I see the war in radically different terms than you. It's not a battle between who has the better historical claim to the land. It's a religious battle. It's a battle between radical Islam and the secular west.
For a fuller treatment of the defense of Israel from a secular view point.
At least you're honest. This is why the vast majority of Westerners support Israel, its colonialism and its right to kill as many brown people as they can, they just don't say it out loud.
Isn’t it the inverse? Gazans voted for Hamas, and still support them per polls. Hamas’s charter is to destroy Israel in particular but also to subordinate women, subordinate all other religions, undermine Western powers, etc. Their goals and ideology are explicitly in conflict with liberal orders that support things like women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, freedom of religion, and so on.
Do you really think Hamas has killed more Israelis than Israel has killed Palestinians? Do you even know why Hamas exists? Do you have any idea how many years passed between the occupation in 1948 and massacres like the Nakba and Deir Yassin before Hamas was established? Also, no matter how much you want it to, your racism against brown people and fetishisation of "Judeo-Christian civilisation" doesn't justify killing them.
That's funny. In mid-October 2023 the narrative was "It doesn't matter who killed more" and now that so many Palestinians are dying - both by Israeli bombs and by Hamas rockets (1/3 to 1/5 fall back into the densely-populated Gaza strip) - the narrative is "Hamas has killed less Israelis than Israel has killed Palestinians".
The pro-Palestinian narrative adapts and changes as per the tides of war and the media. The Israeli narrative has remained consistent, even when it hurts.
Furthermore, your ideas about the colour of people's skin is an artifact of you dragging American racial issues into a place where they don't belong. The varied skin colours here favour neither side as darker or lighter.
No, the Palestinian narrative for those of us actually knowledgeable of history has not changed since 1948. As for Israel being consistent - how are those hostages doing? Cause it definitely doesn't care about any of them now (those it hasn't killed itself), and Netanyahu and others in the cabinet have admitted they want to occupy the land once more.
I'm not American, but you must be if you think racism magically stops outside of America. The racism most Americans and Zionists have towards brown people and the Islamophobia they have towards Muslims are some of their most prejudiced, and at least equal to any form of anti-Semitism you've ever experienced, but for some reason, you only believe in one of those. To be clear, "brown people" don't have to be "brown" just like black people aren't all black, it's a generic term that indicates a rough place of origin, and the point that you're clearly trying to obscure is that racism towards Palestinians is still racism no matter what colour they actually are.
You're right - such association with colour is not limited to Americans. I almost forgot being told about the slaves in the Gaza strip.
It turns out that Gazans call black-skinned Gazans "slaves". I've met black-skinned Bedouins but not black-skinned Gazans, and I don't know if the black-skinned Gazans are also Bedouins. I actually didn't know the word for slave in Arabic, but it was similar enough to the word in Hebrew that I was able to figure it out. I'd later have it confirmed. Not only do they called the black-skinned Gazans "slaves", they treat them as such as well. No lack of colour-motivated racism in the Gaza strip. Yes, I speak with Gazans in Arabic, and before October 7th I'd have conversations with them face to face.
As for Israeli racism - I think that we're the only country in the world who went out to help dark-skinned people immigrate en masse. Israel has a large Ethiopean community. I've had Ethiopean commanders in the army, and I work with quite a few Ethiopeans. I don't feel that they treat me in any unusual way, nor do I treat them in any unusual way.
I'm sure the Gazan friends you spoke to will be overjoyed you had face-to-face conversations with them before going online to advocate for their genocide, and that those conversations you had make them clearly savage enough to justify said genocide.
Are you really so wrapped up in your tech bubble in Tel Aviv that you can believe that? Here's some reading on a story even I knew off from the top of my head: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/28/ethiopian-wome.... And here's the rest of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel. Israel is easily the most racist "Western" country in the world, ahead of even the modern US. Hmm, maybe a genocide against Israelis would actually be justified because Israelis are just racist savages that think black people should be forcibly sterilised against their will?
