The Israel Palestine problem solving thread

And what is your problem with that statement?

gsco mkII wrote:

adam12 wrote:

What is "happening" over there that is causing the problem is that the State of Israel is refusing self determination to Palestine, is an illegal occupying force

No shades of grey there

"

There is plenty of grey over there @gsco, but the fact that Israel is refusing to abide by International Law, refusing the legal right of Palestine to self determination, is an illegal occupier of Palestinian territories, is refusing to abide by UN Resolutions, refusing to even listen to it's strongest Western ally in the US. These are black and white facts. If you want I can go to the legal references and the UN resolutions and the ICJ judgements where it is written in black and white, I can go find the exact quotes from the American and other Western leaders and diplomats and quote them for you too.
Facts are facts, they are not my opinions.

But what I'd prefer to do is quote some words and provide a reference from one of Israel's own leading News outlets and a story from yesterday that provides an insight into how much all this murdering of innocent civilians and the warmongering statements of Netanyahu and his spokespeople is based on a goal that is a lie, an intelligence assessment from the IDF itself, not me.

From The Times of Israel, 16/2/24

"Report: IDF intel assesses that Hamas will ‘survive as terror group’ post-war

Document drawn up by Military Intelligence reportedly states that even if Israel dismantles Hamas’s organized military capabilities, it will continue to operate in Gaza

Israel’s military intelligence circulated a document to Israeli leaders this week warning that even if the IDF succeeds in dismantling Hamas as an organized military force in Gaza, it will survive as “a terror group and a guerrilla group,” according to a Channel 12 report aired Thursday evening.
The document, drawn up by the research division of IDF Military Intelligence, reportedly also states that “authentic support remains” for Hamas among Gazans.
Given that there is currently no practical effort being made to put in place a plan for Gaza on the “day after” the war, the document further warns, “Gaza will become an area in deep crisis".
Channel 12 investigative journalist Ilana Dayan reported that the document was presented on Monday to Israel’s political echelon, after it was discussed last weekend by senior IDF officers, Shin Bet officials and members of the National Security Council.
The “bottom line” is that the document constitutes a warning from those in military intelligence who carry out such assessments, said Dayan, that “Hamas will survive this [IDF] campaign as a terror group and a guerrilla group.”
“In this regard, at least,” she suggested, “there won’t be absolute victory” — as predicted and demanded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu since the start of the war.
The IDF Spokesman’s Office declined to comment on the TV report.

While Israeli officials have consistently publicly declared the goal of the war to be wiping out Hamas from the Strip, many countries and officials around the world have warned that it is not a feasible outcome."
https://www.timesofisrael.com/report-idf-intel-assesses-that-hamas-will-...

So what was all the killing of innocents and the other war crimes for?
It has been argued repeatedly by not just Netanyahu but the bloodlusting idiots cheering the whole thing on here that it was all about wiping out Hamas.
Their own intelligence has told them that is not possible and won't happen.
Which many here pointed out but were attacked as "Hamas simps" for saying it.
So maybe you with your knowledge of these things, or some of the idiots with knowledge of very little that post here, can explain what all those people had to die for, what all those lives were ruined for, and why Bibi is still insisting on creating another blood bath in Rafah for.
And don't tell me it's the return of hostages, that could have been achieved with the loss of zero innocent lives, and Israel have killed enough of their own hostages themselves to repudiate that as a motive.
What the fuck is this all for?
Can someone tell me please, I'm just an antisemitic idiot with no idea apparently.
@Roadkill, @Indo, what is it all for? The Wests war with Islam? What?
And how is @Indo going to defeat Hamas and save Israel with his stupid posts and you tube videos on this surfing website now the IDF themselves say they can't? Might be time to go into a phonebox and strip down into your Stupidman costume and fly over there yourself now Indo, sounds like your work here isn't enough, they need your stupidpowers over there in the flesh.
"Look ...up in the sky...etc"

""What is happening in the area is far greater than just Gaza, and Israel. This is more western world vs Islam. Hamas and Gaza are small players in a far larger game…that you can’t see. And your support is clearly on the wrong side…you make this clear day after day."

whilst I would not portray it this way...

I think there is glaring omission from all the posts of the posters who have clearly taken an anti-israel stance, and that is the bigger chess game currently unfolding...

not even a fleeting mention of it!

nah, it is not as simple as 'western world vs islam' ... but there's clearly lines and divisions being drawn, and anyone denying this is willfully ignorant or ideologically nutty, with a touch of denial thrown in...

the lines and divisions are complicated, but there's a general theme, and a curious one from my perspective... and that's communist russia and china aligning with some muslim nations...

some...

and curious, for many reasons...

I'll have a go at adam12's quiz to try and clear it up a bit

(all off the top of my head, so happy to be corrected)

"The Western world verses Islam."

So are we going to war with Indonesia next? The largest Muslim population on Earth.

nah, not likely... however, prabowo proudly stated his pro russia position pre election, and china basically owns indo... plus i heard this week indo and russia have an intelligence sharing arrangment, wtf is that about...

So why are the Saudis a Western ally?

money... simple...

Is the West going to war with them too?

saudi's have become masters at hedging their bets.... they also are a big part of the move to push petro-dollars away from the american dollar. and they are in on BRICS negotiations. biden's (pathetic) tough guy act showed just how much the saudis don't need the US, and its quite the opposite... the saudis could jump train at any moment, if they choose...

Is the West going to war with the whole 2 billion of the Muslims on Earth because they are Muslims.

nah, not by choice... some still like us... or more importantly, despise / fear china more...

Are the whole two billion of them at war with the West?

nah, I hope not, but geez 'alliances' seem to mean fuck all in the modern context. especially if a bigger cheque book rolls into town...

Or just the one's you two don't like.
There are more Muslims in the Asia Pacific region than the Middle East, 62% of them there. Will AUKUS be saving us from that?

hopefully saving them from all of the above..., some of them like AUKUS... quietly...

There are over 50 majority Muslim countries in the world, are the West at war with all of them?

nah, not yet...

let's hope never...

but geez there's some free flowing hostilities and tensions atm, many cards are in the air, looking for somewhere to fall...

a world in contraction

@Sypkan,
At last an intelligent person steps into the fray.
Yep, the geopolitical maneuvering across the globe is heating up, alliances forged, others dismantling.
Hot spots, weak and strong leaders, dictators, political assassinations, flashpoints, war drums beating all over the place.
History, politics, religion colliding all over.
But has modern history not always been so?
Agree it seems a lot hotter, more uncertain, more unpredictable, lots of cards in the air as you say.
But to say that the West is going to war or at war with Islam itself is not only ridiculous, but simplistic garbage.
It's not like another Crusades is happening.
The threat of another World War lies well beyond the threat posed by any Muslim power in the Middle East. Iran don't want another war that's pretty obvious, they can use proxies to do their striking against Israel and the West and though well armed themselves, perhaps even nuclear armed, maybe, they don't want to get into it themselves, they've shown that. It's from the East of Europe and Asia that the real threats come I reckon and has not much to do with any God.
I know you have time for Trump but I fear another Trump presidency more than any Muslim leadership as far as world peace goes.
The impending US election seems to me to be one of the biggest cards up in the air atm.
And the alternative to Trump doesn't fill me with great confidence either, but would still prefer a senile Biden to Trump and what he's got going on any day.
(btw Did you catch the reports about the FBI informant and Burisma? Think I told you once it was all a lie, maybe I didn't, can't remember)
Pretty much got no problems with every thing you just posted.
Glad someone finally discusses these things with a bit of detail and nuanced understanding.
Sometimes feel like I've been relegated to the kids table at Christmas coming here.
Glad to see there's still adults at this party.

adam12 wrote:

@Roadkill and @Indo
"What is happening in the area is far greater than just Gaza, and Israel. This is more western world vs Islam. Hamas and Gaza are small players in a far larger game…that you can’t see. And your support is clearly on the wrong side…you make this clear day after day."

100% like i said they are like Chickens rallying for more KFC stores.

It's so self destructive, even more so when people are suppose to be a progressive."

"The Western world verses Islam."
So are we going to war with Indonesia next?
The largest Muslim population on Earth
So why are the Saudis a Western ally?
Is the West going to war with them too?
Is the West going to war with the whole 2 billion of the Muslims on Earth because they are Muslims.
Are the whole two billion of them at war with the West?
Or just the one's you two don't like.
There are more Muslims in the Asia Pacific region than the Middle East, 62% of them there. Will AUKUS be saving us from that?
There are over 50 majority Muslim countries in the world, are the West at war with all of them?
Or just the one's you two punch down artists declare are the enemy that need their "buds" nipped.

The problem with you two is that you are both incapable of objective thought and analysis, incapable of anything but hate for those you see as the "enemy". Incapable of learning anything that doesn't align with your little twisted world view. Punch down artists the pair of you. Google Geopoliticians.

What is "happening" over there that is causing the problem is that the State of Israel is refusing self determination to Palestine, is an illegal occupying force and is killing far too many innocent people in it's effort to wipe out Hamas.
Why are Western leaders telling them to back off Rafah if this holy war of wars is going on, and we are at war with an entire religion?
Why are we buying Subs to counter the Chinese if it's Islam we are at war with?
Israel's neighbors would tolerate them, the 'wars' would probably stop altogether if Israel would just abide by International Law and UN Resolutions and let Palestinians have self determination and statehood, like the West itself, the US, the UK and the rest have been telling them to do for decades.
So is the West at war with itself too?
There are plenty of Muslims in the West, should we be wiping them out now? You know, like Indo says, "nipping them in the bud" now?
I did think you were a bit smarter than @Indo Roady, which wouldn't be hard, but I'm even doubting that now with broad generalised paranoid delusionary comments like that.
And the Muslim world picked a pretty shit little army in Hamas to go waging war with the West, they've got much better equipped armies than that to go waging war with.

