US support for Israel is one of the most horrible things imaginable, really makes me ashamed. It is only the US standing between the current horrendous status quo and Israel being an true international pariah state. Hopefully we cut off support and usher in a find out era.
(Though to be honest my position is probably that we need to go past cutting off support and US tax dollars should go toward reparations for Palesine, Lebanon and probably Iran and others, we are complicit in a lot of fucked shit.)
((I don't think those places are lead by great individuals and everything is amazing to be clear, I also think the people there have suffered immensely from a century of american, british and israeli meddling and we should be held accountable))
We've already given Israel almost $400 billion. Subrogate them for Palestinian reparations instead of billing everything to us like a teenage girl let loose at the mall with Daddy's credit card.
Because I don't think US tax money should go toward reparations for Palestine, Lebanon, Iran or anywhere else. We're not 'complicit' in the way you're framing it
The only reason Israel is able to commit the horrors they are is because they can fuck around without finding out due to US protection paid for by our tax dollars, we are absolutely complicit. Of course that's only in the immediate term, I urge you to look at the history of the region even a little critically, so much of the conflict there is rooted in British, American and Israeli meddling, it's an insane take to claim that we are not responsible and that we have not benefited immensely.
No, money has nothing to do with it. The US military aid package to Israel is only around 2-3% of Israel's annual state budget. That's a relatively small amount, and far less significant than people tend to make it out to be.
The US provides this aid because it serves American interests. A large portion of the money is actually spent in the US, benefiting the American defense industry, not just financially but also through technological development and shared innovation.
What Israel truly gains from the relationship with the US is diplomatic cover, mainly the UN Security Council veto. Israel is by far the most condemned country at the UN in terms of resolutions passed against it, whether that's justified or not is a separate debate.
I don't understand what the purpose of making a distinction between monetary support in terms of direct aid, and indirect aid. The entire apparatus of the US government is paid for by our taxes, we pay for it either way. We also pay for it in instability and negative sentiment.
> Israel is by far the most condemned country at the UN in terms of resolutions passed against it
It's crazy to me that you know this and yet it seems like you are still in support of the US protecting Israel? You still think this is a net win for the world? That's incomprehensible to me.
> It's crazy to me that you know this and yet it seems like you are still in support of the US protecting Israel? You still think this is a net win for the world? That's incomprehensible to me.
It's crazy to me that you know the UN is literally run by states that actually commit war crimes, kill LGBTQ people, suppress women and minority rights, countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and you still think UN condemnation means anything. They're condemning the only democratic country in the entire Middle East, the one place in the region where these rights actually matter and mean something. Arab citizens can vote, gay people can live openly, women sit in parliament and serve in the military. That's Israel. And that's who they keep putting on trial.
Call me when the citizens in Gaza and the West Bank get a vote.
Oh, they're citizens of another country you say? What country would that be?
Like, it's great that Israeli Arabs are treated (somewhat) well, but it doesn't excuse what's happening in Gaza and (particularly) in the West Bank.
Regardless of how progressive or democratic a state is, if they keep bombing other states and killing people, they will most likely be judged for it.
It's profoundly depressing that the Jewish people, fresh off of 2k years of oppression, have decided to speedrun the same behaviours against someone else.
> Call me when the citizens in Gaza and the West Bank get a vote.
They can. They voted in Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank. They are not Israeli citizens, which is why they don't vote in Israeli elections. You wouldn't expect the US to give voting rights to Mexicans or Canadians who aren't dual citizens, would you?
> Like, it's great that Israeli Arabs are treated (somewhat) well
"Somewhat"? They get subsidized education, skip mandatory military service, and in some cases receive more benefits than the Jewish population through affirmative action. Gaza and the West Bank aren't part of Israel. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and handed civil control of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords.
> if they keep bombing other states and killing people
Nice summary for wars that were NEVER started by Israel. And before you mention Iran, it has been at war with Israel since 1979, the moment it declared it would erase Israel off the face of the Earth, and has been actively attacking Israel through its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah) for decades.
> It's profoundly depressing that the Jewish people, fresh off of 2k years of oppression, have decided to speedrun the same behaviours against someone else.
I know it can seem like this but it's important to make the distinction that Jewish people are not the same set as zionists and israelis, and that conflation is something the latter two parties DESPERATELY want you to make.
That's totally fair and a distinction I definitely support. I really, really really like almost all of the Israeli people and Jewish people I've met and worked with, and hence why I care about this a lot.
An apartheid ethno-supremacist state is, by definition, not democratic.
In the last month, the Israeli Jews passed a law to allow the death penalty, but only for non-Jews*. The Israeli lawmakers celebrated their lynching law by wearing noose shaped lapel pins. There are several 10s of laws that favor Jews over non-Jewish citizens of Israel. Palestinian citizens are, at best, second-class citizens.
Non-Israeli Palestinians who were violently driven from their homes in previous Israeli Jewish genocides of the indigenous population, do not even have a right to civilian courts. In most cases, the Israeli Jews imprison these Palestinians without charge, trial, or fixed sentence-- including young children. Rape and torture by Israeli Jews is systemic in these detention centers.
Their "democratic" process includes mobs of Jewish Knesset (parliment) members threatening, on the floor of the Knesset, the rape of Palestian Israeli members of the Knesset including, Haneen Zoabi and Sa'id Naffaa.
* The law doesn't really change anything in reality, as Jews have always been able to rape, torture and murder Palestinians with impunity-- e.g., for the year prior to 7 Oct., Israeli Jews murdered, on average, one Palestinian per day, in the West Bank. That rate is much worse now.
I don’t think we do in this case. This is the very first line of the article:
> Israeli soldiers and settlers are using gendered violence and sexual assault and harassment to force Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank, human rights and legal experts say.
So here we’re talking about both the military and some lunatic individuals.
Genocide committed by a democratic country that is cool with lgbtq people that have tech jobs and hang out at cafes doesn't make it OK. You're concerned with aesthetics over everything else.
Read up on "Operation Clean Break" / "The Clean Break Doctrine". Israeli Jews came up with a plan to overthrow Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran... Seven states in all that the Israeli Jews wanted to destroy so they could engage in genocide of the Palestinians without opposition, and steal the land of their neighboring states for their "Greater Israel Project" (Israel refuses to declare their borders as they plan to steal more land from their neighbors and the remaining surviving Palestinians).
The fun part was that their plan was that the US would do their fighting for them. And, it worked. US wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran. Millions dead in illegal wars of aggression, all to benefit genocidal messianic religious crazies who call themselves Israeli Jews / Zionists. Many trillions of the US debt is due to these wars for Israel. The US has gained nothing from any of these wars.
Professor Jeffrey Sacks is a good source for material about this.
The "Clean Break" conspiracy theory is way overblown. The 1996 paper was a policy memo written by American neoconservatives (Perle, Feith, Wurmser) for Netanyahu, advising Israel to ditch land-for-peace, focus on its own security, and pressure Syria and Hezbollah. It also suggested removing Saddam to weaken regional opposition to Israel.
It was not a secret blueprint for the US to destroy seven countries so Jews could seize land and build Greater Israel. The paper said nothing about Libya, Somalia, or Sudan and had nothing to do with territorial expansion.
The Iraq War came from flawed WMD intelligence, Saddam's history of invading neighbors, and defying UN resolutions. Libya was Obama-era regime change over Gaddafi's brutality. Syria was a civil war plus ISIS. Iran has never been invaded. None of this traces back to a 1996 memo.
The death tolls? Saddam, Assad, Gaddafi, and Iranian-backed militias own enormous chunks of those numbers through chemical weapons, terrorism, and repression. Blaming it all on Zionist wars erases that entirely.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, has offered land-for-peace repeatedly, and spends most of its time defending borders against neighbors who call for its destruction. The Greater Israel narrative ignores Arab rejectionism, radical Islamism, and Iranian expansion entirely.
Pinning US foreign policy on a single Israeli advisory paper is scapegoating, not analysis.
>The only reason Israel is able to commit the horrors they are is because they can fuck around without finding out due to US protection paid for by our tax dollars, we are absolutely complicit.
