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I'll be honest about my biases here.
I don't believe the doctors. I think they value the cause higher than their word. And it's been my understanding that some of the viral X-ray images were obviously faked.
Based on your post history, you are obviously a strident opponent of Israel, or maybe Jews in general.
I guess I just wonder what high quality evidence would even look like. What would make me trust you? What would make me trust the doctors? I honestly don't know how to answer that question. But I think the shortest distance to peace is through Israeli victory so that's where I am. War is hell.
And I do believe the damage inflicted on Lebanon and Gaza is nothing compared to what would happen if the shoe was on the other foot. When your ideology explicitly calls for genocide (Hamas/Hezbollah), then you've vacated the moral high ground.
I do feel for the people in Lebanon who are caught up in this. It's awful. But the truth still means something.
Wasn't one of these types of doctors killed recently because he was holding one of the hostages and was killed in the retrieval? Could be misremembering, but I suspect that's what we are working with. And I say that as an ardent doctor defender.
That was a Palestinian doctor, not a foreign volunteer doctor like most interviewed here.
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It sounds familiar but even apart from that the level of supposed sanctity that we're supposed to treat doctors' testimonies with is kind of dumb. The idea that being a doctor automatically confers on someone the kind of supreme ethical status that means they would never lie, be biased, or really hate Jews, has the sort of intuitive logic that I probably accepted as a child but shouldn't be convincing to any adult who tries to think critically.
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I don't know about doctors, but I believe there was an Al Jazeera journalist that met that fate.
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High quality evidence would look like what the NYT did. They polled an assortment of doctors working in Gaza and asked them how often they saw children killed in such a way that would indicate intent. 80% said yes. Some said that it was a daily occurrence. This is high quality evidence. Perhaps 80% of the doctors are liars and the NYT team is lying. Or perhaps extremists who promote and condone war crimes are doing war crimes. Which is more likely?
Oh. You find this a credible source of information? People who volunteer to be governed by terrorists?
A hilarious way to phrase it, but of course. Normal, mainstream, reputable medical organizations issued calls for doctors to volunteer in Gaza. Some accepted. That’s because they care about innocent human lives. Innocent life is not devalued because of the hegemonic political force in power.
Sure it is, if you define value innocence. If you value innocence, then coercing non-innocent actions devalues it by decreasing the degree of innocence.
This includes, for example, compromising information integrity as a condition for access. If you want to assist people in gaza under the administrative control of Hamas, your access to Gaza depends on your public statements aligning with their interests. If they do not like your position, then depending on who you are you may lose access, or people may lose their lives. Therefore, there is a systemic bias at play, and all participants who play to it (speaking only within the bounds Hamas presents) are complicit, and thus less innocent, and thus less valued.
This is why arguments to the value of humanity rarely want to focus on innocence per see. Innocence is too easily compromised.
Here are the problems with that: I don’t see evidence of that happening in the past; Hamas would like to maintain access to top medical care, which would be jeopardized if they began to threaten medical providers; Most of the volunteer doctors are not making a career in the Gaza Strip, so there is no reason for them to cowtow to the ideology of Hamas; the very same survey we are talking about has 20% of the doctors say they didn’t see shot children — so why did this 20% say that? Where’s the evidence that 20% were harassed or asked to leave?
What you presented is a story but the story has nothing evidencing it. The rest of your comment is just trying to obfuscate the fact that innocent Palestinian children ought to obtain medical care.
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Yes, they are probably either lying or have no idea what the hell they're talking about. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
Probably not
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IMO if even part of the IDF evidence of Hamas operating semi-openly out of hospitals is accurate, it seems likely to me that doctors willing to continue working in that environment might be heavily selected to have an axe to grind against the IDF. For example, I know what I'd expect if I started polling Catholic doctors at Catholic hospitals about the ethics of abortion.
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