Israel under attack from Hamas
- Thread starter JamieDimonsBalls
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Everyone has a moral message board superiority, until they get punched in the mouth. To paraphrase Mike Tyson.
You have no idea what life experience I have. Small minds, however, always resort to making reference to other posters' personal lives.
Just from your posting here, it's obvious you're a mama's boy who has rarely left Ft. Wayne, except for a stint in Ohio. You think you're intellectually on a higher plane and went to law school at a (minor) law school to prove it, and then couldn't hack it as a lawyer, so now you're back to food service. Does that about cover it? If not, feel free to fill me in on all your vast accomplishments.
I don't make reference to other poster's personal lives except those who continue to troll me, which includes you.
Some questions from ignorance:
Who is Hanania?
What are we defining as "ethnic cleansing?" I can see some reading that term as murdering all of a certain ethnicity. I can see others saying it means moving all of a certain ethnicity to another location. If the latter is how you are using it, do you agree that if it were done humanely it would less of a problem than the former definition?
What if the position was "we want to export all people who believe Jews are evil, feel they need to kill Jews, want to destroy the Jewish state" no matter their ethnicity, and then it turned out that included 90% of the Palestinians. Would that change the moral calculus? The defining of the notion as ethnic cleansing?
How one would act has little to do with how we think one should act. Revenge killings aren't good for society, even if it is human nature to want revenge.
Ethnic cleansing would be Israel taking out all the Arab non-Jews in Israel and kicking them out of the country or killing them.
If the individual Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank were to sign a pledge renouncing terrorism and recognizing the right of Israel to exist as a state, they would be welcome to stay and probably thrive with all the aid and assistance flowing in.
I'm not saying revenge killings are good. I'm saying it's a natural feeling to have in that situation.
In Israel's situation, it's natural for them to want to exterminate the threat to them, based on the barbarity of the killings. Innocent people will get killed. Is it right for the innocent? No. But I think it's right that Israel exterminates Hamas and is doing so in the fairest manner possible by allowing civilians humanitarian aid and safe passage out of the war zone.
@BradStevens I know you will have a counterpoint here, but I need to pack for a flight, so probably wont' be able to reply for a day or two.
Shalom.
He's a supposedly former racist who magically reformed his opinions once his identity was discovered.
Yes, ethnic cleansing involves forms that don't include murder. That's why it's a separate term from genocide. Inasmuch as you can morally rank crimes against humanity, I agree ethnic cleansing is less bad than genocide.
Iu does have a coaching search going on..... Not saying that is it, but not saying that it isn't.
Gaza Truce a Sign Hamas Can’t Be Defeated - VT Foreign Policy
After repeatedly rejecting a truce with Hamas and labeling the idea “ridiculous”, Israel agreed to a four-day cessation of hostilities in Gaza and a prisoner exchange.www.vtforeignpolicy.com
And this is the issue pretty clearly. Israel attacks and starts defeating Hamas and inflicting punishment for bad behavior, they are evil Zionist Nazis who should be ostracized. They agree to a ceasefire and they are a weak regime who cannot defeat the strong Hamas.
If you are going to lose the PR battle no matter what you do, might as well just rip the whole bandage off.
It's really the "War on Terror" they can't win just like we couldn't. No one can win that war. Victory will always be poorly defined when waging asymmetrical warfare against an ideology. The grievances just become greater and the aftermath harder to manage the more soldiers and bombs you dump into it. Did we win in Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, there hasn't been another 9/11, so the message was at least sent to state supporters of terrorism but most of the pre-9/11 issues remain, so the table is still set.
I can see the point IU is making I think. If the whole area would be better off and more lives were saved in the long run if Israel went scorched earth now, which it almost certainly would, then isn’t the more humane thing Israel going scorched earth now?
It’s analogous to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII.
Was it a horrific thing to do that cost untold thousands of innocent lives and was morally dubious even at the time?
Yes.
Did it save a lot of lives in the long run?
Absolutely.
He can correct me if I’m wrong but I think that’s the gist of what IU is saying.
