No I wasn’t saying you’re like Hamas. I’m saying you’re like the KKK LOL.

Pay attention!

I’m not talking about an organization, I’m talking about actual leadership. There’s a difference. There’s no Martin Luthor King for the Free Palestine movement, there isn’t anyone that can call out the bad actors who are manipulating the movement for their own ends.

The BLM movement as you mentioned got associated with a shady organization. There wasn’t a respected leader that can say “we have nothing to do with that shady organization” so it was kinda convincing to some. But since there were enough existing leaders from the Civil Rights era and politicians to explain it, the message got across well enough to many people.

The Free Palestine movement doesn’t have anyone that can do that. There was no one within the movement brave enough to denouce Hamas the day after October 7, so the movement is associated with Hamas. Which means it’s associated with the genocidal acts of Hamas. So the constant screams about genocide by the movement sound hypocritical to any bystanders. There were a few politicians like AOC that had sympathy for the movement that were harrassed for failing to pass the purity tests of the worst people in the movement. The Free Palestine movement is unable to form alliances with anyone. It’s carcinogenic to mainstream politics because no one can trust those within the movement to not say something overtly antisemitic. And those fears are confirmed when people in the movement talk endlessly about it being the Jews preventing them speaking at an event.

It’s gotten to the point where I don’t think it’s possible for there to be a leader of this movement now. It’s not possible to pass the purity tests of the radicals that want to be more radical than everyone else.

The game of one-upmanship has made the Free Palestine movement is completely out of touch with the rest of the world. There’s protests at syngogues, harrassment campaigns against holocaust museums and somehow y’all believe the rationalizations about these actions not being antisemitic. Nobody outside your little group believes those rationalizations.

You’re just a hate group to the people that don’t frequent your online forums.

The problem with activist groups that spring up online is there’s no leadership to keep it focused on it’s goals.

There’s a one-upmanship that happens where everyone is competing to get attention for themselves regardless of whether it hurts their movement. One person hates Netanyahu (understandable) the next hates the soldiers participating in the war and that gets more attention. The next hates anyone that has ever been in the IDF, gets the attention, so the next hates everyone in Israel. On and on it goes until we start seeing people hate any business that has ever had any association with Israel, and any political group with any association. Eventually gets so that only way to get attention is to express hatred of all Jews. Just have to use the word Zionist (no different to how white supremacist types use Globalist) so you can avoid association with the Nazis.

And what was this movement originally about? Helping Palestinians? How does deplorable behaviour help Palestinians? It doesn’t. But it get attention, it gets internet clout which can be monetized.

The Free Palestine Movement is no longer a movement that’s helping Palestinians in any way. It’s just a hate group full of attention whores.

The KKK claims the Jews are doing a white genocide. Are you a genocide denier if you don’t believe the claims of the KKK?

YF-W36-2U

Though sometimes like to be more specific and say something like “hey can you grab the blue YF-W36-2U for me?”

Are e-bikes and scooters not legal? Those have electric motors that are likely more powerful than that.

Seems to me a stern “go home, you knucklehead” would be the appropriate response.

For Israel every male in Gaza is a Hamas fighter which is so inherently wrong.

That is not true. You’re being shown video of a guy that’s dressed like a civilian being killed by a drone and told that’s not Hamas because they look like a civilian. But Hamas doesn’t wear uniforms. They all dress like civilians. So is that guy a civilian or Hamas? Depends on who you believe.

And that’s the horrible nature of Hamas. You may think that a military having their soldiers wear uniforms and clearly mark their vehicles as military is stupid because it makes them obvious targets. But we do this so in a war it’s easy to distinguish between military and civilians. This results in there being less civilian casualties. You may think that Hamas is being “smart” by dressing like civilians and hiding among the civilian population, but really it just results in higher civilian casualties. We respect soldiers for putting on a uniform because that’s them taking on additional risk to make civilians safer. Hamas doesn’t do this because why would they? More civilian casualties brings more sympathy for them, and more money being sent to them.

And international law agrees with this. The reason why captured Hamas are treated as criminals and not prisoners of war is because that’s what international law considers them to be. If they wore uniforms they would be POWs, but since they don’t they are criminals. Of course if they wore uniforms the war would be over fairly quickly and there would be much fewer casualties. But this is why international law is the way it is. To avoid long drawn out wars with combatants that don’t wear uniforms resulting in a high number of cvilian casualties.

Hamas is a criminal organization, and has been declared a terrorist group by most sensible countries for good reason.

And if we have a bit more critical thinking, even if he was a legitimate fighter, why didn’t they kill him when he was alone.

That’s not how wars work. It is expected for a military to keep their own civilians safe by building their bases apart from civilians (not under hospitals and schools) and wearing uniforms. The onus isn’t on your enemy to keep your civilian population safe, the onus is on your military to keep you safe. Hamas is doing the exact opposite of keeping Palestinian civilians safe, they’re using the tactic of purposefully putting their civilian population at risk and for some reason you think it’s fine for them to do this. It is not illegal in war to hit a target because your enemy insists on using civilians to protect themselves. Hamas is using cowardly tactics, and telling you this is a good thing to do and you’re believing them.