The only reason Israel is able to win wars like they do is because they're much better soldiers than Arabs are. Even against all odds when the surrounding Arab states teamed up against Israel, they still beat them.
interesting, because a common excuse given for israel's continued occupation of Westbank, Golan heights, and Gaza strip is that without those territories israel would be under threat of destruction by her arab neighbors. which is it?
It's almost like good armies understand the concept of buffer zones and bringing the fight to the enemy. Maybe if Arabs weren't such poor fighters they'd understand. You made my point for me.
do you think that israel would be under threat of destruction if they ended the occupation of those territories? if so, how did israel gain those territories in the first place? if not, why does israel use that as an excuse for the continued occupation?
US support for Netanyahu is one of the most horrible things imaginable. US support for a non-Netanyahu Israel may not be so much. The distinction is important, at the very least so people don't call you an anti-Semite. But even without that, I think it's important. I'm anti-Trump, anti-Netanyahu, anti-Hamas, and anti-IRGC, but not anti-US, anti-Israel, anti-Palestine or anti-Iran. The citizens of those countries are the victims of their leaders.
I recommend you read the book World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.
The experience of the world Jewry in (pre-)WW2 continental Europe was so shockingly brutal, the establishment of the state of Israel was an inevitability.
Jews were the scapegoat driven out from cities into the desert to amend for other's sins for millenia. Some would say they've gotten used to it.
The bestial conduct of Nazis was such that even the people for whom the experience of persecution was a fact of life and indeed their toleration of the condition almost stoic in nature, came to realize they had to have a place where they are not the Other and won't be scapegoated again. And so it happened.
To paint a picture with words...Stefan Zweig, model intellectual and model European, ended his life in 1942 at age 61 in Brazil, having lost his home of 20 years in Salzburg, his beloved Europe and, in his own words, a large part of himself.
The worst exponents of Europe in Nazi uniforms and their collaborators, the "decent people" of Germany, Austria and other countries, killed the best exponents of Europe and Europeanism, over insane paranoiac deluded hate. Killed them slowly, then quickly. Indirectly, by stripping them of everything they considered theirs, then very directly in extermination facilities. The people who suffered this horror established a state and Europe lost intelligentsia and human capital it could not afford to lose. Fin.
Just five years ago, saying that the state of Israel is the problem would have you branded an anti-semite and driven out of polite society and rightly so. As a non-Jew with no skin in the game, I find the reawakening of these sentiments horrifying.
this just isn't true, jews didn't have it any worse than non jews in european history, they just like to dwell on their historical instances of suffering. One could argue that jews had it better than the native peoples around them because their population swelled at a higher rate over the duration of their stay, and historically, population growth tracked resource availability.
> To paint a picture with words...Stefan Zweig, model intellectual and model European, ended his life in 1942 at age 61 in Brazil, having lost his home of 20 years in Salzburg, his beloved Europe and, in his own words, a large part of himself.
LMFAO do you understand how incredibly VILE it is to say this in this context?
> Just five years ago, saying that the state of Israel is the problem would have you branded an anti-semite and driven out of polite society and rightly so. As a non-Jew, I find the reawakening of these sentiments horrifying.
Yes, but society is no longer polite. I hope the memes were worth it.
Claiming that Israel is entirely a Netanyahu problem is ridiculous. No Netanyahu and what do you have left? An apartheid state, probably run by any number of awful replacements, like ben gvir or smotrich. Israel was founded in the shadow of the Nakba - they displaced million people and killed something like 15,000. That was only right when it was founded too. Post 1967, Israel ceased to have any left wing politics, and dove head first into their genocidal project, they’ve been doing it ever since. This is not antisemitic. I don’t care about religion and I’m not a baboon - I don’t care what you believe, I care what you do. And Israel has done, since the beginning, very bad stuff.
I deliberately used the phrase "Netanyahu's Israel". The problem is much more than Netanyahu, it's the Israel Netanyahu epitomizes whether or not it got there via Netanyahu or other similar routes. Given that Netanyahu was legitimately elected, there are lots of similar routes.
the early zionists had a similar attitude towards arabs as netanyahu and co do today. but for them it was more from a jewish power colonialist angle rather than the victimhood angle that netanyahu is obsessed with
You don't understand. The good guys are just giving preventive rocket medicine. The Palestinians and Iranians need it so they won't cause any atrocities. They should be grateful because if they got to live they could do something bad and then feel real bad about themselves.
I wonder if Iran being a dictatorship has a cause? Why does the Arab world hate Israel I wonder? Everything you're talking about is basically a direct result of UK, US and israeli bullshit in the area. It's people with exactly the same sort of colonial geopolitical ideas as you that CAUSED THE MESS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
They're almost certainly #1 global problem causers so it's usually the safest bet. Though I wouldn't be as expansive as you, the USA, Portugal, Spain and the USSR are no slouches. Can't be forgetting the Dutch either.
So basically all powerful countries cause problems for other countries. Not exactly a resolutionary thing. Don't forget China, Japan, Mongolia, Romans, all sorts of infighting between native American groups before Columbus. And I assume that Africa wasn't exactly a paradise even before colonialism.
Yes, history happened and people should be held to account for it, not ad infinitum, but you know, if my dad killed your dad and took all his shit, and then left it to me, I'm pretty sure I shouldn't get to keep it and all the benefits that come from it just because I had nothing to do with it.
And how do you map that onto the timescales of states? Because even on the human scale, my grandparents were around for the British Mandate in Palestine. The British government had to win my own lifetime apologise for atrocities carried out in Northern Ireland.
The day my grandma went to school for the first day of her fourth grade, Germans launched an invasion on our country, starting WW2. During the process they set up death camps on industrial scale, and bombed our capital city to oblivion just to set an example.
My grandma died peacefully last winter. I think it's time to move on.
What are you on about lmao, what is "leftist thought". My ideology? I'm not my ideology, my ideology is an ever shifting set of ideals I explore to try to build an internally consistent model for decision making. How in the world does a belief in US/UK meddling being the proximal cause for many of the modern issues in the region have anything to do with the crimes of the Kremlin. Can you please engage with the substance of my claims in any way? I'm not here to defend whatever "leftism" means to you.
> How in the world does a belief in US/UK meddling ...
Because you exclude all other meddling as an explanation. The Kremlin is the other big source of meddling (if you rate them by success in actually changing things, US is on top. Moscow is a distant second, and the third is so far behind it's barely worth mentioning, also it's unclear who that even is), so the assumption is you implicitly defend if you attack US meddling.
Compare to when 2 people are fighting in the playground and you complain only about ONE of them hitting things, without making any remark about the other, or taking any kind of measure to get the other to stop. People like to describe that as neutrality, but of course, it is anything but. Which then gets confusing because people who are badly informed might start to genuinely believe only one of them was hitting, and might even blame the first for all damages. Of course, this is exactly the point of one-sided reporting, even if the reporting itself is 100% true. Even the BBC is doing it these days, little to no reporting on what happens (imho, not because it's going well) in the UK, and "news in support of UK foreign policy" everywhere else. Oh and separate views for UK people and international viewers. And yes, that's in some ways the same Iran does, but there's no bullets or executions involved if you try to get around it, a pretty big difference.
In this conflict the US is defending, let's call it "international liberalism" (in the French revolution sense, ie. laissez-faire), or what the UN calls "freedom of navigation". Which is a euphemism for tax-free international trade over the seas. I get that there are name clashes with for example US politics, let's please not focus the discussion on whether those names are deserving, or who they (don't) match in US politics. And, yes, preventing Iran from getting a nuke falls under liberalism, as in Iran getting a nuke will definitely kill a freedom of navigation in that part of the world.
The other side, ie. Russia/China, if we're only counting UN SC members, is about locking down international trade behind political agreements (which is also a euphemism: these agreements were historically never agreements, but rather the outcomes of wars), ie. letting Russia and China, since they have nuclear weapons, decide who gets oil from the middle east and who doesn't. Through threats.
