“There is increasing outrage at the number of Palestinian casualties in Saturday’s operation in and around Nuseirat”, says the caption to a photograph illustrating a BBC story about what it calls the IDF “operation” in Nuseirat. The BBC story begins,
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza says an Israeli raid on a refugee camp – which led to the rescue of four hostages – killed 274 people, including children and other civilians.
Notice how the BBC characterises the operation as primarily being “an Israeli raid on a refugee camp”, a phrase to tug on the heartstrings. Anyone would think that this raid on a “refugee camp” (Nuseirat has been there since 1948) was launched because the Israelis just like raiding refugee camps. The BBC says that the raid “led to” the rescue of four hostages as if that were a happy accident.
On Saturday Israel’s forces, backed by air strikes, fought intense gun battles with Hamas in and around the Nuseirat refugee camp, freeing the captives.
Noa Argamani, 26, Almog Meir Jan, 22, Andrei Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, who were abducted from the Nova music festival on 7 October have been returned to Israel.
As was the whole point of this meticulously-planned operation, or “rescue” as such things used to be called. There is a lot of outraging being done today. The Observer reports some more of it,
“Israeli attacks in central Gaza killed scores of Palestinians, many of them civilians, amid a special forces operation to free four hostages held there, a death toll that has caused international outrage”.
At least 274 Palestinians were killed and 698 wounded in Israeli strikes on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, Gaza’s health ministry said on Sunday. The Israeli military said its forces had come under heavy fire during the daytime operation.
The international outrage against Hamas for putting those civilians in harm’s way by hiding the hostages among them, and indeed for the crimes of starting the war and taking hostages in the first place, is entirely justified. Or it would be, if there were any. But that is not what “international outrage” means these days.
The EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, called Saturday’s events a “massacre”, while the UN’s aid chief described in graphic detail scenes of “shredded bodies on the ground”.
“Nuseirat refugee camp is the epicentre of the seismic trauma that civilians in Gaza continue to suffer,” Martin Griffiths said in a post on X, calling for a ceasefire and the release of all hostages.
The Observer story does not say who Martin Griffiths is, or why his implication that Hamas releasing the hostages needs to be accompanied – or, in his word order, preceded – by a ceasefire as a quid pro pro should matter. Mr Griffiths is the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. In February 2024, Griffiths told Sky News that “Hamas is not a terrorist group for us, as you know, it is a political movement.”
Too bad, Martin. Your “political movement” attacked and killed and kidnapped a bunch of Israelis back in October and are paying the price for that decision.
I was heartened last night by my fellow citizens.
Went to the local orchestra hall for a nice program. Head pianist was an Israeli. While we’re all milling around outside and entering the hall, a small band of protesters showed up to register their shock that we would listen to one of those bedamned Israelis.
They were screamed at and booed and roundly chased off by the crowd.
It was fun!
(Golda was right. Hamas butchered some and kidnapped others, and then hid those captives behind their own kids. Gazans hate Israel more than they love their own kids. Pity the kids.)
“children and other civilians”
Clearly hammering home “children == civilian” when any open-minded observation of reality would show a very large proportion of “children” actively engaging in armed military warefare, therefore ********NOT*****(*** civilians.
I think we should pity the kids, as bobby b said, even though what jgh said about a large proportion of them being engaged in combat is also true. We should pity them for the same reason we should pity the brainwashed child soldiers of the Khmer Rouge, or the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, or the Séléka and Anti-Balaka militias in the Central African Republic. I hope that one day they can be rehabilitated, but of course that can only happen after Hamas is defeated.
Note that for the BBC, most journalists, the UN. If your are 18 year old Hamas terrorist your are a children.
The Gazan Arab POS “leadership” identified a weak spot in the Israeli and Western mindset: The need for “morality” in war.
Let’s get this straight: The only way you have “civilized warfare” is between two parties that agree upon the rules of said game. And, that’s what it is; a game. A lethal one, but a game nonetheless.
The idea of “war” as practiced by the Israelis and various Western idiots is not the idea of “war” as practiced by the Arabs. You saw Arab “war” demonstrated for you on the 7th of October, 2023. That was a classic Arab bit of warfare, a “Razzia”, a raid for loot, slaves, and whatever they thought they could get away with.
That’s their concept of war; no limits, no rules, no quarter.
