politics

Ever since the unofficial IDF t-shirt design linked of a cross hair over a pregnant women with the words "one shot two kills" I've pretty much been at the "these people deserve everything that's coming and more" stage

One of the most standout moments from the pod ever was when Felix went on a rant (and showed emotion for once) where he talked about how Netanyahu wants the Jewish diaspora to experience antisemtism and be afraid for their lives because it serves his agenda for that to be the case.

Abducting kids is not okay, hitting them is not okay, sexual violence is not okay, targeting tourists at a rave is not okay.

Is there any evidence that Hamas have been committing sexual violence? I've been reading about this all day but haven't seen literally anything.

If they've done that, sure, fuck them, but all ive seen is racist libs trying to attribute it to them based on videos they refuse to share.

Horrible things happen when settlers try to genocide millions of human beings to steal their land. Every sort of violence, sexual included, is a guarantee. That is what war is. There is no clean war.

That will go both ways, but only one side has the power to put a stop to this brutal status quo. The settlers have to end the genocide, and the war will stop.

War is hell, and civilians suffer in every armed conflict. It is preferable to avoid civilian causalities, but that's often not how it goes at all. After generations of ruthless oppression you're going to end up with profound dehumanization of your oppressors. And even if deliberate effort is made to avoid civilian casualties every bullet has to land somewhere.

The civilian status of Israeli settlers is ambiguous as they are directly and proactively involved in the process of genocide. idk if they can be considered combatants per se, but they're definitely in a different category than civilians living peaceably within their own borders. Israeli settlements are a deliberately act of political violence with the express and very conscious intention of displacing and dispossessing Palestinians. They are illegal under international law and by most definitions constitute genocide. The Israeli government has for decades actively pursued a policy of placing Mizrahi on the frontier as a buffer between the Ashkenazi core and the Palestinian territories. And for the most part settlers are ideologically motivated, enthusiastically enacting the goals of Zionism to create a theocratic Israeli ethnostate. Many of them are religious extremists and fascists.

I would prefer that if Hamas is going to take captives they focus on able bodied people of fighting age, but obviously I'm not calling shots on the ground and I will not judge their decisions from the safety of my chair.

That's wishful thinking IMO. Is there any reason to believe that Hamas of all organizations has a more humane code of conduct than most other militaries on the planet? They're literal islamists, I don't really see how you expect them to behave like anything other than that.

And fuck off, smooth brained westerners like you think events are all just discrete occurrences with no connections to decades of past actions. Yeah the history of this conflict began this morning jfc.

We need some sort of equivalent of the “too small” taunt for when libs come in here spout off their moronic takes. Like “too smooth” of a brain or something.

Hey folk hear that? Israel's open air prison camp just kinda started this shit, today.

rude and uncivil.

With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something objective whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There would be no oppressed had there been no prior of violence to establish their subjugation.

And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization a simply a question of relative strength.

Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.

This is an account of things from the mid-1980s:

"As with the Holocaust, I tried to remember my very first encounter with the occupation. One of my earliest encounters involved a group of Israeli soldiers, an old Palestinian man, and his donkey.

Standing on a street with some Palestinian friends, I noticed an elderly Palestinian walking down the street, leading his donkey. A small child no more than three or four years old, clearly his grandson, was with him.

Some Israeli soldiers standing nearby went up to the old man and stopped him. One soldier ambled over to the donkey and pried open its mouth. “Old man,” he asked, “why are your donkey's teeth so yellow? Why aren't they white? Don't you brush your donkey's teeth?”

The old Palestinian was mortified, the little boy visibly upset. The soldier repeated his question, yelling this time, while the other soldiers laughed. The child began to cry and the old man just stood there silently, humiliated. This scene repeated itself while a crowd gathered. The soldier then ordered the old man to stand behind the donkey and demanded that he kiss the animal's behind.

At first, the old man refused but as the soldier screamed at him and his grandson became hysterical, he bent down and did it. The soldiers laughed and walked away. They had achieved their goal: to humiliate him and those around him.

We all stood there in silence, ashamed to look at each other, hearing nothing but the uncontrollable sobs of the little boy. The old man did not move for what seemed a very long time. He just stood there, demeaned and destroyed.

I stood there too, in stunned disbelief. I immediately thought of the stories my parents had told me of how Jews had been treated by the Nazis in the 1930s, before the ghettos and death camps, of how Jews would be forced to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes and have their beards cut off in public.

What happened to the old man was absolutely equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize. In this instance, there was no difference between the German soldier and the Israeli one.

Throughout that summer of 1985, I saw similar incidents: young Palestinian men being forced by Israeli soldiers to bark like dogs on their hands and knees or dance in the streets."

Sara Roy, Harvard professor and child of a Holocaust survivor:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064220308537274

"the world's largest open air prison should be blamed for rising up against the settle colonists with billions of dollars in US military aid."