Yup. It’s statements like this (@Babale 's quoted snip, not @DSeid 's) which is why we have this thread.
The idea that Israel is intentionally killing civilians is delusional. I don’t know what else to tell you.
You know, I just saw an interview with Sarah McBride, and I was struck and incredibly impressed by the incredible level of grace she can show to people she disagrees with.
And I thought to myself, maybe I need to show more grace on this topic, like she does.
But I guess that Sarah McBride is just a better human being than I am, because I came here and saw this post, and I honestly cannot muster any grace for this kind of bullshit.
At the start of this conflict, I put my thoughts into long, well reasoned posts where, despite the horrendousness of the situation, I kept my vitriol to a minimum.
Posts like that one convinced me I shouldn’t bother.
They knowingly and deliberately put incompetent MAGA clowns in charge of food aid to starving civilians. You’ve admitted this on this board! Israeli leadership clearly has no problem with causing and allowing civilian deaths.
Also, there’s not as much moral daylight as might be desired between the categories “deliberately targets civilians in terrorist attacks, because terrorist insurgency” and “deliberately tweaks aims and tactics of war against terrorist insurgents to facilitate attacks ostensibly on military targets but mostly wreaking havoc on civilians to further immiserate and destabilize unwanted population within controlled territory, because nationalist ethnic cleansing”.
I am not privy to Israeli policy and strategy decisions so I can’t say how much, if any, of the immense slaughter of civilians in Gaza is in fact “deliberate” in some meaningful sense of the term. But at some point, some exceptionally reckless amount of “purposeful carelessness and indifference to preventable collateral damage” is inevitably going to start shading into “purposeful targeting”. That’s why the way that a militarily powerful state actor in a conflict usually signals its opposition to the killing of civilians is by killing few or no civilians. For whatever reason, Israel has been really, really sucking at achieving that goal.
I mean, you can state that all you want, but the combatant to civilian ratio is somewhere between 1 to 2 and 1 to 3 which is about as good as you ever get in this sort of urban war. If Israel was displaying the kind of reckless disregard for civilian life that you are asserting, the casualty ratio would be much higher.
…in the interest of fighting ignorance, I have to point out that these ratios are based on unwarranted assumptions and not actual data. And in the context of the scale of the death and destruction in Gaza that is ongoing to this day, it is completely irrelevant.
You misspelled “in the interest of propagating Hamas propaganda”.
Yes, it is quite clear that the best actual information about how many of the people who were killed in Gaza were actually combatants, because you aren’t condemning Israel on the basis of their actions, but instead on some Original Sin.
…we’ve done this dance before. I asked you to justify these numbers. You cited IDF spokepeople that literally were making stuff up.
I’ve got nothing to prove here. The burden is on you. You are the one that made specific claims about a “ratio.” It’s on you to prove it.
What the fuck is this “original sin” bullshit? What the fuck are you talking about?
Yes, we have been through this before - you consider any source that involves the IDF irrevocably tainted but you trust whatever the Hamas Ministry of Health says.
You are the one claiming that Israel is committing a genocide and citing high civilian casualty rates as evidence, so really, you’re the one with something to prove.
Come on, man. You’re way too transparent to play dumb.
…the IDF trusts what the Hamas Ministry of Health says. Nobody (reputable or otherwise) is disputing the numbers. Where do you think part of the ratio you used comes from? It literally comes from the Hamas Ministry of Health. If it weren’t for them you wouldn’t have a ratio in the first place.
Bolding mine.
This is a distortion of my position. I think Israel is committing genocide because I’m convinced by the case made by South Africa at the ICJ. I’m convinced by the arguments put forward by Amnesty International and by Human Rights Watch, by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, by multiple other humanitarian organisations, many of them with boots on the ground in Gaza, along with a broad consensus of genocide scholars.
Those arguments aren’t based on “high civilian casualty rates.” They certainly are part of the broader body of evidence. But all of these people and organisations have reached consensus because they believe that part or most of the conditions for genocide have been met under the conventions.
I’ve provided links to all of these organisations and their argument multiple times in multiple threads. If there are specific things you dispute, I’m happy and open to discussing them. I’m not going to run away.
I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. There is a fantasy version of me living in your head. But the real-life version of me is just completely baffled about some of the things you say or think about me.
Dude. There is a pattern to the blatant lies you swallow incredulously and throw massive fits when anyone cares to question that narrative. This is not the first time you have done this, and there is a clear and obvious link between all the cases where you have.
…I’m not the one who throws “massive fits” in threads like these.
I can back up EVERYTHING I claim. That should be self-evident by reading any thread we’ve done this dance in before.