So you when you attack one side, getting criticized for supporting the other side, is fair. If you don't know the other side, that's called being badly informed, that's literally just dumb and then really you should shut up.
> In this conflict the US is defending, let's call it "international liberalism" (in the French revolution sense, ie. laissez-faire), or what the UN calls "freedom of navigation".
Utter nonsense - the majority of the world is well aware the Strait was open and free to navigate all the way up to the point the US stepped in.
The country directly responsible for the current lack of freedom to navigate is the US.
By the way, I'm not going to provide references, but the same goes for the Bab El-Mandeb strait and the "East Coast of Africa" (in other words Iran is trying to tax ALL shipping between Asia/India and Europe, even if it goes around the Cape of Good Hope)
> The country directly responsible for the current lack of freedom to navigate is the US.
Did you really believe that when you wrote it? I mean you must realize that no matter the motivation or other circumstances, when push comes to shove the person pulling the trigger is responsible ...
What might the reason be? Oh it's the first sentence.
>Tensions between Iran and the West have escalated since U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports took full effect in May and British naval forces seized an Iranian supertanker.
Yeah what that doesn't say is of course that those tensions have escalated from "critical" to "critical-and-also-FUCK-you". But as I pointed out in the post you're replying, seizing vessels by either party is not something new. That's been happening for decades. What's new is that China used to get a free pass, and this was a ship going between Iran and China (the US has even hinted it was delivering weapons to Iran, which China explicitly agreed not to do, of course they've also been caught providing targeting information to Iran)
And I get their position: realistically Iran has much less weapons now than they had 3 weeks ago. The US has more weapons now than in the 12 days of war, and the Hormuz blocking ... doesn't matter at all for US combat power. Same for Israel. So Iran must be desperate. They're, let's call it "mostly, but not yet totally out of options". And the US + Israel should be at close to double their previous strength. The Iranian population hates both the Iranian government and their fighting force, so you can bet your firstborn Israel is receiving targeting information from inside Iran without even trying, with the exact location of every IRGC commander, every government official, half of it from their own mothers. The previous exchange was a disaster for the IRGC. They fired at least 10000 rockets plus drones. They actually hit 3 targets. Anyone the least bit higher up in the IRGC is terrified.
The previous kinetic exchange wasn't even using 2% of US combat power, now it looks like they're ready to double that. The US has been delivering weapons non-stop to middle eastern bases since before the ceasefire started, if you calculate it out it would have been about 800 tons per day, 13 days now, so let's round it to 10000 tons by the time the ceasefire ends.
But in general Iran has never been at peace since it's current rulers came to power, frankly, with anyone. Until their war with Israel they got away with literally everything by using proxy forces. Literally before the first month was over they were at war with Iraq, because they were doing back then what they are doing now: organizing militias in Iraq.
So Russia invades Ukraine, and somehow you blame leftists for that? You must be buried deep in Russian propaganda.
> when will you sign up for Ukraine's army
There is only room in your brain for extreme thoughts? There is a lot of space between not supporting Ukraine and going to the front lines. For example donating money (I sure do as a center-right wing):
> Of course leftists are responsible for the current state of Russia. I hear there was this thing called "Soviet Union", involved in getting this country to it's current state. I guess you must not now. Look it up?
Very strange that you claim the great state of affairs in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is thanks to the the leftist Social Union. But hey, if you want to make that claim, that's all up to you.
Iran is dangerously close to acquiring nuclear weapons.
...
Before Trump it was kind of taboo that US would just go to Iran and shoot them, hence the necessary existence of Israel that gives zero fucks and will shoot everyone who even thinks of threatening them.
Before Trump, the US had a deal with Iran whereby they promised not to build nuclear weapons, and we had inspectors in the country to ensure they kept said promise. There was little to no threat they would acquire nuclear weapons.
Trump blew up that deal in his first term, proving Iran can't trust any non-proliferation deals, the recent attacks proved they need nuclear weapons to protect themselves, and the BS with the strait of Hormuz gave them a giant pile of cash to streamline things.
Congratulations, a country that once may not have built nuclear weapons in our lifetimes is virtually guaranteed to have them inside the next decade.
Don't forget the assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader - the man who issued a fatwa against Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.
It makes you think that ultimately, this is not simply about nuclear weapons. It is really about ensuring there is no possibility of a strong non-vassal state in the region (with the obvious exception).
This is a pretty naive post. First, Russia has nukes. You say Iran can’t have a nuke because dictatorships “tend toward escalation” yet in the same breath mention Russia who has nukes and does not use them against Ukraine. How about North Korea? They have nukes have they “escalated”?
You say Iran is “dangerously close” to a nuke. Do you know this has been said for decades at this point? Do you remember Netanyahu’s ridiculous bomb picture from like 2009?
Did you know Iran specifically had a religious policy AGAINST nukes, a fatwah? So most of your premises are wrong and most importantly, paradoxically:
In fact if Iran had the weapon, the whole region would be MORE secure.
I don't think the passive voice is meant to protect the perpetrators. Instead, they are presenting sexual assault as a deliberate tactic or policy, or at least a common pattern. If true, this is a much bigger story than isolated incidents of violence. But sixteen reported cases over three years seems very low. Likely there are more cases they missed. Mainly it seems like they have very little data.
As the sibling comments point out, in isolation your argument would be reasonable, but within the context of the decades-long conflict, and English-language media in general, passive voice is very much used to soften the blow of damning reports against figures of authority and other privileged peoples.
The passive voice and dishonest language is often used by British and US corporate and state media when describing atrocities committed by Israeli Jews.
"Some Palestinians are dead." Implying, "They seem to have just died. Nobody knows what happened." To describe the countless massacres of Palestinians by Israeli Jews
E.g., the BBC reported an IDF soldier, in uniform, who was captured as a prisoner of war as, "A young girl was kidnapped by Hammas." The BBC also reported on an 8 year old little girl who was kidnapped by the IDF and held as a hostage as, "a woman who was detained."
The BBC is still at it with the Israel-US illegal war of aggression against Iran. They reported that "180 people died" in the triple-tap strike on the school that murdered 165 young children, mostly little girls. The BBC also did not mention that it was a triple-tap strike where subsequent strikes killed rescue workers, parents coming to find their children, and 10s of children who had survived the first strike.
The UK (and Germany) are as bad as the US for media and government controlled by Zionists.
More likely, they already knew what they wanted to say, data or no data: Israel/US, bad: global revolution, good. They have to keep the pressure up so they need to write papers and get articles written about those papers and then get them posted on hacker news regardless of what actually happened. It’s a constant grind, but I suppose it will all be worth it for them if they get appointed on the committee of the vanguard or something like that.
Look up the article in Ha'aretz recently "IDF Soldiers Talk About the 'Moral Injury' – and the Silence" for another example of this. I mean, I am glad they are talking about it, but the way it is framed is maddening.
Israeli Jews recently got out into the streets to protest for the right to rape, after some soldiers were prosecuted for a recorded rape of a Palestinian prisoner where a long knife blade was inserted into body orifices during the rape. The whisleblower was condemned while the rapists were celebrated.
Most likely the settlers. If you start researching the violence by settlers in the West Bank and what they do to try to push out Palestinians and grab more of their land, it's horrifying. And the settlers are not your average Israeli -- they are the most hard-core Zionist Israelis (many of them foreigners)--that's explicitly why they are there in the first place. The pattern has been repeating for decades: Israeli army occupies some land in the WB, gives the land for free plus subsidized living to hardline Zionists who are armed and willing and able to defend and hold the land. Those people abuse the neighboring Palestinians to drive them away, and the now "empty" land can be occupied, the illegal settlement expanded, bring in more people. Rinse and repeat. Even though the settlements have been declared illegal over and over again by the UN and even previous US governments, Israel just ignores all of that. As long as there are "talks" going on, it can continue to slowly gobble up the WB and push the Palestinians into Jordan or an ever shrinking piece of land, just like Gaza.
