Israel, Palestine and Iran

[Rugeley Villa]

Israel remind me of some Liverpool fans. Always offended never ashamed . 

[Rugeley Villa]

We all know what these backward islamists are like cutting off heads etc , but jeez man Israel’s arrogance disregarding international law wiry these weapons. We went into Iraq for less. 

[magnkarl]

1 hour ago, foreveryoung said:

While the world is watching. This is internationally banned and a war crime, they cannot be supported after this if true, but will be.

Is it internationally banned?

USA in Mosul:

Armenia:

In Ukraine by Russia:

Heck, NATO have used it several times in Afghanistan.

Is Mosul or Afghanistan not populated? 

The fact is, it's not internationally banned, and 'we' use it all the time to blow up bunkers and stuff ourselves. Using it in a town is dumb, but in that regard we're as dumb as Israel and Russia as we dropped a ton of the stuff in many of our own wars. 4 or 5 out of the members of the security council uses it actively in war, either as parts of coalitions they're in or via their own military.

NATO/US' common line on the use of this is that it is used 'when civilians are out', something they seldom are, and these weapons caused massive casualties in Mosul.

Edited October 13, 2023 by magnkarl

[blandy]

44 minutes ago, magnkarl said:

Is it internationally banned?

The fact is, it's not internationally banned, and 'we' use it all the time to blow up bunkers and stuff ourselves. Using it in a town is dumb, but in that regard we're as dumb as Israel and Russia as we dropped a ton of the stuff in many of our own wars. 4 or 5 out of the members of the security council uses it actively in war, either as parts of coalitions they're in or via their own military.

NATO/US' common line on the use of this is that it is used 'when civilians are out', something they seldom are, and these weapons caused massive casualties in Mosul.

It's not banned per se, but its use against civilians is. Unfortunately the nations that have used it in that way (USA, Israel, Russia) are not signed up to the treaty or protocol banning its use in that way. As far as I'm aware "NATO" has not used it like that - just the US forces - no other NATO forces.

[brommy]

5 hours ago, StefanAVFC said:

God social media is the biggest cesspool I’ve ever witnessed regarding this topic. Utterly depressing situation with utterly predictably depressing outcomes. 

I'd highly recommend not visiting social media at all. It's far from a necessity and it's disadvantages far outweigh it's advantages.

Think of it as the biggest, dirtiest inner city public toilet you'd rather not even imagine. It's there and could be useful but visits can be avoided and you certainly don't want to stay to browse.

[bickster]

9 minutes ago, brommy said:

I'd highly recommend not visiting social media at all. It's far from a necessity and it's disadvantages far outweigh it's advantages.

Think of it as the biggest, dirtiest inner city public toilet you'd rather not even imagine. It's there and could be useful but visits can be avoided and you certainly don't want to stay to browse.

Why are you here then?

[Jareth]

18 minutes ago, brommy said:

Think of it as the biggest, dirtiest inner city public toilet you'd rather not even imagine. It's there and could be useful but visits can be avoided and you certainly don't want to stay to browse.

In this analogy it is therefore preferable to stay and browse in well kept public toilets... 

[brommy]

3 minutes ago, bickster said:

Why are you here then?

I don't see VT as unsolicited social media. VT isn't a large a inner city public toilet - more like a decent pub or restaurant toilet where you're much less likely to see anything untoward.

[Stevo985]

I don't claim to know enough about the middle east to take sides, but I must admit over the past week, the difference in reporting of the Hamas attack vs the Israeli retaliation is incredibly noticeable

[Davkaus]

8 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

I don't claim to know enough about the middle east to take sides, but I must admit over the past week, the difference in reporting of the Hamas attack vs the Israeli retaliation is incredibly noticeable

It's fascinating reading coverage of the same events from UK media (even ones you wouldn't usually associate with echoing the government's position) side by side with Al Jazeera.

I think our position of expressing our observation of these differences is not yet subject to proposals to be considered illegal speech.

[blandy]

1 minute ago, Stevo985 said:

the difference in reporting of the Hamas attack vs the Israeli retaliation is incredibly noticeable

Perhaps because there's something already "priced in" to the reporting we see?

It's this: Basically, out of the blue Hamas perpetrated horrific mass murder of civilians, kidnap, mutilation and so on. The reporting is therefore reflective of that shock and horror.

Next, there's the consideration that "Israel can't not respond" - if Israel does not take major steps, then it's license for Hamas to do it again. The question, then is "how badly will Israel behave in response", or "how much care will Israel take in responding".

So because it's understood that Israel will respond to the brutal murder of a large number of civilians, and they will take at least some care (if only to try and preserve the lives of the hostages), that's why it's a bit slanted, perhaps?

