Israel performs precise attacks on valid military targets and with multiple measures to reduce the number of collateral damage to civilians. You are trying to equate this with terrorist attacks literally targeting civilians.
I understand from your comment, please correct me if I misunderstood, that you oppose Jews building houses in the West Bank.
The West Bank is a part of the state of Israel that was occupied by Jordanian forces from 1948 to 1967. It was then captured by Israel and many Israelis, many of whom lived there before it was occupied by Jordan, moved (back) there.
The West Bank was settled by both Arabs and Jews before 1948 - for literally thousands of years Jews had lived there. In 1856 many more Jews and Arabs began moving there due to changes in Ottoman law meant to encourage settlement of the area (the Ottomans needed tax revenue). It should be noted that Jerusalem was Jewish majority even before the Ottoman land laws changed in 1856. In 1936 there was a large Arab slaughtering of Jews in Hebron, so many Jews were evacuated from Hebron. In 1948 the Arabs rejected the UN partition plan, and started a war. Israel won that war, and thus became the sole successor state of Mandatory Palestine. Jordan occupied part of that successor state (the West Bank). In 1952 (I may have the year wrong) the Arab league declared that no Arab assistance would be provided to those displaced in the war, because only the suffering of those displaced will cause the destruction of the Zionist Entity. In 1964 the Soviets advised a group to represent the Arabs of the West Bank, the Gaza strip, and those displaced in 1948, and that group adopted the name Palestinians to refer to the populations it represents. Israel conquered the Jordanian-occupied territory in 1967 after Jordan attacked Israel, two months later the Arab League adopted it's policy of No Peace,
No Negotiation, No Recognition of Israel. In 1995 the West Bank was divided into separate areas. Predominantly Arab areas were given autonomy for self rule, under the Palestinian Authority (mostly PLO) with the intention of all parties to see the establishment of an Arab state called Palestine after final borders and other issues are agreed. Predominantly Jewish areas have Israeli rule redeclared in three year cycles, pending final border agreements. Every single final border solution has been rejected by the Arab side, who have also employed extreme violence both in rhetoric and in actions.
Where in all this are the Jews who live in the West Bank a reason to "lose all faith" that Israel has good intentions. Israel's first intention is to secure the safety of her citizens, just like any other nation. Israel has committed to, and taken reasonable steps to, establish a separate state for those who demand Arab rule.
It is the result of crippling economic sanctions and an ongoing trade embargo by USA for 60 years now. The tragedy has a perpetrator. The humanitarian crisis is the result of actions of people who are very pleased with themselves for constructing it. Please don't use passive tone when describing humans inflicting intentional harm to other humans. Many countries in the rest of the world have shown themselves to be extremely willing to both help and trade with Cuba, but USA keeps tightening the noose and scaring them away.
> A judge telling me to give up my password is different than a dozen armed, masked secret police telling me to.
Yes, a judge is unlikely to order your execution if you refuse. Based on recent pattern of their behavior, masked secret police who are living their wildest authoritarian dreams are likely to execute you if you anger them (for example by refusing to comply with their desires).
I don't practically see it happen, but you have to be careful once you are in a jail though, because there are often few limits on what the administration of the jail can do to you for any supposed violation of the jail rules (which they can legally make up on a whim, and due process is extremely limited). In Illinois, at least, a county Sheriff has unlimited power to punish a detainee in any extreme way they can imagine for even the very slightest infraction. There are no laws (statutes) which define what a "crime" is inside jail and what the punishment for it is. If it wasn't for SCOTUS limiting the death penalty to certain levels of behavior (e.g. murder) then a sheriff would be able to simply legally execute a detainee for pretty much anything.
> I don't think we yet have a good understanding of how many deaths he will have caused as a result of DOGE so abruptly cutting off assistance to so many vulnerable people around the world
Nor how many deaths will be caused by his support for far right parties across Europe, when they start ethnic cleansings.