> I'm sure the Gazan friends you spoke to will be overjoyed you had face-to-face conversations with them while advocating for their genocide, and that those conversations make them clearly savage enough to justify said genocide.
Since October 7th I haven't seen any Gazans face to face, but we have spoken on the phone and on Telegram. And I've never advocated for their genocide, rather I've advocated against the genocide of Jews. Anybody who supports Hamas, their goals, or their idealogy supports the genocide of Jews. It's right there in the Hamas charter.
I'll say it clearly. There is no genocide of Arabs, or Muslims, or Palestinians, or Gazans in the Gaza strip. There are many Gazans dying, and many of them are children. Many of them are killed as a result of Israeli actions, and many of them are killed as a result of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other organizations' actions. Israel does not systematically target children, only Hamas benefits from dead children. They say it clearly themselves.
So in your warped logic, the few thousand combined killed by all of the groups you named are more evil than the 60,000 killed by Israel (likely 100,000+ after Israel finally lets the UN in) and the true cost of the genocide can be calculated. Also, Israel just accidentally ended up with a collateral damage rate of 50%, just like several medical doctors have attested to it accidentally sniping tens of kids and people waiting for aid, and accidentally shooting 300 bullets into the vehicle holding Hind Rajab. I suggest you wake up and start moving toward the right side of history, along with the UN, Amnesty International, Oxfam and virtually every other major human rights organisation, because very soon it'll be too late and history isn't going to forget active enablers and propagandists like yourself.
I can only tell you that when I was in high school decades ago, I shared a viewpoint that was similar to yours. But after watching history unfold in real time for the last 35+ years, my viewpoint has had to shift. And shift a lot it has. I have had to begin accept some uncomfortable truths that were not yet reaching me. I see them now.
Considering that your view point is bolstered by a vast ecosystem, I do wonder what propaganda are you thinking of that is responsible for my change in views? Like what do you think I tune into that promotes the viewpoint I hold? I'm asking because I'd love to know what is so that I can listen to more of it! Mine is very hard to find. So if you know where it is - please tell me.
IIRC, wasn't part of the issue that compile-time instruction scheduling was a poor match with speculative execution and/or hardware-based branch prediction?
I.e., the compiler had no access to information that's only revealed at runtime?
I think you may be right. It's hard for me to find then-contemporary benchmarks from 20 years ago, but this snarky Register article mentions it indirectly:
SPECjbb2000 (an important enterprise server benchmark): Itanic holds a slim (under 3%) lead over AMD64 at the 4-processor node size and another slim (under 4%) lead over POWER4+ at the 32-processor node size - hardly 'destroying' the competition, once again.
It was slightly faster than contemporary high-performance processors on Java. It was also really good at floating point performance. It was also significantly more expensive than AMD64 for server applications if you could scale your servers horizontally instead of vertically.
This is more common than you’d think - often subsidiaries are distinct enough that the Canadian or Australian version survives the US parent’s bankruptcy.
And sometimes it’s just a different store that licensed the name for 100 years.
My other favorite example of this is the A&W Restaurants which in the states was a bit more of a fast food establishment. It was never that successful, but you'd see them every so often. Gone now in the states, but I believe its Canadian successor is still going strong.
A&W is exceptionally rural now, and I'm not 100% sure why - it's a weird combination of fast food (drive thru) + waitress/sit down ordering that doesn't really exist anywhere else (kind of how there are a few carhop/drive UP restaurants that still exist).
On a recent visit to the UK (from the US) I briefly thought I was in an alternate universe because their TJ Maxx stores are virtually identical but inexplicably called TK Maxx.
(Well, not quite inexplicably. Wikipedia cleared it up for me.)
UNRWA -as tens of thousands of people| in Gaza, mostly locals. What would be surprising is if no-one of them supported Hamas.
regarding the number of condemnations: the un is directly involved in gaza, and has been for 70 years. At the same time, the US has blocked any binding resolution in the security council.