But look at where we are right now. All I’ve said is that the ratio you provided is based on unwarranted assumptions and not actual data. You could prove me wrong in an instant by showing the actual data and demonstrating that it isn’t based on unwarranted assumptions.
Instead, you are lying about me and ranting about “original sin.” You are doing what you always do: playing the distraction game because you can’t actually back up anything you say.
But you can’t play that game with me. It doesn’t work. We are talking about the ratios here. You should either back up your claim or withdraw it.
…you’re not the one who was banned from the boarding school “mass” graves thread after raging at people who didn’t buy your wildly overblown narrative that was later proven to be incorrect?
Don’t worry, as soon as your homeboys Hamas finish claiming martyrs for strikes that happened in 2023, I will share the data with you. But currently they’re still going back and identifying “civilian” dead as combatants on a daily basis, so it might be a bit.
…I wasn’t proven incorrect.
And I’m not going to relitigate the moderation of that thread outside the bounds of the appropriate forum. Let’s just say I disagree with the moderation, I disagree with your characterisation of that thread, and leave it at that.
But if you do want to relitigate what happened, I’d appreciate it if you could provide links directly to the thread in question and the subsequent ATMB thread that followed so that people can make up their own mind on what actually happened.
Now have you finished playing the distraction game yet? Shall we get back to the ratios?
Yawn.
WARNING: 
JEWISH LINK
Holy shit, you really are incapable of any introspection, huh?
…provide the links to the threads so people can make their own minds up.
So this is a link about journalists that we’ve debated before and isn’t relevant to the topic at hand.
We were talking about the ratios.
THIS is what we were discussing. This alleged “combatant to civilian ratio”.
Why don’t you? I don’t have the thread pulled up, you just threw a fit of such epic proportions that I still remember it however many years later.
You don’t see the relevance of the fact that Hamas and PIJ are retroactively claiming hundreds of people your precious orgs identified as civilians as combatants to what the ratio will end up being? like I said, after the war, when your heroes Hamas and PIJ are done claiming martyrs, that’s exactly where the ratio will fall. Just like in all the prior wars. The information we already have strongly supports that conclusion. Obviously, it is a projection; no one except Hamas has the full list of current terrorists.
But unlike your projection of thousands and thousands of starvation deaths (or your projection of thousands and thousands of graves), this one will actually materialize. And unlike you, I will actually admit it if I turn out to be wrong.
…because searching in the Straightdope is fucking ridiculous at times, and I can’t be bothered to do so. Because YOU ARE MAKING CLAIMS ABOUT ME and so it’s YOUR obligation to provide the cite. Especially if you are claiming I “threw a fit of such epic proportions.” Because that’s a fucking lie.
You are randomly bringing up something that is ancient history because you know you can’t back up your claim. It’s a distraction. Again.
To the ratio?
It’s not relevant at all.
Still no numbers here.
And there won’t be because you give the game away here.
This is the reality of this so-called combatant-to-civilian ratio “which is about as good as you ever get in this sort of urban war.”
It isn’t real.
Calling it a “projection” is being polite. It’s literally a made-up number because, as you say: “no one except Hamas has the full list of current terrorists.”
And that’s an important point because that’s a concession that the IDF don’t know who they are killing.
So not only is the ratio you cited effectively made up: what it demonstrates just how indiscriminate the killing by Israel in Gaza actually is.
I didn’t personally make any projections of starvation deaths. I’ve reported what some experts may have projected. Yes: famine was declared in some parts of Gaza. Yes, the food situation has fluctuated, and when the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was disbanded and the UN and other NGO’s took back over food distribution, things dramatically improved, even though food and aid are still nowhere near the numbers that are required.
And yes, there are tens of thousands of graves. Not from starvation. But there are shootings and bombings and an increase in mortality because many Palestinians in Gaza cannot access basic healthcare.
ROFL.
Really? So if Hamas says 10 people died of which none were militants, and then there years later they admit that actually 4 of the people who died were militants, you don’t see how this changes the ratio from 0/10 to 4/10?
Wow, you really are as stupid as you appear.
You’re demonstrating nothing except for how stupid you are. You’re using English words, but they make no sense in the order you are putting them in.
At Canadian boarding schools? That’s the projection I was referencing - the people you cited looked at some ground scans and decided there were many thousands of unmarked graves, which turned out to be completely untrue.
Said the guy who won’t admit he was wrong about the thousands of boarding school mass graves…
…we aren’t talking about ten people.
The current death toll since the start of the “war” is at least 76,621. There are an estimated 10,000 people still missing buried under the rubble. The numbers you are talking about are statistically irrelevant.
Concession accepted.
Link to the threads already.
Again: link to the threads.