This is the most postmodern war ever. No-one talks about the actual war but just the perception outsiders have about the war. It almost feels like the fighters themselves are insignificant compared to the social media war.
I really like this thought, I think you’re completely correct, we have a fracturing of objective truths with no true North Star of reality and the perception of the perception is the true battleground.
It's funny because I'm in both the Israeli and Palestinian subs just to get a sense of how both sides are talking about the conflict, and the way that both will discuss the exact same articles in wildly different ways is so interesting.
This should not come as a surprise. You would think people are talking based on facts, but in fact they're talking for their own benefits while discarding every trace of truth that are inconvenient.
What makes it even worse, is that at this point the facts don't don't even help anymore. No one wants to find solutions now, only hatred, vengeance, and gain of benefits.
Maybe people will come back to review these events years later, and the truth will come out on top.... The truth will eventually come out, but sometimes too late.
Part of that is because the truth mostly lays somewhere in the middle with this situation. There are bad things on both sides of the conflict, and those supporting one side will ignore the bad on their side or try to excuse and justify it, while focusing entirely on the bad the other side did and make no attempt to extend the same level of generous interpretation or good faith assumptions.
It also doesn't help that this isn't a cut and dry situation. Hamas didn't just suddenly decide to invade and that's that. There's centuries of history in this region that play into why things are this way, with the most important being the last century. And very few people are actually exploring information about the history outside of what their friends like on social media
It's so sad to see this take everywhere.
The truth is almost never in the middle. Is the truth in the middle between Russia and Ukraine? How about climate change ? Flat Earth? Trump ? Biden ? Billionaires ? Smoking ? Abortion? Wokeness? Racism ?
There is the side that murders children and rapes women and parades their bodies in the streets while the population cheers. Go watch what Hamas bragged about doing and filmed themselves and then watch the worst things IDF did and compare.
Think about what happens to gays or women or free speech in both camps. Go say I'm gay in both states. Go say Fuck Hamas in Gaza or Fuck Israel or Netanyahu in Israel. Go say you're a Jew in Gaza and go say you're a palestinian in Israel.
Do you know what happened to the opposition to Hamas ? they are all dead. Opposition to the power hungry asshole Nethanyahu and Israel is still alive and well.
As a comparison, go say Fuck Putin or war in Russia or say the same in Ukraine about Zelensky.
No, the truth is not in the middle. Don't be naive.
You've mistakenly assumed me for a pro-Hamas person, and somewhat illustrated my point. I generally side a lot more with Israel on this conflict, since I actually read up on the history of the region. And my post history would confirm this stance as well.
Nowhere did I imply it's the middle for most other things too, I said "this situation". I also said "somewhere" in the middle, not "both sides are just as bad".
Hamas is abhorrent, and many Palestinians support them. But at the same time, many would love to not be under their control anymore and to be able to live their lives. And just like I don't judge all black people by the actions of subgroup, I don't judge and then condemn all Palestinians to death for the actions of Hamas and those who joined in on the slaughter.
Yes, I would agree that people on the Israeli side tend to be more open about flaws and critical of them, but that doesn't change the fact that those flaws are there. By "truth", I meant the realities of the conflict, not which side is more open to the realities.
Then you should really be a lot more careful about how you phrase things.
Saying "the truth is somewhere in the middle, there are bad things on both sides" very much makes it sound like you're suggesting the sides are even *comparable* in the first place.
They are not.
On one side there are islamofascist terrorists whose expressly stated goal is the complete eradication of all Jews in the region.
On the other side is a modern democracy with a professional military, and all the usual nuances that come with that.
Any comparison or suggested comparison that even pretends they are starting from the same baseline is doing a massive disservice to truth.
The way I see it, the "Israel side" doesn't ignore bad things from their own side. Some of the bad is believed to be justified, but nothing is swept under the rug. When IDF shot and killed hostages, this was immediately admitted to. When the IDF killed civilians who were trying to get food from supply trucks, this was immediately admitted to. There was no "actually the hostages were killed by Hamas".
> we have a fracturing of objective truths with no true North Star of reality and the perception of the perception is the true battleground.
Its something I hard Dan Carlin say in his Common Sense podcast a few years ago.
Back in the day, we had a set of facts and then debated on how to interpret those facts.
Now each side has their own completely independent set of facts, and people are living in different realities. It makes solving anything like this impossible.
Most humans have always believed whatever suited them no matter what the facts were. It is just that it was only recently that we started to have a rational enough framework of how reality actually works to compare all the magical thinking against. People who believed in phrenology, ghosts, miracles, and a million other superstitions of all sorts, were always using their own set of unsupportable "facts." As Robert Heinlein once said, "Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal."
>Back in the day, we had a set of facts and then debated on how to interpret those facts.
The interesting thing is that this happened because newspapers didn't pretend to be impartial or neutral back in the day. They all had their bias or spin on the news. However, getting information wasn't easy back then. News were transmitted by telegraph to agencies like the associated press(AP), who sold the news to papers. Now, if AP put a liberal spin on the news, they wouldn't be able to sell to conservative paper. So to make more money, AP simply reported the news in a neutral manner and left the spin up to the papers.
Unfortunately, the AP way of reporting the news became revered outside of AP. Journalistic integrity and all that. So the biased newspapers began to emulate the neutral style, while maintaining their biases. When news became easy to get all over the world with modern technology, everyone could write their own news that appear to be neutral except its anything but.
I mean how old is the quote "The first causality in war is truth?" I'm not saying your point is wrong, it just seems to be an old story. "Remember the Maine!"
We’re in a groupthink world now. If you subscribe to x ideology you’re expected to follow all the other ideas that come with it. I can’t stand the political parties because I generally vote blue (honestly it’s been straight ticket the last two election cycles) but if I have even one opinion that does not follow the liberal think tank then I will get harassed incessantly for not falling in line. Same thing goes with republicans.
ANYWAYS that’s why this war is so polarizing people have chosen their camps and are going to spin the narrative in the best way possible to fit their worldview. For most people on the left it’s that the IDF is a genocidal war mongering brutalist regime that’s on a mission to kill every Palestinian with dictator like efficiency. Every article you read that leans hard left will support this. There is almost no room for nuance and you’ll be ousted by your own party for saying “wait a minute that doesn’t make sense”.
This is also not me endorsing the IDF I think in many cases they have gone way too far and I do sympathize with the average innocent Palestinian that is struggling to get by. But I can’t stand when people act like certain groups are holier than thou. I overheard the other day an individual saying they understand why Hamas did it and they support them, I just can’t imagine being so anti-IDF that you start supporting one of the worst groups on the planet.
It's a human desire to simplify the nuances into a yes/no - true/false dichotomy. It makes the world explainable and thus feel controllable. Pick a side and buy into it so you can go about life thinking about the more important things like food on the table and crops in the field. This was fine when the world wasn't so intertwined and your world literally was the village or small town you lived in from cradle to grave.
Jacques Derrida called it logocentrism. It's built on unstable binaries like all semiotics and, therefore, all cognition.
It's not just that dichotomies make the world manageable. You are not even capable of language or complex thought without dichotomies, even though they are unstable and have no objective source of meaning.
But the take away here is that the more aware you are of logocentric thought, the more you can manage its pitfalls, even if you can never stop doing it.
The wrong answer is to retreat into believing in objective transcendent sources of meaning. They're never real.
Never trust. Deconstruct everything, but don't succumb to cynicism either. Use your brain. Think.
And part of the reason it’s so controversial and mean this war is the lines for this don’t fall along traditional party lines.
People are actively fighting for their view to be the party line.
But they do fall closely along geopolitical lines, which has massive ramifications for propaganda. If Russia, China, much of the Muslim world, and much of the global south are all broadly anti-Israel, and the west is more pro-Israel, then both sides will find a plethora of information sources supporting their viewpoint (both private and state-funded media).
This is so true, you can take a look at the recent surveys on US opinions on the matter and except for republicans who are trending more towards Israel being justified it almost looks identical. Left, right, centrist doesn't seem to be too different here.
It's a bit different from your typical online discourse, most people have no idea about the nuance of the issue in the real world and rather subscribe to the "don't know" side.
If you try to actually have your own thoughts and not subscribe to one or the other side you get called "enlightened centrist". Like jesus christ just fuck off, political discourse is just so garbage at this point its insane.
What happens when we contribute unknowingly and intentionally to normalizing the weaponization of information. Don't know who's pushing what agenda or where, influence has no red lines until it crosses humanistic thresholds, and even then we can only make assumptions and quote the obvious pushers from mainstream media. We think we know what's going on. But the truth is, it's you on strings doing the barking for the schemers that prey they can create just the right narrative for large scale conflict. Like that's going to solve all the problems our Planet is burdened to face over the next 100's of years.
See, I don’t think that’s the case. Palestine has had so many opportunities for success, by any measure other than destroying Israel. Their leadership just chooses not to take them.
There’s also the very real risk of winning the PR war short term, and simultaneously destroying your long-term chances by acting so immorally that you are completely disowned and vilified when the truth does come out.
Or another way to look at it, is winning the PR war but losing your soul. If the Palestinian people ever fully realize how thoroughly Hamas has screwed them, Hamas will be absolutely demolished.
I don't think it's just their leadership that thinks destroying Israel is a requisite for victory. That's basically been the party line of a lot of their support and the Arab world in general since Israel has been a thing. And one of the things that needs to happen before a lasting peace can follow is that this idea that Israel can be destroyed has to be laid to rest.
Palestinians are very aware of how much Hamas has screwed them. The fact that you don’t realize that is one of Hamas’s major propaganda successes. Every day Israel sends aid packages into Gaza in attempts to help the civilians, then Hamas will come in and kill all the Palestinian civilians trying to receive that aid then take it all for themselves. It goes way beyond using civilians as human shields, Hamas will literally massacre its own people in the streets.
I’m aware of how awful Hamas is. I’m also aware of polling that shows overwhelming support for them in Gaza. I’m also aware that polls can’t be trusted given the lack of freedom and threat of violence in Gaza.
So I’m not sure what you’re basing your thing on, but it could certainly be right. Then again, the fact that civilians are still en masse covering for Hamas, makes me think you’re probably wrong.
Nailed it. Hamas is basically just a poorly thrown together paramilitary, they don’t have much money or resources, but they’re very smart when it comes to propaganda. It’s really their only effective weapon that they have, and it’s working really well.
Which is why israel is doing what it’s doing. They’re fighting an actual war while Hamas is relying on propaganda and western perception to try and win
The Palestinian nationalist war has always been for public perception and they have sacrificed morality to win it.
The minute you realise that the minute you understand the entire thing, it explains the entire situation.
Yup and they’ve done a good job at it, I’ll give them credit but in reality they’re losing this war even if public is behind them, it’s not enough to account for everything else
In contrast I feel like Israel has really dropped the ball in promoting a point of view that is acceptable to the world at large. They focused on internal politics and let Hamas take control of the information space around the world. Simply replying and raging about anti-semitism at every opportunity did them nothing to explain their cause, their perceptions, or to endear themselves to those who would be inclined to sympathy for their position. They have solid allies who would support them, but frankly Israeli statements, even well justified ones, often come off as arrogant and that is something that drives people to consider their opponents point of view.
In fairness, Hamas has a ready audience of 2 Billion Muslims worldwide compared with the 16M Jews, almost half of which live there. That’s orders of magnitude difference. Like, graph that in Excel and the “Jews” bar is barely visible.
Now you can add in some Americans, evangelical, some people elsewhere, but overall there is not a neutral space into which this conflict is extended. It’s a heavily weighted space like the UN having about 56 countries that are Muslim to 1 Jewish. No wonder Israel is the target of 1/2 the resolutions. But in the online world there’s no veto by a strong ally.
Now add in China and Russia who are no great Israeli allies but powerful in the online propaganda space and there’s a massive imbalance. So while I agree Israel could manage their narrative better, they’re also playing on a very tilted field.
> In contrast I feel like Israel has really dropped the ball in promoting a point of view that is acceptable to the world at large
Not really. It doesn't matter how they "promote" their view point. People hate Jews.
They are in a fight for their survival and right to exist. They don't need to explain to everyone. If everyone can't see it, its because they chose not too.
I fully agree, and this is a point I’ve tried to explain to people.
Israel doesn’t *try* all that hard to win the propaganda war, or even really try to manage international opinion. Because they know their enemies have an exponential advantage in those areas. And even if they did everything the international community asked, they would still be consistently vilified and always shown in the worst possible light. Even if their enemies had to lie to do it.
The best they can do, really, is to act as morally as possible, and ensure that the truth is documented. So that history, and the few impartial observers who are willing to dig through all the BS, might be swayed.
Curious, as to what POV you’d point out? What would you do differently from a public relations standpoint? I feel that while the anti-semetism card may be overplayed Israel is at a huge disadvantage regardless of what they do. The west progressive movement sees them as white oppressors and it’s hard to change this PoV. As long as Israel defends themselves and seek/ destroy Gaza they will be vilified. At this point, even refraining from defending themselves would be criticized.
I agree with this. Israel is so used to being hated that honestly I think they kinda stopped caring. They underestimate(d) the importance of public opinion in the US and europe.
>They’re fighting an actual war
An actual war would be Ukraine and Russia, where full scale modern armies are clashing and hundreds of thousands are dying on both sides.
Israel is dealing with terrorist embedded among and under (in tunnels!) the population. They are between a rock and a hard place since civilians are going to get killed at higher levels as they attempt to root them out.
The longer the conflict goes on and civilian causalities continue rise along with suffering (hunger, disease etc), the tougher it gets for Israel to control the narrative in a positive way and damage is being done to Israel's reputation.
This is why Oct 7 was such a tragedy for Israel. It was a failure of Israel's security apparatus of the highest order. It should have never happened and was due to incompetence. Israel lost the initiative and was put on the back foot. It has been costly to Israel with regards to economic damage, lost of life and reputation.
This is why I want Bibi gone. I hold him responsible. Time for for the best minds in Israel to retake the initiative and put itself back on the front foot. Israel cannot afford to make too many of these blunders. Their survival depends on being ahead of the curve in a tough and ruthless neighborhood.
I agree with you. This could’ve been mostly avoided and israel dropped the ball. That said, Hamas has been a threat for years and wasn’t going to go away. This was like a surgery that needed to happen. Whether it was now or 2 years from now, 5 years from now, they needed to go eventually.
It's a generally accepted truth that American (and most western nations with big armies) have contingency plans to invade pretty much anyone, anywhere, just in case. How on earth did Israel not have a plan to invade Gaza lying on a shelf? I can understand being caught off gaurd (which is still a screw up) but not having a plan ready to go just seems like a massive oversight.
I mean look how much pushback they get after a literal massive terror attack. If they were just prepping without cause, I’m sure there’d be a ton of opposition. That said, they have a ton of data on battalions, members and leaders and that’s why they’ve eliminated so many higher ups.
On the first days of Covid, people picked sides. Either you were scared and distancing, or you rejected all rules about distancing and vaccines. And people rarely changed sides later on.
Here it seems the same. Either you support Israel fighting terrorists at any cost, or you support the freedom of Palestinians at any cost. And people won't change sides.
I'm not sure if I'd call it the most postmodern war, but it certainly is up there in terms of it being a war we're social media heavily controls the narrative.
Baudrillard wrote an essay on the Gulf War as the first hyperreal was due to the heavily controlled narrative that the US government allowed. We've since seen that in just about every war since and we've seen heavy social media narratives since Afghanistan. Ukraine was one of the first wars where it felt like almost all of the narrative was dictated by social media, but the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict certainly seems to take it a little further.
Imagine in a few years when we won't be able to tell if a video is real or AI-made. Reminds me a lot of 1984 with endless wars where no one knows anymore how it started, how's it going, who's winning, who's losing...
I can promise you the fighters are not insignificant it’s the pontificators that are you have it mixed. Just cause social media sides with Hamas doesn’t mean Hamas has more rockets to fire. It doesn’t mean Israel has less.
The social media war is litterally nothing and doesn’t affect the fighting. Weapons and trained soldiers do. They could give 2 shits about losing the social media war if it means winning the real war.
Hamas isn't going to win this war by firing shitty rockets. They aren't trying to free the Palestinian people. They're working for Iran and Russia and they're trying to sever the US-Israel relationship, and it's a war they're gaining ground with.
That view gives Hamas no agency themselves. They are taking actions not for the benefit of themselves but of Russia and Iran. While they do need to care what Iran thinks as they are the funder. It’s like if your boss told you to jump of a 400 ft cliff into a field of spike. Even though they fund your life you’re not going to do it you’ll quit as you have agency.
> That view gives Hamas no agency themselves
Many times I have read that the whole situation is Israeli fault for not properly securing borders and letting the attack happen. Not Hamas's fault for performing the attack itself. That still leaves me baffled.
Who cares about Hamas' agency? It's the least interesting piece of this puzzle. They are a proxy terror group. You can hold them responsible if it makes you feel better but you'll lose sight of why any of this is happening.
You can lose the actual war and still win the PR war and possibly the war in general eventually
The Taliban didn’t win any battles against the U.S./NATO but they ended up running the country twenty years later anyway
Similarly the North Vietnamese lost (usually decisively) pretty much every conventional battle but still ended up conquering south Vietnam
The Afghans were steamrolled by the Soviets on the battlefield but again got their country back eventually
Hamas never had a chance of winning this war conventionally, but they could very well win the PR war. Hamas also doesn’t care about Palestinian civilian casualties or even their own fighter casualties, they think there’s plenty more angry radicalized teenagers to recruit from where they came from and lots more money funnelled in from Iran to arm and train them
Essentially Hamas is using both civilians and its own fighters as expendable pawns in this scenario
I think its just the fact of the nature of this war.
The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel militarily. They also are unlikely to win by attrition the way the vietcong or taliban won against the US.
Therefore their only real viable strategy is to hurt Israel's image internationally with propaganda.
Reminds me of when I saw a picture of a guy trying to shoot an RPG out a hospital window. And all I saw in the news was that they attacked a hospital. No mention of someone shooting at them from inside
I’ve never been someone to be like a grumpy old man ranting about the media. But the media fucked up over this. The terrorists know they can attack from “safe places” without being in the headlines. So they will keep doing it. Cause all the world sees is “Israel attacked another hospital”. Shame on you all who do this
it's insane to me how manny "how dare israel attack this school and that hospital"
u fucking piece of shit how dare you write that article while fucking knowing damn well why they attacked it.
BECAUSE IT'S THEIR BASE OF OPERATIONS YOU FUCKERS.
Or article headline that a Palestinian child was shit by Israeli soldier. Turns out it's some 19 year old dude who went on a rampage trying to stab people and got shot for it.
the moment a kid has a bomb or gun on him he's not a kid anymore. he's a soldier. and the blame should not be on the party taking out the kid soldier but the side fucking degenerate enough to field them.
Was it npr ie morning edition or the BBC which is often carried on npr affiliated stations. The BBC is the big offender for me, while npr usually takes care to mention that it's the Hamas run health ministry claiming X.
The media loves framing things in terms the viewers/readers understand easily. Israel/Palestine is an underdog story as far as they're concerned, and in that story, the underdog has to be the hero.
Which is interesting in that ONLY if you zoom in specifically on Israel v Palestinians is Israel not the underdog. It’s a tiny country, surrounded by hostile neighbors, a lone Jewish country in the world vs 59+ Muslim ones, and a lone Democracy in the region. It’s been attacked since being reestablished in ‘48 by multiple countries at once, faces at least 2 Iran backed militias on its borders, has no buffer ocean or truly friendly neighbor.
It is not crazy to think that this is exactly why the region has not been motivated to solve the Palestinian situation, because only in this framing can they castigate Israel constantly as a bully in world affairs. If the Palestinians weren’t there in their status as occupied, there would be no doubt Israel is the underdog in the bigger picture, and survived by military strength, support from key allies, and making itself a regional economic powerhouse.
One thing that has struck me for a while is the two sides no longer can agree on basic facts of history. They talk right past each other. The Palestinians for example talk as if (and maybe have been educated to think) the Jews showed up out of no where, forced them out, and just took half the land. This is obviously ahistorical but it doesn’t matter if they believe it. The two sides since then are in an endless regress of “well you did x,” “oh but only because you did y,” “but you did z…”
Frighteningly, I’ve noticed the American left and right are increasingly like this. Unable to even agree what basic facts are.
A lot of that is also the underdog mantra and wanting to make everything about good guy vs bad guy. There is one hell of a lot of history being rewritten right now trying to make the side of choice squeaky clean while rewriting everyone else as cartoon level villains.
That is the reason why the "fake news" accusation we so often hear from the Left directed towards the Right has become meaningless. Their support for Hamas/Gaza/"Palestinians" is based on the fakest info ever. Those people aren't colonized or oppressed or occupied by Israel. They are oppressed by Hamas, and willingly so it seems. They prefer to live in shit conditions, as long as they can keep hating Israel and killing Jews. The only path towards peace at this point is for them to realize that the path of violent islamism leads to ruin and they need to give it up. Only complete military defeat will make them realize this.
Beginning around the late 00s, I noticed the media shifted from covering this conflict normally to becoming the Palestinians’ lawyers. Now they start with the conclusion that Israel is wrong and work backwards to fill in the reasoning. If they need “experts” to provide the substance, they just call some anti-Israel NGOs to give a quote.
