Merged Gaza just launched an unprovoked attack on Israel

[Derec]

You’re the one placing the death snd destruction on Hezbollah who is not the one dropping the bombs on Lebanon: Israel is.

It is on Hezbollah and their masters in Tehran. Israel would have no beef with Lebanon if not for rockets Hozbollah has been shooting at Israel.

 

[laughing dog]

You’re the one placing the death snd destruction on Hezbollah who is not the one dropping the bombs on Lebanon: Israel is.

It is on Hezbollah and their masters in Tehran. Israel would have no beef with Lebanon if not for rockets Hozbollah has been shooting at Israel.

Having a beef takes on a multitude of possible responses. Countries are responsible for their choice of reactions.

 

[pood]

Meanwhile, over at Why Evolution is True, the village idiot Jerry Coyne is throwing around more baseless anti-semitism charges. He links to another village idiot, Bill Maher, who in one of his stupid videos declares that everyone must wish Israel a happy birthday or admit that they are anti-Semitic. It gets worse from there, as you’ll see if you have the stomach to watch.

Fuck off, Jerry and Bill.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

How 81% of Gaza are ligitimate targets.
If you can't get Reader View, scroll past the childish graphics to "Anatomy of Destruction".


*Yes the title is drowning in sarcasm.

Warning: that page almost completely locked up my chromebook. Mouse stopped moving and touch screen stopped responding. I had to reboot to get that site off my device.

That page has some very large images on it and some javascript that updates the images. I suspect your machine simply didn't have the memory for it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If they are going to run around killing civilians with drones, I think they should first announce that operating a drone to take photographs is a risk since they cannot determine the nature of the drone. And they could perhaps also name the regions of highest risk so that journalists can make decisions for their own safety.

Do we even know that these three were just journalists and that they were doing what is claimed they were doing with that drone?
We know that many Gaza journalists also moonlight as Hamas terrorists.

We also know the IDF has no problem killing civilians or lying about it.

We know that people bleat about claims of Israel killing civilians. The evidence often does not add up, though.

 

[laughing dog]

If they are going to run around killing civilians with drones, I think they should first announce that operating a drone to take photographs is a risk since they cannot determine the nature of the drone. And they could perhaps also name the regions of highest risk so that journalists can make decisions for their own safety.

Do we even know that these three were just journalists and that they were doing what is claimed they were doing with that drone?
We know that many Gaza journalists also moonlight as Hamas terrorists.

We also know the IDF has no problem killing civilians or lying about it.

We know that people bleat about claims of Israel killing civilians. The evidence often does not add up, though.

It adds up often enough.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

If they are going to run around killing civilians with drones, I think they should first announce that operating a drone to take photographs is a risk since they cannot determine the nature of the drone. And they could perhaps also name the regions of highest risk so that journalists can make decisions for their own safety.

Do we even know that these three were just journalists and that they were doing what is claimed they were doing with that drone?
We know that many Gaza journalists also moonlight as Hamas terrorists.

We know that Israeli military spokespersons often claim the journalists killed by the IDF were part of Hamas but have not provided credible evidence to substantiate those claims.

Israel has been targeting journalists in Gaza since the start of the current war.

Israel has found evidence that links about half of them to the terrorists. That is far, far above chance. And there's no reason to think that Israel would have an ID on everyone when they strike the propaganda people.

A study by Brown University in April found that Israeli attacks in Gaza since the war began in October 2023 have killed more journalists there than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says "Israel is engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented." Israeli attacks have also killed dozens of relatives of prominent journalists reporting in Gaza.

The smears are part of the strategy.

The problem is they call their propaganda people "journalists".

The latest major attack was Aug. 25, when an Israeli strike hit Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri during a live transmission from the open stairwell of a hospital, killing him on the spot. Israeli forces struck that same stairwell minutes later again, killing medics, first responders and four more journalists working for international media, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera.

An initial finding by the military said troops targeted a camera positioned by Hamas, but the military provided no evidence and did not respond to further NPR questions. The military also said six militants were killed in the attack, but did not say if they were the intended target nor answer further questions.

