#shut the FUCK up about Hamas and LOOK at what israel has DONE to the Palestinian people and FREE PALESTINE DAMNIT

[timeisacephalopod]

Admittedly I don't know much about the Israel Palestine war but I keep seeing news articles that refer to it as the Israel Hamas war and no it is not. After all Israel has done it gets to be referred to by it's country name and not "terrorists who kill babies and children at the speed of light" but Palestine gets reduced to Hamas?

It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the struggle of the Palestinian people keeps getting reduced to the existence of Hamas, but at no point does the ongoing state violence of Israel define its existence when by all means it should when my understanding is that the creation of Israel was stealing land from Palestinians. Why is Israel's violence ignored while Palestine is defined by the admittedly shit group that only arose out of decades of occupation and imperialism? Those two things are not the same and ignoring Israel's violence to act like Hamas came from nowhere just to hurt the poor Israeli government who acts like they've done nothing wrong is ridiculous to me.

[hero-israel]

Can i just say I am so sick and tired of people claiming genocide. I mean with saying Israel is committing genocide on Palestinians right now. Every time I see it I want to scream. This is one of the numerous reasons why the pro palestine movement sucks. They can't just say something is bad, focus on real grievances. Instead they have to exaggerate and claim everything is the worst possible version. They can't just say "palestinian civilians are suffering," or even "excessive civilian deaths." No. they have to claim genocide.

it’s disgusting. they are appropriating terms and watering them down in the process. genocide is a very real horrific problem that is ACTUALLY happening to people right now... and they have to claim that term for their situation because why? to paint israel/israelis as the ultimate evil? to claim this issue is the worst ever and insist everyone else drop everything and only care about this? to add more emphasis on their lies and propaganda of israel being a colonial empire practicing apartheid? intentional flipping because they know Jews have been victim to genocide (we see this more explicitly when they compare Israel in this war to nazis)?

Maybe part of it is that if israel is responsible for genocide, then there’s no need to acknowledge how HAMAS and their actions play a significant role in palestinian suffering? (It can't be that hamas steals aid for civilians, no it must be 100% israel’s fault and only theirs! Also joe Biden I guess! /sarcasm)

No matter what, it’s a cynical ploy and absolutely disgusting.

In some ways it reminds me of how people online have taken terms like “trigger,” “gaslight,” and more, and completely twisted and watered down their meaning, turned it all into a joke ... except obviously much worse, here.

what really grinds me up is seeing how many people are buying into this. especially gen z. I am so done with my generation honestly. im ashamed to be associated with these people. part of me doesn't get it. im not jewish. and i try my best not to be antisemitic, educate myself. it does take work, but also it’s NOT THAT HARD to just NOT post completely unverified stuff, NOT absorb your news from social media, NOT give accusations of genocide without doing any research, bothering to learn about historical context, actually understanding what experts say and explanations why it is not genocide? And most of all actually LISTEN to jewish people when they talk about their own history and heritage?

Im not saying this to say im so great, in fact it's the opposite: what im doing is nothing special and amazing. it's really BASIC. yet SO MANY PEOPLE fail this??? what the fuck????

I understand people cannot educate themselves on literally very single topic. But then if they are ignorant, then they should just SHUT UP and not weigh on something they didn't take the work to understand. That is not hard!!!! NOT casually throwing around accusations of genocide should be the bare minimum and yet here we are.

All of the above. I am sorry you are dealing with this from so many among your cohort, and deeply appreciate your commitment as a non-Jew to resisting the new Christ-killer / stab-in-the-back mythology. It will continue to be difficult. For decades - for CENTURIES - all the wealthiest and most educated people in societies worldwide "knew" the Jews were guilty of these terrible things.

Derek Chauvin was convicted of the second- and third-degree murder of George Floyd. There were people at that time who were upset he hadn't been nailed for first-degree murder - he was obviously guilty! Look what a horrible thing he did! Get him for everything! But there actually really are different standards of evidence for different crimes and if prosecutors had tried to go for that one they would have lost.