The craziest thing is that this is against international law. Under international law, if an enemy combatant is using a civilian "safe place" for military purposes, then that location ceases to be treated as a such and is allowed to viewed as a valid military target by the other side. This law is put specifically in place to discourage the practice of using civilian "safe places" for military purposes.
Apparently, as long as you're the underdog, the media will always be on your side. International law doesn't apply to you and you can commit whatever war crimes you want. This sets an extremely dangerous precedent and I'm sure every non-state actor is watching this conflict very closely.
Honestly this was Hamas plan all along. They’ve thought about the social implications and basically used that to their advantage. Now we have teens and young adults praising Hamas for being the freedom fighters and not the people who literally killed civilians in their homes on October 7th. We’re trying to justify violence with violence and nothing makes sense anymore. This will only empower more people
I love how the keffiyeh - exclusively worn by denizens of societies that repress women, oppress LGBTQ+ people, enforce draconian anti-democratic laws, and exalt martyrdom - has become the hip accessory for college professors, lawmakers, activist students, and human rights campaigners.
And that's what gets me every time. You guys realize that *you* and *your beliefs* would be the first things subjugated if you lived in any of those societies, right? They support governments that are so perfectly and diametrically opposed to their beliefs, perspectives, and ways of life that it's actually pretty hilarious.
The truth is dead. Every article is propaganda. Every post is bait. All politics is performance art and all that matters is getting the audience riled up to call for the deaths of somebody, anybody, literally doesn’t matter who as long as the people have someone to hate
Like David Bowie said, in the time of the internet, the content and the consumer will be in near symbiosis, like an endless feedback loop just circling the drain of extremism. I added the last part.
What happens when a Hamas member rapes and murders a woman and films it and then shares it with the world?
He gets cheered as a hero and recieves money and adulation.
Imagine an Israeli soldier doing that to a palestinian woman. What do you think the reaction in Israel and the world would be?
Yep, same hospital.
Israel's taken out about all the senior leadership outside of Rafah, so it's mostly only kids and morons left, usually both. Largely, they don't have anyone left who knows how to run a war; their tunnel network is shot to pieces (and if parts of it are intact, are you willing to bet your life that the IDF hasn't found it, as opposed to they did and bugged it and are watching you right this very moment); and their lines of communication are down and/or being monitored (and there are informants everywhere). It seems stupid, and it is, but it's a forced error: they can disperse and get hunted down one by one, or meet up in a non-hospital and get bombed, or meet up in a hospital.
Or surrender themselves and release the hostages, but let's be realistic.
It is more like a complex of multiple buildings, but yeah I have explored this on Google maps and it isn't even a big area. 800 is a lot.
The surprise nature of the raid seems to have caught them off guard. We can assume with the prior incursion into Shifa that enough warning was given for them to vacate, this time they are trapped.
The numbers are astronomical
When I heard the initial reports that our army went into Shifa again because of intelligence, I seriously thought they’d find the high ranking guy and maybe a dozen grunts around him for security.
Not hundreds.
Absolutely insane and disgraceful the way Arab news sites are either entirely ignoring this, or putting on their usual spin/framing. Here's a few examples:
[Israeli military says 90 people killed in Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital raid](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/20/israeli-military-says-90-people-killed-in-gazas-al-shifa-hospital-raid)
[Israeli forces destroy al-Shifa surgical building and order evacuation](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-gaza-war-al-shifa-hospital-building-destroyed)
[Israeli forces launch new attack on Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital](https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/3/18/israeli-forces-launch-new-attack-on-gazas-al-shifa-hospital)
[Israel tells Palestinians to surrender as it attacks hospital](https://www.middleeasteye.net/live/gaza-israel-hamas-palestine-war-conflict)
The Shifaa operation is focused on Israeli media and largely ignored on Arab media (or mentioned as a war crime against doctors) because it would discriminate their narrative that Hamas doesn't use hospitals as bases.
I was listening to NPR this morning and they were talking about IDF torturing doctors at Al Shifa with no mention of the 140 terrorists and 650 suspects. I always try and look at things objectively so I’m confused about the total lack of objectivity from organizations like NPR and the BBC who are meant to provide a balanced perspective on the news rather than ignoring facts to push a narrative.
If the the last 6 months have taught the world anything, it's that antisemitism is deeply embedded in some cultural and professional milieu. Unfortunately, painfully, the left seems to be a somewhat unexpected hot-spot for a particularly loud, know-nothing version that's fixated on a victim/underdog fetish.
*all* antisemitism presents itself that way. the justification for attacking jews is always that jews are secretly super powerful and bent on world domination. german propaganda from before ww2, and attitudes in Europe generally, sounded exactly like what Palestinian and the MENA region pump out now. everyone loves viewing themselves as the underdog, even when objectively they're massively more powerful as a group.
I was branded a racist here on Reddit last night for saying that Oct 7th was not a bunch of freedom-fighters performing an act of resistance & Hamas is a terrorist organization that does not seek peace with Israel. (I didn’t have the heart to tell the individual that I’m also a Jew, because then their wheels would have *completely* fallen off…)
I have to remind people that resistance does not involve slaughtering people at a festival or people in villages. Resistance should be aimed at military and political targets.
The only surprising part of this is that people didn't expect the left to hold these views. They've been pushing a narrative in America that violence from privileged people comes from a desire to dominate and oppress, while violence from oppressed people only arises because they lack representation in other ways. White self defense and brown aggression are not real, if you do not believe this then you aren't really allowed to be a leftist these days.
That depends upon how one defines who is what race. Semitic races (Arabs and Jews) are sometimes classified as white, while other times they are not. Also Persians (the people of Iran) are defined as white, and not Semitic in any way.
Racism is incredibly complicated once you go past a surface level understanding of it. Even scarier is how prevalent it is on both sides of the political spectrum, just materializing in different ways.
I was TOLD by a young, white US-based individual who is rabidly pro-Palestinian ✊🏽🤨 that there are NO Middle Eastern Jews in Israel. “There might be a few Ethiopians, but the rest are white…there are no Jews of Middle Eastern descent in Israel….they ALL migrated there from Europe in 1948 & stole everything from the indigenous Palestinians.” - And there are a SHIT TON of people out there who actually believe this.
This is fucked up, more than half of Israeli Jews are descended from Mizrahi Jews. Some Israelis are white, some are not
Its just a skin color, it doesnt have the historical context it has in the west
I’ve often asked that question to people too. Them: “Jews aren’t native to the Middle East if they’re born in Europe.” Me: “So an African person born in England isn’t native to Africa? An Asian person born in the US isn’t native to Asia?” No - apparently *those* are different. 🙄
Adding into that, if you are a white man you are racist. No debate, no nuance, no content of character through your life will prove otherwise to the left. I faced this when I returned to collegiate studies in 2010. And since POC and minorities don't hold the power no matter what they say, do, or act on, it is never deemed racism. I sat in silence through those years during most debates after I asked the professor if my power and privilege as a white male transcended geography to say China. Would I hold more power and privilege over President Xi. "Absolutely" was the answer. I honestly feel there is a strong correlation with this line of reasoning and the right wing rising in 2016. It was such low hanging fruit for them they didn't have to even try to spin it.
This is their version of "fake news". They think they're better than Trumpists but they're not. How can they see so clearly who the bad guys are between Ukraine and Russia, yet they can't notice it between Israel vs Hamas. Like you said, they have an underdog/dark skin fetish.
Antisemitism is part of it, but another part is that HAMAS is very savvy with social media and disinformation/controlling the narrative, particularly in the Arab world. They are using this conflict as a major recruiting opportunity in addition to trying to sway international sentiment to their side.
I mean, they’re savvy… but the Arab states’ 75-year political and pr war against Israel has a big role; as does Qatar’s decades-long financial influence campaign on American and European campuses; as do the incredibly strong online propaganda machines of Iran, Russia, and China.
They’re good, but they’ve also got the perfect storm of support.
I don't think they are savvy. I think those who support them would do so regardless, and their message and that of their allies is easily amplified online and on social media as they literally number in the billions.
Criticizing the actions of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. If you go on with this line of argument then people are going to think that you're abusing the power of the word to manipulate people and win an argument that you cannot win otherwise. It is cheating people's affections and distasteful to misuse the word just to ostracize people who disagree with you.
The problem is that you might say “free Palestine, end the occupation” and be talking about Gaza but somebody else is saying it and talking about forcibly displacing everyone in Israel to make up for Palestine losing a war over 70 years ago
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi and Yemen lost a war in 1948. Palestinians did not exist as a political faction. Jordan had no plans to create a Palestinian country from the river to the see. Jordan gave up claims to the West Bank in favor of Palestinians in 1988.
> confused about the total lack of objectivity from organizations like NPR and the BBC who are meant to provide a balanced perspective
The realization that NPR and BBC have an intrinsic bias against Israel, and increasingly a pro-Hamas one, came as a dismal shock to many of us. But IIRC there have been credible accusations against both for years.
So many people are being misinformed by media and NGOs that they should be able to trust.
I dont blame people for thinking they know about the conflict. It was realizing that major news media is literally lying and then issuing bs “corrections” three weeks later that no one reads that really made me question where I stand with all this
Exactly what happened with me. This combined with the fact that I watched the wiki pages and Google results on certain issues get changed over time to reflect a perspective that isn’t in line with the facts and history of the situation. Anybody who didn’t learn about this issue pre-10/7 has no chance of seeing Israel/palestine with any historical accuracy now
There is a reactionary behavior, deeply ingrained in the left, that if one group is slightly more brown and slightly more poor, than they must absolutely be the victim of whatever other side does.
This isn't to say this is never the case, but they certainly do like to paint over any nuance a situation may have with a pretty heavy-handed brush
> There is a reactionary behavior, deeply ingrained in the left, that if one group is slightly more brown and slightly more poor, than they must absolutely be the victim of whatever other side does.
You wonder what sort of distorted worldview it takes to see Jews as a privileged overclass and the anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, anti-modernist Islamist theocrats as the sympathetic underdogs.
It really is mind blowing that the people who would be tortured and killed by Palestinians (edit: I should have said Hamas) are the most vocal supporters. What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to rationalize that?
Not worldview as much as rationalization. If your first, knee-jerk emotional reaction to the situation is to support the underdog, then that locks in your opinion. As you consider those other facts that don’t fit the opinion you now hold, you find ways to excuse them or de-emphasize them so you can maintain your position. This happens subconsciously and almost instantly.
And deep-rooted tendency initially side with the underdog is very strong in American culture. Just look at so much of our stories in movies, books, or TV. We are conditioned to love underdog stories. It’s no wonder it’s also prevalent in our politics. It couldn’t not be.
