17. 55 does seem a lot :-)

The proposition is a straightforward war crime.

I don’t think anyone is in doubt that Israel has committed countless appalling war crimes. The question is “who cares?”, and I think we disagree about the answer to that. In my view it’s “nobody at all”.

The denial is that Iran has agency in Israel’s continued need to fight

The denial is that Israel needs to fight. As I’ve said before, if the Palestinian question was solved, nobody would be listening to Iran. As long as Israel continues its war of elimination, there will be volunteers resisting, and those volunteers need Iran’s help.

First Gaza and now Lebanon, both destroyed because of the hatred of Israel by Iran’s religious leaders.

Gaza and Lebanon are being destroyed by the ones dropping the bombs. To claim otherwise is counter-factual victim blaming.And to deny Israeli agency, to claim they are helpless pawns in an Iranian plot, seems a bit … antisemitic.

Re. UNIFIL though, seeing as there is so much Hezbollah activity in the area it does somewhat beg the question of what exactly UNIFIL’s been doing or what the point of them is.

None of which, of course, justifies Israel shooting at them.

Israel complaining that others are not abiding by UN resolutions is a walking talking definition of “chutzpah”

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/10/1155671

I’ve recently had a flurry of waxing activity- waxing fjallraven stuff with their Greenland wax – trousers and bags. Strangely satisfying and not too difficult (if you’re happy to accept non-100% appearance and proofness). Apply wax using bar of soap-like substance, melt into fabric using hair dryer.

This podcast is a good listen, Ezra Klein Wikipedia link here interviews Ta-Nehisi Coates Wikipedia link here

Thanks for the link. Interesting interview and the “bibliography” has some informative articles

Dr Victoria Rose is a Consultant Plastic Surgeon from King’s College Hospital who has worked for Medical Aid for Palestine in Gaza during the latest Israeli onslaught

Yes yes yes. But does she condemn Hamas?

I wonder if Biden has considered the option of telling the Israelis to stop shooting at UN peacekeepers rather than just asking them to stop?

Well, steady on. First he needs to ask the Israelis if they pretty please might possibly consider undertaking an investigation into whether the Israelis might have inadvertently fired at UNIFIL, and then wait until they provide a thorough and impartial report saying that they definitely had nothing to do with it.

What are they going to escalate to next? Stronger words? Cessation of chocolate imports?

Well, as you no doubt guessed, they are going to do nothing at all. Meanwhile…

A US-made munition was used in a strike on central Beirut that killed 22 people and wounded 117, according to an analysis of shrapnel found by the Guardian at the scene of the attack.

The strike on Thursday night hit an apartment complex in the densely populated neighbourhood of Basta, levelling the apartment building and destroying cars and the interiors of nearby residences.

The two authors of the report though are, like the two main antagonists in this forum thread, well known one sided activists outside their day job.  One has a twitter history of familiar sounding quotes comparing Israel to the Nazis and the other is down with calling October 7th last year an innovative and astounding achievement.

Is there some aspect of the report you wish to challenge? Or is ad hominem all you’ve got?

This is what the IDF think about children:

65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza

https://archive.is/cRSC6

I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’ve volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I grew up in Flint, Mich. I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total.

At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. “I couldn’t believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,” I told him. To my surprise, he responded: “Yeah, me, too. Every single day.”

An example. In 2018 President Trump moved the US Embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. The State of Israel and the State of Palestine both claim Jerusalem as their capital, neither claim is widely recognised, but the move by Trump lends weight to Israel’s claim, some would consider that significant.

But it didn’t cost any lives, so compared with the impact of Biden’s ongoing supply of bombs it is of zero consequence. I’m sure Trump would be no less keen to keep sending supplies to help the killing of brown people, but it’s not night and day.

Although let’s not also forget that child casualties would quite a bit smaller if Hamas et al would stop using children as human shields, child soldiers and tunnel workers

Well there you go again. You want space to discuss topics other than Israeli war crimes, but when presented with, in this case, an article about child victims of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza, you pop up with the claim that in fact it’s the Palestinians’ fault that Israel drops bombs on their childrens’ heads.

Who would you prefer, Harris or Trump?

For a Palestinian, what difference would it make?

That’s all that you and DrJ want to focus on and you use it to try to close differences in opinion down

I want to focus on the ongoing slaughter of innocent people. I’m not going to apologise for that. Differences of opinion around peripheral topics can be interesting and informative but they do tend to normalise the atrocities we are witness to, so they’re hard to address appropriately.

It doesn’t promote useful discussion toward the very thing that everyone here wants; stopping bloodshed and a satisfactory peace for all in the region

The bloodshed can stop when the people doing the killing stop. It’s that simple.

the situation that everyone in the region finds themselves in now.

The situation in which 50,000 Palestinians find themselves dead, and 50,000 Israelis don’t, you mean ?

