Hamas likes nothing better than an Israeli strike that kills civilians. That is why it has reportedly been preventing its people from fleeing the war zone, sometimes by force. They seemingly want Palestinian casualties to pile high, in full view of the world’s media. The BBC and others beam footage of the horror of war around the world to people who have lost touch with the reality of armed conflict. Hamas want people in the West to take to the streets in outrage, forgetting that even a just and defensive war is hell. They know this will help them win.
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Samizdata quote of the day – Palestinian civilian deaths are at the heart of Hamas’s strategySamizdata Illuminatus (Arkham, Massachusetts) · Middle East & Islamic · Military affairs · Slogans & Quotations November 9th, 2023 |
 65 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Palestinian civilian deaths are at the heart of Hamas’s strategy |
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Strategically, I think Israel blew it by taking the slow measured path of response. That is exactly what empowers Hamas and its ilk to run such a PR-dependent war program.
Had Israel, in a seeming paroxysm of rage and retribution within hours of the massacre, gone into Gaza and just rage-blasted everything away, Hamas’s PR strategy would be worthless, the world wouldn’t get to spend a month deploring Israel, and, in the end, I doubt Israel would be less popular than it is now.
Unlike Ukraine, Israel is not completely dependent on foreign aid & foreign political support. So, not convinced Hamas’ PR campaign will actually stop IDF doing what it needs to.
Also, charging in to Gaza when Hamas expects IDF to charge into Gaza, & has a vast network of tunnels & effective weapons, would have been very unwise from a military point of view. A slow, careful, firepower & technology intensive corkscrew & blowtorch campaign makes much more sense.
I agree with PdH on this one. As always it depends on what the goal of your military actions is. If it is to convince the world you are the good guy, the victim, then that is one strategy. That is not Israel’s goal. Their goal is to destroy Hamas totally so that this can never happen again. One has to remember that the subtitle to the phrase “The State of Israel” is “Never Again”.
Let’s face it, many, many UN states are fundamentally anti semitic, so it doesn’t really matter what they Israel does, large amounts of the world is going to hate them just for breathing. The whole world was rocked by protests before the Israelis had marshalled one battalion. So if they are going to hate you anyway, you might as well get the job done. And, moreover, do it as best you can within your own framework of ethics, irrespective of what others think. My god, should they worry that China, or Russia or Syria thinks they are committing war crimes?
TBH, I think the Israeli response has been very well measured, and it isn’t over yet. The right response here is grim, cold, calculated, carefully planned, remorseless destructive power applied against Hamas, while doing the best they possibly can, short of surrender, to protect the hostages and the innocent people of Gaza. Which seems to me to be exactly what they are doing.
You don’t get cold-start “short sharp shock” actions out of an army like the Israelis have built. The reserves have to be called up, the gear issued, refresher training conducted… Especially if you want to husband the lives of your personnel.
Ain’t none of this as easy as it looks on TV. I’m impressed by the fact that every Israeli soldier I’ve seen is properly equipped, and is doing the right thing at the right time… That ain’t easy to accomplish.
Most people have no idea how hard it is to do even basic things like a night foot movement, or how much practice and coordination that takes. They discount the value of training, thinking that it’s like a kid’s game on the playground. The reality is that even the simplest basic infantry operation on foot is far more complex and harder to pull off than what they watch pro football players do on television every weekend.
You don’t do “quick” with something like the situation they’re dealing with in Gaza. That’s a pathway that results in lots and lots of dead Israeli troops, which they can’t afford.
Frankly, I don’t see any other option for them than what they’re doing, short of saying “F*ck it, nuke the bastards…”
That, or chemical weapons. I’m at the point with Hamas where I don’t find too many things “unthinkable” any more. Given what they did on the 7th of October, I’d be totally OK with simply exterminating the lot of them. Some things are beyond tolerance, and you have to decide what you’re willing to countenance with regards to these things.
Of course, I’m someone who would have kept the Nazi death camps open, and run every card-carrying Nazi through them just on general principle.
I agree with Kirk mostly, besides Israel has serious issues in their army which is the poor parent of their armed forces and to make things worse the whole establisment have a high level technology hardware festish so human factors like training have been down fora long time.
They should have a thousand of loiter drones over Gaza. But they don’t because the toys are only for the high ups. One of factors for this is that israeli army is not a professional army, most of it is an army of 20 years old kids, still they are very old fashioned compared to Ukranians for example.
I also have not yet seen an analysis that says that Iron Dome was like a Maginot Line, it made Israelis feel safe and dilletant behind the bubble.
The internal political charged situation also have a certain ressemblance to the French politics in the 1930’s…
The BBC also know that will help Hamas win. That is why they do what they do. They punish Israel for protecting their civilians and they reward Hamas for not protecting theirs.
That’s far closer to the option I was describing than sending battalions of foot soldiers to wade through the IED’s. I wasn’t positing a careful and discriminate exploration of Gaza. I was thinking of what it will take to resolve this instead of simply leaving the same situation to pop up again in five years. I am less concerned with innocent Gaza life than I used to be.
We should all hope and pray that the Israelis don’t initiate nukes, because that’s a cusp point in history we’re never coming back from. Ever.
Iran seems hell-bent on pushing them into it, though. Which should prove… Interesting. I wonder how the world will cope without Middle Eastern oil? I could easily see Iran striking all the Gulf states after the Israelis take out their oil terminal at Kharg Island… Which means no Middle Eastern oil for damned long time.
It would be interesting to gather all of the Paliwood footage and carefully go over it with “face-recognition” software.
How many times are some of the actors “killed” or “wounded”??
How many are “mangled victims” one day and “ambulance personnel”, the next?
This is a death cult, so I am not surprised at their actions.
By the way, Hamas and the cheerleaders for these goblins would do well to remember that they are fortunate not to be up against the likes of Arthur Harris, former leader of Bomber Command, at the Royal Air Force, or Curtis Le May, head of the US AF. They had a very, er, comprehensive approach to what a bombing campaign should look like. Under their leadership, Gaza would be reduced to a giant parking lot, to be converted into a sort of tourist destination, maybe with tax haven status.
The sad thing is that under any sort of decent leadership, Gaza could have been a tourist destination and a tax haven. It could have had a prosperous future, but that is incompatible with rule by an islamic death cult.
I find myself deeply admiring Israel’s approach to this crisis – while gobsmackedly pondering “WTF???” at them having been taken by surprise in the first place. Hamas knew the Israelis were monitoring their comms, so they bent-over backwards to prevent there being any warning – but there was warning; not only from Egypt, but their own border guards who watched Hamas rush the fence time-and-again, and drew the correct conclusion; “They’re practising for something – something’s up…” Yet the warnings, even from their own forces, were ignored; I woulda’ thunk the Yom Kippur War would’ve cured Israel’s complacent “We can handle anything they throw at us!” mindset.
But in their approach to Gaza, Israel is doing everything in topnotch form. The Israelis know that the world is harshly dissecting their every move, and blaming everything possible on them; and in the opening hour of response planning, the IDF – who’s played this game before, many times – knew this would be the case. So their priorities would’ve been clearly stated; “Eliminate Hamas while preventing this growing into a pan-Arab war”. Their SWOT likely read, “Advantage: Hamas really bloodied their hands this time, and all reasonable outsiders will understand the need to put-paid to them once and for all; the unreasonable ones are gonna’ hate us whatever we do, so we ignore them and stick to the plan. Disadvantage – Hamas ALWAYS surrounds themselves with human shields to generate Pallywood atrocity-pics, so there’s gonna’ be a LOT of civilian casualties however we go about it.”
So the Israelis made two things clear from the start; no food, water, fuel or ceasefire until ALL the hostages are freed – and by declaring they are at war with Hamas and framing this as an objective, it becomes one of their victory conditions. And from the very start, they made as much noise as they could that ALL civilians should leave Gaza City and move south of Wadi Gaza. And the Israelis really showed brilliance here; clearly Hamas would not let their human shields flee, so now that the IDF has cleared the roads south and isolated Hamas control of Gaza City, the civ’s are finally able to flee, Israel is allowing two-hour breaks in the fighting so hopefully those civ’s who do flee might make it out of the city. And I’d be willing to bet that those two hours are always cloudy, because of all the Israeli drones that are up watching for Hamas fighters trying to hide among the civ’s and scuttle south; that big ambulance convoy full of urgent medical cases trying to get to the Egypt border crossing was largely fleeing Hamas men, as everybody expected it would be. I don’t think many hijab’d women are going to make it past the roadblocks unsearched.
So the IDF is methodically crushing Hamas – I’m sure they’ve given-up on the hostages because even in utter desperation Hamas will NEVER release them all – and the civ’s, who crowded the sidewalks and cheered their returning butchers on October 7th, have lost everything but their lives. But they still have their lives; will they learn from this? – time will tell, but I suspect ‘no’. And Israel made a plan and stuck to it; and as noted, their actions are entirely within the rules of war, and they’re gathering plenty of evidence that Hamas has broken those rules wholesale and filmed themselves rejoicing while doing it.
Y Knott,
During these two hour breaks how do you (or anyone else) know it’s the civilians fleeing? If I were in Hamas’ position I’d leave a garrison in Gaza to keep the hostages and the “civilians” under control and inflict losses on the IDF (if well prepared even a small force could inflict enormous losses on the invasion force) and get as many of my troops out to die another day. Afterall, Islamic female garb can cover a multitude of sins…
What Kirk said. Only to add that I don’t see much reporting of what the IDF is doing with regard to the underground facilities, for which they appeared to have multiple approaches, both high- and low-tech. Maybe it’s just not being reported yet.
