Karmadhi

There is an insane amount of propaganda from the Palestinian side as well Nivsch. The thing that trumps all is direct footage. So when Israel bombs a school and you see footage of countless dead or maimed children, that is what gets people so angry and frustrated. I can assure you, if Gaza did not have this insane number of injured/dead children footage running amok then the protests would have been 10x lower. People tend to be very very sensitive when it comes to children compared to grown men. The number of dead kids I have seen personally (and tons of my friends) has made us basically immune to it. And we are chilling in other side of the world. Imagine being there. I have seen many interviews of foreign doctors that went to Gaza and then they did interviews explaining what they say. It is absolutely horrific to listen to them. And these are usually foreigners from US/UK etc, so I do trust their testimonies. Piers Morgan invited 2 times them. Regarding medias, BBC to me (outside some questionable headlines) tend to be relatively objective. Guardian less so. CNN even less so. Fox News is pure bullshit. So if you follow Western news regarding the war, use BBC (my advice). Watch these with an open mind.

I find it quite hard to understand where you stand on this conflict Leo. On one side you seem to be very critical of Israel, calling them out countless times and discussing it with the Israelis here. On the other side you seem to brush off their action and calling it "some sloppy bombing or some war crimes here and there".

I notice that the support for Israel in the US is MUCH bigger even among your average citizen compared to Europe (exception of Germany maybe). It is ironic considering it is Europe the one that treated Jews bad through history, yet they seem more aware of their devilry and tend to be more critical. Where I live it is hard to find a local under 30 that supports Israel these days.

I made a threat about this a while ago and a lot of people gave their reasoning including Leo. Here you go

Fair. And how exactly does shooting a 5 year old child aid the war effort? A precise sniper shot which actually is perfectly aimed according to doctor testimonies. I fail to understand how that aids a military. It is not 1 case where a child was perceived to be potentially dangerous or human errors which can indeed happen in a war. It is a whole policy with dozens of recorded cases. https://www.facebook.com/IrelandPSC/videos/devastating-testimony-from-a-surgeon-who-was-in-gaza-toddlers-shot-by-israeli-sn/473472438661359/ very informative video from a foreign doctor who was there being interviewed.

From foreign doctors testimonies that were in Gazans hospitals, most of those shots were sniper shots with clear aim at childreen. Not mistakes.

You mean in general or about specific actor?

You can see death toll, civilian to soldier death toll, war crimes being done, destruction etc. A brutal military makes itself obvious by the results. War is pragmatic and result oriented. These days you can just open your phone and see since people stuck in war zones film what goes on. I saw the other day a Gazan child whose half head was blown off by a bullet, that is close to direct experience. So does Russia to be honest. They are very crafty in justifying their invasion of Ukraine and blaming all of it on the West. I feel like even serious scholars like Jeffery Sachs have been influenced by it. I have followed both conflicts and to me Russia excels in doing propaganda via online sources like Tik Tok, Instagram and Telegram. That is their thing. Israel excels in doing propaganda by using the medias like Fox News, CNN and some talk show hosts.

I thought it was PLO that used to be more violent then calmed down. But from what I saw Hamas is not strong there, it is mostly PLO that governs it. But I do not know much about that part so cannot say much. By the way, I saw this video about the hostage deal. Would love your thoughts. He is against a hostage deal it seems but also extremely pro Israel and pro Zionist. Interesting take.

And how exactly were the actual people LIVING there consulted about this? You mentioned every actor except those who would actually have to share that space and be governed by another. That is my fundamental issue here. Way I see this is that Palestinians were forced to endure the consequences of European evil towards Jews. Why didnt they make Bavaria a Jewish state? That would be fitting. Germany had lost the war and was the primary responsible for the Holocaust. Why involve people that had nothing to do with any of this. I agree with you on this, personally I am all for negotiations and swallow your pride. But Israel seems to keep doing illegal expansions so it is not just the acceptance of the status quo. That status quo moves every year. Totally agreed. I feel the same way about Ukraine and the war going on there. I saw Gazans tried to do a peaceful protest some years ago and they were massacred. If they do relatively peaceful protest they get killed (46 childreen killed too). If they do violence and terrorism they get genocied. What can they do? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018–2019_Gaza_border_protests They tried doing it peacefully and look what happened. When I read this then the October attack made more sense since they tried a peaceful route and failed badly. This is how a dictatorship treats massive protests, not a "democracy". "Five former IDF snipers, assisted by Breaking the Silence, published a letter expressing "shame and sorrow" for the killings and stating, "instructing snipers to shoot to kill unarmed demonstrators who pose no danger to human life is another product of the occupation and military rule over millions of Palestinian people, as well as of our country's callous leadership, and derailed moral path". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests_and_massacre#Death_toll

Israel now has killed around 40 times more civilians than Hamas did. If it was 10 it would not be as bad.

It is clear as day that Israel is not just trying to wipe out Hamas but also do a huge collective punishment campaign on the entire Gaza population. Mearsheimer said it best here. If IDF would really want, the civilian death toll would be far lower and the destruction far less than it is. Not to mention the entire famine. I struggle to understand how people on this forum including Leo sometimes can call it anything else than terrorization of an entire population and punishment. "Just because they have not nuked Gaza" does not mean you cannot mass murder civilians in other ways.

To be honest Leo brought it up this time, not me. If there is clear evidence then ok. Still, I find the idea ridiculous to take land because it was yours 3000 years ago. Or better said, I find it ridiculous to do that and then act like you are moral and stuff. To justify it basically. Just say "We need land so we took it, no choice". Then it would be your typical conquest which happened all the time in history. Nothing new there.