Now accuse me of not really understanding the insight you have on these things, please, or of supporting our "real enemies" again, I like a good laugh and you have been a bit droll and not funny enough of late. @Indo's KFC analogy got a bit of a chuckle but I want a real laugh out loud lot of bullshit to start off my night.
So please, fire up cnt, Tell me all about the "larger game", maybe get gsco and the commies involved, not just the Muslims.

Please answer this one question honestly, say that if history was different and the Jews and Israel had somehow survived the virus of Islam, do you honestly think would they be free to live in peace by the surrounding muslim countries??????

This is all about ideologies a Western progressive ideology versus an extreme form of Islam ideology,

And yes it's complicated because Islam itself is made up of more than one virus, there is many forms of the Islam virus, but the major two are Shia(Iran) & Sunni(Saudi's), and yes while they fight each other, if they hate some other group more like Jews a country like Iran (Shia and Persian's) will back traditional enemies (Sunni & Arab)

Or do you really think Iran cares about so called Palestines?

If you think this is just about some self determination (Arab/muslims who are benefactors of Jews being colonised by Romans and driven from their land), then you are delusional, even muslims will tell you it's not including the Son of Hamas who knows Hamas better than anyone, go listen to middle east podcast channels and they say the same.

And yes the funny thing is, you are backing the ideology that is in complete opposition to your own, you and me have opposite political/social views but if you look at Guys shade pic, we are really just one or two shades apart, really we share more in common than differences, but the ideology you are backing is the complete opposite of what you believe in.

Virus of Islam.

Charming....

… irrational man made fear of man made viruses

;);)

https://m.

y'all are missing filipe commentating at sunset, and udo about to launch into a tirade about him upstairs

andy-mac wrote:

Virus of Islam.

Charming....

Most religions are like a virus, they aim to spread and take over.

Christianity too has been a virus in the past, look at what's its done across the world to other culture's outside of the West especially as a result of missionaries, but its more like a common cold today.

Islam is a far more dangerous virus like the first wave of Covid, look at what it did in the middle east, once mostly Christian now majority Islam

look at what its done in countries like Indonesia its entered through North Sumatra and almost wiped out Hinduism and Buddhism, imagine how cool Indo would be if it still remained.

Even today after being loved to death the charm of the Hindu influence in Bali is something special.

Islam coverts by force and intimidation.

Heres the reality of religious growth, id expect now mostly through birth

‘… coverts by force and intimidation’ ;)
- sounds like western foreign policy and colonial expansion

…karen vs karen

;);)

https://m.

indo-dreaming wrote:

andy-mac wrote:

Virus of Islam.

Charming....

Most religions are like a virus, they aim to spread and take over.

Christianity too has been a virus in the past, look at what's its done across the world to other culture's outside of the West especially as a result of missionaries, but its more like a common cold today.

Islam is a far more dangerous virus like the first wave of Covid, look at what it did in the middle east, once mostly Christian now majority Islam

look at what its done in countries like Indonesia its entered through North Sumatra and almost wiped out Hinduism and Buddhism, imagine how cool Indo would be if it still remained.

Even today after being loved to death the charm of the Hindu influence in Bali is something special.

Islam coverts by force and intimidation.

That wasn't actually the case in Indonesia. Islam spread through trade and in the markets etc. Had a lot of appeal to Indonesians well pribumi back then as it was more egalitarian than the hierarchy of Hinduism.
The original Islam in Indo was a form of Sufism which is a more spiritual version of Islam.

Any extremism in religion or political movement is dangerous. Using dehumanising language such as virus or rats is dangerous and should be avoided. Make you case but careful with the language.
As history clearly demonstrates, language matters.

"virus of Islam"
Nice piece of Islamaphobia and inciting hatred to a large part of the worlds population on a public forum Indo.
Dandenong Markets on today?

The extreme, fundamentalist aspects of anything are dangerous and should be moderated, whether in terms of religion, political ideology, national pride, etc.

And remember the most basic idea behind our society is religious and cultural freedom, pluralism, tolerance and understanding, all moderated within a secular framework of governance which in particular decentralises power and is characterised by things like liberal and constitutional democracy, secular and objective rule of law, market economy and economic choice and freedom, etc.

indo's words were not well chosen, but other people in this and other threads have said very similar things about Christianity, particularly in their abuse aimed at opti. None of this kind of stuff is acceptable. Criticising religions in general and the people who practice them is at odds with the most basic feature of our multicultural way of life.

Of course it's the ideal vision and dream of the Middle East but evidently not achievable.

I didn’t give you permission to use my image @info, I guess you think it’s clever on your behalf whereas I just think it’s further proof of the lowlife disgusting human that you truly are.

Indonesia has a large muslim population but are the %s totally accurate ? Most religions in indo have a degree of animism in them and because animism as a religion is against the law some people put down anything when declaring their religion to government . If you don’t pick anything then the government chooses muslim for you . This makes me question the figures that are thrown around . The old saying scratch a muslim and underneath is a hindu , scratch again and underneath is a animist . I have friends both muslim and hindu that don’t believe in their religion but still attend ceremonies and rituals to keep family happy . Gotta laugh when local muslims visit Bali for a holiday and knock back a few sherbets in the evening and bacon with their eggs for breakfast .

Unless your image has been changed , Guy , I think it's public information and fair game .

Everyone is putting others content up !

How many people here think that if the remaining Gazans get forced out into Egypt, that’s it. The Gaza Strip will be Israel’s and the West Bank will follow closely. There’ll be no right of return, as I think Israel’s bombing and destruction of infrastructure is so there’s nothing for civilians to return to? And we’ve got a new wave of refugees. Then we’ll complain about asylum seekers and boat people.

@Indo, I honestly can't answer that question because I honestly read it twice and don't understand what you are asking me to answer, just some guff about Islam being a virus or something and a what if my auntie had balls type of question.
Don't think you understand anything about self determination and human rights law. Maybe you do but choose to just ignore it blinded by you own personal prejudices.
Whatever religion or branch of religion a "peoples" are, they have the same human rights as we do, as everyone does.
When human rights are violently and continually denied the kind of problems Israel has with it's neighbors are inevitable, religion notwithstanding.

You need to take your bizarre hatred and prejudice for people who choose, again, choose, to worship Allah or whatever God they want, out of it and stop dehumanising Muslims and concentrate on the fact that Israel is acting, and has since it's creation, in a manner that contravenes the human rights of Palestinians and in violation of International Law whilst simultaneously trying to umbrella it's actions under those same principles, like the right to self defence.

I do believe that if Palestinians had their right to statehood and self determination granted then many of Israel's problems with them and their other neighbors would be diminished, not eliminated, but diminished, and many innocent lives would be saved, on both sides.

Bibi is trapped himself by his further right wing Zionist partners, his political survival and ability to avoid jail himself depend on them. They are the one's calling the shots now which is why Gaza is a wasteland of death and destruction because they want to settle it. The whole Western world has woken up to the reality of what has happened and Israel is becoming increasingly isolated and a pariah. Something I predicted on this thread months ago. The Jewish homeland, the descendants of the Holocaust, now subject to charges and accusations of genocide themselves, living in a constant state of war or threats of attack, and repeating the same kind of crimes the Jews went through themselves in WW2. A sad and unfathomable situation to me frankly, and to some of, not all, the Jews I know.

Yes, Jihadists are murderers and terrorists and a blight on humanity themselves. But the vast majority of Muslims, Sunni, Shia, Wahhabi, whatever, are not Jihadist. Islam at it's core, like the other great religions are based on philosophies of peace and love and fellowship with others. Like all religions, Christianity itself, they get distorted to suit human means and ends.
Those religions all coexisted in these lands prior to 1948.

I don't have the answers, I don't have the answer to whatever it was you were asking me.
What I do have is objectivity and empathy and humanity for all innocent victims of war, and terror. And I have a degree of knowledge and understanding of the law that applies between states and humanitarian law, and an actual degree in it, so that is what I try to bring to the table here. That is all I try to do. Then I get called a Hamas simp by you, so you and a few others cop shit from me back.
You can put me on whatever shade chart you want, do your worst attacking me. I don't think you understand what my motives or beliefs are anyway. Sadly I find yours very obvious and a bit sickening frankly.

I think you are blinded by your own deep prejudices and personal issues so find it difficult to take you seriously much of the time. There are some great people and commentators that come on these threads and I have learned a lot from many of them, and try to contribute some of the things I have learned along the way in my life. I am willing to listen to you on Indonesia and those waves over there, but not much else unfortunately.

So I'll give it another go and hope you surprise me, I'd like you to read and comment on my other post from last night regarding the IDF intel report that Hamas will not be eliminated by the current actions in Gaza, something I and Guy and others told you many times that you just responded to with your usual go to's "antisemites", "Hamas simps". Something you have stated as your reasoning for your posts here.

Has it changed your mind at all? Will you apologise or show any contrition? Do you think that these mass slaughters are still justified? What do you think Israel should do now that the objective is a failure and they have just actually made things worse for themselves? Do you still think they should create another blood bath in Rafah? Do you accept that the Palestinians have the right to self determination and Statehood as International Law, the UN, and their Western allies do?
I hope you do me the same courtesy as I have you in making a detailed and thoughtful response to my questions, I know I didn't really answer yours but honestly didn't understand it, something about hypothetical outcomes and Islam being a virus, maybe it's just me and I'm dumb, so happy to re-respond if you could perhaps word it again for me, without the virus bullshit and a what if something that happened didn't. Too hypothetical and not a "real world" scenario and just asking me to wildly speculate on an unreality that would just be imagining another.
I look forward to your reply.

Not sure anyone could expect Hamas to END when Gaza Falls .

They have plenty of mates surrounding Israel , this is just one fight , that the IDF has put ALL their resources into .

They can fight elsewhere and guessing half their Force is already out of Rafa !!!

The IDF have to get the all Hostage Holding Cells emptied and blown 2 bits , first .

That is their Number ONE priority ATM .

