Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[ZiprHead]

Israel is responsible for its actions. Israel substantially reduced the flow of food snd medical supplies into Gaza. It is insane to argue that blockade had no effect on well being. It is insane to argue that reduction in well being was not intended.

Let's look at that a bit more.

The claim was Gaza had no food.

Israel cut off the supplies while they switched over to the GHF approach, bypassing Hamas.

The wolf-criers said the population would be dead within weeks.

The people didn't die. Clearly there was plenty of food. It was just under Hamas control.

It doesn’t matter what claims were made. What matters are the actual effects of the blockade which was in effect for 3 months before any switchover. So unless you now making the argument that keeping food and medicine out of Gaza for 3 months did not affect the amount of food and medicine in Gaza, your responses have no relevancy. If you are, there is no effective response to such lunacy.

Quit it with the strawmen.

I'm saying that what Israel did did not affect the amount of hunger in Gaza. It just drew down Hamas inventory. Which is exactly what Israel predicted.

How could it not? Explain it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Israel is responsible for its actions. Israel substantially reduced the flow of food snd medical supplies into Gaza. It is insane to argue that blockade had no effect on well being. It is insane to argue that reduction in well being was not intended.

Let's look at that a bit more.

The claim was Gaza had no food.

Israel cut off the supplies while they switched over to the GHF approach, bypassing Hamas.

The wolf-criers said the population would be dead within weeks.

The people didn't die. Clearly there was plenty of food. It was just under Hamas control.

It doesn’t matter what claims were made. What matters are the actual effects of the blockade which was in effect for 3 months before any switchover. So unless you now making the argument that keeping food and medicine out of Gaza for 3 months did not affect the amount of food and medicine in Gaza, your responses have no relevancy. If you are, there is no effective response to such lunacy.

Quit it with the strawmen. Amount of food != amount of hunger--because Hamas is deliberately creating hunger.

I'm saying that what Israel did did not affect the amount of hunger in Gaza. It just drew down Hamas inventory. Which is exactly what Israel predicted.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Israel is responsible for its actions. Israel substantially reduced the flow of food snd medical supplies into Gaza. It is insane to argue that blockade had no effect on well being. It is insane to argue that reduction in well being was not intended.

Let's look at that a bit more.

The claim was Gaza had no food.

Israel cut off the supplies while they switched over to the GHF approach, bypassing Hamas.

The wolf-criers said the population would be dead within weeks.

The people didn't die. Clearly there was plenty of food. It was just under Hamas control.

It doesn’t matter what claims were made. What matters are the actual effects of the blockade which was in effect for 3 months before any switchover. So unless you now making the argument that keeping food and medicine out of Gaza for 3 months did not affect the amount of food and medicine in Gaza, your responses have no relevancy. If you are, there is no effective response to such lunacy.

Quit it with the strawmen.

I'm saying that what Israel did did not affect the amount of hunger in Gaza. It just drew down Hamas inventory. Which is exactly what Israel predicted.

How could it not? Explain it.

I inadvertently answered you already. The board wouldn't take my post last night, but this morning I added a bit of explanation. See the revised version below your post.

 

[laughing dog]

Israel is responsible for its actions. Israel substantially reduced the flow of food snd medical supplies into Gaza. It is insane to argue that blockade had no effect on well being. It is insane to argue that reduction in well being was not intended.

Let's look at that a bit more.

The claim was Gaza had no food.

Israel cut off the supplies while they switched over to the GHF approach, bypassing Hamas.

The wolf-criers said the population would be dead within weeks.

The people didn't die. Clearly there was plenty of food. It was just under Hamas control.

It doesn’t matter what claims were made. What matters are the actual effects of the blockade which was in effect for 3 months before any switchover. So unless you now making the argument that keeping food and medicine out of Gaza for 3 months did not affect the amount of food and medicine in Gaza, your responses have no relevancy. If you are, there is no effective response to such lunacy.

Quit it with the strawmen. Amount of food != amount of hunger--because Hamas is deliberately creating hunger.

I'm saying that what Israel did did not affect the amount of hunger in Gaza. It just drew down Hamas inventory. Which is exactly what Israel predicted.

You are misinformed. According to the UN, among children, the proportion of malnourished had almost doubled since March.

You have provided no evidence to support your counterfactual explanations.

 

[TomC]

You are misinformed. According to the UN, among children, the proportion of malnourished had almost doubled since March.

You have provided no evidence to support your counterfactual explanations.

