Israel declares war on Hamas

[Whynotnow]

Originally Posted by Doctorfever

So we all agree Hamas is evil and needs to be eliminated.

I think we can all agree that 100% of the deaths from the Oct 7th attacks are Hamas fault.

The civilian casualties due to retaliation of Oct 7th attacks are terrible. Hopefully we can all agree on that.

Who is really to blame for those casualties? If it wasn’t for Hamas attack on Oct 7th, the total number of Palestinian casualties would be 0.

I know some here question Israel tactics used to help defeat Hamas. But shouldn’t at least some of that blame be placed on Hamas? After all, they orchestrated the Oct 7th attack and are using Palestinians as human shields.

I know this isn’t going to sound good to you, but I genuinely would like an answer to this. Your statement is clear that Israel holds no accountability for the deaths of Palestinians at this point due to the actions of Hamas on Oct 7. I don’t think I am mistaking that. If so correct me.

If the above is true, I want to know how long this lasts for you of if there are any reasonable limits to what you said? Is there a red line for you in what Israel is doing where you’d say it’s not proportional anymore?

The world has so few absolutes, the only absolute here is that the deaths of non combatants on both sides of this, many of whom are just there due to the randomness of the birth lottery is tragic.

[Doctorfever]

Originally Posted by Whynotnow

I know this isn’t going to sound good to you, but I genuinely would like an answer to this. Your statement is clear that Israel holds no accountability for the deaths of Palestinians at this point due to the actions of Hamas on Oct 7. I don’t think I am mistaking that. If so correct me.

If the above is true, I want to know how long this lasts for you of if there are any reasonable limits to what you said? Is there a red line for you in what Israel is doing where you’d say it’s not proportional anymore?

The world has so few absolutes, the only absolute here is that the deaths of non combatants on both sides of this, many of whom are just there due to the randomness of the birth lottery is tragic.

I didn’t mean to imply that with my post, so sorry if that’s the way it read.

I meant that the blame for the high number of Palestinian casualties should be a shared blame between Israel and Hamas.

You can blame Israel for their tactics, and blame Hamas for using civilians as human shields.

[Whynotnow]

Originally Posted by Doctorfever

I didn’t mean to imply that with my post, so sorry if that’s the way it read.

I meant that the blame for the high number of Palestinian casualties should be a shared blame between Israel and Hamas.

You can blame Israel for their tactics, and blame Hamas for using civilians as human shields.

Thanks for the clarification.

[Azure]

How many Arab nations have refused to take Palestinians? How many have their borders explicitly closed?

Given how long this has been going on, how many different individual conflicts there have been, which results in humanitarian problems, I find it amazing how the entire blame for the situation is literally being dumped on Israel, but a country like Egypt isn't even talked about.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by Whynotnow

Thanks for the clarification.

The problem is the world, and many posters on here refuse to admit that if Hamas uses human shields, and launches military attacks from civilian areas, you can't say Israel has the right to defend itself while still saying Israel should not endanger civilians. Head stuck in sand, literally.

Now, there was a great point made earlier that Israel is choosing to bomb buildings instead of putting troops on the ground to clear out this buildings, which prioritizes the lives of IDF over the lives of civilians stuck in those buildings, but that point was made by someone with a more realistic perspective, and not by the usual crowd that can't admit to what I said above.

[TherapyforGlencross]

US&UK strike multiple Houthi locations in Yemen, using their carrier strike group, jets, and tomahawk missiles. Houthis claim they will continue to target international ships as long as Israel continues its campaign against Hamas.

[Language]

Originally Posted by TherapyforGlencross

US&UK strike multiple Houthi locations in Yemen, using their carrier strike group, jets, and tomahawk missiles. Houthis claim they will continue to target international ships as long as Israel continues its campaign against Hamas.

Are the Houthi’s just a bunch of Islamic cavemen that crawled out of some deep dark hole, and have been gifted weaponry by Iran? I know they’ve been waging war in Yemen; but literally where did these #######s come from.

It’s amazing they were allowed to disrupt global shipping for this long. Their entire infrastructure should have been bombed to pieces the minute they started menacing ships.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[blankall]

Originally Posted by Language

Are the Houthi’s just a bunch of Islamic cavemen that crawled out of some deep dark hole, and have been gifted weaponry by Iran? I know they’ve been waging war in Yemen; but literally where did these #######s come from.