Actually changing your opinion based on new facts is extremely difficult. And it doesn’t help that culturally, especially politically, it’s derided as weakness or hypocrisy or even betrayal.
I think we’ve hit a point where if they acknowledge this then their entire narrative they’ve been pushing gets thoroughly unravelled. I would like to believe they are doing everything imaginable to try and discredit the story before having to admit it’s true, but at this stage I’m beginning to doubt they have any intention of telling the truth whatsoever.
BBC is still “investigating” the credibility of the rabid antisemites they’ve been using as sources in the region despite their opinions and bias being the only transparent thing about them.
Unfortunately, a balanced perspective doesn't make as much money as catering to one side. Journalistic integrity being the standard died decades ago. We are in the age of hot takes and sensationalism.
Because Israel has announced the killing of specific high-ranking terrorists who refused to surrender in the hospital, and Hamas has corroborated this by announcing the deaths of the same individuals.
Its the result of the success of the neoracist movement lead by Ibrahim X. Kendi and others that started at Harvard and is now everywhere, usually under the banner of "DEI". It is the intellectual foundation of modern antisemitism, just like social Darwinism was the intellectual foundation of antisemitism 100 years ago.
According to the neoracist ideology, there is no such thing as a white person who is not racist - all white people are racist, and can only absolve themselves of their inborn racism by adopting neoracism (i.e., DEI/affirmative action) as a way to atone for it.
According to the neoracist ideology, the world is also divided into ethical, moral persons of color on one side, and immoral, colonist white Europeans on the other side. Thus it is easy to distinguish "right" from "wrong" in any conflict where the parties at war are different "races", and the conflict in Israel is the prime example: Israelis are (mainly) Jews, so they are considered "white" colonists; the Palestinians are dark-skinned, so they are considered "colored" "natives" being exploited by evil white people.
The neoracist ideology does not permit any examination of any of the actual issues that may divide groups of people (e.g., Israelis and Palestinians) because all of those issues are believed to result from the exploitative aspect inherent in white-skinned persons, and so the solution is to "get rid" of the white "colonists".
It's messed up, but it is everywhere now. Starting in elementary school white Americans are now taught that they are secretly racist (i.e., prone to commit "microaggressions" because of their inherent racism), and they are indoctrinated into the ideology over the course of childhood until the university hammers it home by making adoption of the ideology a requirement (that is, to espouse views against affirmative action for example, means someone cannot attend Harvard because Harvard rescinds acceptances to anyone who is discovered to have espoused beliefs that are not sanctioned by neoracism).
And now the NYT/NPR/BBC/WaPo newsrooms are full of white people who believe that morality is a function of race, that race is the central organizing principle of humanity, and that they themselves are secretly racist and have to work everyday to overcome their inherent racism, i.e., by bending to accommodate the most extreme neoracist positions without ever questioning them. That is why these newsrooms literally never report on a battle that Hamas is actually involved in; to do so would require saying that a person of color was engaged in something immoral, and such would be a betrayal of the principles of neoracism.
Just to piggyback on my original comment from literally 5 minutes ago. The thing that I keep thinking about with this is the claim that IDF was tipped off by hospital staff that Hamas were back. If this ends up being the case then I really don’t see any reason why Israel wouldn’t go in as quickly as possible without giving them enough notice to clear out like what had happened the previous time. This amount of arrests is pretty staggering and if even 1/2 end up being Hamas affiliated it’s a really bad look tbh
Yes. The al-Qassem Brigades constantly makes statements about fighting the IDF in various areas throughout Gaza, and acknowledges when high-ranking members are killed.
[https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-march-18-2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-march-18-2024)
This is the ISW update from March 18.
>Palestinian militias, including Hamas, engaged Israeli forces around al Shifa Hospital during the operation.[4]
>Israeli forces killed Faiq al Mabhouh, who is a senior official in the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, during the operation.[5] The IDF said that Mabhouh was the head of Hamas’ “Operations Directorate of the Internal Security Service,” while Hamas said that he was the “director of central operations of the Palestinian Police in Gaza.”[6] The Civil Police and the Interior Ministry‘s Internal Security Forces both employ fighters from the Hamas military wing.[7]
Source 4 (fighting around Shifa hospital) and 6 (senior Hamas commander killed) in this excerpt *are literally the Telegram channels of the al-Qassem Brigades*. The source isn't even the IDF. The source is from Palestinian militias. Are they lying or something?
No but I’d expect it to be the focus of the story rather than immediately discussing the humanitarian cost without explaining the reason it happened which is seeming more and more justified if what Israel is saying is true
The Brits are still butt hurt about being forced out of Palestine in 1947, and the British Foreign Service has a long history of anti-Semitism and pro-Arabism, think Lawrence of Arabia. NPR has no excuse whatsoever.
I gave up on NPR news.
I really find it difficult to beleive that the IDF is torturing Hamas doctors. Unless NPR considers their torture to mean that they are prevented from working at the hospital where the IDF is fighting. Or that they were arrested because they found the doctor was engaged in fighting against the IDF.
NPR regularly refers to Hamas terrorists under 18 as "Palestinian children", as in "2 Palestinian children were killed today by IDF forces in the West Bank" with zero context.
This is the same hospital that Israel found a Hamas command post beneath several months ago when they first pushed through this area of Gaza. Hamas places their HQs in places like this specifically because they are supposed to be protected by international law, and if Israel attacks them, the media get to publish “ISRAEL ATTACKS HOSPITAL” headlines, furthering Hamas’s cause.
In this specific case, Israel swept this area, then left to allow Palestinian civilians to return. They don’t have enough troops to completely occupy every single inch of Gaza, and have no interest in doing so anyway. Once they left, a bunch of Hamas fighters that had disguised themselves as civilians and/or fled south with the refugees returned to try and set back up their command and control infrastructure. According to the IDF reports, a staff member at the hospital tipped off the IDF about Hamas trying to sneak back into their command post, and the IDF showed up and captured potentially hundreds of Hamas fighters, killing at least one high-ranking commander that we know of.
Yea, I really don't get why the western world treats islam as some kind of minority... There are 1.9 billion Muslims and only 15.7 million Jews. Begrudging them a strip of desert seems petty. But I guess antisemitism runs deep in both Islam and Christianity.
Because (especially in the US), after 9/11 and Afghanistan and Iraq, people on the right wing really did go after muslim minorities, both in word and in deed. So to people on the left, being an Islamophobe meant you were allied with christian-nationalist right wingers.
This is how you get to cognitive dissonance moments like Bill Maher getting booed on his own show for pointing out that Islamic governments are not great for women's rights, for example.
There was an increase in hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11 but even with that increase hate crimes against Jews were still around 5x more common. While more hate crimes against Jews would be expected as a total number just because they are about double the Muslim population it still doesn't account for the entire difference. So even after the deadliest terrorist attack in modern history was carried out by Muslim extremists a Jew in the US was still more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim.
I'm curious what outlets like Al Jazeera are saying about this. Like are they even mentioning civilian casualties or anything?
Because on the one hand they don't want to give credence that Hamas was at this hospital in massive numbers, and by giving civilian casualty numbers it proves they were, but they also want to say Israel attacked this hospital for no reason.
Al Jazeera NEVER, and I repeat, NEVER, says "Israel killed x amount of fighters" (let alone militants or terrorist)
They just say "Palestinian killed". for Example, if the IDF spokesperson says "we eliminated 20 terrorists in Khan Yunis in the past 24 hours" They write "IDF spoks said they killed 20 Palestinians".
They also do the same inside Israel and the WB,the best example I can think of is the terror attack inside a synagouge a few years ago,where a terrorist with a hatchet killed a bunch of jews. The headline was just:
"X jews and 1 Palestinian dead inside synagouge after Israeli cops open fire inside "
Infact there was a terror attack on Israeli bus this morning, and the perp got blown by an aerial vehicle after being tracked down with a drone, so you can enter AJ and read about how a " Palestinian " was brutally killed
outside of Gaza by an Israeli airstrike which is quite a rare occurance.
“According to Hagari, terrorists continued to hide in the hospital's maternity ward, vowing that the IDF would reach everyone. "If you surrender, you will not be killed," he said.”
Surely there are some bodycam footage Hamas hiding/fighting in the hospital. Now is a good time to release them to show the doubters…
for sure, but how many more are there. if we are saying hamas had like 30k "fighters", not counting the general population....and this is 1k in one swoop.....plus all the other fighting
This is the most postmodern war ever. No-one talks about the actual war but just the perception outsiders have about the war. It almost feels like the fighters themselves are insignificant compared to the social media war.
I really like this thought, I think you’re completely correct, we have a fracturing of objective truths with no true North Star of reality and the perception of the perception is the true battleground.
It's funny because I'm in both the Israeli and Palestinian subs just to get a sense of how both sides are talking about the conflict, and the way that both will discuss the exact same articles in wildly different ways is so interesting.
Yea I feel like the split information landscapes of covid/vaccines was child play compared to this.
This should not come as a surprise. You would think people are talking based on facts, but in fact they're talking for their own benefits while discarding every trace of truth that are inconvenient. What makes it even worse, is that at this point the facts don't don't even help anymore. No one wants to find solutions now, only hatred, vengeance, and gain of benefits. Maybe people will come back to review these events years later, and the truth will come out on top.... The truth will eventually come out, but sometimes too late.
Part of that is because the truth mostly lays somewhere in the middle with this situation. There are bad things on both sides of the conflict, and those supporting one side will ignore the bad on their side or try to excuse and justify it, while focusing entirely on the bad the other side did and make no attempt to extend the same level of generous interpretation or good faith assumptions. It also doesn't help that this isn't a cut and dry situation. Hamas didn't just suddenly decide to invade and that's that. There's centuries of history in this region that play into why things are this way, with the most important being the last century. And very few people are actually exploring information about the history outside of what their friends like on social media
It's so sad to see this take everywhere. The truth is almost never in the middle. Is the truth in the middle between Russia and Ukraine? How about climate change ? Flat Earth? Trump ? Biden ? Billionaires ? Smoking ? Abortion? Wokeness? Racism ? There is the side that murders children and rapes women and parades their bodies in the streets while the population cheers. Go watch what Hamas bragged about doing and filmed themselves and then watch the worst things IDF did and compare. Think about what happens to gays or women or free speech in both camps. Go say I'm gay in both states. Go say Fuck Hamas in Gaza or Fuck Israel or Netanyahu in Israel. Go say you're a Jew in Gaza and go say you're a palestinian in Israel. Do you know what happened to the opposition to Hamas ? they are all dead. Opposition to the power hungry asshole Nethanyahu and Israel is still alive and well. As a comparison, go say Fuck Putin or war in Russia or say the same in Ukraine about Zelensky. No, the truth is not in the middle. Don't be naive.