At the same time Israel is supposed to be the only democracy in the middle east, and thus subscribe totl the values that funded the UN. That makes it's transgressions feel even worse to many - myself included.
At this point any Israel supporter can’t really afford to care about anybody’s opinion on human rights, so it doesn’t matter who is saying this. I’m sure the UN doesn’t expect their report to influence the people committing the genocide they are documenting: they hope to influence the rest of the world.
Students in the USA had their images posted on the sides of vans / trucks for protesting genocide. That may not be directly funded by the state of Israel, but it's difficult to squint and not see that this is a direct result of their lobbying and / or the lobbying of groups they support or who act on their behalf.
> Agence France-Presse has described UN Watch as "a lobby group with strong ties to Israel" ... Primarily, UN Watch denounces what it views as anti-Israel sentiment at the UN and UN-sponsored events.
If I want to understand any position I would look for first sources. Say I want to understand why Russian invaded Ukraine, I would seek out Russian sources. When I try to understand the Palestinian position, I seek out Palestinian sources.
The beautiful thing about intellectual honesty and openness is that you don't have to agree with any position. You can expose yourself to things that deeply conflict with your personal values and walk away with a deeper understanding of why you value what you value, and how to refute ideas that you strongly disagree with.
To dismiss a source because it is Israeli ironically gives fuel to the antisemitism charge. You're saying that the very reason to dismiss it, to not even bother entertaining its arguments is because it is Israeli and no other reason. Beyond that, you are even arguing that any claims of prejudice can be dismissed outright on the basis of one thing that one Israeli Minster once said [allegedly].
Quite simply Israelis and Jews are not the same group, otherwise you would be holding all Jews on the planet responsible for this genocide. Dismissing the source for being Israeli is not antisemitic.
There are many examples of Israeli sources lying about the state of things, from the baseless claims against UNRWA to the unconscionable excuse of burying medics and the ambulances they were in, to avoid wild dogs eating them.
Israeli sources rarely offer evidence to refute the claims presented in this report, and a cry of antisemitism, as stated, conflates Judeism with Israeli nationality, hence these sources are worthless at best.
Which are not validated by the UN, Norway etc.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/04/1148821
If the claims were valid, countries would not have restarted funding to UNRWA. Simple.
I note you've not denied the issues with claims of antisemitism which are important.
I was referring to your conflation of Israelis with Jews, and calling dismissal of an Israeli news source antisemitic, which it is not.
I'm saying that a biased Israeli news source is less valid than the actions of dozens of countries, which decided to restart funding.
It is telling that UN votes for a ceasefire are only opposed by the US, Israel and a handful of client states. This is a genocide, and most countries seem to agree on that.
First, I think you are conflating two different authors in this thread.
Second, you dismissed what you deemed to be Israeli sources as "lying about the state of things, from the baseless claims against UNRWA". I brought up evidence otherwise - specifically that their claims are not baseless. Dismiss _that_ as biased all you want, but its just links to social media posts from Hamas members. Members of Hamas that also work for UNRWA in some fashion.
We do agree that the US and Israel standing alone is telling. But we will disagree on what it means. For me it confirms just how morally bankrupt the United Nations is. I see no epistemological value in just conforming to the majority when I see clear evidence otherwise.
The points still stand and remain unaddressed, that are:
Conflation of Israelis and Jews and the false claim of antisemitism.
The lack of evidence of UNRWA-Hamas association, such that Israel's claims are deemed baseless by multiple countries and they restart funding. That is not a UN decision, it is by each country and serves as a good benchmark for baseless.
As to some posts to Hamas members, Israel have called reporters Hamas members simply for reporting with Hamas members, so as far as a few posts go, classification is the issue here, to the point where Reuters and other news agencies have stopped sending the IDF their locations, as the IDF label them Hamas supporters and deliberately target them. Actions are a much more clear signal. In Lebanon, the IDF saying there were Hamas tunnels under hospitals was debunked by numerous news organisations like the BBC, Sky etc. This is the IDF here misclassifying and outright lying, let alone an Internet site.
