probablyaCat

Someone peaking out a door at soldiers with a small black object? Well I dunno. Why would soldiers ever shoot in such a situation…

Oh damn. You’re right. I’m a little more familiar with ben Gvir’s history than the whole movement and conflated them. Looking into it, I have changed my stance. The military needs better separation of Torah and State. Also, ben Gvir and Otzma Yehudit are still just giant piles of shit.

I still have issues with much of the Haredi. Things like their iron grip on religious control in Israel, domestic abuse issues, cult like behavior, demanding special treatment, and feeding off of others to survive.

But yeah that isn’t Otzma Yehudit. They’re more of religious militants it seems. Certainly not helping the state of things. Doesn’t help that the haredi groups and religious zionists easily form coalitions.

I absolutely loathe Otzma Yehudit. They are like MAGA, Vox, National Rally, and the rest of the far right religious assholes. While I understand why Israel separated religious courts and authority from the government (don’t like how they did it though), they should have, at the very least, tied voting and government eligibility to national service. So much of the ultra orthodox functions like the extremist Mormon FLDS does in the US. A fucking stain on my people.

So are you arguing that both the governments of Israel and Palestine in no way represent the people they govern?

Ah so I got it backwards. They started with noting abuses, but the letter gained them some notoriety(or infamy depending on who you ask). Good to know.

Again, I have mixed (at best) feelings about it. They do these things in public so don’t necessarily have a reason to expect privacy. I have experienced harassment on campus, myself. But I’m unsure that it will have the desired long term impact.

So other minority groups are given authority on deciding what is and isn’t racist, bigoted, etc.
to them. Particularly amongst the left. Why are Jews not afforded that same authority? The vast majority of Jews in the US support Israel. We are typically Zionist. And when a terrorist group attacked Israel, rather than blaming the group that literally stated their goal is to kill all Jews, they blame the state of Israel for the entire situation and everything that has happened before, we aren’t supposed to see that as antisemitic? When they say Free Palestine. From the river to the sea. We aren’t supposed to see that as antisemitic? Why? Do some of us look too white to be a proper minority? Sure didn’t stop synagogues from getting bombed. Didn’t stop attacks from the Klan. Exclusion from public spaces, and this is just in the US. Should we also look at Europe? One of the reasons Jews support Israel is that now, for the first time in a long time, when people turn on us again, we still have a home.

This started as a response to the letter (as far as I can tell). But Hillel groups at universities (mine included) were regularly harassed by groups supporting a free Palestine. After the response to the letter, they realized “hey maybe we can do something about shit like that, too” (not a direct quote by them).

I mean we were just trying to hang out, pray, and eat food together. And my gut feeling is all of those people should be shamed. But my slower brain reaction is that I hope some of those people that I regularly talked with started to better understand what they were saying.

McCarthyism targeted people for possibly (and often not actually) supporting a legal political movement. Supporting terrorist organizations and that being made public isn’t the same thing. And an individual or group using a website announcing someone’s public actions isn’t the same thing. McCarthy abused his authority as a member of the federal government to harass and and punish. Canary mission has no such authority. It just turns out a lot of people don’t like people who side with terrorists.

That being said, I am not really a fan of canary mission. I think more work needs to be done on education and understanding of the entire situation instead of a few of the most recent events. If I were still in the US, I would probably try to organize such groups. But it is definitely a much harder goal to accomplish.

If they don’t hear it, then it is essentially saying they agree with the lower court ruling. If they want to be against it then they have to hear it.

But these groups and people weren’t the same people as the ones that walked across the land bridge. The cultures had long since diverged and were different. Wars had been fought. Whole groups died or merged. And if you go back a little further, they are all closely related. I don’t think the point is that the slaughtering and pillaging was OK. It is that you cannot have a good faith argument on fixing current problems by trying to focus only on arbitrary time periods to claim certain privileges. I am very much in favor of doing more to make the lives of the native americans better, but I also will not make the argument that descendants of Europeans or Africans have no claim to the land there either. Because to do so is not in good faith and just ignores reality. Any time period you pick to decide who has a claim to a place is arbitrary. We cannot change the past. We can only change the future (but we are limited by the confines of the present).

Yes, but if Minnesota says he is off the ballot it will be appealed to the supreme court who is the authority on constitutional interpretation. If they side with Minnesota, not even the electoral college can put him in. Likely whichever (if any) case goes against him, all other active trials will be put on hold awaiting a response from the USSC. If they decide the 14th does apply (a big if given the state of the USSC), then it is over. In all 50 states. That’s why groups are hitting him in multiple states. They just need 1. It isn’t an attempt to take him off the ballot. It is an attempt to end his federal political career entirely.

This is a lie. Hamas won the vote. The EU, UN, and the Carter Center all called those elections free and fair. If anything, Hamas was an underdog given that Israel, in collaboration with Fatah, kept arresting the politicians in Hamas as they defined Hamas a terrorist organization. Fatah and Israel wanted to delay the elections, but with the encouragement of the US (GWB in particular who felt Hamas would definitely not win), they decided to keep them as they were. Stop making things up to fit your narrative. Hamas still typically wins the popular vote in polling done since then. You have a fucking computer. Just google it. It’s all there in black and white.

