I’m willing most if not all of you who are so outraged about people voting for Trump as a protest of the Palestinian genocide have never done anything for the Palestinians: never signed a petition, and never once thought about it in the voting booth. Now you have to consider it, you can’t take their vote for granted.
And we didn’t vote for the guy that keeps threatening to commit genocide in Iran.
Cite? I’m willing to believe that an Arab state or even a few did this, but all of them?
Thanks. It doesn’t quite validate your claim, and it confuses expulsion with people who came to Israel as refugees for something other than expulsion, but it does contextualise that you mean the Arab League.
You know, none of that excuses dropping bombs on civilians, closing and destroying hospitals, letting infants in incubators die and rot, shooting at starving people trying to access “food aid” I.e. bait. It also doesn’t excuse the violence the “settlers” have been engaging in since I can remember, or leveling an entire country. It’s genocide, murder, violence, and evil. What happend That October was unforgivable, but there is no excuse for what is going on now. And if you think the Russians are making me think that you are high.
Attacking actual humanitarian aid, attacking/ killing journalists, and keeping real journalists out. There is more, but seriously is more needed? Isn’t that enough? Apologizing for Israel is just sickening.
Blame the terrorists who use civilians as human shields and hospitals as staging areas for rocket attacks and plant suicide bombers amongst starving refugees, and who, by the way, STARTED THIS WAR by attempting an actual genocide. This is what they wanted.
It’s war. People die in war.
You keep excusing them. This, “War” is destroying a country, and a community of people, or maybe even a civilzatio. I blame the people dropping the bombs indiscriminately. If they were decent human beings they would not destroy homes, hospitals, and churches, despite what may or may not be hiding there. You are saying letting NICU babies die and rot in incubators is war. I call it slaughter.
Never Again, unless it’s someone elses people. Amirite?
By the by lots of Holocaust survivors are unimpressed.
And it’s never okay that this happens.
Arab civilization is going to be fine.
So it’s perfectly OK for Hamas to fire rockets at civilian targets and murder Israelis willy-nilly as long as they have human shields, but if Israel defends itself it’s genocide. Nice double standard you got there.
A lot of German children died in WWII. Did the Allies commit genocide against Germany?
To compare the systematic, organized, industrialized murder of a third of the world’s Jewish population to an amount of collateral damage in a war of self-defense that amounts to a rounding error in comparison is downright antisemitic.
Easy to say when it’s not your country being told it has no right to defend itself from people who want the entire population dead.
I don’t think that’s what you are being told. But killing escalates the conflict. It’s not my place to tell Israelis or Palestinians what to do, but I will speak out against violence when I see it. That goes for all parties here, including my own rather violent nation.
Which sounds so different in Farsi.
I’m going to answer this and then drop out of this hi-jack.
It quit being defense a long time ago. It has graduated to murder and genocide.
Is there a particular number that you have to meet to make genocide bad? And if you don’t hit that specific number genocide is perfectly fine? Is it a matter of who you’re genociding? So if it’s native Americans it’s bad. If it is Jewish people it’s bad, but if it’s Muslim people go for it?
I do not think any civilian population should be targeted. Israel, however, still has homes, businesses, standing buildings, medical care, food, lives. Palestine has none of this and the Israeli government is quite focussed on making sure they never do. Greater Israel is a thing a plan. And dead elders, children and other noncombatants are not something that would stop the supporters of it. I’ve argued this enough. If you want to stick your head in the sand and not recognize what’s in front of your face, I can’t make you take your head out and see it. No matter what I say. I simply do not support the slaughter of innocents any innocents*.*
…this isn’t what they were saying.
Here is a video from early on in Mamdani’s campaign where he hits the streets to find out why people voted for Trump.
Many of them talk about how Gaza was a factor in their vote.
Are these people just stupid? Brainwashed? Pro-Palestinian activists virtue-signalling because the Democrats aren’t “sympathetic” enough?
No.
They are ordinary average Americans who have been watching Palestinians being slaughtered in the hundreds weekly while scrolling on TikTok.
