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Well I’m glad to hear more people stating the obvious. Well done Bern.
By only condemning human rights violations by Hamas and tacitly approving bigger war crimes by Israel, our American and European leaders are choosing sides in a very obvious and hypocritical manner.
We are unnecessarily antagonizing a billion Muslims and making ourselves a target for terrorism by blindly supporting an unjust apartheid state.
I don't want to on the side of Hamas, but I also don't want to be on the side of Israel.
Why drag us into this?
USA and rest of the Western world has enabled Israel for the last 70 years while the Palestinians have been systematically disenfranchised and radicalized. No one put in geniune effort to de-escalate this situation and now shit has hit the fan.
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A refreshing take for sure, and even though Bernie is Jewish he sees this cruel regime for what it really is. There are no excuses for harming innocent civilians, ever!
A lot of jewish actually call this out as a genocide, its just the world leader playing their politics while the people are getting murdered on the ground.
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Religion has not done a lot of good in the world lately. Turns out the "my way or the highway" approach creates nothing but death and violence.
Religion, and British imperialism
As a Brit I'm always shocked people focus on us so much. Like yeah we fucked up a lot of places and did awful things, but basically every country in Europe has committed atrocities that are as bad if not worse, like the French in Vietnam or Belgium in Africa, or mother fucking Spain basically wiping put the entire south American continent.
Most of the current day border conflicts are related to the past century's British policy, both due to the extent of the British Empire and its little interest in preventing trouble in their way out. You see similar issues with French ex-colonies, but since they weren't as many they don't appear as much in the news. Border conflicts in old Spanish colonies mostly took place during the 19th century, and they've been independent for long enough for their current issues not to have as much to do with Spain anymore. In contrast, there are British people alive today who were kicking around when the victors of WWII decided to split Palestine in half without asking Palestinians for their opinion, and afterwards chose to ignore the ethnic cleansings of Palestinians.
In any case, you shouldn't take of this personally, unless you actually hold any position of relative power.
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Three things: Scale, recency and contrition or perceived lack thereof.
The British Empire is the largest empire there has ever been. At its greatest extent, in 1920, it covered about 1/4 of the entire world, long after having lost many holdings like the US. The second largest, the Mongol Empire, reached almost the same size, but hundreds of years earlier.
In the same time period as the British, the Russian empire covered <20% in 1895, but its proportion of colonial lands to their own was much smaller than for the British Empire and the proportion of the current world population living in those areas is also much smaller. The French colonial empire covered less than 1/10th of the world at its peak in 1920, and was by far the other largest recent holding of colonies geographically and culturally outside of the immediate sphere of the holding country.
Spain is rarely brought up, I think, in large part because the Spanish empire reached its peak in the early 1800's and so is "history". Belgium doesn't get discussed at much because 98% of their colonial holdings was Leopold II's personal ownership of the Congo Free State. And then we get to the last bit: Contritition.
Nobody goes around saying the massive scale of gross abuse that happened under Leopold II's rule of the Congo Free State was a good thing. Few people I've met ever defend France's atrocities in Vietnam. Even the defence of their ownership of Algeria, which was special enough to trigger an attempted coup against Charles de Gaulle when he wanted to let it have independence because many saw it as part of France itself, is relatively muted.
But there's still mainstream support for the British Empire in the UK. There are still people who insist the British Empire was awesome for the colonies that were exploited because they got English and rails and British legal systems and that somehow outweighs the mass murder and brutal exploitation and erasure of local cultures.
E.g. this survey from 2019, where 32% were proud of the British Empire, 37% were neutral, and only 19% considered it "more something to be ashamed of". 32% were proud of their country's history of colonialism and oppression. Critically this was significantly higher than for other colonial powers other than the Dutch. At the same time 33% thought it left the colonies better off vs. only 17% who thought they were worse off.
I'm not British, but I've lived in the UK for 23 years, and I've experienced this attitude firsthand from even relatively young British people (ok, so all of them have been Tories) - a refusal to accept that the fact that a substantial number of these former colonies had to take up arms to get rid of British rule might perhaps be a little bit of a hint that the colonial rule was resented and wrong.
No other modern empire has left behind such a substantial proportion of the world population living in countries that have either a historical identity tied up to rebelling against British rule, and/or have relatively recently rebelled against British rule, and/or still have substantial reminders, such as Commonwealth membership or the British monarch as their monarch. When a proportion of the British population then keeps insisting this was great, actually, there you have a big part of it.
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The Roman empire's spawn. Western imperialism and christianity/islam.
Religion is a plague. It's the reason we're going to destroy ourselves. How many of the people who deny climate change (and every other batshit insane position taken by lunatics) are religious right-wingers? By far, most.
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Shh, Bernie, corporate America might blacklist you from ever working for them.
I (a non-US) watched Hillary in a documentary about her saying Bernie has never worked (in corporate/professional settings) all his life. If that's true, I don't think it matters to him.
