“Resistance Raid” is a bizarre framing of deliberately targeting and slaughtering defenceless women and children in their homes with the deliberate goal of mass terror.
Unlike say the ANC from my home country of South Africa that deliberately tried to only target government targets… that is clearly not what Hamas did. They aren’t freedom fighters, maybe some are, but not their organisation as a whole. Any support for the organisation—given what their charter said pre-2017 - can under no reasonable lens not be seen as tantamount to, at the very least, be supporting ex-Nazis insofar as explicit genocidal antisemitism is concerned. What reasonable counterargument justifying support for Hamas is there that isn’t “Israel is much worse”?
I do not understand why it is so hard for some people to comprehend that both the IDF and Hamas can be net-negative and evil. You don’t have to support the one you judge as the lesser evil and use euphemisms to describe their actions. You can oppose both and say both are savagely genocidal against the other.
“You claim responding against the emotional propaganda is wrong, but writing even close to the parallel from the Palestinian side would result in a perma-ban.”
I don’t believe this is the true given the contentious posts I’ve seen here over the years. I presume you have evidence of someone who is Palestinian and identifies as an EA that was perma-banned for writing from the Palestinian side? (i.e. not a political bot, someone who is actually part of the community) Because I’d be just as interested in reading that as I was reading this piece. And I wouldn’t be putting the two against each other, but be extending empathy to both authors as fellow human beings.
Also during the Oct 7th raid we know Israel killed many of it’s own civilians and it was a highly planned out military operation. If that’s a “terrorist” attack then what israel is doing is even worse than a genocide.
I had to do a double-take and am now only rereading this part after writing my response. You actually believe Israel deliberately perpetuated part of the Oct 7 raid? I’m at a complete loss for words...
“Resistance Raid” is a bizarre framing of deliberately targeting and slaughtering defenceless women and children in their homes with the deliberate goal of mass terror.
This is not what Hamas’ plan was. It was a hostage taking raid for a hostage exchange. Also to provoke a response from the Muslim world and put Palestine back on the map, since your ilk would just want to commit a slow genocide while ignoring it. This was all extremely clear, as Scott Ritter clearly points out. Also Hamas literally spelled out their plans in documents like Jericho Wall.
I don’t believe this is the true given the contentious posts I’ve seen here over the years. I presume you have evidence of someone who is Palestinian and identifies as an EA that was perma-banned for writing from the Palestinian side? (i.e. not a political bot, someone who is actually part of the community) Because I’d be just as interested in reading that as I was reading this piece. And I wouldn’t be putting the two against each other, but be extending empathy to both authors as fellow human beings.
I’ve been banned from multiple rationalist communities for pointing this out (from these alt accounts). Maybe not EA yet, but same type of people.
> I had to do a double-take and am now only rereading this part after writing my response. You actually believe Israel deliberately perpetuated part of the Oct 7 raid? I’m at a complete loss for words...
There was friendly fire which caused many civilian deaths, and possibly the majority of them. Please do some basic research. There are multiple lines of evidence, the overall picture is extremely clear, the destruction could only have been caused by IDF. They didn’t do it on purpose they had a panicked response and acted similarly to the Hannibal Directive. Also there is now even reports from hostages about how they were being fired at. Does truth matter at all to this community?
Incredible how the Palestinians crimes are so exaggerated, while all of the unending horrors from the Zionist side are either downplayed or ignored. There are thousands of hostages still held by Israel while they bomb innocents, steal land, strip Palestinians of their basic rights etc. etc. Even if Oct 7th was a pure “kill civilians” terrorist attack it wouldn’t come close to what the Zionists do constantly, and even though it wasn’t but it still gets portrayed that way for propaganda purposes. This community is extremely biased due to western propaganda and esp. Jewish overrepresentation, but Imagine how this looks from the Muslim side or for anyone with basic human decency willing to check both sides of the story.
The moderation team is banning KnightSaladin for 2 months for violating Forum norms. (You can appeal here.)
KnightSaladin’s comments on the Forum have been aggressive (using rhetorical attacks), overconfident, and uncivil — generally not aimed towards collaborative truth-seeking. Examples of things that I want to heavily discourage from the Forum:
The likeliest (to me) interpretation of the phrase, “your ilk would just want to commit a slow genocide while ignoring it,” is offensive and anti-semitic. A stretched interpretation is that this is a pretty aggressive way of referring to people who disagree with KnightSaladin (in which case it’s attacking a group of people for holding a point of view, which is not what I want to see on the Forum).
Calling a post “a load of genocide supporting nonsense which shows how disgustingly biased this community is” is unnecessarily rude and offensive.