@luckylucky – huh? Every army in the world is overwhelmingly manned by 20-year-olds. My impression, from my Extremely Limited ™ dealings with the IDF is that the junior cadre and NCOs are actually older than average. They certainly don’t suffer from the stultifying excess of more-senior officers and layers of decision-making that bedevil many other Western armies. I’d expect that they would go through Hamas forces like a dose of Kruschens, and they actually have the luxury of planning in depth to minimise their own casualties and maximise the destruction of their enemies. They know where their enemies are, their enemies have no way to escape and no place to go – what’s the hurry? Gaza contains no strategic or tactical objectives, apart from the missile launchers, and those have been effectively neutralized already. If it takes 6 months to sanitize the place, who cares? Better to starve them out than bomb them. Besides, in a few weeks, the teenage temper tantrums in the West will subside and the hipsters will move on to some other cause-du-jour. There’s only upside to slow, deliberate action.
llater,
llamas
JohnK:
The sad thing is that under any sort of decent leadership, Gaza could have been a tourist destination and a tax haven. It could have had a prosperous future, but that is incompatible with rule by an islamic death cult.
Indeed. I read somewhere that one of the Hamas leaders (probably now in a cushy hotel somewhere) said his organisation did not want Gaza to be “Singapore of the Eastern Med”. Think about that statement: they did not want the place to be a rich, well run, clean, multi-faith, and fairly interesting place, full of banks, hospitals, IT firms, students at universities, nice restaurants, golf courses, parks, yacht marinas, an excellent airport, etc.
They wanted to kill Jews. That’s all these cunts wanted, and want.
@Kirk: Nukes are to be used when you face an existential threat, not for clean-up operations right on your own border.
@JohnK: even if we send the total world output of magic dirt to Gaza then there would still need to be vast improvements in the proper dirt sprinkling techniques if you wanted to turn the local population into productive citizens.
Indeed, Gaza was (comparatively) prosperous under Israeli occupation; among its economic generators were state-of-the-art greenhouses that supplied tropical fruit to much of northern Europe. When the Israelis pulled out, they left these intact; the Palestinians rushed in, flattened them, sold anything that could get even scrap prices and used the sites to launch rockets at Israel.
I ‘mind me a story of Haiti. One estate had a large mango plantation that generated $13,000 in earnings every year. Upon anarchy descending, the local peasants swarmed the place, cut down the plantation, rendered the wood into charcoal and sold it across the border in the Dominican Republic for cooking, generating $12,00 for themselves, and likely nothing since. If tasked with this act of economic suicide, the peasants would’ve just shrugged – “that mango money would’ve all gone to the estate owner anyways, we wouldn’t’ve gotten a cent of it.”
JP @1:18pm,
Yup,
You’ve seen the beaches of Gaza on TV and that? It could’ve been so excellent yet when the urge is only to destroy and not to build… I have holidayed quite a bit in the Eastern Med. Greece (inc the Crete), Cyprus, Turkey… Why not Gaza? Because it is a deliberate shit-hole. Nobody simply fucks-up that badly through mere poor management. All I can put it down to is they live on rage fed by hand-outs. Of course Hamas don’t want a Singapore in the Eastern Med (I’d like it, I bet you would too, I bet, if the Gazans really thought about it so would they… But they don’t do they?) They’d rather shit on their neighbour’s lawn than build a sewage system for themselves. The Hamas leadership are, of course, living high on the hog (so to speak!) in Quatar whilst their underlings are maintained in the squalor to feed the rage. It is terrible state of affairs. If the Palestinians just looked at Israel and saw what could be done, what they could do… I mean if Gaza hadn’t become the sink estate from Hell they’d be reaping shekels from Israel and not JDAMs. It’s beyond the usual definitions of tragic. A Classical tragedy involves a noble protagonist gone awry.
I see nothing of that in Gaza. It is just hate turned to 11. I find it very difficult not to think Israel ought to just go in and kill every fucking thing that walks, crawls or slithers. I am now 50 and I’ve had this all my life. I’m fucking sick of it and I live in Cheshire and not Tel Aviv but even here, in my soul, day fights with night…
I have had some very dark thoughts about this.
I also have a cunning plan. Could a drones with supersonic propellors (see XF-84H) be used? A squadron over Gaza 24/7 would break all resistence in days. They’d need to be launched out of Israel using conventional props out over the Med then switch to the supersonic prop to build up speed and come in low at maybe 500kts running race-tracks over the strip before RTB via convential prop. Maybe only nine would need to be in the air at any one time. Then I’d call them The Nazgûl. Now what if their subsonics could be tuned to use the turn the tunnels into Helmholtz resonators? Part of me thinks of this as an interesting theoretical musing on computational compressible fluid dynamics (my erstwhile area of astrophysics). I keep telling myself that… But then I haven’t had 1400 of my fellow citizens gang-raped to death with the videos posted on their own social media accounts.
Israel has been accused of “de-humanizing” the Gazans. Sorry, Hamas got there well in advance.
Sorry about the English in my above comment. I was timed-out whilst revising. That’s what having cats does to you…
@Freddo,
Pushing Israel into making an existential choice is what I’m talking about with regards to Iran. I doubt that the Israelis would nuke Hamas as a solution, unless the idiots of Hamas somehow brought in a nuke of their own…
No matter what, this all bears watching. Significant history is being made, here, and it won’t be pretty. Never ask to see how the sausage is made… You won’t like it.
Yes Hamas tries to maximise the deaths of its own Muslim civilians – knowing that Westerners are often sentimental and may demand a “cease fire” if there are many such deaths.
However, there is no reason to believe the civilian death figures that Hamas controlled bodies put out, the Western media shamelessly repeat their propaganda as fact.
I don’t seem to remember the BBC obsessively wandering around Nazi Germany showing all the Allied bombing.
@bobby b
I am less concerned with innocent Gaza life than I used to be.
I think that is a mistake. Short of killing all the Palestinians (which I presume you oppose), a plan needs to be made how to change their society so that it isn’t a breeding ground for this stuff in the future. First, for sure, Israel needs to kill Hamas and get a reasonable level of control, and I’m sure they need to install a military government for a few years. However, then it needs to give the Palestinians some sort of society where they can practice their stupid religion without living in absolute poverty. When you have nothing to lose then there isn’t much you won’t do. When you have a lot to lose you at least think twice. When your schools teach only hatred instead of algebra, you aren’t going to get very sophisticated students. (Remind you of American downtown city schools at all?)
I don’t know what that means exactly, and now is not really the time to think about it. But every dead innocent Palestinian leaves behind an extended family of angry, despairing people, and that doesn’t lead to good neighbors. Israel needs to leave behind a lot of dead Hamas for sure. Pile those bodies high and boil them in pigs’ blood. But it needs to leave behind a hopeful society where people have a life worth living rather than a life kindling rage, and fomenting terrorism.
I don’t suggest Palestine needs a stable alternative for the sake of the Palestinians, but simply for the sake of the Israelis. And I certainly don’t think this is at all easy to achieve. But it is the only long term solution.
@Fraser Orr, who said:
It’s a nice idea, but can you point out anywhere in history where something short of Alamut has actually, y’know… Worked?
I’m not a particularly vindictive sort of person, or so I like to think, but… I’m a practical man. I don’t see anything short of killing the majority of Hamas and its supporters working.
Spend a few hours perusing MEMRI, and look at all the UNRWA-supported hate indoctrination. I mean, for the love of all that is humane and decent, can you think of a way to undo all that from-childhood indoctrination? How do you “fix” a culture where some little freak of a sub-human is calling his parents proudly on a looted cellphone to tell them how he’s killed 10 Jews all by himself…?
Dude, the f*cking Nazis had the good graces to try and hide what they were doing. The Gazan Arabs of Hamas? They’re out and proud of it; those atrocity videos and pictures were proudly posted on their social media. Not even the sickest serial killers do that, and you think there is some way of reforming the culture that produces that behavior? For the love of God, just… How?
Yeah, I don’t like the idea of just killing everything on two legs in Gaza, but… I also didn’t like the idea of killing our family dog that took to killing our chickens, either. There wasn’t a good alternative to that one, to my nine-year-old sorrow.
Some things just have to be done, I fear. And, if you don’t do them, things just get exponentially worse. I argued for my dog that first time, when she killed a single chicken, but the second time? She got into the coop and killed dozens, just for the fun of it. Huskies don’t make for good farm dogs, I’m afraid.
Hamas and the Gazan Arabs who voted them into power have made some really bad choices. They either pay the price for those choices, or we will continue to see this crap go on and on and on.
What’s most galling? The fact that the US has been paying for all those hate-filled “educational” shows on TV in Gaza, and the UN has steadily been feeding the public there a diet of hate. You look into that, and it is truly disgusting. UN dues are funding this crap, and enabling the killers of Hamas while teaching their children that it is all OK and justified.
How do you fix that? How do you change a culture that’s grown up like that, over generations?
Seriously… Spend some time with the translations of the children’s TV and the educational material that UNRWA uses in Gaza, and then tell me how you undo all that.
I’ve never been comfortable with the UN as an institution, and I’m still not. They’ve rarely been on the side of good, anywhere.
As an aside… Social “planning” or “engineering” isn’t even an existing science, let alone an exact one. You want to try to “fix” the Gazn and West Bank Arab social problems, without even a working theory of what the hell the issues are, there? What to do, in a scientifically valid way?
You need a plan now. You don’t have the time to work through development of something that doesn’t even exist in order to find some ideal “fix” for something these cretins created themselves, with malice aforethought. You’ve got over sixty years of Gazan Arab irredentism and hatred to deal with, that they themselves happily taught their youth. And, celebrated. Never forget that… This is a very sick culture; even the Nazis had the restraint not to do the things that the Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank have done, with regards to publicizing and broadcasting their “accomplishments”.