Their major objective .

There is still so much 2 play out , unfortunately in the ME and Ukraine .

The Russians just took a MAJOR Objective , a Strategic City much bigger than Gaza .

It was also Flattened , but all civilians were out ages ago .

The Russians will the help the People rebuild this city that was flattened .

Not sure what Hamas plan to leave behind , when then fight finally stops , so NFI how many people will be left fn standing .

What's left of Hamas , that is IN Gaza has been SOOO hard to remove and are ridiculously DUG in .

Its a fn nightmare imho !

The Russians , Ukrainians and Israelis are at least TRYING to Fight a FAIR fight as defined by the International Rules of War .

Hamas started the fight with NOT the IDF , but civilians , so Broke the GOLDEN Rule of War .

They declared that they don't fight fair and are Terrorists .

Basic rules of War , to stop war getting totally uncivilised and Barbaric !!!

The IDF have to punish this action .

It's THEIR responsibility to decide the punishment , IF , they WIN the fight .

That is another REAL Rule of War !

The Rules are Lethal but always need 2 be followed , or we get a Hiroshima or a Holocaust !

Great stuff @adam12

adam, at least quote me correctly. I never said the west is going to war against Islam. But again, you read my posts as what best suits your bias.

adam12 wrote:

Those religions all coexisted in these lands prior to 1948.

No they didn't. It's one of the biggest fallacies being thrown around.

indo-dreaming wrote:

Israel’s war on Hamas is the least deadly conflict in region

(February 5, 2024 / Gatestone Institute)
The Associated Press recently made headlines by falsely claiming that the Israeli campaign against Hamas “sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history” and was even worse than “the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.”

The Washington Post argued that “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza,” while The Wall Street Journal contended that it was “generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.”

That’s all the more impressive since, even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (tainted and inflated numbers in which there are no terrorists, only civilians, and fighting age men are really children) as the media does, this is still probably one of the least violent conflicts in the region.

In 2016, the Washington Post described the Syrian Civil War, with a possible 250,000 deaths, as “the most destructive conflict in the region.” In 2020, the United Nations called the Yemeni Civil War, with 150,000 deaths, “the most destructive conflict since the end of the Cold War.”

And then there’s the current phase of the war in Sudan (which the media is currently uninterested in) in which 15,000 people have been killed over the course of last year, as part of a larger conflict that may have claimed as many as 2 million lives.

The Tigray War in Ethiopia over the last three years (which you may have missed because the media chose not to hysterically cover every single bomb dropped and protesters stayed home knitting instead of blocking traffic) may have cost the lives of between 80,000 to 600,000 people.

(El Pais, Spain’s newspaper, which did report on Ethiopia’s civil war, described it as “the deadliest of the 21st century” and then had to pivot to argue later that Israel was worse in “25,000 deaths in Gaza: Why the destruction of this war exceeds that of other major conflicts.”)

In reality, every significant war and civil war in the region has had a much higher death toll than the Israel-Hamas war, including the Iraq-Iran War with an estimated 500,000 to 2 million deaths. And in nearby Africa, the Congo War has been blamed for 6 million deaths since 1996.

How does the media justify arguing that 25,000 is more than 2 million?

There are plenty of statistical gimmicks available to anyone who wants to argue that two plus two is really five. Media “analyses” that claim that Israel’s campaign against Hamas is the deadliest and most destructive, and might even be worse than WWII, adjust their claims accordingly.

That much is true.

The Times cites its own claim that “numbering the dead correctly is virtually impossible.”

That’s why the death toll for everything from the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars to the mass deaths in Sudan and the Iran-Iraq War are broad estimates with vast differences between them.

Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, warned that truth is the first casualty of war. And accurate casualty counts are the first and final casualty of every conflict.As the author of every dubious research study knows, to get the results you want, you manipulate your parameters. Media analyses selectively compare Israel’s campaign to battles, rather than wars, narrowly focus on very specific timetables, attempt to estimate per capita rather than gross figures. But drawing a circle around a particular area and going per capita works both ways; The Hamas attack of Oct. 7 killed 10% of the population of Kibbutz Be’eri, making it far worse per capita than anything in Israel’s response to those atrocities.

But statistical fudging is all in where the line is drawn to achieve a particular agenda.

For example, The New York Times declares that, “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab Loss in Wars With Israel in Past 40 Years.” Of course, the last major Arab-Israeli war took place 50 years ago.

The 40-year figure is based on the Lebanon War, but the actual numbers for that war vary wildly, from the thousands according to Israel, 10,000 according to the CIA, 18,000 according to Lebanon and 30,000 according to Arafat and the PLO.

While the media at the time emphasized the highest estimates, in order to criticize the Israeli campaign against the PLO, they now use lower estimates to attack the Gaza campaign.

Similarly, AP cites its own claim that battles against Islamic State in the Iraqi city of Mosul “killed around 10,000 civilians” to indict Israel. Some Iraqi estimates however peg it as high as 40,000. PBS headlined its coverage by warning that “the human toll of the battle for Mosul may never be known.”

The New York Times, after using the shaky Lebanon numbers to prop up the shaky Gaza numbers, admits that “as in Gaza today, researchers say the number killed in Lebanon may never be known with confidence because of the fog of war, even four decades later.”

The Lancet, the British medical journal, once courted controversy with its claims first that the Iraq War had killed 98,000 Iraqis and then over half a million, or 2.5% of the country. By 2007, a British data company claimed that 1 million Iraqis had been killed. These claims were quickly debunked and the claims are in the rearview mirror now that the debate over the war is over.

During the Iraq War it was politically convenient to inflate the death toll, just as it’s now politically convenient to deflate the death toll while unthinkingly accepting casualty figures from a terrorist group whose main hope of survival lies in inflating civilian deaths while minimizing its own casualties.

The most troubling thing about the universal acceptance of the Hamas numbers is just that.
Estimated death tolls in the Syrian Civil War have varied wildly from the low six figures to over 600,000. Different organizations with different agendas have produced very different sets of numbers. And while many of those may be unreliable, there is at least a healthy debate.

When it comes to Gaza, the media cites no figures other than those of Hamas. And it insists at the same time that most of Gaza has been destroyed, its medical centers pulverized and its government shattered, and that this same system can not only be trusted, but is also somehow capable of producing infallible statistics that don’t exist in any other regional conflict.

The numbers for the Iran-Iraq War vary by 1.5 million, those of the Syrian Civil War and Tigray War by half a million, and yet somehow Gaza is the place where the numbers never vary and where a terrorist group got it just right. That’s something even America can’t do.

On Sept. 11, 2023, DNA testing identified two more victims of the original 9/11 attacks. After 20 years, 1,000 human remains are still unknown. The exact number of deaths from when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017 is still being debated and it took months to nail down the death toll from the Maui wildfires. And yet somehow the medical experts at Hamas can produce better numbers in a shorter timespan in a war zone than we can while at peace.

Casualty figures have always been the subject of propaganda, and the most obvious symptom of propaganda is the lack of meaningful debate. Why does every regional war, including the Iraq War, have a wide range of estimated deaths, but not in Gaza? Because there is no dissent.

There is no dissent in Gaza or in the media which publishes absurd claims that a few months of fighting have somehow been more brutal than WWII or regional conflicts which claimed millions.

How many died in Gaza? The real answer is that, like the other wars, nobody knows.
After the fighting there will be studies that will pump up the estimated total even higher by using excess-death statistics. Surveys of empty houses, heat maps or satellite images will be used to estimate even higher losses without regard as to whether they reflect deaths or evacuations. Local research based on anecdotal accounts and statistical legerdemain will be used to bake a variety of faulty figures into a far more grandiose number than the current 25,000. Expect claims that will go as high as the low six figures to be reported on and treated as fact and history.

Techniques like these account for the wide range of reported deaths from other conflicts. And then we can expect debates over the X curve

and the correct readings of genealogical records. The end results will be deeply dubious but there will at least be some room for debate. There is little point in even debating the current numbers coming out of an arm of a terrorist organization.

But what the debates will reveal is that, agenda or no agenda, we don’t really know. Wars and natural disasters are messy. People disappear, some uproot themselves and some it will turn out never existed but were a mistake in the records of an unreliable part of the world.

Palestinian Authority and Hamas numbers, including population figures and birth rates, have reflected political agendas, rather than reality. As have those of UNRWA, the U.N. agency dedicated to serving the “Palestinians” but locally staffed by Hamas, so there will be plenty of bad numbers to drown out the good ones.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once reportedly quipped. The media’s coverage has offered plenty of all three.

But numbers in war mainly matter when it comes to outcomes of victory or defeat. The obsession with numbers in conflicts is an unhealthy distraction from the real issues.

The moral calculus between the Allies and the Nazis in WWII did not change based on how many German civilians were killed in the bombings and artillery shelling on the road to Berlin. The morality of the American Civil War was not measured in civilian deaths, and neither is any other.

A nation is actively evil when it sets out to exterminate a civilian population. Whether it is WWII or the Hamas war, only one of the two sides was engaged in a war of extermination.

The morality of a war is not measured in civilian casualties, but in deliberate civilian killings.

On Oct. 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not. The number games are meant to be a distraction from that simple fact.

Morality is defined by intent, not statistics.

Daniel Greenfield Originally published by The Gatestone Institute.

Adam, guy, soggy et al, re the above. No comments? You guys do call it the worst civilian deaths since forever. Yet, facts prove you all wrong.

Silence?

Good post Indo .

Great to be told and reminded of some of the realities ( horrors ) of War , Propaganda and Reality .

Normal shit stuff that we all have 2 clean up , afterwards , somehow .

gsco mkII wrote:

adam12 wrote:

Those religions all coexisted in these lands prior to 1948.

No they didn't. It's one of the biggest fallacies being thrown around.

Come on gsco, only adam’s posts understand the situation and are fully aware of the nuances involved.

We know this, because he says so.

