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Author Topic: War in Gaza
Lyrhawn
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quote:
Originally posted by Dogbreath:
quote:
Originally posted by Samprimary:
quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
I'm not sure that's fair. Famine in Africa is a decades-old talked about problem.

The ISIS conflict is weeks old. The Syria conflict has been going on for a few weeks, and unlike Africa, both have direct and indirect importance to our national security. Not exactly part-for-the course.

The syria conflict has been going on for 'a few weeks' .. ?
I think he meant, "years."
Yes thank you.

That's what I meant

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GaalDornick
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quote:
Over 700 people have died in Gaza as of this writing. Muslims have woken up around the world. But is it really because of the numbers?

Bashar al-Assad has killed over 180,000 Syrians, mostly Muslim, in two years -- more than the number killed in Palestine in two decades. Thousands of Muslims in Iraq and Syria have been killed by ISIS in the last two months. Tens of thousands have been killed by the Taliban. Half a million black Muslims were killed by Arab Muslims in Sudan. The list goes on.

But Gaza makes Muslims around the world, both Sunni and Shia, speak up in a way they never do otherwise. Up-to-date death counts and horrific pictures of the mangled corpses of Gazan children flood their social media timelines every day. If it was just about the numbers, wouldn't the other conflicts take precedence? What is it about then?

If I were Assad or ISIS right now, I'd be thanking God I'm not Jewish.

Amazingly, many of the graphic images of dead children attributed to Israeli bombardment that are circulating online are from Syria, based on a BBC report. Many of the pictures you're seeing are of children killed by Assad, who is supported by Iran, which also funds Hezbollah and Hamas. What could be more exploitative of dead children than attributing the pictures of innocents killed by your own supporters to your enemy simply because you weren't paying enough attention when your own were killing your own?

This doesn't, by any means, excuse the recklessness, negligence, and sometimes outright cruelty of Israeli forces. But it clearly points to the likelihood that the Muslim world's opposition to Israel isn't just about the number of dead.

Here is a question for those who grew up in the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries like I did: if Israel withdrew from the occupied territories tomorrow, all in one go -- and went back to the 1967 borders -- and gave the Palestinians East Jerusalem -- do you honestly think Hamas wouldn't find something else to pick a fight about? Do you honestly think that this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they are Jews? Do you recall what you watched and heard on public TV growing up in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt?

Yes, there's an unfair and illegal occupation there, and yes, it's a human rights disaster. But it is also true that much of the other side is deeply driven by anti-Semitism. Anyone who has lived in the Arab/Muslim world for more than a few years knows that. It isn't always a clean, one-or-the-other blame split in these situations like your Chomskys and Greenwalds would have you believe. It's both.

-Ali A Rizvi

I'm curious if anyone has any other explanation other than anti-Semitism of why the Gaza conflict draws so much more attention and criticism than Syria and other mentioned human rights disasters.

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Rakeesh
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Gaal, obviously anti-Semitism is a part of it. Aside from the rather long standing problem the other two major monotheisms have had with Judaism for centuries and almost even millennia, you would expect religious bigotry to eventually take a serious role in a conflict such as that over time anyway. One that was so prolonged.

That said, I can think of a half dozen other significant reasons why Gaza in particular and Israel and Palestine in general draw more ink than Syria here in the US. It's been going on a lot longer. The US has much closer relations with Israel than Syria. The existence of Israel in its modern incarnation is tied to the Holocaust, which is something that rather comes up from time to time in Western consciousness. More people have ever even *heard* of the many locations of conflict among Israel and Palestine. Israel is tied in serious, fundamental ways to Christianity, the largest religion in the United States (though obviously that's a very fragmented group). Israel is also very important to a significantly powerful, very politically active group of voters in the United States-evangelical Christians.

All of those seem like pretty plausible reasons to me why Israel and Palestine would get more ink than Syria. Not that those are good reasons considering the scope and catastrophe of Syria, but we're talking about why people are more interested not whether they should be. Toss in the very convenient use repressive regimes throughout the region have made of Israel as a scapegoat and distraction-and of course you don't need anti-Semitism for repressive, autocratic and otherwise tyrannical regimes to make use of distraction and scapegoating.