You are ignoring the most fundamental problems for the Gazans.
Gazan leadership depends on the continuing suffering of the Gazans to stay in control. It makes no difference how much food and medicine is in Gaza if the GWM keep it from their human shields. Blaming the problem on Israel/IDF is not just ridiculous, it's flat out immoral.
Tom

 

[laughing dog]

You are misinformed. According to the UN, among children, the proportion of malnourished had almost doubled since March.

You have provided no evidence to support your counterfactual explanations.

You are ignoring the most fundamental problems for the Gazans.
Gazan leadership depends on the continuing suffering of the Gazans to stay in control. It makes no difference how much food and medicine is in Gaza if the GWM keep it from their human shields. Blaming the problem on Israel/IDF is not just ridiculous, it's flat out immoral.
Tom

The malnourishment rate among Gazan children is almost double it was prior to the blockade. It appears to this reader you are implying the blockade of food and medicine has no effect on the level of nourishment among Gazan children, the this doubling is entirely due to the efforts of a severely weakened Hamas. Please show with evidence how Hamas achieves such results. Without such a thorough, evidence-driven explanation, your response appears to mindless propaganda that only a Magatard would accept.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say famine claims always predicted mass deaths, and because there weren’t piles of corpses, the warnings were false. But famine isn’t a Hollywood battlefield. It’s kids wasting silently, organs failing, immune systems collapsing. You dismiss all that because it isn’t dramatic enough for your proof standard. That’s not analysis. That’s willful blindness to human suffering.

That's supposed to be a rebuttal?

Claim: mass deaths.
Observation: Hamas can't find said deaths.
Conclusion: Claim is garbage.

You trust Israel’s combatant death claims because “they’re usually within 10%,” yet dismiss every other source wholesale. That’s not skepticism. That’s loyalty masquerading as rigor. If Hamas lied about one hospital blast, that doesn’t erase every death report in a flattened city. It just gives you a convenient excuse to never look closer.

I look at history.

You say Hamas can’t “present the dead,” so mass death must not exist. That’s grotesque logic. Bodies don’t vanish because Hamas fails PR. They vanish under rubble, under siege, under destroyed medical systems. Your standard is simple: if it isn’t paraded before you on camera, it doesn’t count.

Hamas is very, very good at PR. If they don't have something to parade before the cameras and there isn't a good reason they don't have it, assume the claim is false.

You dismiss Amnesty and HRW as propaganda because they reported what you don’t want to hear. Meanwhile, you take IDF statements at face value as if military PR is pure gospel. That’s not consistency. That’s ideological filtering disguised as skepticism.

I've already showed you why I dismiss them. You understood it. Yet you go right back to pretending they're credible.

You claim Geneva “has no problem” with bombing civilian blocks over tunnels. Read it again. Proportionality isn’t just about hitting a valid target. It’s about ensuring civilian harm isn’t excessive relative to military gain. “Call ahead then bomb entire neighborhoods” isn’t humanitarian law. It’s just war sanitized for your conscience.

And you have never established that proportionality was violated. You're just using it as a magic word.

You say they “bent over backwards” to evacuate. Thousands are dead. Entire families wiped out in their homes. Calling it proportional just because someone made a phone call first is moral anesthesia, not legal clarity.

The average deaths per bomb in that phase of the war was well under 1. The only way that's possible is if they did a very good effort at evacuation.

And, yes, sometimes entire families were wiped out. That's not the same thing as blowing the tunnels, though. When a family is wiped out look at the man of the house--almost certainly they'll be one of Hamas' senior people.

Finally, you say you’re analyzing while I’m just “starting from Israel-is-bad.” No. I start from human lives mattering, regardless of flag or faction. You start from Israel’s innocence as a given. That’s why your analysis never changes – it’s engineered to never find fault.

No. Look at our discussion about the civilian casualty ratio. I pointed out that Israel does a far better job than anyone else and your response was to say I was blaming all the other western powers. That makes no sense unless your starting point is that Israeli casualties are excessive.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If we accept Hamas data at face value we still end up with Israel doing far better than the good guys. At face value we get about 1.5 civilians per combatant. Typical western performance is around 10 to 1.

You say Israel’s civilian kill ratio is “far better than typical Western performance” – as if mass death becomes noble once it’s below an arbitrary benchmark. That’s not ethics. That’s moral accountancy: body counts as branding metrics.

You still aren't explaining how their 1.5:1 is immoral compared to the typical 10:1.