This is absurdly one-sided. The "report" is just a summary of internet articles, two of which are from The Guardian itself, which makes this some weird content laundering situation. It also--obviously on purpose--leaves out IDF's response to the incident at Wadi-as-Seeq: "'After the initial investigation, a decision was made to dismiss the commander of the unit that carried out the arrest. Due to the seriousness of the suspicions, it was decided to open a Military Police investigation,' the army said." Sounds like that guy is in deep shit!
I'm so tired of this garbage. The Guardian had to have read this Times of Israel article because the details it reports (ex: the date) aren't included in the report, but they leave out the part where the commander is under investigation by the Military Police? What a joke.
Sexual assault and violence is the biblical explanation for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah according to more and more modern biblical scholars. The Christian's who hate the gays should instead direct their bible and politicians at Israeli soldiers and their government.
Don't trust Christians to interpret Jewish literature. They're still struggling with the "immaculate conception" of the "virgin" Mary. This was common enough that the rabbis weighed in and set the precedent for "technical virginity" (anal) that was later attributed to Catholics.
The residents of Sodom were directly offered Lot's virgin daughters, and they politely declined, preferring to sodomize the angels Lot was harboring. God glassed both cities because the city was full of degenerates that held nothing sacred.
Lot's daughters both raped him immediately after fleeing the city and nobody had anything to say about it, so rape cannot possibly be the offense the Sodomites were punished for.
The reality that war goes hand-in-hand with sexual violence is rarely fairly portrayed in American / Hollywood media. It sickens me when I see warhounds in our government who are, by extension of campaigning for war, rooting for sexual violence against entire populations - though they might not realize it through their ignorance.
That’s why I appreciate anti-war cinema, like Come and See, which notoriously came from Belarusian screenwriters.
Yep, war is the shittiest of things and rarely it is described completely for what it is. Humans following orders are well known to be ruthless and humans in power places are known to abuse their power. Add this to brainwashing and religious propaganda and beliefs, makes this kind of war a particularly shitty one.
"War isn't Hell. War is war and Hell is hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse"
"How do you figure that Hawkeye?"
"Easy Father, tell me, who goes to Hell?"
"Hmm, sinners, I believe"
"Exactly, there are no innocent bystanders in Hell. But war is shot full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander"
I’m a fan of media that conveys the message that hell is real and it’s what we manufacture as humans, like 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. In fact, the broad theme of the 28 * Later series is that even with the most hellish events unfolding, humans are still capable of being depraved to the limits of our imagination.
The christian supporters of Israel can also think a bit about the itf soldiers destroying a statue of Jesus in Lebanon if they want to understand what they are supporting. Useful idiots doesn't even start to describe it.
It's ironic that netanyahu says that Christians are thriving in Israel and more than any other middle Eastern country.
Only 2% of Israel identifies as Christian, whereas Lebanon has 37%, which Israel is bombing
The evangelists in the US support Israel imagining that there is a special relationship between christians and jews. Many jews in Israel seem to find this useful and try not to contradict them while remaining hateful fanatics at heart. Stories like this one show a glimps at what is going on and therefore are worth pointing out when surfacing. They frame the murders, and sexual assaults, and destruction as the ethnic cleansing fueled by greed and hate toward anyone else that it is.
This is not something new. israel has been doing this since Nakba and it’s well recorded even by the israeli historians and academics around the world. Their atrocities against humanity were just not allowed to be exposed by the Epstein class.
Here are some more studies and reports on this topic, in case anyone interested to know the extent of israeli sexual violence against Palestinians:
One incident did leave a scar. It happened at an army outpost in southern Gaza. "I was sitting there in the command room," Maya says. "Suddenly, the soldiers on watch noticed five Palestinians crossing the line they weren't allowed to cross, heading for northern Gaza.
"Everybody went crazy. There was a big mess. The battalion commander gave an order to overwhelm them with fire, even though they hadn't been confirmed as armed or anything like that. A tank started shooting at them with its machine gun. Hundreds of bullets."
She says four of the five Palestinians were killed. "A few hours later, a D9 [Caterpillar armored bulldozer] buried them in the sand. When I asked why, they said that it was so the dogs wouldn't eat them and spread disease. The one who survived was put in a cage at the outpost, and they said we had to wait for a Shin Bet man to interrogate him."
The Palestinian sat there, cuffed and blindfolded, and seemed to be freezing from the cold. "Suddenly, one of the soldiers took out his penis and started pissing on him. He told him, 'This is for Be'eri, you asshole, this is for Nova'"– Kibbutz Be'eri and the Nova music festival, two of the sites attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023. "Nobody could stop laughing. I might have laughed too."
Just like you are not neutral. You can't just say that any article after October 7 exist just as persuasion - everything and everyone is against Israel? This automatically seems extremely suspicious to anyone with basic knowledge of how conflicts work.
> Not clear whether soldiers are acting on their own or following policy.
It mostly doesn't matter, unless they're punished. If they're not, then the policy is, what they did is okay. That's why it's important to keep army disciplined.
It doesn't matter for things that are bad whether they are policy or not, like sexual assault. It matters for things that are okay if they are policy, like strip searches. If prison guards do strip searches on their own for fun, that is a problem, but the mandated ones are not. (Assuming the policy was made with a normal level of concern for human dignity and officer safety.)
Mass rape has strictly nothing to do with "sexual liberation". In fact, you see way more rapes in conservative countries of the global south than in more liberal ones. Rape happens when there is a power imbalance and a total lack of repercussions: exactly the situation in the West Bank.
US support for Israel is one of the most horrible things imaginable, really makes me ashamed. It is only the US standing between the current horrendous status quo and Israel being an true international pariah state. Hopefully we cut off support and usher in a find out era.
(Though to be honest my position is probably that we need to go past cutting off support and US tax dollars should go toward reparations for Palesine, Lebanon and probably Iran and others, we are complicit in a lot of fucked shit.)
((I don't think those places are lead by great individuals and everything is amazing to be clear, I also think the people there have suffered immensely from a century of american, british and israeli meddling and we should be held accountable))
This is "let's you and him fight" logic.
We've already given Israel almost $400 billion. Subrogate them for Palestinian reparations instead of billing everything to us like a teenage girl let loose at the mall with Daddy's credit card.
[flagged]
Why?
Because I don't think US tax money should go toward reparations for Palestine, Lebanon, Iran or anywhere else. We're not 'complicit' in the way you're framing it
The only reason Israel is able to commit the horrors they are is because they can fuck around without finding out due to US protection paid for by our tax dollars, we are absolutely complicit. Of course that's only in the immediate term, I urge you to look at the history of the region even a little critically, so much of the conflict there is rooted in British, American and Israeli meddling, it's an insane take to claim that we are not responsible and that we have not benefited immensely.
No, money has nothing to do with it. The US military aid package to Israel is only around 2-3% of Israel's annual state budget. That's a relatively small amount, and far less significant than people tend to make it out to be.
The US provides this aid because it serves American interests. A large portion of the money is actually spent in the US, benefiting the American defense industry, not just financially but also through technological development and shared innovation.
What Israel truly gains from the relationship with the US is diplomatic cover, mainly the UN Security Council veto. Israel is by far the most condemned country at the UN in terms of resolutions passed against it, whether that's justified or not is a separate debate.
I don't understand what the purpose of making a distinction between monetary support in terms of direct aid, and indirect aid. The entire apparatus of the US government is paid for by our taxes, we pay for it either way. We also pay for it in instability and negative sentiment.
> Israel is by far the most condemned country at the UN in terms of resolutions passed against it
It's crazy to me that you know this and yet it seems like you are still in support of the US protecting Israel? You still think this is a net win for the world? That's incomprehensible to me.
> It's crazy to me that you know this and yet it seems like you are still in support of the US protecting Israel? You still think this is a net win for the world? That's incomprehensible to me.
It's crazy to me that you know the UN is literally run by states that actually commit war crimes, kill LGBTQ people, suppress women and minority rights, countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and you still think UN condemnation means anything. They're condemning the only democratic country in the entire Middle East, the one place in the region where these rights actually matter and mean something. Arab citizens can vote, gay people can live openly, women sit in parliament and serve in the military. That's Israel. And that's who they keep putting on trial.
