enough to provide any dignity or quality of life.
They will disguise themselves as doctors and nurses to carry out extrajudicial assassinations of patients in hospitals. They will sabotage supply chains and blow people up with their cellphones…a clear and obvious terrorist tactic and act. They will shoot children in the head with drones. They kill Iranian scientists in their sleep along with their families. They will sit down at the negotiating table and later in the day blow the people they are negotiating up. The Prime Minister of Israel has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for being “allegedly responsible for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts from at least 8 October 2023 until at least 20 May 2024.”
And I have before (and can provide again) provide citations for every single one of the things I’ve said.
The scale and scope of just how truly evil this Israeli regime, led by Netanyahu, is are off the charts. And yet if you go back and read some of these threads, you will find even some of the most “liberal” of dopers being indifferent to the murder of scientists, supporting the extrajudicial killings of patients by IDF soldiers disguised as doctors and nurses, and supporting the blowing up of cellphones that killed and injured many civilians. We have become complicit in the evil.
And I now no longer wonder why and how historical atrocities happened. This is the world we are living in now. Where we are the bad guys. It’s much easier to turn a blind eye to atrocities than I ever imagined.
Well said, point taken.
I think it’s just when I have debates with these genocide-apologists, it’s just an endless wheel of “It didn’t happen”, “Whatabout…” and “Do you support Hamas?”. Just complete deflection IOW and no concern for innocent people being killed, raped and tortured.
So I got a bit excited there at, very briefly, a very slight acknowledgement. But you’re right – nobody should be setting the bar that low.
Ah, so you missed the destruction of Gaza entirely?
Except I know you haven’t, because we’ve argued about it. You have this peculiar notion that Isreal/Jews/the US are somehow immune to committing genocide. Newsflash: they aren’t. Also, all of the above are committing war crimes.
Which is not to say the other side - Iran’s government, Hamas, etc. - aren’t doing or attempting similar things. Which is always your comeback - if we’re not 100% adopting your view we’re somehow siding with some other group of bad guys.
There are no “good guys” in these current conflicts. EVERYONE is in the wrong and has blood-stained hands.
Minor quibble - there were actually Nazis who proud of/bragged about the Final Solution. Babs isn’t that bad.
And @Babale - ad hominem attacks towards others isn’t helping you at all.
No, you just want the Gazans, West Bank Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims, and a few selected others to die. Which is still pretty horrible.
Again - I don’t like the current crowd running Iran, I despite Hamas, and so on. That still does not make we wish death and destruction on the populations living in Iran, or Gaza, or Lebanon, or other places where evil men (and a few women) conspire to shed blood for whatever gain they imagine they’ll get from the deaths of others.
Here’s the thing, Babs - I don’t lump all Palestinians into the “bad guy” group. I also don’t lump all Israelis into the “bad guy” group, either. Or all Iranians. Or all US Republicans.
I am opposed to Palestinians who are actually the ones committing the terrorist acts, atrocities, and warcrimes. Which is a sub-set of all Palestinians.
Or, as @Chronos put it:
Given the current indications of insider trader Trump really is benefitting from the war with Iran. He and his cronies/backers are making money from that slaughter and ruin.
Netanyahu, of course, is will to kill literally tens of thousands of other people to stay out of jail.
I’m not sure Hamas or the IRGC are getting anything. They might have thought they could but right now they’re getting hammered. Still, they stoked the fire that is now burning them.
Meanwhile - I feel terrible for the Palestinians, Israelis, Iranians, Americans, and more distantly, the Jews and Muslims who are suffering the consequences of this bloodbath sponsored by the rich and powerful.
Except absolutely no one on this forum has ever taken that position.
What you stubbornly refused to understand is that many of us are not either-or in regards to Hamas and Netanyahu, we’re opposed to BOTH of them. YOU are the one continually trying to push the narrative that one must be for one or the other, or against one or the other.
One more time: There are NO good guys here. Every side is guilty. It’s governments, billionaires, and corporations killing people and destroying things for THEIR benefit and everyone else is being ground to paste between them.
