> Trump got a majority because the prior majority political party was literally participating in genocide, which was on display for the entire world to see.
Is the argument here that people vote based on what the prior party was up to, while completely ignoring whether the new party will do less or more of the same action?
Most votes are cast against something, not for something. That's why negative ads work, no matter how annoying and insulting they are.
Most of the Americans I've spoken with who acknowledge voting for Trump said they did so either because they were against abortion or because the were against the great replacement. My sample is small though and may not be significant but there is a similar pattern in my country.
Seeing your posts hours after Trump launched a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is quite the sight.
You’re like the black knight from Monty python.
Edit: I welcome the pushback on this post. The message I meant to convey is that of two evils. Yelling at the losing candidate does nothing for Gaza. It alienates even people who care (but I’m not perfect). I apologize for the divisive nature of my post.
Or you could switch to a different voting system which allows more than two parties, allowing people to make more nuanced choices?
There are even voting systems which are perfectly representative (as a popular vote would be) and ensure all states get a voice (the goal of the electoral college).
Say, a bicameral system.
One chamber allocating each state a fixed number of voices, ensuring each state has a voice,
and a second chamber with mixed-member-proportional voting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT0I-sdoSXU), which allows perfectly proportional majorities in this chamber while giving each district a representative (in the process also fixing gerrymandering).
In fact, it was actually this system, designed by the US, that the allied countries chose for Germany after World War II.
> sounds perfect, how to change to this system? who should people vote for to make it happen?
That's another issue with the US system. If you've got only two choices, and one option is straight up "tear it all down", then the entire rest of the political spectrum has to be represented by the democratic party.
The only candidates in recent years that wanted to improve the situation were Obama, Romney, Bernie and now Walz.
I'd say register democrat, become active on the local level, and vote in primaries.
This is not a response worthy of HN. Calling the parent poster names, saying they support "baby murderers" with no possible justification - please keep this kind of comment off this site.
The Palestinians are in the situation they are in because of their own choices, not because of some Greater Israel plan which the poster seems to think is the reason. The German people and the Japanese people suffered similar privations in WW2 - shouldn’t have attacked Poland and Pearl Harbor then. Choices have consequences. Do you see this rather simple point now?
Once again, your argument aside, your way of speaking is the issue here. If you think you're winning anyone to your arguments in this way, you're wrong.
> And point two is that if you see these facts and decide that you support the Gazans, then you are not holding a different view, you are guilty of being an apologist to Ghengis Khan-level savagery and therefore are deserving of condemnation.
No, your point is wrong. You switched between talking about Hamas to talking about Gazans.
It is entirely consistent to be against Hamas but still support Gazans. In fact, some people claim that supporting Gazans means being against Hamas, because of Hamas's brutal dictatorship over the Gazans.
The Gazans voted for Hamas as their leaders knowing their genocidal policy towards Jews. The October 7 attack was popular among Palestinians including Gazans at first. Less so now. It is fair then to say that the Gazans bear some responsibility for the attack. Also, the IDF are targeting Hamas, not the Gazans as a whole. Additional civilian deaths are caused by the cowardly tactics of Hamas to use human shields. The Gazans knew that Hamas used these tactics when they voted for them. Again, you reap what you sow.
> So you are pushing the idea that Palestine deserves to be genocided because it voted for people who want to genocide Israelis.
I'm not going to speak for the parent poster, but I think the more legitimate Israeli position here isn't that Gaza deserves to be genocided, but it is legitimate to go to war with it to remove its rulers given their invasion of Israel. Israelis in general don't agree that what is happening is a genocide, as opposed to the terrible cost of a legitimate war.
> Does Israel deserve to be genocided because it voted for people who want to genocide Palestinians, or does it only go one way around?
> Why do people pretend the start of history was October 7, 2023?
Why do people keep saying this? No one thinks history started on October 7th. But Israelis did not vote for people who want to genocide Palestinians, and indeed there was no war happening before October 7th, everything since then has been part of the campaign that happened because of October 7th.
>> Why do people pretend the start of history was October 7, 2023?
