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Please don't post in the flamewar style to Hacker News, regardless of what view you hold or how strongly you feel about it. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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We're talking about two different things. You're talking about something big and I'm talking about something small. Nevertheless, we need you to follow HN's rules when posting here, same as for any other user.

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I don't know these places all seem pretty bad but I'm not directly enabling their behavior as an American citizen and taxpayer.

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Is he really trying to move those goalposts? Or is he just voicing the most-common way for humans to process such events?

I'm thinking that 99% of people would feel horrible and/or morally responsible if they lent an axe to their neighbor Mr. Seemed-Nice, which he then used to kill his wife. Vs. far less so, if their neighbor bought his fatal ax from Amazon or Walmart.

This is exactly what I was trying to point out. You've made some reasonable points here, but that doesn't offer any evidence for the hyperbolic statement that Israel is pure and undiluted evil. Israel could be a bad place without that statement being true.

This might seem like a silly distinction to some but what I find depressing about modern culture wars is how "we disagree on these points" seems to morph into "you and everything you represent is terrible". Nuance matters.

You seem a bit over-focused on the literal truth value of that "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement.

Vs. 99% of educated and rational people recognize that as a bombastic/emotive statement. Arguing its truth value is like kitchen-testing whether a cookie recipe turns out worse if you replace "2C sugar, 1/2t salt" with "2C salt, 1/2t sugar".

And sadly, such bombastic/emotive mis-statements are far, far older than our modern culture wars.

It’s very possible that things were always this way, you’re right. My own perception is that politics has become more divisive and less respectful in my own lifetime, and I happen to think that social media makes this worse, but that’s admittedly just an opinion.

To the emotional statement: I think I’d get a reaction if rather than saying “I don’t think Go is a good language” I said something like “Go is objectively the worst programming language ever devised”. I get your point but if you feel emotional about something then say so - IMO the parent comment did much more than that.

>You seem a bit over-focused on the literal truth value of that "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement.

>Vs. 99% of educated and rational people recognize that as a bombastic/emotive statement.

That's a cope. Words have meanings, and being able to make and walk back on misleading/false statements with "I was being bombastic/emotive and it wasn't meant to be taken literally" absolutely poisons any sort of attempt rational discourse. "Israel committed war crimes" becomes not a statement about whether Israel broke international laws but whether you support Israel or not, "fake news" becomes not a statement about whether the news story was conjured from thin air but whether you like the story, etc.

Words have meanings, and "%" obviously means division by zero.

If you logically disproved the "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement - say, by finding one saintly-pure Israeli preschool teacher - would anyone outside the Temple of Ultimate Pedantry really care?

Vs. if you took that statement to mean "I am very angrily anti-Israeli", might you find it quicker & easier to communicate your own position? Or at least make it a bit difficult for people (who you obviously don't like) to deny your interpretations of their positions?

>If you logically disproved the "Israel is pure and undiluted..." statement - say, by finding one saintly-pure Israeli preschool teacher - would anyone outside the Temple of Ultimate Pedantry really care?

Do you think Trump supporters actually cares whether the stories he calls out as "fake news" were actually fake or just displeased the president? Or whether the election was "stolen", or he simply didn't like the way it was conducted?

>Vs. if you took that statement to mean "I am very angrily anti-Israeli", might you find it quicker & easier to communicate your own position? Or at least make it a bit difficult for people (who you obviously don't like) to deny your interpretations of their positions?

But why add all that extra stuff about being the most evil? If you just wanted to express his displeasure at israel, you could have just said "I'm mad at israel", or even "israel is evil". The fact OP went out of his way to say that "israel is the most evil" suggests that he thought he had something to gain from doing so, like adding the fib makes his argument more convincing or something. Same with Trump calling stuff "fake news" instead of just saying "I don't like this story about me".

> Do you think...?

Most don't. A few (and more of the swing voters) care somewhat. Good reason to not spend (waste) time getting picky on the details, eh?

> But why...?

Some combination of social signalling/performance - "look at my uber-ultimate loyalty to the anti-Israel cause!!!" - and an ancient human tendency to exaggerate for emotional emphasis. Anecdote: Back in the 1900's, one of my nieces routinely referred to her kid sister as the "spawn of the devil" and similar. Why? Until the birth of the younger, the older niece had been the baby of the family, and had her own bedroom. Plus normal sibling rivalry. Fast-forward 2 decades from that - and the two nieces were on perfectly friendly terms. The older one both got the younger one a nice office job, and was happy to have the younger one babysit her own small children.

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If the mass murder committed by Israel against the Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian people does not horrify you, then you don't have shred of humanity left in you.

