Israel-Gaza war

[GeneralMacArthur]

Look at these scumbags acting like innocent nine year olds riding on bicycles while just finishing killing innocent civilians. Literally makes my blood cold. So much for the morality complex of the IDF.

As per usual I'm assuming there's absolutely zero evidence that they "just finished killing innocent civilians" or even that the home has been occupied at any point in the last three months?

[GeneralMacArthur]

The fact that people feel a need to double down on calling others mentally ill for having any criticism of Israel says a lot of things about them. All of them bad.

The fact that you are pretending we're labeling this person as mentally ill for "having any criticism of Israel", rather than what we've very clearly said is bizarre and extreme behavior indicative of paranoia, says a lot about you.

Sadly, this kind of thing is very popular on atlas forum dot web where you'll say "Jeffrey Dahmer was bad because he ate people's brains" and some malicious moron will go "wow crazy that someone would say Dahmer was bad just because he didn't eat pancakes"

[GeneralMacArthur]

Hopefully those of us who care about the tragedy going on in Gaza in this country actually wake up and realize that something like this would have never happened under Trump, and vote.

Again and again, with some reservation, I continue to be impressed by the thread of moderation Biden has managed to weave on our biggest foreign policy issues, from the Afghanistan withdraw, to support for Ukraine /w a hard line against direct intervention and multiple groundbreaking admonishments and breaks with Israel, that would've been unthinkable even a few months ago.

I appreciate this but you still have a Marianne Williamson banner in every single post you make on this blog.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Alex Jones isn't the source, he's citing the same gratuitous footage that turned Ed Snowden

The pro-Israel accounts I follow have claimed that this footage is of Hamas soldiers being blown up on their way to plant an IED.  Naturally, since Hamas commits a war crime by disguising themselves as civilians, it is impossible to tell whether these guys were Hamas or civilians, and people are just going to believe what they want to believe.  They could even be civilians that Israel blew up because they thought they were Hamas, and it would still be Hamas's fault because if Hamas didn't disguise themselves as civilians it would be impossible to make such a mistake.

FWIW, the Israel side says the secondary explosion after the missile strike is the detonation of the IED they were carrying, which provides evidence that they were Hamas.  I haven't seen any evidence that they weren't Hamas, other than "they were dressed like civilians" and "well, Israel always lies".

days later, yet another drone caught Israeli soldiers executing civilians with white flags and then burying the bodies with bulldozers

The tweet you quoted here has been deleted but I found the Al Jazeera footage and it is just an extremely blurry video of someone getting shot on a beach, and then a cut to some footage of bulldozers around the dead body some time later.  I don't see any evidence that he was waving a white flag, nor that the bulldozers were to bury the body (which wouldn't be a bad thing anyway).  Regardless, if Israel shot a civilian waving a white flag, that is a war crime and a very bad thing.  But again the reason this happens is because Hamas will commit the war crime of waving a white flag to pretend to be civilians before opening fire on Israelis, so Israel is suspicious of white flags.  It all comes back to Hamas refusing to follow laws of war that are designed to protect the innocent.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Alex Jones isn't the source, he's citing the same gratuitous footage that turned Ed Snowden

The pro-Israel accounts I follow have claimed that this footage is of Hamas soldiers being blown up on their way to plant an IED.  Naturally, since Hamas commits a war crime by disguising themselves as civilians, it is impossible to tell whether these guys were Hamas or civilians, and people are just going to believe what they want to believe.  They could even be civilians that Israel blew up because they thought they were Hamas, and it would still be Hamas's fault because if Hamas didn't disguise themselves as civilians it would be impossible to make such a mistake.

FWIW, the Israel side says the secondary explosion after the missile strike is the detonation of the IED they were carrying, which provides evidence that they were Hamas.  I haven't seen any evidence that they weren't Hamas, other than "they were dressed like civilians" and "well, Israel always lies".

