this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
751 points (96.9% liked)

World News

39102 readers
2226 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

CommonDreams.org

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 228 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (30 children)

"The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz," Metula Mayor David Azoulai said in a radio interview on Sunday, according toThe Times of Israel. "Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust."

How blinkered do you have to be to see the Hamas attacks on October 7 as akin to the Holocaust, but not see that your own determination to wipe out the entire people of Gaza resembles the genocidal intent behind the Holocaust?

[–] [email protected] 74 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I had family die in the work camps, die in the chambers, and die in the ghettos. If Gaza needs to become Auschwitz because you're trying to shoehorn the Holocaust into the conversation, then October 7th was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, you sick fuck. This mayor either needs a history lesson, a reminder to respect his family who died senselessly for their heritage, or would even do best to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. These blood-thirsty assholes need to figure out how to goddamn listen when others are crying before they repeat history's worst atrocities.

Here's a word I used to hear in Hebrew school and history lessons all the time: scapegoat. Look around you and try to identify who the scapegoat is. It ain't us this time... Also, read the fucking room. If many of your most ardent supporters are Nazis, you're probably doing a Nazi thing.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm just reading this on Wikipedia:

In 1939, German authorities began to concentrate Poland's population of over three million Jews into a number of extremely crowded ghettos located in large Polish cities. The largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, collected approximately 300,000–400,000 people into a densely packed, 3.3 km2 area of Warsaw. Thousands of Jews were killed by rampant disease and starvation under SS-und-Polizeiführer Odilo Globocnik and SS-Standartenführer Ludwig Hahn, even before the mass deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp began.

They crowded those people in a small area with a high population density and they started to die of disease and starvation. Gosh gee, why does that sound so familiar? 🫠

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

🤔 I remember reading a book in school about a family that lived in the Warsaw ghetto. At the end of the book, an agency helped them smuggle the main character's baby sister out in a basket, and he remarked to himself about how he knew she'd never know who her real family was.

It always stuck with me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Now, with all that context, that Poles where coexisting peacefully with Jews before the war, that countless of them have sacrificed their own lives and lives of their families to help them during their brutal extermination, even they now get called antisemitic when pointing out Israel’s tactics are no different than what Hitler did to them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

I'm not sure if anyone even cares anymore, and given how nukes are in the hands of most of the countries turning fascist including Israel, everyone on the planet needs to worry now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Dude. I could be wrong, but I think the guy you're replying to is on your side. Are you raging at him or the mayor? Because it seems like the first

[–] [email protected] 41 points 11 months ago (1 children)

To me, it clearly seemed to be directed at the mayor.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Okay. I'm clearly in the minority. I'm not sure why it was a reply and not a top level comment, but I'm willing to go with it

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That really is my bad. I wanted to reply to this quote which really stabbed at the heart of the problem and, for a moment, considered that I might confuse people by "speaking" directly to mayor for literary effect, but then decided I was being overly-anal. Sorry that I confused you, but yes, I was passionately angry at the mayor's mischaracterization of the situation in order to play the helpless victim. The only offense committed by [email protected] is perhaps one of underfloofiness.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Most of us here share your outrage. Peace, bro.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I may never recover from my outrage over the unfloofiness of this situation.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 49 points 11 months ago (2 children)

And if the death of, by the latest count, 764 Israeli civilians is a Holocaust, what does that make the death of 12,000 Palestinian civilians?

[–] [email protected] 57 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

19000+ as of 4 days ago, and this is the minimum number since it only includes people Gazan hospitals physically counted.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

19,000 is the total I've seen, but I don't think there are good figures on civilian vs. combatant deaths. I was assuming a very conservative 2:1, which I saw reported somewhere, but I assume the civilian share is much higher, given that at least 7,000 or more of the dead from Israeli attacks were children.

In any case the point is that if killing Israeli civilians is wrong then killing dozens of times more Palestinian civilians should also be wrong. It's a shame that most of the American political leadership doesn't see it that way and instead wants to send Israel even more weapons with which to murder a vastly disproportionate number of civilians to the losses suffered in Israel.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

19,000 is the total I’ve seen, but I don’t think there are good figures on civilian vs. combatant deaths. I was assuming a very conservative 2:1, which I saw reported somewhere,

I think you might be misremembering; that 2:1 is the number for October 7th.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Seems like the vast majority of those killed in Gaza are civilians.