I don't doubt for an instant that the IDF has committed multiple war crimes during this entirely preventable, entirely pointless cataclysm. But people are racing past the crimes that are clearly visible and could be supported by evidence because they want - need - HOPE for the very worst one to be true. It is a moral obscenity. And you can tell how much they are enjoying themselves, how fine it feels to be able to invoke genocide against Jews and Uno-reverse that nagging Holocaust card, by how quickly they revert to petty Internet slang to silence counter-arguments: "lol WELL ACTUALLLYYY, so you're JUST ASKING QUESTIONS rite, nice SEALIONING." It is meant to be an inherently, automatically truthful claim, one that the Jew has no right to deny.

The Disputations of our time.

And as we did in the past... we must answer, because not-answering will not help.

[canmom]

the especially crazy-making thing about this 'witnessing a genocide' situation is like...

ok, so there's lots of catastrophes that are genuinely kinda intractable. economics shit, climate change. the problems may be evident but there's lots of room for reasonable disagreement about how to solve them and it's easy to get stuck in a bad equilibrium where the only way out is coordinating an enormous collective action problem and nobody is making any headway. that's one kind of bleak, but at least it's a comprehensibly difficult form of bleak.

i know full well that 'genocide' is a geopolitical football where everyone wants to position what the other guy is doing is a genocide but what you're doing is merely anti-terrorism, assimilation, whatever. this is because the post-wwii consensus is pretty clear cut that genocide is one of the worst things imaginable and one of the only things that really merit going to war.

thus WWII, the official Good War, is retroactively cast as a war to end the Holocaust, even if in practice the Allies were pretty indifferent to what was happening and would turn away refugees, and their solution to the problem of millions of displaced people was to jump on board an ethnonationalist colonialist project that would send them all off to a newly defined 'Jewish state' in a spare country the British happened to have lying around in the Middle East... and well, we're seeing how well that's working out for everyone. subsequent stories of genocide, such as Rwanda, Cambodia, or Bosnia, tend to end with 'and then xyz country invaded and put an end to things and the genocidaires went to court and we put up museums at the mass graves and shot documentary films'. even though the nigh-universal hypocrisy about the subject is rancid, you can at least kind of imagine that there is some pretense that the objective of this whole affair is to stop these kind of mass deaths from happening.

at this point there is no ambiguity that what the Israeli army is doing in Gaza is genocide. they've cut off two million people without food, water, and electricity, shut off their communications, and rained the most sophisticated modern weapons on them indiscriminately for going on three weeks. they've blown up most of their completely overwhelmed medical infrastructure and done everything possible to disrupt it. this war is so one-sided it's not funny, it's just a massacre. Hamas can annoy Israel with rockets but can't do a damn thing to protect the population they're ruling. and there is nowhere for people in Gaza to run to. the border with Egypt is closed. an insultingly tiny trickle of aid has made it in, which will instantly disappear to the orders of magnitude more hungry people.

in short there is no option left besides wait to die.

but, ok. in contrast to all those intractable problems... this one is very simple to solve. Israel could stop dropping bombs whenever they feel like it, and negotiate for whatever they fucking want, e.g. prisoner exchanges. they could let the Palestinians out of the ghetto and dissolve the situation that creates Hamas. they could easily continue to maintain Palestinians as second-class citizens. (look at how lopsided South Africa remains.)

and if they won't, because the country is ruled by fascist maniacs with broad support across the settler population, the US - which has all the leverage in the world - could threaten to hang them out to dry until they call a ceasefire. Israel has so thoroughly made enemies of all its neighbours that they would not last long without that US backing. it needn't even get to that point, if the US said 'stop' and made it clear there was any sort of line... Israel might feel it has to do a little damage control and try to look good on camera. maybe hold off on the white phosphorous. leave a few houses standing.

but none of that is happening. none of it.

it seems like the ground invasion will be starting. it might be well underway when i wake up.

despite the 'simplicity', it's still not at all clear what one little human can do about it. if i go to a protest tomorrow, for the symbolic gesture of "having done something" if nothing else, maybe it will make me feel better, but the most likely immediate outcome is that the government (currently going through a rape scandal, i love the uk) is going to step up its internal repression of Muslims. somehow, the idea that the people are displeased with their democratically elected agents won't factor into it. the protestors become 'other' by virtue of protesting, another problem to control.

it's common to ask 'what would you have done if you lived in Germany (or Poland) during the Holocaust?' a lot of people imagine they'd be heroes, hiding Jewish people in their attic or becoming partisans in the woods or whatever. in practice, history suggests that most people would have gone along with it without much complaint, or even taken the opportunity to steal from the victims, moving into vacant houses, taking over companies, even helping the Nazis round people up.

i must not become an inner emigré. doing nothing when i could have done something is unacceptable. but what i feel, faced with this situation, is pathetically impotent.

i feel so sick.