I suppose if the standard is "I don't see any proof they aren't Hamas" is all you need then it's pretty hard to prove anything to you. I could provide the most gratuitous Nazi crimes caught on photograph and you could say "but maybe they're actually secret Soviet agents who totally deserved it (or at least that's what the Good German Soldiers believed because the dastardly Soviet agents use disguises)"

To normal human beings, though, it's pretty obvious what happened. Also, the secondary strikes on the wounded (a common tactic of the IDF) would be a war crime even if they had been walking around with RPGs and weren't guilty of the crime of living in Gaza and walking out in the open

I'm having a lot of trouble following exactly what your analogy is with all the Good German stuff, but Hamas has a long, well-documented, rich history of disguising themselves as civilians -- it is literally their modus operandi -- so if the Soviets had a rich history of disguising themselves as civilians and that was their main tactic in fighting Nazi Germany, then yes I would be way more inclined to believe that some Nazi war crime against "civilians" was actually against disguised Soviets.  Because the odds of that being the case are way higher.

For example, at Stalingrad both sides wore down their uniforms to tatters by the end of the fighting and were wearing civilian clothing or even each other's uniforms.  So if you showed me a video from the last days of Stalingrad of the Nazis assassinating someone dressed in civilian clothing, or even someone dressed in a Nazi uniform, and tried to tell me it was actually a Red Army soldier, I would probably believe you, or at least not care enough to change my worldview based on my not believing you, because I know that kind of thing was happening a lot at the time.

There's also the fact that Nazi Germany was an evil military force that deliberately targeted civilians for extermination, whereas Israel does not generally do that.  I know you are about to bombard me with links from your bookmarks tab of individual cases where individual Israeli soldiers did shoot civilians, but it is not the policy of the IDF to slaughter civilians, whereas it was the policy of the Nazis -- they literally had units whose entire job was to follow behind the main army and slaughter anyone who was still alive in the territories they conquered.

I wish you would find a different analogy to use than Nazis though.  It is really tiresome that history is replete with monstrous villains yet we always have to talk about the Nazis in our analogies.  And it's especially suspect in this conflict because your side is always toeing the line of saying "the Jews and the Nazis were equally bad."

[GeneralMacArthur]

[
Every time you or your ilk repost the most antisemitic UN official since Waldheim, you damage your credibility on this issue further.

Every time UN officials or Human Rights organizations denounce Israel you say they are antisemitic, even though you never add the least elaborate argument supporting your claim. Hasbara guys used to be slightly more sophisticated when resorting to lies or insults. Currently it's harder to speak on behalf of openly racist governments conducting campaigns of genocide.

I have absolutely no concerns about my credibility on "this issue", but I absolutely despise people insulting the UN, Amnesty or whichever organization is reporting Israel's crimes.

Hopefully one day these horrors will come to an end, but even if evil forces prevail, you will be forever on the wrong side of history alongside the worst criminals of the present day.

Anatomy of a Genocide - complicits and supporters

I know you are never going to agree that Francesca Albanese -- the woman who whined that Europe only supported Israel because Europeans felt too guilty about the Holocaust -- is antisemitic.  But it's really a moot point because appeal to authority is not a valid argument technique.

So this one lady says Israel is committing genocide.  The facts on the ground say they are not committing genocide.  That means the one lady is wrong, not that reality is wrong.  I can find some other expert who says Israel is not committing genocide and appeal to that authority.  There's nothing special about Francesca Albanese other than being appointed to the U.N.'s Designated Israel Hater position.

I mean let's take Richard Falk, the "Global Jewry forced America to invade Afghanistan, Israel and the Nazis are two sides of the same coin, check out this awesome drawing of a mangy Jewish dog peeing on the Statue of Liberty" guy.  Suppose he said (and he undoubtedly has said) that Israel was committing genocide and planned to mass murder the Palestinians in Gaza.  Do you actually expect me to say "oh yeah well I'm going to reject reality and just believe this guy"?  After all, he was Albanese's predecessor in the U.N. Special Rapporteur For Hamas position.  She's a novice in the position, he held it for over six years, so that makes him more of an expert than her, right?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Please do not post Krystal Ball on here.  Complete waste of a post.

[GeneralMacArthur]

https://twitter.com/aghamilton29/status/1774927906055090668?s=46&t=4hxUtnUUq...

[GeneralMacArthur]

To try and get things back on track from the ten-thousandth rehashing of the Arab claims that Jews aren't indigenous to Judea...

