Internet Access in Gaza is Collapsing as ISPs Fall Offline (techcrunch.com) 446
As the conflict between Israel and Hamas reaches its third week, internet connectivity in Gaza is getting worse. From a report: On Thursday, internet monitoring firm NetBlocks wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the Palestinian internet service provider NetStream "has collapsed days after the operator notified subscribers that service would end due to a severe shortage of fuel supplies." According to Doug Madory, an expert who for years has worked at various companies that monitor networks across the world, internet connectivity in Gaza is dramatically worsening.
"The evidence of the crippled internet in Gaza is not hard to find. By every metric of internet connectivity, things are in bad shape," Madory, who is now the director of internet analysis at Kentik, told TechCrunch. Madory said that he monitored internet connectivity in Gaza during the 2014 war. At the time, despite some outages, "the ISPs were able to keep their connections to the outside world up using backup power, etc, even if many people were unable to access service due to power outages and infrastructure failures."
"The evidence of the crippled internet in Gaza is not hard to find. By every metric of internet connectivity, things are in bad shape," Madory, who is now the director of internet analysis at Kentik, told TechCrunch. Madory said that he monitored internet connectivity in Gaza during the 2014 war. At the time, despite some outages, "the ISPs were able to keep their connections to the outside world up using backup power, etc, even if many people were unable to access service due to power outages and infrastructure failures."
That's what happens (Score:2, Insightful)
They didn't pick a fight (Score:2, Insightful)
Israel's far right government has consistently supported Hamas over the years while attacking any moderate force in the region. They do this because they know the frequent attacks mean the Israeli people will be in a constant state of fear and prone to electing far right gove
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Pretty sure ISIS didn't have anything to do with 9/11.
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Hamas did. And not with Israel either. But with Israel's far right government
Israel left Gaza some 20 years ago, and the locals voted in HAMAS as their government.
Pretty sure Hamas has been attacking the Israeli citizens, not just the "far right government" - was the music festival where paratrooper terrorists killed 260 attendees really just a cover for a "far right government" gathering?
Gaza has fuel - lots of it, but dropping bombs on Israel is more important to Hamas than letting locals update their Facebook pages.
Please, stop apologizing for Hamas, and by extension the Gaza's t
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If there was an award for the most clueless poster to Slashdot, it would be yours.
Re: They didn't pick a fight (Score:3)
I like you guys. Whenever I'm feeling down, I can always count on your kind to lift my spirits and tell me I'm on the winning team. Since apparently us righties/Jews/whatever are all one big world-straddling colossus, capable of shaping world events, starting wars and revolutions, and lining our pockets in the process.
One thing though. I think I lost my instructions. Could you tell me where I go to collect my cut?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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100% of Gazans are terrorists? What kind of stupidity is that assertion? You've got a Hamas brain too if you think like that.
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I see you took Sophistry 101.
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100% of Gazans did not expel Hamas.
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100% of Gazans don't have the weaponry to expel Hamas.
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100% of gazans consider hamas as resistance fighters against the fascist / aparteid regime of zionist israel
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If this proves to be true, they would be considered associates of terrorists and should brace themselves for the consequences. In my opinion, the absence of internet access should be the least of their worries.
Burning babies alive, raping and parading young girls bodies, killing whole families in a sadist manner, is not an act of war or an act of resistance. This is terrorism, and must/will be squashed hard.
The fun/sad part is that most of the kibboutz that were attacked near the gaza strip were full of peo
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But the "they" in the upthread comment was Hamas, not the strip in general. The people who aren't in agreement with the con
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So Netanyahu told Hamas to assault Israel so he could carry out his plan?
That Mossad sure is a force to recon with that they can even control Hamas!
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No but if he isnt aware of the fact that if you keep shitting on a people and literally stealing their homes for long enough they're inevitably going to do something awful back then he's a hell of a dumbshit.
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Yes, it it is far-fetched. The real world isn't like the movies. Netanyahu isn't a Bond villain with a sophisticated plan to takeover the Middle East.
So you would believe that Israel lets missile components into Gaza so Hamas can fire them into Israel because the Israeli government is trying to build up its military? That is entirely raf fetched.
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So what you are saying is that Israel put a reactionary in the PM's seat who wants to perform some good old fashioned ethnic cleansing and is just looking for an excuse to flip that switch, and Hamas was stupid enough to think that now is the right time to massacre elderly and children, giving him the excuse in the form of the worst terrorist attack on Israel in decades?
It's a shitty situation that may end up turning into a region-wide war before it's done, but Israel absolutely is not going to let by-gone'
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So what you are saying is that Israel put a reactionary in the PM's seat who wants to perform some good old fashioned ethnic cleansing and is just looking for an excuse to flip that switch
This is an accurate assessment of Netanyahu, a man with a record of warcrimes and terrorist behavior going back to the late 60s.
and Hamas was stupid enough to think that now is the right time to massacre elderly and children
Point of order: Hamas (a) saw an opportunity and (b) according to all analysis, launched th
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Re:That's what happens (Score:5, Insightful)
> Imagine if Englishmen came and started kicking people from the 13 colonies off their land, out of their houses, putting them in a walled off concentration camp 25x5 miles large
That's pretty much what happened, except not to colonist minutemen, but to native americans (both North and South). And the world is proud of it.