The only real “solution” (and, I admit that it’s an ugly one…) is to let nature take its unrestrained course. People like the Gazan Arabs who continually make trouble for their more powerful neighbors inevitably wind up like the Comanche, mostly as memories in the history books.
All you can accomplish by advocating for “kindness” and “mercy” on the Hamasniks? Prolonging the agony, and creating still more victims like the innocents of October 7th.
@Kirk
It’s a nice idea, but can you point out anywhere in history where something short of Alamut has actually, y’know… Worked?
Sure. 1946 in Germany and Japan. On Okinawa the Japanese were so indoctrinated in the “Americans are monsters” that they’d throw their kids off cliffs to their deaths to prevent them falling into the hands of the GIs. So committed to their particular religious cause, the emperor, that they’d conduct suicidal banzai charges, or dig themselves into impenetrable underground fortresses, and fight to the last man. Sound familiar?
Would that Palestine were like Japan today. And they ended that way because, brutal in war, but magnanimous in victory, America rebuilt their broken societies.
Fraser… Do you ever read your older posts? The one just above mine, where you say:
I don’t think you quite “get” that “Hamas” is basically 90% or more of the Gazan population, at this point. In order to get to what you’re saying in your most recent post, that means that you’d basically have to kill at least two hundred thousand Gazans in order to achieve something like the WWII solutions in Germany and Japan. Assuming, of course, that the Gazans were as easy to wean off of Hamas as the Germans were to be off of Nazism, which I don’t think they are. Nazism wasn’t a religious faith, although it did ape the trappings thereof.
In other words, you can’t square the circle of mercy, here. In order to achieve lasting results, you almost have to destroy Gaza and the population thereof. Just skimming off the top of Hamas? Ain’t going to work; Germany took three years of heavy bombing in their cities before the civilian population was willing to say “enough”, and for it to take. I can’t see the Israelis inflicting a Dresden or two on Hamas, either.
This is an intractable problem with no good solution, mostly thanks to the Hamasniks. They’ve basically made it impossible to make peace out of this situation absent killing all of them, and that’s the rub, for Israel.
Let’s say they crush Hamas militarily, and then try and do something to fix this problem in the civilian population. That’s going to mean throwing UNRWA and all the rest out of Gaza, shutting down all the propaganda and indoctrination centers, then re-educating the resistant population somehow. Both the German and Japanese had a reasonable amount of tractable people who could change with the times, but do you think there’s a similar set of people in Gaza who’d work with the Israelis?
Would you sign up to teach grade school in a Gaza school system, and try to wean the kids off the diet of hate they get at home? Can you imagine being the schmuck in that position? Because, that’s what this is going to take: Wholesale deprogramming of a population in the millions.
Good ‘effing luck, with that endeavor. I don’t see any of this working out, and if the Israelis have any good options? I’m not seeing them. Mercy is going to be misinterpreted by the Arabs, no matter what.
I’ve said this before: The real problem here is that the “conversation” between modern civilized Israel and atavistic 7th Century Islam in Gaza and the West Bank has been conducted in two totally different languages. The Israelis are couching their arguments in terms of limited “just” war that they learned in the West, where you beat someone, they admit they lost, and quit doing what you didn’t like while you rebuild them. The Arabs? You see how they conduct war, there on the seventh of October: That’s their mindset, demonstrated for the world. That’s how they think, and until the Israelis deliver that same sort of psychotic destructiveness unto Hamas, they’re not going to be convinced that they lost. To them, the idea that their opponent would behave humanely and then reconstruct their destroyed property? That’s not “magnanimous victory”, that’s the “TRIBUTE” properly owed to the real victor by the defeated Israelis. Every time the Israelis do this shit, they’re just confusing the hell out of the Arabs, because on the one hand, they got their asses handed to them on the battlefield, and on the other… Here are the idiot Jews offering them tribute in the form of reconstruction and other “gifts”. It simply does not compute in the Arab mind.
I venture to predict that the current situation is not going to resolve a damn thing, because of these factors. You saw Arab war there on the seventh; you’re seeing ineffectual Israeli “civilized war” today. The two might as well have been taking place on two different planets, because like any good masochist, the Arab mindset thrives off of what the Israelis are doing, because it plays into their persecution complex and psychodrama. It ain’t going to change them or their behavior.
In animal behavior, the solution to something intractable like this would be the “extinction strategy”, wherein you either put the animal down or you remove the stimulus triggering the behavior.
Fraser Orr:
No doubt. But this all turned personal for me, and so I’m still in the asphalt-parking-lot stage. I think that trying to differentiate between Hamas and Gazans would be impossible. My Inner Rationalist is now on sabbatical for some indeterminate period. All enquiries should be forwarded to SMOD until further notice.
In my humble opinion, teasing out a difference would prove impossible. Hamas came out of that cultural matrix; it is an expression of it, and making the claim that it’s some separate thing is both ludicrous and a waste of time.
Which isn’t to say that every Gazan Arab is culpable, either. Not as of yet, anyway… What is about to happen may change that, hardening attitudes and enshrining martyrdom.
I really have no idea how the hell you go about talking an entire society from down off the tower, when they’ve set their minds on killing their neighbors. You’ve damn near got to pull a Paraguay on them, and eliminate every last vestige of “I wanna kill me some X…” by eliminating the people who think that way. Paraguay has pretty much left off from trying to conquer South America since those times, I would point out…
I don’t think anyone is going to like what’s about to happen, and what will inevitably follow. That said, you can’t make the claim that the Hamasniks and the rest of the Gazan Arabs haven’t asked for it, time and time again. “From the river to the sea…” Well, guess what? Y’all are about to find out what trying to make that happen means, when your victims aren’t all helpless.
Honestly? Having watched a surfeit of those October 7th videos, I’m of the opinion that the Israelis are fully justified in doing anything they damn well please in Gaza, if only so as to deliver the lesson “Don’t kill Jews…”
@bobby b
No doubt. But this all turned personal for me, and so I’m still in the asphalt-parking-lot stage.
I 100% agree. There was a discussion here about whether Israel should put out more of the footage. Me? I think they should. The horrors of what happen need to be out there. But if they did, I could not watch it. I have heard the stories, and they are horrendous, the worst evil any human beings have ever done. And need I say, there are hundreds of hostages stuck in those tunnels. What is happening to them? Here is something to keep you up at night, or perhaps something that wants to make you grab your rifle and hop an El Al flight — many of those hostages are women and young girls. Can you imagine what is happening to them?
Nonetheless, despite all our justified paroxysms of rage (to steal your very apt phrase), what Israel is doing is going in with guns and bombs, and deadly actions. And so they must put that rage aside and act in a cold, calculating, brutal, relentless pursuit of Hamas. There is no space for emotions when you are holding an automatic rifle. So I share your rage, and hope that you find a platform to vent it, because keeping it inside is tormenting me for sure. But when you, or I or they act, or plan a course of action we need to put that aside.
@kirk
Honestly? Having watched a surfeit of those October 7th videos, I’m of the opinion that the Israelis are fully justified in doing anything they damn well please in Gaza, if only so as to deliver the lesson “Don’t kill Jews…”
I could not disagree more. Israel seems to have calibrated their actions extremely well in my view. I’m glad they didn’t follow your advice here. To become what you hate is the worst outcome, not so much because of what you do, but what you become.
@Fraser Orr,
What is the worst thing you can do, in a situation like this? “Calibrate” such that you don’t permanently deal with the situation and end it.
This has been the fundamental error of Israel since day one, I believe. If every terrorist strike on Israel earned the response that such things deserved, there wouldn’t be any more terrorist strikes, if only because all the terrorist-prone population was dead, dead, dead.
Proportion and restraint in war is utter folly. It is particularly egregious folly when dealing with enemies like Hamas and its supporters in Gaza. You may think you’re being “civilized” in dealing with them “proportionately”, but in the long run, if you don’t permanently dissuade them? What the hell have you gained, for them or yourself?
Incrementalism is the language of diplomats and professors; it is not a language that the Gazan Arabs understand. We call it restraint, they see weakness and vacillation, meaning that if they just keep on fighting, a little longer, commit some more horrendous and heinous acts of terrorism, then they might win.
All you’re doing with “restraint” is teaching them how to be more effective terrorists and encouraging them.
If the Israelis had done as H.L. Mencken advised, putting the blade between their teeth and flying the black flag from the beginning, odds are good that there wouldn’t be a Hamas. If only because there wasn’t a Gazan Arab population to draw it from…
I don’t think you civilized and refined types actually “get” this crap. At all. This isn’t sport; this is survival. You kill or get killed, that simple. And, when you encounter someone who insists that they are going to keep trying to kill you, the only real response you can make is to take them at their word and kill them first. Anything else is folly, and a waste of human life.
Every Israeli soldier that has gone to their death before this, trying to keep a lid on it all? They were betrayed by their own leadership and their own instincts to be “civilized”, because all that earned them was a forever war that they can’t win without going all the way.
It took killing ten percent, minimum, of all Germans before the German people decided to put away the toys of war after 1945. The sheer existential horror of the defeat they’d earned helped cement the fact in their minds that taking over the world was a non-starter. Unlike WWI, we didn’t get WWIII in twenty years, either…
So, given the obviously higher levels of indoctrination and support for Hamas that the Gazan Arabs have, I’d guess that the actual figure of people you would need to kill in order to break their conditioning might well be a lot higher than ten percent. No idea as to what the actual number might be, either, but I’d start at ten, and if they get stupid again, go back and up the percentage again.
Ballpark figure? I’d guess that breaking the Gazan Arab population of their Jew-killing habit might actually cost them anywhere from thirty to ninety percent of the population. They do seem to love them some Jew-killing, and if I were a Jew, at this point?
