Israel Hamas War, West Bank, Etc. | Hostilities resume

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ZZLPHeels said:
The discussion in question was about whether or not suicide attacks and terrorist attacks against civilians were cultural. In particular, whether they were part of radical Islamist/jihadist culture. I believe that the answer to that question is 100% yes.
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1. It seemed to me that most of the conversation was about whether Israel and Hamas were morally equivalent, roughly speaking. And the idea of Hamas hiding behind civilians or using asymmetric tactics or targeting civilians was being used to elevate Israel, even though they are more destructive.

2. The discussion isn't whether suicide attacks are cultural. Of course they are. Everything is cultural. The point of contention is whether there's some sort of unique aspect to jihadi culture that makes it worse than other perpetrators of mass violence, including Israel and the West.

My concern isn't with slander of Hamas; I'm not sure that's possible. I'm concerned about the truth. To say that terrorism is part of islamist culture is essentially to say that it has no origins in conditions on the ground. That it's a pathology associated with a group of people, rather than a response to tremendous deprivation and injustice. We will never prevail if we keep telling ourselves lies.

The reason that Hamas attacked Israel on 10/7 was the blockade that Israel put in years ago, causing widespread poverty and oppression. I had a colleague visit Gaza and she was just appalled, and she was expecting it to be bad. I don't know if we can call this assertion a fact, but I don't think it's controversial. Whether we call it rioting or terrorism or freedom fighting, people generally do not readily accept placement under another people's boot. It's not quite true to say that everywhere there is oppression there is something like terrorism, but it's closer to true than not.

3. In no way does it absolve Hamas of blame. Saying that a bad act is foreseeable or even certain to happen isn't to excuse the perps. It was a certainty that the Covid paycheck program would be fraudulently abused. That's why Congress normally puts in anti-fraud measures, but in this case it didn't because urgency. Or not as many, at least. And so there was fraud, and Congress has itself to blame. But the fraudsters are to blame even more.

People confuse "no justice, no peace" for a prescriptive slogan when actually it's just descriptive. When there is not justice, people tend not to be peaceful. It's not Muslims or Arabs or Christians or Buddhists -- it's everyone.
 
Paine said:
Here we go with the half-baked clash of civilizations BS that has been trotted out since the Iraq War.
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I don't think the clash of civilizations is necessarily BS. You're referring to how it's been treated since 2001-03, fair; I believe the original article was written in the mid 90s. I mean, there is a certain reality, is there not? You can roughly draw the Muslim world as a mostly contiguous blob of states from Africa to Bangladesh and then Southeast Asia/Indonesia. Only India and Burma interrupt it. And there are confrontations on virtually every front between Muslims and non-Muslims, and those conflicts are frequently (if not normally) deadly and violent.

I think the problem is the characterization. It's not really about religion; it's about colonialism and its legacies. The reason we see it so acutely in Muslim populations owes in large measure to geographic coincidence. If the Syrians, Lebanese or Palestinians were ethnic Japanese and shinto in religion, rather than the bewildering potpourri that exists on the ground, I think there would still be violence. It might take a different form, but I see no reason to think that there would be peace.

The other reason, of course, is that the Middle East was a hot spot for Cold War tensions and a lot of the conflicts we see as "Islamic" have that origin. Saddam, for instance, was a Baathist, not a mullah. His regime was secular and I doubt he had much use for religion at all. So while the Iran Iraq war is often thought of in part as a sunni-shia conflict, it was really geopolitical. The US wanted revenge on Iran (the Soviets supported the socialist Baathists, creating another weird frenemy situation between the two superpowers), and that war was a way to do it. We know all about Syria and Russia. The Soviets were active in South Asia as well.
 
ZenMode said:

UN retracts aid chief's claim that 14,000 Gazan babies will die in 48 hours without aid​

The UN later cited a report that said there could be 14,100 cases of malnutrition in children in Gaza between April 2025 and March 2026, a timeframe of one year not two days.

www.jpost.com

UN retracts aid chief's claim that 14,000 Gazan babies will die in 48 hours without aid

The UN later cited a report that said there could be 14,100 cases of malnutrition in children in Gaza between April 2025 and March 2026, a timeframe of one year not two days.
www.jpost.com www.jpost.com
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Interesting that the only sources “debunking” this are Israeli.

Are you denying children are starving? You are disgusting if you’re trying to argue that starving them is fine as long as it takes a year rather than immediately. That’s basically the point of Israel pushing that propaganda. They want to prolong the blockade on food.
 
RaiGuy said:
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The Israeli army on Wednesday fired shots at a delegation of regional, European and Western diplomats visiting the West Bank city of Jenin, sparking condemnations from the Palestinian Authority and several European capitals. An IDF statement said its troops fired "warning shots" and that the delegation "deviated from the approved route". No one was injured in the incident.
 
ZenMode said:
The Israeli army on Wednesday fired shots at a delegation of regional, European and Western diplomats visiting the West Bank city of Jenin, sparking condemnations from the Palestinian Authority and several European capitals. An IDF statement said its troops fired "warning shots" and that the delegation "deviated from the approved route". No one was injured in the incident.
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This is in the West Bank. Why should it matter if they “deviated from the approved route”?
 
RaiGuy said:
So not having enough food to save starving children is “dumb”?
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No. Giving food to folks and then others saying yeah but that’s not that much is dumb. It’s like when someone donates money to a cause and then people say they are worth xxxx and that’s all they gave? They could have given nothing.
 
HintonJamesHeel said:
No. Giving food to folks and then others saying yeah but that’s not that much is dumb. It’s like when someone donates money to a cause and then people say they are worth xxxx and that’s all they gave? They could have given nothing.
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Totally different scenario. There are tons of trucks waiting to provide aid but Israel is blocking it. The food is available. They’re purposefully starving the people.
 
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