Of course I fully support the aid for Israel.
> Arab citizens can vote
Call me when the citizens in Gaza and the West Bank get a vote.
Oh, they're citizens of another country you say? What country would that be?
Like, it's great that Israeli Arabs are treated (somewhat) well, but it doesn't excuse what's happening in Gaza and (particularly) in the West Bank.
Regardless of how progressive or democratic a state is, if they keep bombing other states and killing people, they will most likely be judged for it.
It's profoundly depressing that the Jewish people, fresh off of 2k years of oppression, have decided to speedrun the same behaviours against someone else.
> Call me when the citizens in Gaza and the West Bank get a vote.
They can. They voted in Hamas in Gaza and the PA in the West Bank. They are not Israeli citizens, which is why they don't vote in Israeli elections. You wouldn't expect the US to give voting rights to Mexicans or Canadians who aren't dual citizens, would you?
> Like, it's great that Israeli Arabs are treated (somewhat) well
"Somewhat"? They get subsidized education, skip mandatory military service, and in some cases receive more benefits than the Jewish population through affirmative action. Gaza and the West Bank aren't part of Israel. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and handed civil control of the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Accords.
> if they keep bombing other states and killing people
Nice summary for wars that were NEVER started by Israel. And before you mention Iran, it has been at war with Israel since 1979, the moment it declared it would erase Israel off the face of the Earth, and has been actively attacking Israel through its proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah) for decades.
> It's profoundly depressing that the Jewish people, fresh off of 2k years of oppression, have decided to speedrun the same behaviours against someone else.
I know it can seem like this but it's important to make the distinction that Jewish people are not the same set as zionists and israelis, and that conflation is something the latter two parties DESPERATELY want you to make.
That's totally fair and a distinction I definitely support. I really, really really like almost all of the Israeli people and Jewish people I've met and worked with, and hence why I care about this a lot.
> They're condemning the only democratic country
An apartheid ethno-supremacist state is, by definition, not democratic.
In the last month, the Israeli Jews passed a law to allow the death penalty, but only for non-Jews*. The Israeli lawmakers celebrated their lynching law by wearing noose shaped lapel pins. There are several 10s of laws that favor Jews over non-Jewish citizens of Israel. Palestinian citizens are, at best, second-class citizens.
Non-Israeli Palestinians who were violently driven from their homes in previous Israeli Jewish genocides of the indigenous population, do not even have a right to civilian courts. In most cases, the Israeli Jews imprison these Palestinians without charge, trial, or fixed sentence-- including young children. Rape and torture by Israeli Jews is systemic in these detention centers.
Their "democratic" process includes mobs of Jewish Knesset (parliment) members threatening, on the floor of the Knesset, the rape of Palestian Israeli members of the Knesset including, Haneen Zoabi and Sa'id Naffaa.
* The law doesn't really change anything in reality, as Jews have always been able to rape, torture and murder Palestinians with impunity-- e.g., for the year prior to 7 Oct., Israeli Jews murdered, on average, one Palestinian per day, in the West Bank. That rate is much worse now.
[flagged]
> And before you mention the West Bank, it is not part of Israel. The Palestinian Authority rules there.
What country is it, then?
And if it's not part of Israel, then why are the Israeli government protecting settlers there?
> the one place in the region where these rights actually matter and mean something
What was the article about, again? Was it about respecting the rights of women?
We must make a distinction between the actions of the government (and the military) and the actions of some lunatic individuals, though.
I don’t think we do in this case. This is the very first line of the article:
> Israeli soldiers and settlers are using gendered violence and sexual assault and harassment to force Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank, human rights and legal experts say.
So here we’re talking about both the military and some lunatic individuals.
Genocide committed by a democratic country that is cool with lgbtq people that have tech jobs and hang out at cafes doesn't make it OK. You're concerned with aesthetics over everything else.
A norse mythology username extolling the evils of non-western countries while full throating a genocidal apartheid state. name a more iconic duo
Read up on "Operation Clean Break" / "The Clean Break Doctrine". Israeli Jews came up with a plan to overthrow Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran... Seven states in all that the Israeli Jews wanted to destroy so they could engage in genocide of the Palestinians without opposition, and steal the land of their neighboring states for their "Greater Israel Project" (Israel refuses to declare their borders as they plan to steal more land from their neighbors and the remaining surviving Palestinians).
The fun part was that their plan was that the US would do their fighting for them. And, it worked. US wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran. Millions dead in illegal wars of aggression, all to benefit genocidal messianic religious crazies who call themselves Israeli Jews / Zionists. Many trillions of the US debt is due to these wars for Israel. The US has gained nothing from any of these wars.
Professor Jeffrey Sacks is a good source for material about this.
The "Clean Break" conspiracy theory is way overblown. The 1996 paper was a policy memo written by American neoconservatives (Perle, Feith, Wurmser) for Netanyahu, advising Israel to ditch land-for-peace, focus on its own security, and pressure Syria and Hezbollah. It also suggested removing Saddam to weaken regional opposition to Israel.
It was not a secret blueprint for the US to destroy seven countries so Jews could seize land and build Greater Israel. The paper said nothing about Libya, Somalia, or Sudan and had nothing to do with territorial expansion.
The Iraq War came from flawed WMD intelligence, Saddam's history of invading neighbors, and defying UN resolutions. Libya was Obama-era regime change over Gaddafi's brutality. Syria was a civil war plus ISIS. Iran has never been invaded. None of this traces back to a 1996 memo.
The death tolls? Saddam, Assad, Gaddafi, and Iranian-backed militias own enormous chunks of those numbers through chemical weapons, terrorism, and repression. Blaming it all on Zionist wars erases that entirely.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, has offered land-for-peace repeatedly, and spends most of its time defending borders against neighbors who call for its destruction. The Greater Israel narrative ignores Arab rejectionism, radical Islamism, and Iranian expansion entirely.
Pinning US foreign policy on a single Israeli advisory paper is scapegoating, not analysis.
>The only reason Israel is able to commit the horrors they are is because they can fuck around without finding out due to US protection paid for by our tax dollars, we are absolutely complicit.
The only reason Israel is able to win wars like they do is because they're much better soldiers than Arabs are. Even against all odds when the surrounding Arab states teamed up against Israel, they still beat them.
interesting, because a common excuse given for israel's continued occupation of Westbank, Golan heights, and Gaza strip is that without those territories israel would be under threat of destruction by her arab neighbors. which is it?
It's almost like good armies understand the concept of buffer zones and bringing the fight to the enemy. Maybe if Arabs weren't such poor fighters they'd understand. You made my point for me.
do you think that israel would be under threat of destruction if they ended the occupation of those territories? if so, how did israel gain those territories in the first place? if not, why does israel use that as an excuse for the continued occupation?
America intentionally bombed schoolchildren
[dead]
US support for Netanyahu is one of the most horrible things imaginable. US support for a non-Netanyahu Israel may not be so much. The distinction is important, at the very least so people don't call you an anti-Semite. But even without that, I think it's important. I'm anti-Trump, anti-Netanyahu, anti-Hamas, and anti-IRGC, but not anti-US, anti-Israel, anti-Palestine or anti-Iran. The citizens of those countries are the victims of their leaders.
I said what I said; israel is the problem, I have no significant beef with Judaism (no more than any religion and less than some).
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-extremes-of-israe...
The first woman doctor in the Netherlands was Jewish.
Ofcourse nowadays Dutch/European Jewish culture is utterly despised by Israelis because it was secular and liberal.
I recommend you read the book World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.
The experience of the world Jewry in (pre-)WW2 continental Europe was so shockingly brutal, the establishment of the state of Israel was an inevitability.
Jews were the scapegoat driven out from cities into the desert to amend for other's sins for millenia. Some would say they've gotten used to it.
The bestial conduct of Nazis was such that even the people for whom the experience of persecution was a fact of life and indeed their toleration of the condition almost stoic in nature, came to realize they had to have a place where they are not the Other and won't be scapegoated again. And so it happened.