I didn’t know any Palestinians before October 7th. I started following many of them after the “war” began. There is an uncomfortable, horrible feeling you get when you’ve been following someone for a while, where they share details and images of their families, for them to suddenly stop posting, and to find out the reason why they stopped posting is because they and their family had a bomb dropped on their house.
This was the first live-streamed genocide, where we got to know the people that were being slaughtered. I’m on the other side of the world. But I would have sleepless nights when people I was following would describe how they were surrounded, and that bombs were going off right next door, and their neighbour had been killed, and they said their goodbyes because they thought this would be their last night on earth.
I’ve seen the most horrible videos. Children being blown up. Parents scraping whats left of their children up into plastic bags. People being burned alive. Every single day.
Then I listened to the American politicians, and their spokespeople, like the smirking man who were telling us that they were “only targeting Hamas”, and that “Hamas were using people as human shields” and it wa plainly obvious that this was all a lie.
This is what many of us (as Johanna describes us as) “non-Palestinian” people experienced for the last two years of Biden’s reign. To think that this didn’t have an impact is a denial of our humanity.
Because its important to remember we are all in information silos right now. And what I experienced and what the guy next door experiences are very different things. But once you get locked into this particular silo, it doesn’t matter if you live in a red state or a blue state or in New Zealand its going to affect you.
So can you blame people for desperately looking for a way to stop this senseless slaughter? I don’t. I think voting for Trump was a mistake. I think the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was the clearest sign it was a mistake, along with the plans to turn Gaza into an “amusement park”.
But I think it’s perfectly understandable at the time why people either chose to vote for Trump or to not vote at all.
Again: the politically motivated activists almost certainly advocated for and voted for Harris. It’s the so-called “low information voter” (a term I don’t really like) that would have voted for Trump.
And the thing is…I think its really easy to win those voters back. Mamdani didn’t “pledge support for Gaza”. That wasn’t what he was running on. He ended the video talking about freezing rent, making buses free, and making universal childcare a reality.
What did he do?
He listened to voters and gave them something to vote for.
The fact that he holds a consistent, morally aligned position on Gaza is important for defining his character. But he had actual policies that are doable and those policies were a result of actually listening to what people wanted.
It’s a very simple process. One that the Democratic establishment has pushed aside in favour of listening to the donors, the consultants, the pundits and the focus groups. And what that means is many Dem politicians have lost the ability to speak off the cuff and just say what they mean. Its all “talking points.”
For example, it became clear that the way the Dems had decided to approach trans issues at the last campaign was simply not to talk about them at all. But when cornered, the talking point to use here was “we will follow the law”.
Harris really says nothing here. Compare that to how Mamdani approached trans issues:
This wasn’t the centre point of Mamdani’s campaign. It was only a couple of minutes. But it was two minutes longer than what was spoken at the entire dem convention.
And it was a clear, unmistakable positioning statement not just about Mamdani but about the people that were running the campaign. The music they chose was ‘It’s Okay to Cry’ by Sophie. They chose to platform Sylvia Rivera. It wasn’t crafted by “focus groups” but by people who cared.
In a world that is now driven by algorithms, these things matter. Trump won in part because people think he speaks plainly and “tells it like it is.” And that’s because most politicians, desperate to stay on message, spout talking points as if they were ChatGPT.
Look at what Polanski has done with the Greens in the UK. He speaks plainly on Gaza and trans rights and sex workers’ rights and decriminalising drugs. And the UK is a place where the establishment punishing trans people has become virtually a religion. But for him and the party he now leads, it isn’t even a question. Trans rights are human rights. That’s what they stand for.
Just another example, this snippet from one of the debates: (excuse the political commentary at the end of the video, this was the only snippet I could find after a few minutes of searching)
Listen to the responses from all of the candidates to the question of what their first foreign visit as mayor of New York would be. All except Mamdani respond that it would be Israel, and Mamdani is the only one that gets follow-up questions because he’s the only one that broke ranks.
That whole thing is just plain fucking weird. Firstly, because it was a question in the first place, and secondly…all except Mamdani respond like pod people. Why are they all saying the same thing? And why did the interviewers decide that Mamdani’s response was so extraordinary that it deserved a follow-up?
