alyaza

alyaza, 1 year ago

Apparently it built from a tropical storm to a Cat 5 in about 24 hours.

correct, and it did so with very little prior warning. already footage from the area is catastrophic–in the history of Mexico, there’s never been a hurricane this powerful making landfall from the Pacific.

alyaza, 1 year ago

this is also a kind of insane detail to how bad the Israeli government has been handling the situation so far: The president of the United States has spoken with the families of Israelis whose loved ones are being held captive in Gaza. The prime minister of Israel has yet to do so. Make of it what you will.

alyaza, 1 year ago

kicking things off: Israel is creating a shit ton of collateral damage. MSF says they’re being given just hours to evacuate their patients in Gaza before bombing continues:

• Israel has given Al Awda Hospital just two hours to evacuate. Our staff are still treating patients. We unequivocally condemn this action, the continued indiscriminate bloodshed and attacks on health care in Gaza. We are trying to protect our staff and patients.

it’s also just come out that an Israeli strike in Lebanon killed a Reuters journalist:

• NEW: A Reuters cameraman named Issam Abdullah was killed by an Israeli strike in southern Lebanon. He was standing with a group of journalists when the strike took place.

alyaza, 1 year ago

NBC News now reporting the following: Documents exclusively obtained by NBC News show that Hamas created detailed plans to target elementary schools and a youth center in the Israeli kibbutz of Kfar Sa’ad, to “kill as many people as possible,” seize hostages and quickly move them into the Gaza Strip.

alyaza, 1 year ago

fyi: if you’d like a vetted cause to donate to, people are fundraising for Palestine Children’s Relief Fund which is one of the best charities i’m aware of that does relief work in Gaza and puts basically all of the money given to them toward actual work and not salaries or overhead.

alyaza, 1 year ago

go away.

alyaza, 1 year ago

The Palestinians should demand an election.

may i ask why is it your presumption they haven’t been doing this?

alyaza, 1 year ago

this is effectively saying “all Palestinians deserve to be killed because of who their leadership is” which is not really acceptable.

alyaza, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

briefly locking this thread to do some cleanup; it’ll be unlocked again in a moment.

edit: unlocked

alyaza, 1 year ago

for what it’s worth i think we’ve about exhausted what can be said on this topic past your own comment; i don’t think further responses between you and @khalic will really go anywhere and i’ve already nuked a bunch of the discussion downthread because it devolved completely.

alyaza, 1 year ago

leave it to Charlie Hebdo to place themselves firmly in the “dumb take” camp

alyaza, 1 year ago

the fact that they were victims of terrorism as a publication does not suddenly exempt them from having dumb takes, and bluntly their “satire” is often far closer to actual islamophobia than humor.

alyaza, 1 year ago

put it in the megathread, please and thanks

alyaza, 1 year ago

the sheer number of Israeli civilian fatalities is staggering. so far the best count only has 80 or so of the dead being military or police and so the rest of the 600 and counting are presumably civilians.

alyaza, 1 year ago

yep. Energy Minister Yisrael Katz has signed an order instructing the Israel Electric Corporation to halt the supply of electricity to the Gaza Strip. i suspect this is the beginning of many, many punitive measures to come as reprisal

alyaza, 1 year ago

the primary reason Hamas has political power and the political support to attack Israel in this manner is because Israel:

• treats all Palestinians as second-class citizens and subjects them to a system of political, social, and economic apartheid
• holds millions of Palestinians in squalid and inhuman conditions, and seizes the territory of millions more in the name of a violent settler project
• subjects the vast majority of Palestinians to state-sponsored discrimination, terror, indiscriminate bombing, and political violence
• leaves Palestinians no feasible democratic path to the rights they should have in their current state or the state of Israel, making armed struggle inevitable

you can and should condemn Hamas, but it is inarguable that Israel routinely does worse—overwhelmingly to people just as innocent as the ones Hamas is murdering—which is what makes attacks like this inevitable. you cannot do what Israel does and not expect the outcome to be violence, and it is incumbent on Israel, who holds all the actual power in this dynamic, to break the cycle and stop using every terrorist attack perpetuated against it as an excuse to roll innocent heads.

alyaza, 1 year ago

Cool so I respond to an antisemite saying that Israel refusing to supply power to a state that just declared war on it is punitive, and your response was to say it’s Israel’s fault.

i mean, yeah. Netanyahu is saying he’s going to basically reduce Gaza to rubble when 99% of Gazans are innocents and can’t leave Gaza because Israel is blockading them. Israeli bombs have killed far more innocents than actual terrorists in the Strip as seen in my citation. this is the exact behavior that allows Hamas to thrive. Israel, as a state, has the power to not do this and to seek more productive options—but does it anyways because it simply doesn’t care about the humanity of Palestinians and considers all of them acceptable collateral damage in killing Hamas members.