Oh Victor, is it really that hard to go a few hours without posting something deplorable?

Of course you do; that is your whole online persona. You are basically a fifteen year old kid trapped in a middle aged man's body. There is no nuance to your views, just basically "big guy bad, small guy good", as if you were watching a Saturday morning cartoon based on a comic book series.

Yeah, he's definitely pro democracy, coherently and invariably.

I understand mite makes right often in life. I totally get it you see the problem at hand is the game some pro Israel people play. They act like Israeli is a western style democracy when it is more like an authoritarian theocracy. these conversations go better if pro Israel people were more honest and many of them are but some of them are not.

Often what pro Israel people do is they start talking about Muslim countries. I don’t know if it’s like a distraction or something but it’s bizarre because the greatest enemy Jews ever faced was in the 1940s from White Christians who committed the holocaust.


OK there’s over 50 Muslim majority countries some like Albania have a history of atheism and communism others like Saudi Arabia and Iran are Islamic

Iran is a very authoritarian Islamic country That is the most sanctioned country in the world. Yet some pro Israel people claim Israel is unfairly picked on, it just doesn’t hold up to fax.

And the other issue is the idea that there’s no terrorism from Israel when provably there is ….from settler terror to people like this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Goldstein

Same as some of the Hamas ^

Finally historically speaking much of the Palestinian resistance has been secular or led by Christians like George Hasbah…. The big difference today is Israel has the best weapons and military and Gaza has rocks and AK-47s.

Back in 1948 and the 1960s the IDF was facing somewhat of a similar military in the arab Israel wars.. but now it is totally lopsided in favor of Israel.

Thank God the Islamofascists are the underdogs. The last thing this world needs is for the favorites to be the ones that throw gay people off of buildings and keep their wives as illiterate sex slave prisoners in their own homes. It is bad enough this goes on in the loser countries.

Those of us who value liberalism, human rights and civil right protections for women and minorities need to be vigilant to make sure Islamofascists never become the favorites.

Hospital I enjoy your posting; but I dont think the evidence actually backs up your argument. I am pretty sure any measure of "liberalism" or "freedom" Israel would score much higher than 95% of Muslim majority countries. Even the charges against Israel that clearly have merit, eg. "Apartheid" treatment of Palestinians in West Bank, you see plenty of comparable examples in the Muslim World, if not worse.

Pakistan just displaced almost 2 million Afghanis, bulldozed their homes, and told them to get the **** out. Janjaweed Jihadis are committed straight massacres in Darfur. Countries like Iraq and Syria are waging active genocide against non Muslim minorities. Even the Gulf Coast countries are clearly Apartheid with very different rules for locals, wealthy foreign workers, and poor manual workers who are basically just slaves. And that is the dimension where Israel fares worse.

Any other measure of liberalism (gender inequality index, human freedom index, LGB rights, press freedom) it destroys 95% of Muslim countries. I'll take your word for it Albania is some big exception, but exceptions make the rule, they dont invalidate it.

Even if all the arguments against Israel were valid (questionable) that still doesn't mean Muslim countries aren't generally worse. And all the evidence points to that being the case.

Again, I'll take your word for it that some point in history the Palestinian resistance was secular. But right now in the Gaza Strip it is 100% Islamofascist, and that is what matters for this conflict.

Israel helped fund Hamas tho as a bulwark against the plo

And I’ve already said Israel is more liberal compared to most Muslim majority countries. With exception to maybe two or three, so it doesn’t look like we disagree on Much

As always, the key point is these Muslim majority countries you talk about don’t identify as western liberal, but Israel at least some of their government plays the game in trying to identify as a western democracy when they are not.

The other key point is some pro Israel people claim that Israel is unfairly picked on, but that’s simply cannot be the case look at the most sanctioned country in the world. It is the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I don’t think it’s accurate. That 60ish number is people in some kind of leadership position. We don’t know how many fighters have died but I can’t imagine some portion of that 10,000 doesn’t include them. I think at least 1,000 were killed immediately after the Oct 7 massacre.

I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re getting at with the hostages? That this necessitates the kind of war Israel has been waging? I don’t think that follows if that’s what you mean. I agree that the status quo of rocket fire is not acceptable but this kind of response from Israel is not to that but rather Oct 7. I don’t think we can retroactively say it’s now because of rockets as well when Israel has been weathering rocket fire for some time.

I absolutely agree that on a long enough time line, Hamas left to its own devices would try something of similar scale again. That’s not the point I’m making though. I don’t think Israel should just stop pursuing Hamas and move on. In the near term, with Israel’s undivided attention, the odds of Hamas being able to carry out another large attack seems incredibly low. It took a combination of years of planning and a long chain of mistakes from Israel for the first one to be successful. Given that, I think they have other options for attacking Hamas that are less destructive. They’re not under some time pressure that if they don’t act immediately Hamas will overrun Israel.

