tomndebb is a genocide denier

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Dear The Second Stone,

I don’t start Pit threads. Hell, I don’t often start threads of any sort. But hey, I figure I’ll hook you up with a place to complain without all the passive-aggressive bullshit. I’m a helper!

I’d avoided the most recent of the Israel/Palestine threads, and MENA threads in general. But I happened on this thread you started in ATMB, in which you asked:

Like an ad in the bolour supplement, that really bought my eye. A handy link from BPC took me over to this gem of a GD thread, which is a discussion about the ethics and morality of Israeli policy toward Palestinians in general and Gazans in particular.

Now, I get your perspective. I really do. You think that Israel is an aggressor, an occupier, an oppressor. I don’t entirely disagree. You also think that Israel is directly comparable, in action and morality, to Nazi Germany:

You also have decided that Israel is “bottling up families in the Gaza ghetto and then periodically slaughtering them” and “a fascist nation implementing fascist policies”.

Ok, I get that. Again, I don’t *entirely *disagree. Heck, you say that “collective punishment is a crime against humanity,” and I largely agree with that. But then you start in on genocide. Israel is committing it. And, apparently, anyone who does not actively condemn its actions supports that genocide.

Excuse me, check that: that anyone who disagrees with you is a “genocide denier.”

Leaving aside that terminology, which to my eyes is clearly intended to parallel “Holocaust denier” (and is not even remotely the same in any sense), you made some specific claims about Israeli actions against Palestinian civilians that you believe support your belief in Palestinian genocide. You very specifically cited a piece from Chris Hedges writing in Salon as providing examples of “what Israeli soldiers do for fun.” You proceed to talk about Israel, as a nation, “machine gunning young boys, bombing schools and hospitals…bait[ing] and murder[ing] young boys, bomb[ing] civilians and schools.” You talk about “baiting and machine gunning little boys” a couple more times. You’re really hammering on it, and understandably; it’s a hell of a rhetorical image. But…is it true? Is it verifiable?

So tomndeb decides to call you on it:

In response, you again cite the Hedges piece. He replies with some points about Mr. Hedges’ reliability as a journalist and witness. And that’s when, IMever-soHO, you lost your shit. tom~ is now, to your mind, a “genocide denier.” Which brings us back around to your ATMB thread. You’d like to put this scurrilous genocide denier on ignore. He’s awful and a denier and probably a Nazi to boot. But, understandably, you’d prefer not to name names in an ATMB thread.

To make my point perfectly clear: That is some seriously next-level passive-aggressive bullshit. I don’t give all that many fucks about your posts in re Israel or Gaza or fascism or genocide. I think you have some good points, and some utterly asinine ones. I think you’re a fucking idiot for saying that tom~ is a denier of, supporter of, and apologist for genocide. But what actually irritates me–enough to write this inane, borderline-unreadable abortion of a Pit thread–is your being such a goddamn passive-aggressive baby about it.
So here ya fucking go. Your very own thread. Calling tomndeb out by name as a genocide denier. I did it for you so you don’t have to. Tell him all about it. Really lay into him. Don’t say I never did anything for ya.
(But please remember: this is not a thread for complaining about moderation. I’d hate to see warnings or a banhammer come down, so leave that “biased mods” stuff out of it. Don’t start on how tom~'s being a horrible, horrible moderator.

This is just a safe place for you to talk about tom~'s being a horrible, horrible person.)

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Well now. That’s a misleading thread title.

Maybe you could get a mod to change the spelling in the thread title?

Nah, in relation to the locked ATMB thread this title works, and I like the well crafted OP.

Well done!

Certainly seems like The Second Stone has had a thing against tomndebb for quite a while.

That’s exactly like what the Nazis did!

That last link includes the following comment from tomndebb:

That proves it! Mods are Nazis!!! :eek::smack::dubious:

I love this. This is such a perfect SDMB point of view. And I agree wholeheartedly.

Thank you, OP. I agree with the thread title. Here is the thread referred to:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=17672719#post17672719

In order to make the case for Tomndebb being a genocide denier people will need to read how he belittles each report of an atrocity against Palestinian children. I’ve summed that up here:

Now, I’m also going to agree that my responses to the genocide denier Tomndebb in that thread are passive-aggressive. One is not allowed to directly insult in other forums, and I got an official warning for calling a consistently racist poster a racist in that thread.

In that thread Tomndebb initially got my attention in his posting capacity by claiming that Chris Hedges, Pulitizer Prize sharing writer, did not see what he reported. I had read Hedges report a few days before and reported without linking to them that baiting and machine gunning young boys by some IDF troops was something he had seen and he reported that others had seen it too. At the time, I repeated Hedges accusation with no attribution. Tomndebb asserted definitively that such things did not happen. I, of course, knew of the report and then found it again and linked to it again. Tomndebb then dismissed the report passively aggressively suggesting it wasn’t credible because if there were other incidents, others would have reported. I then linked to a number of similar incidents, which Tomndebb, like a young lawyer cub for the Nazis, pointed out, tried to point out the differences in each incident, complaining that they were not exactly the same. This is pettifogging and intellectually dishonest. In the service of smoothing over the murders of children.