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BlackBlade
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quote:
I'm curious if anyone has any other explanation other than anti-Semitism of why the Gaza conflict draws so much more attention and criticism than Syria and other mentioned human rights disasters.
Well, for one thing, it's been going on for over 80 years now. The Assad/Isis stuff is new.
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Mucus
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There are a couple questions brought up by that piece, if we accept for the sake of argument that the Gaza conflict draws a lot more attention and criticism than other similar situations (I'm not sure it does, when you throw uninterested countries into the mix, but whatever) then that still brings up a few questions:

1) Is it that the Syria/Iraq situations aren't publicised enough or is it that the Gaza situation is publicised too much? I'd think the former is actually the case which leads to ...

2) Should the rest of the world, particularly that which isn't Muslim, Jewish, or Christian really pull back on criticism of the Gaza situation simply out of a desire to "balance" the Muslim world which is conspicuously silent elsewhere? I'm going to say no.

3) As a follow-up to 1), you have two situations one that might be publicised too much and one that might be publicised too little. Another way to look at the situation is to see how it would really stack up the heat that other occupying powers would take if they were conspicuously bombing occupied civilians with their military.
Like what if China was bombing Muslims in Xinjiang with airstrikes? What if Great Britain airstriked Irish civilians in northern Ireland back during the troubles? The bad press would be the same, if not much much worse. So Israel's bad press is actually pretty much what should be expected, in fact they're probably getting off lightly.

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Tuukka
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He was talking about how the muslim world reacts to the situation, and reports about it. Not about how USA, or the rest of the world, reports about it.

As for it being an old conflict, news in general have a HEAVY bias to report about new things, instead of things that have been going on for 80 years.

But anyway, the whole point was that why the Muslim world is concentrated on reporting and commenting on Gaza conflict, while often being much more indifferent towards much greater tragedies that concern muslims.

It's a very valid question.

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Mucus
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I answered the broader questions that the piece naturally leads to given that a) there are basically few or no Muslims on Hatrack b) we're not particularly avid consumers of media created for Muslims.
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GaalDornick
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
Gaal, obviously anti-Semitism is a part of it. Aside from the rather long standing problem the other two major monotheisms have had with Judaism for centuries and almost even millennia, you would expect religious bigotry to eventually take a serious role in a conflict such as that over time anyway. One that was so prolonged.

That said, I can think of a half dozen other significant reasons why Gaza in particular and Israel and Palestine in general draw more ink than Syria here in the US. It's been going on a lot longer. The US has much closer relations with Israel than Syria. The existence of Israel in its modern incarnation is tied to the Holocaust, which is something that rather comes up from time to time in Western consciousness. More people have ever even *heard* of the many locations of conflict among Israel and Palestine. Israel is tied in serious, fundamental ways to Christianity, the largest religion in the United States (though obviously that's a very fragmented group). Israel is also very important to a significantly powerful, very politically active group of voters in the United States-evangelical Christians.

All of those seem like pretty plausible reasons to me why Israel and Palestine would get more ink than Syria. Not that those are good reasons considering the scope and catastrophe of Syria, but we're talking about why people are more interested not whether they should be. Toss in the very convenient use repressive regimes throughout the region have made of Israel as a scapegoat and distraction-and of course you don't need anti-Semitism for repressive, autocratic and otherwise tyrannical regimes to make use of distraction and scapegoating.

The reasons listed in your second paragraph seem to deal with supporters of Israel. What about the criticism? Why are there so many non-Muslims with no affiliation to the Palestinians or Israel that are more interested in demonizing Israel than Syria or other human rights violators?

quote:
Well, for one thing, it's been going on for over 80 years now. The Assad/Isis stuff is new.
That seems like an argument for why it should receive less publicity. You won't see a famine in Africa all over the news because everyone already knows that food shortages are a problem there. IMO, people want to talk about what's new.

quote:
Like what if China was bombing Muslims in Xinjiang with airstrikes? What if Great Britain airstriked Irish civilians in northern Ireland back during the troubles? The bad press would be the same, if not much much worse. So Israel's bad press is actually pretty much what should be expected, in fact they're probably getting off lightly.
Are you saying those hypothetical scenarios would be similar to what Israel is doing?
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Mucus
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Yup, examples of occupying powers dealing with the eternal question of how to manage occupied territory while dealing with terrorism.