I do believe I’d be starting somewhere in the middle of that range, just to be sure.
I would hope to be wrong, but I believe that a million dead Gazan Arabs might make the rest of them rethink this whole “Kill the Jew” idea. Anything short of that? I’d about guarantee that war is going to continue on into the future until people get tired of their BS and finally decide to just genocide the lot of them.
This problem has been festering since before I was born. All this sanctimonious “restraint” has earned anyone is more and more of the same. Read the writing on the wall, and recognize that unless you eliminate the problem, you’re just going to see more and more October 7th events.
It’s ugly, and I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is. They’ve tried “restraint” for decades now, and observe where we are: The Gazan Arabs and their ilk still won’t live peacefully with the Jews of Israel. They never will, until they learn the lesson, and being as they’re obviously very slow learners, well… Yeah. Not my doing, not my fight, but that’s the way it is from where I sit.
@Kirk
What is the worst thing you can do, in a situation like this? “Calibrate” such that you don’t permanently deal with the situation and end it.
No doubt, but I said nothing to suggesting that they should do that. On the contrary, your approach is guaranteed to make sure this ugly situation goes on and on forever. Israel needs to win the war, but they also need to win the peace.
When this war started, after Israel relied on a high tech fence instead of a proper buffer zone, I was reminded of what George Patton said, “Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man,” but now that Hamas is trapped in its own tunnels, with the IDF methodically discovering and destroying tunnel exits, I think the sandal is on the other foot. It’s possible that the most important weapon the IDF is using in Gaza is the armored Caterpillar D9. The IDF seems to be using combined arms well, including K9 and engineering units.
It has been the technique of the tyrants forever — use their own people as hostages, and when many die, their deaths inspire others to fight on [and there is more food left for the fighters]. We saw the Hitlerites confine their own civilians to cities under aerial bombardment. The Japanese did the same in 1945, when Americans dropped leaflets on cities to warn people to get out before total destruction — but those who tried were stopped by army patrols and sent back into the cities.
I was thinking about this some more and I watched this interview of an American nurse from I believe Medecins sans Frontieres. She describes her escape from Gaza into Egypt and the conditions in the safe zone in Gaza. Of course this situation is entirely the fault of Hamas, and the IDF needs to continue their remorseless attack on Hamas. But you need to think about those people watching their children die horribly of curable sickness — for want of a bandage or clean water, and ask — how can a situation be brought about where they and Israel can live at peace? How long does a parent remember watching their child die in horrible pain, and how long before their wrath is satiated? I think it was Elon Musk who suggested that, in all the chaos of war, Israel might consider random acts of kindness toward the Palestinian civilians, while remaining implacable against Hamas. Perhaps air dropping some basic medical supplies. I know that Hamas will eventually steal them, but perhaps some will get to the children with open wounds and the people who receive them will realize that there is some kindness in Israel. Perhaps even wonder why Israel is given them bandages, whereas Hamas is using their babies for shields. I wonder if, in all the chaos, there is a chance to sow seeds of peace too.
It is easy to throw all the Palestinians into the category of “terrorist”, but the situation is much more complicated than that. The Palestinians are victims of Hamas just as those 1400 Israelis were. Israel needs to utterly win the war for sure, but winning the peace is much more complicated and is in many ways the more important task.
And what I think is a small light at the end of the tunnel is the fact that the other Arab nations might have blustered, but they haven’t done anything. So the problem is largely contained to one small place. This could easily have spun out of control, and, should we follow Kirk’s “kill -em all” approach this detente will not last.
Fraser Orr said:
Fraser, you’re suggesting the Israelis continue to do the same things they’ve been doing for the last seventy damn years.
Has that worked?
Get this through your head: Hamas is what the Gazan Arabs want, what the majority desires. It is an expression of the people in Gaza, not something imposed on them from outside or by some minority. They’re monsters, individually and collectively. Get that through your head: This is who they are.
Have you seen one single dissenting voice since the beginning of all this? Did any Gazan lift a finger to rescue a single Israeli during any of the Intifada killings? Did they criticize any of their fellows that performed those atrocities? Do they not celebrate the killings, the rapes, the slaughter?
What the hell do you think is possible, in terms of peace, with these people? What miracle of enlightenment do you suppose will take place, once the Israelis do whatever it is the Gazans want?
News flash, for you: What you saw on the seventh of October is what the Gazan Arabs want, collectively, for all Israelis and all Jews, everywhere. That’s what they want, and that is all they will accept. They don’t want a peaceful coexistence; they want the peace of the grave.
You make it sound as though I’m some sort of bloodthirsty loon, but the sad reality is that your path is the path of continued slaughter, continued atrocity. Mine gives the Gazan Arabs the wake-up call they need to have, in order to reform their society. They’re not going to reform themselves short of that existential defeat, just like the Nazis and the other totalitarian societies of the 20th Century didn’t.
You want to be humane? Sure; being humane means more slaughter in the end. Does that make you morally superior, or morally bankrupt?
I’d say “bankrupt”. You want peace? You won’t pay the price for it? Then you don’t deserve it, and won’t get it.
The Gazan Arabs have a societal mental illness. Nothing else explains the things they do, tearing apart the bodies of some poor IDF soldier that blundered into their areas unarmed back during the Intifada. Nothing else explains the sheer exuberant joy with which they went on a killing spree during the seventh, while proudly broadcasting what they were doing on the social media accounts of their victims. How sick do you have to be, in order to do that? And, those weren’t just the trained killers of Hamas, either… There’s documentation that some of the worst atrocities were performed by average Gazans who just tagged along for the ride.
You really think you can “calibrate” with that level of outright societal evil? You think it will respond to rational negotiation?
The Israelis have been ohsocivilized and proper with all this crap since the beginning. You see where it has gotten them? Is life better for the Gazan Arabs or the Israelis?
Nope. Not a bit of it.
So, what do you think is going to work, here? More of the same? More failure? More “civilized conduct” by the victims?
This is a mental block, the same one that saw the Jews cooperatively lining up for “authority” and getting on the trains during the Holocaust. Surely, the Nazis couldn’t be that uncivilized, that barbaric… Surely, their promises of exile must be true, they can’t possibly be killing all of us…
That wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now. The Gazan Arabs mean everything they say through Hamas. Everything. There’s no debate, no dissension in Gazan society because there isn’t any such thing. They all want the Jews dead and Israel erased.
Based on their conduct and behavior, I know whose side I’m on, regardless. And, it ain’t the Gazan Arabs, here… You tolerate this, accept it? You’re going to be the next victim after they get done with the Jews. You either destroy the people doing this, or they will destroy you.
What other civilization on this planet has these values, these mores? Who else advocates for this crap, and then acts to make it real? Do you remember that Kuwaiti woman, a few years back, who was advocating for infidel sex slaves, so that her sons wouldn’t soil nice Moslem girls with their uncontrollable lusts? That’s Islam.
And, those were your women she was talking about making sex slaves of. Did you see or hear any protests at that, by other “good” Muslims?
Take these people at their word. They mean what they say, just as the totalitarians of the 20th Century did.
Your worldview is flawed and naive beyond belief. These people do not think the way you do; they are totally alien to your experience and belief systems. Their values are not yours, their mores are not yours. Cease projecting your fantasies onto them, and examine what they’ve actually done with all the “restraint” and “mercy” showered upon them by people sharing your mindset.
None of it has worked, in the last seventy years. It will continue to “not work” on into the infinite future, so long as the “nice people” ignore reality.
I’m not the one making this necessary, just the person who is pointing out the sad facts. 10% of the population was what it took to convince Nazi Germany to cease killing Jews and trying to conquer the world. That would be a minimum value for this endeavor, I fear.
And, no matter what? The Israelis aren’t going to ever earn “peace” for being “restrained in war, magnanimous in victory”. The Arab track record shows that, conclusively. It’s far past time to try something else, the same things that have historically worked in such situations. Ugly but true fact, I fear.
SSSSSiiiiiiggggggghhhhhhh
Fraser Orr:
Sure. 1946 in Germany and Japan.
————————————–
Oy vey. We had a journalist in the Israeli papers who floated this same nonsense.
Germany was the cradle of the Protestant Reformation, with a long, strong connection to Western Humanism and democracy.
Japan was an isolated culture without an Islamic “ummah” of millions. Much easier to turn such a small craft.
There is no basis for this kind of dramatic social change anywhere in the Muslim world – not until a Reformation transforms the entire Ummah, the whole middle east.
It is not “harsh” to dismiss concern for Palestinian non-combatants. It’s simply realistic – because terms like “civilian” or “non-combatant” don’t mean what they mean in our culture.
And it is folly – the folly of Oslo, the folly that got us into this – folly to continue to project our Western values on barbarians.
“Enlightened self interest” that is obvious to us (Gaza as a beachfront resort, etc.) is not even on the map in this other culture.
The overwhelming majority of Palis – and Egyptians, and Syrians, and Jordanians – agree with Hamas.
They will enter into treaties to avoid pain, or for their own short-term interests.
But their goal is to convert the world to Islam. And Israel’s presence in Dar al Islam will never be accepted – barring a Reformation, which will have to come from within Islam.
Hamas is not “radical Islam” – it is Islam.
The Palis who worked in the kibbutzim, and were treated in Israeli hospitals – cooperated fully with Hamas. The terrorists had detailed maps of the towns, down to individual houses and the likelihood of armed resistance in each one…. maps created by the Palis who came to work there.
These same people – knowing the lay of the land – joined in the wave of looting and rape that followed the initial attacks.
These were the people the dreamers of Oslo thought would set aside religious doctrine for prosperity.
They didn’t.
They are different from us.