“Please do some basic research” is unnecessarily rude.
Overconfident statements include “during the Oct 7th raid we know Israel killed many of it’s own civilians and it was a highly planned out military operation.”
Generally, seeing someone engage on the Forum exclusively on one topic isn’t promising to me, especially when that topic is a politicized/current-events issue and not one of the core EA topics (loosely, when it’s discussed more in the news than in EA contexts)
If KnightSaladin comes back to the Forum, we’ll expect to see a much higher quality of discourse, and engagement on more than one issue. I expect that we’ll ban KnightSaladin indefinitely if anything like the above continues.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.
This isn’t hard. Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks were a brutal massacre of innocent civilian life. It’s possible to acknowledge that at the same time as strongly condemning Israel’s conduct, either in the current war specifically or in their history with Palestinians in general.
since your ilk would just want to commit a slow genocide while ignoring it.
There are multiple atrocities of similar moral urgency happening in Northern India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere that are still being ignored. The world has being paying disproportionate attention to the Palestine-Israeli compared to these other places. I’ve read of Indian reporters flying to Palestine to cover the way and Indians are asking “why are they leaving when there are just as bad things happening at home.” Well, because the world doesn’t care about other parts of the world. It isn’t newsworthy.
Obviously this doesn’t make ignoring Palestine justified. I’m just pointing out that anyone ignoring Palestine might just be actually focusing on something more important. There are a million things on fire in the world. We have to triage. Sometimes that looks like some people not caring when a genocide is happening but sometimes that does not mean they don’t care and it is incredibly uncharitable, rude and presumptuous to say what you did. How you feel about others and who they actually are, are two different things.
This was all extremely clear, as Scott Ritter clearly points out. Also Hamas literally spelled out their plans in documents like Jericho Wall.
It doesn’t matter what Hamas planned. It matters what they did.
If you are Muslim this concept is rooted in the Hadith, where it’s stated that actions are judged by intentions, but the ultimate value lies in the action itself. Any Muslim EA can feel free to tell me I’m wrong. I lived in the middle east for 3 years so I know a thing or two but not much. But this seems like an obvious moral truth all religions and secular moral institutions have at their core.
There was friendly fire which caused many civilian deaths, and possibly the majority of them. Please do some basic research.
There is not a single credible source I can find that says this—including sources highly critical of Israel. Even the Palestinian Authority has taken backtheir claim that friendly fire from Israeli helicopters caused a whole lot of friendly-fire deaths.
Incredible how the Palestinians crimes are so exaggerated, while all of the unending horrors from the Zionist side are either downplayed or ignored.
Exaggerated how exactly? I said Hamas, not Palestine. Those are two different things just like Israel and the Knesset and Zionists are three different things.
“Resistance Raid” is a bizarre framing of deliberately targeting and slaughtering defenceless women and children in their homes with the deliberate goal of mass terror.
Unlike say the ANC from my home country of South Africa that deliberately tried to only target government targets… that is clearly not what Hamas did. They aren’t freedom fighters, maybe some are, but not their organisation as a whole. Any support for the organisation—given what their charter said pre-2017 - can under no reasonable lens not be seen as tantamount to, at the very least, be supporting ex-Nazis insofar as explicit genocidal antisemitism is concerned. What reasonable counterargument justifying support for Hamas is there that isn’t “Israel is much worse”?
I do not understand why it is so hard for some people to comprehend that both the IDF and Hamas can be net-negative and evil. You don’t have to support the one you judge as the lesser evil and use euphemisms to describe their actions. You can oppose both and say both are savagely genocidal against the other.
I don’t believe this is the true given the contentious posts I’ve seen here over the years. I presume you have evidence of someone who is Palestinian and identifies as an EA that was perma-banned for writing from the Palestinian side? (i.e. not a political bot, someone who is actually part of the community) Because I’d be just as interested in reading that as I was reading this piece. And I wouldn’t be putting the two against each other, but be extending empathy to both authors as fellow human beings.
I had to do a double-take and am now only rereading this part after writing my response. You actually believe Israel deliberately perpetuated part of the Oct 7 raid? I’m at a complete loss for words...
This is not what Hamas’ plan was. It was a hostage taking raid for a hostage exchange. Also to provoke a response from the Muslim world and put Palestine back on the map, since your ilk would just want to commit a slow genocide while ignoring it. This was all extremely clear, as Scott Ritter clearly points out. Also Hamas literally spelled out their plans in documents like Jericho Wall.
https://www.scottritterextra.com/p/the-october-7-hamas-assault-on-israel
I’ve been banned from multiple rationalist communities for pointing this out (from these alt accounts). Maybe not EA yet, but same type of people.
