Israel declares war on Hamas

[Bagor]

Originally Posted by CalgaryKid12

Check the first line of post #9170, I thought I was pretty clear

No you weren't. Again you avoided answering the question.

It's a pretty straight forward yes or no question and if no why not.

Try again..

Originally Posted by Bagor

Do you find the deliberate killing of Palestinian civilians by Israel to be acts of terrorism just as everyone in this thread is in agreement that the deliberate killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas is?

If not. Why not. What's the difference?

Yes? Or no?

[AltaGuy]

"CalgaryKid12"s original post in this thread was pure tone-deaf, pro-Zionist apologia, to which he added that he wouldn't be reading or responding to comments or criticisms. It was cringe-inducing and embarassing.

Things haven't gotten much better since, I see.

[Bagor]

Originally Posted by CalgaryKid12

What's your issue with me?

I made the argument, then Bagor goes and says "no not true, both are bad, regardless of the order/magnitude of criticism".

You're a right slimy little dishonest person aren't you?

Why are you making up quotes that I am supposed to have said even going to the trouble of quotation marks?

Quote the post where I said what you just quoted me as saying.

Don't know what your game is here except to expose yourself as a little dishonest liar.

[Bagor]

Originally Posted by CalgaryKid12

You didn't call Bagor out when they tried to play the "gotchya" game with me about the Holocaust.

Because there was nothing to call out. It was disgusting.
You were trying to use the Holocaust to defend the current genocide.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

Haven’t you accused people of being insane, that they belong in an asylum, and suggested people were Holocaust deniers because they disagreed with you?

Multiple times you’ve talked about compassion, understanding, being reasonable, all that but… it doesn’t seem like you’ve taken any issue with anyone saying terrible things about Palestinians or even Israeli hostages so long as they are, at least generally, against pro-Israeli government.

So, I guess I should ask why I should call out Bagor when you don’t call out people like Skooten? You’re trying to bridge the gap, right? Commonalities? But apparently that just means going after people you disagree with and playing victim because people dared to disagree with you or question your views?

then you disproportionately go after people that are more Pro-Israel.

Come on Pepsi, you need to go after all the Hamas supporters in the thread, too. Oh, wait. There aren't any. But still. 50/50.

#### Hamas.

There, I did mine. Does that cover me for another week?

[Nage Waza]

Originally Posted by AltaGuy

"CalgaryKid12"s original post in this thread was pure tone-deaf, pro-Zionist apologia, to which he added that he wouldn't be reading or responding to comments or criticisms. It was cringe-inducing and embarassing.

Things haven't gotten much better since, I see.

Is your conclusion that Zionism is a bad thing?

[Harry Lime]

I'm guessing that some of the problem with the arguments Calgarykid12 are engaged in, and those who argue with him, is that Hamas is identified as the villainy on one side, and Israel the villainy on the other side. One is a political entity and the other expanding to include the entirety of the country.

Would it be fair to more directly compare Hamas and Likud, or Palestine and Israel? The phrasing would make any Israeli immediately defensive.

[TheIronMaiden]

Originally Posted by Nage Waza

Is your conclusion that Zionism is a bad thing?

I think the general conclusion is that displacing 90% of Palestinians and destroying 70% of homes is a bad thing.

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by Nage Waza

Is your conclusion that Zionism is a bad thing?

I'll bite, and hope that you'll respond thoughtfully:

Zionism is a form of colonialism, and we have enough history on colonialism to say that while good things can come of it, there is a heavy price to be paid by the colonized people. Israel the country may very well be more prosperous, safe and healthy now because of Zionism, but it was at the expense of suffering of other people to get there. Does the end justify the means? That's the debate I guess, and we can have the same one about Canada.

Was Zionism necessary in a post World War II landscape? I think at the very least it's completely understandable. You saw a group of people face an existential threat, and most of the global community turned their backs on them. I think you can argue that during that period, Zionism was a clear path to defend against those threats.

Is Zionism today a bad thing? In my opinion yes. Segregated societies are not long term solutions, and the existence of Zionism destabilizes the region. It's time to evolve and find an inclusive path forward for Israel. Yes their neighbours make that a difficult one to solve for, no question, but there is a lot of chicken-egg there as well.

[Leondros]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

I'll bite, and hope that you'll respond thoughtfully:

Zionism is a form of colonialism, and we have enough history on colonialism to say that while good things can come of it, there is a heavy price to be paid by the colonized people. Israel the country may very well be more prosperous, safe and healthy now because of Zionism, but it was at the expense of suffering of other people to get there. Does the end justify the means? That's the debate I guess, and we can have the same one about Canada.

Was Zionism necessary in a post World War II landscape? I think at the very least it's completely understandable. You saw a group of people face an existential threat, and most of the global community turned their backs on them. I think you can argue that during that period, Zionism was a clear path to defend against those threats.