It’s amazing they were allowed to disrupt global shipping for this long. Their entire infrastructure should have been bombed to pieces the minute they started menacing ships.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

The Saudis have been fighting a war against them since 2015. The Houthis are a major belligerent in the Yemeni civil war that has claimed the lives of about 400k people.

This is also the same group that was bombing Saudi oil fields.

[Pointman]

One thing that was a bit lost in the debate, is that Hamas is still holding hostages. And don't forget, that Hamas is the legitimate government of Gaza. So, government of Gaza is still holding Israeli hostages. Maybe releasing them could have helped with getting closet to the ceasefire they are apparently calling for?

[Pointman]

Originally Posted by TherapyforGlencross

Reports of incoming bombing by UK&US on Youthi sites in Yemen. Iran seized a Marshall Islands (is this USA-owned, then?) oil tanker. Middle East is a powder keg currently.

What is going on is a USA-Iran proxy war. History of middle East, religion, antisemitism and all that, are secondary, if not irrelevant.

[Pointman]

Originally Posted by _Q_

Let me be the first to tell you that, no, that is not how you conduct war in the 21st century.

I also think that international law has made it so difficult to conduct war now that it is more effective for nations to resolve their issues diplomatically.

That's not how you conduct war against regular army. Hamas is not regular army. They don't wear uniform, don't have separate military infrastructure, distinct from civilians infrastructure, and they hold hostages. Calling for Israel to abide to international war laws is misleading, because war laws are designed to regulate the war between two armies, which is not the case here.

[Pointman]

Originally Posted by _Q_

I think for most Gazans and increasingly, a lot of Palestinians outside of Gaza it has turned in to one party wants to kill me because I'm Palestinian and another party is shooting back. The party that is trying to kill me are the bad guys. The party that are shooting back are the good guys.

We don't want to kill you. We came to get our hostages back. How about releasing them?

[Pointman]

Originally Posted by _Q_

Do any of you zionists have a better defence than "sure, what we're doing is genocide, but look over here at this other genocide."

You are really looking like an idiot here. Incapable of following the plot of the conversation. It went like this:

- UN is biased against Israel.

- Why?

- It issued more anti-Israel declaration, then it did against the rest of the world. Horrible things are happening elsewhere, and UN does nothing. Yet Israel is just defending itself and is being accused of genocide.

- Oh, do you have better defense than "Israel is surely doing a genocide, but look elsewhere"


Man, you are like early bots. Only answer to the last sentence, being incapable of keeping the whole conversation in mind.

[Pointman]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Going to war isn't the only way to achieve those goals, though. Have you spent time considering why average citizens may cheer on Hamas, support them, or be onside with their goals? What factors might make a human feel so strongly? Could it be outside pressures, perhaps from a lack of basic human dignity, freedom, and access to necessities? And what could be contributing to that?



Try to understand humanity before writing them off.

So, you agree that average Gazan is cheering on Hamas? You just think that it is somehow Israel's fault? Forgetting, that there was no Israel presence, no pressure, and in fact a hope for the better future for Gaza when Israel withdrew and let Gazans elect their own government. And they elected Hamas.

[Bagor]

Originally Posted by Pointman

We don't want to kill you.

Course you do. You're loving it.

[FlamesAddiction]

The 1948 Genocide Convention defines the crime of genocide as intending to destroy a group in whole or in part, because of their nationality, ethnicity, race or religion. I don't think there is any evidence on the surface that Israel is targeting Hamas in Gaza for those reasons. If they wanted to genocide Arabs or Muslims, they would have started with the 20-25% that make up Israel's current population. Israel wants to destroy Hamas, not because of their race, nationality, ethnicity or religion, but because of their actions for the past few decades.

Using the relatively recent cases of the 1990s Balkan wars, all three of the main belligerents filed genocide cases at the ICJ, and while all three had actors convicted of war crimes and massacres, several were also charged and acquitted because while high collateral damage and death are tragic and sad, they aren't always war crimes. Only one of the cases was declared a genocide by definition - the case of Serbs committing genocide against Bosniak Muslims at Srebenica. In that case, you had evidence of people on the ground physically separating people based on their religion, and you also had high up government officials like Alexander Vucic (the same guy who is currently the president of Serbia), saying right on live television, that for every Serb killed, they would kill 100 Muslims. I don't think Israeli officials have done or said anything like that. People can debate the proportionality of the response and whether the collateral damage is within acceptable parameters, and it is fair to debate that. Genocide is a different thing altogether and there is a high threshold to prove it based on the Genocide Convention definition. Then again, I don't expect Israel to get a fair shake at the ICJ.

