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Notes -
The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.
Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.
I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it? Is it too far outside the bounds of normal discourse? If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.
There is evidence that Israel is “punishing” the civilian population, which is a war crime. The party that is morally responsible for the misconduct is the only party that should be asked to stop. The US has influence over Israel, but has zero influence over Hamas. It’s brought up that Hamas has tunnels under buildings, and this is to explain Israeli actions, but saying “Hamas should surrender” because of potential Israeli war crimes would be a bad precedent for human rights. Consider a Russian and Ukrainian war where Russia targets civilian homes in Kyiv because they could be housing reserve troops. Would you expect the media to bring up the option that “the Kyiv Regime can surrender to avoid being war crime’d”?
(Just in the past couple weeks we saw Israeli snipers shoot women outside of a Catholic church (leading the Pope to condemn the attack as terrorism) and Israel killing their own hostages, who were walking outside waving a white flag without a shirt. This last one is the strongest evidence we have of Israeli misconduct / war crimes. What is the probability that they accidentally shot these men, versus that they shoot men in most situations where they come across young men?)
People who have cancer often undergo chemotherapy. This procedure involves pumping toxins into the body to kill cancerous cells. Of course some healthy non-cancerous cells do get caught up in this and die. Like many other things in life, chemotherapy comes in different strengths, if a cancer is small you go for low dosage chemotherapy where very few helathy cells get killed in the crossfire. But if the cancer is very big you need to go for agressive chemotherapy because the low dosage stuff won't get rid of the cancer. This agressive chemotherapy will kill lots of healthy cells too, but that doesn't mean the chemotherapy as a whole was a bad idea.
In much the same way Hamas is a cancer on the face of this earth this has grown way too big. Low dosage stuff like precision strikes and being 150% extra sure you're not shooting at people who aren't threats (when by and large 90%+ of the people you encounter will be threats) before pulling the trigger isn't strong enough to excise Hamas from this world. That requires high dosage chemotherapy which will regrettably have side effects including some number of civilian casualites. It's sad, but the alternative (Hamas is left to fester) is even worse.
You understand this comment reads exactly like something Hitler would say in a speech about Jews, right? I suppose he would use the term parasite, or diseased vermin. Just like not every Jew was a Bolshevik extremist (see: Winston Churchill’s comments), not every Palestinian is a Hamas extremist. Punishing Palestinians as a collective is not morally permissible. And incidentally, were Britain to treat the Jewish colonizers like this in the 30s and 40s (punishing the collective for hiding terrorists), it’s doubtful Zionism would ever have got up and running. Their maximum collective punishment was a curfew — should they have bombed them to the abyss instead?
This reasoning essentially amounts to "Hitler treated Jews like enemies. So we should never treat anyone like enemies."
Whether a comparison to disease is appropriate is true or false on the object level; a blanket condemnation makes no sense. You're also glossing over the difference between comparing an ethnic group to a disease, and comparing a military/terrorist oprganization to a disease.
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