You keep citing 1.5:1 like it’s a badge of honor. Tell that to the parents burying children. Tell it to the families wiped out in collapsed apartments. “Better than average” is not the standard for decency – it’s just the floor beneath which your conscience refuses to sink.

It is a badge of honor--job very well done.

You keep going with emotional arguments--do you not realize that you are basically admitting the facts don't support you?

Finally, you accuse me of blasphemy because I won’t bow to your calculations. You’re right in one way: if your god is moral relativism, then yes, I’m a heretic. I think no child’s death is excusable just because the ratio looks good on a Geneva PowerPoint.

Once again, you utterly fail to comprehend.

I'm not saying your words are blasphemy. I'm saying you are treating my words as blasphemy and not understanding them. They are sufficiently different from your worldview that you have very little comprehension, nor do you retain the information even when you do understand.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say I’m pretending solutions will work, but what you’re really saying is that nothing short of domination is realistic. That’s not pragmatism – it’s fatalism with a flag draped over it.

No. It's not fatalism to recognize that a particular problem is the result of outside forces.

You claim despair didn’t exist before 1948 or the Second Intifada. That’s a historical erasure so sweeping it borders on delusion. Gaza was under Egyptian military rule before 1967 and endured poverty, neglect, and refugee camp life long before Hamas even existed. You talk about despair like it’s a PR campaign, not a generational reality built on dispossession, siege, and daily humiliation.

"Refugee camp" life because they were kept that way by their Arab masters to use as cannon fodder. What I was referring to was their economy--amongst their peers (Arab nations without oil) they had the #1 economy.

You say you see symbols misused, so they lose protection. Geneva doesn’t work that way. The misuse of a hospital doesn’t erase the hundreds of real patients inside. The misuse of an ambulance doesn’t make every injured child in it a combatant. You’re just looking for moral shortcuts to avoid wrestling with complexity.

Read. Misused becomes a valid target. At that point it's treated as anything else it's like subject to the proportionality bit that you continue to misunderstand.

Finally, you accuse me of parroting Hamas lies because I insist on human rights as non-negotiable. That’s your tell. You’ve fused decency with enemy propaganda in your mind, so anything demanding restraint or empathy feels like treason.

I accuse you of parroting Hamas because you are. They don't care that you think they're evil, they care that you are attempting to protect them.

If you think dignity and basic protection are illusions, then the only spell here is the one you’ve cast on yourself – to see cruelty as realism, and resignation as wisdom.

You have an utterly unrealistic view of war. And an utterly unrealistic view of the evil Hamas readily commits.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say Geneva only mentions “diversion,” not combat. Let’s read it plainly: diversion for enemy use. Food diverted to fighters is not legitimate cause to starve civilians. Fighters eating bread doesn’t nullify the obligation to keep civilians alive. You’re redefining diversion to mean any aid Hamas touches – that’s not law, it’s loophole hunting to justify siege.

Hamas was taking it, using it to control the people and selling it to get money for their payroll. That is clearly military use.

And you continue to not understand that Geneva imposes no obligation whatsoever on the besieging power to address misconduct by the sieged power.

You claim “there’s no doubt about diversion.” Funny how certainty only ever points toward collective punishment. Show the proof that bread and insulin are systematically rerouted to weapons stockpiles. Otherwise, you’re arguing civilians should die because you can’t separate them cleanly from their rulers. That’s exactly what collective punishment is.

You really need to get a dictionary. You still don't understand "punishment" in the context of Geneva.

You demand where Geneva imposes alternative arrangements. Start with Articles 23 and 59, then read the ICRC commentary: if direct passage fails, parties must negotiate means to ensure aid reaches civilians. That principle is embedded in customary IHL: humane treatment isn’t optional because distribution is complicated.

Must negotiate. Hamas isn't negotiating. They are simply killing people for not going through Hamas. Once again, Hamas commits evil and you blame Israel.

You say diversion was happening, as if that ends the discussion. No, it begins it. The question is whether that diversion justified mass starvation. “Some is stolen” has never been a legal basis to cut off all aid. That’s moral cowardice posing as pragmatism.

Geneva merely says probability of diversion, doesn't even require it to have happened.

You argue Israel gets “complete say.” Wrong. Israel has the right to regulate for security, not to weaponize starvation as leverage. Your reading turns international law into a dictatorship’s handbook.

Again, your magic words that you don't understand. They aren't weaponizing it, they're simply interfering with Hamas weaponizing it.