I tried to pick civilian death tolls that are somewhere in the same ballpark, but its difficult when trying to pick examples that many of us are familiar with. Great Britain was facing death tolls of roughly 200 per year in the 70s, while China is dealing with a civilian death toll of roughly 120 so far this year. It is my understanding that Israel is dealing with a death toll of roughly 70.

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Destineer
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quote:
Originally posted by GaalDornick:
The reasons listed in your second paragraph seem to deal with supporters of Israel. What about the criticism? Why are there so many non-Muslims with no affiliation to the Palestinians or Israel that are more interested in demonizing Israel than Syria or other human rights violators?

I would say a large part of it is that there are significant political forces in the US who support Israel, whereas support for Syria is not really a controversial issue in the US. No one really supports Syria.
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Lyrhawn
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quote:
Originally posted by Destineer:
quote:
Originally posted by GaalDornick:
The reasons listed in your second paragraph seem to deal with supporters of Israel. What about the criticism? Why are there so many non-Muslims with no affiliation to the Palestinians or Israel that are more interested in demonizing Israel than Syria or other human rights violators?

I would say a large part of it is that there are significant political forces in the US who support Israel, whereas support for Syria is not really a controversial issue in the US. No one really supports Syria.
Yeah, I think it's mostly that.

It's kind of a twofold issue really.

1. Americans, anyway, are more involved that most any other nation since we're supporting Israel. If we're going to send the weapons over there that are doing most of the damage and we're going to hand over a few billion dollars then they deserve a heck of a lot of scrutiny in how they're using that stuff. And if we don't like how they're using it, we'd better speak up if we'd like to see it change.

2. Israel is held to a higher standard than Syria, and it's perfectly fair to do so. They're a self-styled land of democracy, western liberal morality and freedom, so they get held to that. Assad, on the other hand, is a brutal dictator waging a civil war. You expect terrible people to do terrible things, so when they do them, it's not that you approve, it's just that you expected it, so the level of surprise and outrage isn't as high. But when someone who proclaims to be better than that does those things, someone you support, it's natural to be angrier about it and to take them to task for it.

"At least I'm better than Syria" is a pretty low bar to hit.

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GaalDornick
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quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
Yup, examples of occupying powers dealing with the eternal question of how to manage occupied territory while dealing with terrorism.

I tried to pick civilian death tolls that are somewhere in the same ballpark, but its difficult when trying to pick examples that many of us are familiar with. Great Britain was facing death tolls of roughly 200 per year in the 70s, while China is dealing with a civilian death toll of roughly 120 so far this year. It is my understanding that Israel is dealing with a death toll of roughly 70.

Neither Great Britain nor China were dealing with terrorist organizations that were committed to the absolute destruction of their country and the death of all their civilians. The fact that Hamas isn't successfully killing more civilians, while trying to, doesn't make it comparable to death tolls by Muslims in Xinjiang or the IRA. Great Britain airstriking Irish civilians in Northern Ireland would not be in self-defense the way Israel striking Gaza is.
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GaalDornick
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quote:
Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
quote:
Originally posted by Destineer:
quote:
Originally posted by GaalDornick:
The reasons listed in your second paragraph seem to deal with supporters of Israel. What about the criticism? Why are there so many non-Muslims with no affiliation to the Palestinians or Israel that are more interested in demonizing Israel than Syria or other human rights violators?

I would say a large part of it is that there are significant political forces in the US who support Israel, whereas support for Syria is not really a controversial issue in the US. No one really supports Syria.
Yeah, I think it's mostly that.

It's kind of a twofold issue really.

1. Americans, anyway, are more involved that most any other nation since we're supporting Israel. If we're going to send the weapons over there that are doing most of the damage and we're going to hand over a few billion dollars then they deserve a heck of a lot of scrutiny in how they're using that stuff. And if we don't like how they're using it, we'd better speak up if we'd like to see it change.