Since then I found an Israeli soldier, linked to above, who has confirmed these stories. Others in the thread have linked to a smearing of his character in an Israeli newspaper. Smearing of the character of witnesses is 100 percent standard when people complain about the murder of Palestinians.

Now, we have all these bodies of Palestinians turning up, and for some reason we have focused on the bodies of the children, and reports of the Israelis Defense Forces shooting at them, including now from a man who was in the IDF, and still it isn’t enough witnesses to credit any one of the reports.

That is why I call Tomndebb a genocide denier. Which is no different than a Holocaust denier, which is a kind of Nazi scum. To the extent that I tried to directly avoid doing that outside this forum, that was because I was trying to follow the rules. To the extent that I was directly insulting outside this forum, I confess to failing to follow the rules of said forum and apologize for directly insulting. Also, it should be noted that Group A are Nazis, and you are a Nazi is not allowed outside the Pit. To the extend I did that, I apologize. I was certainly called a Nazi that way in the thread.

Holocaust denial is despicable and the people who do it should not be engaged in debate and should in general be shunned. Left Hand of Dorkness was doing the same thing in the thread. I’ve put him on ignore. None of the other people on the side of Israel in that thread, including the racist poster, dismissed the dead bodies and slandered the witnesses the way Tomndebb and LHOD did.

I would put Tomndebb on my ignore list if it were allowed, but as Tomndebb is a moderator, that is not a setting currently allowed on the board. According to Giraffe, the settings for the software do allow a poster to ignore the moderators, but as they are the moderators, that makes no sense as we need to be reigned in when we call people too directly on their racism in the wrong forum.

I propose instead that Tomndebb be stripped of moderator status and banned for being a defender of the Gaza genocide that dismisses the evidence by slandering each witness, the thread above is the evidence. Genocide deniers should be shunned and ignored.

This will probably require a review of what the various world agencies define as genocide and then apply them to situation and look closely at the pettifogging Tomndebb has committed.

Oh, and to the people who want me banned or otherwise warned for this post, I’d like to get this in first: I dislike racism and racists and disapprove of genocide in general, and the genocide that the US is funding and Israel is conducting in Gaza against the Palestinian people and has been for five decades. The thousands and thousands of deaths, destroyed homes, punitive collective punishments bombings and shellings, constant libels and other actions support the claim of genocide.

Yes, I have, and it is reciprocated. Go to the links and you will see why I think so.

Well, fuck me running. And I did it throughout the OP, too. Reported to request fixing.

My humblest apologies, tom~, and even more to ~debb.

I’m glad that we finally have a thread in which we can discuss the Israel/Palestine conflict out in the open, so we can get it resolved.

I thought the jackboots made that obvious.

Just as obvious is the fact that The Second Stone is a few tacos short of a combination plate.

Andros:

Thank you for starting the thread. Really. In this world, we are entitled to our opinions, and grown ups are not entitled to dismiss facts. The facts are, we have thousands of dead bodies, its been going on half a century, it isn’t about to change, except go through stages of getting worse from time to time, and these people are treated as sub-human, their eye-witness reports of how the murders have happened are dismissed as lies by people who have no contrary evidence while we have the bodies with bullets right there. And we have the pettifoggers who come in and libel and slander each eyewitness, accept any criticism against each eyewitness as dispositive that nothing wrong happened while we at least figuratively have the body with the bullets not quite cold.

In the last set of links, I included video of two boys/young men, walking with their hands at their sides while they are assassinated by rifle fire. That isn’t warfare, that is murder. I’ve linked to a video of a 48 apartment 12 story building blown to pieces and toppled by rockets to supposedly get to a command center in one apartment. This is different from the WTC 9/11 attacks only in that it was an apartment building for residential uses. It is a crime to destroy whole buildings that may be occupied.

All we need now is a gun control thread, and we’ll be all set!

If Israel is a genocider, they have to be the worstest genocider, everrrrrrrrr. What with the Palestinian population growth rates being one of the highest in the world. How do you say “You got some 'splainin” to do" in Hebrew?

No, it doesn’t prove the mods or even Tomndebb are Nazis. Assuming it is a correct quote, it is strong evidence that Tomndebb, as a Moderator is not interested in justice. I’d argue that is Tomndebb’s style as a poster too. Justice is a basic concern of people trying to be human. Order without justice is dehumanizing.

Is that not a worthy topic to discuss, or should we ignore it and keep funding the killing?

We could also use one on workplace griping. That would be good.

Interesting question. Extreme stress increases birth rates, particularly during wartime.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2770960?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104625437573

Here are world statistics of birthrates, Gaza is only listed once: