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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.

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In regards to the recent hospital explosion, it's looking increasingly likely that Israel did not cause the explosion.

https://manifold.markets/MilfordHammerschmidt/did-the-idf-just-now-blow-up-a-hosp

I saw this however on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/alextomo/status/1714670858914894046?t=UcPxGEUM5ShnUpc8Hav3Vw&s=19

https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1714548529538953637?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1714548529538953637%7Ctwgr%5E4bbaa419eb9133e336435eb810800500af090537%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.hindustantimes.com%2Fworld-news%2Fidf-shares-audio-of-hamas-allegedly-talking-about-rocket-that-hit-gaza-hospital-it-misfired-101697630817752.html

That the IDF released audio of Hamas operatives saying it was from Islamic Jihad, but the audio is clearly faked with bad Palestinian accents and crappy acting. Why do you think the IDF would release obviously doctored audio? Stupidity thinking that no one would call them on it? Rationally making the calculation their supporters would eat it up and it won't make their detractors any angrier than they are? That maybe it isn't actually faked and some Hamas operatives actually do just talk like that? But even to me, I don't speak a lick of Arabic, the tone of voices does sound like script reading and it felt very convenient how they described so much incriminating and explanatory information in a minute of conversation, like exposition from the beginning of a bad movie. Thoughts?

It’s insane to me that anyone would even consider using an alleged “intercepted call” as evidence. At a certain point, something is so easy to fake that it should be ignored completely unless there’s some way to independently verify the data on the call. All it takes is one sound expert employed at the IDF to double check that the lines and phraseology have the same cadence as typical Palestinian speech.

For the hospital blast, I would only trust the information that (1) can be independently verified as having an origin date of around the time of the blast, (2) was immediately posted online in the aftermath, eg within 20 minutes, (3) cannot be faked by a gainfully employed intelligence agent with an IQ higher than 115.

Does Israel’s security branches not employ people with natively Palestinian accents? I would be shocked if they didn’t have at least a few in the relevant departments.

The challenge with propaganda in a conflict like this is that you need the high level, smart stuff that can be at least semi-verified by autistic YouTube journalists AND the most banal, likely fake, dumb propaganda of the Rape of Belgium variety.

Look at the Hamas hospital stuff. Arabs are already the people most likely to believe in weird conspiracies, no ordinary Arab is ever going to buy that Israel didn’t bomb the hospital yesterday. So the Hamas propaganda completely worked, even though it was an obvious lie.

Israel needs both the high level technical proof, and a dumb, obviously fake “intercepted audio” call to convince the average person on the street who isn’t going to listen to a 5 minute lecture on crater size and casualty counts.

Dumb people and their consequences have been a disaster for the human race. At a certain point of intelligence you should just accept that you're not smart enough to meaningfully understand what's going on in the world on large scales and should content yourself with your garden.

Lest someone accuse me of only saying this because I am intelligent, if tomorrow 200 IQ aliens from the planet Tralfamadore suddenly arrived and took over the world I would apply those words to myself.

Suppose that they proclaim they're smarter than you even though by any metric you can understand, including IQ, they aren't.

Would you really though? If their first proclamation was, "With our immense IQ we have decided BurdensomeCountTheWhite, his family line and all his friends and family must be wiped from the Earth, so as to facilitate the future flourishing of the great Tralfamadore Empire". Are you going to walk your friends and family into the disintegration chamber? You are just going to trust that they know what's best?

I would fight them, I would not walk into the disintegration chamber at all. This is probably my Pashtun ancestry speaking but I would far prefer to die like a lion than die like a sheep. But that's not the scenario above, that scenario above is dying like a lion vs living as an extra comfortable sheep, and I've experienced enough creature comforts that Leo can go for a hike.