2. Israel is held to a higher standard than Syria, and it's perfectly fair to do so. They're a self-styled land of democracy, western liberal morality and freedom, so they get held to that. Assad, on the other hand, is a brutal dictator waging a civil war. You expect terrible people to do terrible things, so when they do them, it's not that you approve, it's just that you expected it, so the level of surprise and outrage isn't as high. But when someone who proclaims to be better than that does those things, someone you support, it's natural to be angrier about it and to take them to task for it.

"At least I'm better than Syria" is a pretty low bar to hit.

Good points.
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Samprimary
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I would like to repeat, because this is very much so true about all of this and understanding the patterns of attention and priority:

quote:
It's the same as famine in africa: something so unwaveringly par-for-the-course that we don't even consider it news anymore. just background noise we like to tune out.
to note, this exact same phenomenon is going on right now about Ebola, a disease that took multiple decades to kill as many people as malaria will kill in two days.
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BlackBlade
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quote:
Originally posted by Samprimary:
I would like to repeat, because this is very much so true about all of this and understanding the patterns of attention and priority:

quote:
It's the same as famine in africa: something so unwaveringly par-for-the-course that we don't even consider it news anymore. just background noise we like to tune out.
to note, this exact same phenomenon is going on right now about Ebola, a disease that took multiple decades to kill as many people as malaria will kill in two days.
Do what we did and DDT the hell out of the place until the mosquitoes carrying the disease are all wiped out.
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Samprimary
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besides, a few extra arms never hurt nobody's kid
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BlackBlade
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DDT doesn't do that yo. It has been moderately correlated with cancer and diabetes, but nobody has really been able to establish causation. It does seriously affect the ability of birds to lay hard shells, which was probably why really we stopped using it because the bald eagle was going to go extinct and it sure looked bad that industry was killing patriotism's icon.

The WHO still uses DDT for vector control in countries suffering from malaria, but really in many places the only reason malaria is still found there is because DDT was pulled before finishing it's work and mosquitoes subsequently developed resistance.

But it's pretty compelling that for example in Sri Lanka you had over a million cases a year, which then dropped to 18. For a disease that kills as much as malaria does, you'd need some pretty high carcinogenic correlation to justify not using it.

This post has been brought to you by our new partners at Dow Chemical.

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Mucus
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quote:
Originally posted by GaalDornick:
Neither Great Britain nor China were dealing with terrorist organizations that were committed to the absolute destruction of their country and the death of all their civilians.

I'm committed to winning the lottery. You should ship my neighbour a Lamborghini.
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Lyrhawn
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quote:
Originally posted by BlackBlade:
DDT doesn't do that yo. It has been moderately correlated with cancer and diabetes, but nobody has really been able to establish causation. It does seriously affect the ability of birds to lay hard shells, which was probably why really we stopped using it because the bald eagle was going to go extinct and it sure looked bad that industry was killing patriotism's icon.

The WHO still uses DDT for vector control in countries suffering from malaria, but really in many places the only reason malaria is still found there is because DDT was pulled before finishing it's work and mosquitoes subsequently developed resistance.

But it's pretty compelling that for example in Sri Lanka you had over a million cases a year, which then dropped to 18. For a disease that kills as much as malaria does, you'd need some pretty high carcinogenic correlation to justify not using it.

This post has been brought to you by our new partners at Dow Chemical.

My guess is that as chikungunya becomes more prevalent in the American South, most people will get over their distaste for DDT and it'll become as regular as flouride in water.

Either that or they'll do what Brazil is doing and release genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild that only produce male offspring, so they all die off.

There are some nasty diseases headed our way soon, and we haven't cared about them because they've been half a world away. Not so much, now.