Quarter, in the Arab mind, is something that only they deserve, and only from Westerners. They’re not foolish enough to expect it from their own kind; note well how little attention the various massacres of civilians have garnered in the Arab world, from the destruction of Hama under Assad’s father back in the 1980s to the present day. Did any of these worthy “Arab sympathizers” protest what Arab does to Arab, ever? Did any of them stand outside the Iraqi Embassy, while Saddam massacred his victims?
No, they did not. And, why? Because, dumbasses, they see your compassion and caring about non-combatants as weapons to use against you. They’ve no such morals with regards to their own making of war, and the sooner you fools realize that fact, internalize it, and begin operating as though that were a truth, you’re going to keep losing the PR battle.
You want “peace” with Arabs? Guess what? You only get that when you utterly destroy them. Ask the Mongols; what did it take to get peace with Islam? Wrecking it, and all of its works. That lesson is a bit harsh, but it is a truth. How did the Spanish get rid of the Islamic slave traders who were perpetually raiding them? Drove them out of Spain, and reduced their holdings to ruins.
Only thing that’s historically worked. “Living with Islam” is a joke; you’re either their slaves or you’re perpetually fighting them, worried about whether or not they’re going to take your children as slaves and convert them by force. You want peace with a Muslim? Kill him. Only way to be sure.
That’s the historical lesson, the one they keep teaching us, and which we keep ignoring. There’s never been a single case of “living peacefully with Muslims” that’s persisted past the point of them gaining demographic superiority. Everything else is perpetual conflict. Pay attention, dumbasses… The history is out there; look it up.
Yes, pity them. Hunt down those who put the weapons in their hands.
But also, if they are shooting at your soldiers … shoot them. Their blood is on the heads of those who made them soldiers, and it is not incumbent upon those who fight them to die in order to save them.
If you make using child soldiers tactically effective (or effective as propaganda) then you will get a lot more scum using child soldiers.
So pity them .. as you kill them. And don’t let idiot protesters dissuade you one bit.
I’m totally on your side here Kirk, except that I can’t help thinking how different it would have been if those inhospitable Arabs(?) had shown more compassion to those nice visiting non-combatant Mongols.
But history is like that. Speculation about what might have been. Would WWI even have happened if Belgium hadn’t invaded Germany in 1914?
@gnome,
All you need to do in order to understand the acts of that Khwarazim governor is read the Koran and the Hadiths. In those works, you’ll find everything laid out, and everything they did to the Mongols justified. It was SOP for the Islamic faith, as laid out by their Arab tutors.
I’ll be brutally honest with everyone on here: If you haven’t read the Koran and the attendant commentaries, while paying attention to what the current lot of “wise Islamic scholars” have to say on these issues… You’re an idiot, and someone will be saying the same things about you that they say about Hitler and the Nazis: “Gee, how could they not have known… He told them what he was all about in Mein Kampf… He told them everything he’d do…They should have taken him at his word…”
When your avowed enemy tells you that he is, and what he intends to do? Try taking him at his word; you’ll likely face less problems surviving.
I’m not anti-Islamic because I dislike Muslims; I’m anti-Islamic because I’ve actually studied their history, their doctrine, and their works. The world would be a much better place without any of them or their actions. Islam, no matter how they try to camouflage it, has always been about conquest and destruction of anything not Islamic. They have never, ever been able to live at peace with anyone else; anyone foolish enough to take them in winds up dead, oddly enough. I knew Yazidis who’d sheltered their Muslim neighbors against the thugs of Saddam’s Ba’ath regime, hiding them and preserving their families and properties.
When Isis came, those same neighbors turned on their Yazidi saviors, killed them, stole their property, and sold their wives and daughters into sex slavery. Muslims do not recognize any loyalty or honor, when dealing with anyone; even other Muslims. Observe what they do to each other… Hama rules, my friend, Hama rules.
My morals frequently get used against me. That’s why they’re challenging – there’d by no point to having them if they always left me comfortable and productive and happy. Morals are what keep us from doing what we always want to do in recognition of what we know we should do. Heck, I could have been much better off financially if I had been able to put aside those pesky morals.
And so, I know that there are people – daily – who are going to use my morals against me.
But what would be the point of my side – the “good side” – prevailing if we abandoned our morals? The only real reason to fight (aside from pure survival, which isn’t an actual danger to most of us) is to nurture a social system in which everyone pays attention to moral principles. Hopefully, MY moral principles.
Makes life harder, makes winning harder, but also makes life and winning worthwhile.