Roadkill wrote:

indo-dreaming wrote:

Israel’s war on Hamas is the least deadly conflict in region

(February 5, 2024 / Gatestone Institute)
The Associated Press recently made headlines by falsely claiming that the Israeli campaign against Hamas “sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history” and was even worse than “the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.”

The Washington Post argued that “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza,” while The Wall Street Journal contended that it was “generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.”

That’s all the more impressive since, even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (tainted and inflated numbers in which there are no terrorists, only civilians, and fighting age men are really children) as the media does, this is still probably one of the least violent conflicts in the region.

In 2016, the Washington Post described the Syrian Civil War, with a possible 250,000 deaths, as “the most destructive conflict in the region.” In 2020, the United Nations called the Yemeni Civil War, with 150,000 deaths, “the most destructive conflict since the end of the Cold War.”

And then there’s the current phase of the war in Sudan (which the media is currently uninterested in) in which 15,000 people have been killed over the course of last year, as part of a larger conflict that may have claimed as many as 2 million lives.

The Tigray War in Ethiopia over the last three years (which you may have missed because the media chose not to hysterically cover every single bomb dropped and protesters stayed home knitting instead of blocking traffic) may have cost the lives of between 80,000 to 600,000 people.

(El Pais, Spain’s newspaper, which did report on Ethiopia’s civil war, described it as “the deadliest of the 21st century” and then had to pivot to argue later that Israel was worse in “25,000 deaths in Gaza: Why the destruction of this war exceeds that of other major conflicts.”)

In reality, every significant war and civil war in the region has had a much higher death toll than the Israel-Hamas war, including the Iraq-Iran War with an estimated 500,000 to 2 million deaths. And in nearby Africa, the Congo War has been blamed for 6 million deaths since 1996.

How does the media justify arguing that 25,000 is more than 2 million?

There are plenty of statistical gimmicks available to anyone who wants to argue that two plus two is really five. Media “analyses” that claim that Israel’s campaign against Hamas is the deadliest and most destructive, and might even be worse than WWII, adjust their claims accordingly.

That much is true.

The Times cites its own claim that “numbering the dead correctly is virtually impossible.”

That’s why the death toll for everything from the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars to the mass deaths in Sudan and the Iran-Iraq War are broad estimates with vast differences between them.

Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, warned that truth is the first casualty of war. And accurate casualty counts are the first and final casualty of every conflict.As the author of every dubious research study knows, to get the results you want, you manipulate your parameters. Media analyses selectively compare Israel’s campaign to battles, rather than wars, narrowly focus on very specific timetables, attempt to estimate per capita rather than gross figures. But drawing a circle around a particular area and going per capita works both ways; The Hamas attack of Oct. 7 killed 10% of the population of Kibbutz Be’eri, making it far worse per capita than anything in Israel’s response to those atrocities.

But statistical fudging is all in where the line is drawn to achieve a particular agenda.

For example, The New York Times declares that, “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab Loss in Wars With Israel in Past 40 Years.” Of course, the last major Arab-Israeli war took place 50 years ago.

The 40-year figure is based on the Lebanon War, but the actual numbers for that war vary wildly, from the thousands according to Israel, 10,000 according to the CIA, 18,000 according to Lebanon and 30,000 according to Arafat and the PLO.

While the media at the time emphasized the highest estimates, in order to criticize the Israeli campaign against the PLO, they now use lower estimates to attack the Gaza campaign.

Similarly, AP cites its own claim that battles against Islamic State in the Iraqi city of Mosul “killed around 10,000 civilians” to indict Israel. Some Iraqi estimates however peg it as high as 40,000. PBS headlined its coverage by warning that “the human toll of the battle for Mosul may never be known.”

The New York Times, after using the shaky Lebanon numbers to prop up the shaky Gaza numbers, admits that “as in Gaza today, researchers say the number killed in Lebanon may never be known with confidence because of the fog of war, even four decades later.”

The Lancet, the British medical journal, once courted controversy with its claims first that the Iraq War had killed 98,000 Iraqis and then over half a million, or 2.5% of the country. By 2007, a British data company claimed that 1 million Iraqis had been killed. These claims were quickly debunked and the claims are in the rearview mirror now that the debate over the war is over.

During the Iraq War it was politically convenient to inflate the death toll, just as it’s now politically convenient to deflate the death toll while unthinkingly accepting casualty figures from a terrorist group whose main hope of survival lies in inflating civilian deaths while minimizing its own casualties.

The most troubling thing about the universal acceptance of the Hamas numbers is just that.
Estimated death tolls in the Syrian Civil War have varied wildly from the low six figures to over 600,000. Different organizations with different agendas have produced very different sets of numbers. And while many of those may be unreliable, there is at least a healthy debate.

When it comes to Gaza, the media cites no figures other than those of Hamas. And it insists at the same time that most of Gaza has been destroyed, its medical centers pulverized and its government shattered, and that this same system can not only be trusted, but is also somehow capable of producing infallible statistics that don’t exist in any other regional conflict.

The numbers for the Iran-Iraq War vary by 1.5 million, those of the Syrian Civil War and Tigray War by half a million, and yet somehow Gaza is the place where the numbers never vary and where a terrorist group got it just right. That’s something even America can’t do.

On Sept. 11, 2023, DNA testing identified two more victims of the original 9/11 attacks. After 20 years, 1,000 human remains are still unknown. The exact number of deaths from when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017 is still being debated and it took months to nail down the death toll from the Maui wildfires. And yet somehow the medical experts at Hamas can produce better numbers in a shorter timespan in a war zone than we can while at peace.

Casualty figures have always been the subject of propaganda, and the most obvious symptom of propaganda is the lack of meaningful debate. Why does every regional war, including the Iraq War, have a wide range of estimated deaths, but not in Gaza? Because there is no dissent.

There is no dissent in Gaza or in the media which publishes absurd claims that a few months of fighting have somehow been more brutal than WWII or regional conflicts which claimed millions.

How many died in Gaza? The real answer is that, like the other wars, nobody knows.
After the fighting there will be studies that will pump up the estimated total even higher by using excess-death statistics. Surveys of empty houses, heat maps or satellite images will be used to estimate even higher losses without regard as to whether they reflect deaths or evacuations. Local research based on anecdotal accounts and statistical legerdemain will be used to bake a variety of faulty figures into a far more grandiose number than the current 25,000. Expect claims that will go as high as the low six figures to be reported on and treated as fact and history.

Techniques like these account for the wide range of reported deaths from other conflicts. And then we can expect debates over the X curve

and the correct readings of genealogical records. The end results will be deeply dubious but there will at least be some room for debate. There is little point in even debating the current numbers coming out of an arm of a terrorist organization.

But what the debates will reveal is that, agenda or no agenda, we don’t really know. Wars and natural disasters are messy. People disappear, some uproot themselves and some it will turn out never existed but were a mistake in the records of an unreliable part of the world.

Palestinian Authority and Hamas numbers, including population figures and birth rates, have reflected political agendas, rather than reality. As have those of UNRWA, the U.N. agency dedicated to serving the “Palestinians” but locally staffed by Hamas, so there will be plenty of bad numbers to drown out the good ones.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once reportedly quipped. The media’s coverage has offered plenty of all three.

But numbers in war mainly matter when it comes to outcomes of victory or defeat. The obsession with numbers in conflicts is an unhealthy distraction from the real issues.

The moral calculus between the Allies and the Nazis in WWII did not change based on how many German civilians were killed in the bombings and artillery shelling on the road to Berlin. The morality of the American Civil War was not measured in civilian deaths, and neither is any other.

A nation is actively evil when it sets out to exterminate a civilian population. Whether it is WWII or the Hamas war, only one of the two sides was engaged in a war of extermination.

The morality of a war is not measured in civilian casualties, but in deliberate civilian killings.

On Oct. 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not. The number games are meant to be a distraction from that simple fact.

Morality is defined by intent, not statistics.

Daniel Greenfield Originally published by The Gatestone Institute.

Adam, guy, soggy et al, re the above. No comments? You guys do call it the worst civilian deaths since forever. Yet, facts prove you all wrong.

Silence?

No, if you look at the authors work he has an established angle. That’s not to say he’s wrong but he has a historic body of work that indicates a bias.
Looking at the numbers as a whole over the respective time periods yes the numbers in Gaza haven’t reached the hundreds of thousands yet. But if you are a bit more honest and take time periods into account the daily death rates in Gaza do seem to exceed other conflicts. So there’s a counter point.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/11/gaza-daily-deaths-exceed-all-ot...

Pop Down wrote:

Good post Indo .

Great to be told and reminded of some of the realities ( horrors ) of War , Propaganda and Reality .

Normal shit stuff that we all have 2 clean up , afterwards , somehow .

Except it was horseshit. Daily death rates are what really counts. Israel has time to hit those big numbers.

soggydog wrote:

Roadkill wrote:

indo-dreaming wrote:

Israel’s war on Hamas is the least deadly conflict in region

(February 5, 2024 / Gatestone Institute)
The Associated Press recently made headlines by falsely claiming that the Israeli campaign against Hamas “sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history” and was even worse than “the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.”

The Washington Post argued that “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza,” while The Wall Street Journal contended that it was “generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.”

That’s all the more impressive since, even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (tainted and inflated numbers in which there are no terrorists, only civilians, and fighting age men are really children) as the media does, this is still probably one of the least violent conflicts in the region.

In 2016, the Washington Post described the Syrian Civil War, with a possible 250,000 deaths, as “the most destructive conflict in the region.” In 2020, the United Nations called the Yemeni Civil War, with 150,000 deaths, “the most destructive conflict since the end of the Cold War.”

And then there’s the current phase of the war in Sudan (which the media is currently uninterested in) in which 15,000 people have been killed over the course of last year, as part of a larger conflict that may have claimed as many as 2 million lives.