Buffalo jackets have full length side zips, as does the one I’m wearing, with zip-pulls at both ends, and a Velcro tab across the bottom, so all you need to do is pull the top zip down a bit to get some ventilation

My point was that if you’re wearing it next to bare skin, the bit of naked flesh that is exposed when you open a zip will be frostbitten while the rest of your body remains too hot.

And people believe Israeli propaganda that they have “degraded” Hezbollah’s capabilities with its enormous arsenal of thousands of missiles hidden deep in the mountains of Lebanon?

Well they believed that all Iran’s missiles had been shot down. Now it turns out that 30 hit a well-defended airbase. What happens when they aim at a city?

The point is you can always go back further, or point to this or that, but what matters is the choices made in the present.

I sort of agree with that actually, but this:

Hamas chose violence a year ago today (as did Hezbollah a year ago tomorrow), and Israel then also chose violence.

is dishonest. Calling two things by the same name (“violence”) suggests they are somehow comparable, but in this case they are quantitatively and qualitatively entirely different. To return to your first point – the choice being made every day by the Israelis is to kill more innocent people, to starve more innocent people, to degrade the environment to a point where habitation is impossible. Every day Israelis get out of bed and go and kill some more people. There isn’t a level of sophistry that excuses that.

No, but if someone says “Hitler was a pretty good painter” the response should not be “ignore that, he killed millions therefore I refuse to look at his good aspects”.

Of course. Context is everything. If there’s a thread about Auschwitz and you pop up with a comment saying we must bear in mind Hitler’s painting talent I suspect you’d be criticised.

1) Accept that it’s possible to talk about the good or positive points of Israel, or the negative points of Hamas/Hezbollah/whoever.

So we should caveat any discussion of Nazism by noting that Hitler was a pretty good painter ? Absurd.

For example: everyone’s very quick to instantly dismiss anything Israel says as lies, and instantly believe anything any Hamas run organisation says, without any sort of verification or checking

That’s clearly not the case. The BBC always refer to the Gaza Health Ministry as “Hamas-run”, with the implication that their statistics are in doubt, despite a track record of providing accurate statistics. On the other hand Israeli claims of beheaded babies and whatnot are quoted as gospel.

Nobody is 100% evil, or 100% good. Now we’ve established that profound truth, then what ?

There is no need to paint Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis or the Iranian regime as whiter than white to make that point though… the lies aren’t needed. The horrific attacks all these groups carry out shouldn’t be whitewashed.

I don’t see anyone doing that, but to suggest that their attacks are remotely comparable to what the Israelis are doing is next-level whataboutery. The casualty figures speak for themselves – there’s really nothing else needs saying.

What a tiresome and predictable response. Everything’s so black and white, isn’t it.

50,000 and counting killed. A million suffering from hunger and disease. I’m struggling to see the “white” bit.

no end to the fighting in sight.

I’m not sure I’d characterise jet planes bombing schools and hospitals as “fighting”, but no, no end in sight.

Probably a dumb question but … if you wear a Buffalo or Buffalo-alike next to your skin, how do you regulate your temperature?  Seems like if you open a zip you will get very cold skin in that immediate area and the rest will stay hot ??

It might come as a surprise to many just how much control and influence deeply religious Muslim women can have.

Well, only to those whose opinions are dominated by racist stereotypes.

Bloody environmental fanatics. I blame that Greta Thunberg. Lock em all up, I say.

Am I getting the hang of this?

24 people killed in an attack on a mosque, but yeah – let’s get our knickers in a twist about a bad taste fancy dress.

Plenty to look into there – thanks all. I’d previously ruled out the Nitecore ones cos of £££ but maybe Ali Express puts them into play again.

And didn’t offer much on the suggestion that Iran also needs to stop supplying munitions to the Houthis/Hamas/Hezbollah

Was it a serious suggestion? Iran should stop arming H/H/H while the West continues to arm Israel and Saudi?

Meanwhile, the re-occupation of Gaza gathers pace …

https://news.sky.com/story/israel-establishing-infrastructure-for-long-term-military-presence-in-gaza-satellite-images-suggest-13206114

At this point the story seems unlikely to be true.

“False flag”. Kerching!!!

If this Iran-Israel conflict continues to escalate then it will cause more human tragedy in the middle-east and it will directly affect the availability of munitions for export to Russia from Iran

And it might bring Russia into direct conflict with Israel. What happens when US weapons kill Russians in Syria?

Corkscrew for a prostate core

That’s what they use, isn’t it? Certainly felt like it.

The ordinary citizens of Palestine, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria or anywhere else have very little power to stop conflict. But you knew that didn’t you?

Of course. If you’re desperately looking for clean water for your kids, there’s not much you can do to influence geopolitics. But if you’re dropping bombs on schools, that’s different. I repeat – one side is being slaughtered. Stop it.

I’d say that the onus was on all of them to stop the madness, wouldn’t you ?

Damn those Palestinians. They keep selfishly dying.

Iran wants the US and Israel out of the region

If only that nice Mr Shah were still in charge