To paint a picture with words...Stefan Zweig, model intellectual and model European, ended his life in 1942 at age 61 in Brazil, having lost his home of 20 years in Salzburg, his beloved Europe and, in his own words, a large part of himself.
The worst exponents of Europe in Nazi uniforms and their collaborators, the "decent people" of Germany, Austria and other countries, killed the best exponents of Europe and Europeanism, over insane paranoiac deluded hate. Killed them slowly, then quickly. Indirectly, by stripping them of everything they considered theirs, then very directly in extermination facilities. The people who suffered this horror established a state and Europe lost intelligentsia and human capital it could not afford to lose. Fin.
Just five years ago, saying that the state of Israel is the problem would have you branded an anti-semite and driven out of polite society and rightly so. As a non-Jew with no skin in the game, I find the reawakening of these sentiments horrifying.
this just isn't true, jews didn't have it any worse than non jews in european history, they just like to dwell on their historical instances of suffering. One could argue that jews had it better than the native peoples around them because their population swelled at a higher rate over the duration of their stay, and historically, population growth tracked resource availability.
What you describe is known as the "lachrymose" framing of their historiography.
> To paint a picture with words...Stefan Zweig, model intellectual and model European, ended his life in 1942 at age 61 in Brazil, having lost his home of 20 years in Salzburg, his beloved Europe and, in his own words, a large part of himself.
LMFAO do you understand how incredibly VILE it is to say this in this context?
> Just five years ago, saying that the state of Israel is the problem would have you branded an anti-semite and driven out of polite society and rightly so. As a non-Jew, I find the reawakening of these sentiments horrifying.
Yes, but society is no longer polite. I hope the memes were worth it.
This is some tired fanfiction no one asked for. But please, keep ringing the bell of victimhood, it's surely going to be well received this time.
Claiming that Israel is entirely a Netanyahu problem is ridiculous. No Netanyahu and what do you have left? An apartheid state, probably run by any number of awful replacements, like ben gvir or smotrich. Israel was founded in the shadow of the Nakba - they displaced million people and killed something like 15,000. That was only right when it was founded too. Post 1967, Israel ceased to have any left wing politics, and dove head first into their genocidal project, they’ve been doing it ever since. This is not antisemitic. I don’t care about religion and I’m not a baboon - I don’t care what you believe, I care what you do. And Israel has done, since the beginning, very bad stuff.
I deliberately used the phrase "Netanyahu's Israel". The problem is much more than Netanyahu, it's the Israel Netanyahu epitomizes whether or not it got there via Netanyahu or other similar routes. Given that Netanyahu was legitimately elected, there are lots of similar routes.
the early zionists had a similar attitude towards arabs as netanyahu and co do today. but for them it was more from a jewish power colonialist angle rather than the victimhood angle that netanyahu is obsessed with
[flagged]
> even good guys
I assume in your fantasy said "good guys" are the US?
https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/09/20-years-us-torture-and-...
https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-us-wa...
https://theconversation.com/operation-condor-the-secret-syst...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
[flagged]
Why? I'm not the one separating nations between "good guys" and "bad guys".
You don't understand. The good guys are just giving preventive rocket medicine. The Palestinians and Iranians need it so they won't cause any atrocities. They should be grateful because if they got to live they could do something bad and then feel real bad about themselves.
I wonder if Iran being a dictatorship has a cause? Why does the Arab world hate Israel I wonder? Everything you're talking about is basically a direct result of UK, US and israeli bullshit in the area. It's people with exactly the same sort of colonial geopolitical ideas as you that CAUSED THE MESS IN THE FIRST PLACE.
When in doubt, blame the British. The British theorem: all life's problems can eventually be traced back to the British.
They're almost certainly #1 global problem causers so it's usually the safest bet. Though I wouldn't be as expansive as you, the USA, Portugal, Spain and the USSR are no slouches. Can't be forgetting the Dutch either.
So basically all powerful countries cause problems for other countries. Not exactly a resolutionary thing. Don't forget China, Japan, Mongolia, Romans, all sorts of infighting between native American groups before Columbus. And I assume that Africa wasn't exactly a paradise even before colonialism.
Yes, history happened and people should be held to account for it, not ad infinitum, but you know, if my dad killed your dad and took all his shit, and then left it to me, I'm pretty sure I shouldn't get to keep it and all the benefits that come from it just because I had nothing to do with it.
Dad? Sure. Grandfather? Maybe. Great-grandfather? Let it go.
And how do you map that onto the timescales of states? Because even on the human scale, my grandparents were around for the British Mandate in Palestine. The British government had to win my own lifetime apologise for atrocities carried out in Northern Ireland.
The day my grandma went to school for the first day of her fourth grade, Germans launched an invasion on our country, starting WW2. During the process they set up death camps on industrial scale, and bombed our capital city to oblivion just to set an example.
My grandma died peacefully last winter. I think it's time to move on.
An example of what? You're not making any clear point or engaging with what I asked you.
The largest empire in global history had influence on contemporary geopolitics. Why should we pretend otherwise?
Well, God is British. It is customary to blame Him
[flagged]
What are you on about lmao, what is "leftist thought". My ideology? I'm not my ideology, my ideology is an ever shifting set of ideals I explore to try to build an internally consistent model for decision making. How in the world does a belief in US/UK meddling being the proximal cause for many of the modern issues in the region have anything to do with the crimes of the Kremlin. Can you please engage with the substance of my claims in any way? I'm not here to defend whatever "leftism" means to you.
> How in the world does a belief in US/UK meddling ...
Because you exclude all other meddling as an explanation. The Kremlin is the other big source of meddling (if you rate them by success in actually changing things, US is on top. Moscow is a distant second, and the third is so far behind it's barely worth mentioning, also it's unclear who that even is), so the assumption is you implicitly defend if you attack US meddling.
Compare to when 2 people are fighting in the playground and you complain only about ONE of them hitting things, without making any remark about the other, or taking any kind of measure to get the other to stop. People like to describe that as neutrality, but of course, it is anything but. Which then gets confusing because people who are badly informed might start to genuinely believe only one of them was hitting, and might even blame the first for all damages. Of course, this is exactly the point of one-sided reporting, even if the reporting itself is 100% true. Even the BBC is doing it these days, little to no reporting on what happens (imho, not because it's going well) in the UK, and "news in support of UK foreign policy" everywhere else. Oh and separate views for UK people and international viewers. And yes, that's in some ways the same Iran does, but there's no bullets or executions involved if you try to get around it, a pretty big difference.
In this conflict the US is defending, let's call it "international liberalism" (in the French revolution sense, ie. laissez-faire), or what the UN calls "freedom of navigation". Which is a euphemism for tax-free international trade over the seas. I get that there are name clashes with for example US politics, let's please not focus the discussion on whether those names are deserving, or who they (don't) match in US politics. And, yes, preventing Iran from getting a nuke falls under liberalism, as in Iran getting a nuke will definitely kill a freedom of navigation in that part of the world.
The other side, ie. Russia/China, if we're only counting UN SC members, is about locking down international trade behind political agreements (which is also a euphemism: these agreements were historically never agreements, but rather the outcomes of wars), ie. letting Russia and China, since they have nuclear weapons, decide who gets oil from the middle east and who doesn't. Through threats.
So you when you attack one side, getting criticized for supporting the other side, is fair. If you don't know the other side, that's called being badly informed, that's literally just dumb and then really you should shut up.
> In this conflict the US is defending, let's call it "international liberalism" (in the French revolution sense, ie. laissez-faire), or what the UN calls "freedom of navigation".
Utter nonsense - the majority of the world is well aware the Strait was open and free to navigate all the way up to the point the US stepped in.
The country directly responsible for the current lack of freedom to navigate is the US.
Of course not.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/timeline-irans-recent-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/britain-says-iran-seiz...
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-navy-says-iran-seized-marsh...
https://www.reuters.com/world/second-oil-tanker-week-seized-...
By the way, I'm not going to provide references, but the same goes for the Bab El-Mandeb strait and the "East Coast of Africa" (in other words Iran is trying to tax ALL shipping between Asia/India and Europe, even if it goes around the Cape of Good Hope)
> The country directly responsible for the current lack of freedom to navigate is the US.