It's the only answer that make sense. Or we can drag it on another 1000 years.
That's how I took his point, too. My only complaint with Crazy is sugarcoating. Call it what it is: ethnic cleansing, the end to the two-state solution, etc. Maybe that's the answer, but at least be upfront about what it is.
But Crazy isn't whom I was responding to, there. I was responding to Danc, who was advocating something quite different: literal eye-for-and-eye response, visiting upon the Palestinians as a punitive measure exactly what Hamas visited upon the Israelis. He basically suggest as a matter of common sense that if someone hurt my family, I'd want to see their family hurt in return. But I wouldn't, and I don't think any decent people would. You punish the perpetrators. You don't become them.
Yes, exactly.
ETA: You see what the Palestinians teach their kids in school. They basically have to be forced to give up all of that type of thinking and the only way that is going to happen is through a massive and bloody conclusion and an overly oppressive occupation and weapons confiscation program set up afterwards. They will also need a Palestinian Marshall Plan if they are to remain in the area that shows them how to be a Singapore or Hong Kong with the territory they do have.
The other option is thousands of deaths that are spread out in such a way that they ensure each successive generation of Palestinians and Israelis is traumatized in perpetuity. The kids of the Israeli hostages are dommed to raise children who will be traumatized by Palestinian terrorism and the kids of the kids being bombed in Gaza will likely have their own cycle of bombing to face in response to their parents terrorism and on and on it goes.
I get Goat's sentiment that this is all terrible. That is war. It is awful. Nobody likes seeing innocent people and kids get blown up. However, when you remove that emotional response and look at it from a cold and calculating way, you are trading a bunch of lives in the present to hopefully end the cycle now.
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You dismiss these liberals as inherently antisemitic, but their complaints seem to be accurate, considering what you're proposing in this thread. I noticed you deleted your other response before I could reply to it. Why? Afraid of what it says about you?
No, go ahead and undelete it. I removed it because I felt I was too harsh on you based on some clarifications you made later in the thread that I hadn't read yet when I initially answered.
I would humanitarianly relocate (ethnically cleanse if you won't allow me use the euphimisms leftists are so fond of in other instances) the Palestinians if that was the solution that looked most likely to permanently resolve the conflict. We've done it before:
Postwar forced resettlement of Germans echoes through the decades
After World War II ended in Europe, millions of ethnic Germans faced an uncertain future. The political repercussions of their expulsion continue even today.
theconversation.com
Call that the "nuclear" option. It is probably the last one I would use but I wouldn't take it off the table. As horrible as that process is at the time, I think it is a better option in the long run than the status quo. And after almost 80 years, I don't see any solutions being put on the table that aren't status quo. We are just kicking the can down the road to have this blow up again in 5 to 10 years. These folks cannot live together under the current paradigm and one side in particular is completely recalcitrant on accepting the reality on the ground and moving that paradigm.
As to the individuals I was mentioning, it was two separate groups: well intentioned liberals (who IMO make things worse coming from a place that is generally good hearted) and antisemitic people (who just hate Jews). Both are locked in an alliance where they end up downplaying Jewish lives lost because of proportionality. This embolden the weaker side to dig in ever deeper ensuring that they are not going to face reality. Coddling the Palestinians everything they lash out like this and rescuing them from the knockout blow every time they start a fight sets the table for neverending conflict. You can pat yourself on the back about how humanitarian that solution is and how awful mine is (and what that says about me) but I think it is awful to allow these people to beat on each other forever causing injuries to each subsequent generation all because we don't want things to be so messy in the here and now.
Fair. Sorry in turn I was too harsh to you, as well.No, go ahead and undelete it. I removed it because I felt I was too harsh on you based on some clarifications you made later in the thread that I hadn't read yet when I initially answered.
I would humanitarianly relocate (ethnically cleanse if you won't allow me use the euphimisms leftists are so fond of in other instances) the Palestinians if that was the solution that looked most likely to permanently resolve the conflict. We've done it before:
Postwar forced resettlement of Germans echoes through the decades
After World War II ended in Europe, millions of ethnic Germans faced an uncertain future. The political repercussions of their expulsion continue even today.
