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And conversely, I attended a Convention in Las Vegas about 20 years ago where Gerry Adams was a guest Speaker. Roughly 7500 attendees at the convention were informed the Mr. Adams would be shaking hands and taking pictures after he finished his speech. When he finished his remarks and the next speaker was introduced, more than half the attendees were outside of the hall standing in line to press the flesh with the “hero of the struggle’…..

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This is not really the place to go into this issue with the depth and nuance it deserves and I'm not going to. But calling a plain sentence "word salad" doesn't make it one either.

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See this Twitter post for a visual analysis of the NYTimes Home Page from this morning.

https://x.com/Photoonist/status/1715122329393737836?s=20

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WOW----the truth about "X" came out at last,--- about TIME! but-I-guess the "FOOL'S" will beleive almost anything----this shows how "SMART " they ARE NOT! why am I not surprised ? Hmm yes always blame us first . to HELL WITH THE FACTS , besides a headline is a headline ---------no matte!r how WRONG it is. OH WELL! everyone knows how little they know GO FIGURE

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You can see how the truth gets sorted out on Osi Twitter. 8-12 hours before the US news organizations had to acknowledge it.

https://twitter.com/GeoConfirmed/status/1714390254935851272?t=uK51AnywGUvgf_mYhNLdcg&s=19

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How about bacon wrapped in bacon?

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As ticked off as I am about the initial coverage of the Al Ahli Hospital explosion, I'm equally ticked off at myself. I'm supposed to be an educated person. Why did I not stop to think that "Gaza health official" meant "Hamas health official" and that in any case a "health official" is not your go-to source for technical military information (like how an explosion got started)?

I did go around all day thinking "we don't know yet, we don't know yet", but in the part of my brain that doesn't think in sentences, I was preparing for Israel to be the perpetrator.

Turns out eternal vigilance is also the price of not screwing up the critical-thinking thing. And the more emotional and outside-the-pale a situation is, the more careful we need to be. (Yeah, "we"; I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this.)

Something tells me we'll have plenty more chances to practice.

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That was a special period in ensemble comedy. Pardon me, it's time to prepare dinner in my Bass-O-Matic....

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Rashida Tlaib is a Palestinian. I will cut her some slack on this and so should you. Does it surprise you that she would react with her gut at seeing her people slaughtered? Many Palestinians on the ground probably jumped to that conclusion based simply on the fact that Israel is hammering Gaza right now. I myself, after careful consideration initially concluded that it was more likely that the rocket came from Israel. This was based on

a) the erroneous reporting that the blast was too big to have come from a Palestinian rocket and

b) the fact that the official IDF spokesman I saw on MSNBC only denied that Israel would deliberately target hospitals, and did not deny at that time that this particular rocket came from Israel

I thought this meant that the blast was likely fired by Israel by mistake, or that

some rogue military man with an extreme agenda of his own trying to sabotage Biden's attempt to calm things down. I wondered where the evidence was. I was wrong, and very happy to be wrong. Ms. Tlaib is not a "useful idiot" but she, like I, was wrong.

Those fools who celebrated the Hamas attack were idiots and moral dolts. But nobody else is responsible for their action. And even they are not wrong about everything, it remains true that the UN designated Gaza as an "outdoor prison" and that Bibi Netanyahu has pursued for years, a policy of favoring Hamas over the PA on the grounds that this would prevent the Palestinians from coalescing around a statehood. He bears some responsibility for these events, as his plummeting poll numbers indicate.

Enough with the left-bashing. This is not 2001.

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Oct 20, 2023·edited Oct 20, 2023

No, we should not "cut her some slack."

She's not a "Palestinian." She's an American. She took an oath to AMERICA. She represents AMERICANS, not Palestinians.

We do not expect our leaders to react/lead with their "gut" but to be introspective and cautious in their statements.

It's been over a day and a half. It is clear that it wasn't an Israeli bomb. It's clear that a hospital wasn't destroyed. It's clear that 500+ people were not killed.

Yet she continues with the same false claims. This isn't a responsible leader. This is propagandist for a foreign organization.

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So, immigrants from another country must renounce any sympathy they may hold for family and friends in their former country? Interesting concept. Must I renounce any sympathy for my cousin and her family who LIVE in Israel and know people who were killed, simply because I'm American? Must pro-Zionist American Jews renounce THEIR sympathy for their kin in Israel. These cousins are activists for peace. That also exists in Israel. We know much about the victims of the Hamas attack. We have no real idea of the human catastrophe that is going on in Gaza. Nobody here has said the killings of Israeli children were justified.

Propagandists for a foreign organization? Is that not what organizations like AIPAC do?

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founding
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We don’t need to know about your personal issues.

