Key points:
- The federal government has announced a plan to make it a criminal offence to perform the Nazi salute in Australia.
- Meanwhile, hundreds of prominent Australians have signed a letter denouncing anti-Semitism and racism.
- Jewish and Islamic groups say there has been a huge rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.
We can probably get behind the idea that Hamas shouldn’t exist.
But the act of trying to root out Hamas cannot involve the mass slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians. No, not even if Hamas is “using human shields”. And not even if those innocent civilians did support Hamas. Is it any surprise that someone might voice support for the one organisation that’s actually doing something to try to fight against the people that have been enacting a genocide against them for decades?
Since October 7th, Israel has killed ten times as many people as Hamas has. This is including human rights workers, journalists, and healthcare professionals. And that’s without even going in to the apartheid conditions Palestinians have been forced to put up with for decades before then, and all the people Israel has killed before then.
This is not a matter of some surgical strike against terrorists. It’s genocide. Genocide being committed by a nation which identifies itself strongly with the one group that you would think, given their history, should be most strongly attuned to how terrible it is to commit genocide. However, it’s important not to conflate the two. While Israel likes to think of itself as representative of all Judaism, it is not. Many Jews rightly speak out against the genocide, and criticism of Israel is not antisemitism.
All I can say - suggest the alternative. How one can remove Hamas without such war?
No. That’s not up to me. I’m not a military strategist. Nor do I have any expertise in anything remotely close to this. One does not need to be a chef to be a food critic.
All I know is, if you can’t conduct your war without doing war crimes and crimes against humanity, stop doing your war. It makes you worse than the people you’re claiming to be against.
Well, it is easy to say - the fighting must stop, but consequences of this decision is easily seen - Hamas will stay in power, blockade of Gaza Strip will continue, there will be more attacks by Hamas in future, Israel will retaliate and Palestinians will continue to live in open prison with periodic bombing. It is intellectual dishonesty to call for war end and say “it is somebody else problem” to avoid what I have described above. If you do not have alternative solution then calling for war to stop does mean you calling for open prison and mass casualties in foreseeable future with no end in sight.
I don’t need to come up with a solution, because it doesn’t matter what the response actually is, only that committing war crimes cannot be an acceptable answer.
If there are war crimes during this war, for sure they should be stopped. But you are advocating stopping the whole war with Hamas. For which you have to suggest alternative, or admit that you are OK with Palestinians to suffer further in open sky prison with periodic bombing as Israel will react on future Hamas attacks. There is no third option.
Mass punishment of civilians is 100% a war crime.
So is using human shield. But only one of these allegations is true. Do you really think if the goal of IDF was to mass-kill civilians, then they would be that ineffective?
And, by the way, you still avoiding acknowledging that you are OK with Palestinians living in open prison with periodic bombing for foreseeable future.
I saw very similar questions being asked back in the day about the IRA.
What are you implying? IRA was hunted by authorities.
And a situation deemed unsolvable and irrevocable, too far gone…ended not in genocide, but the good friday accords.
You are implying that there is some kind of analogy here. But the only similarity I see here that both IRA and Hamas are terrorist organizations. But their goals and operation style and size are very different. I have no hope whatsoever that Hamas would reject their main purpose - to destroy Israel.