Right, but you have a red line somewhere, which is presumably somewhere BEFORE they order your death to make tasty BurdensomeCountTheWhite chops for alien Easter. When they start shaving your hair for stylish human hair jumpers? When they order you neutered? When they round you up and put you in a pen? When they decide who you can breed with to maximise hair growth? When they take away your ability to earn a living? When they only allow you to watch TV shows involving benevolent aliens? When they only allow IQ 200 people to have a say in government legally? When they decide who you can breed with to maximise IQ uplift? When they decide where you can live? What job you can hold? When they decide you should just stay home and garden? When they decide the words of an intellectual dullard are pointless, and so ban you from the Motte? The position, that their intellectual superiority makes you irrelevant to decision making has practical impact on what policies they will pursue. Presumably at some point your Pashtun sensibilities will decide that dying like a lion is better than living like an actual sheep? Or maybe they will put you in a zoo like we do with lions. A cultural artefact for alien clonelings to ooh and ahh at.

In other words, just because the aliens are smarter than you, and make better decisions than you, does not mean the values they are working towards will be good for you. Just because you are smarter than IQ 100 Tony, does not mean that he should submit to your decision making unless he actually agrees with your goals. If you want to outsource manufacturing which will gut his town. Even if you are correct that it will make the world better off, he does not have to agree that the trade off is worth it. And if he does not agree, his view is just as valid as yours.

Do they really need that dumb level faked audio to convince people they’re innocent if they’re really innocent? I would think it’d just hurt their credibility

bad Palestinian accents

I don't speak Arabic, so I can't tell if it is true or not. But I also observe that there are a great many Arabic speakers who hate Israel with the passion of a thousand burning suns, so I'm not sure to what extent I can trust the reports of those who do speak Arabic either.

I’m not going to say it’s impossible it’s a fake, but the relevant Israeli departments surely have enough people on staff who have good Palestinian accents that this claim significantly raises my priors towards the debunking being fake.

I still want to believe that this is the equivalent of someone going "ching chong ding dong", but everybody in the west is too ignorant to notice, and too in awe of Mossad to believe something like that could happen.

I would hope Channel 4 got actual experts to verify and not random Arabs off the street, but admittedly my trust in media is low

The Arabic appears fine, but dont have enough of the local knowledge to know if all the words are pronounced the “palestinian” way. Same goes for the diction… :/

I mean… I’m not going to say it’s impossible that it’s a fake. Getting some of the Arabic blokes in the office to VA your intelligence transcript seems like the kind of unforced error that could happen when you are scrambling to regain control of the narrative. Though it would be such a stupid mistake that I still wouldn’t think it likely.

But the people who are shouting that this is an ‘obvious fake’ are the same people who only yesterday were telling me that this couldn’t possibly have been a Palestinian missile because it whistled like a JDAM, or that there were no rockets in the Palestinian armoury that could have done this, or that Gazan Ministry of Health death tolls are historically very accurate. Every claim so far that supports the Palestinian narrative has been easily falsified or just outright nonsense. And now I’m being told that this is an obvious fake, and it’s all a big IDF coverup, but this time I can’t make my own judgements because I don’t speak the language. And so I guess I’m supposed to take it on trust that this really is an obvious fake?

Sorry, no. When it comes to this incident, the pro-Palestinian side have been throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna give them a free win. So for now I’m going to wait and see how this shakes out, with a very high prior that this is all just the latest round of BS peddled by pro-Palestinian journos who mistake their shower thoughts for hard-hitting journalistic analysis.

So, I mostly agree with you - I wouldn't expect IDF to manufacture evidence, either (that's the sort of thing that plays right into their detractors' hands). But it's weird how on-the-nose the dialogue is. "Oh gosh, we're the ones that bombed the hospital, oh no." We can put aside that I wouldn't expect these people to even admit to themselves that it wasn't Israel's fault. I expect real intelligence in the real world to be noisy and full of irrelevancies and requiring expert analysis to even figure out its implications. Recording a straightforward admission like this would be hitting the covert-ops jackpot.

So now the story is pivoting from "Israel killed 500 people in a hospital" to "Israel maybe releases a cropped image and sus audio", instead of "Hamas lied preposterously and all of western media went with the lie"? Good pivot, from a PR stance, for the pro-child killers, I guess.