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It is understandable, but it is still not excusable. Bigotry in all forms should be called out. Tlaib's statements can do real damage even if her heart is in the right place (which I'm not convinced it is).

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So butchering children is ok? Because of a different “point of view?”

Interesting take.

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The only thing “ignorant” is trying to understand the “point of view” of people who celebrate the butchering of children.

Please. Tell us why this was OK. Give us all the reasons why burning people alive; tossing grenades into rooms full of unarmed civilians is Ok; why killing whole nurseries full of children was “justified”

GTFO.

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"the current Hamas estimate of 471 dead may still be inflated" (from Ms Young's post)

-----

I keep coming back to this one thought over and over again: why won't Hamas break out the numbers of non-combatant Palestinians and Hamas fighters? I can only surmise that it is because the number of Palestinians *total* dead and wounded make Hamas look like the protectors of the Gazans against the "antagonistic apartheid government of the Zionist state," and Israel as a completely heartless country. The large numbers of Palestinians given by Hamas serves to bring condemnation on Israel and sympathy for *all* Gazans, including the terrorists.

While I know that I will never see it, a breakdown of ordinary Palestinians -- men, women and children -- from Hamas fighters would bring some clarity to the situation. I would also like to see a breakout of Palestinian civilians killed or wounded because Hamas was using them as human shields

The Israeli/Hamas war is asymmetrical, Israel has more soldiers and funding than Hamas, true, but Hamas has blatantly targeted Israeli civilians in violation of international law. When will the useful tools on the American left (I'm looking at you Reps Tlaib and Omar, as well as a whole bunch more) realize and acknowledge that Hamas has no desires to establish a Palestinian homeland: that their openly stated goals are the complete destruction of "the Zionist entity," and the death of all Jews?

Israel has been considerably less than a good neighbor to Gaza (and the West Bank for that matter), but it takes a truly sick mind to blame more than 1400 innocent victims, almost all non-combatants, for their deaths on themselves.

fnord

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Hamas is expert at "managing the narrative". It's easy to forget that though they are fanatics, they also can be quite intelligent, analyse and massage messages to suit their cause. After October 7, they would have been looking for anything to divert the outrage of people throughout the world and the shame of people within the parameters of their movement and the hospital looked just fine. If I was a conspiracy theorist I could even think "PIJ" did this on purpose. One of the skills that comes with media management is understanding the 24 hour, instant news reality today. Wire service reporters fight to be the first to get some tidbit out from a press conference; I've been there so know. An event in a war is just like that - print first and inquire later. Hamas uses this. That means that those being used need to be extra alert, to frame their writing accordingly, make sure headlines don't mislead,, and take care not to be stooges for actors on the political stage.

More broadly, moreover, Hamas' success at managing public opinion has ensnared millions of people the world over into uncritically swallowing their case. The entire "Palestine" issue is crazily skewed and has been for a few generations now. A big picture analysis of what's going on is only now emerging in the mainstream media in the wake of the massacre. It's not just the gullible public that is being used; policy makers too have a lot to answer for.

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And since most of us, if I may paraphrase Charlie today, have the memory of a goldfish, we simply forget about the reason Israel is defending itself; the mass murder of unarmed civilians that happened nine days or so earlier,,,,

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I just want to reiterate something I’ve been saying: if Israel didn’t care about Gazan civilians they would simply raze Gaza by only bombing it from the air, thereby sparing their soldiers, rather than by planning a ground attack.

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founding

RE: NYT headline

The Gray Lady has been around plenty long enough to know better than this. In a situation clouded by shades of gray, that the paper's editors obviously prioritized a narrative over facts in a "rush to publish" concerning a matter of this gravity is beyond shameful. But no blush will be found upon her cheeks anytime soon, since shamelessness in the pursuit of profit in nearly any field, even if it's ostensibly labeled as the pursuit of truth, is simply de rigueur these days.

Sort of puts the lie to the notion that one should always respect one's elders for their experience and wisdom. At least in the (so called) journalism game.

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"One thing I cannot stomach, or support is a bully." Oh GFY you idiotic stooge. your orange god does that all day every day. jesus h

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MTG is half right. We may have a terrorist attack in the USA but it will be a RW domestic group and it will be TFG and MTG's fault for all the fear mongering they have been doing against fellow Americans who refuse to bow down to their "my way is the only way" of thinking. It is so sad they are so blind to their own rhetoric and ignoring the fact the constitutions grants freedom to all citizens and not just the ones that agree with them. They believe in a kingdom and not a free country.

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founding

Ha, we already did, remember Charlottesville? January 6th? Those were terrorist acts, plain and simple. And these clowns were cheering just like the people in Gaza and Arab capitals.

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Charleston. El Paso. Pittsburgh. Allen, Texas. Jacksonville. All right wing terrorist attacks.

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Will someone please put a mussel on MTG?

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