(The day that my actual life, and the lives of those I love, are threatened, watch me change this view. But, we’re not there yet.)
Thing is – this only applies to the Israelis.
The US has done horrible things in war – even as recently as Afghanistan. A lot of horrible things in the last 20 years. We don’t hold ourselves to the standard that these people are holding the Israelis to. None of them seem to care about Uyghurs or Russia’s irresponsible use of area-effect weapons in its many little wars of the last couple decades. They don’t care about the morality of the attackers in the 6 Day War or on Oct 7.
Its not that they’ve found a weakness because we expect war to be moral. They’ve tapped into a not-deeply-buried seam of anti-semitism that exists across the world. Tons of people hate Jews . . . for some reason.
Serious (and very relevant) question: if the lives of your neighbors are threatened and yours is not, do you change your view or no? Because if you do not, and your neighbors act the same way, you are joined together in a suicide pact. And if you do change your view when your neighbors are threatened – then you are in fact there now.
How many box trucks driving through Christmas crowds, how many raging jihadis with knives rampaging through unprepared westerners passing by, how many millions of immigrants who utterly despise your culture, how many rape gangs roaming the streets of your cities and grooming your children, does it take to sound the alarm?
I said “The day that my actual life, and the lives of those I love, are threatened, watch me change this view.”
I think you’re underestimating the number of people I love. In my rural six months every year, I love my neighbors, and so in that environment, a threat to them is a threat to me, and vice versa. In my suburban six months, not as much, but some. But at the point where it matters, I’m headed out to rural, anyway.
The deliberate left wing switcheroo working as usual to blunt criticism. International outrage? Let’s call it what it really is: International Appeasement. Doesn’t sound so high minded does it?
“When Israel rescued 102 hostages from Entebbe in 1976, after Palestinian terrorists hijacked a plane full of Israelis to Uganda, UN Sec-Gen Kurt Waldheim (who served in the Wehrmacht) condemned Israel for a “serious violation of sovereignty.””
https://x.com/EylonALevy/status/1799871461311533236
Bobby b:
But what would be the point of my side – the “good side” – prevailing if we abandoned our morals?
—–
Wake up, Narcissus.
Let’s try it this way:
Deuteronomy 23:19-20
Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother; usury of money, usury of food, usury of any thing that is lent with interest:
20 Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon usury
—-
This is just one of many instances that contrast the Judeo-Christian brother (who accepts upon himself the moral obligations of Western society) with the stranger – literally an “alien” in the original text – who attaches himself to Western society to exploit it, with no sense of mutual obligation.
We are allowed to gouge the heathen – as long as they reserve the option of gouging us. They do not deserve to be treated as brothers until they earn it.
I am one of those Israelis who tore their hair out throughout Oslo as my bien-pensant brethren ignored the basic schoolyard rules – you don’t win over bullies and brutes by giving them your sandwich.
Their feckless idealism brought a bloodbath upon innocents… all the while they delivered many hifalutin pronouncements about their refined morality, just like you…
I started with the Bible so let’s finish with the Talmud:
Those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind.
End of the day, the final results will show which end is up. And, until the usual moralizing idjits recognize the failure of their fantasy worlds, we’re going to continue being defeated by the Islamoids. Not on the merits of the civilization created by their dubious theocracy, but because they embrace the primitivism that works. They’re outbreeding us, and we’re subsidizing that. The Islamoid freak that confronted the Danish Prime Minister the other day told that worthy a truth, in that the Danes are being outbred on their own territory, and will soon be extinct.
Same-same everywhere that the semi-serious confront the very serious Muslim horde. The only people who’ve ever been even half-way rational about Islam and the threat that it presents are all universally decried by their own kind as “racist” and “bigoted”. By the time the fools recognize that the Islamoids mean precisely what they say about overrunning the (somewhat, in some ways…) more successful civilizations around them? It will be too late.
Islam is a cancer of the mind and social structure. It isn’t a religious faith as understood and envisioned by all the numpty-nump “visionaries” of religious freedom, here in the benighted West. It’s more of a quasi-religious political/social movement, intended to triumphally place Arabs on top of conquered populations. And, you can see what happened to the regions those Arabs conquered, all across Northern Africa and the Middle East. What were once the most prosperous regions of the Roman Empire, the ones that fed it? Destroyed, turned to deserts. Syria never approached the population levels reached during Roman times under the Arabs, and never will. Same across all the regions conquered by the Arab Islamicists. Look at the borders between Israel and their neighbors… Green, fertile land on the Jewish side, and utter sere brown devastation on the other, run by… Arabs, with Islamic influences. The entire planet, under their sway, would look the same. And, why? Because, Allah wills it.
