[Livia]

They'd still have the fresh water through the system the EU paid £100 million for if they hadn't dismantled it to make homemade rockets.

[Vanessa]

Originally Posted by joeysteele

That's all very sadly true DemRed.

I just see this getting worse, even moreso as long as Netanyahu stays in control.
It's frightening and desperately sad for the ordinary citizens of both sides.

Netanyahu won't even listen to his strongest allies.
Only the dangerous voices making up his despicable government.

The guy is a monster.
Neither parties have covered themselves with glory, but this is genocide now and I can't support it.

[Crimson Dynamo]

Originally Posted by Livia

They'd still have the fresh water through the system the EU paid £100 million for it they hadn't dismantled it to make homemade rockets.

Silly Livia

Hamas/Palestine are the innocence oppressed
Don't you watch telegram and Chinese tiktok

[Beso]

Originally Posted by DemRed

I haven't twisted anything! Protests haven't just happened on memorial day. There are regular protests.

As for the Palestinians, if they aren't dead, injured, starved or diseased and if they still had their homes and access to warm clothing, who knows what they would do, but right now, they have their own despair.

The ones elsewhere could..

[Livia]

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

Silly Livia

Hamas/Palestine are the innocence oppressed
Don't you watch telegram and Chinese tiktok

I get my news from Hamas press releases, just like the BBC do. They wouldn't lie to us, would they?

[Crimson Dynamo]

Originally Posted by Livia

I get my news from Hamas press releases, just like the BBC do. They wouldn't lie to us, would they?

Well we did find out today they lied by double the deaths of Palestinian people

But hey ho, these things happen...

[joeysteele]

Originally Posted by Vanessa

The guy is a monster.
Neither parties have covered themselves with glory, but this is genocide now and I can't support it.

He absolutely is Vanessa.

As soon as I saw him taking over as PM again.
I expected some conflict.

However nothing like this.
Nor the blatant murder of the 7 international aid workers .

I cannot support Netanyahu and his really atrocious government.
It seems neither can the Israeli citizens.
I hope whenever this is concluded that Netanyahu will be out of power for goo

It is heartbreaking to think of the slaughtering going on now
October last year was pure evil from Hamas.
However there comes a point where 2 wrongs DON'T make a right.

I cannot now support this continuing.
What really worries me is what too our own PM Sunak stated at the start of Israel's retaliation.
When he said we stand with Israel ALWAYS''.
Virtually giving a blank cheque to them.

He's never retracted those words .

It's hard to look at this now and not think International law has been broken.
Even possibly war crimes too.
The frightening this is just where this is going to go and for how long too.
It's now wrong what Israel is doing.
It greatly saddens me to say that but I don't support it now either.

[Livia]

I've taken the liberty of copying LT's post in the Gary Lineker thread and posting it in here. Something to think about...

Originally Posted by LeatherTrumpet

Gary Lineker, the BBC’s chief political commentator, believes it’s unfair that
he receives so much criticism for his comments on Israel and Gaza. “The
minute you raise your voice against what they’re now doing there,” he
complained during an interview with the Left-wing journalist Mehdi Hasan,
“you get accused of being a supporter of
Hamas.”

Any such accusation is clearly outrageous. I’m quite sure St Gary doesn’t
support Hamas, or indeed any other genocidal Islamist terror group.

I do, however, think he suffers from the same problem as an awful lot of
Western progressives. Which is that, when it comes to Israel, he has
absolutely no idea how biased he sounds.

As a matter of fact, he demonstrated this during the very same interview.
Speaking about the war in Gaza, St Gary said: “I can’t think of anything that
I’ve seen worse in my lifetime.”

This is a remarkable statement. Not least because St Gary was born all the
way back in November 1960. And, during the 63 and a half years since, the
world has endured quite a large number of brutal conflicts. Take the Second
Congo War (1998-2003), which
claimed an estimated 5.4m lives. And the Vietnam War (1955-75), which
claimed an estimated 3.5m. And the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-89), which
claimed an estimated 2m. To name but a few.

Indeed, far from being the bloodiest conflict since 1960, the war in Gaza isn’t
even the bloodiest being fought right now. The Syrian civil war, which began
in 2011, has so far killed more than 600,000 people. Then there’s the small matter of Russia’s war in
Ukraine. And, as mentioned in Saturday’s Way of the World, the ongoing
conflict in Sudan. To give just one small glimpse of the horror: a 17-year-old
Sudanese boy told Human Rights Watch that he’d witnessed paramilitaries
shooting children and then flinging
their corpses into a river.

St Gary, however, says he can’t think of anything that he’s seen worse in his
lifetime than what Israel is currently doing in Gaza, in its efforts to destroy
Hamas. I’ve no doubt that he’s being entirely sincere. I merely wonder how
he came to such a conclusion,
given that so many other conflicts in his lifetime have been even more
horrifying, and killed vastly more people.

Perhaps, during his glorious playing days, St Gary was so relentlessly focused
on his football that he never watched the news or opened a newspaper – and
therefore simply didn’t hear about these other conflicts. I suppose that’s one
possibility.