Yes, far too many rightists try to ascribe to "Jewish control" what is actually just firm ideological control. The media isn't controlled by shadowy forces as much as it is just staffed top-to-bottom with die-hard true believers in American Progressivism.

TBH, what is the difference? If Israel blew up a hospital, it probably contained Hamas operatives and weapons (there are none in Gaza known to lack such things, ditto schools, retirement homes, and all other potentially sympathetic targets). Lets say IDF missile launch operator #112 misread an intelligence report that said a mass barrage was about to be launched from the roof of Mecca Hospital in Gaza, and instead leveled Medina Hospital. What would change? there would still be operatives and a weapons cache there in most cases. In the incredibly unlikely scenario that there was not, fog of war is fog of war. Is Israel not allowed to make a mistake when targeting rocket launch sites? Police forces in the 1st world are certainly not held to such a standard in active shooter or hostage scenarios (both of which are easy to deal with compared to the current situation in Gaza). If a hostage in a bank heist is wearing a Nixon mask and charges a police officer the PO is not put on trial for shooting said Nixon masker.

All that said, its probably not Israel, because they know they are held to a standard that is higher than almost any other country in history. Most would have ethnically cleansed the West Bank and genocided Gaza by now. Israel might be the only country in history to show such restraint.

The difference would be if Israel launched a surprise attack on a hospital that killed 500 innocents without giving them warning to evacuate. That did not actually happen apparently, but if it did it would be bad.

If the hospital was also the site of a military installment (they all are), why would that be bad?

Because an unnecessary number of civilians would be killed.

Why is it unnecessary to dismantle rocket installations pointed at your population?

That’s why you warn the civilians to evacuate first. Yes, that also allows terrorists to flee too, but being civilized sometimes means choosing policies that aren’t maximally effective so innocents don’t die.

That isn't being civilized, its just being self loathing. That international pressure forces some countries to do such a thing is saddening.

If the hospital is the site of a military installment, the number is not unnecessary, just excessive.

To be nitpicky Israel is being treated with kids gloves in this situation compared to the treatment of western police forces during encounters. We had George Floyd a dude all up on fentanyl launched nationwide race riots.

Then you had this incident recently. Notice how the article headline includes nothing about him trying to kill the cop first.

And of the SPLC was running with it. I’m going to assume the ADL would be commenting if they didn’t have real things to deal with.

https://twitter.com/splcenter/status/1714646960005632186?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

We have plenty of guy tries to kill cop but ends up dead events followed by protest in the last few years. The Jews managed to get any Ivy leaguer supporting Hamas unhirable for a few years.

George Floyd was a race riot, and was not in response to excessive force used during an active shooter drill. But you do have a point that the same people who were up in arms about Floyd also will hold Israel to an impossible to meet standard, because the childish POV overlaps on the two issues.

And this is relevant how, exactly? Either excessive force was used, or it wasn't.

????

It's relevant because it shows excessive force was not being used, and that the policeman was forced to kill him in self defense.

Police don't get a free pass because a suspect, especially a hancuffee suspect, is an extra bad guy, and it not even as if Chauvin was acting in the heat of passion, given how the death occurred.

What are you even talking about, and what does Chauvin have to do with this case?

Sorry I thought he was talking about George Floyd. I'll delete the comment. Though on a side note, the SPLC has been a joke, if not a scam, going on 30 years. Their views cant be used as representative of anything, let alone what the ADL supposedly would say.

I was talking about George Floyd. Its certain that Fentanyl heavily contributed to his death. A person without the health issue of being high on fentanyl almost certainly would have survived that arrest. Yet the cop was treated as if he had to be a Superman who could make a legitimate arrest of someone who physically could handle very little additional force. Also it may have just been a straight up OD. Yet the cop got no mercy from our media or justice system.