Call that the "nuclear" option. It is probably the last one I would use but I wouldn't take it off the table. As horrible as that process is at the time, I think it is a better option in the long run than the status quo. And after almost 80 years, I don't see any solutions being put on the table that aren't status quo. We are just kicking the can down the road to have this blow up again in 5 to 10 years. These folks cannot live together under the current paradigm and one side in particular is completely recalcitrant on accepting the reality on the ground and moving that paradigm.
As to the individuals I was mentioning, it was two separate groups: well intentioned liberals (who IMO make things worse coming from a place that is generally good hearted) and antisemitic people (who just hate Jews). Both are locked in an alliance where they end up downplaying Jewish lives lost because of proportionality. This embolden the weaker side to dig in ever deeper ensuring that they are not going to face reality. Coddling the Palestinians everything they lash out like this and rescuing them from the knockout blow every time they start a fight sets the table for neverending conflict. You can pat yourself on the back about how humanitarian that solution is and how awful mine is (and what that says about me) but I think it is awful to allow these people to beat on each other forever causing injuries to each subsequent generation all because we don't want things to be so messy in the here and now.
I'm willing to accept you might be right if you're willing to accept my discomfort with the euphemisms, as you put it.
I get your discomfort. Human conflict is ugly. War is ugly. That is why I think sometimes we need to just let the ugly happen and get it over with. That traumatizes a generation but it allows parties to move on from there. At least we mostly confine the most traumatizing aspects to one generation. It allows subsequent ones to move on.
We currently make it where neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians can move on.
Thing is, IU is the only one on this board who has even articulated a solution, as flawed as it might be.
The liberals here have no ideas at all, it seems like, beyond Israel mean/Palestinians suffer.
I can tell you what the solution is for others on the far left though, and it’s the same as IU’s, only in reverse. The “ethnic cleansing/genocide” of the Israelis in the name of decolonization.
That’s what the people who go to pro Hamas rallies want, they’re just really squirrelly about saying it.
Two thoughts about this.
First, the perpetrators are living in luxury in Qatar and are the guys in black robes running Iran. The only way to punish them without bombs and missiles is sanctions and asset seizures. We not only have refused to do that, we have inexcusably and inexplicably done the exact opposite.
Second, any notion the Israel has “become” like the Palestinian savagery is part of the problem. There is no equivalency with October 7. The list Of equivalent examples of human atrocities in the last 100 years is a short one and the Palestinians are on it.
I didn't say Israel had become like the Palestinians. I'm responding to people advocating they do just that.
Fair enough. However, those who parade around our streets and campuses with Palestinian flags believe that, and they have Biden’s ear. Biden even apologized for questioning Hanas’ body count statistics. We can’t solve the problem with this kind of leadership.
If they had Biden's ear don't you think our real policy would be different?
I'd like to throw in one more thing: you are making a very utilitarian argument. I'm fairly confident you would reject such arguments in many contexts. I'm not trying to throw out a slippery slope argument here, but just consider whether accepting such an argument is consistent with what would otherwise be your moral worldview.
No. Biden and many democrats are as pro Iran/Palestine/ as practicalities will allow.
Of course I would. We all do that. If the Japanese nuked us in WW2 I wouldn't like that. I come to the table with my own biases.
This is ridiculous. Pro-Iran? There might be a tiny handful of Democrats who are pro-Palestine, but Biden isn't one and no one is pro-Iran. Get a grip.
7th October 2023 - Hamas’s unprecedented assault on Israeli communities
You can’t look at what has happened to Israel's mothers, fathers, grandparents, sons, daughters, children — even babies — and not scream out for justice. Justice must be done.This archive will make sure, that the world will never forget.
oct7th.org
I make no bones about it. I don't really like the Palestinians. I am really not a fan of Islam in general and I have a lifetime of reasons (from an admittedly Western/US POV) as to why. I frankly don't care why they do what they do or why they don't like the "West". The feeling is mutual.
It is a civilizational clash. I prefer our civilization. Simple as that.
