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On July 09 2025 17:29 RJGooner wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2025 16:24 Magic Powers wrote:
You are evidently very late to the party, or else you wouldn't be surprised that so many people call it a genocide. You might still deny it, but you wouldn't be surprised anymore. Nah, I don't think I'm late to the party but you are right - I'm not surprised. The amount of misinformation that has been spread about this war from the very beginning is astounding. The genocide distortion is one of the worst because it attempts to put the IDF and Hamas on some kind of morally equivalent plane when the moral differences between the two sides are just so obvious. In any case, the amount of people who may or may not call this a genocide really isn't the interesting thing here. I'd rather focus on this question: does the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza have any substance based on the actual definition of the term and the facts and context on the ground? I just laid out for you the case that it doesn't. Also WRT "so many people" saying it's genocide. I guess this is relative given that the official position of countries like the UK, France, Germany, Australia, the US, and yes, Austria, is that it is not a genocide.
I'm not going to discuss things with people who deliberately ignore the mountain of evidence proving mass murder by the IDF. Call it whatever you want, deny that it's a genocide, you have every right to call into question the specific use of words. But if you even deny that there's a mass murder going on then you're stuck in a propagandist echo chamber.
Edit: Here's just one of many instances of mass murder. The IDF never goes a single day without committing mass murder. They can't help but commit mass murder at all times. They give absolutely no regard to Palestinian lives, including children, women, elderly, aid organizations, ambulance vehicles, other rescue services and journalists. All of these killings are 100% deliberate and sanctioned by Israel's administration.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-news-07-03-2025-7bed9df1b8a5278631ae844c18ace2b2
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Northern Ireland25118 Posts
On July 09 2025 18:32 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2025 12:58 RJGooner wrote:
Always with the both sides trying to put Hamas and the IDF on some kind of a similar moral plane. So sick and tired of this.
Have to agree with you there, this moral equivalence is disgusting since the IDF is much worse.
Much worse in that sense?
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Not only is the IDF actively engaged in mass murder of Palestinians, they're also fighting for a completely pyrrhic victory for Israelis. Their stated goal is to rescue the hostages, but by the end of this war many hundreds of IDF soldiers - possibly thousands - will have been killed in this senseless war.
When the war started there were around 250 hostages, some alive and some dead.
By January 2025 around 890 IDF soldiers have been killed since October 7. Additionally, suicides among them are increasing.
This stands in absolutely no relation to the number of living hostages, which are now in the double digits. Roughly a few dozen hostages are estimated to be alive at this point, while IDF soldiers are dying in much greater numbers compared to the number of hostages still being alive.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/hk6zi1e8ke
By now we're probably looking at around 1000 IDF soldiers having been killed since October 7. This number will continue to rise while hostages are being freed at a pace that cannot justify the number of IDF deaths. IDF soldiers are Israelis, too.
Netanyahu is sacrificing not only Palestinians in his murderous pursuit, he's also sacrificing his own people that he's supposed to protect from outside aggression. His continuation of the war has caused almost as many Israeli deaths as Hamas did on October 7. He is just as bad as Hamas for his own people.
This is an argument that's literally always being ignored because it's extremely inconvenient to accept the truth of it.
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Well, I don't think its really fair to say that IDF deaths are all for nothing, regardless of my feelings for Israel, from a strategic standpoint what they did to Hamas and Hezbolah is in the long term going to save more Israeli lives then the amount of soldiers who died.
The amount of firepower that Hezbolah had and Israel destroyed alone would justify the losses and taking out the Hamas military wing and it's leadership in Gaza, along with a lot of their infrastructure is by all means beneficial to Israel's security.
What isn't is the amount of death and suffering they caused in the process, in longer term that will be catastrophic and every day that the slaughter of innocents in Gaza continues makes it worse, not to mention what they are doing in West bank.
Hostages question is silly for anyone on Israeli side to use, they gave up on actually trying to free them a long time ago and they are just a sunken cost, that is both disgusting and despicable but it doesn't seem like Israeli public cares about that anymore, the almost 2 years of war footing and insane rhetoric seems to have worked wonders in radicalizing them.
The genocide deniers coming to this thread late seem tired and silly to me, all of these shitty arguments have been brought up and discussed to death, Israel is doing a slow roll genocide, they just stated a new plan of a "Humanitarian city" where no one is allowed to leave, aka a fucking concentration camp, so whoever is still trying to push the "Israel doesn't have genocidal intent" around here is completely detached from reality.