Even so, it is curious that Western progressives in general always seem so
very much louder in their condemnation of Israel than in their condemnation
of other warring nations. What exactly is it about Israel that makes them
constantly single it out like this?

I fear we may never know.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...his-worst-yet/

[user104658]

I feel like the article is trying to suggest it's because of antisemitic bias but, I think it's just the same thing I was talking about before. Cause du jour. Why are the public focussed on this and not the myriad other conflicts around the world? Because that's where focus has been drawn for now. And that's where it'll stay - until it's drawn somewhere else, for other reasons. Then Palestine will just be another colour on the ever-morphing "flag of support" and the marching will be for [insert tomorrow's all-consuming issue here].

It's not just the flag wavers of course... the vast majority of pro-Israel chatter will disappear long before the conflict ends as well. Out of the news cycle, out of mind. And of course there's the ever-glaring and oh-so-sad reality that most heavily pro-Israel commenters doing the rounds (on and offline ) don't really care about Israel all that much - they care about "sticking it to the libtards" - so when the flags are onto the next topic... the counter-warriors will be too.

[Vanessa]

Originally Posted by joeysteele

He absolutely is Vanessa.

As soon as I saw him taking over as PM again.
I expected some conflict.

However nothing like this.
Nor the blatant murder of the 7 international aid workers .

I cannot support Netanyahu and his really atrocious government.
It seems neither can the Israeli citizens.
I hope whenever this is concluded that Netanyahu will be out of power for goo

It is heartbreaking to think of the slaughtering going on now
October last year was pure evil from Hamas.
However there comes a point where 2 wrongs DON'T make a right.

I cannot now support this continuing.
What really worries me is what too our own PM Sunak stated at the start of Israel's retaliation.
When he said we stand with Israel ALWAYS''.
Virtually giving a blank cheque to them.

He's never retracted those words .

It's hard to look at this now and not think International law has been broken.
Even possibly war crimes too.
The frightening this is just where this is going to go and for how long too.
It's now wrong what Israel is doing.
It greatly saddens me to say that but I don't support it now either.

Definitely. What he's doing is genocide.
The world has learnt nothing from the past.

[user104658]

It's bizarre really - no matter what one believes about the nuance and rights/wrongs of the response from Israel, there is NO denying that the PR for Israel is absolutely shocking. And I fear unfixable. For a country that, let's face it, really is physically surrounded by hostility and relies heavily on international support to remain viable it's a very odd choice to be going in as hard and (at least, apparently) heavy-handedly. Moral high-ground posteuring and surgical strikes minimising collateral damage and offering maximum support to the civilian population would have been a politically far better choice in terms of "what comes next". When this is all over - whether Hamas is eliminated and Gaza reduced to dust or not - the future landscape looks fairly bleak and (despite what some disingenuous individuals would like to suppose from certain song contest results) international support for Israel is now at an all-time low.

[Cherie]

I don't know how he could forget the Bosnian War

During the subsequent civil war that lasted from 1992 to 1995, an estimated 100,000 people were killed. Approximately 80 percent of the civilians killed during the war were Bosniaks. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed as many as 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from the town of Srebrenica. It was the largest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust.

On May 25, 1993, while the conflict in Bosnia continued—and a full year before the genocide at Srebrenica—the UN Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to prosecute the perpetrators of the atrocities. It was the first such tribunal since Nuremberg and the first mandated to prosecute the crime of genocide, among other offenses.

Fighting ended after a NATO bombing campaign forced Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table, and a peace agreement, the Dayton Accords, was signed in 1995. The agreement established two state “entities” joined by a weak central government: the Serb Republic, which includes Srebrenica, and the Bosnian Federation. Refugees were guaranteed the right to return to their homes, but only a fraction of the prewar Bosniak population has gone back to Srebrenica.

In 2001, the ICTY ruled that genocide had occurred in Srebrenica. Efforts to achieve justice for the victims at Srebrenica are still ongoing in Serbia and internationally. The genocide in Srebrenica continues to challenge us to learn from the past, to hold the perpetrators of mass atrocities accountable, and to prevent these horrific crimes from happening in the future.

Last Edited: Apr 12, 2019

[Cherie]

Originally Posted by Soldier Boy

It's bizarre really - no matter what one believes about the nuance and rights/wrongs of the response from Israel, there is NO denying that the PR for Israel is absolutely shocking. And I fear unfixable. For a country that, let's face it, really is physically surrounded by hostility and relies heavily on international support to remain viable it's a very odd choice to be going in as hard and (at least, apparently) heavy-handedly. Moral high-ground posteuring and surgical strikes minimising collateral damage and offering maximum support to the civilian population would have been a politically far better choice in terms of "what comes next". When this is all over - whether Hamas is eliminated and Gaza reduced to dust or not - the future landscape looks fairly bleak and (despite what some disingenuous individuals would like to suppose from certain song contest results) international support for Israel is now at an all-time low.

