578
Biden under pressure to act amid new fears of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Gaza
(www.aljazeera.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
578 points (100.0% liked)
World News
48938 readers
2192 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
For literal decades Biden has been telling Israel he'll support them no matter what, but they need to worry about the optics of their actions...
He's 100% ok with what's happening, he just wishes they were quieter while doing it.
He's not going to hold Israel accountable, because he knows the only other person Americans can vote for is trump.
So Biden sees no reason to stop supporting Israel, in a moderates mind it literally doesn't matter because the Republicans would be even shittier. Which by some twisted logic means Biden can be just as bad and it's not a negative.
It's a great example of why "not a Republican" can't be the bare minimum for the dem candidate.
'dissolve your democracy' or 'support ethnic cleansing'
Not a great set of choices at the ballots for Americans this election.
This is indeed both radical and paranoid.
The care bear Dems will hold hands and care the situation away.
Fighting for anything is only just starting to be considered. But it's so very late, now.
Hope we never get to what you describe. We need the laws and LEO to do what's right and keep things from sliding. Very hard to know that may not happen and I deeply wish Biden held himself to one term.
He has a considerable polling and enthusiasm gap now - and this isn't the time for that to be true.
Or here's a novel idea: the candidate who doesn't want to dissolve democracy could dramatically increase his chances of winning by NOT enabling genocide including ethnic cleansing and domicide.
I'd set the likelihood of THAT ever happening at zero a month or two ago, but now it seems he's slowly realizing that enough people actually care more about human rights than empty platitudes and slavish devotion to what's become an apartheid state that he has to change course.
I'd say there's now a 10-20% chance he's going to at least PRETEND to agree that Palestinian lives matter between now and November.
As a someone on the left, few things are as persuasive and soothing as wrung hands.
I'm gonna have to ask you to elaborate on what you mean by that.
Biden is likely to go out and wring his hands about the difficult situation for everyone involved in the conflict. He'll show it is something he thinks about, then it will (likely) decrease the pressure on him.
Because he wrung his hands on a stage and/or into a microphone.
My theory is that people think that counts as being heard.
Edit: my apologies if my earlier brevity sounded like a dismissal of your point. I was attempting to agree and, well... didn't provide enough context.
Thank you for the question.
Yeah, you're probably spot on 😮💨
I don’t know why he bothers, i have never had a choice in an election in the first place. I can’t imagine someone being on the fence at this point unless they are cloaking for an argument.
Who is the more accelerationist candidate? The one who openly calls himself a dictator (‘on day one only, teehehehe’) or the status-quo octogenarian who continues the moral bankruptcy and refuses to stop lethal support or even public condemnation towards Israel even slightly? And I’m supposed to be thankful that Biden-Harris check the “not Trump lol” box and ignore the rest? Remember the hemming and hawing about Ukraine getting last gen/expiring tech? And we’re just GIVING Israel hardware from active US inventory???
I’d LOVE a viable third party or AVP/STV/etc voting, but electoral reform is a threat to DNC & RNC hegemony, so that never happening without a constitutional convention. So tell me, do you really have a choice at the ballot? Federal and primary races are littered with corporate and party money, there is no organic change coming from DC anymore.
You vote Republican to sink into the muck. You vote Democrat to stand there to let the tide take you. But you don’t have a choice other than to stall and hope that something changes.
Let me help, it’s more nuanced than that
It’s “dissolve our democracy and support ethnic cleansing at home and abroad” or “support ethnic cleansing abroad only”
The reason he's starting to pretend to listen is that he's losing in the polls.
Turns out that the electorate has a ridiculously short memory.
Turns out that the "I'm not the other guy" tactic is much less effective for an incumbent than a challenger.
Most shockingly, it turns out that continuing to ignore the rightful moral outrage of as many as half of your potential voters, maybe even more, is an extremely bad idea even if your opponent is objectively many times worse than you.
So yeah, as much as he hates it, he's gonna have to do something different, or at least pretend to, and he knows it.
He's been polling bad this whole time...
And just illegally went around Congress to "sell" weapons to Israel in exchange for a small slice of the billions we've given them this year.
I wish what you were saying was true, because its optimistic
But it's just not what's actually happening...
It's gone from bad to worse in the last couple of months, though.
I'd say that giving it a 10-20% likelihood of happening in spite of him almost certainly being forced to do it or lose is rather pessimistic tbh..
I'm not saying it's happening. I'm saying that the likelihood of it happening in the future has increased from nonexistent to very small, theoretically.
Factually incorrect...
https://www.270towin.com/2024-presidential-election-polls/national
They've been 2-3% away from each other all year.