Arguing about pedantic details does not change that.

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Yes.

Yes.

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Because when a nation starts believing its own myths of moral purity, it stops seeing the line between justice and domination. This is a dangerous line to cross.

That might be true but, even if it is, it's a far cry from the statement that the Israeli government is singularly evil.

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Israel stole US nuclear secrets to create their own nuclear weapons program, they killed American navy men, they destroyed 90% of the buildings in Gaza and very blatantly committed genocide in the process of doing so, Palestinians prisoners are commonly held without trials or charges i.e. they're hostages. Zionism literally cannot exist without them committing ethnic cleansing because everywhere Israelis live used to be Palestinian properties.

Honestly, what is your point? What are you seeing that the rest of us aren't getting? For the record, my mother's family is mostly Sephardic.

> they killed American navy men

This was about 50 years ago, was accidental, and Israel apologized and paid reparations soon after.

This is a pretty clear example of double standards for Israel - no other country gets demonized for friendly fire incidents.

None of the sailors that survived believe it was accidental. They claim it was a deliberate false-flag attack.

The claims that it was deliberate boil down to "they must have known because there were identifying marks", which can be said about almost any friendly fire incident. In reality, not every operation is executed competently. Plenty of militaries have shot down their own airplanes, for example, despite the existence of several safeguards designed to prevent that.

Alternatively, Israel may well have identified the ship and decided to sink it regardless. The USS Liberty was a SigInt ship that was well-known for monitoring wireless transmissions to hold nations accountable from offshore. Israel, at the time, was engaged in an internationally condemned and illegal military operation in the Golan Heights, and may just as well have sank it consciously to prevent the US from taking leverage of the situation.

We may never know the truth, taking Israel's Military Censor into account.

Your speculation seems a bit farfetched - there's no evidence that intelligence collected by USS Liberty was hurting Israel, and if Israel's goal was to avoid scrutiny, attacking an expensive asset of the world's superpower would have been rather counterproductive.

Israel captured the Golan Heights because it had been used to shell Israeli communities for decades, and that continued even after Syria officially accepted the ceasefire. It would be unreasonable to expect Israel to tolerate that sort of aggression; no capable military would do so.

> It would be unreasonable to expect Israel to tolerate that sort of aggression

It would also be unreasonable to allow Israel to colonize the annexed territory in violation of international law, especially if the goal is to reduce the exposure of Israeli citizens to reparation attacks. The Knesset isn't exactly known for reasonable decisions though, and I'm willing to extend that judgement to the upper echelons of Israeli leadership as well. Maybe I'm bigoted.

Again - evidence-based speculation would be of use if the IDF didn't directly censor all domestic reporting and investigations. An honest postmortum was never going to be an option, even if Israel bombed the Liberty with custards and coffee. Cui bono, you decide.

> if the IDF didn't directly censor all domestic reporting and investigations

This just seems like another double standard. What modern military doesn't censor reporting during a war in its own territory?

> An honest postmortum

Israel and the US settled the matter (with the help of substantial reparations) and went on to become allies. Why would they bother trying to convince anyone else?

And what would the convincing postmortum you're expecting look like? Some kind of third-party investigation? Can you name any military that willingly subjects itself to such investigations?

> What modern military doesn't censor reporting during a war in its own territory?

The ones willing to defer to an ICJ investigation? Hell, an IAEA inspection?

Both Dimona and the Liberty were critically reliant on America's infinite tolerance for Israeli transgression. Kennedy's stance towards Israel could have only convinced Johnson that resistance was futile, there's no way he could raise a finger if he did suspect foul play. The two nations were motley and often disagreeing partners united by a desire to mete out territory of neighboring petrostates. If a closed-door meeting ever decided that secrecy was the cost of keeping oil prices low, not a single American president would put their name on the line to speak up about it.

Not a damning accusation, sure. But it's also the same thing many Americans wondered in 1967.

> The ones willing to defer to an ICJ investigation?

What state has ever consented to an ICJ investigation that was focused on interrogating its military command or other sensitive military assets?

> Hell, an IAEA inspection?

If a state is an IAEA member, their nuclear program is (ostensibly) not a military program, so there should be no military secrets at risk.

> America's infinite tolerance for Israeli transgression

Even if we accept the extraordinary claim that the US would have tolerated what it knew was an intentional attack on an expensive ship, at best that means that we can't infer anything from the US reaction. There are plenty of other reasons to doubt that the attack was intentional. I.e. it's extremely difficult to imagine any risk-benefit analysis under which it would make sense for Israel to suddenly attack a neutral superpower in the middle of a war for its survival.