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On July 09 2025 18:32 Nebuchad wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2025 12:58 RJGooner wrote:
Always with the both sides trying to put Hamas and the IDF on some kind of a similar moral plane. So sick and tired of this.
Have to agree with you there, this moral equivalence is disgusting since the IDF is much worse.
Bonkers if you believe this.
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On July 09 2025 22:18 Billyboy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2025 18:32 Nebuchad wrote:On July 09 2025 12:58 RJGooner wrote:
Always with the both sides trying to put Hamas and the IDF on some kind of a similar moral plane. So sick and tired of this.
Have to agree with you there, this moral equivalence is disgusting since the IDF is much worse. Bonkers if you believe this.
No, it is not "bonkers". You can disagree without calling it that.
For example in terms of total casualties, the IDF has more than surpassed Hamas. In that sense the IDF would be objectively much worse.
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On July 09 2025 18:35 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2025 17:29 RJGooner wrote:On July 09 2025 16:24 Magic Powers wrote:
You are evidently very late to the party, or else you wouldn't be surprised that so many people call it a genocide. You might still deny it, but you wouldn't be surprised anymore. Nah, I don't think I'm late to the party but you are right - I'm not surprised. The amount of misinformation that has been spread about this war from the very beginning is astounding. The genocide distortion is one of the worst because it attempts to put the IDF and Hamas on some kind of morally equivalent plane when the moral differences between the two sides are just so obvious. In any case, the amount of people who may or may not call this a genocide really isn't the interesting thing here. I'd rather focus on this question: does the claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza have any substance based on the actual definition of the term and the facts and context on the ground? I just laid out for you the case that it doesn't. Also WRT "so many people" saying it's genocide. I guess this is relative given that the official position of countries like the UK, France, Germany, Australia, the US, and yes, Austria, is that it is not a genocide. I'm not going to discuss things with people who deliberately ignore the mountain of evidence proving mass murder by the IDF. Call it whatever you want, deny that it's a genocide, you have every right to call into question the specific use of words. But if you even deny that there's a mass murder going on then you're stuck in a propagandist echo chamber. Edit: Here's just one of many instances of mass murder. The IDF never goes a single day without committing mass murder. They can't help but commit mass murder at all times. They give absolutely no regard to Palestinian lives, including children, women, elderly, aid organizations, ambulance vehicles, other rescue services and journalists. All of these killings are 100% deliberate and sanctioned by Israel's administration. https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-news-07-03-2025-7bed9df1b8a5278631ae844c18ace2b2
Translation: You got called out for misusing the term genocide and you refuse to engage substantively when I made points to show you why that use of the term was wrong. Now you just want to pivot to "mass murder." Fine, that's your right but don't go throwing around the term genocide willy-nilly like that if you're not prepared to back it up.
Also, there literally isn't "mountains of evidence" as you claim that the IDF is committing mass murder or has a policy of mass murder. Civilians dying in a war as collateral damage does not equal mass murder - especially when the war is being fought against a terrorist group that LITERALLY USES ITS OWN CIVILIANS AS PART OF ITS MILITARY STRATEGY.
Murder again also requires intent. If the IDF did have a policy of mass murder then thousands or even hundreds of thousands more Palestinians would be dead. I mean seriously, just think about what you are saying. So the Israelis supposedly want to mass murder the Palestinians - and yet they have consistently let in aid, set up humanitarian zones, and vaccinated children?
WRT to the article you posted. First of all, it uncritically repeats numbers and statements from the Gaza Health Ministry. The Gaza Health ministry is Hamas. So I take any story or figure they post with a massive grain of salt given that the information we get from there is incredibly unreliable and has been shown several times to be flat out wrong. But here's what I'll say: I think the GHF operation has been extremely poorly handled and to the extent that any Palestinians have been killed by incompetence or bad conduct by IDF soldiers I fully support investigation and prosecution of those soldiers and their commanders. Which, btw, the IDF military advocate general is doing at this very moment.
No, it is not "bonkers". You can disagree without calling it that.
For example in terms of total casualties, the IDF has more than surpassed Hamas. In that sense the IDF would be objectively much worse.
Saying the IDF is worse than Hamas - either this person is genuinely morally confused or has an astounding ignorance of the facts and context on the ground. Hamas is a radical Jihadist death cult that started this war, continues to perpetuate it by not surrendering and holding hostages, and maximizes the deaths of civilians as part of its military strategy. Compare that with the IDF which is a professional western army that actually wears uniforms, has a mechanism to investigate its own bad conduct, and takes precautions to prevent civilians deaths. The difference could not be more stark.