Same as the world will be proud of the end of the existence of Gaza. Its a terrible thing to happen, has been a long time coming, but as you said, the firepower has been set up for 70 years.
There is also another issue at hand: there are peoples that literally nobody wants to accept and live with. Gypsies, Rohingas, and Palestinians (maybe others). And there are reasons for that.
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The way I read history is that Jews started to purchase land (from the British, I think) there at the beginning of the 20th century, pretty much for the same reasons Palestinians want to be there: its their "Holy land" and maybe a desire to restore the Kingdom of Israel. (keeping in mind that Judaism is about 2000 years older than Islam)
After WW2, Israel itself was created as compensation for the shoah.
Colonies are a mess. When religion gets involved, it gets even worse...
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Except, that Jews are the "natives" there and Israel was seen as a beacon of decolonization.
Palestinians came into existence in the 60s, they didn't exist before that, Palestine was a derogatory term the Romans gave the region to eradicate the memory of claims to a Kingdom of Israel. There were some (failed) attempts to create an anti-Israel movement by Islamic political and religious leaders throughout the early 20th century but only came to fruition after a huge injection of supplies and cash from the Sov
Re:That's what happens (Score:5, Informative)
Except that those Palestinians (i.e. Arab Muslims from the Palestine Mandate territory) who chose to stay in the new christened Israeli territory/country, who became Israeli citizens, are elected to the Israeli legislature, join the Israeli armed forces, are appointed to judgeships in Israel, vote in Israeli elections, etc.
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An interesting point. I queried both Claude and ChatGPT AI chatbots as to why the US supports Israel. I restricted answers to science, not speculation.
Including weapon sales, warfare support in a strategic area, and a proxy for shipping more weapon sales to other parts of the area, they also made a vague reference to, "protecting American interests."
In a follow-up, I asked, "Precisely what interests?" The answer was "oil."
Confused, I asked if Israel had oil. They said no, but surrounding countries did.
Endless Cycle has to Stop but How? (Score:3)
But, anyone not also thinking the way the Israelis treated the Palestinians like literal trash to be buried or shipped off their land is also despicable.
The problem is that the Israelis will tell you that they have to do that to protect themselves and you complete a whole vicious cycle of violence where one side harbours and supports terrorists that commit atrocities against the other side which then retaliates with overwhelming force killing terrorists and the innocents they use as human shields which causes outrage amongst the general population leading to more terrorist recruits and the whole cycle repeats again and again and again.
The question we sh
Re: That's what happens (Score:3)
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Hamas has made it super clear. The only acceptable solution is "from the River to the Sea".
Anyone who doesn't know what that means has no business discussing Middle East anything.
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Except that various Palestinian organizations have held East Jerusalem and continue to hold West Bank and Gaza...
What you're saying is that you agree with terrorist governments ethnically cleansing the Jews (look at the charter of every Palestine organization since their inception), because you feel any resistance to (civilized) Western government is good.
Re:That's what happens (Score:4, Interesting)
The context of when this really started is fully correct, before 1917 the land didn't belong to either group it was under Ottoman control and the Ottomans lost the territory because they lost a war. By all measures the land was Britain's.
We can argue about the moral right of owning land via conquest but pretty much the borders of every nation on earth are the way they are because it was won via violent conflict. I know the land I live on is only that way because of war and the same is true probably for most people reading this. It's neither right or wrong but it's how things just work. All land was stolen at some point. We can acknowledge that is a fact and also that that's just how history and politics works. Most people in Europe live on land that changed hands dozens of time over hundreds of years. History is useful as analysis of today but we cannot use it to define what should happen today.
We can walk back the historical land argument to the point of absurdity but that gets us nowhere in reality. Israel exists, it's going to exist and that's simply not going to change. That doesn't justify their actions towards the Palestinians but at the same time anyone who's idea of peace involves Israel not existing is moving the needle nowhere but backwards.
That's awful! (Score:2)
Anyway...
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Stick around long enough and you'll snap to the realization that /. is not the author of TFA.
Taking a side but not the one most folks expect (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm informed enough to understand that this is not between the people of Gaza/West Bank/etc. versus the people of Israel.
It's between the evil, evil, evil leaders of both Hamas and the government of Israel on one hand, versus the PEOPLE living under both of them.
And understanding that this is the fundamental nature of this and most other conflicts, I take the side, which I am willing to defend with my own life as well as the lives of the wicked if necessary, that INNOCENT CIVILIANS MUST NOT BE HARMED, and oppose the side of those who would harm them regardless of the reason.
