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There’s a reason why I trust the NYT on this specific topic. If the NYT tells me that Assad used poison gas against civilians, I doubt it pending further evidence because it is aligned with American geopolitical interests and the interests of the NYT’s Democrat + wealthy bent. Same with the hilariously biased title reporting on Kamala’s plagiarism today. This is par for the course of NYT. But NYT has no compelling reason to post anti-Israel falsehoods. It doesn’t help Democrats, it doesn’t help their financial status, and it goes against the values of some of the execs who have ties to the Jewish community (CEO and chief editor). Why would the NYT be particularly critical of Israel? I think because the truth actually compels them here. There’s no financial, status, or political reason for them to criticize Israel. Now in this particular article, there is also an element of objective reporting, not pure subjective storymaking. No, it’s not perfectly objective, but polling a good sample of doctors is better than your usual Israel-Gaza coverage.
Re: your point that the doctors are forced to testify like this, they can simply abstain from answering if that were so, or they could answer anonymously. Is Hamas forcing them to answer with a gun to their head? I don’t recall reading this from previous medical workers. One of them is bound to spill the beans.
See: “Israel’s army, for much of its seven decades the country’s pre-eminent secular institution, is increasingly coming under the sway of a national religious movement that has made bold moves across Israeli society in recent years. About 40% of those graduating from the army’s infantry officer schools now come from a national religious community that accounts for 12 to 14% of Jewish Israeli society and is politically more aligned with Israel’s right and far-right political parties and the settler movement. Critics charge that its growing influence – including from the more orthodox portion known as Hardalim – is pursuing its own agenda within the army. Two-fifths of infantry graduate officer cadets now come from section of Israeli society aligned with far-right parties and settler movement” […] “In 1990, 2.5% of the graduate officer cadets of the infantry came form the national religious,” Shaul said. “By 2014 it is 40%. That is three times the representation of the national religious in Jewish Israeli society.” […] “Already we have seen discipline issues [related to national religious ideology] become almost unenforceable, and that has consequences elsewhere, including on issues like the rules of engagement.”
No, it is sufficient to show that there is an extremist section of Jewish Israeli society which is so radical that it would kill enemy children. And that such a section serves in the military at a higher rate. I think I proved this. I also made a general point about how this is a unique vulnerability of the Jewish religion.
Strong disagree. The NYT is emblematic of where the Democrats will be in the future, and the future of the Democrats is a consistently expanding Hamas caucus.
This is why Hamas and Hezbollah felt emboldened to do 10/7 and the expanded rocket attacks, and also why Israel feels pressure to deal with both problems NOW in a significant matter. The Democrats are signaling that within a few cycles sanctions on Israel akin to South Africa or Rhodesia are on the table.
The pro-Israel lobby is one of the strongest in America. Pro-Israel donors are some of the largest in America. Why would they give this up for young anti-Israel liberals? The NYT also has the ability to influence its readers’ opinion, so why would it abstain from influencing it to be pro-Israel?
Because its been/being colonized by anti-Israel youths who have bought into the neo-Marxist anti-colonial talking points. Also with immigration, and your longstanding black base, the average Democrat him/herself will be an antisemite fairly soon.
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I know you have not missed the last year of media coverage, therefore I do not believe your conviction that the NYT would not criticize Israel unless they really had the goods and were compelled by a sense of commitment to accuracy to report it.
The NYT does have a wealthy Jewish constituency. It also has a very large and very woke constituency that has been criticizing Israel and signal-boosting the Palestinian narrative since October 8. (Well before that, actually.)
You know this. The NYT is not some bastion of Jewiness that was suddenly forced to admit to Israeli atrocities because they had no choice. Now to be clear, I doubt any NYT reporters are deliberately reporting falsehoods. They might or might not really believe that Israeli soldiers are now routinely and intentionally shooting 5-year-olds. Maybe they think the doctors in Gaza who are claiming this believe it and deserve to be reported, because it's "close enough" to the truth. But they are certainly being as willingly credulous as you in accepting a narrative at face value that tells a story they want to tell.