I assume, if you were to watch one of the Middle Eastern TV channels, the coverage would be slanted the other way - not necessarily because of "support" for Hamas, but because they would see it as "inevitable that at some point Hamas would respond to the imprisonment of the Palestinian people, but what's not predictable is the extent of the terror for the people of Palestine that Israel unleashes"

[magnkarl]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

It's not banned per se, but its use against civilians is. Unfortunately the nations that have used it in that way (USA, Israel, Russia) are not signed up to the treaty or protocol banning its use in that way. As far as I'm aware "NATO" has not used it like that - just the US forces - no other NATO forces.

But for me the issue is that we've used this against 'military targets' that are in between civilian targets, making us implicit in using white phosphorus on civilians.

It's a line not easy to define, that's for sure. I'd rather no one used them, just like I'd rather no one use cluster munitions, but here we are with NATO\US\Ukraine using it. It's hard to take the high ground when reports of coalition forces use of white phosphorus even within cities are quite wide-spread. What do you tell Russia and Israel to stop using them?

"Listen, we only drop our white phosphorus on the baddies, and when we do we think the areas we use them on don't have civvies in them." It's a dumb argument.

Edited October 13, 2023 by magnkarl

[peterw]

I think the wider context of what this means to Jews who aren't in israel is often overlooked in this. I've had it mentioned by a work colleague, but also David Baddiel highlighted it last night on the BBC podcast that is aired after Newsnight. He pointed out that whenever there are attacks against israel it becomes a real safety concern for all Jews as rates of attacks against them increases. They are almost pulled into the debate about Israel even if they have no direct link with the country because everyone associates every Jewish person with every act that Israel is involved in or when attacked. He points out that is past religion and is racial, because as an atheist someone looking to hard someone who is Jewish wouldn't care if they're practicing or not. Its also noteworthy that he is referred to as Jewish without context of his own atheism.

It is difficult to approach this without taking sides. Hamas have been barbarous, and Israel are going to you'd imagine inflict deaths on many more civilians. Its a never ending cycle and the only hope is that Hamas are destroyed, that the Palestinian Authority  do have leadership that is open and accountable, that Israel is lead by someone willing to see and treat Palestinians as equals, and that there is genuine will for the two state system. However, that looks  as far away now as it ever has.

[Chindie]

51 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

I don't claim to know enough about the middle east to take sides, but I must admit over the past week, the difference in reporting of the Hamas attack vs the Israeli retaliation is incredibly noticeable

We have our side, and our media and institutions follow that side to one degree or another to a fault.

They just hope you don't notice the war crimes.

[blandy]

Just now, magnkarl said:

we've

Who is the "we" in your post?

[blandy]

Just now, Chindie said:

We have our side, and our media and institutions follow that side to one degree or another to a fault.

They just hope you don't notice the war crimes.

I don't think that's true at all of the/our media as a whole.

Of course you're right that some of the media will weight their coverage in accordance with that particular outlet's own biases or standpoints, but I don't think any of them "hope we don't notice the war crimes" - they will cover them. They are covering them. They are (amongst) the ones covering them. They are telling us about them. Given the state of the place, it's dangerous work for the journos on the ground, but they are there. They are reporting what they find.

[Chindie]

3 minutes ago, peterw said:

I think the wider context of what this means to Jews who aren't in israel is often overlooked in this. I've had it mentioned by a work colleague, but also David Baddiel highlighted it last night on the BBC podcast that is aired after Newsnight. He pointed out that whenever there are attacks against israel it becomes a real safety concern for all Jews as rates of attacks against them increases. They are almost pulled into the debate about Israel even if they have no direct link with the country because everyone associates every Jewish person with every act that Israel is involved in or when attacked. He points out that is past religion and is racial, because as an atheist someone looking to hard someone who is Jewish wouldn't care if they're practicing or not. Its also noteworthy that he is referred to as Jewish without context of his own atheism.

Well this is a reflection of the complicated nature of what 'Jewishness' is, and how that ties into Israel on varying levels.

Judaism is a ethnoreligious entity. It is a religion, and it's more than a religion. It's a number of races (who have racism between them even), and it's not any race at all. It's a culture, but it's more than a culture. There are Jewish people that don't practice at all, there are Jewish people that are defined by their take on practice of the faith. There are Jewish people who actively reject any element of faith but they come from Jewish families and are still identifying as Jewish because that's in their DNA (literally). There are (a very small number of) Jewish people that have no connection to Jews at all but converted (who some Jews would say aren't Jewish at all). And so on.