Any dealing with Islam is “Us or Them” – by their doctrine, not our faults: NOTHING Westerners do can change that, until Islam changes.
We have to start choosing Us and stop trying to appease Them out of misplaced, unreciprocated liberalism.
We have to start choosing Us and stop trying to buy Them off out of mistaken ideas that they also want peace and prosperity.
Stop worrying about “innocent civilians” that do not exist, not in the way you think.
So when you write:
It is easy to throw all the Palestinians into the category of “terrorist”, but the situation is much more complicated than that.
—————————–
Only in the fevered – if well-intentioned – brains of some Western intellectuals….
Hamas has actually made this the opposite of complicated – very , very simple:
All you have to do is take another culture at its word and deed.
And understand the folly of extending the privileges of Western citizenship to barbarians who neither believe nor reciprocate those values – and therefore do not deserve its considerations.
To provide aid that will indeed be stolen Hamas means you are not implacably against Hamas, you are just kinda sorta against Hamas provided it doesn’t get too icky. That just isn’t how a total war is fought, and that is what this is.
It requires a falcon-like focus on military objectives & military targets, and nothing can be done that might aid your enemy. It is illegal to target civilians as an objective in and of itself (i.e. what Hamas did to 1,500 people explicitly on Oct 7th). However civilians proximate to a legitimate military target are an entirely different kettle of fish: they are to put it coldly collateral damage. If Hamas cares about them, all they have to do is surrender.
Israel is fighting the only war it can possibly fight: one to utterly exterminate Hamas, or as close to that as they possibly can get. Everything else is mere static.
PdH, I have crossed swords with you on this concept of “total war” before in the context of Ukraine. Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems that it justifies absolutely any atrocity in your mind. This is the very idea — my cause justifies a total abandonment of any moral framework — that allows Hamas to jusfify the horrors they committed. That is precisely the rational of the nutjobs marching on the Cenotaph today.
In all wars conducted by civilized people there are absolutely some limits that we self impose and expect of our opponents: avoiding killing civilians, providing protection for POWs, not raping and murdering and stealing. And we have trials after the war to punish those who use wars to exceed these bounds of basic decency. And this just as true if your enemies do not do this.
This may be war, but not feeling compassion, not trying to help children who have had their skin burned off, or in the case of Ukraine, arresting political opponents or abandoning free speech, is certainly outside of the bounds of decency. Even if it does increase the risk to our military, we do it. It would, for example, have saved a lot of American lives if Fallujah had been turned into a parking lot before our troops entered. However, we chose to place our soldiers at higher risk in exchange for the decency of protecting the innocent lives of the people who lived there.
So you can suggest that I am not implacably against Hamas, something that is not at all true — I want to see them all dead, and I’d be happy to do it myself if I had the opportunity. But that does not mean I have no sympathy for their most proximate victims — the people of Palestine.
Israel is fighting the only war it can possibly fight: one to utterly exterminate Hamas, or as close to that as they possibly can get. Everything else is mere static.
This is correct in the first part, but not the second. Any war has to be fought with the ultimate objective in mind — and peace with the Palestinians is the ultimate objective. How the war is conducted absolutely will affect the options post-bellum. I think that the Israelis have it pretty much right for now, but there will be an after, and what the after looks like will be formed in the during. This is most certainly not static.
But I doubt we will agree on any of this.
@Ben David
There is no basis for this kind of dramatic social change anywhere in the Muslim world – not until a Reformation transforms the entire Ummah, the whole middle east.
That isn’t true at all. There are many very peaceful Arab countries. For example, recently read an article by a Christian guy who runs foreign Christian missionaries and he said that the UAE had a far higher toleration for Christianity than Britain has. One of the most important things to observe post October 7th is, irrespective of all their usual bluster, the Arab states don’t seem to be planning to do anything except talk. Lebanon perhaps being the exception.
And it is folly – the folly of Oslo, the folly that got us into this – folly to continue to project our Western values on barbarians.
I wouldn’t suggest doing that. The goal is not to make them like us, it is to live at peace with them. Israel is successfully living at peace with all the surrounding Islamic countries, and so it is certainly possible. Gazans live in brutal poverty, and indoctrinated ignorance, but that doesn’t have to be so. The world is full of Muslims why practice a “Church of England” style Islam, and concern themselves with their families and their communities rather than murdering others. Jihad definitely means different things to different muslims. So what is it about Palestine that makes them especially radicalized, and what can be done to fix it?
While Israel continues to conduct this war, something they should do coldly, grimly, brutally and relentlessly, they must also plan for peace. And thinking about these very things is the only option beyond continuing with situation ante — a boiling cauldron waiting to explode.
Hamas is not “radical Islam” – it is Islam.
Says who? Not the guy who runs the grocery store I sometimes visit. Not the guys who build a software start up with my brother. Not a friend of mine who works within the Islamic money system to build hotels all over the world. Not the kid who was one of my children’s best friends at school. Every religion has different factions, and different interpretations of their (insane) holy books. So your statement is plainly not true. Irrespective of what people might say with their mouths their actions reveal that the vast majority of the world’s billion muslims do not want to strap a bomb to their kids and blow up a pizza joint.
The Palis who worked in the kibbutzim, and were treated in Israeli hospitals – cooperated fully with Hamas. The terrorists had detailed maps of the towns, down to individual houses and the likelihood of armed resistance in each one…. maps created by the Palis who came to work there.
That is like saying gun owners planned the latest school shooting. Certainly some gun owners did, but you can’t paint them all with the same brush. However, let me add that those who did — who exploited the kindness and generosity of these people — it is hard to describe the depth of depravity of these people’s souls.
I’m guessing from how you write that you live in Israel, so all I’d say is that, much as the IDF’s response is necessary, much as a military governorship of Gaza will no doubt be needed, Israel needs to think carefully about two things — how did their defenses allow this to happen, and what does post-bellum look like — how can you live in peace with the Palestinians. They aren’t going anywhere, so you’ll have to work something out. Unless groundhog day is what you see in your future.
And if you are living in Israel, let me also say: please do not allow the nut job protests in the US make you doubt that the vast majority of Americans are with Israel, and they, and certainly me, are horrified by what happened, offer you our deepest sympathies for what happened, and our support as you try to remedy it.
I sadly have to agree with Ben David.
I don’t “want” this for the Gazan Arabs. I’m just doing the rational analysis that tells me the facts of the situation, and acknowledging them.
I don’t have the cultural blinders on that tell me what is good or bad, and gives me the warm fuzzies when I say that we ought to treat the Gazan Arabs as we would want to be treated. That’s been tried; objective acknowledgment should tell you that there is nothing short of self-immolation on the part of Israel that will satisfy them.
You can either deal with these unfortunate facts as they are, or you can continue to deny them and behave as though you are dealing with a rational party. Me? I believe someone when they tell me they’re going to kill me, and I react accordingly.
Whistling past the graveyard they want to put you into isn’t a rational act.
And, get this much straight: I’m not “advocating for genocide”. I’m pointing out the unpleasant realities of things, which is that restraint and vague desires for reform and “peace” aren’t going to materialize anything in this situation. It’s like trying to reform a rabid dog that’s running loose in a playground; sure, that’s someone’s beloved pet, probably, but… Which is the proper course of action? Wanting to save the dog and find a “cure” somewhere off in the halcyon distance of the ever-receding future, or dealing with things as they actually are, now?
The unfortunate actuality of it all is that the Gazan Arabs have voluntarily and with malice aforethought turned themselves into rabid dogs. Barring some magical solution? I don’t see fixing that issue; they are too integrated in with the insanity and are not likely to give it up, barring some truly outrageous amount of shock treatment. The track record for this sort of thing is pretty clear, and it sets the threshold for it actually working somewhere at a base value of ten percent of the population. With the depth of demonstrated depravity and mindless adherence to the doctrine espoused? I fear it might actually be a hell of a lot higher.
I’m open to ideas that would actually work, however. Mass lobotomies, perhaps? Is that any more “humane”, or do we value the lives of the deranged killer more than the innocent victim?
I have tried to deal with some of the matters this thread discusses on another thread (on the matter of a certain lady becoming a Christian) to repeat what I have said, on this thread, would bore people.
“Bashing people over the head” by saying the same thing over and over again, can be counter productive, I have made that mistake before.
Fraser Orr said:
This is a clear case of delusional thinking, Fraser. How do you “make peace” with someone who doesn’t want peace with you? This isn’t a conflict over which particular nobleman runs some duchy in Europe, which is where all these “rules of restraint in war” came out of, this is an existential war of survival between a civilized country and a de facto self-made nation of criminal killers. The Gazans chose this path; the idea that they are going to reform absent utter defeat is delusional.
I get that you like being well thought-of, that you pride yourself in being a “civilized man”, but the sad fact is, you’re not at all equipped to survive in these conditions. You think “Oh, I’ll just talk them around, and it will all work out…”
The real situation is that while you’re “talking them around”, they’re going to slit your damn throat the moment they can do so. This is exactly what the Gazan and West Bank Arabs have been doing since the beginning of this problem, and they’ve pretty obviously ignored all the nicey-nice talky noises in favor of throat-slitting.
I don’t know what the hell it takes to get through to people that think the way you do. At some fundamental level, you just don’t process “threat” realistically, possibly because you’ve never had the signal experience of someone trying to kill you “just because” they feel like it. Which explains why there are so many confused victims out there, I suppose.
You can’t reason with insanity. Insanity is not equipped for it; when you see it demonstrated the way it was on October 7, there’s only one thing you can do, and that is eliminate the insane.
I don’t think you “get” any of this; you apparently cannot comprehend that the things that happened on the 7th represent what the Gazan Arabs believe in and support; that the majority wants that sort of thing for all of Israel. The implications of those facts apparently slide off the surface of your mind like water off of a duck’s back, and you default to “humanity, restraint, and peace”, unwilling to comprehend the true nature of that which the Israelis are facing.
