Sorry, I have neither the time nor the inclination to plow through enormous blocks of words which the writer doesn't even bother to divide into digestible paragraphs.
Sorry, I have neither the time nor the inclination to plow through enormous blocks of words which the writer doesn't even bother to divide into digestible paragraphs.
it sadly speaks much to your requirements that grammer is more important to you than the answers to questions you put...its almost as if you defer to grammer excuse is just a escape to answers you didnt want to hear? :( [i think you never had the inclination to listen to anything i said anyways-so what changed?-winks] :(
Right, like I'm obliged to waste my time and energy and ultimately nod off trying to decipher your self-indulgent bloviating.
.
There are a handful of interminable cranks like you on this site and I'm going to treat you the same way I treat them: From now on, every message I get from you goes directly, unopened and unread, in the trash..
It was clever. You are welcome. I guess you lied, you aren't done after all. Shocker. That easily triggered huh? I see the common traits with an equally easily triggered state of Israel which as it commits genocide also claims to be a victim. Un-real.
Awww nice attempt. You know who the genocidal Hutu extremist government has more in common with in this genocide? The Israeli extremist government. Both like the Nazis before them are indiscriminately massacring civilians in an effort to ethnically cleanse their countries of unwanted civilians. Israel is engaged in genocide. I know, I was on the receiving end of a genocidal government when I was 8 years old in Rwanda. I know what genocide looks like and Israel's conduct today smells and looks like the Hutu government in Rwanda. But you do know that. Thats why you are trying so hard to deflect Israel's ethnic cleansing and genocidal campaign. Did that go according to how you thought it would?
I'm sorry you had to endure actual genocide. But you of all people should be able to tell the real thing from propaganda.
Google almost anything by John Spencer. If you won't listen to an expert like him, there's obviously nothing I or anybody else could ever say or write that would open your eyes.
But if you come across authentic footage of Israelis systematically hacking thousands of helpless civilians to death, or lining them up in pits and shooting them, or herding them into gas chambers, or forcing them into the desert or up into the mountains without food, water, shelter
or medicine - or raping, mutilating, shooting and burning unarmed civilians alive as Hamas triumphantly did on October 7 - please send it to me and I will take it very seriously.
I appreciate your kind thoughts. It is however because I have endured actual genocide, lost my entire extended maternal family that I am calling out the similarities with what the Israeli leadership is doing. Hamas committed a terrorist attack on Israel. The Israeli campaign however started bordering on genocide and has quickly run past that line and is into genocide territory. Each genocide is different. In 1994, people were saying it isn't a genocide because they were no gas chambers in Rwanda. The mistake people make is that they are stuck in the last genocide to see what is going on.
What constitute a genocide is an intent by the state carry out the "deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." Required is intent by the state and execution by its armed forces. Israeli leaders at all levels have uttered comments since October that have demonstrated genocidal intent, the Israeli armed forces have conducted a campaign that has left Gazans civilians without food, water, shelter, or medicine" according to your own statement. Israeli drones have mutilated, shot, burned unarmed civilians, Israeli soldiers have stream lived themselves triumphantly destroying Palestinian homes with inhabitants in them. Everything you allege Hamas did on one day, Israel is doing for seven months and has killed 30 times the same amount of people. Is that how a civilized nation behaves? Reports from human rights organization reports of Israeli troops raping and torturing Palestinians. It is untenable to call this daily evidence propaganda, Israeli claims are increasingly untethered to reality and more and more becoming propaganda.
I am happy to actually have a discussion with you, not sure we will ever agree. The guy you presented is simply not a credible source for this topic. His claims are far more propaganda than actual fact based assertions. He also provides no evidence for his claims. Just speculates. We are far from exchanging evidence. For people to exchange evidence of their claims, they have to first agree on the basic premises. You and I have not even established the basic premises.
Even were I to stipulate to what you are asserting (and experts like John Spencer certainly claim otherwise), the upshot would be that Israel is morally obliged to let Hamas survive to threaten both Israel and any non jihadis in the vicinity.
