If you think it's acceptable to kill people who's lands you are stealing, that's your problem — Manuel

Actually, it is much easier to steal someone's land if they are dead first. Just saying, from a practical perspective, dead people do not object.

To be killed in such a brutal manner, for mere political theatre is digusting. — Manuel

Do you have a more preferred reason for being killed? Just wondering.

Cease US military & economic support and NATO/EU silent acquiescence of the State of Israel immediately, so that the Israelis will have very strong incentives to honestly, earnestly, wrestle with the devil in the details on the ground in order to make hard, bitter "peace" with the PA/Hamas. Sweeten the pot with US/EU "Marshall Plan"-style rebuilding and subsidy of any negotiated State of Palestine (& especially the Palestinian refugee settlements in Jordan & Lebanon and those governments) and only then resume support of Israel once both parties have implemented a series of "good faith" measures to "secure the peace" (e.g. NO right of return for Palestinians ... joint-US/Israel/Arab League control of Jerusalem ... IMMEDIATE REMOVAL of Israeli settlements (occupation of Palestinian territories) back to pre-1967 War borders ... NO international/UN peacekeepers). Those seem to be – always have been – the essential elements, IMO, needed to begin this process.

Do you have a more preferred reason for being killed? Just wondering. — Book273

You think that among the reasons a person could die or be killed from, political calculations for a group of politicians is particularly noble or decent?

The point is that these murders are particularly onerous, given the situation.

Defending one's home or family and dying for them seems to me to be as good a reason as possible for dying. But killing people in the largest open air prison in the world is pathetic.

All I find hateful is Hamas and their insistence on the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. The "occupation" can be negotiated and Israel has made concessions in the past such as removing settlements and withdrawing the army from Gaza. Right or wrong, that territory was won by Israel in a defensive war.

Accept Israel's right to exist and we precede from there and negotiate like civilized people. Reject it and it's permanent war. Hamas chooses the latter. Smart, forward-looking Palestinians choose the former.

so that the Israelis will have very strong incentives to honestly, earnestly, wrestle with the devil in the details on the ground in order to make hard, bitter "peace" with the PA/Hamas. — 180 Proof

It seems to me that's what they've been doing for 73 years. But your way and see how it goes. Do you suppose what I call the neighbors, the other state actors - all of them - are going to let it happen? I think they're committed to the destruction/annihilation of Israel and all things Israeli, and probably Jewish. Or in another words, what in your plan protects the Israelis? They have their bombs, one supposes, but no one wants it to come to that, do they?

I have in mind my lifetime's news of every disgusting thing Arab neighbor terrorists have done, and every disgusting excuse they've given for doing it, and the inevitably of their doing it again no matter what. Are they-all done with that? Is Hamas done with that? Is Iran done with that? And so forth.

My view, if they have to war, make it war, and make it for peace. And if needs be, death and destruction on those who obstruct peace - in their homes and not Palestinian homes. Or maybe that's too just a fantasy.

All I find hateful is Hamas and their insistence on the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. — BitconnectCarlos

As distinct from the actual destruction of the Palestinian people, whose destitution at the hands of Israel you have consistently ignored and or excused.

I feel bad for the Palestinian people but when the ruling body in Gaza refuses to accept the existence of its much more powerful neighbor & launches lethal attacks that's gonna end up hurting the people when the retaliation comes, just as Hitler's regime left the German people endangered.

I still haven't heard you talk about the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Arabs between '48-'72, by the way.

I feel bad for the Palestinian people — BitconnectCarlos

Your 'feelings' are just about the most irrelevant possible objects of discussion right now. In any case your words of lip service are belied at every turn by what you continually say.

I still haven't heard you talk about the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Arabs between '48-'72, by the way. — BitconnectCarlos

Yes, you'd do everything you can to change the subject to further ignore actual suffering taking place in real time at the hands of current-day Israeli murder. You're as transparent as the air in your head is thick.

Stupid argument. Rhetoric, no matter how hateful, is not fait accompli. You've previously boasted that the Jewish people are "indigenous" to that land; what about the Canaanites? and Joshua's offensive war of genocide and ethnic cleansing against them? "Teleological suspension of the ethical?" (Theodicy?) :roll:

Ethical-Existential tip, Bitcon: the ends never justify the means in the long run where those means undermine – e.g. performatively self-contradict – said ends. Ergo, eighteen centuries of Jewish diaspora following several centuries of both Babylonian exile and Roman domination. A lesson from the Torah – it's exceedingly hard, even futile, to try to keep what was stolen by unprovoked mass murder. As Rabbis Buber & Heschel repeatedly make clear: zionism without justice is nothing but fascism. :fire:

No you don't, because you're a racist shit. Y — StreetlightX

Says the person who doesn't even believe in letting other societies rule in their own way and set their own national policies based on their own unique histories and cultures.