I mean they did have conflicts with Fatah. But the biggest fights weren’t until after they won the election.

There won’t be one because he is disqualified from office (if these suits are successful). Not from running. From office. If Mickey Mouse won we wouldn’t have a cartoon for president. Second place would win.

Regardless we might have another insurrection attempt, but this time the authorities will be more prepared. So unless the military decides on a coup, a successful suit here would be the end of it for him.

That article has such a stupid take. It takes tiny pieces of quotes from a couple of ex-Israeli officials and with one of them is clearly omitting context. Did Israel permit Islamist groups to do stuff like build mosques and have charities? Yes. Did he also say, but it is not mentioned in the article, that they were completely peaceful at the time and that Israel didn’t want to be viewed as attacking Islam? Also yes.

See, what you are saying is that Israel created Hamas by not using more oppression to stop these groups at a time when they were not attacking Israel, but the PLO was. And that is just such a simple naive take that it is ridiculous. Yeah if Israel could redo things, they might have decided that was a good idea. But then again, what if it just caused more attacks from the surrounding countries after they were claimed to be “attacking Islam.” Then would we also blame Israel for those attacks due to them repressing the Islamist movements?

It even does the same by using cherry picked foresight about Afghanistan. It entirely ignores the situation in Afghanistan and just implies that the US caused Al Qaeda. Things just aren’t that simple. It’s entirely possible that had the US and other countries not interfered in Afghanistan that the soviet union would’ve lasted longer and Afghanistan might’ve been another Chechnya.

At the time, Israel was having to fight against the PLO. They were not fighting against the religious Islamic groups. And knowing the history of the time period and the politics in the region, the very religious groups were not nearly the force that they are now. So they made choices for reasons that absolutely made sense at the time. And we have no way of knowing how things would be different if they made different choices.

We can say that places that aren’t Israel still have issues with the Muslim brotherhood or are friendly with them all over the middle east. And Israel certainly didn’t create the Muslim Brotherhood. And if Israel didn’t exist and it was all a Palestinian state with a secular government, it isn’t a stretch to say that they would be in that area too, calling for an Islamist government. As they have done in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and more.

So again, the entire state of Israel? The ones elected in free and fair elections? Don’t get me wrong. I am not a fan of Likud and I loathe ben Gvir and Otzma Yehudit. Just all of it. And only Hamas. The group that won what was called a free and fair election by the EU and the Carter Center and continues to be ahead in opinion polling since they have stopped elections. What are you defining as “Israel the State”?

Why do you say Israel and Hamas? Not Likud. Not otzma Yehudit. Just Israel. All of Israel is an enemy? But only Hamas when it comes to Palestine. What about the PLO? Are they fine? Yesh Atid? Or is it really just only Hamas but all of Israel?

I hate the idea that older kids shouldn’t do it. Like I remember getting shit when I decided to be kid-like again at 15 after not having done it when I was 13 and 14.

Houses told me I was too old. And looking back now, as a parent of teens, and I wish they and their friends were just going out trick r treating. I will definitely encourage any kid I see. And at my age anyone under 26 is a kid, easily. I’d much rather kids do something communal and fun than just go out drinking. I’m sure that by the next Halloween when I was 16 I was probably doing something less good than asking for free candy.

If we want people to be communal, have fun, and be safe then we shouldn’t give them shit when they do that. So I don’t care if the old dude down the streets dons a skeleton costume and grabs a pillow case. If he has a costume, he gets candy. And anyone who tells me different will get called out for being a killjoy.

I miss my life as it was before

This sucks. I’m a very pro-Israel person. I still don’t want civilians to suffer. On the other hand, that before she mentions is before the government elected by people there perpetrated the third largest terrorist attack in history. It’d be real great if there were something … Like… Soldiers to keep the peace maybe… That would guard things like fuel so it isn’t stolen or hospitals so that hospitals built by say a union of nations or something aren’t used in rocket attacks.

I miss the days when a 2 state solution seemed imminent. Gaza being demobilized was supposed to be a stepping stone to exactly that.

What do you mean when you say “a people”?

I’m not a military mastermind. More of an armchair 5 star general. But I feel like there are probably more effective ways to mine hunt than this. I get it was a mine hunter, but perhaps if they found them without blowing up in the process it would be a more sound strategy. But this does seem to be their consistent philosophy. It seems to be how they find anti tank mines as well. Unarmed soldiers to get rid of bullets. I wonder if they will start using jets to run into drones next. It’s almost like a reverse war of attrition.

Personally, if I were in charge of the military, I’d probably at the very least compare costs of the average mine to the average Russian navy ship.

But I suppose it does offer a good morale boost when they show their mine hunter successfully finding mines. For Ukraine.