Moreover, Hamas's strategy of deliberately violating international law to purposely maximize its own side's civilian casualties would become an accepted part of warfare, and Israel's faults would be cited as evidence that resisting organizations like Hamas was too great an evil in and of itself to be tolerable or worthwhile.
So the world would condemn itself to rule by savages because non-savages were forbidden to call their bloody bluff.
Ie, its fault in his view has lain, ironically, in prolonging the war - thereby *increasing* collateral suffering - to satisfy its critics who either don't understand that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." or, for cynical political reasons, don't care.
But If I actually had to choose between having Israel do either what Spencer recommends or what it is currently doing - even if it meant that its leaders were *properly* indicted for war crimes - and giving Hamas and its allies a new and indefinite lease on life, I would accept the former tradeoff. I simply wouldn't want to live in a world where brutality is treated, let alone politically rewarded, as an international norm. I'd rather Israeli leaders were criminally convicted but Hamas and its ilk were soundly defeated than see the latter win.
Realistically, I think Israel will eventually prevail, and I hope Israelis who've committed real, provable crimes are punished. If only because I think the truly fanatical settlers and some of Bibi Netanyahu's coalition partners who coddle or encourage them endanger Israeli social cohesion, not to mention military discipline. (Ben-Gvir, for example, is apparently upset that the IDF doesn't summarily, shoot terrorists (real or suspected) who've already laid down their weapons and surrendered.)
The IDF is a moral professional military organization with also, like any good army, a scattering of disreputable members. The political echelon in Israel today, like many others of its kind has a superabundance of loudmouths. Btw, simply shooting your mouth off intemperately in public after a massacre of your own people, in a manner nonetheless reasonably perceived to be indiscriminately homicidal, may even be a separate war crime if you're a politician with the power tangibly to effect your sentiments. But it's not remotely genocide, though I can understand why it might trigger people who have their own horrible memories.
We're now having a serious debate and I will say I appreciate the fair exchange at this point. I understand your view even if I do not agree with it. I have bad news for you though.
Israel is not going to win this war against Hamas. Precisely because of the brutal nature of the Israeli campaign (John Spencer's assertions aside), it is creating 15 resistant fighters eager to join Hamas for every 1 innocent civilian it kills. It creates about fighter future Hamas fighters for every 1 Hamas militant it kills. With a population of 2 million, Israel will have to kill over 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza to basically win this war of attrition. The world will not stand for this. So what you are left with is a future Hezbollah size and type fighting force in Gaza, probably the West Bank, and now a world that now sees Israel as a brutal terrorist regime in the same manner it viewed Hamas. If anything Palestinian resistance is gaining public support.
So on a strategic level, the Israeli campaign is going to go down in flames as counter effective. All the tactical and operational victories will not be able to overcome the strategic defeat to come. Take it from me, a former U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you don't take it from General David Petraeus who commanded our forces in Iraq.
Those leaders you are dismissing as loudmouths are causing Israel serious damage, but what is even more terrifying are the words that came out of the Israeli defense minister, prime minister, and president. Those you cannot throw away as irrelevant. The first one said "not a single of humanitarian aid to go to 2 million civilians", the second one gave Israeli troops a biblical commandment to wipe of Gaza as they wiped out Amalek. The third one said "there was no single innocent civilian in Gaza". That U.S. pressure has forced Israel to let humanitarian aid in does nothing to erase the actual intent of Israeli leaders. Their statements, when combined with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as well as members of the Knesset, you have a frightening number of senior Israeli leaders giving intent to commit genocide.
The dangers you see as endangering Israeli society will only get worse. The ultra nationalistic Israeli campaign for land and expulsion of Palestinians has caused far more rot in Israel than our leaders and theirs are willing to admit, the same rot that was within the Hutu government that started its own ethnic cleansing campaigns from its 1960 independence movement that culminated in the 1994. The parallels are stunningly similar and Israel will not be able to reverse the march towards insanity. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are the future of Israel.
I'd say you're being way, way too deterministic, even fatalistic. Most Israelis dislike Netanyahu, let alone Ben Gvir. Conversely, you are imputing to Gazans a nihilistic, suicidal fanaticism that was not remotely manifested in Germany or Japan after they were battered in WW2. And of course you're attributing much the same mentality to Israelis. That's obviously not my take on the matter.