As for your beliefs about the intentions of those in power in the Israeli government, I think you can look to the policies and language of some even before this attack to understand limiting Palestinian suffering and death is not a priority for at least some of them. There are prominent members of Netanyahu’s government who are openly racist and have long called for complete annexation of the West Bank. A government serious about limiting harm to Palestinians would have dealt with the settler issue a long time ago.

Do you open carry long guns into Starbucks? Seems like a similar mentality as expressed in your post.

Your post conveys total paranoid delusion about how the world works. Iranian leaders have declared nuclear weapons impermissible under Islam. Have you calmly looked at Iran's history of actions? As internally repressive as they are, they are the adults in the region. Do you really think they would commit national suicide by trying to nuke Israel? That's preposterous. The odds ratio of Israel doing that to Iran over Iran doing that to Israel is on the scale of like a 10000/1 in my estimation. Israel is a basket case who could corner themselves into thinking they have to nuke IRan to survive. Iran, on the other hand, refrained from using chemical weapons against IRaq even after Iraq used them on Iran.

The world would be a more stable place if Iran had nuclear weapons as a deterrent to Israel thinking it can take them out and causing endless geopolitical antagonisms to get us to destroy Iran.

I need some help with the logic of Israel's claim to the land itself as their ancestral lands. I've got to be missing something. What is the principle here?

Say I have American Indian heritage. Under the Israeli "logic" should I be able to go to any place in America and "settle" the land as my own? Just walk into someone's living room in Milwaukee and say it's mines now you gotta get out right now don't even pack? Say there is a house I'm not too fond of sitting on some land where some American Indian put a teepee once. Can I just get a caterpillar bulldozer and raze it? What's the difference between that and what Israel has been doing?

If Gaza had unlimited ammunition it would definitely be a problem cleaning up all remnants but they're going to run out and have no way to resupply. They're going down. We'll see if they Allah Akbar (yolo) to the last man or not.

oh look , more disinformation by people in actual government positions

https://twitter.com/ofirgendelman/st...vByfbQYeA&s=19

Israelis are the ones living there right now. The "Indians" in your example are the Palestinians demanding right of return. Which has been the main impetus for their guerrilla war the last 75 years. And I agree, it is absurd. In more peaceful times Yglesias said he was in Jerusalem and talked to some Palestinian activists and asked them if the American Indians should demand their land back and fight for it were told no, and the activists said absolutely they should fight. So here we are.

Israel grabbing land right in the West Bank now isn't much different than what the Muslims have been doing the last 1400 years, that is still ongoing in places like Aizerbaijan, Turkey, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, etc.; except Israel does exponentially less of this than the Muslim countries do.

And no one in the Middle East or the Muslim diaspora in the West has any problems when Muslims take land, so clearly there is no first principle against taking land; they just feel it should be a one way street and they should be the takers 100% of the time, and even 1% the other way is unacceptable.

imagine if someone said this about Israelis. we wouldnt hear the end of it from mets and his ilk.

oh im sure she will get censured for that (/s)

im sure a very verbose response why her statement is acceptable will be posted here.

Virulent antisemite and opponent of Israel, Blinken says Israel actually hasn’t prosecuted this war with the utmost attention to minimizing civilian deaths:


https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/11/10/p...aza/index.html

Yeah you certainly showed your love for Ukraine, consistent as always vic. Or is Russia the poor underdog in your bizarre universe?

You're proving the argument why Palestinians do not get a right of return

This this this

Its a fine diplomatic statement

It was illegal for Americans to fight in the originally Isreal war for independence, but many did, including Paul Reuben's dad

Every single country, empire, civilization, now or back to the beginnings of civilization, was formed after some type of invasion, war, mass migration etc. Lands were stolen, taken by force, just to be taken again by some stronger civilization later on, all the time. Many with lots of killings and atrocities. That's how it works. This whole expectation that we should live in a democratic world where no one does this type of stuff, a world with rules, crimes etc, maybe this is the absurdity.

Think killing another human being for example. Have you ever thought we might consider this wrong just because of religion, religious value? Lots of other mammals have no problem killing their own, e.g. a male polar bear that finds and kills the offspring of some female bear. Then after a while, they just have sex and she gives birth to other bears. And it goes on and on.

And ofc there is a very big hipocrisy here, otherwise countries that consider this wrong, that punishes murderers, wouldn´t ever wage wars abroad. Or specific examples of people going to church every sunday while defending such wars, defending segregation etc. World would be much better if people would just be 100% honest with everyone and with themselves.

It’s more than an empty diplomatic gesture. It proves, as does Israel’s agreement to the current conception of pauses, that unlike what you and others in this thread have advocated, Israel can operate in a way that reduces civilian deaths. They wouldn’t have agreed to pauses and the US wouldn’t be saying they could do more if doing so would actually lead to the existential calamity that people have claimed.