naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
So they fire 6-10,000 missiles and kill only 3-4000 Gazans in surgical strikes, many of whom may well be actual Hamas fighters. Then they decide to throw a missile at a hospital and kill 1500+ civilians at the same time, because? If the response is to hasten civilian departure / ethnic cleansing, then there’s a whole escalation hierarchy that doesn’t involve that level of bad press.
Why does Israel get the “they’re not stupid enough to do something like this” benefit of the doubt while everyone was parroting the 40 beheaded babies or whatever that clearly insane story was?
I dunno. I mostly saw the more sober claims of piles of corpses, rapes, and burnings. Claims backed up by Hamas-released footage. What’s this about 40 babies?
There were a lot of very young children killed, along with adults, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some photos that were released and I'm not linking to that were baby-sized bodies that had been both burned and their heads removed. This was initially reported as 40 babies decapitated, but it's likely that this was a conflation of different ages of children, and different causes of death; given the total population of the Kibbutz it's very unlikely that there were 40 <3-year-old infants there.
There's a lot of mid-information social media users that don't really get updates as they come around, and it hasn't helped that a lot of the initial pushback came as complete denial (Hamas spokesman saying that their soldiers wouldn't hurt women or children) or in ludicrous ways (that LA Times moron). A lot of more casual observers just saw the initial confused claim, then people getting dunked on for a bizarre claim that the photos of some of the baby corpses were a photoshopped live dog, without the intermediate bit bringing the specific claim from "40 decapitated babies" to "at least some decapitated babies and a lot of children killed in other ways".
It wasn’t an initial confused claim, though, it was atrocity propaganda, which requires a stable phrase to repeat and a visual image. An IDF spokesperson doesn’t accidentally say “40 babies decapitated”.
You should read up on atrocity propaganda before you make suggestions about “winning arguments”. Since the Congo Propaganda War of the 1800s nations have used atrocity propaganda to manufacture public support and/or outcry. They do that to win arguments, by creating a sticky grotesque visual image that can be repeated ad nauseam. Like, you know, beheading babies.
No war is fought with bullets and bombs alone. For as long as enemies have taken up arms against each other, propaganda has proven a robust weapon. During the Civil War, Southern printing presses put out materials that claimed Northern victory would lead to “race-mixing” and newspapers portrayed Union soldiers as rapists and thieves. World War I brought the rise of “atrocity propaganda,” which highlights, exaggerates, and sometimes outright fabricates the gruesome acts of violence committed by opposing combatants.
“Yesterday the Israeli Prime Minister’s office said that it had confirmed Hamas beheaded babies & children while we were live on the air,” she posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, Friday. “The Israeli government now says today it CANNOT confirm babies were beheaded. I needed to be more careful with my words and I am sorry.”
There is an enormous emotional difference between a child being shot and a baby being beheaded.
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Notes -
So they fire 6-10,000 missiles and kill only 3-4000 Gazans in surgical strikes, many of whom may well be actual Hamas fighters. Then they decide to throw a missile at a hospital and kill 1500+ civilians at the same time, because? If the response is to hasten civilian departure / ethnic cleansing, then there’s a whole escalation hierarchy that doesn’t involve that level of bad press.
Why does Israel get the “they’re not stupid enough to do something like this” benefit of the doubt while everyone was parroting the 40 beheaded babies or whatever that clearly insane story was?
I dunno. I mostly saw the more sober claims of piles of corpses, rapes, and burnings. Claims backed up by Hamas-released footage. What’s this about 40 babies?
There were a lot of very young children killed, along with adults, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some photos that were released and I'm not linking to that were baby-sized bodies that had been both burned and their heads removed. This was initially reported as 40 babies decapitated, but it's likely that this was a conflation of different ages of children, and different causes of death; given the total population of the Kibbutz it's very unlikely that there were 40 <3-year-old infants there.
There's a lot of mid-information social media users that don't really get updates as they come around, and it hasn't helped that a lot of the initial pushback came as complete denial (Hamas spokesman saying that their soldiers wouldn't hurt women or children) or in ludicrous ways (that LA Times moron). A lot of more casual observers just saw the initial confused claim, then people getting dunked on for a bizarre claim that the photos of some of the baby corpses were a photoshopped live dog, without the intermediate bit bringing the specific claim from "40 decapitated babies" to "at least some decapitated babies and a lot of children killed in other ways".
It wasn’t an initial confused claim, though, it was atrocity propaganda, which requires a stable phrase to repeat and a visual image. An IDF spokesperson doesn’t accidentally say “40 babies decapitated”.
The initial report was 40 killed babies with some decapitated. The first is undoubtedly true. The second claim seems arguably true.
May I suggest that the argument “not all of the babies were decapitated” isn’t quite the winning argument?
You should read up on atrocity propaganda before you make suggestions about “winning arguments”. Since the Congo Propaganda War of the 1800s nations have used atrocity propaganda to manufacture public support and/or outcry. They do that to win arguments, by creating a sticky grotesque visual image that can be repeated ad nauseam. Like, you know, beheading babies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocity_propaganda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State_propaganda_war
The initial claim is wrong anyway; there is no evidence of babies decapitated
https://archive.ph/4J92h
There is an enormous emotional difference between a child being shot and a baby being beheaded.
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