The last time Israel was overtaken by messianic zealotry was against the Romans, who destroyed the country. I doubt the majority of Jews intend to channel the ultimately self-destructive impulses of 2000 years ago, much though a minority may fantasize about it.
The idea that killing terrorists only creates more terrorists is also an argument for simply letting terrorists have their way. Talk about suicidal. And don't forget that Israel coddled Hamas for years, even funneling cash into Gaza. Which led directly to October 7. Yet you're now hypothesizing that crushing Hamas instead will breed eternal violence. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But Israel has survived against much greater odds than the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and even Iran. Back in the 1950s and most of the 1960s it had to contend with all the Arab states, plus the Soviet Union. And without the United States. And with but a tiny fraction of its current military and economic power.
Needless to say, your premise that the Israeli government is like the Hutus', is about as plausible from my angle as saying it is like the Third Reich. To be sure, there are risky political currents in Israel, but most of the people with grandiose genocidal dreams are the Palestinian Arabs who haven't abandoned them in 100 years... certainly not the Israeli peaceniks who were slaughtered by Hamas on the Gaza border. But no doubt Hamas targeted them for precisely that reason.
I do hope Sinwar and Haniyeh are not the future of "Palestine," although I don't discount the possibility. But right now a lot of Palestiniians (including the PA) are accusing them of having been Gaza's misfortune. The best way to reinforce that mindset is to ensure that their gunmen don't get away with murder. Of course, a workable "day after" plan would also be nice.
But you should give actual Israelis the benefit of your childhood and adult experiences. Jews can always use another opinion.
Sorry, I have neither the time nor the inclination to plow through enormous blocks of words which the writer doesn't even bother to divide into digestible paragraphs.
Also I'm done with this conversation anyway.
But please have a nice day.
it sadly speaks much to your requirements that grammer is more important to you than the answers to questions you put...its almost as if you defer to grammer excuse is just a escape to answers you didnt want to hear? :( [i think you never had the inclination to listen to anything i said anyways-so what changed?-winks] :(
Right, like I'm obliged to waste my time and energy and ultimately nod off trying to decipher your self-indulgent bloviating.
.
There are a handful of interminable cranks like you on this site and I'm going to treat you the same way I treat them: From now on, every message I get from you goes directly, unopened and unread, in the trash..
So go annoy someone else, if he'll humor you
Bye.
We're going to miss your genocidal rumblings. Not.
That was so clever. I bet you got all the way through fourth grade without special ed.
It was clever. You are welcome. I guess you lied, you aren't done after all. Shocker. That easily triggered huh? I see the common traits with an equally easily triggered state of Israel which as it commits genocide also claims to be a victim. Un-real.
So, which side were you on in Rwanda? Judging from your mindset, probably the Hutus.
Awww nice attempt. You know who the genocidal Hutu extremist government has more in common with in this genocide? The Israeli extremist government. Both like the Nazis before them are indiscriminately massacring civilians in an effort to ethnically cleanse their countries of unwanted civilians. Israel is engaged in genocide. I know, I was on the receiving end of a genocidal government when I was 8 years old in Rwanda. I know what genocide looks like and Israel's conduct today smells and looks like the Hutu government in Rwanda. But you do know that. Thats why you are trying so hard to deflect Israel's ethnic cleansing and genocidal campaign. Did that go according to how you thought it would?
https://youtu.be/sP5JHNDZqbQ?feature=shared
I'm sorry you had to endure actual genocide. But you of all people should be able to tell the real thing from propaganda.
Google almost anything by John Spencer. If you won't listen to an expert like him, there's obviously nothing I or anybody else could ever say or write that would open your eyes.
But if you come across authentic footage of Israelis systematically hacking thousands of helpless civilians to death, or lining them up in pits and shooting them, or herding them into gas chambers, or forcing them into the desert or up into the mountains without food, water, shelter
or medicine - or raping, mutilating, shooting and burning unarmed civilians alive as Hamas triumphantly did on October 7 - please send it to me and I will take it very seriously.