I don't think its disingenuous to claim that most normal people can seperate normal Israelis from their government.... the public vote speak for themselves ...the bullying of that 20 year old girl by fellow contestants was low, even you must agree with that surely? Also after the Manchester bombing I seem to recall Mancunians coming together against terrorism, that was allowed but your bog standard Israeli it seems are supposed to take mass massacre on the chin...because of....something something Nethanyahu

[Beso]

We can also add the persecution and slaughter of the Rohingya Muslims, by the Burmese government..to the long list if things st gary doesn't see as heartbreaking.

[Ammi]

…the Telegraph article (imo…)…is pretty awful tbh…it talks about ‘bias’, while referring to him as St Gary …so very much a bias article in itself …I think Gary Lineker in his wording…(…whatever his intent…)…the Hamas attack of 7th October and I don’t think that was good at all, I think for anyone speaking out as a humanitarian, it’s important to know the weight of words and how important they are…but so far as ‘anything he’s seen in his lifetime…’… is concerned, I think that has more to do with how we have access to world news in terms of visuals and the internet and the how that impacts the world …a missile is launched…?…we see that immediate impact as it finds its target etc…we are ‘live witnesses’ in a way that is quite recent in terms of technology…so again, I think it’s just his choice of wording is my opinion/ my own take and interpretation…

[Crimson Dynamo]

[user104658]

Originally Posted by Cherie

I don't think its disingenuous to claim that most normal people can seperate normal Israelis from their government.... the public vote speak for themselves ...the bullying of that 20 year old girl by fellow contestants was low, even you must agree with that surely? Also after the Manchester bombing I seem to recall Mancunians coming together against terrorism, that was allowed but your bog standard Israeli it seems are supposed to take mass massacre on the chin...because of....something something Nethanyahu

I don't recall groups of Mancs carpet bombing any hospitals or obliterating entire cities in retribution to be fair so I don't see how this is a helpful comparison, other than to point out that many nations have experienced terrorist catastrophes and not used it as justification for the careless bombing of civilians.

Anyway... I've gone over why the standalone number is irrelevant as a statistic in the absence of a directly opposite choice in the Eurovision threads but that doesn't really matter here: if you're right and the vote reflects people separating "Israeli individuals from Israeli state" (as I agree, everyone absolutely should, for all nations) it's still or perhaps even more disingenuous to imply that the Eurovision vote demonstrates widespread public approval for Israel's military/political actions.

And thus, has no bearing on the simple fact that international support for Israel (as a state) is potentially at an all-time low. Which was really my main point.

[Beso]

Bit of a difference between ISIS terrorist cells bombing places and the Palestinian ruling party ordering the oct 7th attacks....but anything to diminish their responsibility huh...

[Beso]

Bombing cities after act if war against your citizens....not ok...

Raping and murdering because you dont like your neighbour ok.....

In some peoples heads

[user104658]

Originally Posted by parmnion

Bit of a difference between ISIS terrorist cells bombing places and the Palestinian ruling party ordering the oct 7th attacks....but anything to diminish their responsibility huh...

Hamas is either a terrorist organisation or a legitimate government, it seems some people would like to define them as either/or depending on what fits on that day.

If they are a legitimate government then Oct 7th was not a terrorist attack but a first-strike act of war.

If they are a terrorist organisation then they are not the legitimate ruling party of Palestine in any meaningful way that would justify action against the population of Palestine in retribution for attacks carried out by Hamas.

I get that you don't want to pick because it's more convenient not to - but in my view, Hamas has far more in common with a terrorist organisation than they do with a legitimate government... thus Oct 7th was a terrorist attack... and bombing civilian populations is a disproportionate response.

[user104658]

Originally Posted by parmnion

Bombing cities after act if war against your citizens....not ok...

Raping and murdering because you dont like your neighbour ok.....

In some peoples heads

No one on this forum.

[Cherie]

Originally Posted by Soldier Boy

I don't recall groups of Mancs carpet bombing any hospitals or obliterating entire cities in retribution to be fair so I don't see how this is a helpful comparison, other than to point out that many nations have experienced terrorist catastrophes and not used it as justification for the careless bombing of civilians.

Anyway... I've gone over why the standalone number is irrelevant as a statistic in the absence of a directly opposite choice in the Eurovision threads but that doesn't really matter here: if you're right and the vote reflects people separating "Israeli individuals from Israeli state" (as I agree, everyone absolutely should, for all nations) it's still or perhaps even more disingenuous to imply that the Eurovision vote demonstrates widespread public approval for Israel's military/political actions.

And thus, has no bearing on the simple fact that international support for Israel (as a state) is potentially at an all-time low. Which was really my main point.

As I have already explained no one said there was widespread approval for Israels actions, the positive vote was for a 20 year old girl bullied by people who jump on the latest bandwagon which happens at the moment to be be Palestine

and the comparison with Manchester is very appropriate, she was bullied because she had sympathy with those Israelis killed..how very dare she have empathy for people from her country

[Crimson Dynamo]

Originally Posted by parmnion

Bombing cities after act if war against your citizens....not ok...

Raping and murdering because you dont like your neighbour ok.....

In some peoples heads

[arista]

Bring a Big Van
chuck them all in it.

[Beso]

I shall say it again.
.71 percent of Palestinians support the actions of hamas ,(the ruling body of Palestine) on oct 7th...

I wonder if they still do?