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Lyrhawn
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quote:
Originally posted by Samprimary:
I would like to repeat, because this is very much so true about all of this and understanding the patterns of attention and priority:

quote:
It's the same as famine in africa: something so unwaveringly par-for-the-course that we don't even consider it news anymore. just background noise we like to tune out.
to note, this exact same phenomenon is going on right now about Ebola, a disease that took multiple decades to kill as many people as malaria will kill in two days.
Two ways to get rid of Ebolas:

1. Develop a vaccine or cure. We have a preventive measure, I have several friends who've been in Africa for the Peace Corps and they've been taking it for years (despite the possibility of some rather bad side effects). The vaccine is in trials now and shows a lot of promise, after decades of research. Malaria isn't exactly a snap to solve. We've spent billions trying to figure it out.

2. Do what we did in the American South. Build a huge network of drainage ditches and tunnels, re-engineer the entire landscape to drain bogs, swamps and low lying areas to get rid of standing water, then carpet bomb it all with DDT.

It's not like we've been doing nothing, but really, option two simply isn't going to happen. And Option One takes a really long time.

Ebola is terrifying because the mortality rate is considerably higher than malaria's is.

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Samprimary
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I'm confused as to why we would want to drain swamps for Ebola? It's not even worth the effort.

Ebola is really seriously not a threat for any even moderately developed nation. The fear factor aside, anyway.

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BlackBlade
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quote:
Originally posted by Samprimary:
I'm confused as to why we would want to drain swamps for Ebola? It's not even worth the effort.

Ebola is really seriously not a threat for any even moderately developed nation. The fear factor aside, anyway.

Well you can wipe out malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, and a handful of other diseases that even if they weren't killing hundreds of thousands of people still interrupt and waylay people's lives. When you're struggling in poverty, you don't have a week to lay in bed with fever/chills.
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Mucus
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Seems like the kinda thing that would backfire:
quote:
In the United States, filling or draining swamps was an accepted practice. Almost half of U.S. wetlands were destroyed before environmental protections were enacted during the 1970s. Most of the Everglades have been reclaimed as agricultural land, mostly sugar plantations. Draining swampland also created valuable real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.

Federal and state authorities drained much of the wetlands at the delta of the Mississippi River in Louisiana as part of a massive system of river management. When Hurricane Katrina blew in from the Gulf of Mexico in 2005, the spongy swamp that traditionally protected the city of New Orleans from destructive weather patterns was diminished. The city was hit full force with a Category 3 hurricane.

Eradicating swampland also threatens economic activity. Two-thirds of the fish and shellfish that are commercially harvested worldwide are linked with wetlands. From Brazils varzeas, or freshwater swamps surrounding the Amazon River, to saltwater swamps near the Florida Keys, commercially valuable fish species that depend on wetlands are threatened with extinction.

In the early 1970s, governments began enacting laws recognizing the enormous value of swamps and other wetlands. In some parts of the United States, it is now against the law to alter or destroy swamps. Through management plans and stricter laws, people are trying to protect remaining swamps and to re-create them in areas where they have been destroyed.

http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/swamp/?ar_a=1
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Lyrhawn
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quote:
Originally posted by Samprimary:
I'm confused as to why we would want to drain swamps for Ebola? It's not even worth the effort.

Ebola is really seriously not a threat for any even moderately developed nation. The fear factor aside, anyway.

My bad I meant malaria not Ebola for my two scenarios.
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Jake
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I was wondering, since Ebola isn't transmitted by mosquitos.
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GaalDornick
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quote:
For a disease that kills as much as malaria does, you'd need some pretty high carcinogenic correlation to justify not using it.
What disease are you referring to that kills as much as malaria?
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Rakeesh
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quote:
Originally posted by GaalDornick:
quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
Yup, examples of occupying powers dealing with the eternal question of how to manage occupied territory while dealing with terrorism.

I tried to pick civilian death tolls that are somewhere in the same ballpark, but its difficult when trying to pick examples that many of us are familiar with. Great Britain was facing death tolls of roughly 200 per year in the 70s, while China is dealing with a civilian death toll of roughly 120 so far this year. It is my understanding that Israel is dealing with a death toll of roughly 70.