[Pointman]

Originally Posted by Lanny_McDonald

The ironic part about Pointman's narrative is that he initially supported Russia against weaker Ukraine then suddenly changed their mind when it became apparent that they might be conscripted for military service and fed into the meat grinder. At that point they abandoned their native country and fled to another only to support similar military action against another weaker enemy and espouse some of the most dark and hateful rhetoric on this topic. There are some incredible mental gymnastics required to maintain the positions they do when they "fled for their life" from their homeland and have been in this new country for less than a year. I'm not sure how someone squares these things.

This needs to be called out, if not reported. It's blatant false and basically a defamation of a fellow CPer. First, I never suppoted Ukranian war, as evident by my posts in Ukranian thread, such as this:

Originally Posted by Pointman

I am terrified at how horrible war is and that it's my country that is doing it. I don't understand why there's such a thing as "war crime", as it seems to imply that the war itself somehow is not a crime. Like a war is ok as long, as you play it by some rules. It should not be like this. War itself should be a crime. Killing military should be as much of a crime, as killing civilians, because soldiers are humans too.

Mostly I want this to end soon and never happen again. Because of this, I want Russia to fail hard. Much like USA stopped being so aggressive after a major failure in Iraq. I want this war to prove that invasions don't work and one should never try to do it again.

Originally Posted by Pointman

We are.

Also the argument that I "changed my mind" and decided to leave Russia only after forced conscription kicked in is false. The truth is that I have applied for Israeli citizenship as soon, as in March 2022, a month after the war started and long before Putin declared mobilization. At that point most western analytics still expected Russia to win soon. However the waiting lines were so long, that I had to stay in Russia for the whole summer, and then in September Putin declared mobilization. Which forced me to emergently flee the country, however it is well-documented that I decided to leave long before the risk of conscription was even on the horizon

Originally Posted by Pointman

Yes, effects of sanctions are slowly creeping in. First off, we can't fly to US or Europe as there are no direct flights. Then we have no Instagram/Facebook/Twitter and some people were living off accounts or at least used them for promotions. I planned to make a course to sell on Udemy, but now I can not. I can't take exams for any IT certificates. Me and my wife considered enrolling our 6 years old into an online USA school, but now it's going to be problematic. Groceries prices are up like twice. I don't drive so I don't know about gas. Our company has started layoffs and massively cutting costs. Annual bonus is out of question. At this point losing a job is by far the biggest threat for an average Russian. Finding a new job after layoff is a tough ask in current environment.

Yet, more mundane parts of lives are still the same. Shops are still full, services are reliable and as long, as people can keep their jobs, they are somewhat alright.

Also, we have started a repatriation to Israel process. Waiting time is extremely long due to demand, but hopefully by 2023 I will be done with this country.

Originally Posted by Pointman

That's exactly what I am doing, but waiting time to get Israel citizenship is over a year now. And most have no chance to get a residency in another country.

[_Q_]

Originally Posted by Pointman

You are really looking like an idiot here. Incapable of following the plot of the conversation. It went like this:

- UN is biased against Israel.

- Why?

- It issued more anti-Israel declaration, then it did against the rest of the world. Horrible things are happening elsewhere, and UN does nothing. Yet Israel is just defending itself and is being accused of genocide.

- Oh, do you have better defense than "Israel is surely doing a genocide, but look elsewhere"


Man, you are like early bots. Only answer to the last sentence, being incapable of keeping the whole conversation in mind.

UN biased against Israel.... hahahahahahaha

Stop. I can only laugh so hard. Is this what they teach you before handing you citizenship?

Before calling someone an idiot, don't follow up with a post like this. I thought you were taking a break for being blatantly genocidal? Why are you back?

[Lanny_McDonald]

@ Pointman

I apologize for getting your support of the Russian effort wrong. I thought you were a Z supporter initially. My honest apology.

[Manhattanboy]

NHL releases statement on IIHF decision to bar the the Israeli national hockey team from future events, citing safety concerns.

https://www.nhl.com/news/statement-f...-hockey-league