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Notes -
Samson is a defensive stance, Iran is an aggressive nation with offensive interests that present existential threats to its neighbor as well as more mundane severe threats.
Fundamentally Iran is a nation that is running around punching people in the face. Who is more problematic, the guy who can punch back hard, or the guy punching people in the face?
lol, lmao
I'm surprised, I thought you would have kept up with news from the Middle East if you're going to talk about it with that level of confidence. This may come as a shock, but Israel is currently invading Lebanon, deploying white phosphorus on civilians, demolishing homes, blowing up hospitals and now moving settlers in to build houses on their newly acquired living space. They are in fact punching people in the face, right now! They have been punching people in the face for several years, and they launched the first strike on Iran.
I'm not going to respond to your entire ridiculous Gish Gallop, however it is worth commenting on the hospital thing since it's a great illustration of the distinction between defense and offense.
This may come as a shock, but once you use a hospital as a base of aggressive terrorist operations, it's fair game as a target of defensive measures.
This isn't reddit anymore buddy. You have to actually make an argument if you want to convince anyone - come back when you're capable of participating in an adult conversation.
For what it's worth, your post was clearly not a Gish gallop and the accusation seems in bad faith to me, but I'd also recommend a better reaction than this sneering.
That said, on the specific issue, I think you're correct - any criticism of Iran for being aggressive needs to have the context that Israel is also a very aggressive nation.
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"...deterrence strategy of massive retaliation with nuclear weapons as a "last resort" against any country whose military has invaded and/or destroyed much of Israel.[1]"
Defensive. Stance.
Iran has been engaged in terrorist attacks against Israel for literally decades. Now also engaging in terrorist attacks on other non-Israel neighbors.
Offensive stance.
All Iran has to do to be left alone is not engage in terrorism (well, prior to recent events). That seems like a simple ask.
Of the two approaches referred to as the Samson option (threatening europe and asia for failing to defend them or just simply nuking the entire region if they were about to fall) none of them qualify as defensive. They serve solely to make the rest of the world suffer if the Israeli regime falls. That's not defensive, just spiteful - and further evidence that Israel needs to be disarmed for the sake of the entire world.
Israel has been responsible for far more terror attacks than Iran. How much white phosphorus has Iran used against civilian populations?
Pedantically, there's a difference between "war crimes" and "terror attacks". Also pedantically, use of white phosphorous as a concealment is legal.
Less pedantically, how many cluster munitions has Iran used against civilian populations? Those have much less of a legal grey area than white phosphorous does, even if they weren't a key moment in Spec Ops: The Line.
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I do not understand the way you view the world.
I cannot imagine hating jews so much that you feel compelled to paint being the victim of terrorist attacks as terrorism.
I cannot imagine hating the jews so much that you support adversaries that want you and your way of life to end and die, just as I can't understand woke LGBTQs who support islamic fundamentalism that quite literally would appreciate it if they die.
The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
And perhaps most importantly, I don't understand why all the anti-Jew posters can't just hate Israel and want Iran to lose at the same time.
Like why the heck not?
You might want to work on your cognitive flexibility then - I can imagine hating jews that much pretty easily, it isn't particularly hard. More importantly, I actually have to imagine it - I get along just fine with the torah jews and other antizionist Jews. When I object to the murder of Hind Rajab, the ethnicity of the people doing the shooting of young girls doesn't really enter into the calculus. If they were Japanese Shinto practitioners, I'd feel just as strongly about what they did! Israel is singled out not because it is the Jewish State consisting of Jews practicing Judaism, but because it is in large part funded by western power structures and has a direct negative impact on people.
I don't believe the Iranians are adversaries that want me and my way of life to end, and I've gotten along just fine with Shia Iranian coworkers in the past. There's been far more hostility to my way of life as a result of the countless wars in the Middle East that have been fought for Israeli interests.
You really should work on that - it isn't hard at all to understand why people who don't like Israel would want Israel's chief regional competitor to remain strong and capable of causing problems for them. The only reason Iran is a problem for people in the West is that our governments are helplessly tied to Israel - the Strait of Hormuz was free for everyone to transit until Israel forced the US into this war (as per the claims of notorious anti-semites Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance and Donald Trump).
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