You call me diseased for believing there must be an answer. That’s your confession: you’ve given up. You think because it’s hard, we’re permitted to abandon decency. If you truly believed there’s no answer, you wouldn’t waste time defending cruelty as strategy. You’d just admit it’s all about punishment dressed up as realism.

I didn't say diseased. But it is a serious flaw. You grasp at straws to find answers and end up taking wildly wrong actions.

You blame Hamas for exploiting kids, so you wash your hands of the starvation those kids endure. That’s not analysis. That’s moral outsourcing.

It's not my job to take the food from Hamas and give it to the kid.

You keep citing “dual use” as a blank cheque for attacks. Dual use triggers proportionality analysis, not immunity from accountability. You collapse complexity into excuses because anything more honest would force you to grapple with these civilian lives as human.

Magic words again. You think proportionality automatically makes Israel wrong.

You demand proof that Israel struck civilian sites. Your own military acknowledged airstrikes that hit schools and hospitals later found not to contain Hamas infrastructure. You dismiss Israeli apologies as PR, but happily cite IDF claims when they suit you. That’s not skepticism. It’s selective trust to maintain your moral comfort.

Strawman.

You're saying "infrastructure". Note that that does not mean they did not contain Hamas.

The study showed radicalization correlates with oppression – not that oppression is the only factor. My point wasn’t that Palestinians radicalize because Israel oppresses them, but that oppression fuels radicalization. Your analogy to incels collapses because incels radicalize despite privilege, while Palestinians radicalize under siege and daily violence. That’s not the same psychology. That’s comparing loneliness to military occupation.

And you fail to understand.

There unquestionably is a relationship. That does not prove that it's the only path, nor does it prove the oppression is real.

Gazans radicalize because that's what their schools teach.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You keep calling death counts “irrelevant” because they don’t affect your strategy conclusions. But for everyone under the rubble, they are the only reality. Saying “it’s irrelevant” isn’t analysis – it’s moral disengagement repackaged as pragmatism.

I say they are irrelevant because even if you accept the Hamas numbers it doesn't prove what you think it proves. I believe reality lies somewhere between the Israeli combatant count of 20,000 and the Hamas count of 60,000. But no value in this range makes any difference in evaluating the war, so it doesn't matter.

I’m not blaming Israel for that misfire. I’m pointing out your tactic: one exposed lie becomes your license to dismiss every death report. You obsess over timestamps while ignoring the broader reality – civilians are dying daily, with or without that hospital strike. You use one fraudulent claim to wash your hands of every real corpse.

Your broader reality is standing on a house of illusionary cards.

I obsess over timestamps because they show a video that purports to be of an event, but does not show the time at which the event happened. That's clear evidence they didn't care about the truth. And they should have somebody who knows a little bit about war doing the coverage for war--they would have known that there's no weapon in existence that could have done it.

So every local medic, fixer, morgue worker, and NGO staffer is lying out of fear? That’s convenient. You erase every single source as tainted so nothing can ever challenge your narrative. That isn’t realism. It’s selective blindness.

Yes, they are lying out of fear. What's so hard to understand about that? To go on record telling the truth would get you killed.

No, I think you’re redefining them out of civilian status to justify anything. Birth registrars, sewage workers, teachers – these aren’t valid targets under any law. Calling them “underlings” doesn’t erase their humanity.

And nobody's going to be shooting at them, either.

And when cutting Hamas control means children starve with no replacement in place, what do you call that outcome? Strategic brilliance? Because from the outside, it just looks like collective punishment dressed as policy.

So the evil can prevail by killing kids.

You treat proportionality as a death ratio when it also weighs alternatives and foreseeability – tests you ignore. On intent, you claim civilians are hit by accident every time, as if near-total aerial surveillance produces permanent accidents. You dismiss alternatives because they’d require giving up total control. That isn’t rigor. It’s moral laziness.

Magic words with no relevance.

And it's not by accident, it by Hamas intent.

No, satellites identify burial activity which field teams then corroborate. You dismiss all triangulated evidence because partial proof is still proof – and your worldview can’t tolerate even that crack in certainty.

And you think there are field teams? What are you smoking?!

10/7 was catastrophic. Nothing I’ve said denies that. But your logic stops there: Hamas committed an atrocity, therefore any scale of civilian death in response is justified. That’s not strategy. That’s moral vengeance. Both can be true: Hamas is guilty, and Israel is choosing mass suffering. You refuse to hold both truths.

You fail to understand war.