Also, if you're going to claim that total deaths on one side is an indicator of who has the moral high ground then by that standard the US was morally far worse than Imperial Japan since many more Japanese died in WWII than Americans. It's not really a strong point at all.
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On July 09 2025 21:08 Jankisa wrote:
Well, I don't think its really fair to say that IDF deaths are all for nothing, regardless of my feelings for Israel, from a strategic standpoint what they did to Hamas and Hezbolah is in the long term going to save more Israeli lives then the amount of soldiers who died.
The amount of firepower that Hezbolah had and Israel destroyed alone would justify the losses and taking out the Hamas military wing and it's leadership in Gaza, along with a lot of their infrastructure is by all means beneficial to Israel's security.
What isn't is the amount of death and suffering they caused in the process, in longer term that will be catastrophic and every day that the slaughter of innocents in Gaza continues makes it worse, not to mention what they are doing in West bank.
Hostages question is silly for anyone on Israeli side to use, they gave up on actually trying to free them a long time ago and they are just a sunken cost, that is both disgusting and despicable but it doesn't seem like Israeli public cares about that anymore, the almost 2 years of war footing and insane rhetoric seems to have worked wonders in radicalizing them.
The genocide deniers coming to this thread late seem tired and silly to me, all of these shitty arguments have been brought up and discussed to death, Israel is doing a slow roll genocide, they just stated a new plan of a "Humanitarian city" where no one is allowed to leave, aka a fucking concentration camp, so whoever is still trying to push the "Israel doesn't have genocidal intent" around here is completely detached from reality.
Ok, I'm sorry for the double post but this really needs to be called out. Israel gave up on trying to free the hostages you say as they are literally in talks with Hamas/US/Qatar on a deal that will release hostages (in exchange for actual criminals and terrorists, btw). What???????
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you can't claim the government really wants the hostages back while there are reports of Netanyahu actively sabotaging early negotiations.
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On July 10 2025 01:34 Gorsameth wrote:
you can't claim the government really wants the hostages back while there are reports of Netanyahu actively sabotaging early negotiations.
This is the latest NYT report on where things stand between Hamas and Israel on the negotiations. It does not back up your claim that Netanyahu is "actively sabotaging the early negotiations."
https://www.nytimes.com/article/israel-hamas-ceasefire-negotiations.html
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On July 10 2025 01:09 RJGooner wrote:
Translation: You got called out for misusing the term genocide and you refuse to engage substantively when I made points to show you why that use of the term was wrong. Now you just want to pivot to "mass murder." Fine, that's your right but don't go throwing around the term genocide willy-nilly like that if you're not prepared to back it up.
No, I'm just interested in good faith argumentation. That is how it works when you argue in good faith. You allow the opposing argument room for validity, i.e. if a person can substantiate their argument then it should be considered to be within the realm of reason and not dismissed out of hand.
This is 100% a bad faith argument on your part. I'm not "pivoting". What I'm doing is allowing room for a range of possibilities outside of strictly genocide. And I allow this because I'm open-minded, not because I realize that I'm wrong and am unwilling to admit it.
I firmly stand by the accusation of genocide. However, my goal isn't to make everybody around me adopt the same terminology as mine. My goal is to present arguments in such a manner that people can agree that this war is A) a genocide or B) being fought in such a manner that the accusation of genocide is plausible.
In doing so my primary goal is to demonstrate that the accusation of genocide is within reason, and not outside of reason. My secondary goal is to prove that people accusing Israel of genocide are not zealots, but reasonable people with reasonable arguments.
You are attempting to paint people as unreasonable, and you're using bad faith argumentation to accomplish this. If you want people to take your argumentation seriously, you need to stop doing this and start accepting that people here have thought about this problem for years from various angles, and that they have drawn their conclusions independently from one another. The accusation of genocide doesn't come from nothing, and it also doesn't come from pro-Hamas propaganda efforts. Various highly reputable institutions and scholars have accused Israel of genocide.
When you argue against this accusation, you're arguing against an entire body of evidence by a large number of reputable entities. You're not just arguing against a few random people on a random internet forum.
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I'm not sure what the relevance is of a report about a separate negotiation that took place back in 2024. Especially in light of the fact that Israel agreed to a ceasefire that released hostages earlier this year. Let's just stop with this fiction please.
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On July 09 2025 23:21 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2025 22:18 Billyboy wrote:On July 09 2025 18:32 Nebuchad wrote:On July 09 2025 12:58 RJGooner wrote:
Always with the both sides trying to put Hamas and the IDF on some kind of a similar moral plane. So sick and tired of this.