This isn't what I said, and you know this isn't what I said.
I don't suggest Hamas is holding guns to doctors' heads to force them to make up stories. The NYT clearly did not interview every doctor in Gaza. Do you think any doctor in Gaza would say "No, that definitely isn't happening"? At most, they might say "I haven't seen this."
I do expect at some point we'll hear stories from people who were in Gaza who will be more honest about the Hamas militants in hospitals (I mean, these stories have already gotten out), but (a) they will have to have left Gaza, as will their families; (b) they will have to be people who don't want to cover for Hamas. Which is not a lot of people.
Most medical workers in Gaza, asked "Have you heard of the IDF shooting children?" will probably say "Yes, I've heard that's happening." Some will also have seen children brought to the hospital who've been shot.Were they shot deliberately? The family might say so. Is the medical worker going to disbelieve them?
Take a handful of actual incidents, a large proportion of sympathetic and biased medical workers, and a heavily censored reporting environment, and unsurprisingly it's easy to get a story like "Yes, everyone agrees the IDF is sniping children." Every war produces these kinds of atrocity stories; many turn out to be untrue. We already have a lot of conflicting narratives about October 7, and about what has happened in Gaza so far.
I cannot resist pointing out the obvious: the evidence for the Holocaust is far more voluminous and convincing, and yet strangely your skepticism comes out in full force on that subject. Why, one wonders, are stories of atrocities committed by Jews so believable, and stories of atrocities committed against Jews so hard to believe? Could you possibly suffer from bias?
That's still 40% and it's their infantry officer schools - a subset of a subset. So you tried to quietly move the goalposts from "Most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists" to "40% of infantry officers are from right-leaning religious communities." While this might be cause for concern within Israel, it still does not follow that even these 40% believe the things you claim, that murdering children is totally moral.
This is not sufficient when your claim is that the IDF is now routinely sniping children and Israelis are okay with it. There is an extremist section of every society radical enough to say "Kill the enemy, including their children." We have no shortage of them here in the US, and they come in right, left, secular and religious, woke and Dissident Right.
The number of people in the Israeli military who believe it's fine to shoot children is greater than the number of people in the general Israeli population? Yes, I am confident you could say the same thing about the US military (or nearly any military) as well.
Yes, and your point was weak and poorly argued; it amounted to "Jews are awful and they are different from Christians, therefore it's easy to believe awful things about what they believe." There are plenty of Christian extremists with awful views and some of them join the military. A while ago there was a spate of stories about white nationalists infiltrating the Special Forces. I suspect you would be both more skeptical about the threat and protest about the unfair characterization of so-called white nationalists.
Why do you believe that their sample of doctors is flawed? There’s not an enormous amount of Western doctors in Gaza. There is no reason to believe that the NYT Time only picked doctors willing to lie. This is just what you want to believe. A team of NYT employees oversaw the polling.
The doctors had the option to answer anonymously. There is no evidence of Hamas threatening doctors. Many of these doctors have already returned home permanently. So your theory here is wrong.
Infantry officer is an influential role. It is a relevant role if we are looking at shot children. You mistakenly thought that there was not a high level of extremism in the Israeli military. I showed you an article that 40% of infantry officers come from a group with extremist views. The article goes on to say that these extremists have already violated rules of engagement and caused problems. Your screed called this “specious” — are you willing to concede you were empirically wrong? There are, factually, a lot of extremists in the Israeli military.
Read what I wrote again. You made up that quote wholecloth. I said that there are extremists in the Israeli military, that the military selects for that more. You do not need most of the military to be extremists to have major problems with shooting innocent kids in the head. You need a sufficient amount of extremists, like… 40% of the infantry officers coming from a group that has problems with extremism. Read the article — it’s literally about how the group is extremist and has caused problems for the military and is causing secular soldiers worry. Even the secular Israeli soldiers see problems with extremism.
We both know that is not my argument. Let’s ask these questions: in what capacity is the religious practice different? Which type of cognition is increased by the different practices? Where is the moral concern located?