And there is no question they are targeting journalists, which btw is a war crime, when they launch an airstrike on a clearly marked press tent.

Clearly marking a tent "press" doesn't make so.

And note that even a bona fide reporter who won't stop broadcasting stuff useful to the enemy is a valid target (say, the Al Jazeera people Israel threw out for refusing to stop broadcasting a live feed of Gaza.) You've already cooked your goose here: "camera positioned by Hamas". There is no need to show it was currently being used for hostile purposes.

And why does it not occur to you that someone operating a camera positioned by Hamas might very well be Hamas?

Two weeks before the Aug. 25 attack, on Aug. 11, six journalists were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a press tent outside one of Gaza's main hospitals.

Israel's military said it was targeting Anas al-Sharif, Gaza's most well-known television reporter, who was killed while wearing a blue "PRESS" vest. The 28-year-old was Al Jazeera's correspondent in the north and had a massive online following. Before his death, he had denied Israeli allegations of affiliation with Hamas' military wing, and continued reporting despite the risks to his life. Early in the war, his home was bombed by Israeli forces and his father was killed.

Al Jazeera--as the organization that was left scrambling when Israel found one of their "reporters" guarding a hostage.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

IDF accepts Gaza Health Ministry death toll of over 71,000 Palestinians killed in the war

Although many international experts have accepted the Health Ministry's data as reliable, and even conservative relative to the true death toll, Israel had refused to accept the Health Ministry's count until now

www.haaretz.com

So now Israeli govt is accepting it and so will people claim Israel is anti-Semitic, too?

And we are to take the word of Haaretz as to what Israel thinks?

 

[pood]

It takes only watching the first 34 second of Maher’s video to realize what a revolting, dishonest creep the village idiot is.

 

[laughing dog]

IDF accepts Gaza Health Ministry death toll of over 71,000 Palestinians killed in the war

Although many international experts have accepted the Health Ministry's data as reliable, and even conservative relative to the true death toll, Israel had refused to accept the Health Ministry's count until now

www.haaretz.com

So now Israeli govt is accepting it and so will people claim Israel is anti-Semitic, too?

And we are to take the word of Haaretz as to what Israel thinks?

How about Reuters?
Israel military reported to accept death toll of around 70,000 in Gaza

Citing a briefing on Thursday with senior military officials, Israel's Ynet news website and other leading outlets reported that the military had adopted a similar estimate.
"In our estimation, around 70,000 Gazans were killed during the war, not including missing persons," Ynet cited an official as saying.
"We are currently doing the work of distinguishing between terrorists and those who were not involved," the official was quoted as saying.

BTW - This is almost 4 months old.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

We could say that a reasonable upper bound number of terrorists could be the difference between the male and female numbers, but this would only be an upper bound. A more recent dataset gives 68226 Gazans killed. 21706 were female. If we suppose that females were innocent of being armed militants and innocent males were at least this number, then we have 2 x 21706 = 43412 lower bound innocent Gazans killed. We also have an upper bound of terrorists killed of 68226 - 43412 = 24814. We could say that the upper bound of terrorists killed was 36.4% and lower bound of innocents killed was 63.6%.

I would not expect too many female combatants in Islamist groups like Hamas or PIJ. But secular groups like PFLP have recruited female terrorists. So it's not appropriate to assume all females are innocent non-combatants.

That said, of course the Gaza war had a large share of non-combatant fatalities. Part of it is due to it being urban warfare, and that is always hell for the civilian population. But another part of it is that Hamas and its allies deliberately operate from civilian areas, even going as far as putting rocket launchers and weapons caches in the midst of tents in places like al-Mawasi.
They do that because they know they can rely on useful idiots in the West (including media outlets, universities, and not few politicians) to do their bidding by blaming Israel for the civilian casualties caused by Hamas' actions.

There's a big problem here: Even if the list is true it includes non-combat casualties (remember the dozen "starvation" fatalities--that were medical.) And it includes Hamas-inflicted casualties.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You write as if the gov’t of Israel had no agency in their response to Hamas’s barbaric act.

They certainly were not going to turn the other cheek.