One more time, to be clear (to everyone else even if Babs will never get it): when it comes to the destruction of Gaza I oppose the actions of BOTH Hamas and the Israeli government/IDF. I support neither.
I can also oppose the IRGC while also declaring that the US government/military is ALSO in the wrong with this current war
You see, up until March, 2025 every US government knew that while the IRGC were scum, bad people, and sponsoring terrorism they ALSO knew that starting a goddamn war with them would only make things worse. Which has now been demonstrated. Just the closing of the Strait of Hormuz has the world by the short’n’curlies. Great fucking job - I mean, what the fuck do billionaires care if the cost of fuel and food goes up, they’re fucking billionaires. To them it’s a rounding error in pocket change. To the rest of us? At best our standard of living goes down and our lives suck. And that’s the lucky ones. If you live in the wrong place your home crashes down on top of your head in the middle of the night (or day) and you die, slowly, half-suffocated in the rubble, dying of thirst while buried alive. Or maybe you’re a girl in school burned alive because some fucking shithead far away wants to win an election.
This is like the 3rd or 4th time I’ve seen you make this accusation, based on some post from years ago, which you are twisting to reach your desired meaning.
It’s creepy as fuck to be this obsessed with another person’s old post, and frankly a little sad. Every time I read it I picture you sitting there, gloriously smug, because you once got to touch a woman’s breast, so you for sure are better than another anonymous poster here, who definitely isn’t as suave and accomplished.
Posts and arguments and logic? Nah, all that matters is “I get more than he does”. I promise that the local Boy Scout troop is suitably impressed.
Well sure, but our friend Babale has a cite from an Israeli government source that says every single person they have killed was a terrorist, including the babies. They were just terrorists disguised as babies.
Yes, sarcasm, but not by much. Babale is now simply an apologist for war criminals.
Behavior they’ve been notorious in indulging in for decades; one of my childhood memories is reading a Doonesbury comic where an Israeli military officer talks about how they killed X number of male terrorists, Y number of female terrorists, and Z number of baby terrorists.
They’ve always been a genocidal regime. It’s just more socially acceptable to talk about it now.
Jesus Christ, some things never change.
Babale is claiming that everyone killed in Lebanon in the last week was a Hezbolla fighter, and it’s up to me to prove any different.
Ah! That was the one I was recalling, yes.
…Babale spent three years actively disputing the death toll coming out of Gaza because the source was the “Hamas Ministry of Health”, even though that same number was accepted by the IDF, the US State Department and regarded by most experts as while broadly accurate, most likely to be a substantial undercount.
Yet they uncritically claim 30,000 Iranians were killed by the regime as if that were a verified number and not just the upper end of a wide range of estimates.
I’m beyond being upset with Bable. They are indoctrinated. You cannot have a good faith debate with them because all they can do is repeat talking points and propaganda. I have them on ignore, but I sometimes check to see if they are spouting disinformation, and if they are, I’ll address it. But otherwise I try to ignore them because they say the most nasty, horrible things.
At this point, they’re just an apologist for war criminals.
We’re now deliberately blocking global trade:
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/trump-says-us-start-blockading-strait-hormuz-2026-04-12/
Crazy shit. Fuck the warmongers, as well as their cheerleaders and enablers.
That article was paywalled for me.
Here’s an article from CNBC:
When will he learn that he cannot extricate himself from this situation by bombing or blockading?
This is a potentially forever situation. Until we get rid of some idiots.
Is this Trump’s misguided way of trying to get Europe involved? He needs somebody to clean up his mess; why not them?
It might simply be that he hates the idea of Iran possibly benefiting from tolls rather than himself, and so he’ll blockade the Strait in order to spite them. Greed, spite and ego are his holy trinity.
It’s all about revenge on NATO countries for not cleaning up after his mess, plus blackmail to get them involved now.
Odds of that happening: very low.
Also, it’s a form of bullying & coercion and those are the only tools he has in his toolbox to deal with anyone who fails to just fold for him. And he loves using them even when they make no sense - look at his fetish for tariffs.