Lastly, given that both Trump and Netanyahu have openly and on TV advocated ethnic cleansing, and that these comments get next to zero blowback, the US and Israel appear to be the morally bankrupt ones. If an internet site takes precedence over open admission by presidents, multiple country's decisions, evidence presented from an acknowledged organisation (and confirmed from multiple sources), then I'd argue that there's something amiss here.
"To dismiss a source because it is Israeli ironically gives fuel to the antisemitism charge."
We agree it is an Israeli source.
All the unwatch site does is accuse Israel's critics of being antisemites. When you can't respond to the message, attack the messenger. Accuse them of being antisemitic and being funded by Hamas.
If we're on the subject of damning historic quotes, I've got one for you:
> Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.
Of course ignoring that Hamas was deliberately funded by Israel to cause a split between the politics of the West Bank and Gaza to prevent a unified political authority in Palestine.
I can well imagine a parallel universe where Israel gave them NO money whatsoever. You know what would have happened? Hamas would do the usual Islamic fundamentalist thing. Form a terrorist group and attack Israel. And then media commentators and intellectuals would accuse Israel of failing to help Hamas get put on the right path by helping them at the start, and instead Israel's inaction was like strangling a baby in the cradle. Typical Israel! Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
You imagine the future that suits your perspective and act like it's a fait accompli.
In reality, the PLO would have (and had been) quelling Hamas effectively. And then they were sitting at the negotiating table (after a rather ugly period). So Israel was facing awkward questions of "If Arafat is willing to negotiate, why aren't you?", so the Israeli far right locked in on the idea of "surreptitiously fund Hamas against the PLA/PLO".
Your imaginings count for nothing, because they're just your preconceived notion.
Many (not all) of those countries are fine with when it's a member of the second or third worlds committing atrocities. So no, there's no guts here. They perceive it's in their interest to call out some acts but not others - just like almost everyone else.
You are aware that Shulamit Alloni was on the extreme left and was criticizing this supposed misuse of Antisemitism, this is not some playbook
The american equivalent would be to quote Bernie Sanders saying "America is fascist" and then saying, see? therefore the USA system of government is fascism, even Congress agrees!
Plenty of people criticize Israel and are not antisemites. This is true of most Israelis. They generally criticize Israel in non-antisemitic ways. It is quite easy to do so.
Roger Waters is an antisemite.
Do people who have known Roger Waters his entire life think he is an antisemite because of his obsessive criticism of Israel, or because of all the other anti Jewish things he has said and done AND his singular obsession with Israel?
>In the 2023 documentary The Dark Side of Roger Waters, the
>saxophonist Norbert Stachel recounts Waters refusing to eat >vegetarian >dishes in Lebanon, calling them “Jew food”. When >the musician explained >that most of his relatives had been >killed in the Holocaust, the singer did >a crude and offensive >impersonation of a Polish peasant woman, and said, >“Oh, I can >help you feel like you’re meeting your long-lost relatives. I >can introduce you to your dead grandmother.”
>
>Tellingly, Stachel also claimed to overhear Waters telling a >girlfriend that Judaism was not a race, saying, “They’re >white European men that grow beards and they practise the >religion Judaism, but they’re no different than me; they have >no difference in their background or their history or their >culture or anything.”
He did write the forward to Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. The book is framed as an attack on Jewish fundamentalism.
Werner Cohn, Professor Emeritus at the University of British Colombia, writes: “He [Shahak] says (pp. 23-4) that "Jewish children are actually taught" to utter a ritual curse when passing a non-Jewish cemetery.[b] He also tells us (p. 34) that "both before and after a meal, a pious Jew ritually washes his hands....On one of these two occasions he is worshiping God... but on the other he is worshiping Satan..." I did take the trouble to question my orthodox rabbi nephew to find what might be behind such tall tales. He had no clue. If orthodox Jews were actually taught such hateful things, surely someone would have heard. Whom is Dr. Shahak kidding?”