Is Zionism today a bad thing? In my opinion yes. Segregated societies are not long term solutions, and the existence of Zionism destabilizes the region. It's time to evolve and find an inclusive path forward for Israel. Yes their neighbours make that a difficult one to solve for, no question, but there is a lot of chicken-egg there as well.

I think its fair to say that Zionism in its current form is at odds with modern democratic values of equality and human rights. The 2018 Israeli Nation-State Law, which declared Israel as the "nation-state of the Jewish people," has been widely criticized for institutionalizing inequality by explicitly prioritizing the rights of Jewish citizens over others and at the expense of marginalizing both Arab Israelis and non-Jewish populations. I agree on the colonialism part - it has its time, and looking back I think all can agree it always did more harm than good and always at the expense of the original population. We still deal with the problems it has left here in Canada.

[Flames Fan, Ph.D.]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1838366657686688219

Can anyone help me determine if this is an acceptable number? Do I take the derivative of the number of deaths and divide by the slope of the ages of the children? Or do I integrate the product of bomb number x surface area bombed and divide that by left handed casualties?

Would really appreciate some help deciphering this. These math problems are coming every day and I'm getting behind on completing these very complicated determinations.

[hah]

Originally Posted by Flames Fan, Ph.D.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1838366657686688219

Can anyone help me determine if this is an acceptable number? Do I take the derivative of the number of deaths and divide by the slope of the ages of the children? Or do I integrate the product of bomb number x surface area bombed and divide that by left handed casualties?

Would really appreciate some help deciphering this. These math problems are coming every day and I'm getting behind on completing these very complicated determinations.

I can't give you the maths, but Israel seems to be winning. Their bombings have been more effective than Hes be la las since October 7, 2023. I think it has to do with the ratio.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Flames Fan, Ph.D.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1838366657686688219

Can anyone help me determine if this is an acceptable number? Do I take the derivative of the number of deaths and divide by the slope of the ages of the children? Or do I integrate the product of bomb number x surface area bombed and divide that by left handed casualties?

Would really appreciate some help deciphering this. These math problems are coming every day and I'm getting behind on completing these very complicated determinations.

For someone who thinks the entire conversation plays into the hand of the aggressor nation you do spend a lot of time focused on it.

[opendoor]

It's interesting how things shift over time. In 1982, the Reagan administration was threatening Israel with sanctions behind closed doors over their invasion of Lebanon. They also voted to condemn Israel in a UN Security Council vote, and also delayed the transfer of nearly 100 F-16s and F-15s because of the invasion.

This was Reagan's diary entry about his conversation with Israel's Prime Minister after Beirut was bombed, where he referred to Israeli actions as a "holocaust":

I was angry. I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with it’s arms blown off. He told me he had ordered the bombing stopped—I asked about the artillery fire. He claimed the P.L.O. had started that & Israeli forces had taken casualties. End of call. Twenty mins. later he called to tell me he’d ordered an end to the barrage and plead for our continued friendship.

No one in the current US political landscape seems to be willing to use even a fraction of the leverage that Reagan was.

[Flames Fan, Ph.D.]

Originally Posted by GGG

For someone who thinks the entire conversation plays into the hand of the aggressor nation you do spend a lot of time focused on it.

reductio ad absurdum

[afc wimbledon]

Originally Posted by opendoor

It's interesting how things shift over time. In 1982, the Reagan administration was threatening Israel with sanctions behind closed doors over their invasion of Lebanon. They also voted to condemn Israel in a UN Security Council vote, and also delayed the transfer of nearly 100 F-16s and F-15s because of the invasion.

This was Reagan's diary entry about his conversation with Israel's Prime Minister after Beirut was bombed, where he referred to Israeli actions as a "holocaust":



No one in the current US political landscape seems to be willing to use even a fraction of the leverage that Reagan was.

Reagan never needed Jewish votes

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Flames Fan, Ph.D.

reductio ad absurdum

Or just hypocrisy.

[Nage Waza]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

I'll bite, and hope that you'll respond thoughtfully:

I always do despite some of the allegations from the usual suspects.

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

Zionism is a form of colonialism, and we have enough history on colonialism to say that while good things can come of it, there is a heavy price to be paid by the colonized people. Israel the country may very well be more prosperous, safe and healthy now because of Zionism, but it was at the expense of suffering of other people to get there. Does the end justify the means? That's the debate I guess, and we can have the same one about Canada.

I disagree. Zionism was the attempt at undoing the colonialism. Many countries were created at the time Israel was created, included almost all of Israel's neighbors. Once the Ottoman empire ended, the Brits were basically tasked with nation building, along with the UN.

Israel received the smallest portion of the land and they were asked again to divide it another time, but the Palestinians refused. Israel said yes, they said no. Israel provided human rights which many other of the neighbors did not. Anyway, not only was Israel created, the neighbors kicked all the jews out (the real ethnic cleansing that people are searching for) and then invaded Israel. Israel did not start these wars but I think it was inevitable, not even if Israel existed, but any nation on the edges of the current Islamic empire.