> Why do people keep saying this? No one thinks history started on October 7th. But Israelis did not vote for people who want to genocide Palestinians,
they did
> and indeed there was no war happening before October 7th,
Haifa Massacre 1937
Jerusalem Massacre 1937
Balad al-Sheikh Massacre 1939
Haifa Massacre 1939
Haifa Massacre 1947
Abbasiya Massacre 1947
Al-Khisas Massacre 1947
Bab al-Amud Massacre 1947
Jerusalem Massacre 1947
Sheikh Bureik Massacre 1947
Jaffa Massacre 1948
Deir Yassin Massacre 1948
Tantura Massacre 1948
Khan Yunis Massacre 1956
Jerusalem Massacre 1967
Bahro Al Baquar 1972
Sabra and Shatila Massacre 1982
Al Aqsa Mosque Massacre 1990
Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre 1994
Jenin Refugee Camp April 2002
Gaza Massacre 2008-09
Gaza Massacre 2012
Gaza Massacre 2014
Gaza Massacre 2018-19
Gaza Massacre 2021
Gaza Massacre 2023
This list is incomplete. You can help by expanding it.
Firstly, this list is completely one-sided. If you actually think you're right, why not write something real? Do you honestly think this is a good representation of reality? It's like writing down a list of Allied attacks in WW2.
Secondly, what do you think this proves in terms of whether there is a war? Again, I can make a similar list of battles in WW2. Does that mean WW2 is still happening? Obviously not.
A bunch of what you wrote is before Israel was even founded. At least one is a (horrendous) terrorist attack carried out by an Israeli, but not by Israel. A bunch of them are from the war that followed Israeli independence, when multiple Arab nations attacked Israel. The biggest country that attacked Israel in that war iirc - Egypt - has had a peace agreement with Israel for 40 years!
You could say there is a war with Hamas, though officially there was a ceasefire following the previous fighting, which you call - for some reason - the "Gaza Massacre 2021").
We've banned this account. If you keep creating accounts to break HN's rules with, it will get your main account(s) banned as well, so please stop doing this.
Even if you believe that Israelis are mass murderers, and even if you are willing to ignore that plenty of other groups have killed far more people, there's zero justification for making this statement about Jews and not Israelis.
You are clearly saying it's acceptable for Israel to respond to the pogrom on their citizens.
Can you clarify whether or not it's also acceptable for Palestine to respond to the pogrom on their citizens? Is this a privilege that every country gets, or just Israel?
And does the amount of acceptable response scale in proportion to the amount of citizens killed in the pogrom?
> Seeing your posts hours after Trump launched a plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza is quite the sight.
Biden provided the bombs and the diplomatic cover that allowed Israel to decimate Gaza's population, permanently damaging entire generations, reducing the most densely populated areas on Earth to smoking rubble, and explicitly supported Netanyahu's ethnic cleansing plans. He basically alley-ooped this scenario to Trump.
> You’re like the black knight from Monty python.
Sheer projection.
Democrats lost because they supported genocide [0], [1]. They tried to court Republican women instead of their own base, trotting out people like Dick fucking Cheney [2] (after removing any mention of stopping torturing people from their platform).
When over 30% of Biden 2020 voters told pollsters they felt so strongly about an arms embargo that it could affect their vote, and Harris responded by saying she would keep sending bombs "no matter what", she lost. The win could have been a landslide, and Dems chose to tell their base to eat shit instead.
> It was damned if you do, damned if you don’t. What about all the voters you lose by dropping support for Israel?
Nonsense. As can be plainly seen in the posted links, far fewer Democrat votes would have been lost by support for an arms embargo.
What would have been lost was the support of many Democrat funders - fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, Zionist billionaires, and a vast swathe of complicit corporate media. As in, the people perverting the party against the interests of their base.
> Democrats were powerless to stop the genocide.
Again, utter nonsense. Democrats voted against ceasefire four times at the UN; and made a mockery of domestic and international law by providing billions in arms to a regime that was likely to commit genocide.
And so it needs to be said: lack of money for Harris' campaign was not the issue. She outspent Trump, ffs.
> Gaza voters weakened them further.
That was a choice! Gaza voters would have strengthened them, if they had simply decided to stop arming a genocidal apartheid regime. That's what the polls I posted showed beyond doubt; and Dem elites knew all this months before the election.