Swear to God, to my mind? You’re like one of those idjit types that wants a picture of their kid riding on the buffalo at Yellowstone, or to pet the bears. You don’t grasp that these are wild animals, dangerous ones, that aren’t going to behave as you think “proper”.
Your ideas have a seventy-odd year record of failure. The Gazan Arab mind produced Hamas; they are not going to “make peace” with Israel any more than that sleeping buffalo is going to let you put your kid on top of it for a photo shoot…
Depends what you mean by ‘atrocity’. That usually means an illegal act, a war crime. I am against war crimes.
Is bombing a hospital full of civilians an atrocity? Absent any mitigating context, yes, it is illegal. Is bombing the same hospital with an enemy HQ in the basement an atrocity? Perhaps you would say yes, but I hope you realise what perverse incentives that provides. As a matter of legality, if an enemy HQ is in the basement, that hospital has indeed become a legitimate legal military target.
The western allies banned fascist pro-German, Italian & Japanese parties during WW2. Likewise, given the massive decades long Russian subversion efforts inside Ukraine, it would be (almost literally) insane during an all out war to just act as if politics as usual is possible in such a situation. For example elements of the Russian orthodox church, the Moscow Patriarchate, is an adjunct of the Russian state. This is not an matter of “freedom of religion” as you can still be an Orthodox Christian in Ukraine, just not one who is part of an institution controlled by the Russian government.
I believe you. But to be implacable means not allowing your enemy a way to run away and fight another day. It means not providing aid to presumed innocents that the enemy will then steal and use to get their soldiers back in the fight. I too am ‘sympathetic’ but I am also realistic. I wish war wasn’t like this, I really do, but it is.
You can try peace as a starting point, but if that isn’t an option, and your enemy doesn’t play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules of war, then it’s time to start making pyramids out of skulls. If nothing else, it shows the your own resolve to the next guy who might want to start something with you.
You can frame a war as a Skinner Box, a mechanism by which you modify behavior. It’s a useful mental construct, because it enables you to work out what is necessary in that war.
In the case of Gazan Arab/Hamas vs. Israel, the Israeli side is trying to modify the unacceptable behavior of the Gazan Arab. If the behavior is not modified, and continues, then you try another stimulus/reward option until you find one that does.
So far, the Israelis have tried just about everything except the self-immolation that the Gazans apparently desire for Israel, and the utter destruction of Gaza and Hamas as opposition. We can observe from October 7th that half-measures and “restraint” garnered nothing in the way of effective behavioral modification, so we are now left with escalating the stimulus. Rewarding the Gazans with de facto independence and the means to improve their lives on their own has not worked. They destroyed the greenhouse complexes left behind by Israel for their economic benefit, and ripped up the irrigation pipes to make missiles from. This would indicate that further such rewards will likely fall on similarly barren soil.
Which leaves increasing the pain until the subject modifies their behavior. Or, alternatively, extinction. When discussing animal training, extinction as a method of behavioral modification can be accomplished several ways, one of which is the elimination of the trigger for the behavior. If your dog misbehaves whenever you get out a particular toy for them, then you get rid of the toy. No more of the undesirable behavior, that way. Another means? Shoot the dog.
Or, I suppose, you could just remove the dog from your home. Any of those techniques work, but it depends entirely on what you want and what you can actually accomplish.
Do note that when you frame WWII as a Skinner Box within which Nazi behavior was modified, a bunch of things become crystalline-clear about what it actually took to accomplish that result… Bombing Dresden flat, for example? Along with most other major German cities… Driving ethnic Germans out of the territories Hitler laid claim to in Eastern Europe? Seen any German attempts to regain those territories, of late?
The goal is to stop the behavior. You have to carefully determine what works, and what is necessary to do that. You want to stop Hamas from committing atrocity and terrorism? You have to do some very unpleasant things to them and their supporters, because nothing else has worked.
Whose fault is that? The people trying to modify the behavior, or the subject of that attempt? Is it your fault when your child misbehaves in public, or theirs?
@Perry de Havilland (Wiltshire)
Likewise, given the massive decades long Russian subversion efforts inside Ukraine, it would be (almost literally) insane during an all out war to just act as if politics as usual is possible in such a situation.
I am really baffled by your position on this. I have read your articles and comments for years, and have always found you a fierce defender of free speech, even the worst kind, in the worst situation. Let me ask this — if I am a Ukrainian and I don’t agree with the way the government is conducting the war, what options do I have to express my disagreement? What options do I have to campaign to change it? Or am I simply to shut up, pick up a rifle and blindly go where ever the government sends me? This is not something I would do under any circumstances regardless of the cause. Of course I’d like to walk away, but I’m a conscript, so I’ll get shot should I try.
I wish war wasn’t like this, I really do, but it is.
I’m sure you are familiar with the story of the great escape during world war two, and that after some 80 prisoners escaped most were rounded up at great cost to the Germans, who then shot fifty of them in cold blood. The prisoners were talking resources including men from the war in the name of decency, and the Germans measured that that was not a trade worth continuing. Some of them were hung for it after the war. If they have to give some resources to dying innocents, even if they are stolen to some degree by the enemy troops it seems to me to be quite analogous. Would you also blockage UN humanitarian aid, or Doctors without borders from the “safe” zone too? Presumably a terrorist could sneak down there, get treated and then head back to battle.
But there is a deeper issue here, which is, what happens after the war? This is a very difficult situation and somehow this battle has to be fought in such a way that the people who are left (having killed nearly all those who were responsible at every level for the original atorcity) can move toward a peaceful settlement. It seems a small price to pay to buy even the smallest good will.
And it is also worth saying that this war is completely different than the Ukraine war. In Ukraine is is literally an existential crisis. Under those circumstances I think the balance between brutality and compassion swings to the left. But Israel is currently under no threat of extinction. Violence and death for sure, but they have more control of the battlespace and different ultimate goals, and eventual peace has to be the goal. In fact the only existential crisis they are likely to face is if they follow Kirk’s “massacre the lot of them” strategy, which will force the rest of the Arab world to reply — and they will reply in a fashion far better than their previous clown show of the six days’ war. The Arab world seems to be trying very hard to stay out of it; so it would be wise for Israel not to force their hand.
The point that you’re willfully ignoring Fraser, and the one I’m making to all of you, is that you don’t save lives in the long run by being all “civilized” about these things.
This is exactly akin to the fuzzy well-meaning thinking that says you shouldn’t treat murder as a capital crime, and then actually execute the damn murderer.
You think you’re being all humane, and virtue-signaling how much you value human life… But the actual reality, here? You’re telling the world that the victim’s lives were utterly meaningless and unimportant, in the grand scheme of things. What is more important, in your moral calculus? Looking good to all your fellow do-good types. Your moral preening does nothing for the victims, and likely ensures that there will be even more victims when the object of your “mercy” gets released to kill and kill again.
The situation with Hamas and the Gazan Arabs is exactly the same. You have prioritized their lives over that of their victims, and what you’re really saying is that the barbarous Gazan Arab has more of a right to exist than the people they’ve so diligently killed in the name of their religion over the years.
You just don’t grasp this fact, apparently. You keep accusing me of wanting to slaughter them all, but the truth is, I’m just putting the ugly fact in your face that your moral preening ain’t going to do the job, and is, in fact, mere posturing. You don’t really want to stop the killing; if you did, you’d be willing to grasp the nettle and acknowledge reality. And, the sad fact is, that a realistic and honest appraisal of the last seventy years of internecine Arab-Israeli strife has done nothing to change Arab behavior, in any way whatsoever.
Raw fact? Something is going to have to be done, and mere posturing and wishing for “positive outcomes” ain’t going to cut it. If the Israelis go for the “nuanced” approach? That’s not going to fix the problem; all that will happen is that there will be less killing for a space, and then it will start up again.
People that think as you do are not living in the real world, the one where actual human beings interact. You think that because you’ve postulated this magnificent cloud-castle where the Gazan Arabs want peace and prosperity, that they’re going to conform to your wishes. That ain’t happening. They want Israel erased, and every Jew in it dead, whereupon they can get started killing every Jew everywhere else in the world. Nothing you can do or say is going to change that, nothing the Israelis can offer up as compromise is going to dissuade them.
This being the fact, your desire for peace is actually monstrous, because instead of ripping the band-aid off and getting this over with, you’re wanting things that will never, ever manifest. You’re also enabling more and more killing of innocents by the Gazan Arabs.
The moral depravity of your position is, frankly, astounding. You apparently demand that a civilized nation bare its throat for the blade, and never mind that we already know the blade will come.
You think you’re on the side of civilization and “righteous” behavior, but the sad fact is that you’re an enabler for these barbarians. They’ll never make peace until it’s been made clear that they were defeated, and maybe not even then. From the historical record, Hamas and the Gazan Arabs are not going to give up killing Jews. Ever.
And, that’s the side you’ve chosen: That of the barbarian, thinking yourself some virtuous soul, magnanimously demanding that the Israelis make false peace with people whose primary purpose in life is to kill Jews.
You think yourself morally superior? I think you’re monstrous. You want the killing to go on and on. I want it stopped, and I’m realistic about what it’s going to take to do it. And, to be honest? I’m completely OK with erasing Hamas and the rest of Gaza, if that’s what it takes. They’ve made a choice, and demonstrated that slaughtering Jews is more important than anything else to them. I say that the Israelis should take them at their word, and do unto the Gazans before they can do any more to the Israelis. War is an ugly thing, and I don’t advocate starting them. But, once you have one on your hands? You end it permanently, or the lives you’ve expended are wasted. This waste doesn’t appear to bother you, possibly because you believe you’ll never have war visited upon your doorstep. You may feel differently, were your home being rocketed daily, and your children murdered in their beds.