It’s not that Floyd was a bad guy. It’s that he committed a serious crime, resisted arrest, and was close to death before the arrest occurred. It created a very difficult situation for the cop.

He responded to the part were you were talking about Cure.

Fair.

Though I don't know if SPLC can be considered a joke when it comes to the influence they wield. Aren't they on various "trust and safety" councils of social media? Or am I conflating them with ADL and other orgs?

The right comparison surely is not police action in Western countries, but Russia/Ukraine. Depending on whether you ultimately believe that the hospital was hit by the Palestinians themselves, this story either has the shape of the Konstantinovka market missile (where the NYT timed their "actually it was the Ukrainians" article to coincide with Zelenskiy's US visit for reasons I'd still like to understand better) or any number of prior cases with hospitals/train stations/hotels being hit (to Ukrainian claims of "atrocity" and Russian claims of "military were stationed there").

I doubt anything actually resembling war like Ukraine_Russia is comparable to Hamas-Israel. In the Hamas conflict, Hamas wants its own people to die, because that is literally their most effective weapon in their toolbox.

There is a sense in which it is effective for Hamas but not Ukraine (the former has no state capacity or military mobilisation and therefore relies on inflaming more Palestinians to join their cause/participate in the fighting, while the latter can easily put anyone who would ever be willing to fight under arms and has little to gain from additional internal anti-Russian sentiment on the margin), but I contend that the more significant dimension in either conflict is Western support, and any reporting (certainly any reporting that we see) from them is primarily aimed at the Western audience. The Western world has the military-economic power to snuff out either of the belligerents in either conflict at the cost of perhaps cutting down on dessert and gratuitous taxi rides for a few months; the only obstacle to overcome to get it to do that is to talk its people into a state of sufficient moral outrage on your behalf that they would actually be willing to bear those sacrifices.

Somewhat, yes. The West can beat Russia, but it can't be certain that wouldn't have high costs. It could also just let Russia win.

Hamas can't win unless the West turns on Israel fully. Which is why Gazan's dying is literally all they have. It won't work on someone like me who sees the strategy as fully transparent.

That the IDF released audio of Hamas operatives saying it was from Islamic Jihad, but the audio is clearly faked with bad Palestinian accents and crappy acting. Why do you think the IDF would release obviously doctored audio?

Pure hypothetical, say it is fake. Midwit PCM types? I see this all the time with lawyers, they throw everything including the kitchen sink. "Ok... that makes sense and that makes sense and that's pure bullshit." The court throws out the bullshit, but if it had snuck through instant win or padding the case.

Normal person: "You have established yourself as a liar, so I should toss out everything else you say."

Midwit lawyers/judges: "This is just a debate game, fair play."

Take this thread: https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1714535497958334678

Vast majority is "definitely not Israel". Then... but why did they crop the crater out of the photos? The Crater it seems clearly too small.

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1714600473104404966

Midwit bureaucrat: "Let's pad just how much our enemies it was."

Perhaps another example is the 40 beheaded babies. Maybe it's 2 babies beheaded a dozen killed but just needed to make the story a bit more tragic.

Vast majority is "definitely not Israel". Then... but why did they crop the crater out of the photos?

The small crater is not cropped out of that photo. There are people standing between it and the camera; it's right where the road enters the parking area.

The original report wasn’t 40 beheaded. The pro Palestinians reporters have transformed it into “they claim 40 beheaded and that was bs”

This is a more plausible explanation than ‘the mossad doesn’t have anyone who can do a Palestinian accent’.

Do you speak Palestinian Arabic?

Does the poster confidently stating that this is "clearly faked with bad Palestinian accents" accent speak Arabic in a Palestinian accent? Where is this easy confidence (selectively only applied in one direction) coming from?

Audio seems fake to me, but when has that ever stopped a government? They will use whatever resources they have to accomplish their ends. Even if they had no relation to the hospital, there's effectively zero downside to fabricating evidence in addition to what is already available.

The downside is that (smart) people trust Israel less, and their opinions trickle down to the masses