I appreciate your kind thoughts. It is however because I have endured actual genocide, lost my entire extended maternal family that I am calling out the similarities with what the Israeli leadership is doing. Hamas committed a terrorist attack on Israel. The Israeli campaign however started bordering on genocide and has quickly run past that line and is into genocide territory. Each genocide is different. In 1994, people were saying it isn't a genocide because they were no gas chambers in Rwanda. The mistake people make is that they are stuck in the last genocide to see what is going on.
What constitute a genocide is an intent by the state carry out the "deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." Required is intent by the state and execution by its armed forces. Israeli leaders at all levels have uttered comments since October that have demonstrated genocidal intent, the Israeli armed forces have conducted a campaign that has left Gazans civilians without food, water, shelter, or medicine" according to your own statement. Israeli drones have mutilated, shot, burned unarmed civilians, Israeli soldiers have stream lived themselves triumphantly destroying Palestinian homes with inhabitants in them. Everything you allege Hamas did on one day, Israel is doing for seven months and has killed 30 times the same amount of people. Is that how a civilized nation behaves? Reports from human rights organization reports of Israeli troops raping and torturing Palestinians. It is untenable to call this daily evidence propaganda, Israeli claims are increasingly untethered to reality and more and more becoming propaganda.
I am happy to actually have a discussion with you, not sure we will ever agree. The guy you presented is simply not a credible source for this topic. His claims are far more propaganda than actual fact based assertions. He also provides no evidence for his claims. Just speculates. We are far from exchanging evidence. For people to exchange evidence of their claims, they have to first agree on the basic premises. You and I have not even established the basic premises.
Even were I to stipulate to what you are asserting (and experts like John Spencer certainly claim otherwise), the upshot would be that Israel is morally obliged to let Hamas survive to threaten both Israel and any non jihadis in the vicinity.
Moreover, Hamas's strategy of deliberately violating international law to purposely maximize its own side's civilian casualties would become an accepted part of warfare, and Israel's faults would be cited as evidence that resisting organizations like Hamas was too great an evil in and of itself to be tolerable or worthwhile.
So the world would condemn itself to rule by savages because non-savages were forbidden to call their bloody bluff.
Of course, Spencer himself believes Israel has actually conducted the war more humanely than literally any army in history. And not necessarily for the better. https://www.newsweek.com/israel-has-created-new-standard-urban-warfare-why-will-no-one-admit-it-opinion-1883286
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/05/17/opinions/israel-gaza-hamas-war-us-arms-spencer
Ie, its fault in his view has lain, ironically, in prolonging the war - thereby *increasing* collateral suffering - to satisfy its critics who either don't understand that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." or, for cynical political reasons, don't care.
But If I actually had to choose between having Israel do either what Spencer recommends or what it is currently doing - even if it meant that its leaders were *properly* indicted for war crimes - and giving Hamas and its allies a new and indefinite lease on life, I would accept the former tradeoff. I simply wouldn't want to live in a world where brutality is treated, let alone politically rewarded, as an international norm. I'd rather Israeli leaders were criminally convicted but Hamas and its ilk were soundly defeated than see the latter win.
Realistically, I think Israel will eventually prevail, and I hope Israelis who've committed real, provable crimes are punished. If only because I think the truly fanatical settlers and some of Bibi Netanyahu's coalition partners who coddle or encourage them endanger Israeli social cohesion, not to mention military discipline. (Ben-Gvir, for example, is apparently upset that the IDF doesn't summarily, shoot terrorists (real or suspected) who've already laid down their weapons and surrendered.)
The IDF is a moral professional military organization with also, like any good army, a scattering of disreputable members. The political echelon in Israel today, like many others of its kind has a superabundance of loudmouths. Btw, simply shooting your mouth off intemperately in public after a massacre of your own people, in a manner nonetheless reasonably perceived to be indiscriminately homicidal, may even be a separate war crime if you're a politician with the power tangibly to effect your sentiments. But it's not remotely genocide, though I can understand why it might trigger people who have their own horrible memories.
.