Reread what I posted. I did not say the NYT only picked doctors willing to lie, and I specifically addressed the "lying doctors" theory. Stop trying to use these slippery tactics and moving goalposts.
My theory is that the doctors are some combination of lying, credulous, and sympathetic enough not to question too much. "Your theory is wrong" is based on nothing but your belief that if you state something confidently enough it should be taken seriously.
Again, slippery goalpost-moving.
Again, stop being slippery. The specific claim (by you) was that "most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists." Do we need to go through this word by word? I never claimed that "there is not a high level of extremism in the Israeli military," because we didn't even discuss what "a high level" would be. I would consider 40% of infantry military officers to be a high level by some measures, but not by the measures you were claiming, when you used the word "most" and asserted that it was a sufficiently large majority of all soldiers to make it likely that head-shotting children has become SOP.
Debunking you point by point and line by line, while tedious, does not make a screed. What I called "specious" was, again, your claim that most Israeli soldiers are religious extremists. You've retreated to "a lot of their infantry officers are from right-wing religious communities" but are now pretending that that's what was in dispute.
No, because I am not. You are provably and demonstrably so, right here, and I won't bother asking if you are willing to admit it.
"A lot" is a much slippier and unquantifiable number than "most." Again, moving goal posts.
No, we do not both know that. I genuinely believe that you hate Jews and your, ah, "screed" of an OP is motivated by hatred of Jews. Are you willing to clearly state this is false and you do not hate Jews?
Why should I care? Every religion has different religious practices. This is only relevant if you're trying to argue there is something uniquely pernicious about Judaism.
Those might be interesting philosophical questions, but nothing you've posted so far (in your many posts under this topic, under your many alts) has ever supported the conclusion you keep reaching for that "Jews are hostile aliens."
ETA: My apologies, I will retract one thing: I reread your post and you didn't say "Most soldiers." However, I will stand by my claim that this is the central thesis of your claim, that Israelis are now adopting tactics of shooting children because (some number of them which we can argue about whether it literally constitutes "most" or not) are sufficiently extremist that this is now commonplace in the IDF and widely accepted among Israelis because of their Jewishness.
"In other words, the Israeli military selects for the extremists which are raised up within the de-centralized schools of Israel" would be the primary quote here. I was mistaken, in that you used more weasel-wording than I remembered, but let's say it's 20% or 40% or 80%. It's still quite an extraordinary claim that the IDF is deliberately targeting children in Gaza, and they're doing this because.... Jews are monstrous and believe they are fighting a holy war against an evil enemy. You think if there were really Hamas militants in Gaza hospitals, or that doctors were advancing false Hamas narratives and faking bullets embedded in kids' skulls, "someone would tell." Yet you don't think if the IDF was being told "Shoot children," no one would tell?
I don’t know why you would include the line “the NYT didn’t interview every doctor” if you weren’t insinuating that the sample was biased by the NYT. But okay, if you’re not alleging that, then you’re alleging that the doctors were under some pressure by Hamas to testify in a certain way? This hypothesis is unevidenced, would be evidenced if it happened (given how important it would be for the Israeli propaganda machine), contrary to the nature of the interview (anonymous), and counter-evidenced (20% of doctors said it didn’t happen). So I have to simply ask why you retain this belief. If you’re merely insinuating that the doctors, by virtue of their willingness to volunteer in Gaza, are predisposed to lie (?), or predisposed to like Hamas (?), or by virtue of caring about dying children are willing to exaggerate how many they saw (?)… maybe it would just be helpful if you tell me clearly what you believe.
To copy-paste my original assertion,
Please notice the italics. My assertion would wholly explain why the children are shot in the head. There are 20k-30k Israeli soldiers in Gaza. How many deprave, genuinely evil Jewish extremist soldiers do you need in order to see too many killed children? Not most. Not half. Mere percents in combat roles. Yet this is not excusable; the failure of Israel to check or punish its extremists is inexcusable.