> What would have been lost was the support of many Democrat funders - fossil fuel companies, weapons manufacturers, Zionist billionaires, and a vast swathe of complicit corporate media. As in, the people perverting the party against the interests of their base.
This could have cost many seats in congress.
I acknowledge you might be completely right, but they were never gonna get the campaign and all of D congress to that position in the first place in a high stakes election.
> they were never gonna get the campaign and all of D congress to that position in the first place in a high stakes election.
If true, that would be just one of many reasons why they don't deserve our support.
The Democrats have repeatedly proven to be unable and unwilling to give anything more than token support to the existential crises of our time; be it forever wars, genocide, ethnic cleansing, free speech, surveillance, torture, climate change, housing, healthcare, justice reform, election reform, etc etc.
By your logic above, all that would be justified.
Don't you get tired of being shepherded? Isn't the last 200 years of lesser evil voting [0] wearing kinda thin?
If voters had more than few days memory of latest tiktok trends, they would recall how Trump agreed to make Jerusalem fully Israeli. That was a moment of absolute devastation and losing any real hope for whole Palestine. Maybe it wasn't visible in US, or you guys simply didn't care, but elsewhere it was shocking.
This was IMHO the main reason 7.10. attacks happened as they happened, when they happened. But it requires watching the news continuously, understanding the world and cultures a bit and connecting those (very) few dots. In nation trained hard on short dopamine kicks from junk fun of reality shows and outcries.
This is but 1 of hundreds of threads happening out there, daily. Sure, democrats f*cked up badly with all stuff mentioned all over here, no point saying it wasn't the case. But concept of long term complex consequences and the tenacity to keep that mental model in one's head is what most of his supporters simply lack. Those who have it and still voted for him... not sure what to say there, I guess he aligns with their core values and keeps delivering on spot and beyond.
What goes around, comes around, just that whole world suffers and few well connected aholes profit. I can't foresee a situation where US won't be in worse position in 4 years, if he even benevolently decides to step down, which is unlikely. China is profiting massively from his chaotic actions long term, that's for sure.
Personally, as European, clearly we're not friends anymore. Just as I wasn't buying any US products during his first tenure, my family won't be buying any US products for foreseeable future just like I don't buy puttin's gas.
Except the Israeli/Palestinian conflict started way before the current Gaza event. For years Israel has forced the mass displacement of Palestinian (ask a Lebanese), blockaded Gaza, destroyed many of the civilian infrastructure, continue its colonization of the west bank (and further displacing population without any regard for international laws). The fact that they did not decide to straight up murder the whole population in one go doesn't make this less of a genocide. They have just been committed to it for years.
I haven't followed the conflict closely and I'm not in any way trying to say Israel is blameless.
However your claims here seem very one-sided. For example I've read about how Israel has been trying to provide aid to Gaza but most of the resources have been controlled by Hamas who have been constructing elaborate tunnel systems, militias and weapons rather than improving the lives of civilians.
From my understanding this has culminated into the attack that started the war, and I can understand that Israel can't just sit on their hands while Hamas prepares for another attack.
The civilians of Gaza deserve to be able to live their lives in peace, but I don't see how that can happen if Hamas isn't dealt with.
The requirement for all members of the target group to die in order for it to be called genocide is fallacious and not historically acccurate.
Was it genocide of the Native Americans, since 'they survived'? Was it genocide in Australia when white europeans took the land from the prior caretakers?
The answer: yes of course it was. Genocide doesn't mean total eradication - it means, attempted total eradication. In Gaza today, the lifestyles of the Palestinian peoples have been completely eradicated, and it will be years before they recover.
So what I'm saying is that if Israel had attempted total eradication they would kill more than 2.5% of them.
I also think that if Hamas had the means they would have been happy to totally eradicate Israel, civilians and all, so I can't say I have much sympathy for them. The civilian deaths are tragic but given these numbers I think it's pretty clear that they are collateral damage from fighting Hamas, not a target in themselves.
I agree with this, I don’t think it was the only reason but it’s a big one. When people point out what Trump said or plans to do I want to remind people it’s not like we had a real choice this election. It’s right wing or far right wing.