Did you really believe that when you wrote it? I mean you must realize that no matter the motivation or other circumstances, when push comes to shove the person pulling the trigger is responsible ...
(and obviously that's Iran)
What might the reason be? Oh it's the first sentence.
>Tensions between Iran and the West have escalated since U.S. sanctions on Iranian oil exports took full effect in May and British naval forces seized an Iranian supertanker.
Yeah what that doesn't say is of course that those tensions have escalated from "critical" to "critical-and-also-FUCK-you". But as I pointed out in the post you're replying, seizing vessels by either party is not something new. That's been happening for decades. What's new is that China used to get a free pass, and this was a ship going between Iran and China (the US has even hinted it was delivering weapons to Iran, which China explicitly agreed not to do, of course they've also been caught providing targeting information to Iran)
And I get their position: realistically Iran has much less weapons now than they had 3 weeks ago. The US has more weapons now than in the 12 days of war, and the Hormuz blocking ... doesn't matter at all for US combat power. Same for Israel. So Iran must be desperate. They're, let's call it "mostly, but not yet totally out of options". And the US + Israel should be at close to double their previous strength. The Iranian population hates both the Iranian government and their fighting force, so you can bet your firstborn Israel is receiving targeting information from inside Iran without even trying, with the exact location of every IRGC commander, every government official, half of it from their own mothers. The previous exchange was a disaster for the IRGC. They fired at least 10000 rockets plus drones. They actually hit 3 targets. Anyone the least bit higher up in the IRGC is terrified.
The previous kinetic exchange wasn't even using 2% of US combat power, now it looks like they're ready to double that. The US has been delivering weapons non-stop to middle eastern bases since before the ceasefire started, if you calculate it out it would have been about 800 tons per day, 13 days now, so let's round it to 10000 tons by the time the ceasefire ends.
But in general Iran has never been at peace since it's current rulers came to power, frankly, with anyone. Until their war with Israel they got away with literally everything by using proxy forces. Literally before the first month was over they were at war with Iraq, because they were doing back then what they are doing now: organizing militias in Iraq.
So Russia invades Ukraine, and somehow you blame leftists for that? You must be buried deep in Russian propaganda.
> when will you sign up for Ukraine's army
There is only room in your brain for extreme thoughts? There is a lot of space between not supporting Ukraine and going to the front lines. For example donating money (I sure do as a center-right wing):
https://savelife.in.ua/
[flagged]
> Of course leftists are responsible for the current state of Russia. I hear there was this thing called "Soviet Union", involved in getting this country to it's current state. I guess you must not now. Look it up?
Very strange that you claim the great state of affairs in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is thanks to the the leftist Social Union. But hey, if you want to make that claim, that's all up to you.
Trump blew up that deal in his first term, proving Iran can't trust any non-proliferation deals, the recent attacks proved they need nuclear weapons to protect themselves, and the BS with the strait of Hormuz gave them a giant pile of cash to streamline things.
Congratulations, a country that once may not have built nuclear weapons in our lifetimes is virtually guaranteed to have them inside the next decade.
Don't forget the assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader - the man who issued a fatwa against Iran obtaining nuclear weapons.
It makes you think that ultimately, this is not simply about nuclear weapons. It is really about ensuring there is no possibility of a strong non-vassal state in the region (with the obvious exception).
Fascinating theory. Are there any statistics on how many Israeli soldiers have died for the U.S.? How many have been deployed to fight for the U.S.?
This is a pretty naive post. First, Russia has nukes. You say Iran can’t have a nuke because dictatorships “tend toward escalation” yet in the same breath mention Russia who has nukes and does not use them against Ukraine. How about North Korea? They have nukes have they “escalated”?
You say Iran is “dangerously close” to a nuke. Do you know this has been said for decades at this point? Do you remember Netanyahu’s ridiculous bomb picture from like 2009?
Did you know Iran specifically had a religious policy AGAINST nukes, a fatwah? So most of your premises are wrong and most importantly, paradoxically:
In fact if Iran had the weapon, the whole region would be MORE secure.
I've heard Israel is close to a nuclear bomb since 1972. How is it different today?
The language in the article would be fascinating if it wasn't such a horrible thing.
It's not that the Israeli soldiers are sexually assaulting Palestinians, instead they are using Sexual Assault.
Later they say "Sexualised violence is used...", "men and boys were Targeted..."
It's like there is a gun shooting people, or someone using a gun. But we can't connect fully understand how or who is perpetuating it.
Edit: some more:
"Israeli soldiers present during abuse had repeatedly failed to prevent it..." Who was abusing?
I don't think the passive voice is meant to protect the perpetrators. Instead, they are presenting sexual assault as a deliberate tactic or policy, or at least a common pattern. If true, this is a much bigger story than isolated incidents of violence. But sixteen reported cases over three years seems very low. Likely there are more cases they missed. Mainly it seems like they have very little data.
As the sibling comments point out, in isolation your argument would be reasonable, but within the context of the decades-long conflict, and English-language media in general, passive voice is very much used to soften the blow of damning reports against figures of authority and other privileged peoples.
The passive voice and dishonest language is often used by British and US corporate and state media when describing atrocities committed by Israeli Jews.
"Some Palestinians are dead." Implying, "They seem to have just died. Nobody knows what happened." To describe the countless massacres of Palestinians by Israeli Jews
E.g., the BBC reported an IDF soldier, in uniform, who was captured as a prisoner of war as, "A young girl was kidnapped by Hammas." The BBC also reported on an 8 year old little girl who was kidnapped by the IDF and held as a hostage as, "a woman who was detained."
The BBC is still at it with the Israel-US illegal war of aggression against Iran. They reported that "180 people died" in the triple-tap strike on the school that murdered 165 young children, mostly little girls. The BBC also did not mention that it was a triple-tap strike where subsequent strikes killed rescue workers, parents coming to find their children, and 10s of children who had survived the first strike.
The UK (and Germany) are as bad as the US for media and government controlled by Zionists.
See it in EU news as well. They're essentially free PR for IDF.
More likely, they already knew what they wanted to say, data or no data: Israel/US, bad: global revolution, good. They have to keep the pressure up so they need to write papers and get articles written about those papers and then get them posted on hacker news regardless of what actually happened. It’s a constant grind, but I suppose it will all be worth it for them if they get appointed on the committee of the vanguard or something like that.
So you don't view the genocide that's happening right now as bad? Or the US support for it? Noted.
Look up the article in Ha'aretz recently "IDF Soldiers Talk About the 'Moral Injury' – and the Silence" for another example of this. I mean, I am glad they are talking about it, but the way it is framed is maddening.
> Who was abusing?
Israeli Jews. Both IDF soldiers and civilians.
Rape was always a weapon by the Israeli Jews. Remember that every accusation made by the Israeli Jews is an admission.
https://www.un.org/unispal/document/report-of-the-commission...
Israeli Jews recently got out into the streets to protest for the right to rape, after some soldiers were prosecuted for a recorded rape of a Palestinian prisoner where a long knife blade was inserted into body orifices during the rape. The whisleblower was condemned while the rapists were celebrated.
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/israelis-rio...
The settlers. They are there illegally and do illegal things but the soldiers are there to provide them with functional immunity
> Who was abusing?
It's possible that in some cases it was settlers. So technically not soldiers. But soldiers protected them, incl. from any resisting abuse.
[flagged]
„There” — you mean where? Generally in the West Bank or intruding into Palestinian homes to abuse their children?
I'd wager Palestinians would throw them out of their homes. Instead, parents had to stand there helpless.
If you meant generally, I think they wouldn't be there without soldiers at all, illegaly tranfering own population into occupied territories.
Is this a joke?
The article starts with “Israeli soldiers and settlers” so presumably the answer to your question is settlers.