Israel is free to continue the war against Hamas so long as Hamas does not surrender. And Israel is expected to do as good a job as possible at avoiding killing civilians. But there is no bag limit. The total dead proves nothing.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Yes, Hamas exploits civilian deaths. But your quick “some of them, yes, as Hamas intended” shrug is exactly the problem. You reduce thousands of lives to Hamas’s PR strategy, as if that erases the reality of what bombs actually do. A body isn’t less dead because your enemy benefits from it.

I don't reduce them to a PR strategy. I recognize them for what they are: the biggest weapon Hamas has.

You say he meant minimizing civilian casualties. Fine. But if “minimizing civilian casualties” still means thousands dead, half the population displaced, and children dying of starvation and trauma, then your moral baseline is broken. Calling that “impressive” just reveals how little human cost factors into your praise.

And you continue to baa for Hamas.

We have one acknowledged medical case.
We have one AI "case".

Where's the starvation???

You keep telling me I don’t realize how awful war can be. I do. I just refuse to accept that “war is awful” automatically justifies any level of atrocity. Your logic boils down to: war is hell, so let’s stop counting the burned. That isn’t realism. It’s moral surrender rebranded as clarity.

You realize your position amounts to granting victory to whoever kills as many of their people as they can? What do you think this is, Pandemic?

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You ask how you’re supposed to have an alternative. That’s the point. You’ve surrendered to the idea that cruelty is the only path left. You talk about “the leftist trap” of believing solutions exist, as if searching for ways to end mass death is naïve. No – what’s naïve is thinking perpetual siege and bombardment will produce anything but deeper cycles of violence. Iran is a player, yes, but blaming them for everything just masks that Israel still chooses its methods. Fatalism isn’t realism. It’s just despair masquerading as analysis.

Israel chooses from amongst the options that exist. You want to deny them any defense options, just let Hamas bleed them to death because you can't face reality.

You insist I’m misrepresenting you, but your words are clear: “civilian deaths don’t matter because they’re the wrong yardstick.” That’s not a distortion. That’s your own admission that human cost isn’t part of your moral calculus. If you don’t like what your words reveal, change them – don’t blame others for hearing exactly what you’re saying.

NHC

Context!

I said civilian deaths do not matter for proving wrongdoing. Not that they don't matter in general.

You are looking at lots of deaths and proclaiming Israel must be wrong. Your "solution" is to reward genocide.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say Hamas uses aid as income and control, and that justifies starving civilians to break their grip. But punishing an entire population to weaken rulers is the very definition of collective punishment. You can’t bomb bakeries, block flour trucks, and cut off water then call it “humanitarian strategy.” Direct distribution isn’t happening at scale – children are still starving. That isn’t moral precision. It’s coercion by starvation.

More magic words. Your spells don't work.

You ask how to measure proportionality if not with body ratios. Simple: by asking whether striking a target offers concrete, direct military advantage significant enough to outweigh foreseeable civilian harm. If destroying one tunnel shaft collapses an apartment block, is that shaft worth fifty civilians? That’s proportionality analysis. Reducing it to “combatant kill counts vs civilians” is moral accountancy, not ethical warfare.

And we have no ability to evaluate this, making it a basically useless metric.

And your ass isn't a useful source of data. Got an example of one apartment that killed 50 civilians? And if you do do you have evidence that Hamas wasn't shooting those who tried to leave?

You say I don’t understand war because I refuse to exempt Western militaries from critique. That’s revealing. You think if a standard indicts your side, the standard is flawed. I think if a standard indicts your side, maybe your side needs to change. That’s the difference between moral reasoning and tribal defense.

You are the one imposing the standard.

You claim I have zero evidence of wrongdoing in hospital strikes. Multiple independent investigations, including by UN agencies and humanitarian groups, documented attacks lacking proper verification or carried out despite warnings of patients and staff present. You dismiss them all as biased because acknowledging them would force you to confront the reality that even justified targets don’t erase obligations to protect the innocent around them. Your blanket denial isn’t rigor. It’s reflex.

"Independent investigations". Stop there, I've already shown there are none.

And what's an attack "lacking proper verification"?? Until some time long in the future when all the intel is laid out the concept is meaningless.
"Warnings of patients and staff present"--human shields. And note that warning of their presence doesn't mean the attack was improper.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You say the hostage list proves Hamas doesn’t care about its people. True – but your broader argument treats their list as proof of guilt for everyone named. That’s my point. Hamas’s depravity doesn’t transform their propaganda into a court ruling. You keep using their demands as a moral shortcut to erase due process entirely.

Yes, I treat it as proof. Hamas knows if they're terrorists or common criminals, why should I question their naming one as a terrorist?

