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PaperclipPerfector  15d ago (text post)   29663 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Israel is fighting a small group of arabs with no logistics and failing to do so while consistently pestering the US for support.

Israel won on the battlefield in Gaza.

They couldnt take a city in a year and pacify it even with exceptional brutality and completely cutting off Gaza from the rest of the world.

They were using the opposite of exceptional brutality.

Have you heard the story of Hind Rajab? There are mountains of evidence with regards to the brutality on display, and multiple international prosecutions of the people involved. IDF members are now frequently unable to holiday in a large number of countries because they posted the war crimes they committed on social media for everyone to see. I personally have seen some of the most sickening images of my life come out of the conflict, and it actually does make me upset that my government supports what's happening (and the manufacture of the bomb delivery mechanisms that blew up those innocent people).

I'm not moved by the authority of international prosecutions - certainly it is not unthinkable that many countries, perhaps even most countries, can be wrong, or more likely overtaken by a political agenda that requires them to act as they do.

Brutality that is less than exceptional or even less than expected can undoubtedly still shock. One child killed in a bombing is one child too many for a lot of people. In the circumstances given, where the militants deliberately walk among innocents and their greatest weapon against Israel are the sickening images they publish on the Western news, I'm convinced for the moment that Israel is using less brutality than would be justified of them. It would be merely expected of them to strike at the people shooting rockets at Israel without regard to who else is in the strike zone. Taking any measures at all to blow up a little bit fewer innocent people is less brutality than expected.

None of what you said applies at all to the story of Hind Rajab and what happened, but you don't seem to understand the source of a lot of those sickening images. The Hind Rajab foundation, for instance, works almost exclusively by archiving and publishing the posts made by IDF soldiers on social media - this isn't Hamas uploading brutal images to shock the west, but the IDF uploading recordings of their own actions with pride.

If you want to keep talking about this I'd be happy to, but your post seems like a reflexive response to the issue as a general theme rather than the specifics. If you think that what you've said is in anyway an appropriate description of what happened to Hind Rajab, Mohammed Bhar or countless other stories I think you should take a long hard look at yourself. Of course, you don't need to switch sides - as I've stated on here before, I simply prefer talking to Israelis who admit that their goal is ethnic cleansing and genocide rather than trying to spin a transparently false tale about what's happening.

Is there something in the definition of winning a war that you have to win it nicely or it doesn't count?

This is a non sequitur. The person you are responding to isn't claiming the victory was illegitimate, he's making a claim about the level of force that was needed in order to win.

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