The Tigray War in Ethiopia over the last three years (which you may have missed because the media chose not to hysterically cover every single bomb dropped and protesters stayed home knitting instead of blocking traffic) may have cost the lives of between 80,000 to 600,000 people.

(El Pais, Spain’s newspaper, which did report on Ethiopia’s civil war, described it as “the deadliest of the 21st century” and then had to pivot to argue later that Israel was worse in “25,000 deaths in Gaza: Why the destruction of this war exceeds that of other major conflicts.”)

In reality, every significant war and civil war in the region has had a much higher death toll than the Israel-Hamas war, including the Iraq-Iran War with an estimated 500,000 to 2 million deaths. And in nearby Africa, the Congo War has been blamed for 6 million deaths since 1996.

How does the media justify arguing that 25,000 is more than 2 million?

There are plenty of statistical gimmicks available to anyone who wants to argue that two plus two is really five. Media “analyses” that claim that Israel’s campaign against Hamas is the deadliest and most destructive, and might even be worse than WWII, adjust their claims accordingly.

That much is true.

The Times cites its own claim that “numbering the dead correctly is virtually impossible.”

That’s why the death toll for everything from the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars to the mass deaths in Sudan and the Iran-Iraq War are broad estimates with vast differences between them.

Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, warned that truth is the first casualty of war. And accurate casualty counts are the first and final casualty of every conflict.As the author of every dubious research study knows, to get the results you want, you manipulate your parameters. Media analyses selectively compare Israel’s campaign to battles, rather than wars, narrowly focus on very specific timetables, attempt to estimate per capita rather than gross figures. But drawing a circle around a particular area and going per capita works both ways; The Hamas attack of Oct. 7 killed 10% of the population of Kibbutz Be’eri, making it far worse per capita than anything in Israel’s response to those atrocities.

But statistical fudging is all in where the line is drawn to achieve a particular agenda.

For example, The New York Times declares that, “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab Loss in Wars With Israel in Past 40 Years.” Of course, the last major Arab-Israeli war took place 50 years ago.

The 40-year figure is based on the Lebanon War, but the actual numbers for that war vary wildly, from the thousands according to Israel, 10,000 according to the CIA, 18,000 according to Lebanon and 30,000 according to Arafat and the PLO.

While the media at the time emphasized the highest estimates, in order to criticize the Israeli campaign against the PLO, they now use lower estimates to attack the Gaza campaign.

Similarly, AP cites its own claim that battles against Islamic State in the Iraqi city of Mosul “killed around 10,000 civilians” to indict Israel. Some Iraqi estimates however peg it as high as 40,000. PBS headlined its coverage by warning that “the human toll of the battle for Mosul may never be known.”

The New York Times, after using the shaky Lebanon numbers to prop up the shaky Gaza numbers, admits that “as in Gaza today, researchers say the number killed in Lebanon may never be known with confidence because of the fog of war, even four decades later.”

The Lancet, the British medical journal, once courted controversy with its claims first that the Iraq War had killed 98,000 Iraqis and then over half a million, or 2.5% of the country. By 2007, a British data company claimed that 1 million Iraqis had been killed. These claims were quickly debunked and the claims are in the rearview mirror now that the debate over the war is over.

During the Iraq War it was politically convenient to inflate the death toll, just as it’s now politically convenient to deflate the death toll while unthinkingly accepting casualty figures from a terrorist group whose main hope of survival lies in inflating civilian deaths while minimizing its own casualties.

The most troubling thing about the universal acceptance of the Hamas numbers is just that.
Estimated death tolls in the Syrian Civil War have varied wildly from the low six figures to over 600,000. Different organizations with different agendas have produced very different sets of numbers. And while many of those may be unreliable, there is at least a healthy debate.

When it comes to Gaza, the media cites no figures other than those of Hamas. And it insists at the same time that most of Gaza has been destroyed, its medical centers pulverized and its government shattered, and that this same system can not only be trusted, but is also somehow capable of producing infallible statistics that don’t exist in any other regional conflict.

The numbers for the Iran-Iraq War vary by 1.5 million, those of the Syrian Civil War and Tigray War by half a million, and yet somehow Gaza is the place where the numbers never vary and where a terrorist group got it just right. That’s something even America can’t do.

On Sept. 11, 2023, DNA testing identified two more victims of the original 9/11 attacks. After 20 years, 1,000 human remains are still unknown. The exact number of deaths from when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017 is still being debated and it took months to nail down the death toll from the Maui wildfires. And yet somehow the medical experts at Hamas can produce better numbers in a shorter timespan in a war zone than we can while at peace.

Casualty figures have always been the subject of propaganda, and the most obvious symptom of propaganda is the lack of meaningful debate. Why does every regional war, including the Iraq War, have a wide range of estimated deaths, but not in Gaza? Because there is no dissent.

There is no dissent in Gaza or in the media which publishes absurd claims that a few months of fighting have somehow been more brutal than WWII or regional conflicts which claimed millions.

How many died in Gaza? The real answer is that, like the other wars, nobody knows.
After the fighting there will be studies that will pump up the estimated total even higher by using excess-death statistics. Surveys of empty houses, heat maps or satellite images will be used to estimate even higher losses without regard as to whether they reflect deaths or evacuations. Local research based on anecdotal accounts and statistical legerdemain will be used to bake a variety of faulty figures into a far more grandiose number than the current 25,000. Expect claims that will go as high as the low six figures to be reported on and treated as fact and history.

Techniques like these account for the wide range of reported deaths from other conflicts. And then we can expect debates over the X curve

and the correct readings of genealogical records. The end results will be deeply dubious but there will at least be some room for debate. There is little point in even debating the current numbers coming out of an arm of a terrorist organization.

But what the debates will reveal is that, agenda or no agenda, we don’t really know. Wars and natural disasters are messy. People disappear, some uproot themselves and some it will turn out never existed but were a mistake in the records of an unreliable part of the world.

Palestinian Authority and Hamas numbers, including population figures and birth rates, have reflected political agendas, rather than reality. As have those of UNRWA, the U.N. agency dedicated to serving the “Palestinians” but locally staffed by Hamas, so there will be plenty of bad numbers to drown out the good ones.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once reportedly quipped. The media’s coverage has offered plenty of all three.

But numbers in war mainly matter when it comes to outcomes of victory or defeat. The obsession with numbers in conflicts is an unhealthy distraction from the real issues.

The moral calculus between the Allies and the Nazis in WWII did not change based on how many German civilians were killed in the bombings and artillery shelling on the road to Berlin. The morality of the American Civil War was not measured in civilian deaths, and neither is any other.

A nation is actively evil when it sets out to exterminate a civilian population. Whether it is WWII or the Hamas war, only one of the two sides was engaged in a war of extermination.

The morality of a war is not measured in civilian casualties, but in deliberate civilian killings.

On Oct. 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not. The number games are meant to be a distraction from that simple fact.

Morality is defined by intent, not statistics.

Daniel Greenfield Originally published by The Gatestone Institute.

Adam, guy, soggy et al, re the above. No comments? You guys do call it the worst civilian deaths since forever. Yet, facts prove you all wrong.

Silence?

No, if you look at the authors work he has an established angle. That’s not to say he’s wrong but he has a historic body of work that indicates a bias.
Looking at the numbers as a whole over the respective time periods yes the numbers in Gaza haven’t reached the hundreds of thousands yet. But if you are a bit more honest and take time periods into account the daily death rates in Gaza do seem to exceed other conflicts. So there’s a counter point.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/11/gaza-daily-deaths-exceed-all-ot...

Attack the messenger is classic avoidance.

The facts speak for themselves.

How about my question above RK?

Roadkill wrote:

soggydog wrote:

Roadkill wrote:

indo-dreaming wrote:

Israel’s war on Hamas is the least deadly conflict in region

(February 5, 2024 / Gatestone Institute)
The Associated Press recently made headlines by falsely claiming that the Israeli campaign against Hamas “sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history” and was even worse than “the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.”

The Washington Post argued that “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza,” while The Wall Street Journal contended that it was “generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.”

That’s all the more impressive since, even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (tainted and inflated numbers in which there are no terrorists, only civilians, and fighting age men are really children) as the media does, this is still probably one of the least violent conflicts in the region.

In 2016, the Washington Post described the Syrian Civil War, with a possible 250,000 deaths, as “the most destructive conflict in the region.” In 2020, the United Nations called the Yemeni Civil War, with 150,000 deaths, “the most destructive conflict since the end of the Cold War.”

And then there’s the current phase of the war in Sudan (which the media is currently uninterested in) in which 15,000 people have been killed over the course of last year, as part of a larger conflict that may have claimed as many as 2 million lives.

The Tigray War in Ethiopia over the last three years (which you may have missed because the media chose not to hysterically cover every single bomb dropped and protesters stayed home knitting instead of blocking traffic) may have cost the lives of between 80,000 to 600,000 people.

(El Pais, Spain’s newspaper, which did report on Ethiopia’s civil war, described it as “the deadliest of the 21st century” and then had to pivot to argue later that Israel was worse in “25,000 deaths in Gaza: Why the destruction of this war exceeds that of other major conflicts.”)

In reality, every significant war and civil war in the region has had a much higher death toll than the Israel-Hamas war, including the Iraq-Iran War with an estimated 500,000 to 2 million deaths. And in nearby Africa, the Congo War has been blamed for 6 million deaths since 1996.

How does the media justify arguing that 25,000 is more than 2 million?

There are plenty of statistical gimmicks available to anyone who wants to argue that two plus two is really five. Media “analyses” that claim that Israel’s campaign against Hamas is the deadliest and most destructive, and might even be worse than WWII, adjust their claims accordingly.

That much is true.

The Times cites its own claim that “numbering the dead correctly is virtually impossible.”

That’s why the death toll for everything from the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars to the mass deaths in Sudan and the Iran-Iraq War are broad estimates with vast differences between them.

Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, warned that truth is the first casualty of war. And accurate casualty counts are the first and final casualty of every conflict.As the author of every dubious research study knows, to get the results you want, you manipulate your parameters. Media analyses selectively compare Israel’s campaign to battles, rather than wars, narrowly focus on very specific timetables, attempt to estimate per capita rather than gross figures. But drawing a circle around a particular area and going per capita works both ways; The Hamas attack of Oct. 7 killed 10% of the population of Kibbutz Be’eri, making it far worse per capita than anything in Israel’s response to those atrocities.

But statistical fudging is all in where the line is drawn to achieve a particular agenda.

For example, The New York Times declares that, “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab Loss in Wars With Israel in Past 40 Years.” Of course, the last major Arab-Israeli war took place 50 years ago.

The 40-year figure is based on the Lebanon War, but the actual numbers for that war vary wildly, from the thousands according to Israel, 10,000 according to the CIA, 18,000 according to Lebanon and 30,000 according to Arafat and the PLO.

While the media at the time emphasized the highest estimates, in order to criticize the Israeli campaign against the PLO, they now use lower estimates to attack the Gaza campaign.

Similarly, AP cites its own claim that battles against Islamic State in the Iraqi city of Mosul “killed around 10,000 civilians” to indict Israel. Some Iraqi estimates however peg it as high as 40,000. PBS headlined its coverage by warning that “the human toll of the battle for Mosul may never be known.”

The New York Times, after using the shaky Lebanon numbers to prop up the shaky Gaza numbers, admits that “as in Gaza today, researchers say the number killed in Lebanon may never be known with confidence because of the fog of war, even four decades later.”

The Lancet, the British medical journal, once courted controversy with its claims first that the Iraq War had killed 98,000 Iraqis and then over half a million, or 2.5% of the country. By 2007, a British data company claimed that 1 million Iraqis had been killed. These claims were quickly debunked and the claims are in the rearview mirror now that the debate over the war is over.

During the Iraq War it was politically convenient to inflate the death toll, just as it’s now politically convenient to deflate the death toll while unthinkingly accepting casualty figures from a terrorist group whose main hope of survival lies in inflating civilian deaths while minimizing its own casualties.

The most troubling thing about the universal acceptance of the Hamas numbers is just that.
Estimated death tolls in the Syrian Civil War have varied wildly from the low six figures to over 600,000. Different organizations with different agendas have produced very different sets of numbers. And while many of those may be unreliable, there is at least a healthy debate.

When it comes to Gaza, the media cites no figures other than those of Hamas. And it insists at the same time that most of Gaza has been destroyed, its medical centers pulverized and its government shattered, and that this same system can not only be trusted, but is also somehow capable of producing infallible statistics that don’t exist in any other regional conflict.

The numbers for the Iran-Iraq War vary by 1.5 million, those of the Syrian Civil War and Tigray War by half a million, and yet somehow Gaza is the place where the numbers never vary and where a terrorist group got it just right. That’s something even America can’t do.

On Sept. 11, 2023, DNA testing identified two more victims of the original 9/11 attacks. After 20 years, 1,000 human remains are still unknown. The exact number of deaths from when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017 is still being debated and it took months to nail down the death toll from the Maui wildfires. And yet somehow the medical experts at Hamas can produce better numbers in a shorter timespan in a war zone than we can while at peace.

Casualty figures have always been the subject of propaganda, and the most obvious symptom of propaganda is the lack of meaningful debate. Why does every regional war, including the Iraq War, have a wide range of estimated deaths, but not in Gaza? Because there is no dissent.

There is no dissent in Gaza or in the media which publishes absurd claims that a few months of fighting have somehow been more brutal than WWII or regional conflicts which claimed millions.

How many died in Gaza? The real answer is that, like the other wars, nobody knows.
After the fighting there will be studies that will pump up the estimated total even higher by using excess-death statistics. Surveys of empty houses, heat maps or satellite images will be used to estimate even higher losses without regard as to whether they reflect deaths or evacuations. Local research based on anecdotal accounts and statistical legerdemain will be used to bake a variety of faulty figures into a far more grandiose number than the current 25,000. Expect claims that will go as high as the low six figures to be reported on and treated as fact and history.

Techniques like these account for the wide range of reported deaths from other conflicts. And then we can expect debates over the X curve

and the correct readings of genealogical records. The end results will be deeply dubious but there will at least be some room for debate. There is little point in even debating the current numbers coming out of an arm of a terrorist organization.

But what the debates will reveal is that, agenda or no agenda, we don’t really know. Wars and natural disasters are messy. People disappear, some uproot themselves and some it will turn out never existed but were a mistake in the records of an unreliable part of the world.

Palestinian Authority and Hamas numbers, including population figures and birth rates, have reflected political agendas, rather than reality. As have those of UNRWA, the U.N. agency dedicated to serving the “Palestinians” but locally staffed by Hamas, so there will be plenty of bad numbers to drown out the good ones.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once reportedly quipped. The media’s coverage has offered plenty of all three.

But numbers in war mainly matter when it comes to outcomes of victory or defeat. The obsession with numbers in conflicts is an unhealthy distraction from the real issues.

The moral calculus between the Allies and the Nazis in WWII did not change based on how many German civilians were killed in the bombings and artillery shelling on the road to Berlin. The morality of the American Civil War was not measured in civilian deaths, and neither is any other.

A nation is actively evil when it sets out to exterminate a civilian population. Whether it is WWII or the Hamas war, only one of the two sides was engaged in a war of extermination.

The morality of a war is not measured in civilian casualties, but in deliberate civilian killings.

On Oct. 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not. The number games are meant to be a distraction from that simple fact.

Morality is defined by intent, not statistics.

Daniel Greenfield Originally published by The Gatestone Institute.

Adam, guy, soggy et al, re the above. No comments? You guys do call it the worst civilian deaths since forever. Yet, facts prove you all wrong.

Silence?

No, if you look at the authors work he has an established angle. That’s not to say he’s wrong but he has a historic body of work that indicates a bias.
Looking at the numbers as a whole over the respective time periods yes the numbers in Gaza haven’t reached the hundreds of thousands yet. But if you are a bit more honest and take time periods into account the daily death rates in Gaza do seem to exceed other conflicts. So there’s a counter point.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/11/gaza-daily-deaths-exceed-all-ot...

Attack the messenger is classic avoidance.

The facts speak for themselves.

No attack, but an observation as I would expect you may do to a pro Palestinian author given your position. Yes facts don’t lie the daily death rate in Gaza exceeds all the wars listed in Greenshields article. The omission of this fact is telling as it had the desired effect on people reading the article.

soggydog wrote:

Roadkill wrote:

indo-dreaming wrote:

Israel’s war on Hamas is the least deadly conflict in region

(February 5, 2024 / Gatestone Institute)
The Associated Press recently made headlines by falsely claiming that the Israeli campaign against Hamas “sits among the deadliest and most destructive in recent history” and was even worse than “the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.”

The Washington Post argued that “Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars in Gaza,” while The Wall Street Journal contended that it was “generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.”

That’s all the more impressive since, even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (tainted and inflated numbers in which there are no terrorists, only civilians, and fighting age men are really children) as the media does, this is still probably one of the least violent conflicts in the region.

In 2016, the Washington Post described the Syrian Civil War, with a possible 250,000 deaths, as “the most destructive conflict in the region.” In 2020, the United Nations called the Yemeni Civil War, with 150,000 deaths, “the most destructive conflict since the end of the Cold War.”

And then there’s the current phase of the war in Sudan (which the media is currently uninterested in) in which 15,000 people have been killed over the course of last year, as part of a larger conflict that may have claimed as many as 2 million lives.

The Tigray War in Ethiopia over the last three years (which you may have missed because the media chose not to hysterically cover every single bomb dropped and protesters stayed home knitting instead of blocking traffic) may have cost the lives of between 80,000 to 600,000 people.

(El Pais, Spain’s newspaper, which did report on Ethiopia’s civil war, described it as “the deadliest of the 21st century” and then had to pivot to argue later that Israel was worse in “25,000 deaths in Gaza: Why the destruction of this war exceeds that of other major conflicts.”)

In reality, every significant war and civil war in the region has had a much higher death toll than the Israel-Hamas war, including the Iraq-Iran War with an estimated 500,000 to 2 million deaths. And in nearby Africa, the Congo War has been blamed for 6 million deaths since 1996.

How does the media justify arguing that 25,000 is more than 2 million?

There are plenty of statistical gimmicks available to anyone who wants to argue that two plus two is really five. Media “analyses” that claim that Israel’s campaign against Hamas is the deadliest and most destructive, and might even be worse than WWII, adjust their claims accordingly.

That much is true.

The Times cites its own claim that “numbering the dead correctly is virtually impossible.”

That’s why the death toll for everything from the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars to the mass deaths in Sudan and the Iran-Iraq War are broad estimates with vast differences between them.

Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, warned that truth is the first casualty of war. And accurate casualty counts are the first and final casualty of every conflict.As the author of every dubious research study knows, to get the results you want, you manipulate your parameters. Media analyses selectively compare Israel’s campaign to battles, rather than wars, narrowly focus on very specific timetables, attempt to estimate per capita rather than gross figures. But drawing a circle around a particular area and going per capita works both ways; The Hamas attack of Oct. 7 killed 10% of the population of Kibbutz Be’eri, making it far worse per capita than anything in Israel’s response to those atrocities.

But statistical fudging is all in where the line is drawn to achieve a particular agenda.

For example, The New York Times declares that, “Gaza Deaths Surpass Any Arab Loss in Wars With Israel in Past 40 Years.” Of course, the last major Arab-Israeli war took place 50 years ago.

The 40-year figure is based on the Lebanon War, but the actual numbers for that war vary wildly, from the thousands according to Israel, 10,000 according to the CIA, 18,000 according to Lebanon and 30,000 according to Arafat and the PLO.