For some reason you are naive about the extremism in Israel. So I will provide more sources. It’s almost Jihadi, indeed we may call it Jewhadi. Apparently the support for sexually torturing POWs by some Israeli leaders, and the call for killing children by what amounts to a military recruiter, were not sufficient. From Haaretz:
From the New Yorker, interviewing Yehuda Shaul, who founded “an organization made up of former Israeli soldiers dedicated to exposing what they see as the realities of Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories”:
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Now responding to other points:
Jews are not a monolithic group. I hate the extremists, and I do not hate the others. I probably have positive valence toward secular Jews. While I hate aspects of progressivism, I do not see it as Jewish-driven like some commenters here.
I can’t help but ask: have you invested your identity into Israel in some way? Are you yourself a religious zionist? Your posts come off as biased, to say the least. You misread my original post, which isn’t a big deal, but maybe it hints to deeper biases in this discussion. I am a random American guy from the east coast, have made friends of all faiths. There is no reason for me to be biased against Israel. But, you know, if I grew up singing songs about how Israel is the pure God-given land of my forefathers, and that everyone else has it out to get me, and that I have to love other Jews as tribesmen, that is going to bias me, right? So I think I am naturally less biased than anyone who grew up in a religiously Jewish household. If you think about how Hitler was able to make young Germans prejudicial and extremist, it was through singing songs about their homeland, hyping up their history, believing they were the chief victims of the last world war, increasing love for pan-Germans and sending them to German summer camps to instill values and camaraderie. So should we really be surprised if Israel has a lot of extremists — more than a Western nation? They are maxxing for extremism, except unlike the Hitler Youth, some of the orthodox get little secular education and are trained in the violent Old Testament.
I've already explained this several times. What I believe is that every doctor in Gaza is obviously someone who sympathizes with Palestinians and has seen a lot of dead children. They aren't out in the field, so they see kids coming in with bullet wounds, and they probably aren't doing forensics to determine if it looks like a direct shot or a ricochet. If people tell them "IDF soldiers are shooting children," how skeptical will they be? Are they really seeing a lot of direct "kill shots" (e.g. to the head and chest, as opposed to various other random wounds like you'd expect of civilians caught in crossfire?) If they see one or two, how much convincing do they need? If you have one or two doctors willing to go along with a fabrication or an embellishment (such as doctoring an X-ray scan), and then disseminates them, who is going to call bullshit on them? How much evidence would the NYT need?
What I believe, and have explained, is that the truth is probably much messier than either "Yes, the IDF is now sniping children as SOP" or "Every doctor in Gaza is now making up stories of children being sniped." It's going to be a combination - a soldier here or there who said "Fuck 'em all" and is willing to shoot children, a few credulous doctors, a very active Hamas PR campaign (with no small amount of help from people like you). The fact that the NYT is willing to signal-boost any hint of Israelis misdeeds and spin a narrative of Jews being child-killing monsters, on the thinnest of evidence, helps make the extreme version of the story more plausible to people like you, who hate Israel and/or Jews.
If you just want me to agree that shooting children is bad and anyone who does so intentionally should be prosecuted, I agree. That Israel is allowing it is your claim; I suspect Israel is "allowing" it in the same sense that the US "allowed" atrocities in Viet Nam, and Iraq, and Afghanistan. Some people got away with shit, sometimes the brass were willing to look the other way, but sometimes people got caught and were prosecuted, and the American public was definitely not "okay" with it. Only people with a deep ideological hatred of America would say we committed war crimes out of sheer American evilness.
Okay. That is genuinely surprising to me, though I am not sure I believe you. But I'll take your word for it--
Oops. There's the tell. Gotta admit, I was waiting for that.
As I have told the other Joo-posters who eventually pulled that on me (and not that it is your business or should matter): nope. No Jewish or Israeli affiliations whatsoever. Well, I do have Jews in my family tree. Which according to some Joo-posters would make me a Jew genetically, so maybe my Jew-genes "bias" me. But given that my entire family is Protestant and I have literally never set foot in a synagogue in my life, that would have to be some deep DNA-programming.