Have to agree with you there, this moral equivalence is disgusting since the IDF is much worse. Bonkers if you believe this. No, it is not "bonkers". You can disagree without calling it that. For example in terms of total casualties, the IDF has more than surpassed Hamas. In that sense the IDF would be objectively much worse.
Total casualties has Ukraine as worse then Russian. There are ways to make many argument but that does not make them good ways.
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United States42609 Posts
The hostages are not a sticking point for peace and are close to an irrelevance. Hamas previously took hostages because Israel previously gave them very generous deals for the return of hostages. That practice incentivized large scale hostage taking raids like the one we saw on Oct 7. Israel wants the hostages back, but not as badly as it wants Hamas to no longer be the government of Gaza. If Israel special forces conducted a raid and recovered all the hostages, including the bodies of the deceased, all in one location nothing would materially change. The IDF would still have to fill the power vacuum in Gaza in order to keep Hamas displaced until such a time as a viable alternative is found.
It's essentially a straw man. "If Israel is fighting for the hostages then why are they doing [action inconsistent with prioritizing the return of the hostages]". The initial premise is false.
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On July 10 2025 01:09 RJGooner wrote:
Saying the IDF is worse than Hamas - either this person is genuinely morally confused or has an astounding ignorance of the facts and context on the ground.
The facts and context on the ground are more than 60 000 dead Palestinians, the vast majority of them innocent people. There have been plenty of reports of Israel destroying buildings and compounds in which no members of Hamas were found, attacking sites and vehicles that are under protection for humanitarian purposes, etc.
Amnesty International has investigated a number of attacks and come to a clear conclusion of war crimes being committed.
Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in-depth investigations into 16 Israeli air strikes that killed a total of 370 civilians, including 159 children, and left hundreds more wounded. Amnesty International has found evidence of war crimes by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians or indiscriminate attacks, as well as other unlawful attacks and collective punishment of the civilian population.
For this latest investigation, Amnesty International interviewed 17 survivors and witnesses, surveyed the locations of the strikes, visited a hospital where the wounded were receiving treatment, photographed remnants of the munitions used in the attacks for expert identification, reviewed video and photographic material obtained from local sources and available on social media, and examined satellite imagery of the locations.
In all three cases, Amnesty International did not find any evidence that there had been any military targets in or around the locations targeted by the Israeli military, raising serious concerns that these attacks amount to direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects, which are war crimes. Israel has not provided any information about the attacks in Rafah, and has only provided general allegations, which it later contradicted, regarding the attack on al-Maghazi.
Even if Israeli forces had intended to target legitimate military objectives in the vicinity of these three strikes, the evidence indicates these attacks did not distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects, and as such would therefore be indiscriminate. Indiscriminate attacks that kill or injure civilians, or destroy or damage civilian objects, are war crimes.
The evidence collected by Amnesty International also indicates the Israeli military failed to provide warning – at minimum to anyone living in the locations that were hit – before launching the attacks.
On 7 May 2024, Amnesty International sent questions regarding the strikes to the Israeli authorities. At the time of publication, no response had been received.
https://amnesty.ca/human-rights-news/israeli-air-strikes-that-killed-44-civilians-further-evidence-of-war-crimes-in-the-occupied-gaza-strip/
If you think this is an outlier - no, it's absolutely not. This is the norm in Gaza.
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On July 10 2025 04:41 RJGooner wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2025 04:12 Gorsameth wrote:On July 10 2025 04:09 RJGooner wrote:On July 10 2025 01:34 Gorsameth wrote:
you can't claim the government really wants the hostages back while there are reports of Netanyahu actively sabotaging early negotiations. This is the latest NYT report on where things stand between Hamas and Israel on the negotiations. It does not back up your claim that Netanyahu is "actively sabotaging the early negotiations." https://www.nytimes.com/article/israel-hamas-ceasefire-negotiations.html I said early negotiations, not current. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July(2024) effectively spiked a draft hostage and ceasefire deal by introducing a raft of new, 11th-hour demands, according to a report by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth citing a document it obtained. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/04/middleeast/netanyahu-derailed-hostage-deal-in-july-intl
I'm not sure what the relevance is of a report about a separate negotiation that took place back in 2024. Especially in light of the fact that Israel agreed to a ceasefire that released hostages earlier this year. Let's just stop with this fiction please. What fiction, Netanyahu was happy to sabotage negotiations and let hostages suffer so that the war against Gaza could be continued, because if all the hostages were released international pressure to stop the war would increase. That Israel is now more receptive to hostage exchanges now that the war is nearing its end and their earlier conduct has come out doesn't stop the original premise from being true. Netanyahu sacrificed hostages to keep the war going.