And talking about weird: do you remember when Tim Walz went off script and said the GOP is weird and that went viral and lots of people started saying “well, FINALLY they are taking the gloves off” and then they obviously told him to pull back, and we got that muted performance in his debate with Vance?
Just stop following the script already. In the UK it’s a two-horse race between Reform and the Greens. I couldn’t have imagined that ten years ago.
And in America you’ve got Trump and MAGA that have all but destroyed the traditional establishment Republican party. But on the other side you’ve got the establishment Democrats, still trying to do things the same old way, locked into the same patterns, who might eek out a win based on the fact that MAGA are so awful, but will never address the things that made people turn on them in the first place.
…Smapti is trolling.
Far be it for me to tell anyone else to stop responding to him because I’m more than responsible for my share of extended arguments with them. I’m as guilty as anyone.
But there isn’t anything they are saying here that hasn’t been addressed and debunked over in their own pit thread.
I’m just so tired of the deniers. They’ve got nothing new to say, nothing new to bring to the table. Just the same denialist talking points. And now that Israel is using the “Gaza Plan” on Southern Lebanon, it makes those talking points ring even more hollow.
It’s a genocide. That is the conclusion that over 70% of Dem voters have reached. This thread is partly about how to get more people to vote for the Democrats. Ignoring that over 70% of potential voters and listening to people like Smapti would be a mistake: a mistake that I think contributed to the Harris loss at the last election.
Exactly, I should probably not have participated but some days you just get pissed off. This is that day for me I guess.
I wish the Dems would get the hint and quit trying to court the conservatives. I wish they would quit moving right. Most of the base is not as progressive as me, but much more progressive than the corporate party elite. Speaking of heads in the sand…
Oh, and didn’t you know the Russians have convinced all of us progressives that it’s a genocide. 
None of us watch the news, or see the devastation of Gaza. We just listen to some Rusian prop. and that’s it. 
Seemingly, it gets harder each day to remember another kind of day.
…I think that the constant labelling (I don’t mean you) as “progressive” or “centrist” or “right-wing” muddies the waters. I’ve heard people that look and sound like the stereotype of the typical MAGA supporter come out and support trans rights and express their sorrow and anger at kids being killed in Gaza.
These aren’t “progressive” issues. It’s just humanity.
There are more people than what people suspect who are desperate for political leadership that embraces humanity. Just be human already and stop being so fucking weird. That’s what people want.
There has to be an intent to exterminate an ethnic group for genocide to EXIST. Israel has no intention of exterminating the Arab people. You can criticize the way Israel is fighting this war if you must, but to accuse Israel of genocide is false, defamatory, and born of Russian propaganda.
One in five Israeli citizens are Muslim, you know.
So what recourse would you propose that Israel take when Hamas uses schools and hospitals and apartment buildings as staging areas to attack and murder civilians?
Israel’s focus is on defeating Hamas. It’s not their fault that Hamas doesn’t value the lives of their own citizenry.
Of a fringe movement that is ILLEGAL in Israel. The Kahanists are nowhere near having any power over the future of Israel.
If the only just wars are those with no civilian casualties, then the future of mankind will belong to the unjust.
The Russians have convinced you that the collateral damage that occurs in EVERY SINGLE WAR IN HISTORY constitutes a “genocide” when Israel does it because it looks gross on TV and are exploiting your misplaced guilt over what a different group of people did 200 years ago to convince you the same thing is happening again. They did this so you’d sit out the 2024 election, Trump would win, and they could carry on with the actual genocide they’re prepetrating in Ukraine.
Congratulations on falling for it.
Yes. No matter how much self serving shit you cover yourself with, if in a two horse race you either vote for the guy who threatens to nuke the people you profess to care about, or at least refuse to vote against them, you’re a fucking idiot.
You’re the guy who would assassinate F. W. de Klerk to speed up the negotiations. You’d back hardline communists in the Soviet Union to stop Gorbachev because he’s a communist too.
You’re trying to defy the laws of arithmetic. You’re fucked up.