Israel is complicated for Jewish people. There's a common prayer to Jewish people that holds 'the concept of Israel' as sacred, and therefore a lot of Jewish people are extremely tied to the nation of Israel regardless of whether they have any real physical connection to the place, and any attack on Israel is, to these people, an attack on the entire Jewish community at large. There's also a fairly significant section of Jewish people that reject that the state of Israel is anything other than a country that just so happens to be Jewish in nature and want to firmly draw a line between Israel and Jewishness (which is also something some definitions of anti-Semitism do). And there's also a small section of Jews that actively are against Israel for various reasons (iirc there's one small segment of particularly conservative Jews that believe the creation of a nation of Israel is actually a wrongdoing and they actively campaign against it's existence). This is then complicated because the nation of Israel holds itself out as the international representative of Jewish people in many respects and has actively sought to muddy the waters around what it is - hence things like pushes to make criticism of Israel be included as anti-Semetic, or trying to attack critiques of the country as attacks on Jews as a whole. And then you forget complicate it by Israel allowing any Jewish person to emigrate to the country. And you have forget complications on the emotive nature of the nation of Israel because it is the only Jewish nation-state and was born in large part out of the attempt to eradicate the entire group on an industrial scale, and it represents a homeland and safe state for Jewish people as a result of it being founded and run as an explicitly Jewish state - it's somewhere a Jewish person can feel entirely safe to be Jewish in a wholly Jewish community.

As a result, this whole thing is a complete mess. And it leads to bad outcomes. Sadly there are holdovers of classic anti-Semetic tropes still, whereby people will attack a Jewish person in London for actions of Israel because people believe they must be pro-Israel because they're Jewish (which they might even be, as discussed above, but it would still be wrong to do), because people still 'other' Jewish people as not truly being 'X' nationality because they're Jewish, which is as old as time and one of the foundations of anti-Semitism as a whole.

[Chindie]

13 minutes ago, blandy said:

I don't think that's true at all of the/our media as a whole.

Of course you're right that some of the media will weight their coverage in accordance with that particular outlet's own biases or standpoints, but I don't think any of them "hope we don't notice the war crimes" - they will cover them. They are covering them. They are (amongst) the ones covering them. They are telling us about them. Given the state of the place, it's dangerous work for the journos on the ground, but they are there. They are reporting what they find.

I disagree.

They clearly have a bias. Israelis killed, Palestinians died. The perfect example. Every interview given to Palestinians or Palestinian aligned people's is always formed on the basis of them being secondary, of the Israeli story being the important one, of the need to condemn the Palestinian aligned violence before we even discuss anything else, of the glossing over of the suffering of these people that has gone on for decades, and on and on. Apparently there is now a winding down of interviews being granted to Palestinian aligned voices I read earlier. You see the difference in the reporting - three is righteous justification in the actions of Israel, tacit support of it, and when they do refer to the immense suffering that action results in, the tone is always resigned, accepting. 'This is very bad, but...' and no condemnation of the Israeli reaction, no insistence that Israel condemns it's actions before we hear their side of things.

You'll disagree of course, and list off hours all this is wrong, and I will not be convinced. Maybe someone reading will. But I've read and watched and studied this whole thing enough to see there's not a level playing field here, and while it could be worse, it's certainly not fair, and certainly not right in my view.

[magnkarl]

42 minutes ago, blandy said:

Who is the "we" in your post?

By we in my post I was referring to Britain as part of a NATO-led coalition against Taliban, Iraq, ISIS and Libya.

One can say that Mosul was bombed with phosphorus by the Americans, but the reality is that the whole operation was one we and many other NATO nations were in on. British SF entered the area after the US had burned it to hell, meaning that our guys profited from the Americans wiping it out with a weapon we don't condone using. The waters get murky, to say the least.

The British army also operates several bunker busting varieties of white phosphorous ordinance, it doesn't necessarily detonate in the sky and rain down on a town, but it has hit civilians in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and it has the same terrifying effect either way. NATO certainly doesn't have a clear conscience when it comes to the use of the so called 'banned' weapon. The reality is that it isn't banned, and while it sounds nice to an emotive audience to write things like "Look at them there using that banned ordinance on civilians', we're none the better.

Edited October 13, 2023 by magnkarl

[Keyblade]

8 hours ago, StefanAVFC said:

God social media is the biggest cesspool I’ve ever witnessed regarding this topic. Utterly depressing situation with utterly predictably depressing outcomes. 

It's incredible isn't it? I remember about a decade ago people were hypothesising that the internet would turn out like this and we laughed at them. How could it? We have all the information we need at our fingertips we said.