[carcass-confessions]

Things I've learned from my dad on the car ride home after getting flowers for mothers day:

Israel has done nothing wrong, they're America's best ally

The IOF hasn't been slaughtering and/or raping civilians, that's just propaganda, in fact it's entirely hamas doing the raping and killing

Children aren't dying, that's just propaganda

All the college student protestors are secretly being organized by some unknown higher power

(In fact, most of the protestors aren't even students)

"My generation" is just naive and wants any excuse to jump on innocents because of mob mentality

The police aren't shooting rubber bullets, that's just not true, why would the police use excessive force against some dumb college students

Hospitals were never bombed because Israel said so and they're our greatest ally

Yeah there's good and bad on both sides but it's a war, that happens, and besides, hamas attacked first so anything Israel does is justified

Rafah isn't being bombed, that's propaganda

There's no famine, that's propaganda

Israel is actually the ONLY democratic country in the entire region, so they're the Good Guys

he's In The Know and is very involved in national security so he knows everything about The Situation TM

Protestors are never violent or even disruptive if they want to prove a point, that's counterintuitive, just look at Martin Luther King Jr, he was TOTALLY peaceful.

I don't know how the FUCK I'm supposed to argue with this man when not only does he just not accept any piece of evidence I provide, but I get way too emotional and can barely talk through tears let alone REMEMBER anything specific enough to make me sound at least a little informed.

And then he says I need to stop shutting down and giving up the moment someone has an opposing viewpoint, and "what this country needs is calm civil discussions" as if there isn't a literal genocide, which you cannot be neutral about

[wack-ashimself]

This bullshit on is-(it)-real is tiring. No joke, they had....10 major articles about it, all pro israel, but with a few patterns that showed their biasedness.

1-they ALWAYS blamed hamas, and almost refuse to ever say Palestinians or the country of Palestine. They always say West Bank or Gaza. Where is hamas based out of? MAGIC-ville? Like in real time, they are white washing history....acting like the place they are attacking isn't there...and soon, it won't be.

2-they regularly try to tie in ANYONE from another country visiting or who have dual citizenship that are in the war zones, basically guilting the countries to get involved too. WHY? israel has been slaughtering Palestine for decades. They have every-single-advanatage but they constantly act like THEY are the ones being bullied. CRUNCH THE NUMBERS-you killed over 2000 Palestinian kids since 2020. YOU KNOW THEY HAVEN'T EVEN TOUCHED THAT IN TOTAL KILLS AGAINST ALL OF ISRAEL. I know. I pay attention. They kill even 2 israeli soldiers, IT MAKES NEWS EVERY TIME.

3-They are releasing REAL UNEDITED video of stuff they claimed hamas did. That is fair: we should have to see the dark sides of war, in full, if WE ARE PAYING FOR IT (BILLIONS TO ISRAEL EVERY YEAR. NEVER ONCE TRULY STOPPED). However...I have seen fucked up shit israel has done to Palestine for...20 years. I HAVE SEEN SOME SHIT. But NOW when israel is attacking IN FULL RAGE MODE, they play the sympathy card? Palestine has begged for aid for decades, with regular video evidence of dead babies, but YOU THINK YOU CAN PLAY THAT CARD NOW?! HYPOCRITES. Fucking israel is ran by hypocrites. Especially their fucking media.

It just pisses me off cuz it ignores who is doing most of the killing, has all the money, cuts off their resources and emergency aid, then tries any small and stupid way to look innocent or defenseless when that is not even close to the case. YOU can shut off resources they require to survive; in no form can they do that to you. HYPOCRITES. FUCKING HYPOCRITES! Lying, selfish, cruel hypocrites. Fuck all zionists.