Neither Great Britain nor China were dealing with terrorist organizations that were committed to the absolute destruction of their country and the death of all their civilians. The fact that Hamas isn't successfully killing more civilians, while trying to, doesn't make it comparable to death tolls by Muslims in Xinjiang or the IRA. Great Britain airstriking Irish civilians in Northern Ireland would not be in self-defense the way Israel striking Gaza is.
This seems strange to me. Surely there is *some* upper limit to the number of civilians one can ethically kill in the pursuit of enemy soldiers, in response to deliberate killing of your civilians by those soldiers?
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BlackBlade
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quote:
Originally posted by GaalDornick:
quote:
For a disease that kills as much as malaria does, you'd need some pretty high carcinogenic correlation to justify not using it.
What disease are you referring to that kills as much as malaria?
You're parsing the sentence wrong.

"For a girl who abuses you as much as Jennifer does, you'd need some pretty mind-blowing sex to justify not breaking up with her."

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Geraine
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The country is developed enough that Ebola just isn't the threat that people think it is. Barring some strange mutation in the virus that makes it airborne, any outbreak would be small.
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Lyrhawn
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The media could get people terrified about just about anything.

If they spent a day talking about how you should turn off your taps because you'd be drinking dihydrogen monoxide, people would freak out and buy bottled water.

Though my favorite pop culture example is the episode of Avatar the Last Airbender when Sokka invents Pentapox as a faux plague.

"Pentapox...yeah I've heard of that, didn't your brother have Pentapox?"

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GaalDornick
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quote:
Originally posted by BlackBlade:
quote:
Originally posted by GaalDornick:
quote:
For a disease that kills as much as malaria does, you'd need some pretty high carcinogenic correlation to justify not using it.
What disease are you referring to that kills as much as malaria?
You're parsing the sentence wrong.

"For a girl who abuses you as much as Jennifer does, you'd need some pretty mind-blowing sex to justify not breaking up with her."

Yeah, that seems obvious in retrospect. [Embarrassed]

quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote:
Originally posted by GaalDornick:
quote:
Originally posted by Mucus:
Yup, examples of occupying powers dealing with the eternal question of how to manage occupied territory while dealing with terrorism.

I tried to pick civilian death tolls that are somewhere in the same ballpark, but its difficult when trying to pick examples that many of us are familiar with. Great Britain was facing death tolls of roughly 200 per year in the 70s, while China is dealing with a civilian death toll of roughly 120 so far this year. It is my understanding that Israel is dealing with a death toll of roughly 70.

Neither Great Britain nor China were dealing with terrorist organizations that were committed to the absolute destruction of their country and the death of all their civilians. The fact that Hamas isn't successfully killing more civilians, while trying to, doesn't make it comparable to death tolls by Muslims in Xinjiang or the IRA. Great Britain airstriking Irish civilians in Northern Ireland would not be in self-defense the way Israel striking Gaza is.
This seems strange to me. Surely there is *some* upper limit to the number of civilians one can ethically kill in the pursuit of enemy soldiers, in response to deliberate killing of your civilians by those soldiers?
I didn't mean that there isn't a limit on how many civilians can be ethically killed in defense. I meant that the realistic threat an enemy poses to the survival of your nation should dictate how severe of a reaction is needed to deal with the threat.

Mucus was saying that Israel was getting off lightly in terms of bad press because China or Great Britain would've been more harshly criticized if they airstriked their enemies and I thought this was a poor comparison because neither of those countries faced a threat to their country's survival like Hamas poses.

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Lyrhawn
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I'm not sure if that's really the best argument.

Ignore for a moment that one of Hamas' guiding principles is to destroy Israel and focus on their CAPABILITY.

So a serious question: Is Hamas really a threat to Israel's survival?

My answer is no, they aren't. And given the relatively low impact they've had on Israel during this conflict, I'd argue their response has been wildly disproportionate.

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GaalDornick
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Or maybe Hamas isn't a threat to their survival BECAUSE of Israel's response. You don't think those tunnels were a threat that had to be addressed immediately?
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Lyrhawn
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A threat to their SURVIVAL?

One that involved mass shelling and bombing of Gaza?

No, I don't.

Were they a threat that had to be dealt with immediately? Sure.

But destroying the tunnels involved jackhammers and hand placed bombs. None of that killed civilians.

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