We're now having a serious debate and I will say I appreciate the fair exchange at this point. I understand your view even if I do not agree with it. I have bad news for you though.
Israel is not going to win this war against Hamas. Precisely because of the brutal nature of the Israeli campaign (John Spencer's assertions aside), it is creating 15 resistant fighters eager to join Hamas for every 1 innocent civilian it kills. It creates about fighter future Hamas fighters for every 1 Hamas militant it kills. With a population of 2 million, Israel will have to kill over 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza to basically win this war of attrition. The world will not stand for this. So what you are left with is a future Hezbollah size and type fighting force in Gaza, probably the West Bank, and now a world that now sees Israel as a brutal terrorist regime in the same manner it viewed Hamas. If anything Palestinian resistance is gaining public support.
So on a strategic level, the Israeli campaign is going to go down in flames as counter effective. All the tactical and operational victories will not be able to overcome the strategic defeat to come. Take it from me, a former U.S. Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you don't take it from General David Petraeus who commanded our forces in Iraq.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/13/israel-gaza-hamas-counterinsurgency/
Those leaders you are dismissing as loudmouths are causing Israel serious damage, but what is even more terrifying are the words that came out of the Israeli defense minister, prime minister, and president. Those you cannot throw away as irrelevant. The first one said "not a single of humanitarian aid to go to 2 million civilians", the second one gave Israeli troops a biblical commandment to wipe of Gaza as they wiped out Amalek. The third one said "there was no single innocent civilian in Gaza". That U.S. pressure has forced Israel to let humanitarian aid in does nothing to erase the actual intent of Israeli leaders. Their statements, when combined with Ben-Gvir and Smotrich as well as members of the Knesset, you have a frightening number of senior Israeli leaders giving intent to commit genocide.
The dangers you see as endangering Israeli society will only get worse. The ultra nationalistic Israeli campaign for land and expulsion of Palestinians has caused far more rot in Israel than our leaders and theirs are willing to admit, the same rot that was within the Hutu government that started its own ethnic cleansing campaigns from its 1960 independence movement that culminated in the 1994. The parallels are stunningly similar and Israel will not be able to reverse the march towards insanity. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are the future of Israel.
I'd say you're being way, way too deterministic, even fatalistic. Most Israelis dislike Netanyahu, let alone Ben Gvir. Conversely, you are imputing to Gazans a nihilistic, suicidal fanaticism that was not remotely manifested in Germany or Japan after they were battered in WW2. And of course you're attributing much the same mentality to Israelis. That's obviously not my take on the matter.
The last time Israel was overtaken by messianic zealotry was against the Romans, who destroyed the country. I doubt the majority of Jews intend to channel the ultimately self-destructive impulses of 2000 years ago, much though a minority may fantasize about it.
The idea that killing terrorists only creates more terrorists is also an argument for simply letting terrorists have their way. Talk about suicidal. And don't forget that Israel coddled Hamas for years, even funneling cash into Gaza. Which led directly to October 7. Yet you're now hypothesizing that crushing Hamas instead will breed eternal violence. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
But Israel has survived against much greater odds than the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah and even Iran. Back in the 1950s and most of the 1960s it had to contend with all the Arab states, plus the Soviet Union. And without the United States. And with but a tiny fraction of its current military and economic power.
Needless to say, your premise that the Israeli government is like the Hutus', is about as plausible from my angle as saying it is like the Third Reich. To be sure, there are risky political currents in Israel, but most of the people with grandiose genocidal dreams are the Palestinian Arabs who haven't abandoned them in 100 years... certainly not the Israeli peaceniks who were slaughtered by Hamas on the Gaza border. But no doubt Hamas targeted them for precisely that reason.
I do hope Sinwar and Haniyeh are not the future of "Palestine," although I don't discount the possibility. But right now a lot of Palestiniians (including the PA) are accusing them of having been Gaza's misfortune. The best way to reinforce that mindset is to ensure that their gunmen don't get away with murder. Of course, a workable "day after" plan would also be nice.
But you should give actual Israelis the benefit of your childhood and adult experiences. Jews can always use another opinion.