> There are plenty of other reasons to doubt that the attack was intentional

I don't buy them, especially given Israel's 1967 political situation. Fun discussion though, thanks for entertaining it!

You're putting it gently. They killed him for insisting on inspections of Dimona.

That's ridiculous to anyone who has read the slightest bit about the lengths to which Israel goes to avoid actions against the US.

It seems to track with Seymour Hersh's accusations of Israeli intelligence holding the CIA over a barrel. If the Mossad wanted to maintain their access to satellite surveillance over Russia and Syria, letting the US blackmail them could have jeopardized their cooperation.

Taking into account the lengths to which Israel goes currying favor with the US, pretending to show remorse for a sunken ship is nothing compared to the sham Dimona investigation they put together for the Kennedy administration. Lying isn't beneath their means.

The started off settlement by legally buying property for wealth (mostly absentee) landlords, who were non-Palestinians (they lived in other part of the Ottoman Empire).

America bought the Louisiana Purchase from France. France never had any meaningful presence in that territory; being incapable of defending the territory should America decide to take it anyway is probably a big part of the reason they decided to accept money for it.

Now my question: having purchased that land from France, did America have a right to eject the native people who lived there? Or did France in fact have no right to sell that land which, in all practical ways, actually belonged to the people who lived there?

Israel "bought" that land from people who had no legitimate ownership of the land in the first place.

That was a very different situation. That area had been under ottoman rule for generations. There was a long history of ownership.

The Ottomans had no legitimate right to sell that land out from under the people who actually lived there. The whole premise of Zionism is just one of many cases of European colonialism, and no more legitimate than any of the rest.

Why did the owners (under Ottoman law) not have the right to sell? How is/was that different from any property sale at the time, or now?

It wasn't their land, the Ottomans were just another imperial power.

(I know I'm talking to a wall here, getting you people to think outside of a legalistic mindset is impossible.)

I'm not trying to be specifically legalistic, just trying to see if there is some general principles here that you think apply outside this situation.

You see the rule of the ottomans as invalid, and this all (legalistic) property rights during that period invalid? That seems it would apply everywhere. How are property rights ever established? What does it take to invalidate them?

If I setup a $10b trust fund to buy up Texan land, I can't unilaterally invade Texas and build my ethnostate on it after I've purchased, say, 6-7% of it. That's the percentage of Palestine the Zionists bought before expelling the indigenous people in the Nakba genocide.

Likewise, if you legally purchase double-digit percentages of Indian, Chinese, Brit, Australian land, it doesn't give you the moral or legal precedent to expel the natives from the rest of their land and declare it your state.

You can evict renters from the land and move in yourself.

If they then take to violence against you, you have the right to defend yourself.

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Rwandan genocide was almost 30 years ago. There is nothing I can do to help there.

Israel is comitting a genocide and attacking/murdering everyone right now.

That is the crucial difference.

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What is wrong with helping Palestine? Are we to look the other way as the genocidal religious zealots in Tel Aviv commit mass murder?

> There is nothing I can do to help there.

What is wrong with "helping" Sudan? Your comment suggested that the only reason you weren't "helping" in Rwanda is that you couldn't because it was 30 years ago.

If you think commenting here is "helping" "Palestine", you need to recalibrate your assessment of the impact of HN comments on the world.

The genocide in Sudan is horrific.

It in no way diminishes the genocide in Gaza

Both countries should be sanctioned

Using the same word for the situations in Gaza and Sudan demonstrates a profound misunderstanding.

The same thing is happening.

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Oh wow I didn’t know that America was funding the atrocities in Sudan.

What’s also neat is that in America you can say “free Sudan” and not worry about losing your livelihood, but good luck with saying “free Palestine” and not getting swarmed.

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It's not just a numbers game. Many of those you've listed also only lasted a few years, while Israel's evil still continues after almost a century.

"Operation Cast Thy Bread was a top-secret biological warfare operation conducted by the Haganah and later the Israel Defense Forces which began in April 1948, during the 1948 Palestine war. The Haganah used typhoid bacteria to contaminate drinking water wells in violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cast_Thy_Bread

Not to mention that Israel has dropped the equivalent of several nuclear bombs on a tiny open-air concentration camp with no possibility to flee.

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Is Europe or the US engaged in slave trade right now? Israel is committing mass murder right now. There is a difference between past evils that can't be helped and present evils that we have the power to stop.

There is indeed a difference and I don’t think we’re disagreeing on that.

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We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle and ignoring our request to stop doing this.

(No, this is not because of your views; yes it works the same way for accounts with opposite views. It's because this is a failure mode for HN, and therefore an important line to draw.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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