Both parties are completely beholden to AIPAC it’s disgusting.
You seem unaware of the actual meaning of the word genocide, and I would suggest not using it in that case.
What the US did to the native Americans was a genocide. Siding with a foreign country in a conflict with a terrorist force is not a genocide, and throwing verbal atom bombs into an already maximally heated discussion isn’t helpful.
Eh. Pretty much everyone called what happened in Gaza an attempt at genocide, including many Israeli scholar. The wiki page [1] list some source from the U.N, various NGO, ... Amos Goldberg ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Goldberg ) called it a genocide, and the ICC launched an investigation (ofc, blocked by Israel).
Is Hamas a terrorist group ? Yeah, by many definitions. But if you accept this, you also cannot not see how what Israel did in Gaza, and has been doing for years with Palestinian, is not genocide: Force displacement of vast amount of population, regularly blockading humanitarian aid, mass destruction of civilian infrastructure, mass imprisonment, often with little to no representation, mass killing of civilian (it is estimated, by many source, that roughly 45000 Palestinian died, of which at least ~80% where civilian) ...
This is the textbook definition of genocide. If you accept the Shoah, the Armenian genocide, the genocide of the tutsis, ... You cannot logically not see this as a Palestinian genocide.
As for the U.S involvement, that's honestly not for me to say. I am not a us citizen.
> you also cannot not see how what Israel did in Gaza, and has been doing for years with Palestinian, is not genocide
In what way is "what Israel has done for years" genocide, if we're not including the response to October 7th?
> mass killing of civilian (it is estimated, by many source, that roughly 45000 Palestinian died, of which at least ~80% where civilian) ...
Every civilian death is tragic. But if civilians aren't targeted, but are killed as part of other military actions, then it is the unfortunate and terrible reality of war. Unless you consider every war genocide, this doesn't show that it was a genocide. (I'm not sure your 80% number if anywhere near accurate, btw.)
> If you accept the Shoah, the Armenian genocide, the genocide of the tutsis, ... You cannot logically not see this as a Palestinian genocide.
Let's make clear the difference. In the Shoah (Holocaust), Jews were rounded up, sent to concentration camps, then killed by various means. They were not a hostile armed group, not in a territory that was controlled by militants, or anything like that. They were literally civilians that were rounded up and killed.
None of that applies in Gaza. Civilians are not rounded up and killed. They are killed as terrible, horrible collateral damage while attempting to kill militants. If the militants, who are their current government, were to put down their arms - the war would be over immediately.
Also - since the Holocaust, the Jewish population still hasn't recovered its numbers. The Gazan population has only increased. This isn't proof of anything (it can be an attempted genocide even with a low count of dead), but you're comparing ~30k civilian deaths to 6 million Jewish deaths in the Holocaust.
> Eh. Pretty much everyone called what happened in Gaza an attempt at genocide, including many Israeli scholar.
Many people have called it a genocide. Many people called it a genocide two days into the war, and some have been saying Israel is committing genocide for years, which makes you think it's something they think without Israel's actual actions since October 7th having any relevance to it.
But by no means "pretty much everyone" calls it a Genocide. What determines whether something is a genocide is not a show of hands of a select group of organizations.
> The Arabs of the Western half of the Palestinian mandate refused to accept a state in 1948
A state that was imposed on them. And which state are you even talking about ? If it is the U.N proposition for the partition of Palestine, Israel also never accepted it and disregarded it entirely.
> That is not genocide.
Mass displacement of a population, destroying their civil infrastructure, kill civilian on mass is the definition of genocide.
> Hamas’s constitution explicitly calls for the killing of all Jews in Israel.
And that is why Hamas is a terrorist organization.
> Congratulations on siding with the genocidal maniacs, Jew haters, and murderers. Hamas thanks you.
I never sided with Hamas.
You are just spouting hatred. A sad continuation of this conflict.
The state was not as a fact imposed on the Palestinians. After centuries living under empires, they were offered a state for the first time ever by the UN in 1947 but turned it down. Instead they decided to go to war to destroy Israel and have been trying to do so ever since. That was their choice. It has worked out very badly for them because they keep making the same stupid mistakes driven by Jew hatred.