Edward Said wrote the foreward to the second edition, calling Shahak “one of the most remarkable individuals in the contemporary Middle East.” Said writes that the book is “nothing less than a concise history of classic and modern Judaism, insofar as these are relevant to the understanding of modern Israel.”
At best Said endorses antisemites.
Tucker Carlson hosted Darryl Cooper, a podcaster known for promoting Holocaust revisionism and making historically inaccurate claims about World War II. He labeled Winston Churchill as the "chief villain" of the conflict. They perpetuated downplayed Nazi atrocities.
Regarding antisemitism, it is unfortunately a two millennium old racist phenomenon, which shows itself in an obsession many persons had with Jews and their "influence on world politics".
Behaviors include use of ritual scapegoating, where double standards are applied to the jews and then blame is shifted to them, culminating in ritual violence.
It's hard to delete 2000 years of western culture, so what you are seeing is mostly a rehash of this
This predated Israel by much and can be seen online for example by the unhealthy obsession with this conflict or even paranoid delusions considering Israel ("Israel killed Charlie Kirk cause I saw Nethanyahu respond to the murder" as can be seen in this thread)
In the above mentioned UN human right council you can see it in the fact 40% of decisions are about Israel while countries like Iran chair the committee. Or the fact there is a permanent clause (Article 7) meant to condemn Israel permanently, the only such country that had such a clause
I don't think you responded to the argument there. He's not saying antisemitism isn't real. Of course it's real, and has been for a long time. He's saying that automatically tarring critics of Israel as antisemites is invalid.
No, antisemitism is historically based on shifting blame and scapegoating. That's why the nazis were blaming Jews of genocide ("Germany must perish") while they were working on their destruction.
That's why an organization that used death squads to mass-execute civilians in entire towns (as was done by the Einsatzgruppen) gets to blame the side that bombs military targets (exactly the tactic used against nazis) with genocide
Unwatch is, and has always been, critical of everything the UN does with regards to Israel. Had the UN made one statement like "Israel should not arbitrarily detain children and hold them without fair trials", I am pretty sure unwatch would twist it into antisemitism.
Proving the absence of something is kinda impossible… depends on if you believe in guilty until proven innocent or if you’re totally okay with going gung-ho into trusting the UN, a body led by the majority of non-democratic governments and used to try to destroy democracies
The purpose of a tool like unwatch is to disseminate information to help zionists pollute discussions like these. They dont care about being right, or contributing information to the discussion, as much as they want to hand out gotchas, whatabouts, ad homs and so forth. Thats why its all just character assassination.
labeling information as pollution is sort of a red flag for me. I see this tactic used often, and its often followed up with accusations that don't even address the information labelled as pollution. now don't get me wrong, this tactic does work, it won trump two terms didn't it? I guess its just sort of a red flag for me as I'm not a trump fan. at least you didn't call it "fake news" so have an upvote, I'll take progress where I can get it lol
Yeah thats a fair statement. Feel free to check me on this, but the front page of unwatch appears to be covered in attack/slander/talking points on Francesca Albanese, compare and contrast with say,the wiki talk page for her, which goes through each claim individually.
I read through some items regarding Albanese and I'll certainly confess to some bias against palestinians that hasn't really abated since the october 7 attacks. But the unwatch page was pretty helpful to me precisely because of its attention to detail. I doubt that my opinion is that important tho lol
True. And in the interest of balancing the claims of the critics, I offer up the observation that UN Watch is "a lobby group with strong ties to Israel" (AFP article: Capella, Peter. "UN Gaza probe chief underlines balanced approach." 7-Jul-2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20111222162658/https://www.googl...).
i saw this comment before going to take a look, but scrolling down from the top, the page seems to all be character assasination about Francesca Albanese and not disputing facts.
you can look for yourself - its the same as the "its funded by lunatics" comment, just swapping which lunatics.
if they've got arguments, they arent putting them forward as what they consider the most important.