It’s a joke. They are saying Bernie will never be a paid off tool of the corporations. Which he would never want to be anyway. And that’s why he lost the nomination.
Hillary is a very transparent corporate goon. She's never done anything out of the currently accepted status quo. She's entirely interested in what benefits her political career.
It's genocide. It's hate for hates sake. All for the benefit of a few rich old men.
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Bernie being on the right side of history as usual.
At least someone has common sense
I mean, Bernie Sanders always had that. That's a good part of why people liked him.
See him arguing against various wars where he stood among few against the many and was so far right on these takes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_om-x323Em0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZo97nFS9GU
One of the comments under the videos puts it well:
For every wrong move america has made in the last 40 years, there is a video of Bernie arguing against it.
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I just got done watching PBS News hour Brooks and Capehart segment and, wow... Talk about completely one-sided. As though viewing this event in isolation without recognition to the broader historical context. Basically drooling over Netanyahu.
When will people learn that radicalization doesn't just manifest out of thin air...?
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Even when international powers would force the place into two countries the fighting will never stop. Because both don't have a country and want one and both ground their claim on religion. The religions are incompatible. Hamas consider Jews as the enemy of Allah quite literally.
Jews were pushed out of countries and killed and therefore promised land. So land was simply taken from a torn place that couldn't protect itself. Palestinians are also pushed out of countries and killed and want their land back. The Brits just left them with this conflict because they couldn't handle it. And now probably no one will be able to stop Israel anymore because they were given the better hand in terms of weapons.
Asking either side to stop won't work. Ban religion instead. They could both live there.
Before 1943, both Muslims and Jews lived in Palestine in peace, but as immigration increased, so did tension. It wasn't about religion, it was about land.
There were plenty of Jewish leagues, sports, ect, called the Palestinian Jewish (league name).
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Oh yes of course banning religion is the obvious answer that will lead to harmony. Even in your magical world where religion doesn't exist this conflict would then be on racial lines.
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So land was simply taken from a torn place that couldn’t protect itself.
I mostly agree, but 'taken' is somewhat reductive, it was more like a forced partition. Jews already lived there and were already emigrating there en masse long before the end of WWII, Zionism ramped up in the late 1800's, 60 years before the Jewish state. There was already violence in that area through a lot of early Zionism and a civil war in the few years leading up to partition.
It would be like if the UK decided tomorrow to give 35% of the US to Hispanic Americans despite them only being ~20% of the population, it just a weird way to split up a country that is bound to cause conflict. (Jews were 30% of the population of Israel/Palestine when it was split in half) No one actually expected Israel to survive the wars at the start, as you said they just wanted to push the 'problem' onto someone else. If you're a displaced population what do you do if no one wants to take you and your under threat of death most places you go? It's important to remember that Jews were pretty much universally hated everywhere in the world prior to WWII, they didn't have many prospects for peace.
I suspect however that if partition never happened, there would still be ethnic conflict in that area and it would have just shifted who was the oppressed group. Which really highlights the real problem as you implied, the inability for many religious communities to live side by side. Look at India, Nigeria, Ireland, etc. Whenever you have 2 prominent religions in large enough numbers living closely together their fanaticism often doesn't allow a shared sense of national unity. Banning religion is a great way to make religion popular again though, not the best way to get rid of it. A secular education is the best way to get rid of religion.
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If a law carries no punishment, is it even a law?
Seems like more a set of guidelines that people are free to ignore whenever it suits them.
It's unclear.
Hamas clearly and obviously committed crimes against humanity (intentionally murdering civilians, raping, torturing and kidnapping).
Israel, so far, is playing in the gray areas. It's legal, according to international law, to lay siege on a population as long as it has a definitive and declared military purpose. It's illegal to do it to intentionally harm civilians or to intentionally starve them.
The main problem is that Hamas is using the Palestinians and hides amongst them. That makes the legal discussion very difficult because Israel can always say that they target Hamas and everything else is just collateral damage.
Unfortunately the Palestinians are getting f'ed from both sides here.
I'm pretty sure cutting of food and water to an entire population is no gray area, it's pretty unambiguously a warcrime.
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How come nobody is mentioning how President George Bush is the guy who fucked up Gaza?
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-day-that-bush-took-gaza/
The Day That Bush Took Gaza
April 25, 2004
President Bush’s embrace of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan for unilateral Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip is going to turn out to be more than a mere gesture. Sharon’s radical initiative would evacuate all Israeli settlements and military positions, unilaterally, within the next 18 months...de facto responsibility for what happens in Gaza once Israel withdraws will fall to the United States. That’s the hidden meaning in the president’s letter of assurance to Sharon saying that the United States will lead an international effort to build the capacity and will of Palestinian institutions to fight terrorism and prevent the areas from which Israel withdraws from posing a threat.
One wonders whether Bush really appreciates what he is getting himself and the United States into. Having trumpeted his support for an independent Palestinian state, he is now taking on responsibility for ensuring that the Gaza mini-state created by Israel’s withdrawal does not turn into a failed terrorist state.
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this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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