You’ve got the warnings before you, but nobody believes them. Observe the coming years, as more and more of the Islamoid freaks come to outnumber the natives across Europe; it won’t be a peaceful amalgamation of new and old; it will be a shitshow of rapine, plunder, and destruction.
Brought on by your leaders, who see their own daughters raped and murdered by the saintly “newcomers”, and then donate to shelters for those very people. It’s an inverse morality that says “Other is better…”, against your own self-interest. Most of that ilk will wind up as destitute beggars, put out on the streets in indigence, while the “newcomers” enjoy their fine houses and possessions… Until those run out, and then it will be more of the same looting economy that’s always been in place across the Islamic world. Europe’s future is an Islamic one, with Europeans taking the place of Third Country Nationals that are little better than slaves, in their own countries. You want to know what fate’s in store for you, Europe? Look at how the various Sri Lankan and Pakistani laborers are treated in your favored slave-states of Dubai and UAE. That’s the future laid out for you, and your children.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/report-special-forces-posed-as-displaced-gazans-moving-into-building-where-hostage-held/
Damned impressive operation if you ask me.
Too many Germans killed during liberation of Auschwitz!
I wonder how often Muslim parents fail in their attempts to pass the faith onto their children? Is the rate of attrition significant or negligible? I ask the question because I am aware of two sisters whose Muslim parents are originally from Lebanon. Neither of the girls are Muslims, they are estranged from their parents and now live and work in South Korea. Is this highly unusual, fairly typical, or somewhere in between?
The number to be concerned with is “How many are killed because they want to leave Islam…?”
That’s the number that encourages the apostate to do things like join terrorist organizations as participants: “See? I’m a good Muslim; I kill kaffirs…”
Islam isn’t a religion as understood by other people. Even the Catholics at their worst weren’t routinely telling people to kill their children for apostasy, something that’s a matter of course in Islam. I’m not sure that there’s another religion, world-wide, that has similar rules.
You may “escape” Islam, but you’ll always be looking over your shoulder… Much like any other gang or criminal organization. And, to get back in good graces with the rest of the gang? You’ll need to do some outrageous things, to prove yourself. After which, of course, you’ll be unacceptable in polite society.
Do note the similarities between all of these evil things. If your “religion” operates in a similar fashion to criminal gangs, with things like “jumping in”, and expecting you to commit acts of heinous cruelty to outsiders or apostates…? You might not be joining a worthy religion. Or, a religion at all; Islam has rather more commonality with a death cult like the Thuggee or the distortions deliberately created by the Japanese military government when they hijacked Shinto and Bushido tradition.
The “tells” are there, if you bother to look.
WRT ethical norms: I believe in Locke (i.e. in a minimalist Judeo-Christian ethics) when dealing with people over whom i have unchecked, unbalanced power.
(Which is to say, nobody; or almost nobody.)
I follow a Viking/Mongol ethic towards near-peers: I deal with them as i expect/have seen them deal with me.
I follow a Roman/Viking ethic towards people with unchecked, unbalanced power over me: my priority is to reduce, possibly eliminate their power over me.
As in the case of Tarquinius Superbus, and several other cases up to Julius Caesar.
(There were similar cases in Viking Iceland.)
The BBC, and the rest of the international establishment left, hates Israel – and in other shock news, water-is-wet. Israel is, after all, a nationalist ethno-state – that is what Zionism is (which the “Revisionist” Zionists always understood – the socialist Zionists being lost in their delusions).
I suspect the root of the hatred is that the left once loved Israel – Israel was supposed to be a leftist country, and for a couple of decades it sort-of was (although about 5% of Israeli Jews lived in the communal living experiments that were so beloved in the West – with even a young Boris Johnson turning up to live one for a while, the sort of place that a conservative Israeli would avoid like the plague), as Israel turned out to be a rather “right wing” country, with strong families, lots of small business enterprises and private farms, increasingly religious, and-so-on, so the love of the international left turned to hatred.
“What was supposed to be California turned into Texas – or even Utah!” say some.
Although by “California” they mean a small leftist elite with nothing in common with the California that, for example, elected Ronald Reagan Governor (twice), a leftist elite that has imported, from Latin America, a new electorate that vote for them in return for benefits and public services.