It's always unclear what liberal supporters of oppressive theocratic regimes expect to happen when said oppressive theocratic regimes attack a liberal democracy.

Do they expect Israelis to vacate Israel? Do they expect Israeli policy and its citizens to simply capitulate and say, "Okay, we realize that after being invaded multiple times since 1947 and being subject to suicide and car bombers we finally see the light of hateful religious killers. Oh, and that whole 1972 Munich Olympics thing? Don't worry about it! We deserved that too! That barbaric October operation? It was our fault!"

The whole concept that it was Hamas, supported by Iran, has little to no responsibility in what's happened seems to be absent in their thinking.

Fundamentally, this is a case of looking for the keys under the streetlight. The only way there is a solution is if somehow Israel is the cause, therefore Israel must be the cause. And it doesn't help anything that all news is biased in the direction it's viewers want. It's a feedback loop, the more people support something the more the press will support that something. Both directions--the reich wing goes down the Faux Noise path, the left wing goes down the Islamist path. News that tries to stay neutral goes out of business.

The disconnect from reality is farther with the MAGAs, but both sides are rapidly moving in the direction the money wants, not in the direction of the truth.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

There are no king(s) in Gaza.

How many revolutions result in democracy, especially in the Middle East?

Of course they didn't--because Iran was playing puppetmaster.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

For example, Israel used to provide support to Hamas because it was the enemy of the PLO. Remind everyone how that worked out for Israel and the civilian population of Gaza.

For example Iran used to provide support to Hamas because it was the enemy of Israel. Remind everyone how that worked out for Israel and the civilian population of Gaza.

So Israel and Iran, at least at one point, supported Hamas for their own political benefits. Neither case is moral.

I don't think "political" is the right word here.

Israel supported Hamas in a successful effort to break the Palestinians into warring factions. The fact that in the end Hamas ended up on top is irrelevant. The total amount of fighting is decided by the level of Iranian support, not by Israel's actions. Thus Israel did not lose from Hamas coming to power.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Well it certainly isn't enlightened to say. Hamas can't be reasoned with because their foundational reason for existence isn't peace. That doesn't mean Muslims "often can't be reasoned with".

Hamas has a veto on peace.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Refreshingly Israel came second place (with a terrible song) simply because so many people voted for them.

I assume its because readers of gossip magazines, glamour hounds, families with young kids and fag hags are also sick of everyone picking on Israel

I don't follow that stuff but here is an article on it:

How to Win Eurovision With Just a Few Hundred Voters

Exclusive voting data shows that, despite Eurovision’s assurances, an Israeli campaign could easily have influenced last year’s contest.

www.nytimes.com

The article misses the spirit of Eurovision. Its a populistic competition where every dirty trick is allowed.

Almost every single song played at Eurovision is objectively a terrible song. Very few of them ever sell anything, even after winning. The hits are vanishingly few. The best song rarely wins.

The entire competition is a spectacle that aims for the lowest common denominator and is proud about it.

Also... worst kept secret... it is a celebration of gay and queer culture. In the gay world Eurovision is something else entirely and important to that community. Which is why so many gays hate it today. Its from a time when being gay had to be hidden in euphemisms. And is a reminder of that. Which explains why Eurovision is so important and embraced the eastern, gay hating, Europe and Russia.

Will Ferrell has made the best film about it

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Arctish]

If they are going to run around killing civilians with drones, I think they should first announce that operating a drone to take photographs is a risk since they cannot determine the nature of the drone. And they could perhaps also name the regions of highest risk so that journalists can make decisions for their own safety.

Do we even know that these three were just journalists and that they were doing what is claimed they were doing with that drone?
We know that many Gaza journalists also moonlight as Hamas terrorists.

We know that Israeli military spokespersons often claim the journalists killed by the IDF were part of Hamas but have not provided credible evidence to substantiate those claims.

Israel has been targeting journalists in Gaza since the start of the current war.

Israel has found evidence that links about half of them to the terrorists. That is far, far above chance. And there's no reason to think that Israel would have an ID on everyone when they strike the propaganda people.