I'm not even going to accuse you of being a racist here; I honestly think you just don't like humanity. Like...at all. You have absolutely zero respect for other cultures or traditions, and your fundamentalism isn't far from the Taliban blowing up ancient Buddhist statues. Same level of respect for others.

I'm not even going to accuse you of being a racist here; I honestly think you just don't like humanity. Like...at all. You have absolutely zero respect for other cultures or traditions, — BitconnectCarlos

Says the person whose sole objective in this thread is to excuse genocide. If that's the 'culture' you'd like to 'respect' then I hope to hell it is universally 'disrespected'. I am fundamentalist about the rejection of Israeli state terrorism.

It seems to me that's what they've been doing for 73 years. — tim wood

They haven't been doing shit for peace, just security, since 1967. That's when Israel became a US client-state in the Cold War. Begin fell into the realpolitik embrace completely. Almost three decades later, after the Soviet collapse, Rabin tried to loosen for good the reciprocal Arab-Israeli death grip but was assassinated for his strategic prudence and moral courage by a (deranged?) Israeli rightwinger. And here we still are, almost three decades on from there, the State of Israel remains an even more fascistic US client-state.

Says the person whose sole objective in this thread is to excuse genocide. — StreetlightX

There is no genocide. Never has been. What ever happened to our discussion about America's ongoing genocide against its own minorities? Now that should be news, why not start a thread on it?

What a p_o_s you are? :shade:

Streetlight quoted a thinker earlier who basically defined genocide not as the actual extermination of a people, but as the erosion of their social institutions. Under that definition virtually everything is genocide.

There is no genocide. Never has been. What ever happened to our discussion about America's ongoing genocide against its own minorities? — BitconnectCarlos

Genocide denial and more attempts to change the subject. Nice.

Why haven't you acknowledged the attempted genocide of Jews by Hamas? How about by the rest of the Arab countries? How about the slow, gradual genocide of virtually every minority by its host country? Everything is genocide today.

And yet more attempts to change the subject. Your apologetics is tired. You've chosen to stand with war criminals and apartheid mongers. You're a moral vaccum.

I think being killed for any reason is less than desirable, which was my point. Your response suggested that the reason for them being killed was what should be objected to, not so much that they were being killed. I will try to be less circumspect in the future.

People keep using that word "genocide", I think they should read the actual definition first, might reduce the use of it.

They could but that would require an IQ over 70.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gaza-israel-airstrike-family-omar-b1848193.html
But this doesn't matter to Bitconnect because he thinks it's about sides and he's already taken his. Moral vacuum, exactly.

Here it is again for those in the cheap seats:

More often [genocide] refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight. The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feelings and their religion. It may be accomplished by wiping out all basis of personal security, liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the machine gun can always be utilized as a last resort. Genocide is directed against a national group as an entity and the attack on individuals is only secondary to the annihilation of the national group to which they belong. —

Raphael Lemkin

You couldn't sum up what is happening to the Palestinian people by way of Israeli agency better than this if you tried.

"The baby was found clutching his dead mother’s chest when the first responders in Gaza dug him out from underneath the rubble of a three-storey building.

In a split second 11 members of the Palestinian family, who had gathered for Eid, were buried by the giant claw of an Israeli airstrike.

The remains of the building in Gaza’s Shati refugee camp were strewn with children’s toys, a Monopoly board game and plates of uneaten food from the holiday gathering.

In total 10 were dead: eight children and their two mothers, who were sisters-in-law.

But by some miracle there was a cry: five-month-old Omar, the youngest, was alive.

“What had they done to the Israelis to be targeted while wearing their special Eid clothes as they sat in their uncle’s house?” the distraught father Mohamed al-Hadidi, asked The Independent, from Shifa hospital where his son was being treated.

“They are only children, they haven’t fired rockets, ” he added, breaking down.

“Except Omar, I lost my entire family, in an instant.”

A mass slaughter of civilians, many of them children, by an absolutely dominant occupier as a form of deliberate collective punishment. If you can't step out of your partisan stance and see this for the inexcusable moral wrong it is and continue to distract with whatsboutism, you are just missing something human.

Yeah sure, being killed is trivially, not good. Within the possible reasons for why one could be killed, there's some room for honor, altruism and the like.

What Israel is doing now is horrific and senseless. They are not even winning any favors in the PR department outside of fooling themselves. If they continue like this, there will come a time when even the US elite can't put up with it anymore, if only to save face.

From this point to whenever that may happen, will take lots of senseless deaths.

Damn.

I don't know how'd I'd live after something like that. No words.

Of course Israel was just defending itself against those terrorist children in the refugee camp. The bombers did nothing wrong. Just ask @BitconnectCarlos.

The way I've heard it put is that every building leveled is retroactively Hamas so that makes it OK.

I believe the surviving baby is Hamas too, so they should probably go in and finish the job. Like, literally this is the logic of apologists like @BitconnectCarlos. And then he'll ask you why you care, are you an Arab? It's beyond comprehension.