You admit the world doesn’t call state violence terrorism but dismiss it as a semantic quirk rather than a moral inconsistency. You ask for relevance? The relevance is simple: your definitions of terrorism and legitimacy change depending on who wields the gun. That’s not justice. That’s selective outrage.

I disagree with the exclusion. I believe state actions can be terrorism.

You claim I just want to “give Hamas what it wants.” No. I want civilians not to be collectively punished for what Hamas wants. If your justice system mirrors Hamas’s disregard for civilian life, what exactly are you defending?

What you want is to make conditions such that Hamas is happy and quits killing it's people.

You ask what act I meant regarding perfidy. I was addressing your sweeping argument that Hamas’s use of civilian disguise voids protections for all civilians in Gaza. Under Geneva, perfidy strips protection for direct misuse, not for everyone under the same flag. That distinction matters if law matters.

And I'm not understanding the relevance. Hamas doesn't even have a combat uniform, they're automatically guilty of perfidy.

You pivot from one debunked photo to dismissing mass graves altogether. The claim about mass graves under Israeli strikes has been documented by multiple field teams. Whether one photo showed Hamas burials doesn’t negate other burial sites verified by aid groups. You keep grasping for any flaw to reject the entire record.

When the poster boy for something is shown to unquestionably be false then I assume the rest of it is also false.

You say pre-1948 land purchases weren’t occupation. Technically they weren’t under Israeli occupation – they were under British colonial rule. Purchases enforced through colonial frameworks of land tenure, eviction, and policing aren’t neutral market transactions. Legality imposed by empire isn’t justice to those displaced by it.

As you say--British. Not Israeli. What's your evidence that they aren't neutral market transactions? Who was even in a position to apply pressure?

You ask what wasn’t published in the Camp David offers. Maps were selectively released, and core proposals remained off-record to shape public perception. Regardless, even leaked terms showed fragmented cantons, continued border control, and security vetoes that preserved Israeli supremacy while granting administrative autonomy. That’s why Arafat walked. It wasn’t dignity. It was subordination rebranded.

There is no way Israel is going to tolerate a militarized Palestine. That's just a recipe for a bigger war.

You say “stop funding terror” is the answer but admit you can’t do it. That’s not an answer. That’s resignation disguised as solution. You keep defining Palestinians purely as pawns of foreign funding rather than people with grievances rooted in decades of dispossession, blockade, and military rule. If you see them only as cannon fodder, your proposed “solutions” will always be about managing bodies, not resolving the conflict that produces them.

Your answer is Holocaust 2.0.

That won't bring peace, either, because they'll just turn to other targets.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't believe they can be prevented. The goal is minimizing.

....and you are pissing on about NoHolyCows 'plan' when you admit the future violence is a fait accompli.

That's not a rebuttal. His answer is to baa to Hamas and let them continue the genocide.

I think, in hindsight, Netanyahu's response to 10/7 has been a lot more cerebral than first understood, regarding Iran. Israel put into place a plan that took out Hezbollah and generally weakened the Houthis to a point where they were capable of then going on the offensive directly in Iran, with much less risk at home. That said, it has been over 18 months of attacks on Gaza, which doesn't appear to have been remotely as guided by intricate planning as the staged responses by the IDF on the other targets.

Nothing that Israel did created a situation where they could take the offensive to Iran.

Okay, you can go on thinking that the IDF and Mossad have no fucking clue what they are doing, but it seems quite obvious that the bombings and attack on Iran's nuclear targets was part of a very well coordinated plan that involved steps to cut the head off of Iran's remaining snakes to limit the targeting of Israel from multiple directions.

It was an attempt to take out Iran's ability to build nukes. That's not the same as conquering Iran.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Calling it “just consequences” doesn’t erase the reality. When you knowingly inflict suffering on civilians to deter or punish a political choice, that is collective retribution under any moral or legal definition. Your flood analogy fails because floods aren’t sentient actors making choices. War policies are. Pretending inevitability absolves agency is moral cowardice in realist clothing.

Quit it with the magic words.

Your Deir Yassin reply dodges the core fact: women, children, and elderly weren’t misidentified fighters – they were executed or expelled to terrorize surrounding villages. That’s why even Begin’s own allies condemned it as massacre. Geneva’s perfidy provisions are about false combatant identity, not slaughtering noncombatants to send a message.

I already showed you the data on what actually happened. Many stories have been added since.