Even before this Israel shit, Biden doesn't have a good chance.
That doesn't mean I agree with anything else you're saying, I'm just not going to provide a source that disproves every single thing you just said, because it's not a good use of time so I'm trying to focus on just one thing.
The election year just started, and these numbers are going to change dramatically
Strong disagree on this language.
https://jcpa.org/new-u-s-poll-raises-questions-about-americans-support-for-israels-war-against-hamas/
Anyone in the 10% that thinks hostages or sexual assault is a lie, or that Jews overplay the fucking Holocaust, are not "rightful" and their concerns do not come from empathy, because they lack empathy as a concept.
Is it right to be morally outraged by an ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing and domicide? Yes or no?
The indisputable facts that Hamas has committed heinous terrorism and that the holocaust happened and was unimaginably awful doesn't excuse the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli government, so please pack your fucking whataboutism away.
It's not whataboutism to demonstrate that an election-significant number of Democrats believe Hamas bullshit over reality, and that the number of people who believe that is enough to change Dem support from strong majority agreement with the President to disagreement.
It's also not whataboutism to point out that nearly a third of people polled have generally no opinion on such basic things as "did the Holocaust happen" or "was the Hamas terror attack a big deal" or "does Hamas target civilians."
War does indeed suck and you're allowed to not like it and even use your irresponsibly inflammatory language, but it's absurd to suggest these comments are whataboutism.
Even if the pro-IDF propaganda piece you linked to had successfully demonstrated that, yes it would still be a whataboutism.
What Americans believe has no bearing on whether the Israeli government should be allowed to systematically slaughter and demolish their way through Palestinians, including children, at a rate completely unheard of anywhere in the world in recent years.
Yes it is. That is by definition whataboutism. Maybe you need to look up what whataboutism is. While you're at it, look up "bad faith arguments" and several logical fallacies.
And war crimes perpetrated against a mostly defenseless civilization population of over 50% children are much worse.
Gee, thanks! So generous of you!
Fixed that for you
Again, just Google it. You can also use a better search engine, but PLEASE look up the word you keep pretending you know the meaning of.
You do understand that you are literally expressing a thing that some Americans believe, yes? Like, you get that your position is an opinion, right?
Yes, it is indeed an opinion that committing atrocities is a bad thing to do. Well done on finally getting something right.
It's a VERY popular opinion though, one shared by so many people that the world has decided that people are not allowed to do that bad thing.
That the Israeli Apartheid regime is committing genocide, ethnic cleansing and domicide isn't an opinion, though. It's an objective fact by all definitions of all the words.
A fact not changed by whether or not some misguided Americans think or pretend to think that the atrocities of Hamas are justified or that the holocaust didn't happen.
You're not dumb. You know that people disagree with you on the atrocities you claim.
For instance, it's impossible to have an apartheid system against another country. Israel is, by definition, not an apartheid state.
It's hilarious to me that you'll try to bring up the definitions of words after that - perhaps this is why your opinion is so extreme.
Wow, you've already doubled the number of things you've been right about! At this rate we'll only have to keep arguing a couple months more until you stop being an insincere moron!
I know that some people deny objective reality, yes, but that doesn't make objective reality any less real or any more subjective.
Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs living in Israel and Israel-occupied and/or -controlled Palestine are treated as, at best, second class citizens. Desmond Tutu agreed that Israel is an Apartheid state and he of all people should know.
I guess the truth sometimes looks like hilarious comedy to those who believe in ridiculous gaslighting such as that coming from Times of Israel, AIPAC and Faux News 🤷
Yeah, it's SO extreme to think that the lives of Palestinians matter! Such an audacious notion! 🙄
You went to all the effort to cite Tutu and yet provide no evidence for this, because they're not, and they literally have representation in Israel's government.
Yeah, because everyone knows that having 1/12 of the knesset be Arabs means that there's not systemic inequality and oppression of Arabs and other minority groups! 🤦
here's some evidence you're gonna ignore or pretend to refute.
It's proportionate to their population.
This article is about the Palestinian territory, a different country than Israel.
Lol they literally acknowledge it.
No. As pointed out in the article you just pretended to have read, the Jewish and Palestine populations of the territories controlled by Israel are roughly equal.
"between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)".
It's right in the opening sentence of the fucking summary the report starts with ffs! 🤦
Gaza is not in Israel lol. It's an occupied territory, not part of their country. Hamas runs Gaza as the official government.
Gaza is de facto controlled by Israel and as such is their responsibility.
Even if Hamas wasn't a terrorist organization first, a political advocacy group second and a government as a WAY distant third, they still wouldn't be able to properly take care of the people of Gaza, given the inhumane conditions created and enforced by Israel.