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

Was Zionism necessary in a post World War II landscape? I think at the very least it's completely understandable. You saw a group of people face an existential threat, and most of the global community turned their backs on them. I think you can argue that during that period, Zionism was a clear path to defend against those threats.

It certainly proved to be true. Every jew was kicked out of the countries surrounding Israel while Israel maintained their Muslim population, and those same countries have made antisemitism a real focus, through government, schools and religion.

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

Is Zionism today a bad thing? In my opinion yes. Segregated societies are not long term solutions, and the existence of Zionism destabilizes the region. It's time to evolve and find an inclusive path forward for Israel. Yes their neighbours make that a difficult one to solve for, no question, but there is a lot of chicken-egg there as well.

Every other country is living with the same rules as Israel - is Israel the only country you feel this way about? Israel is not segregated, a significant portion of their country is not Jewish. And you are blaming the girl in the pretty dress here, zionism (the idea that jews should have a state) is not the cause, Islamic extremism is the cause. From Iran to the proxies, they make it very clear who they want destroyed. But if you aren't paying attention, there is the same wave of destruction across north Africa and more and more territory is being taken over.

The solution lies in Iran, not Israel, and the sooner the entire world rejects what Iran wants to deliver, the sooner we can find peace.

[Fuzz]

Interesting presentation, but it sure paints a one sided picture. I had recently read this, and it comes across very differently from the picture you paint.

The Zionist enterprise saw itself as providing “a land without a people for a people without a land,” to use its own unfortunate phrase. Palestine was not a land without a people, neither in 1897 nor in 1917 nor in 1948, To put it as starkly as possible: The Zionist movement aimed at establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, a land already inhabited by another people awakening to national identity. To this people the Zionist enterprise could only have appeared as an attempt by a culturally alien group to colonize and eventually gain control of their country.

Many of the early Zionist settlers in Palestine considered themselves socialists or even Marxists. They did dream of creating a new, egalitarian and progressive Jewish society in that land. Some of them may have honestly believed that Palestine could be transformed into an idyllic Jewish commonwealth without infringing on the rights, the land, the way of life of its indigenous inhabitants. Yet the very means required to create the foundations of a functioning Jewish society were incompatible with socialist principles.

Land was bought from absentee landlords for exclusively Jewish settlements; the peasants, the actual cultivators of the land, were dispossessed and — if they resisted — suppressed by the Turkish or British overlords of the country. Campaigns were launched to boycott Arab produce so as to encourage Jewish agricultural (and later industrial) enterprise. Bitter struggles were fought to force Jewish employers to hire only Jewish workers rather than cheaper Arab labor. David Hacohen, for many years a prominent figure in the Labor Zionist movement, explained what the dream often meant in practice:

I remember being one of the first of our comrades to go to London after the First World War…. There I became a socialist…. When I joined the socialist students — English, Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Indian, African — we found out that we were all under English domination or rule. And even here, in these intimate surroundings, I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs in my trade union, the Histadrut, to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there…. To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; to praise to the skies the Keren Kayemet [Jewish National Fund] that sent Hankin to Beirut to buy land from the absentee effendis and to throw the fellahin off the land — to buy dozens of dunams [of land] from an Arab is permitted, but to sell, God forbid, one Jewish dunam to an Arab is prohibited; to take Rothschild, the incarnation of capitalism, as a socialist and to name him “the benefactor” — to do all that was not easy. And despite the fact that we did it — maybe we had no choice — I wasn’t happy about it. [1]

Jews constituted some 10 percent of the population of Palestine in 1914, and about one third in 1947. As the Zionist enterprise progressed, as a growing percentage of the land was alienated from Arab hands, as new immigrants poured in, as a ramified network of settlements and pre-state institutions developed and Zionist leaders openly proclaimed their intention to establish a Jewish state, the Palestinian Arabs resisted in both peaceful and violent ways. Whatever the motives, intentions, hopes and dreams of the early Zionist settlers and leaders, in practice Zionism was quite understandably perceived by the Palestinian Arab people as a dire threat to their national integrity, to their homeland. It is difficult to see how things could have been otherwise. One can, in retrospect, argue that the Palestinians should have accepted the 1947 UN partition plan and been content with less than half their country, and thus perhaps they could have avoided the catastrophes that have followed. At the time the partition of their country seemed to them and to the whole Arab world as a grave injustice: they were being made to pay for Europe’s crimes against the Jews.

https://merip.org/1983/05/zionism-good-and-bad/


It's a really interesting read if you want the whole thing at the link. But I'm not sure it matches up with how you present history. It was written in 1983 by Zachary Lockman, who seems to know his stuff. Let me know if it changes your perspective a little.

[GGG]

I think Nage is right with his last sentence. If you could get rid of Iran funding you would open the door for peace. Israel does not fight Iran though. Only its proxies and the expense of the civilian populations.