Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
It doesn't seem that complicated. Any sort of reasonable standard for war crimes or violation of international law damns Hamas (and Hezbollah) as much as Israel and functions as a casus belli for Israeli actions against Hamas that would cost a ton of lives. You go this way and then you're just Biden and everyone else complicit in the "genocide".
Any rejection of moral standards turns this into an amoral contest of strength, which Palestinians cannot win. If they both suck, why not go with the richer, more competent, more militarily capable force and close your eyes and let nature take its course?
So the only response when faced with things done by the other side is to deflect, deny, minimize and hope that enough people have internalized the progressive stack enough to find those denials convincing.
It makes sense for the Palestinians to do this - though kind of sad that they've had to Christianize their jihadism - but why Westerners care is the strange thing.
tl;dr: They're pussies. Pussies cannot win fights, so pussies construct a moral system in which responding to their indirect or feeble aggression with the direct version is unacceptable (this has already been trialed in local contexts with the whole prescription against "punching down")
One of the things I find annoying about the whole free palestine thing is that people conflate palestine with gaza. And while a case could be made that Gazans deserve what happens to them by using "Russians deserve what happens to them" as template, it is the west bank where israel is doing unjustified things.
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Because the news says it. Because that’s the oil region of the world. Because it’s The Holy Land. Because The Jews. Because we want sensemakers to explain how bad people aren’t bad, actually. Pick a reason, there are dozens more.
Here’s one I just thought of. A world full of govts has taken the place of God in our lives, and the Middle East is its theodicy: if Civilization is all-powerful, why does evil still exist in the Middle East?
Either Civilization is not all-powerful (which bodes poorly for socialists) or is not all-good (even more poorly), or Israel/Islam is the dualist enemy of Civilization, as powerful as all good governments put together, insidiously worming its way into each and corrupting it (which is too prevalent a conclusion).
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