No, I didn’t change my tune. Israel walked from meaningful negotiation repeatedly by continuing settlement expansions while refusing sovereignty terms Palestinians couldn’t possibly accept. When you negotiate with a gun in one hand and bulldozers rolling in the background, it isn’t bargaining. It’s extortion posing as diplomacy.

Israel knew that Arafat couldn't make peace. They were simply not making concessions for talks they knew to be useless.

You say B’Tselem’s deception is systemic, not isolated. Fine – produce your comprehensive proof. Because their documentation includes decades of cross-verified legal records, witness testimonies, and photographic evidence. Dismissing the entire body of work because you dislike their conclusions is intellectual laziness, not rigor.

Their records are to the best of my knowledge accurate but highly deceptive. Consider my example of hitting a commander and his bodyguards--yes, the bodyguards were not actively taking part in hostilities. Doesn't make them not combatants.

You claim Geneva permits treating under-18 combatants as lawful targets. Yes – if they directly participate in hostilities. But you extend that logic to treat all minors as suspect, voiding the entire principle of special protection for children in war. That isn’t legal nuance. That’s moral rot.

Once again you fail to understand.

The mortality data clearly shows that males are becoming combatants before 18. Thus showing someone is under 18 is not evidence they are not a combatant. You seem to be allergic to the notion of a piece of data being unknown.

You claim sniper killings are fakes because it’s “more logical.” More logical for whom? For the families burying medics shot while evacuating wounded? For journalists shot despite clear markings? You’re just choosing the narrative that absolves your side without requiring evidence.

How about addressing why I said it was more logical for being a "fake". (I'm not saying the people weren't shot--they clearly were. The issue is whether they were shot by IDF snipers. And in no case do we have any evidence that it was the IDF.)

An election isn’t peace, but your argument ignored that Hamas’s electoral victory was immediately met with blockade before armed resistance resumed. You keep acting like Palestinians rejecting surrender terms is proof they don’t want peace. They’ve repeatedly proposed flawed ceasefires and diplomatic overtures. You refuse to engage because to you, any agreement requiring Israeli concessions is by definition illegitimate.

The Palestinian answer is we keep the hostages, the fighting stops. Can you possibly comprehend why Israel finds that unacceptable?

You claim border protesters weren’t human shields but violators. That doesn’t erase the reality that these were unarmed demonstrators overwhelmingly kept within fence zones and sniper range. Firing on them isn’t defending a border. It’s enforcing a siege with live ammunition – a policy choice, not an act of fate.

Once again, you have no understanding.

Most stayed in Gaza. Proves nothing, as most weren't shot. We had video of people coming up to the fence, hesitating, climbing it and getting shot.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When you keep pointing to Israeli actions to explain Hamas you are saying that 10/7 was justified and thus that all the horrors of it were justified.

Now you're being blatantly dishonest.

I have presented no argument that makes the case that the 10/7 terror attack was justified. I have said it was predictable that Hamas would use terrorism in an attempt to force Israel to make changes in policy. I said it was predictable that when Israel supported Hamas in order to weaken the PLO, that decision would eventually bite Israel in the ass. I have said it was predictable that Gazans would resent the State that built and maintains the walls surrounding them, the naval blockade that prevents aid from reaching them, and kills people on the street and children sleeping in their beds with impunity, and that the resentment makes it easier for Hamas to gather recruits.

If 10/7 is entirely because of what Israel did then it's inherently a justified action.

And when you say the response to 10/7 should be to remove the things you blame, you again are indirectly saying it's justified.

You "blame" Hamas but want no consequences, that's not really blame.

I told you long ago that I'm not going to pretend I think you're stupid or a little kid who wandered into a discussion the adults were having. And while I understand you are prone to either-or, black/white, yes/no thinking, you have been discussing issues with people who don't share your mindset long enough for you to at least grasp the concept of "better or worse".

It's not black/white, it's refusing to fall for the deceptions.

The deceptions you say happen but have no evidence actually occur?

Your claims are indistinguishable from paranoia, propaganda, and bullshit. And since you have a history of posting propaganda and bullshit, I'm going with 'not a mental illness, just a mindset' as the reason you make claims you don't even try to support.

I don't like being right.

There are things that can be done to make a situation better, and things that will make it worse. I believe we should always choose the "make things better" option.

Yes, we should be trying to make things better. The difference is that I look at it from the defense side rather than overall.

IOW, you look at it from one side only, and argue for what benefits your preferred group, not what will benefit everyone.