> I had to do a double-take and am now only rereading this part after writing my response. You actually believe Israel deliberately perpetuated part of the Oct 7 raid? I’m at a complete loss for words...
There was friendly fire which caused many civilian deaths, and possibly the majority of them. Please do some basic research. There are multiple lines of evidence, the overall picture is extremely clear, the destruction could only have been caused by IDF. They didn’t do it on purpose they had a panicked response and acted similarly to the Hannibal Directive. Also there is now even reports from hostages about how they were being fired at. Does truth matter at all to this community?
Incredible how the Palestinians crimes are so exaggerated, while all of the unending horrors from the Zionist side are either downplayed or ignored. There are thousands of hostages still held by Israel while they bomb innocents, steal land, strip Palestinians of their basic rights etc. etc. Even if Oct 7th was a pure “kill civilians” terrorist attack it wouldn’t come close to what the Zionists do constantly, and even though it wasn’t but it still gets portrayed that way for propaganda purposes. This community is extremely biased due to western propaganda and esp. Jewish overrepresentation, but Imagine how this looks from the Muslim side or for anyone with basic human decency willing to check both sides of the story.
The moderation team is banning KnightSaladin for 2 months for violating Forum norms. (You can appeal here.)
KnightSaladin’s comments on the Forum have been aggressive (using rhetorical attacks), overconfident, and uncivil — generally not aimed towards collaborative truth-seeking. Examples of things that I want to heavily discourage from the Forum:
The likeliest (to me) interpretation of the phrase, “your ilk would just want to commit a slow genocide while ignoring it,” is offensive and anti-semitic. A stretched interpretation is that this is a pretty aggressive way of referring to people who disagree with KnightSaladin (in which case it’s attacking a group of people for holding a point of view, which is not what I want to see on the Forum).
Calling a post “a load of genocide supporting nonsense which shows how disgustingly biased this community is” is unnecessarily rude and offensive.
“Please do some basic research” is unnecessarily rude.
Overconfident statements include “during the Oct 7th raid we know Israel killed many of it’s own civilians and it was a highly planned out military operation.”
Generally, seeing someone engage on the Forum exclusively on one topic isn’t promising to me, especially when that topic is a politicized/current-events issue and not one of the core EA topics (loosely, when it’s discussed more in the news than in EA contexts)
If KnightSaladin comes back to the Forum, we’ll expect to see a much higher quality of discourse, and engagement on more than one issue. I expect that we’ll ban KnightSaladin indefinitely if anything like the above continues.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.
Whatever Hamas’ plan was, what actually happened included gunning down hundreds of helpless civilians at a music festival and massive, brutal sexual violence against large numbers of women.
This isn’t hard. Hamas’ Oct 7 attacks were a brutal massacre of innocent civilian life. It’s possible to acknowledge that at the same time as strongly condemning Israel’s conduct, either in the current war specifically or in their history with Palestinians in general.
That link doesn’t say anything about the Hamas attacks.
There are multiple atrocities of similar moral urgency happening in Northern India, Ethiopia, Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere that are still being ignored. The world has being paying disproportionate attention to the Palestine-Israeli compared to these other places. I’ve read of Indian reporters flying to Palestine to cover the way and Indians are asking “why are they leaving when there are just as bad things happening at home.” Well, because the world doesn’t care about other parts of the world. It isn’t newsworthy.
Obviously this doesn’t make ignoring Palestine justified. I’m just pointing out that anyone ignoring Palestine might just be actually focusing on something more important. There are a million things on fire in the world. We have to triage. Sometimes that looks like some people not caring when a genocide is happening but sometimes that does not mean they don’t care and it is incredibly uncharitable, rude and presumptuous to say what you did. How you feel about others and who they actually are, are two different things.
It doesn’t matter what Hamas planned. It matters what they did.
If you are Muslim this concept is rooted in the Hadith, where it’s stated that actions are judged by intentions, but the ultimate value lies in the action itself. Any Muslim EA can feel free to tell me I’m wrong. I lived in the middle east for 3 years so I know a thing or two but not much. But this seems like an obvious moral truth all religions and secular moral institutions have at their core.
There is not a single credible source I can find that says this—including sources highly critical of Israel. Even the Palestinian Authority has taken back their claim that friendly fire from Israeli helicopters caused a whole lot of friendly-fire deaths.
Exaggerated how exactly? I said Hamas, not Palestine. Those are two different things just like Israel and the Knesset and Zionists are three different things.