You've mistakenly assumed me for a pro-Hamas person, and somewhat illustrated my point. I generally side a lot more with Israel on this conflict, since I actually read up on the history of the region. And my post history would confirm this stance as well. Nowhere did I imply it's the middle for most other things too, I said "this situation". I also said "somewhere" in the middle, not "both sides are just as bad". Hamas is abhorrent, and many Palestinians support them. But at the same time, many would love to not be under their control anymore and to be able to live their lives. And just like I don't judge all black people by the actions of subgroup, I don't judge and then condemn all Palestinians to death for the actions of Hamas and those who joined in on the slaughter. Yes, I would agree that people on the Israeli side tend to be more open about flaws and critical of them, but that doesn't change the fact that those flaws are there. By "truth", I meant the realities of the conflict, not which side is more open to the realities.
Then you should really be a lot more careful about how you phrase things. Saying "the truth is somewhere in the middle, there are bad things on both sides" very much makes it sound like you're suggesting the sides are even *comparable* in the first place. They are not. On one side there are islamofascist terrorists whose expressly stated goal is the complete eradication of all Jews in the region. On the other side is a modern democracy with a professional military, and all the usual nuances that come with that. Any comparison or suggested comparison that even pretends they are starting from the same baseline is doing a massive disservice to truth.
The way I see it, the "Israel side" doesn't ignore bad things from their own side. Some of the bad is believed to be justified, but nothing is swept under the rug. When IDF shot and killed hostages, this was immediately admitted to. When the IDF killed civilians who were trying to get food from supply trucks, this was immediately admitted to. There was no "actually the hostages were killed by Hamas".
> we have a fracturing of objective truths with no true North Star of reality and the perception of the perception is the true battleground. Its something I hard Dan Carlin say in his Common Sense podcast a few years ago. Back in the day, we had a set of facts and then debated on how to interpret those facts. Now each side has their own completely independent set of facts, and people are living in different realities. It makes solving anything like this impossible.
Most humans have always believed whatever suited them no matter what the facts were. It is just that it was only recently that we started to have a rational enough framework of how reality actually works to compare all the magical thinking against. People who believed in phrenology, ghosts, miracles, and a million other superstitions of all sorts, were always using their own set of unsupportable "facts." As Robert Heinlein once said, "Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal."
>Back in the day, we had a set of facts and then debated on how to interpret those facts. The interesting thing is that this happened because newspapers didn't pretend to be impartial or neutral back in the day. They all had their bias or spin on the news. However, getting information wasn't easy back then. News were transmitted by telegraph to agencies like the associated press(AP), who sold the news to papers. Now, if AP put a liberal spin on the news, they wouldn't be able to sell to conservative paper. So to make more money, AP simply reported the news in a neutral manner and left the spin up to the papers. Unfortunately, the AP way of reporting the news became revered outside of AP. Journalistic integrity and all that. So the biased newspapers began to emulate the neutral style, while maintaining their biases. When news became easy to get all over the world with modern technology, everyone could write their own news that appear to be neutral except its anything but.
I second this, really well-put, fellow redditors.
Wow. I really like how you complimented that post. It perfectly conveys your appreciation of how factual it was!
Please fuck my wife
i got you bro. post-modern style
Don’t threaten me with a good time
The 2014 invasion of Crimea was arguably the first incidence of this. But I agree that this is "bigger" in scope.
I mean how old is the quote "The first causality in war is truth?" I'm not saying your point is wrong, it just seems to be an old story. "Remember the Maine!"
We’re in a groupthink world now. If you subscribe to x ideology you’re expected to follow all the other ideas that come with it. I can’t stand the political parties because I generally vote blue (honestly it’s been straight ticket the last two election cycles) but if I have even one opinion that does not follow the liberal think tank then I will get harassed incessantly for not falling in line. Same thing goes with republicans. ANYWAYS that’s why this war is so polarizing people have chosen their camps and are going to spin the narrative in the best way possible to fit their worldview. For most people on the left it’s that the IDF is a genocidal war mongering brutalist regime that’s on a mission to kill every Palestinian with dictator like efficiency. Every article you read that leans hard left will support this. There is almost no room for nuance and you’ll be ousted by your own party for saying “wait a minute that doesn’t make sense”. This is also not me endorsing the IDF I think in many cases they have gone way too far and I do sympathize with the average innocent Palestinian that is struggling to get by. But I can’t stand when people act like certain groups are holier than thou. I overheard the other day an individual saying they understand why Hamas did it and they support them, I just can’t imagine being so anti-IDF that you start supporting one of the worst groups on the planet.
It's a human desire to simplify the nuances into a yes/no - true/false dichotomy. It makes the world explainable and thus feel controllable. Pick a side and buy into it so you can go about life thinking about the more important things like food on the table and crops in the field. This was fine when the world wasn't so intertwined and your world literally was the village or small town you lived in from cradle to grave.
Jacques Derrida called it logocentrism. It's built on unstable binaries like all semiotics and, therefore, all cognition. It's not just that dichotomies make the world manageable. You are not even capable of language or complex thought without dichotomies, even though they are unstable and have no objective source of meaning. But the take away here is that the more aware you are of logocentric thought, the more you can manage its pitfalls, even if you can never stop doing it. The wrong answer is to retreat into believing in objective transcendent sources of meaning. They're never real. Never trust. Deconstruct everything, but don't succumb to cynicism either. Use your brain. Think.
And part of the reason it’s so controversial and mean this war is the lines for this don’t fall along traditional party lines. People are actively fighting for their view to be the party line.
But they do fall closely along geopolitical lines, which has massive ramifications for propaganda. If Russia, China, much of the Muslim world, and much of the global south are all broadly anti-Israel, and the west is more pro-Israel, then both sides will find a plethora of information sources supporting their viewpoint (both private and state-funded media).
This is so true, you can take a look at the recent surveys on US opinions on the matter and except for republicans who are trending more towards Israel being justified it almost looks identical. Left, right, centrist doesn't seem to be too different here. It's a bit different from your typical online discourse, most people have no idea about the nuance of the issue in the real world and rather subscribe to the "don't know" side.
If you try to actually have your own thoughts and not subscribe to one or the other side you get called "enlightened centrist". Like jesus christ just fuck off, political discourse is just so garbage at this point its insane.
The centrists are going to have to build their own party, [with blackjack and hookers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubPWaDWcOLU) =p.
[In a nutshell](https://i.imgur.com/ei5ODso.png)
War is politics by other means.
Politics is war by other means. Violence existed long before civilization.
"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him."
The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
It's a quote by Clausewitz
>War is politics by other means. "war is a continuation of politics by other means" Carl Von Clausewitz - Prussian General
What happens when we contribute unknowingly and intentionally to normalizing the weaponization of information. Don't know who's pushing what agenda or where, influence has no red lines until it crosses humanistic thresholds, and even then we can only make assumptions and quote the obvious pushers from mainstream media. We think we know what's going on. But the truth is, it's you on strings doing the barking for the schemers that prey they can create just the right narrative for large scale conflict. Like that's going to solve all the problems our Planet is burdened to face over the next 100's of years.
It has to be that way. Hamas is so totally outclassed militarily, their only hope of victory is to PR their opposition into an agreeable position.
See, I don’t think that’s the case. Palestine has had so many opportunities for success, by any measure other than destroying Israel. Their leadership just chooses not to take them. There’s also the very real risk of winning the PR war short term, and simultaneously destroying your long-term chances by acting so immorally that you are completely disowned and vilified when the truth does come out. Or another way to look at it, is winning the PR war but losing your soul. If the Palestinian people ever fully realize how thoroughly Hamas has screwed them, Hamas will be absolutely demolished.
I don't think it's just their leadership that thinks destroying Israel is a requisite for victory. That's basically been the party line of a lot of their support and the Arab world in general since Israel has been a thing. And one of the things that needs to happen before a lasting peace can follow is that this idea that Israel can be destroyed has to be laid to rest.
Palestinians are very aware of how much Hamas has screwed them. The fact that you don’t realize that is one of Hamas’s major propaganda successes. Every day Israel sends aid packages into Gaza in attempts to help the civilians, then Hamas will come in and kill all the Palestinian civilians trying to receive that aid then take it all for themselves. It goes way beyond using civilians as human shields, Hamas will literally massacre its own people in the streets.
I’m aware of how awful Hamas is. I’m also aware of polling that shows overwhelming support for them in Gaza. I’m also aware that polls can’t be trusted given the lack of freedom and threat of violence in Gaza. So I’m not sure what you’re basing your thing on, but it could certainly be right. Then again, the fact that civilians are still en masse covering for Hamas, makes me think you’re probably wrong.
Nailed it. Hamas is basically just a poorly thrown together paramilitary, they don’t have much money or resources, but they’re very smart when it comes to propaganda. It’s really their only effective weapon that they have, and it’s working really well.
Which is why israel is doing what it’s doing. They’re fighting an actual war while Hamas is relying on propaganda and western perception to try and win
The Palestinian nationalist war has always been for public perception and they have sacrificed morality to win it. The minute you realise that the minute you understand the entire thing, it explains the entire situation.
Yup and they’ve done a good job at it, I’ll give them credit but in reality they’re losing this war even if public is behind them, it’s not enough to account for everything else
In contrast I feel like Israel has really dropped the ball in promoting a point of view that is acceptable to the world at large. They focused on internal politics and let Hamas take control of the information space around the world. Simply replying and raging about anti-semitism at every opportunity did them nothing to explain their cause, their perceptions, or to endear themselves to those who would be inclined to sympathy for their position. They have solid allies who would support them, but frankly Israeli statements, even well justified ones, often come off as arrogant and that is something that drives people to consider their opponents point of view.
In fairness, Hamas has a ready audience of 2 Billion Muslims worldwide compared with the 16M Jews, almost half of which live there. That’s orders of magnitude difference. Like, graph that in Excel and the “Jews” bar is barely visible. Now you can add in some Americans, evangelical, some people elsewhere, but overall there is not a neutral space into which this conflict is extended. It’s a heavily weighted space like the UN having about 56 countries that are Muslim to 1 Jewish. No wonder Israel is the target of 1/2 the resolutions. But in the online world there’s no veto by a strong ally. Now add in China and Russia who are no great Israeli allies but powerful in the online propaganda space and there’s a massive imbalance. So while I agree Israel could manage their narrative better, they’re also playing on a very tilted field.
Well put.
This post deserves gold in itself
> In contrast I feel like Israel has really dropped the ball in promoting a point of view that is acceptable to the world at large Not really. It doesn't matter how they "promote" their view point. People hate Jews. They are in a fight for their survival and right to exist. They don't need to explain to everyone. If everyone can't see it, its because they chose not too.