Actual journalists won’t say someone is a murderer even if there’s a video of the person shooting a guy pulling out their ID and showing it to the camera and say “my name is ___ and I murdered this person”.

When the person is charged then they will be termed “alleged murderer”. Before there’s charges they’re termed something like “shooter” not murderer. Only once someone is convicted of the crime will they be called “murderer”.

Genocide is a much greater crime than murder. It’s not responsible journalism to make accusations like this. If a body like the ICJ convicted Israel’s leadership on charges, or maybe id the country the media organization is based in made a declaration, then a journalist will start using the word genocide.

“Alternative media” have no journalistic standards and will say such things to lead their audiences to conclusions. If you’re reading articles that are telling you how to think about a story, it’s not actually journalism. Real journalism is about telling people what’s happening, not telling people how they’re supposed to think about, and definitely not about making accusations in an effort support activist causes.

I’m not Israeli nor Jewish, but I constantly get labelled a “zionist” anyway because I don’t fall in line with the crazy bullshit conspiracies promoted on this site. You’ve come up with ways of labeling people so you can make them “the other” and acceptable to hate. That’s the tactic of a hate group.

The tactic of making it acceptable to hate a subset of Jews (while changing the terminology) has been used in past, particularly by leftists. Read up on anti-cosmopolitan campaigns in the Soviet Union. They also use the term anti-zionism back then too, because the Soviets didn’t want to sound like the Nazis.

But whatever terminology gets used, when you have hateful intent in your movement, you’re in a hate movement. You go around saying the Jews/Globalists/Israel/Zionists/Cosmopolitans are controlling world governments and the media, it’s all the same thing.

So… only Hamas tells the truth and everyone else in the world is lying?

Yeah, someone here is being suckered…

No, according to the Geneva Conventions only armed combatants are legitimate targets.

Show me where in the Geneva convention it says this. Go on, find this in the rules of war where it says that. I’ll wait.

You know just making shit up doesn’t further your cause, it just makes people distrust you.

If your ideas can’t survive any kind of opposition, it might be because you’re wrong.

Even if one takes Israel’s allegations at face value — which I absolutely do not, given Israel’s track record — and entertains the idea that in 2013, at the age of 17, al-Sharif joined Hamas in some form, what are we to make of that choice? Hamas has been the governing authority of Gaza since 2006.

So… maybe he was Hamas, what’s the big deal?

Yeah if the guy was Hamas, he’s a valid target.

So there was a lot of outrage over his death by news organizations around the world last week. Israel presented their evidence, and then… silence. That indicates news organizations consider Israel’s evidence to be at least credible.

And then this opinion column comes out and this guy is saying “He’s not Hamas… and even if he was, it’s ok for him to be Hamas.” It smacks of the Trumpian “I didn’t do that, and if I did, it’s perfectly fine” style of logic.

The silence of news organizations (other than Al Jazeera and alt media trash) on this and then this opinion piece making excuses about why it’s perfectly fine for Anas al-Sharif to be a member of Hamas… it kinda seems like he actually was a member of Hamas.

The whole genocide narrative started with a NY Times story about Israel bombing a hospital. Turned out the story wasn’t true, and they retracted it.

It’s actually a bit of a problem going the opposite way than you suggest. People in news organizations can be emotional and publish anti-Israel stories without proper confirmation because they’re sympathetic to Palestinians. And the stories you’re seeing on Hamas propaganda feeds that don’t get published isn’t because of some Jewish conspiracy, it’s because even emotional journalists can’t justify publishing raw propaganda with zero confirmation.

So… straight up Hamas propaganda?

It may be shocking for you to learn this, but most people don’t want to be complicit in distributing propaganda from a terrorist organization whose goal is to promote violence. If someone gets “radicalized” by this propaganda and does something violent they may be held liable.

Media sources generally don’t believe what a terrorist organization says at face value. They work to confirm the reports and if they can’t there’s a high probability that a group that celebrates massacring people is lying.

Understand that sometimes terrorist groups that are willing to kill people to further their cause are also capable of lying to further their cause. It takes a lot of time and effort to decipher which of the things Hamas is saying are lies and which are the truth. Responsible media organizations do that, irresponsible click-baity scammy organizations don’t. So sometimes you’ll see things reported by “alternative media” before it’s reported by mainstream media (after it’s confirmed) and sometimes the things reported by “alternative media” is never reported by mainstream media because it can’t be confirmed and is likely not true.

Is it censorship when someone is just being careful not to spread lies?

It would probably be fine if there was someone competent in Whitehouse to manage the fallout.

But since there isn’t, you are very likely correct.

Yeah I’m getting real dot com bubble vibes from all of this.

Only because after 15 years the AIs will have finished exterminating the human race.

The Taliban didn’t have a military that could stop the US either. How did that work out again?

The US could invade any country on Earth easily. Put up a big “Mission Accomplished” banner and all that.

The occupation that follows an invasion? That’s something the US isn’t all that good at. The US couldn’t hold Afghanistan. But with Afghanistan Americans could run home with their tail between their legs.

What your plan for withdrawing from a war on the North American continent?