While the media at the time emphasized the highest estimates, in order to criticize the Israeli campaign against the PLO, they now use lower estimates to attack the Gaza campaign.

Similarly, AP cites its own claim that battles against Islamic State in the Iraqi city of Mosul “killed around 10,000 civilians” to indict Israel. Some Iraqi estimates however peg it as high as 40,000. PBS headlined its coverage by warning that “the human toll of the battle for Mosul may never be known.”

The New York Times, after using the shaky Lebanon numbers to prop up the shaky Gaza numbers, admits that “as in Gaza today, researchers say the number killed in Lebanon may never be known with confidence because of the fog of war, even four decades later.”

The Lancet, the British medical journal, once courted controversy with its claims first that the Iraq War had killed 98,000 Iraqis and then over half a million, or 2.5% of the country. By 2007, a British data company claimed that 1 million Iraqis had been killed. These claims were quickly debunked and the claims are in the rearview mirror now that the debate over the war is over.

During the Iraq War it was politically convenient to inflate the death toll, just as it’s now politically convenient to deflate the death toll while unthinkingly accepting casualty figures from a terrorist group whose main hope of survival lies in inflating civilian deaths while minimizing its own casualties.

The most troubling thing about the universal acceptance of the Hamas numbers is just that.
Estimated death tolls in the Syrian Civil War have varied wildly from the low six figures to over 600,000. Different organizations with different agendas have produced very different sets of numbers. And while many of those may be unreliable, there is at least a healthy debate.

When it comes to Gaza, the media cites no figures other than those of Hamas. And it insists at the same time that most of Gaza has been destroyed, its medical centers pulverized and its government shattered, and that this same system can not only be trusted, but is also somehow capable of producing infallible statistics that don’t exist in any other regional conflict.

The numbers for the Iran-Iraq War vary by 1.5 million, those of the Syrian Civil War and Tigray War by half a million, and yet somehow Gaza is the place where the numbers never vary and where a terrorist group got it just right. That’s something even America can’t do.

On Sept. 11, 2023, DNA testing identified two more victims of the original 9/11 attacks. After 20 years, 1,000 human remains are still unknown. The exact number of deaths from when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017 is still being debated and it took months to nail down the death toll from the Maui wildfires. And yet somehow the medical experts at Hamas can produce better numbers in a shorter timespan in a war zone than we can while at peace.

Casualty figures have always been the subject of propaganda, and the most obvious symptom of propaganda is the lack of meaningful debate. Why does every regional war, including the Iraq War, have a wide range of estimated deaths, but not in Gaza? Because there is no dissent.

There is no dissent in Gaza or in the media which publishes absurd claims that a few months of fighting have somehow been more brutal than WWII or regional conflicts which claimed millions.

How many died in Gaza? The real answer is that, like the other wars, nobody knows.
After the fighting there will be studies that will pump up the estimated total even higher by using excess-death statistics. Surveys of empty houses, heat maps or satellite images will be used to estimate even higher losses without regard as to whether they reflect deaths or evacuations. Local research based on anecdotal accounts and statistical legerdemain will be used to bake a variety of faulty figures into a far more grandiose number than the current 25,000. Expect claims that will go as high as the low six figures to be reported on and treated as fact and history.

Techniques like these account for the wide range of reported deaths from other conflicts. And then we can expect debates over the X curve

and the correct readings of genealogical records. The end results will be deeply dubious but there will at least be some room for debate. There is little point in even debating the current numbers coming out of an arm of a terrorist organization.

But what the debates will reveal is that, agenda or no agenda, we don’t really know. Wars and natural disasters are messy. People disappear, some uproot themselves and some it will turn out never existed but were a mistake in the records of an unreliable part of the world.

Palestinian Authority and Hamas numbers, including population figures and birth rates, have reflected political agendas, rather than reality. As have those of UNRWA, the U.N. agency dedicated to serving the “Palestinians” but locally staffed by Hamas, so there will be plenty of bad numbers to drown out the good ones.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once reportedly quipped. The media’s coverage has offered plenty of all three.

But numbers in war mainly matter when it comes to outcomes of victory or defeat. The obsession with numbers in conflicts is an unhealthy distraction from the real issues.

The moral calculus between the Allies and the Nazis in WWII did not change based on how many German civilians were killed in the bombings and artillery shelling on the road to Berlin. The morality of the American Civil War was not measured in civilian deaths, and neither is any other.

A nation is actively evil when it sets out to exterminate a civilian population. Whether it is WWII or the Hamas war, only one of the two sides was engaged in a war of extermination.

The morality of a war is not measured in civilian casualties, but in deliberate civilian killings.

On Oct. 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not. The number games are meant to be a distraction from that simple fact.

Morality is defined by intent, not statistics.

Daniel Greenfield Originally published by The Gatestone Institute.

Adam, guy, soggy et al, re the above. No comments? You guys do call it the worst civilian deaths since forever. Yet, facts prove you all wrong.

Silence?

No, if you look at the authors work he has an established angle. That’s not to say he’s wrong but he has a historic body of work that indicates a bias.
Looking at the numbers as a whole over the respective time periods yes the numbers in Gaza haven’t reached the hundreds of thousands yet. But if you are a bit more honest and take time periods into account the daily death rates in Gaza do seem to exceed other conflicts. So there’s a counter point.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/11/gaza-daily-deaths-exceed-all-ot...

Oxfam is repeating Hamas figures..so not really a counter point. They have no real verified figures for how many people have died in Gaza.

“ even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (tainted and inflated numbers in which there are no terrorists, only civilians, and fighting age men are really children)”

But thx for answering

OK,
first up, Lil'Cowboy, Roady, apologies if I misread your post, don't think I did but apologies anyway,
as for "Come on gsco, only adam’s posts understand the situation and are fully aware of the nuances involved.
We know this, because he says so"
I just fucking posted this "I don't have the answers..."
Now who is not reading what the other says?
And as for "Adam, guy, soggy et al, re the above. No comments? You guys do call it the worst civilian deaths since forever. Yet, facts prove you all wrong.
Silence?"
Never said that at all, ever. Nor did Soggy or Guy as I can recall, but they can speak for themselves.
Putting words in people's mouths that they never said again.
You think this is a numbers game?
Ride on Lil'Cowboy. Lil'Trigger needs watering.

@gsco, they did co exist, they existed there, don't really want to get into a historical debate, how far back in history do you want to go? It's not really relevant to the main point of my post which was to ask @Indo the question whether the Palestinians have the right to self determination and Statehood. Be interested for you to answer that same question seeing you actually do present as mostly intelligent and have some knowledge yourself. What do you think?

@Pop, that article contained this statement "On Oct. 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not."
Do you honestly agree with that?, That Israel has not engaged in deliberate killings of civilians?
Because I don't want to, but can "go to the video tape" and show you a mountain of evidence that proves the bullshit in that, you won't be eating or sleeping too well if you watch it and I know how much you like your tucker.
And aren't you on holidays with your girls? WTF are you doing here and not backing me up like I did you on these threads? I can feel another @Pop story coming and maybe not so complimentary either.
FMD. Mates, remember?

As for that article itself, again, is this a fucking numbers game? What is the point of comparing death statistics? The last estimate I read was 100,000 dead but don't really care if it's half that or 10% or whatever the death toll is, the principles remain the same. Would the Holocaust have been any less abhorrent if it was 3 million or 1 million and not 6million?
You guys need to concentrate on the real issues and stop treating this thing like some footy match that you are keeping scores on.
The fucken lot of you, answer this fucking question, do the Palestinians have human rights, the right to statehood, the right to self determination, the right to resist an illegal occupation of their territories???
Answer that first, then we can get down to how Israel and Hamas and others go about things, and history and death score sheets.
That is the fundamental issue at stake here. Each of you, answer that fucking question, or I'm just gonna go back to bagging out the lot of you.
Sheesh

soggydog wrote:

How about my question above RK?

I went back over what was said, I can’t find where you asked me a question?

“ even accepting the Hamas casualty figures (tainted and inflated numbers in which there are no terrorists, only civilians, and fighting age men are really children)”

This is the opinion of the author only. I can find pundits who say the same for Israel. So what do we believe. The point should be stopping further civilian deaths or death destruction full stop. Not using cheap equivocation to justify an avoidable disaster.

How many people here think that if the remaining Gazans get forced out into Egypt, that’s it. The Gaza Strip will be Israel’s and the West Bank will follow closely. There’ll be no right of return, as I think Israel’s bombing and destruction of infrastructure is so there’s nothing for civilians to return to? And we’ve got a new wave of refugees. Then we’ll complain about asylum seekers and boat people.

This one

adam12 wrote:

OK,
first up, Lil'Cowboy, Roady, apologies if I misread your post, don't think I did but apologies anyway,
as for "Come on gsco, only adam’s posts understand the situation and are fully aware of the nuances involved.
We know this, because he says so"
I just fucking posted this "I don't have the answers..."
Now who is not reading what the other says?
And as for "Adam, guy, soggy et al, re the above. No comments? You guys do call it the worst civilian deaths since forever. Yet, facts prove you all wrong.
Silence?"
Never said that at all, ever. Nor did Soggy or Guy as I can recall, but they can speak for themselves.
Putting words in people's mouths that they never said again.
You think this is a numbers game?
Ride on Lil'Cowboy. Lil'Trigger needs watering.

@gsco, they did co exist, they existed there, don't really want to get into a historical debate, how far back in history do you want to go? It's not really relevant to the main point of my post which was to ask @Indo the question whether the Palestinians have the right to self determination and Statehood. Be interested for you to answer that same question seeing you actually do present as mostly intelligent and have some knowledge yourself. What do you think?