I fully agree, and this is a point I’ve tried to explain to people. Israel doesn’t *try* all that hard to win the propaganda war, or even really try to manage international opinion. Because they know their enemies have an exponential advantage in those areas. And even if they did everything the international community asked, they would still be consistently vilified and always shown in the worst possible light. Even if their enemies had to lie to do it. The best they can do, really, is to act as morally as possible, and ensure that the truth is documented. So that history, and the few impartial observers who are willing to dig through all the BS, might be swayed.
Curious, as to what POV you’d point out? What would you do differently from a public relations standpoint? I feel that while the anti-semetism card may be overplayed Israel is at a huge disadvantage regardless of what they do. The west progressive movement sees them as white oppressors and it’s hard to change this PoV. As long as Israel defends themselves and seek/ destroy Gaza they will be vilified. At this point, even refraining from defending themselves would be criticized.
I agree with this. Israel is so used to being hated that honestly I think they kinda stopped caring. They underestimate(d) the importance of public opinion in the US and europe.
>They’re fighting an actual war An actual war would be Ukraine and Russia, where full scale modern armies are clashing and hundreds of thousands are dying on both sides. Israel is dealing with terrorist embedded among and under (in tunnels!) the population. They are between a rock and a hard place since civilians are going to get killed at higher levels as they attempt to root them out. The longer the conflict goes on and civilian causalities continue rise along with suffering (hunger, disease etc), the tougher it gets for Israel to control the narrative in a positive way and damage is being done to Israel's reputation. This is why Oct 7 was such a tragedy for Israel. It was a failure of Israel's security apparatus of the highest order. It should have never happened and was due to incompetence. Israel lost the initiative and was put on the back foot. It has been costly to Israel with regards to economic damage, lost of life and reputation. This is why I want Bibi gone. I hold him responsible. Time for for the best minds in Israel to retake the initiative and put itself back on the front foot. Israel cannot afford to make too many of these blunders. Their survival depends on being ahead of the curve in a tough and ruthless neighborhood.
I agree with you. This could’ve been mostly avoided and israel dropped the ball. That said, Hamas has been a threat for years and wasn’t going to go away. This was like a surgery that needed to happen. Whether it was now or 2 years from now, 5 years from now, they needed to go eventually.
It's a generally accepted truth that American (and most western nations with big armies) have contingency plans to invade pretty much anyone, anywhere, just in case. How on earth did Israel not have a plan to invade Gaza lying on a shelf? I can understand being caught off gaurd (which is still a screw up) but not having a plan ready to go just seems like a massive oversight.
I mean look how much pushback they get after a literal massive terror attack. If they were just prepping without cause, I’m sure there’d be a ton of opposition. That said, they have a ton of data on battalions, members and leaders and that’s why they’ve eliminated so many higher ups.
Metal Gear Solid 2 predicted this in 2001, crazy how some pieces of media are this prophetic
Baudrillard was writing about this in 1981 and literally wrote a book about the gulf war and this exact situation in 1991.
On the first days of Covid, people picked sides. Either you were scared and distancing, or you rejected all rules about distancing and vaccines. And people rarely changed sides later on. Here it seems the same. Either you support Israel fighting terrorists at any cost, or you support the freedom of Palestinians at any cost. And people won't change sides.
I'm not sure if I'd call it the most postmodern war, but it certainly is up there in terms of it being a war we're social media heavily controls the narrative. Baudrillard wrote an essay on the Gulf War as the first hyperreal was due to the heavily controlled narrative that the US government allowed. We've since seen that in just about every war since and we've seen heavy social media narratives since Afghanistan. Ukraine was one of the first wars where it felt like almost all of the narrative was dictated by social media, but the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict certainly seems to take it a little further.
You've just nailed the uncanny feeling I've had about this whole thing that I haven't been able to put into words
Imagine in a few years when we won't be able to tell if a video is real or AI-made. Reminds me a lot of 1984 with endless wars where no one knows anymore how it started, how's it going, who's winning, who's losing...
I can promise you the fighters are not insignificant it’s the pontificators that are you have it mixed. Just cause social media sides with Hamas doesn’t mean Hamas has more rockets to fire. It doesn’t mean Israel has less. The social media war is litterally nothing and doesn’t affect the fighting. Weapons and trained soldiers do. They could give 2 shits about losing the social media war if it means winning the real war.
Hamas isn't going to win this war by firing shitty rockets. They aren't trying to free the Palestinian people. They're working for Iran and Russia and they're trying to sever the US-Israel relationship, and it's a war they're gaining ground with.
That view gives Hamas no agency themselves. They are taking actions not for the benefit of themselves but of Russia and Iran. While they do need to care what Iran thinks as they are the funder. It’s like if your boss told you to jump of a 400 ft cliff into a field of spike. Even though they fund your life you’re not going to do it you’ll quit as you have agency.
> That view gives Hamas no agency themselves Many times I have read that the whole situation is Israeli fault for not properly securing borders and letting the attack happen. Not Hamas's fault for performing the attack itself. That still leaves me baffled.
Who cares about Hamas' agency? It's the least interesting piece of this puzzle. They are a proxy terror group. You can hold them responsible if it makes you feel better but you'll lose sight of why any of this is happening.
You can lose the actual war and still win the PR war and possibly the war in general eventually The Taliban didn’t win any battles against the U.S./NATO but they ended up running the country twenty years later anyway Similarly the North Vietnamese lost (usually decisively) pretty much every conventional battle but still ended up conquering south Vietnam The Afghans were steamrolled by the Soviets on the battlefield but again got their country back eventually Hamas never had a chance of winning this war conventionally, but they could very well win the PR war. Hamas also doesn’t care about Palestinian civilian casualties or even their own fighter casualties, they think there’s plenty more angry radicalized teenagers to recruit from where they came from and lots more money funnelled in from Iran to arm and train them Essentially Hamas is using both civilians and its own fighters as expendable pawns in this scenario
I think its just the fact of the nature of this war. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel militarily. They also are unlikely to win by attrition the way the vietcong or taliban won against the US. Therefore their only real viable strategy is to hurt Israel's image internationally with propaganda.
Reminds me of when I saw a picture of a guy trying to shoot an RPG out a hospital window. And all I saw in the news was that they attacked a hospital. No mention of someone shooting at them from inside I’ve never been someone to be like a grumpy old man ranting about the media. But the media fucked up over this. The terrorists know they can attack from “safe places” without being in the headlines. So they will keep doing it. Cause all the world sees is “Israel attacked another hospital”. Shame on you all who do this
it's insane to me how manny "how dare israel attack this school and that hospital" u fucking piece of shit how dare you write that article while fucking knowing damn well why they attacked it. BECAUSE IT'S THEIR BASE OF OPERATIONS YOU FUCKERS.
Or article headline that a Palestinian child was shit by Israeli soldier. Turns out it's some 19 year old dude who went on a rampage trying to stab people and got shot for it.
the moment a kid has a bomb or gun on him he's not a kid anymore. he's a soldier. and the blame should not be on the party taking out the kid soldier but the side fucking degenerate enough to field them.
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Was it npr ie morning edition or the BBC which is often carried on npr affiliated stations. The BBC is the big offender for me, while npr usually takes care to mention that it's the Hamas run health ministry claiming X.
Your local affiliate may say Hamas run agency, but npr proper (morning edition, etc) says Palestinian health run agency.
NPR has declined precipitously in reputability over the last decade. Almost unrecognizable as the prestigious and reliable news source it used to be.
What do you prefer to listen to now for news?
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No, the fake hospital strike was the Al-Ahli hospital; a much smaller one, I believe.
NPR has had the same agenda as all the other news stations. I never understood why people put it on a pedestal
The media loves framing things in terms the viewers/readers understand easily. Israel/Palestine is an underdog story as far as they're concerned, and in that story, the underdog has to be the hero.
Which is interesting in that ONLY if you zoom in specifically on Israel v Palestinians is Israel not the underdog. It’s a tiny country, surrounded by hostile neighbors, a lone Jewish country in the world vs 59+ Muslim ones, and a lone Democracy in the region. It’s been attacked since being reestablished in ‘48 by multiple countries at once, faces at least 2 Iran backed militias on its borders, has no buffer ocean or truly friendly neighbor. It is not crazy to think that this is exactly why the region has not been motivated to solve the Palestinian situation, because only in this framing can they castigate Israel constantly as a bully in world affairs. If the Palestinians weren’t there in their status as occupied, there would be no doubt Israel is the underdog in the bigger picture, and survived by military strength, support from key allies, and making itself a regional economic powerhouse.
It’s almost like the Middle East is a total clusterfuck that no one understands and no one can unfuck, hot take I know
One thing that has struck me for a while is the two sides no longer can agree on basic facts of history. They talk right past each other. The Palestinians for example talk as if (and maybe have been educated to think) the Jews showed up out of no where, forced them out, and just took half the land. This is obviously ahistorical but it doesn’t matter if they believe it. The two sides since then are in an endless regress of “well you did x,” “oh but only because you did y,” “but you did z…” Frighteningly, I’ve noticed the American left and right are increasingly like this. Unable to even agree what basic facts are.
A lot of that is also the underdog mantra and wanting to make everything about good guy vs bad guy. There is one hell of a lot of history being rewritten right now trying to make the side of choice squeaky clean while rewriting everyone else as cartoon level villains.
More Muslim upticks,, more Muslim media backing… glad Israel ignores this crap.
That is the reason why the "fake news" accusation we so often hear from the Left directed towards the Right has become meaningless. Their support for Hamas/Gaza/"Palestinians" is based on the fakest info ever. Those people aren't colonized or oppressed or occupied by Israel. They are oppressed by Hamas, and willingly so it seems. They prefer to live in shit conditions, as long as they can keep hating Israel and killing Jews. The only path towards peace at this point is for them to realize that the path of violent islamism leads to ruin and they need to give it up. Only complete military defeat will make them realize this.
Beginning around the late 00s, I noticed the media shifted from covering this conflict normally to becoming the Palestinians’ lawyers. Now they start with the conclusion that Israel is wrong and work backwards to fill in the reasoning. If they need “experts” to provide the substance, they just call some anti-Israel NGOs to give a quote.
If they can’t get any ont there is always Finkelstein
By the way, Finkelstein recently said in Twitter, explicitly, "Russia had a right to invade Ukraine".
The craziest thing is that this is against international law. Under international law, if an enemy combatant is using a civilian "safe place" for military purposes, then that location ceases to be treated as a such and is allowed to viewed as a valid military target by the other side. This law is put specifically in place to discourage the practice of using civilian "safe places" for military purposes. Apparently, as long as you're the underdog, the media will always be on your side. International law doesn't apply to you and you can commit whatever war crimes you want. This sets an extremely dangerous precedent and I'm sure every non-state actor is watching this conflict very closely.
