The destruction of Hamas in the sense of killing the members that currently make up Hamas is a possibility. Destroying the ideas and goals of the organization in the minds of the populace is not. Conflict that has, as part of its roots, irreconcilable axioms has no good or easy solution.
That’s literally the very next line of my post:
Emphasis mine. So is the original quote, actually. You know what I mean.
Oh, it gets worse than that. I’m sure some of the most heinous, raping, murdering terrorists who struck Israel the other day have dogs or kids or siblings who they love and show genuine kindness to.
How is a human being capable of committing the kinds of heinous acts that Hamas’ terrorists committed? Simple: you rationalize away your target’s humanity. Once you’ve convinced yourself that the people you’re dealing with are not fellow human beings, nothing stops you from treating them accordingly.
There is also of course the irony that the language @DrDeth uses is the exact same language used by the Nazis to justify their genocide, this example being from Der Untermensch by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.
Der Untermensch www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Just as the night rises against the day, the light and dark are in eternal conflict. So too, is the subhuman the greatest enemy of the dominant species on earth, mankind. The subhuman is a biological creature, crafted by nature, which has hands, legs, eyes and mouth, even the semblance of a brain. Nevertheless, this terrible creature is only a partial human being.
Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal. Inside of this creature lies wild and unrestrained passions: an incessant need to destroy, filled with the most primitive desires, chaos and coldhearted villainy.
A subhuman and nothing more!
Not all of those, who appear human are in fact so. Woe to him who forgets it! Every great creation, idea, and artistic expression on this planet were brought forth by real man. It was this true man that thought to invent and to create.
“As a whole” just doesn’t exist. The Palestinians are a collection of millions of humans.
There was a photo in the Washington Post yesterday, of a man fleeing a bombing. In his arms he carried a little girl dressed in pink, maybe six or seven years old. I think they were both Palestinians.
Which of them made that bed? Which one is lying in it?
This sort of attitude is extraordinarily dangerous. It clears the way for war crimes. It’s precisely the sort of dehumanizing thinking that Hamas uses to justify their murder of Israeli children.
Don’t blame Palestinians “as a whole” for the actions of the humans who make up Hamas. That way lies genocide.
Indeed.
How much choice did most of them have about who’s in charge? How much accurate information do they have access to?
If you or I had been born in Gaza: how sure can you be about what we’d be doing?
The ground attack and the bombing may be necessary. I think they probably are. But yet again: because something is the least bad thing doesn’t make it right.
Here’s how I’m thinking about the attacks.
There’s two houses. Each of them has Hamas fighters, as well as civilians.
In the first house, the civilians are hostages, Israeli citizens kidnapped by the fighters.
In the second house, the civilians are Gaza residents who did not volunteer to have Hamas fighters in their house.
If the IDF treats these houses with identical care to protect the lives of the civilians, it may be a necessary evil. If the IDF shows less care to protect the lives of the civilians in the second house, that’s a moral atrocity.
My belief is that the massive US response to 911 was the desired outcome of the attack. It created the circumstances and images that elevated Islamic extremism in the general population of many Muslim regions. It gave the extremists power.
Israel may be being similarly played.
Hamas has committed horrific atrocities. And doing so will create many thousands of martyrs for the ends of Hamas, many who are people who are just victims of circumstance. Images like that photo will, within the month, be getting more media play than what Hamas did. They (or those of similar thoughts and desires) will as a result soon be in control of the West Bank area as well.
Oh, this was absolutely the plan of the leaders of Hamas, safe in their hotel rooms. They want Palestinians to be killed, so they can use this to get more money from their propaganda campaigns.
They may not be able to protect the lives of civilians in either house.
I was watching one IDF spokesperson (probably a senior officer if I recall correctly) being interviewed on CNN or CBC stating that we have to think of Gaza as two layers - an upper layer with a mix of building types and a lower layer filled with tunnels and fortifications etc. According to him, IDF wasn’t going to do anything indiscriminate, rather it was basically going through the first layer to destroy all the stuff in the lower layer.
Cynically, it sounds like a rationale to carpet bomb the whole place, if that spokesperson was accurate.
Which is a reasonable argument as far as it goes. Invariably, though, it seems the people who make this argument do so to defend current Israeli policy, which is not just not removing settlements but rapidly expanding them.
Exactly what should be done about the existing settlements is a difficult question, but “Should we keep building more of these?” definitely shouldn’t be.
“It would be very difficult for Israel to get out of that hole, so clearly they have no choice but to keep digging”.
But part of that withdrawal from Gaza was the decision by Israeli leaders to tolerate and even secretly (sort of) support Hamas’ takeover of the region, correct? That should be considered the true catastrophic mistake (or at least one of them) of Israeli leaders’ Gaza policy, right?
He was surely describing what IDF ground forces would be doing when they go in.
Israel apparently neither confirming or denying.
Presumptively to block arms getting from Iran to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon let alone elsewhere?
Does it risk escalation in any way?
I’m baffled that that happened like 6-8 hours ago and I can’t see any news stories following up on the original reports. Seems like that should be a pretty big deal.
It was briefly discussed in the Breaking News thread too.
A pipe dream, but would it make a difference if Qatar captured/arrested Hamas leadership in their country and turned them over to an international organization to stand trial?
Haven’t there been diplomatic crises over this, e.g. the one in 2017? Qatar will not do that because does it not regard Hamas as a terrorist organization. Nor does Brazil or Switzerland.
Sure. Just like in Germany in WW2- some were anti-Hitler or too young to take a side. But the USA still bombed the shit out of Germany, and the Brits firebombed Dresden.
We did blame the Germans and the Imperial Japanese as a whole.
Did we commit Genocide against the Axis in WW2?
What is the alternative?