Would you say there is a difference in breaking international law and lying in general between Russia and Israel? People say Israel is a democracy and hence is more trustworthy and "moral" than Russia, but isnt a democracy just a way to elect people? I always thought that respecting human rights is independent of the method that you choose to elect those in power. I say this because I notice that Russia makes the same claims as Israel (we bomb schools because Ukranians troops hide there etc), yet nobody believes them. Meanwhile when Israel says the same thing, people trust it. When it comes to rule of law which is indeed stronger in a democracy, I have rarely seen IDF soldiers be tried for war crimes or go to jail. Recently there was the scandal with the IDF guy that raped Palestinians in prison and filmed it and the guy was released and now is shown in tv shows as a celebrity. So how exactly is being a democracy a benefit for Israel when it comes to being moral army or trustworthy?

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240507-unlike-anything-we-have-studied-gaza-s-destruction-in-numbers https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/immense-scale-gaza-killings-amount-crime-against-humanity-un-inquiry-says-2024-06-12/ https://apnews.com/article/biden-israel-hamas-oct-7-44c4229d4c1270d9cfa484b664a22071 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/18/systematic-torture-to-be-palestinian-in-an-israeli-prison https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/israel-opt-horrifying-cases-of-torture-and-degrading-treatment-of-palestinian-detainees-amid-spike-in-arbitrary-arrests/ https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-rights-group-says-palestinian-prisoners-subject-systematic-abuse-2024-08-05/ https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/08/30/732353/10,300-West-Bank-Palestinians-arrested-by-Israel-since-Gaza-war-onset--Rights-group https://theintercept.com/2024/08/09/israel-prison-sde-teiman-palestinian-abuse-torture/ I sent sources to prove that I am not making anything up nor exaggerating. There are countless reports showing it. In the West Bank where there is no Hamas they do countless times raids on middle of night and abduct randomy civilians and terrorize their homes. I seen interviews from ex IDF personnel saying they did raids on houses which they knew were not involved with anything dodgy just to keep them in line (aka terrorize them). Skip to third minute. I saw they have close to 8000 Palestinians in jails at the moment, more than half without charges nor trials. What are them but hostages? I am not saying IDF are Nazis or Mongols, but by far the most brutal and inhumane army among first world countries, on par with countries like Russia. And even if Hamas is worse, does that mean Israel is also not awful? We can agree both are depraved enough to the point where they go to terrorism. You can have 2 terrorists fighting each other. If 1 side is more terrorist than the other is irrelevant once both cross a certain line. My point has never been that Israel is worse than Hamas, but that Israel in its own right is horrible. Nothing more. Just like Stalin was slightly better than Hitler but still awful on his own right, and they fought agaisnt each other.

Neither will Palestinian stubbornness and unwillingness to be dominated by Israel. They would rather die than surrender. Either give them a state or live in fear forever. Your choice.

Israel will not let me go there as a normal citizen and if I go with some aid group, they will murder me if I try to help them like they murdered Kitchen food staff

You can say the same about Israel having the right to defend itself but using terrorist tactics too. I see a lot more agreement that Hamas are terrorists than Israelis are even though they have broken every war law that exists out there at this point. That those people that were put on Palestine were the descenders of the Jews from 3000 years ago. I am sure during the last 3000 years they mixed so much with Europeans that they stopped having any sort of resemblence to the original historical Jews and therefore are not entitled to that land at all. The whole idea that you are entitled to some land because people with your religion came from there is absurd to begin with. They can say "We need land so we will take it, better us than you have it". That would be honest. Is there any proof that Israelis these days, most of them have much ancestry to those people from back then? What if Palestinian Arabs are the real and in time they converted to Islam? That would make more sense to me to be honest. Ideally it should have been established in a sparsely populated area so large groups of people would not need to be kicked out or forced to live under another's rule. Also somewhere with a less strong sense of nationalism/religion. Middle East is quite uncompromising when it comes to this stuff I feel.

Bernie is also anti establishment type of guy, even more than Trump I would say. How come Trump is so much more popular than Bernie? Both are anti establishment but the differnence is that Bernie policies benefit 90% of the population while Trump policies do not.

So why did he choose Trump over Kamala? Curious.

To show that Israeli claims to that land are not based on truth They could have made a Jewish state somewhere else where they would not get this backlash. There were countless proposed places to build a Jewish state, and they chose the worst one. That is the root cause of all this bullshit.

Fair points. However the Supreme Court ruling for him not paying Daniels was quite a ridiculous charge. You have Bush illegally invading another country (resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents), you have Obama illegally attacking Libya and getting away with it and Trump got charged for some stupid thing. It made him more popular than anything. They should have either charged him with a serious offense or nothing. If you apply such a harsh standard, then the entire Congress should go to jail.

Do you genuinely believe he will install a dictatorship in the US or just regress democracy but still maintain at its core a democracy? I never seen you so worried about elections before, with Biden vs Trump in 2020 you seemed a lot chiller. And it was still Trump back then for the second term. I can understand the worry because we had the EU elections some months ago and many of my French friends were worried a lot that Le Pen would win (Trump European version) so I can understand it. But considering this same situation was in 2020, I saw you a lot chiller back then, idk.

They are key politicans, what you mean? "Moderates" like Gantz are irrelevant since they are not in government. The current Israeli governement has been called as the most far right in its history. I said also Lebanon, UAE. Name me some Arab countries then. Iran and Afghanistan are not Arab countries. I said UAE, Qatar, Lebanon.

@Raze I bombed him with links