A nonsensical false dichotomy of sorts. Between "Japan surrenders without a single further death" and "We have to nuke two cities for them to surrender" there are numerous steps of gradual escalation that could have been taken before arriving at the "nuke the cities" option. One such possible step could have been nuking a remote area, or at the very least sparsely populated area, to achieve the demonstration of destruction without hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I have no sympathy for the Japanese who killed tens of millions of people in their WW2 atrocities, and the two bombs killed orders of magnitude fewer of their people. I also see no reason to pretend that there weren't obvious alternatives to USA dropping nukes on their cities if we are to believe that the objective was merely getting Japan to surrender (an objective most difficult to believe). No need for pretense -- they wanted to demonstrate their new weapons, AND they wanted to kill a lot of Japanese.
> One such possible step could have been nuking a remote area, or at the very least sparsely populated area, to achieve the demonstration of destruction without hundreds of thousands of deaths
There is a reason it took bombing both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cause surrender. And if you telegraph that you’re going to bomb a remote place and the bomb fails, you’ve undermined your weapon’s credibility in unique ways.
I’m not saying you’re wrong. Just that your confidence is wrong. What you’re talking about was contemporaneously and continues to be historically debated.
For the part of the history relevant to the topic, you have to go back to at least November 2, 1917 [1].
From the same page: "1901 the Sublime Porte (the Ottoman central government) gave Jews the same rights as Arabs to buy land in Palestine and the percentage of Jews in the population rose to 7% by 1914"
I am more powerful than you, and I come to you with a request to act against your own interests in order to serve me. You refuse. The harsh consequences for refusing me that I am about to unleash against you are your fault. I am going to starve you for resources for decades, and any bad outcomes for your economy are your fault. You should not have refused me.
> the most disturbing part to me is how quickly the Trump administration will just declare these people as "terrorists" before any kind of investigation has happened
Imperial boomerang. After enabling Israel/IDF which routinely just shoots unarmed people and officials on all levels simply justify it with "Terrorists.", and also routinely denies ambulance access to victims shots, it was only a matter of time until such and similar tactics come back home. Because politicians back home saw that the world was okay with it, so why not do it home.
People are supposed to defend their rights from far away, so that they don't have to defend them uncomfortably close when it's too late to avoid many casualties.
The U.S. itself has been engaging in similar behavior around the world for a long time. The specific relevance of Israel may only be a combination of recency and amount of U.S. attention.
But “scapegoat”?
“Israel did 9/11” is treating them as a scapegoat. “IDF often calls men they killed terrorists with no justification” is just stating a fact.
Yeh, the poster should have also at least name checked the administrative detention system of CIA's Phoenix program in Vietnam, which seems like a reasonable test-bed for many of the recent and horrific systems and a kind of common ancestor to both of the US ICE agency and its cousins in the Levant.
Leaving that bit of history out certain seems like a missed point of history, and absent that your parent post's point might indeed seem a little reach-y.
When going back into history, examples become too abstract, a thing that other people did, in different times. The example I used is not only recent, it is still ongoing. It is right there in front of domestic authoritarians, showing them how it can be done in this day and age. And it is right there in front of the general population, showing them what can and will be done to them if they do not make it clear to their governments that they will not tolerate such conduct. Therefore I insist that I used the correct example.
> Social media incentivizes small 'creators' to espouse outrageous views that mainstream media does not, and that seem vitally important
You write about this in a negative tone ("outrageous views"). To go for the extremely low hanging fruit, what about when the establishment media tried to mostly ignore Epstein, and it was only the hard push from social media personalities that brought the topic back into the mainstream? What confidence does that leave in the establishment media, and that they are not bought and paid for by the 'ruling pedophile class'?
When the establishment media refuses to talk about certain topics, it gives up the control over the narrative on that topic. That is their conscious choice. It is obvious that individuals will rise to fill that gap. Why are you writing about it as if it's a bad thing?
Does a liberal democracy even exist without independent media? I think not.
On the contrary, some pre-internet establishment media would have been all over a story about a billionaire and his ring of underage escorts. The National Enquirer, for example.
Now take a long look in the mirror.
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