There are four things I'd like to know more about, I've been so busy the last week that I've barely been following the news at all and would appreciate someone catching me up on these topics:

1) Israel's attack on the World Central Kitchen workers -- this is a disgraceful act and one for which Israel should suffer severe punishment, up to and including American intervention or withdrawal of aid, if they can't come up with a good explanation fast.  Has there been any progress whatsoever on either an investigation into how this happened or some Israeli explanation beyond "it was an accident"?  I do not believe that it was an accident.  If the IDF intentionally attacked aid workers as a matter of national policy then they've gone too far and need to be cut off.

2) The consolidation of Northern Gaza -- how did Hamas get back into Shifa hospital?  How is Hamas able to come up here and steal food and aid with impunity?  Why are there any Hamas fighters left in the area at all?  I thought Israel had this region under control.  How hard can it possibly be to secure the border between north and south, Gaza is less than three miles wide.  Are there still tunnels Israel doesn't know about?  I seriously was under the impression that all that was left to do outside of Rafah was just a cleanup operation.

3) Speaking of Rafah, has Bibi decided yet when he's going to make the push?  Last I heard on this, his crew was going to meet with Joe Biden to hear about Biden's top secret plan for how to defeat Hamas in Rafah without any civilian casualties.  I personally don't think that's possible and that this is just a waste of time to let Biden save face when Hamas's last stand is inevitably a bloody mess and Biden can say "that stubborn Bibi, he just didn't listen to my secret plan that would have avoided all this."  But either way, Bibi needs to get on with it instead of sitting on his hands forever.  I've also heard that he may be waiting until the end of Ramadan for some reason?  He needs to get on with it because Biden's patience is obviously wearing thin and he's not going to go into the DNC Convention in August still having to defend Bibi's war.

4) Going back to Biden, how is the construction of the aid pier going?  It's been almost a month since it was announced and I can't find any news about recent progress.  Have there been any other efforts to get more aid into Gaza, in particular northern Gaza?

[GeneralMacArthur]

To try and get things back on track from the ten-thousandth rehashing of the Arab claims that Jews aren't indigenous to Judea...

There are four things I'd like to know more about, I've been so busy the last week that I've barely been following the news at all and would appreciate someone catching me up on these topics:

1) Israel's attack on the World Central Kitchen workers -- this is a disgraceful act and one for which Israel should suffer severe punishment, up to and including American intervention or withdrawal of aid, if they can't come up with a good explanation fast.  Has there been any progress whatsoever on either an investigation into how this happened or some Israeli explanation beyond "it was an accident"?  I do not believe that it was an accident.  If the IDF intentionally attacked aid workers as a matter of national policy then they've gone too far and need to be cut off.

Tbf I doubt there is any written order to killing aid workers from the higher ups, and it would be pretty foolish of them to leave a paper trail if they did. That said intentionally killing aid workers as policy, and turning a blind eye to the more bloodthirsty members of the IDF doing so is a distinction without a difference.

How high up the chain of command was this decision made?  There's a huge difference between one deranged IDF pilot deciding to airstrike a convoy, versus an insubordinate commanding officer ordering him to do it, versus some colonel or brigadier general ordering it, versus it being official IDF policy coming direct from Yaron Finkelman or Yoav Gallant or Netanyahu himself.

Like if it's just one insubordinate officer, throw the book at him and call it a day.  If this was Yoav Gallant's decision, or Bibi's, then America needs to cut off Israel until the entire Netanyahu administration is replaced.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Israeli explanation seems plausible but they need to provide an unambiguous, measurable set of changes they are going to make to prevent it from happening again.

Also just in general I think this is a watershed moment and Biden should take the opportunity to maximize pressure on Israel to get the humanitarian situation under control.  We can already see yesterday that he's pushed them to reluctantly open more aid vectors.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Just released ...

Israeli military says it's preparing to shift from defense to offense on the border with Lebanon.

I fear this is going to explode to a huge military operation, on multiple fronts in Israel.
Scary/Deadly thoughts for everyone involved.

Lebanon has only themselves to blame.  Hezbollah has been launching rockets and raids into Israel for months now and Israel has been incredibly patient with it.