@Pop, that article contained this statement "On Oct. 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not."
Do you honestly agree with that?, That Israel has not engaged in deliberate killings of civilians?
Because I don't want to, but can "go to the video tape" and show you a mountain of evidence that proves the bullshit in that, you won't be eating or sleeping too well if you watch it and I know how much you like your tucker.
And aren't you on holidays with your girls? WTF are you doing here and not backing me up like I did you on these threads? I can feel another @Pop story coming and maybe not so complimentary either.
FMD. Mates remember.

is this a fucking numbers game? What is the point of comparing death statistics? The last estimate I read was 100,000 dead but don't really care if it's half that or 10% or whatever the death toll is, the principles remain the same. Would the Holocaust have been any less abhorrent if it was 3 million or 1 million and not 6million?
You guys need to concentrate on the real issues and stop treating this thing like some footy match that you are keeping scores on.
The fucken lot of you, answer this fucking question, do the Palestinians have human rights, the right to statehood, the right to self determination, the right to resist an illegal occupation of their territories???
Answer that first, then we can get down to how Israel and Hamas and others go about things, and history and death score sheets.
That is the fundamental issue at stake here. Each of you, answer that fucking question, or I'm just gonna go back to bagging out the lot of you.
Sheesh

Fark you are an idiot at times…

You have asked Indo about 50 times to tell you figures that are acceptable?

Now, when it suits you cry “ is this a fucking numbers game? ” ffs clown..such a fucking crybaby hypocrite. Demand when it suits and then whinge about the same thing you demand.

Do you practice being such a fool?

adam12 wrote:

OK,
first up, Lil'Cowboy, Roady, apologies if I misread your post, don't think I did but apologies anyway,
as for "Come on gsco, only adam’s posts understand the situation and are fully aware of the nuances involved.
We know this, because he says so"
I just fucking posted this "I don't have the answers..."
Now who is not reading what the other says?
And as for "Adam, guy, soggy et al, re the above. No comments? You guys do call it the worst civilian deaths since forever. Yet, facts prove you all wrong.
Silence?"
Never said that at all, ever. Nor did Soggy or Guy as I can recall, but they can speak for themselves.
Putting words in people's mouths that they never said again.
You think this is a numbers game?
Ride on Lil'Cowboy. Lil'Trigger needs watering.

@gsco, they did co exist, they existed there, don't really want to get into a historical debate, how far back in history do you want to go? It's not really relevant to the main point of my post which was to ask @Indo the question whether the Palestinians have the right to self determination and Statehood. Be interested for you to answer that same question seeing you actually do present as mostly intelligent and have some knowledge yourself. What do you think?

@Pop, that article contained this statement "On Oct. 7 and in the months since, Hamas has engaged in the deliberate killings of civilians. Israel has not."
Do you honestly agree with that?, That Israel has not engaged in deliberate killings of civilians?
Because I don't want to, but can "go to the video tape" and show you a mountain of evidence that proves the bullshit in that, you won't be eating or sleeping too well if you watch it and I know how much you like your tucker.
And aren't you on holidays with your girls? WTF are you doing here and not backing me up like I did you on these threads? I can feel another @Pop story coming and maybe not so complimentary either.
FMD. Mates, remember?

As for that article itself, again, is this a fucking numbers game? What is the point of comparing death statistics? The last estimate I read was 100,000 dead but don't really care if it's half that or 10% or whatever the death toll is, the principles remain the same. Would the Holocaust have been any less abhorrent if it was 3 million or 1 million and not 6million?
You guys need to concentrate on the real issues and stop treating this thing like some footy match that you are keeping scores on.
The fucken lot of you, answer this fucking question, do the Palestinians have human rights, the right to statehood, the right to self determination, the right to resist an illegal occupation of their territories???
Answer that first, then we can get down to how Israel and Hamas and others go about things, and history and death score sheets.
That is the fundamental issue at stake here. Each of you, answer that fucking question, or I'm just gonna go back to bagging out the lot of you.
Sheesh

The fucken lot of you, answer this fucking question, do the Palestinians have human rights,

Nope

soggydog wrote:

How many people here think that if the remaining Gazans get forced out into Egypt, that’s it. The Gaza Strip will be Israel’s and the West Bank will follow closely. There’ll be no right of return, as I think Israel’s bombing and destruction of infrastructure is so there’s nothing for civilians to return to? And we’ve got a new wave of refugees. Then we’ll complain about asylum seekers and boat people.

This one

1. I don’t think Egypt will take the Palestinians from Gaza.

2. I don’t think Israel will get Gaza Strip or West Bank.

No neighbour country wants the Palestinians, because they know they will only bring problems and hate and disruption and conflict.

https://apnews.com/article/palestinian-jordan-egypt-israel-refugee-502c0...

Adam 12

U misread what I wrote and added questions that didn't need 2 be asked , so I won't try and answer them .

I said Hamas broke the Golden Rule and did not start the Oct 7 with an attack on the IDF .

This is how a REAL War is supposed to fn start , FFS .

The JUST went after fn Civilians , get it ?

That is against the International Rules of War as I expect U fn know .

That DECLARED them , by fn definition , a Terrorist organisation .

It's not that fn hard to understand this basic concept , surely !

Israel has to Punish them for this International Rule of Law Transgression , as U know .

U tell me how they should Punish Hamas , U seem to be the fn legal expert on this shit ?

My god...arguing over numbers

Deir Yassin massacre 1948... sounds a lot like Oct 7.

anyone interested in numbers, this was 31st of December:

yvdreh wrote:

49 pages????? Go for a surf ya silly billy's.

ruffly 50 more pages, in 50 days.. average is pretty consistent.

basesix wrote:

anyone interested in numbers, this was 31st of December:

yvdreh wrote:

49 pages????? Go for a surf ya silly billy's.

ruffly 50 more pages, in 50 days.. average is pretty consistent.

Yep. Over 5 months and 100 pages and Indo still is at the base level of accusing anyone who doesn't agree with him that they're Hamas lovers and anti semites.
Which is why i refuse to engage while the conversation is stuck in the basement still. What is the point.

Do the “Palestinians have human rights, the right to statehood, the right to self determination, the right to resist an illegal occupation of their territories”

Yes.

But it is not Israel that has refused self determination and statehood for Palestine but the Palestinians.

The Palestinians have turned down five offers of a two-state solution since the 30s. Good offers acceptable by centrists on the matter.
Most Palestinians want Israel destroyed. They certainly don’t want a two-state solution. We know what that means.
Now, neither does Israel and who can blame them. A sovereign terrorist state on their border ruled by Hamas intent on repeating October 7 over and over again?
Those who blame the problems of Palestine on Israel ignore the diversion of humanitarian funds into terrorism. They ignore that corruption is so rampant that the leadership in Hamas, Fatah & the PA, are billionaires or millionaires. They steal money from the Palestinian people to their own bank accounts.

Until the people of Palestine depose Hamas and the corrupt leadership of the PA the attempts to destroy Israel will continue. 

^^^

Wow holy mother of jebus wow
Such hate in someone who thinks himself as balanced

“ …. Most Palestinians want Israel destroyed. They certainly don’t want a two-state solution…”.

Now if I accused Jews in such a broad brush manner you couldn’t get on here quickly enough to (rightly) condemn me.

“ … Those who blame the problems of Palestine on Israel ignore the diversion of humanitarian funds into terrorism …” likely to be true but let’s not forget the death by a thousand cuts war wagged on the Palestinians by successive Israeli governments since at least the’67 war never once missing an opportunity to use a crisis to its advantage, let’s also not forget the land theft in the West Bank.

Bonza, let’s also remember this in the current Zionist world wide PR war

https://www.theage.com.au/national/i-m-a-doctor-who-wants-peace-in-gaza-...

GuySmiley wrote:

^^^

Wow holy mother of jebus wow
Such hate in someone who thinks himself as balanced

“ …. Most Palestinians want Israel destroyed. They certainly don’t want a two-state solution…”.

Now if I accused Jews in such a broad brush manner you couldn’t get on here quickly enough to (rightly) condemn me.

“ … Those who blame the problems of Palestine on Israel ignore the diversion of humanitarian funds into terrorism …” likely to be true but let’s not forget the death by a thousand cuts war wagged on the Palestinians by successive Israeli governments since at least the’67 war never once missing an opportunity to use a crisis to its advantage, let’s also not forget the land theft in the West Bank.

Bonza, let’s also remember this in the current Zionist world wide PR war

https://www.theage.com.au/national/i-m-a-doctor-who-wants-peace-in-gaza-...

But it’s true,

“Most Palestinians want Israel destroyed. They certainly don’t want a two-state solution”

GuySmiley wrote:

^^^

Wow holy mother of jebus wow
Such hate in someone who thinks himself as balanced

“ …. Most Palestinians want Israel destroyed. They certainly don’t want a two-state solution…”.

Now if I accused Jews in such a broad brush manner you couldn’t get on here quickly enough to (rightly) condemn me.

“ … Those who blame the problems of Palestine on Israel ignore the diversion of humanitarian funds into terrorism …” likely to be true but let’s not forget the death by a thousand cuts war wagged on the Palestinians by successive Israeli governments since at least the’67 war never once missing an opportunity to use a crisis to its advantage, let’s also not forget the land theft in the West Bank.

Bonza, let’s also remember this in the current Zionist world wide PR war

https://www.theage.com.au/national/i-m-a-doctor-who-wants-peace-in-gaza-...

I never said I was balanced and I’ve never rushed in here to condemn you. Everytime you have questioned me I have responded politely and in good faith guy. So quit the hyperbole.

That statement is based on ME institute polling which has been posted at least twice now. So I don’t make it lightly not with hate but sober analysis.

But since you asked furthermore the kids of Palestine are taught from a a very young age to hate and kill the Jews (at school at least) Jihadism and the desire for martyrdom will remain until this stops. 

“… the kids of Palestine are taught from a a very young age to hate and kill the Jews (at school at least) “

- hmmmmm ;)

https://m.

Geez if the same or similar statements being made on this forum by some against the Palestinians were being made against the Israeli's or Jews, it would be extreme antisemitism.
The hypocrisy is mind blowing.

More unsubstantiated hyperbole