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On July 10 2025 04:49 KwarK wrote:
The hostages are not a sticking point for peace and are close to an irrelevance. Hamas previously took hostages because Israel previously gave them very generous deals for the return of hostages. That practice incentivized large scale hostage taking raids like the one we saw on Oct 7. Israel wants the hostages back, but not as badly as it wants Hamas to no longer be the government of Gaza. If Israel special forces conducted a raid and recovered all the hostages, including the bodies of the deceased, all in one location nothing would materially change. The IDF would still have to fill the power vacuum in Gaza in order to keep Hamas displaced until such a time as a viable alternative is found.
It's essentially a straw man. "If Israel is fighting for the hostages then why are they doing [action inconsistent with prioritizing the return of the hostages]". The initial premise is false.
Getting the hostages back was(is) pretty clearly at best the secondary goal after the complete destruction of Hamas and the significant weakening of the axis of resistance.
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On July 10 2025 04:45 Billyboy wrote:Show nested quote +On July 09 2025 23:21 Magic Powers wrote:On July 09 2025 22:18 Billyboy wrote:On July 09 2025 18:32 Nebuchad wrote:On July 09 2025 12:58 RJGooner wrote:
Always with the both sides trying to put Hamas and the IDF on some kind of a similar moral plane. So sick and tired of this.
Have to agree with you there, this moral equivalence is disgusting since the IDF is much worse. Bonkers if you believe this. No, it is not "bonkers". You can disagree without calling it that. For example in terms of total casualties, the IDF has more than surpassed Hamas. In that sense the IDF would be objectively much worse. Total casualties has Ukraine as worse then Russian. There are ways to make many argument but that does not make them good ways.
These two wars are based on entirely different premises.
Ukraine is not in a position to end the war with Russia, only Russia is in such a position. Russia is the one continuing the war until Ukraine falls. Ukraine would end the war immediately if Russia withdrew to the border.
If Israel stopped fighting, they'd just be withdrawing from Gaza. They wouldn't be surrendering anything.
If Ukraine stopped fighting, they'd be surrendering their country to Putin's Russia.
This is why Palestinian casualties are such a big deal. The Israel-Gaza war is completely and utterly pointless from both perspectives. Neither Palestinians nor Israelis stand to gain anything from its continuation.
Meanwhile Ukrainians stand to gain everything if Russia surrenders, and they stand to lose everything if Ukraine surrenders.
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On July 10 2025 04:54 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On July 10 2025 04:41 RJGooner wrote:On July 10 2025 04:12 Gorsameth wrote:On July 10 2025 04:09 RJGooner wrote:On July 10 2025 01:34 Gorsameth wrote:
you can't claim the government really wants the hostages back while there are reports of Netanyahu actively sabotaging early negotiations. This is the latest NYT report on where things stand between Hamas and Israel on the negotiations. It does not back up your claim that Netanyahu is "actively sabotaging the early negotiations." https://www.nytimes.com/article/israel-hamas-ceasefire-negotiations.html I said early negotiations, not current. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July(2024) effectively spiked a draft hostage and ceasefire deal by introducing a raft of new, 11th-hour demands, according to a report by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth citing a document it obtained. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/04/middleeast/netanyahu-derailed-hostage-deal-in-july-intl
I'm not sure what the relevance is of a report about a separate negotiation that took place back in 2024. Especially in light of the fact that Israel agreed to a ceasefire that released hostages earlier this year. Let's just stop with this fiction please. What fiction, Netanyahu was happy to sabotage negotiations and let hostages suffer so that the war against Gaza could be continued, because if all the hostages were released international pressure to stop the war would increase. That Israel is now more receptive to hostage exchanges now that the war is nearing its end and their earlier conduct has come out doesn't stop the original premise from being true. Netanyahu sacrificed hostages to keep the war going.
The original premise was that Israel has completely given up on getting the hostages back which is just patently untrue.
It's true as Kwark and others have pointed out that getting the hostages back is not Israel's only war aim and it's also true that the eradication of Hamas from Gaza is the real non-negotiable here. But that doesn't automatically invalidate the premise that Israel wants its hostages returned too.
In the previous and current negotiations Israel has and will have to release some of the worst and most vicious terrorists who have previously murdered innocent Israeli civilians, among other concessions. You really think Israel wants to do that?
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