Of course I'm sure this will quickly be forgotten and if Israel decides to take care of Hezbollah, it will be declared a "genocide" and "unprovoked aggression" and so on and so forth by the people who are Just Asking Questions About Zionist Lies.

[GeneralMacArthur]

So Hamas actually tortured most of the hostages to death long ago, and has only been pretending they were still alive so they can bulls--t the entire western world about there being any chance for peace.

Now that Israel has withdrawn, Hamas no longer has to keep up the lie, so they are free to say "ha ha ha we actually killed all the hostages, thanks for wasting your time at the bargaining table you chumps."

[GeneralMacArthur]

Buddy do you really think AI can't make mistakes? Imagine this applies in the US. You could be completely unrelated to the actual target; if the AI makes a mistake you're a dead man.

They are using a combination of AI and human intelligence.  The human intelligence is used to identify known terrorists.  The AI is used to track their movements.  AI can also be used to identify people they interact with on a regular basis and flag those as also potential accomplices, who can then be manually checked and tracked both manually and with AI.

We do this in the American military as well.  It's not dystopian.  Palantir developed this tech over a decade ago.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I can't believe I wasted several posts on this thread trying to have a conversation with someone who is getting his information from one of Twitter's most notorious Holocaust-denying neo-nazis.

Really wild how these people will always say "oh I'm just anti-Zionist" or "oh I just don't like the Israeli government" and insist that they're not anti-semites, but then inevitably, inevitably, inevitably they eventually tell on themselves by either
A) Palling around with real anti-semites who hate Jews and want to kill them
B) Revealing that they see anti-semitic neo-nazis as credible arbiters of information
C) Endorsing the aims, and defending the tactics, of anti-semitic groups that want to kill the Jews

but then people like me getting slammed for labeling them "anti-semitic" based on such things because even though I'm inevitably proven right, until that day comes, we are all required to go along with this farce of "oh that person just doesn't like Netanyahu" even though it's very obvious where things are headed.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Democracy Now!  is basically just the Green Party.  Most of their guests are either Green Party figures, leftie communist types, or anti-American professors/journalists/pundits like Chomsky.

Just like the Green Party they are very talented at dressing up anti-Americanism in the guise of human rights and peace and love and social justice.  Just don't ask about how any of those concepts are handled by the actual groups fighting against America... it doesn't matter because of the David and Goliath framing.  It's very easy to just always say America isn't good enough and should be better, and therefore because America isn't good enough it is the bad guy, and anyone fighting America is the good guy.

You are the mark, and if you got snookered by it then, you know, all too easy.

[GeneralMacArthur]

You guys truly do not need to quote the entire reply stack every time you respond to this conversation that at this point is at best only tangentially related to the thread.

How many times has Amy Goodman's Wikipedia page now been copy+pasted into this thread?  A dozen?

[GeneralMacArthur]

Netanhayu has made it pretty clear from day 1 that the only choices in the negotiations are either Gaza gets leveled now or it gets leveled after the hostages are released. Meanwhile, Hamas has said with slightly less force that any negotiations must leave them in power or at least safe after hostages are released.

This is why I dont put much faith in any of the negotiations that we keep hearing about.

Rafah is only a small area of Gaza.  It's like the size of JFK Airport.  Even if Israel has to raze it to the ground, it's only like 10% of Gaza.  I don't think Israel should be overly concerned about the physical destruction of Rafah.  It will probably be necessary to demolish large swaths of it in order to destroy the vast tunnel network Hamas and various smuggler groups have built underneath the Palestinian side (including those going through to the Egyptian side).

The main concern with the Rafah attacks is twofold.  First is the number of innocent civilians who would die in the attacks.  Second is the humanitarian crisis it would create.  Right now hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are huddled up in Rafah, and since it hasn't been attacked yet it still has some resources they can use.  At a certain point that won't be true anymore, but how do you help them without also letting Hamas out of its little cage?  This is why Israel has proposed letting women and children/elderly males leave Rafah, because Hamas is almost entirely composed of men between the ages of 15 and 50.

