politics

There really are no winners here.

Let's be realistic. Hamas fucked around and found out. You don't go around provoking a regional superpower with decades-old guns and improvised weapons. There was never a situation where Israel wasn't going to go in and curb stomp them in response. Israel has always been open about this.

But the response they gave is beyond inhumane. They've decided that the best course of action is to just "kill 'em all and let God sort it out". The vast majority of their targets so far have been civilian targets, and they defend their actions by essentially saying that since they can't tell the difference between Hamas and the civilians, they're just going to mow down everybody. Hospitals have been bombed. Supplies have been all but cut off. Civilian vehicles targeted on video, with the IDF's official response being barely more than "sucks to be them." Thousands of civilians dead, and Israel's response is to say "we're just getting started" and advancing a ground attack.

There is no justification for that response. None. If Israel had any chance of getting regional or global support for their actions, they pissed that away the second they thought bombing a hospital was a good idea. If they think that indiscriminately bombing civilian targets is going to magically stop their enemies from interfering, they thought wrong (as evidenced by the fighting along the Lebanese border). If anything, Israel just gave them the justification that they have been looking for and probably just made their own situation exponentially worse.

At this point, I really do believe that Biden needs to withdraw all but humanitarian support from Israel. Helping to arm Israel while they commit genocide in real time isn't going to help our position with allies in the middle east. And neither side are exactly saints here. The US should take this into consideration, withdraw military support for Israel, offer humanitarian aid to civilians in both Israel and Gaza, and say they no longer take any position on the conflict outside of protecting US interests.

I would think it would take a hell of a lot to make a terrorist organization like Hamas look like the sympathetic victim. And while I'm not saying they are, Israel seems to be speedrunning their attempts to make them look like they are.

The image I have is a GIF of Q laying in a sultry manner on the bridge of the Enterprise. So bizarre.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The open disdain toward Biden from many in a reliably Democratic bloc is among the many signs the conflict is quickly remaking U.S. domestic politics, with public fury over a Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis colliding with the horror of entire families in the Gaza Strip being wiped out in Israel’s retaliatory strikes.

Incensed U.S. Arab and Muslim advocacy groups this week called Biden’s remarks about the death count dangerous, and some prominent voices from those communities chimed in on social media, saying that the president had lost them and that they were considering sitting out the 2024 election.

When word got out that the president wanted to meet with community leaders — ones approved by senior staffers — national activists immediately began working the phones to pressure invitees to decline or to accept only on the condition that Biden answer for his remarks about Palestinian deaths.

Two days later, the president made the comments questioning the accuracy of Palestinian casualties at a time when Arabic-language TV channels were showing nonstop footage of lifeless, dust-covered children being pulled from the rubble after Israeli strikes.

Contacted by The Post about the meeting, Ellison said in an email, “Muslim community leaders told President Biden that the suffering of innocent Gazans trying to survive in extremely difficult circumstances has actually increased the likelihood of Islamophobic attacks in the United States.

“It’s really crazy to me that the Democratic party destroyed 20-years … worth of good will with Muslims and Arabs in just 2 weeks, losing an entire generation that was raised in the progressive coalition, possibly forever,” Eman Abdelhadi, a University of Chicago professor of comparative human development who studies Palestinian Americans, wrote Thursday on X, formerly Twitter.

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