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Oct 18, 2023
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J. Andres Hannah-Suarez's avatar

The utter moral blindness is astonishing.

I've had the same issue recently with people I consider(ed) friends making ridiculous comments. One has now permanent blocked me on FB because I kept fact checking his statements, often literally encouraging the Israeli blockade of water, food, electricity, fuel, and even medical supplies, "until Hamas returns the hostages". Buddy didn't like when I pointed out that collective punishments are a war crime.

The buddy that REALLY astonished me is a criminal defence lawyer who is normaly a vocal advocate for the disadvantaged. And I've been making 6+ FB posts on the war since it started.

The ONE comment he replies to is the famous clip where an English Sky reporter asks a former Israeli PM what he has to say about the fact that Palestinians in incubators will die without electricity, and said former PM replied something to the effect of: "Are you fucking kidding me asking about Palestinian civilians? We're fighting Nazis here."

This guy's response (and this is a different person from the dude who blocked me), was to repeat that the blockage will end when Hamas turns over the hostages.

He went on to make more ludicrous claims like that the Israeli government gave Palestinians a full week to evacuate to Egypt. I of course pointed out:

1) Ummm no, Israel immediately started air attacks, they dropped 6k bombs in 48 hours

2) Israel didn't even bother to clear the plan with Egypt (and bombed the Palestinian side of the border more than once) so it wasn't a serious idea.

3) Asking civilians of a certain ethnicity to clear a geographic area they've been residing in for years, decades, millenia even, meets one of the definitions of "ethnic cleansing" under international law.

Rather than say, consider the arguments, I got really glib responses including:

"Stop being a child"

And weirder still, direct quote: "Of course, the Jew is always wrong." (he's Jewish for context, lol he didn't just add that for no reason)

Obviously, I was very puzzled by a random, strongly implied accusation of antiSemtism.

I'm hoping that as time progresses, the emotional reaction to the horrendous Hamas attack will steady out to at least get to a point where we all at least agree that there are no civilian Palestinian baby Nazis who deserve to die in incubators.

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