Which fact would make you both a hypocrite and a monster.
Fraser Orr: It is almost surreal to read this interleaving of my post and your response:
Hamas is not “radical Islam” – it is Islam.
Says who? Not the guy who runs the grocery store I sometimes visit. Not the guys who build a software start up with my brother. Not a friend of mine who works within the Islamic money system to build hotels all over the world. Not the kid who was one of my children’s best friends at school. Every religion has different factions, and different interpretations of their (insane) holy books. So your statement is plainly not true. Irrespective of what people might say with their mouths their actions reveal that the vast majority of the world’s billion muslims do not want to strap a bomb to their kids and blow up a pizza joint.
The Palis who worked in the kibbutzim, and were treated in Israeli hospitals – cooperated fully with Hamas. The terrorists had detailed maps of the towns, down to individual houses and the likelihood of armed resistance in each one…. maps created by the Palis who came to work there.
That is like saying gun owners planned the latest school shooting.
—————————-
No – it’s saying that even battle-toughened Israelis willfully deceived themselves about the “good” Muslim storekeepers.
Get it?
… then you assure me that the “nut-job protests” are nothing to worry about… but the nut-job protesters include members of Congress. Politicians would not be saying these things if they thought it would lose them the Muslim-storekeeper vote…. you can browse this blog for parallel examples from the UK and Europe.
Get it?
So when you (repeatedly) write:
peace with the Palestinians is the ultimate objective
——————————-
That is no longer the goal of most Israelis… and more and more Europeans (and residents of certain areas of the US) understand that they will have to make a similar reckoning with their Muslim populations.
The vast majority of Israelis (and many other Westerners) now understand that peaceful coexistence is not, was never, possible. They vary only in their ability to bring those thoughts up into consciousness, and explicitly state them.
When Israel unilaterally pulled its settlers out of Gaza, the slogan even back then was “we are here, and they are there” – a last, despairing gasp after Oslo failed to produce a New Middle East. Events have overtaken and trashed any trace of wishful thinking.
The post-bellum most Israelis hope for is Gaza recaptured, cleared of its implacably hostile population (as allowed by international law) and repopulated by Jews.
It’s a whole other post, but: historically this is the looong Seventh Day of the Six-Day War – which was the first defensive action against attacks from these areas.
And BTW you write:
This may be war, but not feeling compassion, not trying to help children who have had their skin burned off
————————
Well let’s not keep dredging up Dresden and London… and Atlanta…
Fraser doesn’t get the “Arab World” at all. My Father is Egyptian, my mum Cypriot-British. Dad’s view sums up as “I wish the Israelis would just get it over with and annihilate everything in Gaza once and for all. Then bulldoze it all into the sea, so the Middle East has one less problem to worry about and we can all focus on containing Iran and the Shiites.”
He sees the Arabs vs Jews thing as an infuriating distraction.
@Ben David
… then you assure me that the “nut-job protests” are nothing to worry about…
I did not. I said they are not representative. They keep ME up at night thinking about them.
When Israel unilaterally pulled its settlers out of Gaza, the slogan even back then was “we are here, and they are there” – a last, despairing gasp after Oslo failed to produce a New Middle East. Events have overtaken and trashed any trace of wishful thinking.
You have three choices — kill all the Gazans, move them all somewhere or find a way to live with them. The first simply isn’t justifiable, the second impossible (notably the queen of Jordan, in her rant about how terrible Israel was refused take any Gazans in her country), so door number 3 is your only option. If you try to kill them all it will not go well for you.
Well let’s not keep dredging up Dresden and London… and Atlanta…
And we aren’t to feel compassion for the innocent victims who were killed or badly injured in Dresden, London and Atlanta?
For someone who espouses the nihilist’s viewpoint that “nothing matters”, you sure have a line on sympathy for the killers.
Simple rules of life: Don’t throw shit at heavily armed strangers. Don’t stand next to people who do that, either.
The Gazan Arabs have made it abundantly clear, as did the Nazis surrounding Dresden, that they support everything that Hamas has done and is doing. They are manifestly not “innocent victims” in any of this, and your continual attempts to make them such clearly indicates where your sympathies lie. It’s not with the actual victims; you want to stop these creatures from receiving the just desserts they have earned, short-circuiting the behavioral modification process because you “feel” for them. Reality? None of your ilk has done a damn thing for the Gazan Arabs except to encourage them in their folly. Their evil folly.
What does that make you, except a monster? Do you enjoy the constant barrage of terror attacks? Do you get a warm feeling, every time you walk by a Sbarro, remembering the bomb going off? Did you enjoy viewing the proud videos they made for you, on the seventh? Do you get a warm frisson every time you think of some random Israeli girl being gang-raped to death? Is that exciting for you?
Seems so. You want more of this, and your “humane” ideas have created the situation before us, ratcheting the terror levels ever upward, and preventing the learning events that would have, perhaps, taught the Gazan Arabs to respect the lives of their neighbors.
I suspect that if your lot had been running the world when the Nazis were trying to take over, you’d have let them, because of all those poor, poor Germans that joined with the monsters of their nation to “get ahead”. Apparently, they deserve sympathy, not the millions they killed for economic gain. Which, in the end, was the real reason the Nazis originally went after the Jews in Germany: Convenient source of dosh to pay off everyone. WWII can be assessed as a gigantic pirate raid, just like Trajan in Dacia.
Show us on the doll where they hurt you, Kirk. I think they’ve turned you into an NPD rager. Healthy men don’t speak to others like that.
Hamas has said (1) that they intend to do these sort of attacks again; and (2) that they are content with the deaths of their fellow “Palestinians”.
And despite some rhetoric from the usual suspects to the contrary, Hamas isn’t imposing its evil will upon an innocent and resisting “Palestinian” population in Gaza; they are more popular in Gaza than Brandon himself is in the United States. According to Reuters, if an election was held today about 40% of “Palestinians” would vote for Hamas, and presumably some other number might not vote for them but don’t find them completely objectionable. That’s something like half the population who don’t have much of a problem with the people who make videos of themselves murdering babies.
That leaves Israel facing only three possible outcomes: (1) the destruction of Hamas and possibly also Gaza; (2) the destruction of Israel; or (3) a future of endless butchery and terrorism, and having to respond over and over to having their civilians slaughtered. The attitude of Hamas, their celebration of death both for Israel and for themselves, simply doesn’t leave any other outcomes on the table.
Hamas apologists arguing for Israel to show restraint and maintain the status quo are therefore arguing for option 3, or even worse, for option 2.
They should just be honest about it and say so.
Healthy men don’t beg for people to “think of the children” of murdering bastards, either. They don’t speak proudly of their nihilism, saying that nothing matters.
You’ve never met horror, I suspect. Never looked someone in the eyes as they die inside, told what happened to their son or daughter, or watched the lives they lived afterwards in the shadow of that horror.
As a human being, I don’t wish that on anyone. But, for the monstrous creatures that belittle and denigrate the actual original victims? I rather hope you do get to experience those things, first-hand. I hope you’re going to find yourself in the shoes of those Israeli parents, defenseless and unarmed in the face of evil, while your erstwhile neighbors pour gasoline into your shelter and light it.
Maybe then you’ll understand, hearing the screams of your children. “Nothing matters; it’s all chemicals just dancing in the starlight”
Yeah, well maybe it is. May your particular set of chemicals go wafting up in the smoke from those burning bomb shelters, so you can fully experience what your nihilism truly implies. I mean, you wouldn’t want to miss out on anything, now would you? It’s all meaningless, right?
You want it for others; may you have it for yourself.
Gentlemen, the topic may be deeply uncivil but kindly keep the discussion civil.
Yes, they specifically do. The bastards and the children of the bastards are separate human entities. Each deserves individual judgment. In this particular case, I’m with Ferox above – I don’t see a split between Hamas and adult Gazans. Adult Gazans. So, yeah, think of the children. And if the day comes when we act with power without having people arguing both sides of this thinking, that’s the day we lose . . . everything.
You don’t know me, or anyone else here. I’ve imposed that horror. I’ve consoled that horror. If you wander up-thread, you’d see that my initial point was that it’s time to hold adult Gaza responsible for Hamas, since they fund and arm and man and support them wholeheartedly. You say sick things about other people of whom you know little, but knowing little slows you down not at all. You are the classic rager.
And it’s too bad, because you have a huge store of information on a lot of topics, and you write well about it. I enjoy, and benefit from, many of your comments. But your rage ends up making you one of the people we ought not take too seriously.
(ETA: Sorry, PdH. I’m done. If you need to delete, not a problem.)
Yikes, things got hot here, I don’t usually read Kirk’s comments, so I must have missed the ignition point. But, and let me be polite at Perry’s request despite some of the horrible things Kirk just said — which FWIW is why I don’t usually read his comments — and try to address the substance:
I suspect that if your lot had been running the world when the Nazis were trying to take over, you’d have let them
No, I wouldn’t have, WWII was a war that had to be fought, just as the present action in Gaza is a war that has to be fought. However, there is fairly widespread consensus that one of the causes of the Nazi’s rise was the Versilles Treaty and the way Germany were treated following World War I, which made it impossible for Germany to recover. So perhaps if that war had ended better, the next one wouldn’t have happened. Which is pretty much exactly what I am saying. After WWII the allies took a very different approach than Versailles, including the Marshall plan, and Germany and Japan went from implacable foes to massively successful trading partners and allies. Don’t just win the war, win the peace. Nonetheless, I suppose if they had killed every last German after WWI that would have prevented WWII. You tell me if that is a better outcome.