Both of these statements are false. Not "I disagree." They are false and they would offend the fuck out of Gazans.
They control the food supply, the water supply, the power supply, the fuel supply, the medicine supply and the international aid supply.
That means that they're in control and it's in no way offensive towards Gazans to acknowledge that.
Hamas didn't build any infrastructure with Iran's money. They built bombs. Israel voluntarily provided power to Gaza, but is under no compulsion to provide power to an enemy they're actively at war with.
Where would they have gotten water for the cement or fuel for the machines? Money's not very useful when someone else is actively preventing you from using them on the things you need.
As does Israel with the tens of billions of dollars the US sends every year. Israel spends more than the entire GDP of Palestine on murdering Palestinians every year.
It's a quasi-occupied territory that they have made sure can't get power in any other way. For Israel not to provide power to Gaza is Israel preventing Gaza from having power at.
And they're actively at war with Hamas, not the entire population. The vast majority of which has never harmed a single Israeli citizen and over 50% of which is CHILDREN.
Turns out the restrictions only applied because Hamas wants genocide. Money can, in fact, be exchanged for goods and services, and was for years prior to Hamas.
They are at war with the government of Gaza, correct.
So 6.8 million people have to suffer and die for it? You call that justice? Also, Hamas may want genocide, but they don't have the power to carry it out. Israel's government HAS the power and IS committing genocide.
The majority of Gazans weren't alive the last time Hamas allowed a vote, let alone old enough to vote.
Hamas is not a legitimate government and their atrocities are neither the fault nor the responsibility of the civilian population.
They are the government, and they have been consistently attacking Israel for 16 years, culminating in "Israel's 9/11"
Imagine Israel without the Iron Dome you don't want to give them money for.
Suffering happens in war. That's why war is bad. 6.8 million people won't die though. There will be 6.77 million Palestinians in Gaza after this war, ideally closer to a 2 state solution than if Hamas was still around.
You know what? Fuck it.
Keep using an imagined genocide to excuse an actual genocide.
Keep simping for a fascist government.
Keep defending an apartheid ethnostate system.
Keep excusing war crimes.
Keep victim blaming.
It's not like your awful perspective actually matters to anyone who matters anyway, thank fuck.
Have the day you deserve, genocide cheerleader.
What other country has their roads, electricity, water, trade, and police controlled by another?
Like there are words, and then there are facts on the ground. It walks and quacks like an apartheid.
That's not whataboutism. Whataboutism is changing the subject to derail the conversation. This is simply addressing a different point of view in the same discussion.
No. Mentioning the opinions of uninvolved people IS changing the subject of whether or not genocide is bad and should be stopped.
A comparable if much lower stakes example would be if we were discussing whether or not it's ok to say that Wings were better than The Beatles and then some rando chimes in to inform us that 10% of techno fans think that the world doesn't need guitars.
Fun had, let's return to the actual: 10% of the respondents of a poll saying ANYTHING doesn't make genocide more or less acceptable and bringing it up in spite of that is a whataboutism, a distraction and a very crass way to try to derail the conversation.
Biden works for the war machine
No. The best information is that they've been putting a ton of pressure on Netanyahu to back the fuck off, but it hasn't done any good because he's a legitimate asshole and always has been. (Remember, this is the same guy who deliberately embarrassed Obama by accepting a GOP invitation to address Congress without consulting the White House or making an official state visit to the president. He's the scum of the earth and always has been. There's zero question that he's hoping for a Trump win.)
They don't want to go public with demanding restraint or a cease fire because they are afraid it will widen the war by encouraging Iran and its other proxies such as the Houthis and Hezbollah which could further hinder freight traffic through the Red Sea, thus bumping global inflation back up and giving Trump a campaign gift. I think at this point it's a lost cause and they need to cut their losses and tell Israel to knock it the fuck off, but I expect they will continue to drag their feet and work on back channels.
We also know that every time Iran has been met with real force rather than empty threats, they have backed off. Ultimately it would still be a big gamble to openly threaten them, but it's something to think about, especially if you don't fancy another Trump presidency/dictatorship.
Most of what we see on Lemmy is pure amateur hour speculation that has only a very tangential relationship with what's actually happening.
I agree with this but also I'm not sure if this isn't already a proxy war with iran-russia, and it also seems to benefit china too.
And even if netanyahu wasn't an arse, he's totally reliant on some awful people to stay in power, and out of prison, for however long he can manage both.
Pushing back publically against his actions now is equivalent to demanding regime change in Israel and while I think it would be a good thing I can see why geopolitically it's difficult for the US to do.