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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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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.

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

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.