Thank you, even Betselem (israeli human rights org) claims that israel is an apartheid state.
People will also use the holocaust to justify this somehow. Americans are brainwashed since theyre in elementary school by “learning about the holocaust” literally year after year. All this has led to justify any wrongdoings israel has done.
At the end of the day, israel is a colonial entity, its not welcome in the region and will never will be. Hopefully I can live long enough to see its demise, but I know I will die knowing that it will no longer exist in the lifetimes following me.
It’s unnatural and is held up by excessive funding from the West. hopefully they can transition peacefully but until then I view every violent action against them as justified.
They occupied all of south lebanon for 20 years (after the PLO was completely expelled to Algeria). Only violent resistance was able to expel them.
You might identify as a fact vending machine, but don't count on others buying your processed snacks.
> Fact: This began in 1948...
Let's add a breakpoint there. You haven't defined "this", and everyone knows any measure of "this" goes back before 1948. Speaking of 1948, just 3 years after WW2 ended, the Jews who suffered some of the worst death and despair of WW2, were attacked again in 1948 from all sides in the Arab Israel war. Yes we all know the crimes on both sides at that time. But still... Welcome to the neighborhood!
When a country needs an "iron dome" to protect itself from neighbors, the problem is the neighbors, not the ones who built the iron dome.
Wherever you have humans, there's conflict. This pattern repeats in varying degrees everywhere. The idea is to move towards peace, resolution, compromise, and a way out of misery. Pointing fingers at Israel and blaming everything on them is not an exercise in fact-finding.
Oct7 was probably the worst strategic blunder ever. "Look over there, a music festival! Let's gleefully kill, rape and torture! What could go wrong?!"
The rape allegations have not been debunked. The UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict just yesterday announced convincing evidence not just of organized sexual violence on October 7th, but of sexual violence against the hostages themselves, including evidence that such abuse is ongoing. It's been a Twitter talking point for the last 2 weeks that the rape accusations are hoaxes; some of that is the New York Times fault for mishandling a story, and some of it is a credulous alternative media that platforms Syrian genocide deniers, but at any rate: the consensus among serious people seems to be that the sexual violence narrative is substantiated.
This is one of those things that you can probably reasonably debate, if you're extraordinarily careful how you write about it (is it worth it? it's not as if it changes the calculus of how horrible Hamas is), but you can't reasonably claim is "debunked".
(The comment you were replying to was dismissive and uncivil; I'm just taking issue with a specific point you raised.)
While the allegations are credible (off course they are, these are a bunch of violent men brutalizing civilians) they have been far from proven. But what has been pretty much debunked at this point is Hamas using sexual violence as a weapon of war.
We know what using sexual violence as a weapon of war looks like as we have plenty of evidence the Israel army doing exactly that and we have no evidence of Hamas doing it.
> some of that is the New York Times fault for mishandling a story
This is putting it mildly. The NYT propagandized these allegations to support a pro-Israeli narrative. What they did was not only lie about Hamas’ true crimes, but also use a horrible crime—which no doubt some victims of oct. 7 experienced—as a way to justify other horrible crimes, including other sexual violence committed by the IDF in the aftermath.
Nothing about this story has been debunked. Past that, there's no chance we're going to have a useful discussion resolving the issue. The bar we need to clear is simply civility and good faith; the term "debunk", like "misinformation", applied to anything other than things completely discredited, flunks both those tests. When the UN is going out of its way to say that Hamas has and continues to use sexual violence, you may retain the ability to keep debating the issue, but you've lost the use of the word "debunk".
> "The comment you were replying to was dismissive and uncivil"
Fascinating. The person you replied to unleashed a barrage of toxic misinformation, including absurd claims about nobody being tortured on Oct7, and that Israel killed the music festival attendees, among other propaganda nuggets.
They also frame Oct7 as a strategic positive, based on the "killing" of normalized relations between Israel and Arab countries. You replied to a pro-Hamas supporter, basically. I don't want to debate it now, but you were doing well countering the misinformation about the rape allegations, and about "debunking" in general. Then you added an unnecessary evaluation of my post.
Is "more right" even possible? I don't want to be "more right"!
Static charge emerges from the process of disagreement on these and other crisis subjects. Calm diplomacy is main goal but occasionally something unexpectedly ferocious latches to your ankle, and calmly ushering the threat from your ankle becomes the lesser option of a more animated response.