Most likely the settlers. If you start researching the violence by settlers in the West Bank and what they do to try to push out Palestinians and grab more of their land, it's horrifying. And the settlers are not your average Israeli -- they are the most hard-core Zionist Israelis (many of them foreigners)--that's explicitly why they are there in the first place. The pattern has been repeating for decades: Israeli army occupies some land in the WB, gives the land for free plus subsidized living to hardline Zionists who are armed and willing and able to defend and hold the land. Those people abuse the neighboring Palestinians to drive them away, and the now "empty" land can be occupied, the illegal settlement expanded, bring in more people. Rinse and repeat. Even though the settlements have been declared illegal over and over again by the UN and even previous US governments, Israel just ignores all of that. As long as there are "talks" going on, it can continue to slowly gobble up the WB and push the Palestinians into Jordan or an ever shrinking piece of land, just like Gaza.
[dead]
Nothing to say. Just absolutely maddening that this is what my taxes go to accomplish
This is absurdly one-sided. The "report" is just a summary of internet articles, two of which are from The Guardian itself, which makes this some weird content laundering situation. It also--obviously on purpose--leaves out IDF's response to the incident at Wadi-as-Seeq: "'After the initial investigation, a decision was made to dismiss the commander of the unit that carried out the arrest. Due to the seriousness of the suspicions, it was decided to open a Military Police investigation,' the army said." Sounds like that guy is in deep shit!
I'm so tired of this garbage. The Guardian had to have read this Times of Israel article because the details it reports (ex: the date) aren't included in the report, but they leave out the part where the commander is under investigation by the Military Police? What a joke.
Sexual assault and violence is the biblical explanation for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah according to more and more modern biblical scholars. The Christian's who hate the gays should instead direct their bible and politicians at Israeli soldiers and their government.
Don't trust Christians to interpret Jewish literature. They're still struggling with the "immaculate conception" of the "virgin" Mary. This was common enough that the rabbis weighed in and set the precedent for "technical virginity" (anal) that was later attributed to Catholics.
The residents of Sodom were directly offered Lot's virgin daughters, and they politely declined, preferring to sodomize the angels Lot was harboring. God glassed both cities because the city was full of degenerates that held nothing sacred.
Lot's daughters both raped him immediately after fleeing the city and nobody had anything to say about it, so rape cannot possibly be the offense the Sodomites were punished for.
The reality that war goes hand-in-hand with sexual violence is rarely fairly portrayed in American / Hollywood media. It sickens me when I see warhounds in our government who are, by extension of campaigning for war, rooting for sexual violence against entire populations - though they might not realize it through their ignorance.
That’s why I appreciate anti-war cinema, like Come and See, which notoriously came from Belarusian screenwriters.
Yep, war is the shittiest of things and rarely it is described completely for what it is. Humans following orders are well known to be ruthless and humans in power places are known to abuse their power. Add this to brainwashing and religious propaganda and beliefs, makes this kind of war a particularly shitty one.
If only hell was real.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUeBMwn_eYc
"War isn't Hell. War is war and Hell is hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse"
"How do you figure that Hawkeye?"
"Easy Father, tell me, who goes to Hell?"
"Hmm, sinners, I believe"
"Exactly, there are no innocent bystanders in Hell. But war is shot full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander"
Well it sure must seem real for Palestinians. And it's just called life on Earth.
I’m a fan of media that conveys the message that hell is real and it’s what we manufacture as humans, like 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. In fact, the broad theme of the 28 * Later series is that even with the most hellish events unfolding, humans are still capable of being depraved to the limits of our imagination.
The christian supporters of Israel can also think a bit about the itf soldiers destroying a statue of Jesus in Lebanon if they want to understand what they are supporting. Useful idiots doesn't even start to describe it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpd575n1znzo
Maybe they were carrying out exodus 20:4...
It's ironic that netanyahu says that Christians are thriving in Israel and more than any other middle Eastern country. Only 2% of Israel identifies as Christian, whereas Lebanon has 37%, which Israel is bombing
And Iraq used to have Christians before the pointless wars for israel, now it doesn’t.
Anything for Second Coming of Jesus
I kinda feel like from all the things going on ... breaking statue is the least of the things. Like, who cares.
The evangelists in the US support Israel imagining that there is a special relationship between christians and jews. Many jews in Israel seem to find this useful and try not to contradict them while remaining hateful fanatics at heart. Stories like this one show a glimps at what is going on and therefore are worth pointing out when surfacing. They frame the murders, and sexual assaults, and destruction as the ethnic cleansing fueled by greed and hate toward anyone else that it is.
This is not something new. israel has been doing this since Nakba and it’s well recorded even by the israeli historians and academics around the world. Their atrocities against humanity were just not allowed to be exposed by the Epstein class.
Here are some more studies and reports on this topic, in case anyone interested to know the extent of israeli sexual violence against Palestinians:
1. https://israelpalestinenews.org/israeli-torture-core-element... “ israel’s widespread use of torture is a core element of its genocide against the Palestinian people”
2. https://youtu.be/KjAmlit0yzY “israel’s history of sexual assaults on Palestinian women”
3. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372963626_Beyond_Ma... “ Beyond Male Israeli Soldiers, Palestinian Women, Rape, and War: israeli State Sexual Violence against Palestinians”
4. https://thejerusalemfund.org/2018/08/sexual-harassment-and-v... “ Sexual Harassment and Violence against Palestinian Women in israeli Prisons”
5. https://zeteo.com/p/palestinian-women-raped-by-israeli “ Palestinian Women 'Raped by israeli Soldiers.' Silence From Western Media”
6. https://www.academia.edu/43471289/Israeli_Settler_Colonialis... “ israeli Settler Colonialism in Context: Celebrating (Palestinian) Death and Normalizing Gender and Sexual Violence”
[flagged]
[flagged]
Straight from IDF soliders:
One incident did leave a scar. It happened at an army outpost in southern Gaza. "I was sitting there in the command room," Maya says. "Suddenly, the soldiers on watch noticed five Palestinians crossing the line they weren't allowed to cross, heading for northern Gaza.
"Everybody went crazy. There was a big mess. The battalion commander gave an order to overwhelm them with fire, even though they hadn't been confirmed as armed or anything like that. A tank started shooting at them with its machine gun. Hundreds of bullets."
She says four of the five Palestinians were killed. "A few hours later, a D9 [Caterpillar armored bulldozer] buried them in the sand. When I asked why, they said that it was so the dogs wouldn't eat them and spread disease. The one who survived was put in a cage at the outpost, and they said we had to wait for a Shin Bet man to interrogate him."
The Palestinian sat there, cuffed and blindfolded, and seemed to be freezing from the cold. "Suddenly, one of the soldiers took out his penis and started pissing on him. He told him, 'This is for Be'eri, you asshole, this is for Nova'"– Kibbutz Be'eri and the Nova music festival, two of the sites attacked by Hamas on October 7, 2023. "Nobody could stop laughing. I might have laughed too."
[flagged]
We don't fund Hamas with our tax dollars. Actually, Israelis were funding Hamas with their tax dollars not too long ago. I wonder why?
Also, this is what most of Gaza looks like now. Are you aware of this? https://static.972mag.com/www/uploads/2025/01/IMGL8385.jpg
Just like you are not neutral. You can't just say that any article after October 7 exist just as persuasion - everything and everyone is against Israel? This automatically seems extremely suspicious to anyone with basic knowledge of how conflicts work.
[flagged]
You only had to wait a few minutes
and now its flagged :D
[flagged]
> Not clear whether soldiers are acting on their own or following policy.
It mostly doesn't matter, unless they're punished. If they're not, then the policy is, what they did is okay. That's why it's important to keep army disciplined.
It doesn't matter for things that are bad whether they are policy or not, like sexual assault. It matters for things that are okay if they are policy, like strip searches. If prison guards do strip searches on their own for fun, that is a problem, but the mandated ones are not. (Assuming the policy was made with a normal level of concern for human dignity and officer safety.)
[dead]
[flagged]
Mass rape has strictly nothing to do with "sexual liberation". In fact, you see way more rapes in conservative countries of the global south than in more liberal ones. Rape happens when there is a power imbalance and a total lack of repercussions: exactly the situation in the West Bank.
[dead]