The IDF claims 7k were "terrorists" but of course no proof for that. So far they have said anything from "we have captured/killed a dozen Hamas fighters" to "they are surrendering in hundreds"... but in the former example, a family of 35 members all die and among them is maybe, somewhere in the rubble a single Hamas government official or Hamas errand boy... and the latter, well, we've seen the pictures of "hundreds of Hamas fighters surrendering" and they all seemed to be civilians who got tortured.

I think the IDF could barely kill any militant fighters and that's why they have no figures or bodies or photographic evidence or any way to verify whom they've killed. Add to that, the majority of those people killed in Gaza were in their homes or a refugee camp.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (1 children)

In the minds of those who see Palestinians as "untermenschen" - subhumans - their lives don't count the same as human lives. (An Israeli government official quite literally and openly in a press conference deemed Palestinians to be "human animals").

This shit we're seeing is the violent expression of the most cold, cruel and extreme racism, all endorsed and even militarilly and diplomatically supported by the US (which is the ultimate hypocrisy from such loudly self-proclaimed defenders of "freedom").

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Freedom (Terms and conditions apply)

[–] [email protected] 41 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And to actually say you wanted to recreate the horrors of it. Like explicitly say that. That's a special level of non-self-awareness.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Zionists are the new Nazis.

Treat Zionism like you would treat Nazism.

Treat Zionists like you would treat Nazis.

Israel has killed more civilians in 2 months than Russia has killed in 2 years, just to put things into perspective.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago (2 children)

For some, "never again" means "never again let this happen to any People", to others, it means "never again let this happen to us". Unfortunately, it is much more common in the Israeli right to understand it the second way.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (8 children)

the Isreali right

The Israeli right: flatten the whole place, I want to salt the earth so they have nowhere to return to and they're destroyed forever.

Israeli moderates: the IDF can have a little white phosphorous, as a treat

load more comments (8 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

By all indications Germans (at least their political elites and a large part of the population) seem to have learned "never again" as being "never again do this to Jews" rather than "never again do this to other human beings", hence they keep on giving unwavering support to Israel.

The racism never ended, all that happenned is that an etnicity who were "one of them" became "one of us", hence the continued support of Israel and their actions: it's "those like us" doing it to "them", hence different moral limits if any apply than if it was "anybody vs those like us" (as it was in the Russian invasion of Ukraine were even a fraction done to Ukranians of what is being done to Palestinians led this very same German leadership to impose sanctions and break its long standing rules and start providing military help to the victims).

If there is one (somewhat surprising) thing this situation in Gaza brough to light, is how Germany doesn't seem to have learned the absolute nature of the Evil of hyper-racist ultranationalist Fascism, instead it's all seen as relative, the Evil being not in the nature of the actions but in the specific etnicity of the Fascists and their victims.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

For such people the limits on to the harm done to "them" are entirelly different of the limits on the harm done to "us" - it's the ultimate two-weights-two-measures and you can see that splattered all over Israeli propaganda (starting by the whole "it ain't terrorism if done by us" that anchors most of the messaging).

That said, these types being the full-blown german-style cold murderous ultra-racist Fascists, in their mind it's probably more "der ubermensch" vs "der untermensch" than "us" vs "them".

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

I think it's fucking dumb how the US supports Israel.

We only got attacked on 9/11 because of our support of Israel. Now we send them more support because they get attacked.

What exactly does Israel do for the US? Seems like being the main motivation behind the 9/11 attacks really outweighs any benefits they may have.

I don't see any benefits from supporting Israel, personally, as a United States citizen.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

The US doesn't have a great track record of "not supporting distopian regimes". They've either installed leaders with a dictatorial bent when the elected government wasn't doing what they wanted, or just supported their puppet in the area even though they did horrific things. Generally they think "the end justifies the means".

Apart from WW2, I can't think of any major foreign operation that Americans were involved with that hasn't blown up in their face sooner or later.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Because it's assumed Israel's detractors also want to commit genocide, just on the Jewish people, who have largely been the victims of such throughout history.

Now the tables are turned and the world doesn't really know how to feel about it.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (24 replies)