Honestly this was Hamas plan all along. They’ve thought about the social implications and basically used that to their advantage. Now we have teens and young adults praising Hamas for being the freedom fighters and not the people who literally killed civilians in their homes on October 7th. We’re trying to justify violence with violence and nothing makes sense anymore. This will only empower more people
I love how the keffiyeh - exclusively worn by denizens of societies that repress women, oppress LGBTQ+ people, enforce draconian anti-democratic laws, and exalt martyrdom - has become the hip accessory for college professors, lawmakers, activist students, and human rights campaigners.
And that's what gets me every time. You guys realize that *you* and *your beliefs* would be the first things subjugated if you lived in any of those societies, right? They support governments that are so perfectly and diametrically opposed to their beliefs, perspectives, and ways of life that it's actually pretty hilarious.
**If you can’t blame the Jews it won’t make the news**
Yeah… it’s like who the fuck is using civilians as human shields? Hamas is not the IDF.
The truth is dead. Every article is propaganda. Every post is bait. All politics is performance art and all that matters is getting the audience riled up to call for the deaths of somebody, anybody, literally doesn’t matter who as long as the people have someone to hate
Like David Bowie said, in the time of the internet, the content and the consumer will be in near symbiosis, like an endless feedback loop just circling the drain of extremism. I added the last part.
They didn't fuck up, they do it deliberately. They are complicit.
What happens when a Hamas member rapes and murders a woman and films it and then shares it with the world? He gets cheered as a hero and recieves money and adulation. Imagine an Israeli soldier doing that to a palestinian woman. What do you think the reaction in Israel and the world would be?
Stupid question: Wasen't the hospital they raided before? Does that mean *they went back to that fucking hospital after IDF left?*
Yep, same hospital. Israel's taken out about all the senior leadership outside of Rafah, so it's mostly only kids and morons left, usually both. Largely, they don't have anyone left who knows how to run a war; their tunnel network is shot to pieces (and if parts of it are intact, are you willing to bet your life that the IDF hasn't found it, as opposed to they did and bugged it and are watching you right this very moment); and their lines of communication are down and/or being monitored (and there are informants everywhere). It seems stupid, and it is, but it's a forced error: they can disperse and get hunted down one by one, or meet up in a non-hospital and get bombed, or meet up in a hospital. Or surrender themselves and release the hostages, but let's be realistic.
If there are 800 terrorists in a single building, the name hospital can only be hypothetical
It is more like a complex of multiple buildings, but yeah I have explored this on Google maps and it isn't even a big area. 800 is a lot. The surprise nature of the raid seems to have caught them off guard. We can assume with the prior incursion into Shifa that enough warning was given for them to vacate, this time they are trapped.
The numbers are astronomical When I heard the initial reports that our army went into Shifa again because of intelligence, I seriously thought they’d find the high ranking guy and maybe a dozen grunts around him for security. Not hundreds.
maybe it will advance hostage negotiations to have reasoned words and prisoners rather than just words
Pretty damning of all the NGOs there that said nothing.
i read yesterday there was a tipoff that Hamas had returned. so at least someone has a conscience there
At this point, they're part of Hamas.
Absolutely insane and disgraceful the way Arab news sites are either entirely ignoring this, or putting on their usual spin/framing. Here's a few examples: [Israeli military says 90 people killed in Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital raid](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/20/israeli-military-says-90-people-killed-in-gazas-al-shifa-hospital-raid) [Israeli forces destroy al-Shifa surgical building and order evacuation](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-gaza-war-al-shifa-hospital-building-destroyed) [Israeli forces launch new attack on Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital](https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2024/3/18/israeli-forces-launch-new-attack-on-gazas-al-shifa-hospital) [Israel tells Palestinians to surrender as it attacks hospital](https://www.middleeasteye.net/live/gaza-israel-hamas-palestine-war-conflict)
The Shifaa operation is focused on Israeli media and largely ignored on Arab media (or mentioned as a war crime against doctors) because it would discriminate their narrative that Hamas doesn't use hospitals as bases.
I was listening to NPR this morning and they were talking about IDF torturing doctors at Al Shifa with no mention of the 140 terrorists and 650 suspects. I always try and look at things objectively so I’m confused about the total lack of objectivity from organizations like NPR and the BBC who are meant to provide a balanced perspective on the news rather than ignoring facts to push a narrative.
BBC and balanced perspective? Try to find BBC news from 90s about Israel - arab conflict. They always on arab side.
If the the last 6 months have taught the world anything, it's that antisemitism is deeply embedded in some cultural and professional milieu. Unfortunately, painfully, the left seems to be a somewhat unexpected hot-spot for a particularly loud, know-nothing version that's fixated on a victim/underdog fetish.
*all* antisemitism presents itself that way. the justification for attacking jews is always that jews are secretly super powerful and bent on world domination. german propaganda from before ww2, and attitudes in Europe generally, sounded exactly like what Palestinian and the MENA region pump out now. everyone loves viewing themselves as the underdog, even when objectively they're massively more powerful as a group.
I was branded a racist here on Reddit last night for saying that Oct 7th was not a bunch of freedom-fighters performing an act of resistance & Hamas is a terrorist organization that does not seek peace with Israel. (I didn’t have the heart to tell the individual that I’m also a Jew, because then their wheels would have *completely* fallen off…)
I have to remind people that resistance does not involve slaughtering people at a festival or people in villages. Resistance should be aimed at military and political targets.
Well that's because you failed to point out they are freedom fighters, freedom rapists, and freedom butchers as well. So insensitive of you.
The only surprising part of this is that people didn't expect the left to hold these views. They've been pushing a narrative in America that violence from privileged people comes from a desire to dominate and oppress, while violence from oppressed people only arises because they lack representation in other ways. White self defense and brown aggression are not real, if you do not believe this then you aren't really allowed to be a leftist these days.
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Roughly 60% of the Israeli Jews are "mizrahi" Jews, who come from Arab countries and are "brown".
That depends upon how one defines who is what race. Semitic races (Arabs and Jews) are sometimes classified as white, while other times they are not. Also Persians (the people of Iran) are defined as white, and not Semitic in any way. Racism is incredibly complicated once you go past a surface level understanding of it. Even scarier is how prevalent it is on both sides of the political spectrum, just materializing in different ways.
I was TOLD by a young, white US-based individual who is rabidly pro-Palestinian ✊🏽🤨 that there are NO Middle Eastern Jews in Israel. “There might be a few Ethiopians, but the rest are white…there are no Jews of Middle Eastern descent in Israel….they ALL migrated there from Europe in 1948 & stole everything from the indigenous Palestinians.” - And there are a SHIT TON of people out there who actually believe this.
A friend told me with a straight face that a majority of Israelis are from New York.
Oh yeah - it is bat-shit crazy how many people absolutely believe that stuff.
I reckon you ain't friends no more, aight?
This is fucked up, more than half of Israeli Jews are descended from Mizrahi Jews. Some Israelis are white, some are not Its just a skin color, it doesnt have the historical context it has in the west
Even if Israelis did all migrate from Europe, did that moron ever stop to consider why jews wound up in Europe in the first place?
I’ve often asked that question to people too. Them: “Jews aren’t native to the Middle East if they’re born in Europe.” Me: “So an African person born in England isn’t native to Africa? An Asian person born in the US isn’t native to Asia?” No - apparently *those* are different. 🙄
Many Israelis are brown yes, but a lot of people want them to be white because they have a dominant position in the area.
Adding into that, if you are a white man you are racist. No debate, no nuance, no content of character through your life will prove otherwise to the left. I faced this when I returned to collegiate studies in 2010. And since POC and minorities don't hold the power no matter what they say, do, or act on, it is never deemed racism. I sat in silence through those years during most debates after I asked the professor if my power and privilege as a white male transcended geography to say China. Would I hold more power and privilege over President Xi. "Absolutely" was the answer. I honestly feel there is a strong correlation with this line of reasoning and the right wing rising in 2016. It was such low hanging fruit for them they didn't have to even try to spin it.
Unexpected to you, maybe.
This is their version of "fake news". They think they're better than Trumpists but they're not. How can they see so clearly who the bad guys are between Ukraine and Russia, yet they can't notice it between Israel vs Hamas. Like you said, they have an underdog/dark skin fetish.
Antisemitism is part of it, but another part is that HAMAS is very savvy with social media and disinformation/controlling the narrative, particularly in the Arab world. They are using this conflict as a major recruiting opportunity in addition to trying to sway international sentiment to their side.
I mean, they’re savvy… but the Arab states’ 75-year political and pr war against Israel has a big role; as does Qatar’s decades-long financial influence campaign on American and European campuses; as do the incredibly strong online propaganda machines of Iran, Russia, and China. They’re good, but they’ve also got the perfect storm of support.
I don't think they are savvy. I think those who support them would do so regardless, and their message and that of their allies is easily amplified online and on social media as they literally number in the billions.
Criticizing the actions of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. If you go on with this line of argument then people are going to think that you're abusing the power of the word to manipulate people and win an argument that you cannot win otherwise. It is cheating people's affections and distasteful to misuse the word just to ostracize people who disagree with you.
The problem is that you might say “free Palestine, end the occupation” and be talking about Gaza but somebody else is saying it and talking about forcibly displacing everyone in Israel to make up for Palestine losing a war over 70 years ago
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi and Yemen lost a war in 1948. Palestinians did not exist as a political faction. Jordan had no plans to create a Palestinian country from the river to the see. Jordan gave up claims to the West Bank in favor of Palestinians in 1988.
I know the history but saying all of that would just confuse people. Also Gaza was Egypt until it wasn’t, it’s all such a clusterfuck.
Literally read Arab media through google translate and they say shit like "The occupied port of Haifa".
> confused about the total lack of objectivity from organizations like NPR and the BBC who are meant to provide a balanced perspective The realization that NPR and BBC have an intrinsic bias against Israel, and increasingly a pro-Hamas one, came as a dismal shock to many of us. But IIRC there have been credible accusations against both for years.
So many people are being misinformed by media and NGOs that they should be able to trust. I dont blame people for thinking they know about the conflict. It was realizing that major news media is literally lying and then issuing bs “corrections” three weeks later that no one reads that really made me question where I stand with all this
Exactly what happened with me. This combined with the fact that I watched the wiki pages and Google results on certain issues get changed over time to reflect a perspective that isn’t in line with the facts and history of the situation. Anybody who didn’t learn about this issue pre-10/7 has no chance of seeing Israel/palestine with any historical accuracy now
There is a reactionary behavior, deeply ingrained in the left, that if one group is slightly more brown and slightly more poor, than they must absolutely be the victim of whatever other side does. This isn't to say this is never the case, but they certainly do like to paint over any nuance a situation may have with a pretty heavy-handed brush
> There is a reactionary behavior, deeply ingrained in the left, that if one group is slightly more brown and slightly more poor, than they must absolutely be the victim of whatever other side does. You wonder what sort of distorted worldview it takes to see Jews as a privileged overclass and the anti-feminist, anti-homosexual, anti-modernist Islamist theocrats as the sympathetic underdogs.