I don’t think it’s a given that these humanitarian doctors sympathize with Palestinians especially rather than humankind generally. I also don’t think that sympathy to Palestinian kids in their practice would lead to biasing their answers to a survey. There’s a subset of doctors who seek out wild ways to help people, and there is no wilder or more attention-grabbing way to help people than volunteering in Gaza. I would wager (total conjecture here) that volunteering in Gaza is actually a coveted position for young medical school graduates. Maybe 1% are accepted. It will probably shift to Arabic-speakers for practical reasons, so maybe that’s a small selection bias. It beats potentially getting malaria in Africa or helping alcoholic Appalachians in West Virginia.
There’s no tell. I remember almost zero biographical details of any posters. Google tells me that your name is Gaelic for fool. Why do you think the Irish are so critical of Israel — are they all secret anti-semites too? You are clearly impassioned in this particular topic. Slippery this, that’s a tell that, Jew-hater there, alt accusations yonder… it’s all so tiresome .jpg
Most of them are probably not literally Hamas agents or Jew-haters. If you asked them, the average doctor would probably say "I want peace for everyone in the Middle East." However, if you asked them "Who do you think is to blame?" I suspect the great majority of doctors in Gaza would say "The Israelis," and if you asked them (outside of Gaza, where presumably they could answer truthfully), "Do you think Hamas is to blame?" they'd give you answers similar to what we hear from American leftists, that Hamas is a justified/expected reaction to oppression and occupation, October 7 was horrible but the Israelis brought it on themselves, etc. So yes, they are probably mostly humanitarians, but they are humanitarians who would have strong incentives and ideological motivations to be willing to endorse a narrative that the IDF is targeting Palestinian children.
How many videos from Gaza have you actually watched? I've watched quite a few. Some in Arabic, as I said.
I can't say how "coveted" medical positions there are, but I doubt they are actually that competitive - if you are a medical school graduate who contacts an aid organization and says "I want to volunteer to work in Gaza," I doubt you'd have much trouble being accepted. From what I have seen, the majority of doctors working there are either Palestinians, or European or American doctors who have some Arab/Palestinian ancestry. Not all, but most. I have seen a few who are white or Asian; they mostly seem to come from fairly leftist charity organizations. Something like Save the Children - which does not directly employ medical workers (their thing is mostly providing food and education to children in poor countries). Save the Children doesn't explicitly take a political position on the Gaza war, but they are among those demanding an immediate cease fire. I suspect that the average Save the Children aid worker in Gaza does not hate Jews or support Hamas, but if you asked them "Do you think the IDF is deliberately shooting children?" would say "Yes" because they've heard of it happening and are willing to embrace any narrative that engenders horror and makes a cease fire more likely. I think this is typical of all aid organizations in Gaza. Look at Medicins Sans Frontieres. Are they explicitly anti-Israeli? No, but it's pretty clear who they think are the victims and who are the responsible parties.
That's a tell too. You're right that it's tiresome. Insisting that someone is "impassioned" because they have a point of view is just a windy way of saying "You mad bro?" or "Why so serious?" If I used less words my posts would be too low effort to rebuke your voluminous walls of text; when I use more words: "Wow, why do you care so much? Must be because you're a Jeeeew!"
I don't particularly have a passion for Israel - I have stated before that I actually don't like Israel that much, I just dislike their enemies more. I do think the plague of Joo-posters is corrosive to reasonable discourse, because they are (without exception) disingenuous both about the facts and about their motives for posting. So it is one of the topics where I'll weigh in, because while I don't want to ban shitty points of views, I don't want to let them dominate the discussion and claim the field.
I am claiming you are impassioned because you misread my post with extraordinary confidence, and then proceeded to act like I was lying for informing you that you misread my post. Not because you have a point of view. This is despite my original assertion having abundant and frankly unnecessary qualifiers due to the sensitivity of our pro-Israel contingent.
This is ironic, no? I didn’t mind your faux pas but now you’re claiming some sort of moral high ground. After woefully misreading my post you wrote
There’s definitely some corrosion and disingenuous posting, I agree with you there.
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