@Ferox
According to Reuters, if an election was held today about 40% of “Palestinians” would vote for Hamas
Funny how one gets halfway into a sentence and suddenly realize it isn’t going where you want. If 40% of people actually support Hamas, and we assume that merely supporting Hamas makes you worthy of death, then that is still 60% of people who aren’t worth of death. And, FWIW, I accept neither of these premises. Over a hundred thousand people protested in favor of Hamas in London yesterday. Should we kill all of them too? That seems the logical conclusion of your argument here.
If you take the time to read what I actually wrote you’d see that at no time have I advocated holding back the IDF assault on Hamas. I have suggested that we need to think what happens afterward, what those 60% of people are going to do and how they are going to relate to Israel going forward. Israel has handled this pretty well I think. But there is a bigger picture here too.
Hey, bobby b… It’s just like, chemicals, man… Nothing matters.
You want manners? Behave like an actual human, not something that walks around aping one.
I’m done with people excusing the unexcusable. On the one hand, we have the spectacle of someone saying, literally, that nothing matters. Then, on the other, they take offense when taken at their word.
It appears that you espouse a sort of selective nihilism, applying it to the victims of your chosen protagonists, and object to it when applied to yourself. Be consistent, at least.
Of course, that’s the last thing we can expect from those excusing barbarity, and attempting to deflect the righteous punishments due the perpetrators of horrors.
I don’t think you quite comprehend that all those nasty, nasty little customs and rules that you think you’re above, because they’re old and outmoded, actually exist because they were worked out over long centuries of human conflict. You make a habit of killing your neighbors and their children? Don’t be awfully surprised when someone comes in and kills you right back… Along with your get. That’s how this has always worked, and when it’s been applied? It has the signal effect of actually working.
Rather unnecessary to worry about recidivism when the criminal is dead and buried. As they should be, when the crime is violence.
Of course, when nothing matters, then who cares? Might as well protect the killers, they’re so noble and entertaining, after all…
Because someone saying “where the evidence that there is a purpose to humanity that comes from on high” is clearly the same as saying “kill ’em all because they’re going to die anyway”.
I think you might have gotten halfway into your sentence and made that realization, if you had stopped typing for a minute midway. As governments go, 40% support is pretty strong. And I don’t think everyone who supports Hamas should be killed … I just think it isn’t Israel’s job to handcuff themselves when they are fighting amidst a people who support joyful baby murderers that strongly. But let’s be clear – the current media narrative that the “Palestinians” are just as oppressed by Hamas as the Israelis are is just bullshit.
I don’t think the IDF should murder babies. I think they should kill every “Palestinian” who appears in one of the murder porn videos the terrorists made when they attacked. Every.single.one. Track each of them down, no matter how long it takes, and kill all of them. If they want to kill the murderers reciprocally, by gouging out their eyes or putting them alive into ovens, or dousing them with gasoline and setting them on fire, frankly I wouldn’t hold it against them. Deterrence.
I think they should raze to the ground every single building that was used by Hamas, even if it occasionally doubles as a hospital or a school. Every piece of infrastructure that was used to make rockets, or to hide tunnels, should be taken completely apart. And while they are at it they should fill all the tunnels, or collapse them, even if that means the “Palestinians” lose some basic civilizational infrastructure along the way. F*** around and find out, frankly.
I think they should forever regard their borders with “Palestinians” as hostile borders. That means walls, guards, and impassibility. If the surrounding Arab states don’t like it, let them deal with the “Palestinians” for a while. Something, by the way, which they have all resolutely refused to do. Apparently it’s not such a humanitarian crisis that any of them feel the need to actually pony up.
And I think Israel should use this moment as an opportunity to find out who their friends are, and who their enemies are. If a person’s response to Israel being invaded by butchers who make porn videos of them torturing children to death is to admonish the Israelis to be reasonable and measured, then I think the Israelis should regard that person as someone they don’t need to deal with.
The burden does not fall on the Israelis to make this a gentle, considerate war when their enemies film themselves raping and torturing and loudly proclaim their intention to do it again and again.
When the recent ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nargono-Karabakh by Azerbaijan took place, I did think all those weapon sales Israel made to Turkey and Azerbaijan (Israel is Azerbaijan’s number one arms supplier) was short sighted at best. Turkey has gone into full anti-Israeli rhetoric and Azerbaijan seems to be following suit.
I have to say in the ‘Kirk vs Fraser Orr’ debate I tend to the Kirk side. The ‘negotiate and give them some of what they want in return for peace’ tactic has been tried and found wanting. So more of the same isn’t going to work. And using the example of how we dealt with the warmongering of Germany and Japan in the post war period is a pointless comparison, unless you are suggesting that Israel occupy Gaza and run it themselves for years to come. Not only that they would have to root radical Islam out of the society in the way that we did with Nazism and Japanese militarism. Plus of course operate a system of trials and capital punishment for all those convicted of war crimes. None of which is going to happen under a Fraser Orr inspired ‘lets be nice to the The Palestinians’ post conflict regime. It would just allow the same toxic soup of Jew hatred to simmer nicely until it came to the boil again at some point as it just has.
As far as I can see the Palestinian people are Hamas and Hamas is the Palestinian people. Yes, not every single Palestinian supports Hamas but neither did every single German support the Nazis. They suffered and died because of Nazi behaviour nonetheless, because you can’t see into men’s hearts. You can’t tell if Abdul over there just wants to get on with his life and doesn’t mind living next to Jews, or whether he’d cut a Jew’s throat the moment he got the chance. When the latter form a large proportion of a population, maybe the majority, then you have to treat the whole as being that way inclined.
In the UK we have the legal principle of joint enterprise. You don’t have to be the one wielding the knife that kills someone to be held liable for murder, if you are part of a group of people acting as one. If you know one of your number is armed and liable to kill and you still associate with them, then you get part of the responsibility for his crimes attached to you. I see exactly the same principle at work here in Palestine. And as such the ‘innocent’ must suffer the same fate as the guilty precisely because they have continued to associate with the known killer(s).
Fraser Orr:
we aren’t to feel compassion for the innocent victims who were killed or badly injured in Dresden, London and Atlanta?
———————————
1. Not while actually prosecuting the war – a war of self-defense. You must be aware that this compassion – and the demand for impossible precision in both waging war and judging others’ hearts – is being selectively deployed to cripple Israel’s self defense.
2. Not more than for my own, soldiers and civilians. Even Christianity does not demand ‘turning the other cheek’ in this situation.
3. Not when their words and deeds say otherwise… I am under no obligation to ignore these people’s consistent embrace of violence despite decades of internationally brokered peace efforts. That counts – and if you are truly interested in encouraging peaceful resolutions around the world, their refusal of peace must count in how much sympathy we have for them.
Wars follow the schoolyard rules. Not the moral niceties of armchair philosophers.
The Nazis never really won a majority – they got into the Bundestag and then did a putsch…. throughout the war there were 5th columns, even an assassination attempt.
That in no way changed the tactics or conduct of the Allies – nor should it have.
One repeated theme in postmodern woke nonsense is misplaced mercy for self-declared victims, from BLM to Hamas… As the Talmud says:
Those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind.
If it weren’t so pitiful, I’d be laughing right now.
Both Fraser Orr and bobby b are apparently too dense to pick up on when they’re being trolled, and it demonstrates both the utter hypocrisy and total lack of self-awareness typical of both parties.
Couple of posts upstream, in the one about AHA, both of my interlocuters made the point that they were effectively nihilist in outlook. “Nothing matters; it’s all just chemicals”.
Down here, we find that their principles of nihilism apparently only apply to others, not themselves. They take offense at being castigated and abused. Ain’t it all just “chemicals, man…”?
Nihilism for thee, but not for me. Interesting.
I figured that would happen when I started, but is amusing in a rather dark way. The intellectual depravity displayed is something else, though.
Do note something: Consistently, people of this “tolerant” ilk demand that you do not apply the time-hallowed principles of “blood guilt” to their favored parties. We’re to presume all those children of Gazan Arabs, who created and built Hamas, are innocent bystanders, having no part of the actions taken by Hamas.
Great. No blood guilt. Love the idea.
Now, for the sake of consistency, shall we apply it elsewhere in the intellectual oeuvre of the people that “believe” in these things? Like, oh… Say, cis-hetero white males? Joooos, even? Why are white males the sole parties in the world we feel good about applying blood guilt to? Why does the idea that they’re doing so never occur to these good people?
If I come off as bitter and pissed off, well… That’s absolutely true. If I were a Western soldier and did anything at all remotely close to what Hamas did on the seventh, then I’d wind up tried and in prison. I could recount dozens of examples, some really egregious and some that were highly questionable. You don’t see Hamas trying their people for committing atrocities; indeed, that’s what they were sent in to do. They celebrated those monstrous creeps, made heroes of them.
Double-standard, much? That’s the society these cretins came out of, and people think that they and theirs deserve mercy? Forebearance?
As you go on, do remember the illustration we’ve had here: Nihilism for you, nihilism for me, nihilism for those little girls murdered and raped in their homes near Gaza. It’s all just chemicals, see, and nothing matters.
Yet, you treat these deep philosophic types in the same way, they suddenly want things done differently. They want consideration, good manners, politeness… Because, all of a sudden, it matters. Huh. Go figure… I guess there are special snowflakes, chemical reactions with pretensions. Or, more accurately, delusions of grandeur. Funny, that.
All I ask of people is consistency and at least an attempt to avoid being a hypocrite. That’s apparently too much to ask, because it’s readily apparent in this case that some things do matter… To them.
After all, if it really is all “just chemicals” and “nothing matters”, then how can you possibly take offense at what this other chemical reaction is saying about you?