Please, sir, STFU. Much appreciated. — 180 Proof
But yeah, better to leave your racist rantings there. Not that you could do much worse, but that we don’t have to feel so nauseated by being reminded that members of this forum hold such disgusting, callous views. — Mikie
Arab Muslims are far better colonizers than Jews will ever be. They are such good colonizers that the Western world takes it for granted that they must be the original inhabitants of the huge swaths of land they've conquered. The Islamic fundamentalism of Hamas is difficult for the West to wrap its mind around because the mentality is so foreign to us but it's encapsulated in the original 1988 Hamas charter: "Jihad is its path and *death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes."*
Maybe we're the ones in the wrong. What's this brief life on Earth compared with the eternal bliss of the one true Creator, Allah? Live for death, not for life. — BitconnectCarlos
Gaza is a concentration camp whose people have been living with Israeli occupation and terrorism for decades. — Mikie
This is mostly bullshit, though. For the most part, the geographical development of Islam was done by Persians, and it wasn't done violently. Islam was attractive because it served as merchant law throughout Central Asia.
And there's nothing foreign about Muslim extremism. Your bigotry stinks. — frank
The whole reason the Middle East is Islamic is because Arabs formed a deadly army that was able to defeat the floundering empires — schopenhauer1
You cannot just skip over stuff because it's convenient for your argument. — schopenhauer1
I was just answering Bitconnect's claim that Arabs were great colonizers. That's not true. The great Muslim colonizers were Persian. — frank
The Persians still had to be conquered and made it worth their while to "convert" for this to even be a thing, that's all I'm saying. — schopenhauer1
Your solution leaves out the security issue for Palestinians and is a common denial for people's right to self-determination. — Benkei
You, Benkie, and others who are perfectly capable of more precise language are falling back on terms applicable to the Nazi extermination of Jews. — BC
You two, Mikie and @Benkei should be performing at a higher level of expression, especially since you are moderating, — BC
acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group
denounce Israel for establishing itself, — BC
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
— Convention
Meaning is use, and it's no coincidence that the language used to describe the Israeli response is intended to write an ironic and hypocritical narrative of the Jewish experience by comparing today's Israel to yesterday's Nazis. It's an argument of moral equivalence.
The terms bantered about here like genocide and concentration camps bear no resemblance to what those terms mean to Jews, and we cannot pretend they are not being used sardonically and intentionally to say "you escaped persecution only to be like those you escaped." — Hanover
What exactly is your point? Is it that October 7th gets a pass because of something that happened before October 7th? How exactly does that work?If you don't know the history of Palestine after WWI then you're just willfully ignorant. — Vaskane
First step is getting Netanyahu out of office. — schopenhauer1
Another thing to consider is, I wonder what it would take for the Gazans to hand over Hamas. — schopenhauer1
So apparently not everything that the Gulf States gave their weren't put into building tunnels.This is the Gaza "concentration camp" prior to the recent war: — Hanover
I've lost count how many times the Palestinian areas have been built by outside money just for Israel to destroy the buildings as "terrorist strongholds". — ssu
Netanyahu might go at some time, but I think the real problem is the extreme right, people like Smotrich and others. They won't go away and the moderates in Israel are few without much support. The Labor party is a tiny opposition party. People that push for the "From the Sea to the River"-soluntion without the Palestinians and are totally against any kind of Palestinian sovereignty do have a lot of power. And from their viewpoint, why not?
Equally difficult is the Palestinian politics. Democratic elections might give authority, but I think with the current environment and actions of the IDF, that might also not get elected the kind of people that we Westerners would assume to solve the situation. — ssu
Equally difficult is the Palestinian politics. Democratic elections might give authority, but I think with the current environment and actions of the IDF, that might also not get elected the kind of people that we Westerners would assume to solve the situation. — ssu
I've lost count how many times the Palestinian areas have been built by outside money just for Israel to destroy the buildings as "terrorist strongholds". — ssu
Just curious when is there a distinction between genocide and simply the consequences of war itself? Was the carpet bombing of North Vietnam genocide or bad war policy? Was the bombing of Berlin genocide or how the strategic goals of the war were carried out in order to gain unconditional surrender. — schopenhauer1
Rather, the framing of the question should be whether this is the right military strategy, and overall approach to resolving this issue — schopenhauer1
I think rather Hanover is suggesting that rather than dealing in the substance this is using cynical ploys at terminology by so framing this “hypocritical and ironic narrative of moral equivalence”, as he put it. — schopenhauer1
In the case of the various different kinds of bombings of Vietnam and Cambodia (including chemical ones), I think this may qualify as genocide given the sheer scale of mass killings and the decades-long impact of the atrocities. That impact is still felt today. Was the mass killing of civilians intentional? In the case of the Vietnam war, I think so. It's a typical phenomenon seen during counterinsurgencies, where the conventional force grows frustrated with its inability to break the resistance, and turning on the civilian population out of frustration. — Tzeentch
What Western countries have always had a hard time figuring out is how to conduct asymmetrical warfare whereby the enemy hides amidst the population, uses tunnels, and in the case of groups like Isis and Hamas, use a variety of barbaric terrorist methods, no matter the cost to their own people.It’s time for the U.S. to tell Israel to put the following offer on the table to Hamas: total Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, in return for all the Israeli hostages and a permanent cease-fire under international supervision, including U.S., NATO and Arab observers. And no exchange of Palestinians in Israeli jails. — Thomas Friedman
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