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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   25230 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Another day, another Guardian article.

Palestinian civil defence teams began exhuming bodies from a mass grave outside the Nasser hospital complex in Khan Younis last week after Israeli troops withdrew. A total of 310 bodies have been found in the last week, including 35 in the past day, Palestinian officials have said.

“We feel the need to raise the alarm because clearly there have been multiple bodies discovered,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights.

“Some of them had their hands tied, which of course indicates serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and these need to be subjected to further investigations,” she said.

[...] Medics working for Doctors Without Borders described how Israeli forces attacked Nasser hospital in late January before withdrawing a month later, leaving the facility unable to function.

I have no doubt that the IDF commits some human rights violations. But if the UN high commissioner for human rights is disturbed about reports of mass graves, the subtext to me is "this is another Srebrenica". And I am rather sure that Israel does not systematically carry out mass shootings of prisoners. The optics would just be terrible, and in the age where everyone has a phone with a FullHD camera and some fraction of IDF soldiers presumably do not want to see every last Palestinian dead, the inevitable backslash would negate a thousandfold any perceived strategic advantage by reducing the population of their enemy. Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.

From reading the executive summary from MSF, you would think that Hamas is a collective hallucination of the IDF, who find it necessary to lay siege to a hospital instead of just walking in to the front door and asking if it would be possible to search the basement for the existence of any secret tunnels really quick before moving on, looking for further windmills to tilt against.

Mithridacy is the art of misdirecting by omission without telling outright lies, and of seeing through them by noticing what is only implied instead of stated outright. If there was not a single armed Palestinian on hospital grounds, that would strengthen the story by making the IDF attack on the hospital a war crime. The fact that MSF does not claim that explicitly makes it unlikely to be true. While artillery shelling always carries the risk of collateral damage, snipers generally see whom they kill. If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning. The fact that the article does not mention that suggests that at least the primary victims of the snipers might have been some of the hypothetical Hamas fighters in the hospital.

Likewise, if the bodies in the mass grave all featured gunshot wounds to vital areas, which would be a clear indication of mass executions, you can bet that both the "Palestinian civil defense teams" (I am always amazed at the level of benevolence Hamas has shown in handing key functions of the Gazan government to decent people instead of consolidating all of the power in their own hands ) and the Guardian would go out of their way to tell you about it. So the fact that they do not mention it is somewhat strong evidence that it is not the case.

Also:

[...] Shamdasani said her office was working on corroborating Palestinian officials’ reports that hundreds of bodies had been found at the site.

So she has confirmed that there have been "multiple bodies" discovered, and also that some of them had their hands tied, but is still hedging on the total number of bodies claimed by Ham^H^H^HPalestinian officials? I would assume that if you have a trusted source in Gaza, you could confirm the latter quickly enough.

Also, I do not think that Hamas would lie about that. The Health Ministry numbers may be exaggerated, but they should certainly be able to find 310 bodies to put into that mass grave they discovered after two months. Or perhaps they legitimately found them and someone buried them afer the Nasser fighting.

More broadly, I wonder about the long term strategy of Israel. Assuming that Nasser was an important point of access for the Hamas tunnel system, they went in, smashed it, and left again? Why not occupy it long term, turning Gaza into an open air prison in earnest, with checkpoints and curfews, eventually establishing an alternative structure of government? Gaza is not exactly Afghanistan in size, after all. Going in, kicking Hamas a bit and then have them disperse hidden among the civilian refugees seems like it would cause a lot of civilian hardship without accomplishing the legitimate goal of wiping Hamas from the Earth.

Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.

I kind of wonder about that. The institutions that launder that sort of information into public awareness are to a large extent captured by people who are anti-Israel, so it's actually kind of questionable how many people they'd lose vs. the counterfactual by actually doing massive war crimes. A lot of the populace already thinks Israel's guilty of ethnic cleansing, and a reasonable amount have heard "Wolf!" cried enough times that they've tuned out and won't believe reports of massacres; there's just not all that much of the US meaningfully in play here.

The media is solidly pro Israel as is the entire foreign policy establishment. If anything blind support for Israel is their prime directive and they ignore things Israel does in a way they wouldn't do for anyone else. The October 7th attack was lied about to an absurd extent, with stories of mass baby burnings and rapes that turned out to be as true as Saddam's nukes. Those stories were pushed hard by pro zionist media which is essentially all media. This report has more credible sources than those stories.

I mean, I did forget about the ADL, and that's my bad, but as you say they aren't in play either and so I think the overall issue of "remarkably little of the USA is actually movable by any potential Israeli warcrimes, because most of the populace either is already dead-set against Israel, is shielded from the information, or is so pro-Israel it'd still support it" still exists.

I am not so sure information doesn't matter:

Knowledge – or lack of knowledge – about casualties is related to attitudes about the conflict in a few ways. For a start, respondents who do not correctly answer that more Palestinians than Israelis have died are much more likely to decline to answer many opinion questions in the survey. Chart shows In the U.S., awareness that more Palestinians than Israelis have died is related to opinions about the current conflict

For example, among those unaware that more Palestinians have died, 59% offered no opinion when asked whether Biden has been favoring one side or the other too much. Among those who knew the balance of casualties, far fewer – 22% – had no opinion on Biden’s approach to the war.

In addition, those who are aware that more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the current war tend to express more pro-Palestinian views on certain questions. One example is that they express more favorable attitudes about the Palestinian people than do respondents who are not aware of the relative number of deaths on each side. Among those who correctly answer this knowledge question, favorable opinions of the Palestinian people outnumber unfavorable opinions by 61% to 36%; among those unaware of the balance of casualties, more have an unfavorable than favorable opinion of the Palestinian people (47% unfavorable, 39% favorable).

Similarly, those aware that more Palestinians have died are about twice as likely to say Biden is favoring the Israelis too much (35%) as to say he’s favoring the Palestinians too much (17%). Among those who do not know that more Palestinians have died, 15% say Biden is favoring the Palestinians too much and 9% say he’s favoring the Israelis too much.

https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/emotions-news-and-knowledge-about-the-israel-hamas-war/

Americans with the most knowledge about casualties are much more pro Palestinian. There is a major divide between young and old americans and that is probably due to getting info from pro zionist mainstream media vs those who get information online.

Americans with the most knowledge about casualties are much more pro Palestinian.

In large part the only Americans who care about Palestinian casualties at all are already pro-Palestine.

My point is: suppose Israel commits an atrocity. People who consume pro-Palestinian media will hear about it and be outraged, but they mostly already hate Israel so nothing's changed. People who consume pro-Israel media will just hear Israel's side of the story, as implausible as it may be, and therefore won't be outraged because they don't know it happened, so nothing's changed.

Sure, there are people who care about the truth, have a variety of sources, but are not either already pro-Palestinian or rabidly pro-Israel and thus can be flipped - those people are in play. But there aren't actually all that many of them.

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