The current war was started by Hamas and they knew exactly what the outcome would be - thousands of deaths of their own people. They sacrificed their own people to use it as a political tool by which they aim to get the political support of useful idiots like you against Israel. It is a sick policy carried out by sick people. This is not genocide; it is a war, started by Hamas who wanted the results we see.
And what Native American tribes sometimes did to each other was genocide. There were lots of actors in the fight for the American land mass - the US , the British Empire, the French Empire, Mexico, the Japanese were even having a look. So I don’t think it is as simple as saying the US committed genocide of the Native Americans, who were actually many different tribes often warring with each other. Their way of life was bound to largely die out once the modern world arrived.
The stated objective of the Final Solution was to murder literally every Jew in Europe, thus the “Final”.
The stated objective of Hamas, voted into power by the Arabs of Gaza, is to murder literally every Jew in Israel.
I don’t think that anywhere in the Likud manifesto for the democratic elections of the democratic state of Israel it states that genocide of the Gazans is a policy.
Do you see the difference between a democratic state with the rule of law and a gang of self-declared genocidal terrorists? Obviously not.
The current Hamas charter states that they fight Zionism, not for them being jews but for their own stated goal of stealing their land, which they have and are continuing to do. Why are you trying to pretend that Israel have not had far right forces within it for a very long time, they're currently in power. I'm not saying that Hamas is good by saying that Israel is also bad, both are bad, but only one of them came there with the goal to steal the land of the people living there.
Part of Likuds founding charter is this phrase: Between the sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty. Sounds familiar?
Almost all Israeli land was granted by the UN or won in wars started by the Arabs, not stolen. You can criticize Israel for building settlements on the West Bank in contravention of international law. And because Israel is a democratic state with the rule of law, and free speech, many Israelis do express opposition to the building of illegal settlements on the West Bank.
Meanwhile, the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza have chosen people to govern them whose only goal is to destroy Israel and murder all Jews there. These people are possessed by an extreme Islamist ideology which has driven them insane.
The Arabs and Jews of Palestine were in essentially the same position in 1947. Look at them now. The Jews have built a successful modern state, while the Arabs are using all their resources to build tunnels to try to get in to Israel and murder Jews randomly. Clearly, the Arabs of Palestine have made stupid mistakes and should have just accepted the state in 1947.
> I'm not saying that Hamas is good by saying that Israel is also bad, both are bad, but only one of them came there with the goal to steal the land of the people living there.
If you mean Hamas was founded with the goal of stealing the land (by destroying Israel), then yes.
But it's not correct historically to talk about Jews coming to Israel to "steal" the land - the majority before the founding of Israel came as refugees looking for a place they wouldn't be oppressed, and came mostly legally as immigrants, legally buying the land, not "stealing" anything.
The majority immediately after Israel's founding were either a) the remaining European Jews that had been rounded up in concentration camps but hadn't been killed by the Holocaust, and that spent a few years in displaced persons camps with nowhere to go, until the UN collectively voted to give them a tiny patch of land in Israel, or b) Jews ethnically cleansed from the Arab world.
Apparently, it is true that the Likud manifesto of 1977 called for only Israeli sovereignty “from the river to the sea”, but this is already de facto the case as Israel are occupying the West Bank. And they don’t appear to have killed all the Arabs of the West Bank in fact.
Hamas changed their charter in 2017 from a struggle against Jews to a struggle against Zionists for cosmetic reasons, by which they are presumably referring to all Jews in Israel at least, as I stated; and they have not repudiated their old charter which targets Jews not Zionists. And as a matter of fact, Hamas spent several years and used all their resources to carry out the October 7 attach in which they brutally massacred all the Jews, sorry Zionists, they could get their hands on; including deliberately targeting babies, pregnant women and families. This shows what Hamas would do if they had the wherewithal - they would murder all Jews in Israel to the last one. They have shown themselves to be literally genocidal.
Israel is responding to an attack on its people according to, above the standards of even, international law. I don’t see you calling the Ukrainians bad for fighting back against Russia. This stance is pure anti-semitism, though you may not realize or intend it.