A study by Brown University in April found that Israeli attacks in Gaza since the war began in October 2023 have killed more journalists there than the U.S. Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s and 2000s, and the post-9/11 war in Afghanistan, combined.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says "Israel is engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented." Israeli attacks have also killed dozens of relatives of prominent journalists reporting in Gaza.

The smears are part of the strategy.

The problem is they call their propaganda people "journalists".

The latest major attack was Aug. 25, when an Israeli strike hit Reuters cameraman Hussam al-Masri during a live transmission from the open stairwell of a hospital, killing him on the spot. Israeli forces struck that same stairwell minutes later again, killing medics, first responders and four more journalists working for international media, including The Associated Press and Al Jazeera.

An initial finding by the military said troops targeted a camera positioned by Hamas, but the military provided no evidence and did not respond to further NPR questions. The military also said six militants were killed in the attack, but did not say if they were the intended target nor answer further questions.

And there is no question they are targeting journalists, which btw is a war crime, when they launch an airstrike on a clearly marked press tent.

Clearly marking a tent "press" doesn't make so.

And note that even a bona fide reporter who won't stop broadcasting stuff useful to the enemy is a valid target (say, the Al Jazeera people Israel threw out for refusing to stop broadcasting a live feed of Gaza.) You've already cooked your goose here: "camera positioned by Hamas". There is no need to show it was currently being used for hostile purposes.

And why does it not occur to you that someone operating a camera positioned by Hamas might very well be Hamas?

Two weeks before the Aug. 25 attack, on Aug. 11, six journalists were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a press tent outside one of Gaza's main hospitals.

Israel's military said it was targeting Anas al-Sharif, Gaza's most well-known television reporter, who was killed while wearing a blue "PRESS" vest. The 28-year-old was Al Jazeera's correspondent in the north and had a massive online following. Before his death, he had denied Israeli allegations of affiliation with Hamas' military wing, and continued reporting despite the risks to his life. Early in the war, his home was bombed by Israeli forces and his father was killed.

Al Jazeera--as the organization that was left scrambling when Israel found one of their "reporters" guarding a hostage.

Why does it not occur to you that the failure to support your claims makes your posts appear to be complete bullshit?

Support your claims, Loren. Don't just say Israel has found evidence of something, link to the article from a reputable source that specifies what that something is and what specific evidence was found.

We're talking about war crimes, here. Simply saying "there was this one time when a supposed journalist was found guarding a hostage" doesn't cut it. When did this alleged event happen, how was it discovered that the journalist was a guard or that the guard was a journalist, etc.

And remember, even if it did happen that one time or even a hundred times, that still would not justify an airstrike on a clearly marked press tent.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Well it certainly isn't enlightened to say. Hamas can't be reasoned with because their foundational reason for existence isn't peace. That doesn't mean Muslims "often can't be reasoned with".

The argument that Islam's foundational ideology is imperialistic, therefore Islam can't be a tool for peace.... is just bullshit. Islam is arguably based on Syriac Christianity. They're very similar. Syriac Christians has managed to get on just fine with other groups.

What sets Syriac Christianity apart from Islam, above all, is that Islam has a history of winning. While Syriac Christianity doesn't. It's just that.

What that tells us is that ideologies can be updated, mordernised and changed.

Islamism is a recent trend in the Islamic world. It's a trend that started as an anti-colonial movement, that morphed into Soviet supported communism and the after the fall of Communism (because that well of money dried up while oil money flowed in) became a fascist movement. And that's a shame, and is just an accident of history.

Right now it fucking sucks to have to deal with Islamists. I am sure they'll get over it. But at the moment they're dominated by histerical fanatics that cannot be reasoned with. Which to put it mildly, is a shame.

But people like winning. Eventually Muslims in the Middle-East, just like the Germans and Italians, will learn that fascism is a dead end

 

[Loren Pechtel]

They do not mention what percentage of the total population these demographic groups represent (~77% of the total population), as that would show that 56.2% is heavily underrepresented, meaning that adult men under 65 are heavily overrepresented.

They do not need to mention that. You _want_ to mention it because you want to be political. Science doesn't need to be political as _you_ were able to draw the conclusion from the data anyway.