The report states on the first page "most likely pro-Hamas lobby groups in
those countries", very conclusive indeed.
The supposedly pro Hamas groups: The Australian Friends of Palestine Association and Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, as well as the Free Palestine Melbourne and Palestinian Christians in Australia.
Just regular old "its antisemitism" to say that Israel shouldn't be killing so many civilians. Hasbara has become so bad its laughable that they think this is a website worth taking seriously, or it would be if they were using Hasbara to keep killing civilians.
I think this one asks you to pay for it after a bit. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just felt bad about getting a little bit in, and then being hit with a decent pay wall.
Right, I mean, author has the right to do this -- but it still seems like a gloriously stupid thing to try to get someone to pay for in this way; like what market is this?
Like, I'd bet "Pay $10 if you like it" / ReaperWare would earn this person literally an order of magnitude more money.
Personally, I would happily pay for vim-adventures, but never monthly. It provides one-time value, it should have one-time cost. I'd much rather pay a one-time cost and get a downloadable local copy.
I paid for it, was worth it for me. Reason: I did vimtutor 4 times and was learning but found it super painful/boring, but really wanted to learn vim keybindings. Vim adventures made learning keybindings and muscle memory just tolerable that I could do 1h in the evening even after a long/busy/tedious day. I probably would have persisted learning vim keybindings without it, but it definitely made doing so less painful.
A free alternative for learning just hjkl, nethack supports this way of moving[1]. Remember to keep your index finger on ‘j’ (don’t shift your hand to ‘h’), to build the muscle memory.
This was quite weird and honestly a bit infuriating. Just felt like it was encouraging really bad habits in vim.
You start out and you only have `h,j,k,l` available to you (despite what the help says). So just end up holding the keys and maybe that's fine but then that first level is WAY too big.
Like I got to the second area and it starts talking about word motions and then you try `w,b,e` and it then tells you those keys aren't available. That's not even the first character you talk to that is mentioning movement keys while those keys remain unavailable to you!
I rage quit after unlocking `w,b,e` and moving back to that chest at the beginning only to realize I had forgotten there was a space between the word and punctuation meaning I'd need to unlock something like `B`, `0`, `^`, or even the ability to use numbers which a character had already mentioned to me...
[1/10] do not recommend. I believe most people will be able to read half of `vimtutor` before you will unlock the `b` key in this game as well as have a much better understanding of how vim actually works.
I highly suggest vimtutor to people because what a lot of people miss while learning vim is that there isn't actually much to remember. There's sets of motion keys and sets of command keys. The beauty of vim is that the commands are putting these together. For example, say you learn `b,w,e` and then you learn `d`. You now automatically know `db, dw, de, dd`. You didn't learn 4 new things, you learned 1 new thing. Similarly learning `B,W,E` isn't learning 3 new things, you learn one new thing: capitalized motion keys work on WORDS instead of words (aka: big movements)
One of the key features of fascism is keeping up the illusion of private property and other individual rights. When such abrogation of rights ultimately results in disasters, our intellectuals will lay the blame at the foot of capitalism without having ever really understood what it was and why the current administration is not pro-capitalist and neither is the GOP.
Some life insurance companies offered it for free as part of a service to existing clients. Mine claimed they would not know the results. I hope its true because I did take them up on the offer. Results were statistically favorable for me so I appreciate the test for what it is.
Curious to see how these hold up over the long term.
Once they've had a chance to warm up on skin, they're pretty good. Don't think my smell receptors are quite up to their descriptions, mind, but I enjoyed them.
For a fuller treatment of the defense of Israel from a secular view point.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38926431-what-justice-de...
I'm grateful that what little good pieces are left in the American right their defense of Israel remains in place.