I look at it from the side on the defense. Wars of aggression are not acceptable, period. But beware of mistaking wars of defense against irregular attacks from wars of aggression.

Remember that time I said the important thing is respecting the human rights of everyone and you responded "So Jews aren't people?" because to you, respecting the human rights of Palestinians must come at the cost of not respecting the human rights of Jews, and for some reason you think Jews have a Right to permanently remove Palestinians from the parts of Palestine Jews want to be exclusively theirs? That's your either-or, black/white thinking at work.

How about a bit of accuracy? My actual response was:

So Jews aren't people?

Because your plan calls for their death, not their human rights.

You want the Palestinians to have the right to kill the Jews.

By trying to minimize overall deaths you inherently fall for the bad guy killing their people. You are saving Gazan lives now at the cost of Israeli lives down the road--and I do not believe a defender is required to sacrifice their people to spare the attacker.

And here's where you reveal the racism and bigotry inherent in your one-sided argument.

You believe in the inherent evil of certain ethnic and cultural groups. Your condemnation of future Palestinians for crimes against humanity you are certain they will commit is exactly the same kind of thinking behind the slaughter of Tutsi in Rwanda, why Serbs murdered Bosnians and Croats in Srebrenica, and why Nazis killed Jews all over Europe. That's the underpinning of your "dead or fled'" arguments.

Inherent evil??? No I have said it repeatedly, the Palestinians are pawns. The evil comes from their backers.

I don't share your worldview, especially the part where you judge the worth of a person based on their ancestry or the culture in which they were raised. Fuck that bigoted, racist shit. The life of a Palestinian child is not worth less than that of an Israeli child just because he/she was born on the not-Israel side of the Green Line.

Cut it out with the racism allegations. This isn't about race, this isn't even about populations.

If 10/7 is entirely because of what Israel did (that's a mighty big "if"), the terrorism of 10/7 is not therefore justified. I don't believe terrorism is ever justifiable. It's murder and destruction aimed at the most vulnerable and least culpable members of a society. It makes things worse, usually for people who deserve that "worse" the least.

If it's entirely then Hamas did nothing wrong and thus it must be justified.

No.

This is an extremely important point, so please pay attention: one party to a conflict doing something heinous does not grant permission to others in that conflict to be just as heinous.

First, try demonstrating said heinous behavior.

NoHolyCows has been patiently explaining this to you. I hope you learn something from them.

He hasn't been explaining anything, just throwing out magic words.

And honestly, Loren, you can take that "[y]ou "blame" Hamas but want no consequences" and stuff it right back up the orifice you pulled it from. Stop lying about my posts and my opinions.

That's not a rebuttal.

You say you blame Hamas but you propose to give them what they are after. And whose demands you think should be followed means a lot more than who you "blame".

Bullshit.

Hamas is not after being removed from power and having their agenda curtailed. It is not after free elections. And since you say Hamas does not like prosperity and I'm all for it for the people of Gaza, I think you're shitposting nonsense that even you don't believe.

So far Hamas has gotten what they're after: A bunch of hostages to torture and trade with Israel. You want them to be allowed to keep them. (And what in the world is your justification for continuing to torture the hostages? It's not like they have information to give.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Nah, Loren, you’re not applying Goodhart’s Law, you’re weaponizing it to excuse atrocity. You’re talking like death is just a metric being gamed instead of what it actually is: a human cost. And that’s the problem. You're so worried about how Hamas might manipulate outrage that you’ve started pre-blaming the victims for their own deaths, as if their existence in a war zone is what 'made' them die, not the bombs dropped on them. You say you're trying to avoid the next one? Cool. But pretending that holding Israel accountable somehow causes more death is twisted. That’s like saying exposing police brutality leads to more shootings because the outrage 'incentivizes' the next one in your white supremacist world view.

1) You are demonstrating exactly why I'm applying Goodhart's Law. You are using the bodies as a metric.

2) I'm not pre-blaming the victims. I have said it repeatedly--they are pawns.

And cut it out with the racism. I'm no white supremacist. I object to DEI because it's gone too far--I want equality. I do not want the bad old days.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

@Loren Pechtel -- -- I see you are still posting but you seem to be unable to respond to my questions and comments. I have tried to correct several of your confusions, but as a minimum I would appreciate an answer to what seems like a simple question:

Let me repeat the question you are unwilling to answer:
Have you ever told us how you would feel if an Army of Muslims arrived in your town with superior force, and kicked you out of your home so they could live there?

We're still waiting.
.View attachment 51299

I didn't answer because it's a strawman.