No, what they did was political. They cherry picked the numbers to make Israel look bad. We can deduce the missing data but that doesn't mean most people will.

It also ignores the fact that Hamas and other terror groups routinely recruit minor teenagers.

Why do you feel that they need to state this explicitly?

Because the data is counting those under 18 as if they were non-combatants.

Therefore, 15-17 age cohort should have been examined separately from the 0-14 one.

Show the math.

The graph was presented. Note how the lines deviate before 18. And there have been plenty of other discussions on this.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Gaza death toll for first 16 months of war far higher than reported, says peer-reviewed study

Lancet Global Health research suggests more than 75,000 killed in period, 25,000 more than announced at the time

www.theguardian.com

If you look in the methods section of the paper, it is based on surveys and a lot of extrapolation.

I am not sure how accurate their results are. Note also this statement: "Women, children (ie, younger than 18 years), and older people (ie, older than 64 years) comprised 56·2% (95% CI 50·4–61·9) of violent deaths". They do not mention what percentage of the total population these demographic groups represent (~77% of the total population), as that would show that 56.2% is heavily underrepresented, meaning that adult men under 65 are heavily overrepresented. It also ignores the fact that Hamas and other terror groups routinely recruit minor teenagers. Therefore, 15-17 age cohort should have been examined separately from the 0-14 one.

Stop playing into the antisemites game. This is classic reframing the narrative to create a villain.

The left keeps presenting the casualty numbers as evidence of something. He's pointing out the error.

The pro Israel side gets stuck on trying to downplay the number of casualty side. This is just designed to make that side look morally bankrupt. fuck that. Boost the numbers. Interpret the numbers as inflated as possible. But blame Hamas. Blame Hamas for every single wounded or dead in this conflict. I think that's the only morally right thing to do. Israel did what they needed to do.

I do agree that Hamas is to blame.

Modern warfare is artillery, drones and bombardment, where ground troops only come in at the very end to mop up. Everybody who knows anything about modern warfare not coming from war movies knows this.

But that's not describing the majority of the readers. Most people picture soldiers fighting it out, rather than the reality that soldiers' actual job is locating the enemy and call fire on them. The charge went out of fashion in the civil war, now if it happens at all it's under the cover of artillery.

The Hamas attack of 7/10 October was designed to trigger a response by Israel, and when/if they did, Hamas had organised Gaza to maximise Palestinian civilian casualities. They were counting on a western public too dumb to understand what they were doing, so as to ruin the reputation of Israel in the west. Western support is the one thing keeping the Muslims from being able to conquer Israel.

Hamas took a gamble that Israel wouldn't have the balls to counter attack.

Disagree. Hamas got a bigger win than they expected, they bit off so much that Israel was not going to be restrained by the world opinion and would prosecute the war until the hostages were freed.

This is a strategy they'd been planning for and designed Gaza defences around for 20 years. Basically, all of Gaza was a subterrenean military base with soft and squishy civilians on top of it. Mobile rocket batteries fired systematically from refugee camps.

This part I agree with. The whole thing is set up to maximize civilian casualties.

Look at the fighting in Lebanon--same IDF, same embedded enemy, but Hezbollah doesn't deliberately maximize civilian casualties. And we see 80-90% of deaths are combatants.

If Israel hadn't attacked they'd been stuck. Hamas would have an unstoppable terror weapon, you can be sure they'd keep using. Israel had no choice but to counter attack.

And if Hamas was a bit smarter, they'd known this would happen. The Jewish world only has Israel. It's the only safe haven for Jews anywhere. No, way would they let go of this little strip of land.

I don't think smarter is relevant. I think they intended to get some bargaining chips, but instead got so many that there was no way Israel would agree to any terms they would agree to.

Hamas was also stuck between a rock and a hard place. Hamas existence is about conquering Israel and murdering all Jews in "the holy land". Eventually they'd had to make a move. Or they'd stop getting funding from Iran. And that's, pretty much, the only money Gaza had flowing into it. Something like what happened, was going to happen.

Yup, Hamas didn't have much of a choice here. The only side with a meaningful choice is Iran.