[GeneralMacArthur]

UN report says destruction of housing in Gaza hasn't seen been since WWII: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/unprecedented-destruction-housing-gaza-world-war-ii-109888554

I've been pretty critical of the protests especially since it seems that at least a good chunk of the protesters seem outright pro-Hamas and are not pro-ceasefire...but this sort of stuff hits so much. I was kind of floored when this article was pushed to me. And none of this is even necessary to go after Hamas, with the size of Gaza Israel could've occupied with it with minimal damage in a couple weeks. Netanyahu's crimes continue to pile up.

It's a dense urban area and pretty much every house is potentially a Hamas hideout, base, or covering up a tunnel entrance.  Only two ways to kill Hamas fighters -- either blow them up with bombs/tanks/artillery, or shoot them in street fighting.  The former option obviously destroys the house.  The latter option involves pursuing Hamas as they freely go from civilian household to civilian household turning one after the other into military posts -- which you should then blow up in order to avoid putting your soldiers in harm's way.

Remember that bodycam video a couple weeks ago where some IDF soldiers were pursuing a Hamas militant through an apartment building, and then he lured them into a room and it was a trap and they were being shot at and fled the room?  Pro-Hamas people were posting it all over the internet and laughing at how "cowardly" the IDF soldiers were for not putting their lives at risk engaging with this fight.  But now Israel knows that guy and his buddies are holed up in the apartment building so they can either blast that specific room with a tank from across the street, or they can drop a bomb on the entire building, and in either case they won't have any harm come to their own soldiers.

These are the decisions actually being made on the ground.  Israel isn't just blowing up buildings for kicks.  They have to make a tradeoff in every single one of these situations -- either let the guy go free (to kill more IDF soldiers) or try to capture him with just ground forces (and risk him killing your soldiers) or just blow his brains out from the stratosphere (no risk, but also destroys a Palestinian apartment building).  The end result after six months of fighting is a lot of destroyed Palestinian apartment buildings.

[GeneralMacArthur]

This is all the more reason to not attack Gaza.

Of course this isn’t really about Hamas or the hostages, it’s about reversing what Israel did in 2005 and going even further.

Well, Israel wouldn't have attacked Gaza, if Hamas hadn't decided to start a war on 10/7.

Palestine doesn't get immunity from the consequences of their attacks just because they're weak and vulnerable.  Being so terrible at protecting your own people that any war you start will inevitably result in lots of them dying is not the invincibility star from super mario bros.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Any report that says "cease-fire deal" without specifying the details is being dishonest.

The fundamental conflict here is whether or not Hamas gets to continue controlling Gaza.

Hamas has proposed/accepted plenty of "cease-fire deals" where the terms are, Israel will completely withdraw its troops and the war will end without any conditions.

Obviously Israel is not going to accept any such deal since that is tantamount to an Israeli surrender.

Israel, for its part, has proposed plenty of "cease-fire deals" that involve, in some form or another, Hamas exiting the Gaza Strip.

Hamas has thus far refused to accept those deals.

This has has the result that Israel will possibly invade Rafah within the week and forcibly exit Hamas from the Gaza Strip by putting a bullet between their eyes.

But all this talk of a "cease-fire deal" without giving any of the terms only serves to mislead people.  Most people say they would like a cease-fire.  Most people also say they would like Hamas to exit the Gaza Strip.  These are two fundamentally contradictory things in the eyes of Hamas, who refuse to accept any cease-fire deal that does not leave them in power in Gaza.

You guys talk a big game about how much you care about Palestine, but also claim that the Palestinians are oppressed hostages of a tyrannical Hamas dictatorship.  So you should be upset about this!  You should want the Palestinian people liberated and Hamas expelled!  But instead you carry water for Hamas by lending credence to their malarkey claims of "Israel rejected the cease fire we graciously offered."

[GeneralMacArthur]

Bibi continues to insult America after we just gave him tens of billions.

If you look in the tweet replies, it seems like Ian Bremmer messed this up and he's digging in because that's what professional journalists on social media do these days.  Netanyahu was telling a story about what someone else said to him and Bremmer stripped it of context to make it sound like this was Netanyahu saying this.  Furthermore people are saying (I have no clue either way) that the Hebrew Bibi used actually refers to "the nations" rather than "the gentiles" and Bremmer apparently based his tweet solely on the YouTube translated transcript.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Truly we are all witnesses to the genocide of the Gaza welcome center sign