<and again, for all the stupid fucks in the back. zionists=people who believe in the state of israel AND its' superiority AND in their right to kill anyone they feel is in their way of their rights. Tell me how ANY OF THAT is a good thing? Sound like NAZIS. Cuz zionsists are the new nazis. And that's isn't anti Semite. Tried of that bull shit. Tons of smart great people who are Jewish do NO support israel CUZ THEY HAVE SOULS. I love those Jewish people. I hate anyone of any background that blindly supports israel & what they are doing. Because that's what zionists do: support israel's ethnic cleaning. Then the try to make it sound like you're hating certain people. No. Fuck, I even wish the best for Israelis but (like the USA I live in) FUCK THEIR GOVERNMENT TO HELL AND ANYONE WHO BLINDLY SUPPORTS IT. ...I mean, we, the USA, basically GAVE israel nukes.....WE ARE THE BAD GUYS TOO.)>

[chargetheintruder]

The second biggest threat in 2024.

Short version: lots of Americans in general and lots of Democrats in particular are feeling poorer than we were, thanks to lapsed and betrayed benefits. Meaning: yes, having the corrupt and back-biting Supreme Court push people off of a cliff with regards to student loan relief didn't help, but it runs deeper than this.

It's that AND the engineered expiring of Trump's "tax breaks" for the middle class during Biden's term, and also this:

Meaning people feel like they're losing money hand over fist, regardless of how well people might be doing in the workplace.

And yes, it's the Second Biggest issue since it isn't about a) putting Trump behind bars and disqualifying him from further political office (remember the 14th Amendment) and also stuffing the Supreme Court until it gets back on the damned team again, OR b) doing whatever it takes to keep World War III, As Usual, from breaking out in the Middle East over Israeli business (and yes, it's complicated and a mess, but the short of it is (i) Israel has no business even remotely looking or sounding fascist at any given time, while (ii) Hamas and Palestinians really could learn how to be a civil society and NOT just constantly attack and kill people like the REST OF the Middle Fucking East).

What I'm saying is: I can wrap my tired brain around the Second Biggest Issue. I can imagine our doing something about it. Trump's not going to go to or stay in prison until or unless we stuff the Supreme Court and also throw the entire book at him, 14th Amendment and all. And we've all, as human beings, completely blown the last three good chances we had at peace between Israel and anyone else? Yeah.

So, here's the deal with the Second Biggest Issue. Congress in general and the Traitor Party in the House in particular just needs to get rolled the fuck over. It's that simple: everyone needs to be grabbed roughly as fuck by their shortest short hairs and brought back ON the team already, if only because the rest of the world is so fucked up that WE have to be a rational neighbor if not role model for them.

And in the medium-term this means finding ways (without engineering a new pandemic, mind you) to force the issues on a) Student Loan Debt Relief, wherever possible, since it was promised until Harlan Crow's sleeper muppets on that "Supreme Court" decided to be fucking traitors, and b) rreforming and funding the hell out of expanding Social Security until people on it are no longer in abject poverty. Yes, two high-risk and high-profile goals at once, I get it.

But to be candid, I can't think of much else that would give President Joe Is Still Biden some honest-to-God, "sit down and SHUT UP" Points to use against whatever Trump Muppet he faces in 2024. And as for having those points already, versus Congress? There's already plenty of blackmail material that can be coughed up against ANY Congressman, it's just a question of how willing you have to be to go IN on everyone as roughly as possible.

And there's the issue: is there the will and manpower to actually put a gun to everybody's head in Congress until actual good work and budgeting gets done? I doubt it. But to be candid? We had two solid years of control of the Congress and they STILL didn't deliver the goods. They still didn't act aggressively in the best interests of this Union and her people. Nope, not even post-January 6th.

What I'm saying is: it's not just corruption. It's not just the unfettered psychosis of the Reich Wingers in the House.

It's that the people who say they represent the actual majority of this nation literally refuse to act like it time and again even when they can. At this point I'm assuming your average Democratic Congressman has some form of Stockholm Syndrome and literally will not act in the best interest of the American People who voted for them, nope, not until or unless they can "get brownie points" by sucking Traitor Party off somehow. It's appalling and ridiculous.

It is. It's appalling and ridiculous that I have to cyberbully and threaten folks and demand a coup'd'etat, of all things, just to get anything to work properly? Yeah. But here we are now, and the Media's looking for excuses, any excuses, to betray the President and to let the Head Traitor out of the cage before he's even in it.