That, Third World, electorate in California will, soon, turn on the rich elite (in spite of the leftism of that rich elite) and things will get very nasty – but that is a discussion for another day.
The capital-L Left only loved the Jews so long as they were victims whose identity as victims could be exploited to wedge their ways into various arguments. When the Jews became non-victims, then the worm turned.
The left loves victimhood. Status as “victim” is a huge advantage in their war on everything and everyone else; because of the morality of the Christian West, which has a cultural weakness in that it loves the underdog, the pitiful victim of circumstance, the left is able to use victimhood as an opening wedge into everything. The Jews were the primary tool used during the period when they were seeking to “open up” the institutions, and while a good deal of that was a net good, it did serve as a template for other, later efforts to do away with merit and ability. They were able to point at the way Jews had been kept out of the Ivy League as justification, and sold the efforts to get sub-par intellects from other communities into those same institutions, where their presence has festered and gone rotten.
Now that they’re done using the Jews, they’re discarding them. Too bad that the Jews themselves fail to recognize that fact, or understand the meaning of what is going on before their eyes. The left knows no loyalty or morality; they see the whole of their efforts as being world-historical in significance, meant to utterly change everything. The fact that they’ve really got nothing other than destruction on hand to replace things with doesn’t bother most of them, because they’re just like the asshole nihilists populating Tsarist Russia that assassinated the only decent man thrown up by the Romanovs, Alexander II.
That’s the prototype for most leftoids: The same sort of nihilism that said it was better to kill Alexander II than to work with him, and actually improve things. That mentality is precisely what led to the Communists, their 70-year nightmare, and the present-day status of Russia.
Everything offered up by the left is a poisoned chalice. Drink at your own risk.
@BenDavid
We are allowed to gouge the heathen – as long as they reserve the option of gouging us.
I think you are assuming a moral authority vested in the Torah and Talmud that many don’t, I certainly don’t. There are lots of really horrible things in those books that I find reprehensibly evil. Nonetheless, I think your point is valid — our moral responsibility does diminish with distance, whatever that distance might be.
They do not deserve to be treated as brothers until they earn it.
I doubt anyone is suggesting treating them like brothers. What I’d say is that if you descend into the depths of depravity that they do, you injure yourself, you might even destroy yourself. It isn’t about them it is about us. Now, there are circumstances when we have to compromise and let it slide a little. Better to injure yourself than let the bastards destroy you. But there is a reason why Israelis try to minimize deaths of Palestinian civilians and Hamas tries to maximize them. Israelis are trying to do the decent thing, trying to keep their humanity. Protecting their souls as much as their bodies.
And I’m not at all arguing against the raid that Israel did. On the contrary I think it was totally justified, my heart leap for joy to see those men and that woman freed from what must have been a terrible captivity. And the blood of the Palestinian civilians are on the hands of Hamas who use babies and women as human shields.
The civilian population of the Gaza Salient (and it is a salient – look at a map) are living in a battlefield – that is obviously an unsafe place to be, but it is the Egyptian government that refuses to allow them to move to a fellow Muslim area (Egypt – with which Gaza has a border).
I remember years ago writing comments in reply to Economist magazine articles (when the Economist magazine still allowed no subscribers to comment) on fighting in the Gaza Salient – pointing out that the civilian population in the Gaza Salient were in a horribly unsafe place and needed to be evacuated to Egypt (or other Muslim countries) – the Economist magazine deleted my comments.
The bitter truth is that the international establishment wants (yes wants) Muslim civilians to be killed in the Gaza Salient – in order to have a “moral” stick to beat the Jews with.
The 2005 decision to make the Gaza Salient “Jew free”, to remove all Jews from the place, and to allow the Islamic population to remain in the Salient and govern themselves has ended in disaster – yet the “international community” wish to continue with this policy, indeed to extend the policy to the “West Bank” – much of which is closer to the sea than to the Jordan river – the “West Bank” almost cuts Israel in two.
The policy of the international community appears to be (in effect – even if not in intention) to wipe the Jews out – as any such independent “West Bank” would act in much the same way, but on vastly larger scale, as the Gaza Salient did on October 7th 2023 (indeed for years before that).
It should be noted that Islam (unlike Judaism) has no doctrine of a special sacred land – Islam claims the world (on the logical grounds that Allah created the world – including the people in it).
The implications for Western nations with changing demographics are obvious – so I will NOT point them out.