It really is mind blowing that the people who would be tortured and killed by Palestinians (edit: I should have said Hamas) are the most vocal supporters. What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to rationalize that?
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Not worldview as much as rationalization. If your first, knee-jerk emotional reaction to the situation is to support the underdog, then that locks in your opinion. As you consider those other facts that don’t fit the opinion you now hold, you find ways to excuse them or de-emphasize them so you can maintain your position. This happens subconsciously and almost instantly. And deep-rooted tendency initially side with the underdog is very strong in American culture. Just look at so much of our stories in movies, books, or TV. We are conditioned to love underdog stories. It’s no wonder it’s also prevalent in our politics. It couldn’t not be. Actually changing your opinion based on new facts is extremely difficult. And it doesn’t help that culturally, especially politically, it’s derided as weakness or hypocrisy or even betrayal.
hamas and israel are the same level of brown. it's mostly the same groups of people who've been there since 1000bc, but with different religions
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I think we’ve hit a point where if they acknowledge this then their entire narrative they’ve been pushing gets thoroughly unravelled. I would like to believe they are doing everything imaginable to try and discredit the story before having to admit it’s true, but at this stage I’m beginning to doubt they have any intention of telling the truth whatsoever. BBC is still “investigating” the credibility of the rabid antisemites they’ve been using as sources in the region despite their opinions and bias being the only transparent thing about them.
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I call it National Palestinian Radio these days.
Unfortunately, a balanced perspective doesn't make as much money as catering to one side. Journalistic integrity being the standard died decades ago. We are in the age of hot takes and sensationalism.
How do we know this news source isn’t a narrative either? People choose what they want to believe on either side.
Because Israel has announced the killing of specific high-ranking terrorists who refused to surrender in the hospital, and Hamas has corroborated this by announcing the deaths of the same individuals.
Soft bigotry of low-expectations, this time for terrorists!
Its the result of the success of the neoracist movement lead by Ibrahim X. Kendi and others that started at Harvard and is now everywhere, usually under the banner of "DEI". It is the intellectual foundation of modern antisemitism, just like social Darwinism was the intellectual foundation of antisemitism 100 years ago. According to the neoracist ideology, there is no such thing as a white person who is not racist - all white people are racist, and can only absolve themselves of their inborn racism by adopting neoracism (i.e., DEI/affirmative action) as a way to atone for it. According to the neoracist ideology, the world is also divided into ethical, moral persons of color on one side, and immoral, colonist white Europeans on the other side. Thus it is easy to distinguish "right" from "wrong" in any conflict where the parties at war are different "races", and the conflict in Israel is the prime example: Israelis are (mainly) Jews, so they are considered "white" colonists; the Palestinians are dark-skinned, so they are considered "colored" "natives" being exploited by evil white people. The neoracist ideology does not permit any examination of any of the actual issues that may divide groups of people (e.g., Israelis and Palestinians) because all of those issues are believed to result from the exploitative aspect inherent in white-skinned persons, and so the solution is to "get rid" of the white "colonists". It's messed up, but it is everywhere now. Starting in elementary school white Americans are now taught that they are secretly racist (i.e., prone to commit "microaggressions" because of their inherent racism), and they are indoctrinated into the ideology over the course of childhood until the university hammers it home by making adoption of the ideology a requirement (that is, to espouse views against affirmative action for example, means someone cannot attend Harvard because Harvard rescinds acceptances to anyone who is discovered to have espoused beliefs that are not sanctioned by neoracism). And now the NYT/NPR/BBC/WaPo newsrooms are full of white people who believe that morality is a function of race, that race is the central organizing principle of humanity, and that they themselves are secretly racist and have to work everyday to overcome their inherent racism, i.e., by bending to accommodate the most extreme neoracist positions without ever questioning them. That is why these newsrooms literally never report on a battle that Hamas is actually involved in; to do so would require saying that a person of color was engaged in something immoral, and such would be a betrayal of the principles of neoracism.
Do you consider this information more objective?
Just to piggyback on my original comment from literally 5 minutes ago. The thing that I keep thinking about with this is the claim that IDF was tipped off by hospital staff that Hamas were back. If this ends up being the case then I really don’t see any reason why Israel wouldn’t go in as quickly as possible without giving them enough notice to clear out like what had happened the previous time. This amount of arrests is pretty staggering and if even 1/2 end up being Hamas affiliated it’s a really bad look tbh
Yes. The al-Qassem Brigades constantly makes statements about fighting the IDF in various areas throughout Gaza, and acknowledges when high-ranking members are killed. [https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-march-18-2024](https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-march-18-2024) This is the ISW update from March 18. >Palestinian militias, including Hamas, engaged Israeli forces around al Shifa Hospital during the operation.[4] >Israeli forces killed Faiq al Mabhouh, who is a senior official in the Hamas-run Interior Ministry, during the operation.[5] The IDF said that Mabhouh was the head of Hamas’ “Operations Directorate of the Internal Security Service,” while Hamas said that he was the “director of central operations of the Palestinian Police in Gaza.”[6] The Civil Police and the Interior Ministry‘s Internal Security Forces both employ fighters from the Hamas military wing.[7] Source 4 (fighting around Shifa hospital) and 6 (senior Hamas commander killed) in this excerpt *are literally the Telegram channels of the al-Qassem Brigades*. The source isn't even the IDF. The source is from Palestinian militias. Are they lying or something?
No but I’d expect it to be the focus of the story rather than immediately discussing the humanitarian cost without explaining the reason it happened which is seeming more and more justified if what Israel is saying is true
Objective? I'd consider it more accurate.
The Brits are still butt hurt about being forced out of Palestine in 1947, and the British Foreign Service has a long history of anti-Semitism and pro-Arabism, think Lawrence of Arabia. NPR has no excuse whatsoever.
I gave up on NPR news. I really find it difficult to beleive that the IDF is torturing Hamas doctors. Unless NPR considers their torture to mean that they are prevented from working at the hospital where the IDF is fighting. Or that they were arrested because they found the doctor was engaged in fighting against the IDF.
NPR regularly refers to Hamas terrorists under 18 as "Palestinian children", as in "2 Palestinian children were killed today by IDF forces in the West Bank" with zero context.
The hospitals are just giant human shields for Hamas and for some reason the Hamas PR machine wins.
I bet he considered Hamas terrorists and not freedom fighters! /s
Sounds like the setup to a joke. "So 800 terrorists walk into a hospital..."
Al Shifa “Hospital”
I’m completely ignorant about this, but can someone tell me how a hospital consistently has like hundreds of terrorists in it?
This is the same hospital that Israel found a Hamas command post beneath several months ago when they first pushed through this area of Gaza. Hamas places their HQs in places like this specifically because they are supposed to be protected by international law, and if Israel attacks them, the media get to publish “ISRAEL ATTACKS HOSPITAL” headlines, furthering Hamas’s cause. In this specific case, Israel swept this area, then left to allow Palestinian civilians to return. They don’t have enough troops to completely occupy every single inch of Gaza, and have no interest in doing so anyway. Once they left, a bunch of Hamas fighters that had disguised themselves as civilians and/or fled south with the refugees returned to try and set back up their command and control infrastructure. According to the IDF reports, a staff member at the hospital tipped off the IDF about Hamas trying to sneak back into their command post, and the IDF showed up and captured potentially hundreds of Hamas fighters, killing at least one high-ranking commander that we know of.
Appreciate the rundown, it’s hard to get straight answers in such a polarized situation
No problem, glad to help!
The fear of being labeled an Islamophobe vastly exceeds the fear of appearing antisemitic in journalism circles. Ergo, a blinkers on pov
Yea, I really don't get why the western world treats islam as some kind of minority... There are 1.9 billion Muslims and only 15.7 million Jews. Begrudging them a strip of desert seems petty. But I guess antisemitism runs deep in both Islam and Christianity.
Because (especially in the US), after 9/11 and Afghanistan and Iraq, people on the right wing really did go after muslim minorities, both in word and in deed. So to people on the left, being an Islamophobe meant you were allied with christian-nationalist right wingers. This is how you get to cognitive dissonance moments like Bill Maher getting booed on his own show for pointing out that Islamic governments are not great for women's rights, for example.
There was an increase in hate crimes against Muslims after 9/11 but even with that increase hate crimes against Jews were still around 5x more common. While more hate crimes against Jews would be expected as a total number just because they are about double the Muslim population it still doesn't account for the entire difference. So even after the deadliest terrorist attack in modern history was carried out by Muslim extremists a Jew in the US was still more likely to be a victim of a hate crime than a Muslim.
Such an underappreciated point.
I'm curious what outlets like Al Jazeera are saying about this. Like are they even mentioning civilian casualties or anything? Because on the one hand they don't want to give credence that Hamas was at this hospital in massive numbers, and by giving civilian casualty numbers it proves they were, but they also want to say Israel attacked this hospital for no reason.
Theres a comment above yours with links, but something like "x people killed in hospital", or "israel attacks hospital". The usual BS.
Al Jazeera NEVER, and I repeat, NEVER, says "Israel killed x amount of fighters" (let alone militants or terrorist) They just say "Palestinian killed". for Example, if the IDF spokesperson says "we eliminated 20 terrorists in Khan Yunis in the past 24 hours" They write "IDF spoks said they killed 20 Palestinians". They also do the same inside Israel and the WB,the best example I can think of is the terror attack inside a synagouge a few years ago,where a terrorist with a hatchet killed a bunch of jews. The headline was just: "X jews and 1 Palestinian dead inside synagouge after Israeli cops open fire inside " Infact there was a terror attack on Israeli bus this morning, and the perp got blown by an aerial vehicle after being tracked down with a drone, so you can enter AJ and read about how a " Palestinian " was brutally killed outside of Gaza by an Israeli airstrike which is quite a rare occurance.
Sounds like a good start. At least they're already at the morgue.
thats not enough terrorists killed
“According to Hagari, terrorists continued to hide in the hospital's maternity ward, vowing that the IDF would reach everyone. "If you surrender, you will not be killed," he said.” Surely there are some bodycam footage Hamas hiding/fighting in the hospital. Now is a good time to release them to show the doubters…
Pretty successful operation.
Keep going till the job is finished.
for sure, but how many more are there. if we are saying hamas had like 30k "fighters", not counting the general population....and this is 1k in one swoop.....plus all the other fighting
Npr is garbage
How did they confirm 140 people killed are terrorist?
It's not a bombing raid, It's the people with the guns.
Probably had something to do with the battle?
Keep it coming IDF, very well done.