When more people start to take this side, they will be able to save countless precious lives that otherwise would be lost.
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Both sides are not going to change their points of view and the revanchist fighting will continue until one side has no one left. It's a war that has never ended. Would that it were amenable to some kind of a compromise solution (like the IRA thing in Ireland) but neither side will compromise meaningfully so it's a fight to the death. I can't even think of a meaningful compromise.
Let it not be the death of the rest of us.
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Ahistorical, but you be you.
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I'm informed enough to understand that this is not between the people of Gaza/West Bank/etc. versus the people of Israel.
It's between the evil, evil, evil leaders of both Hamas and the government of Israel on one hand,
They're the same picture [theguardian.com]. (In March 2019, Netanyahu told his Likud colleagues: "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas ... This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.")
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What you're describing isn't a "side", it's a moral viewpoint. The "sides" in any conflict are the parties fighting, so here there are only two. If you actually took up arms to save civilians, then there would be another "side", fighting both of the others. You'd be shooting down Israeli jets and going house to house rooting out Hamas, effectively making you the worst "side" of the three, because now you're doing the evil that BOTH sides are doing.
Your idea is only have a moral concept, one that sounds fine
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War is always the old sending the young off to die; but that dynamic is particularly strong in Gaza. I'm given to understand the demographics are such that since Hamas was voted in, something like half the current population was born. Factor in the number who were too young to vote, the fact that they were born in to an indoctrination/prison camp where Hamas seized power and hasn't held an election since. Now go back and factor in that a bunch of puppet masters in Qatar are pulling the strings on Hamas,
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Re:Taking a side but not the one most folks expect (Score:5, Insightful)
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This comment wins the Internet today.
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American citizens enjoy the right to vote, but they can't control the politicians after they are in office.
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Russia/Ukraine is pretty cut and dry. What are you confused about?
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Are Hamas progressive? Is Netanyahu progressive? Is Putin? What the fuck are you talking about?
Re:Taking a side but not the one most folks expect (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you talking about the same conservatives who for years have suggested that we nuke the middle east until its residents glow, then shoot them in the dark?
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between the russia/ukraine conflict, and now israel/gaza; progressives have shown themselves to be far more deranged and blood thirsty than conservatives. All that moral grandstanding.. really?
Wow, spotted the idiot ultra partisan.
If you think supporting Ukraine's democracy versus foreign aggression is deranged that says a lot about you. If you think recognizing that Israel has not only kept the Palestinian people in thrall for over a half century with no serious attempts being made at finding a solution to this issue for the last half of that all while bulldozing their homes and annexing the land (to name only a few of Israel's misdeeds in all this) they live on is deranged then that says a lot
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sorry wrote Vietnam - meant to say Korea, but hell Vietnam - that was LBJ! another one!
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Re:Taking a side but not the one most folks expect (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, do you realize that you think just like Hamas. In fact you have clearly have a Hamas brain but happen to be born elsewhere. At least some Gaza residents have the excuse that they only received propaganda all their lives .. but what's your excuse for wanting civilian deaths?
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"Arabs are like drugged cockroaches in a bottle,” former Israeli army Chief-of-Staff Gen. Rafael Eitan in 1983, speaking at an Israeli parliament’s committee. https://consortiumnews.com/202... [consortiumnews.com]
"Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948,” Ariel Kallner, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. https://consortiumnews.com/202... [consortiumnews.com]
"We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly...t
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So, your rebuttal is a rambling incoherent rage regarding the commenter.
Name that fallacy.
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On the one side, you have actual terrorist Nazis.
Gotcha, an entire people are evil and so deserve bad things to be done to them.
Who's famous for saying that again? Oh right, Nazis.
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Hating Nazi's didn't require being born in Germany. Genocide is genocide, and when you cut of water to 2.3 million people, you lose the moral high ground.
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Amen, brother. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
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How is cutting off water to 2.3 million people not worse than the Hamas attack? And food. And fuel. Go after Hamas, sure, but must it be so destructive to everyone else in Gaza?
Sucks to be an innocent (Score:2)
Hamas did what they always do, something horrific to provoke a response so they can complain about Israeli atrocities. But what country would ignore such a massive attack that killed so many?
If they'd taken my family hostage or killed them, I'd be calling for flattening the whole strip, men women, and children alike (if they decided not to flee). "Us vs them" is really dumb up, right up until the killing starts at which point it becomes mandatory. That's why it's so easy to escalate and so difficult to d
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That's the point, both sides suck. Hence, the overheated propaganda. No one who was actually in the right would have to argue this hard.
One thing i'm sure of is that I don't want myself and my family snuffed out because of these assholes in the Middle East and their endless war on each other. The US is going to wise up sooner or later, hopefully before we end up getting nuked over this. Which is why the neocons are pushing this so hard now, they know they won't have another chance to 'settle' the whole
"ISPs Fall Offline" (Score:4)
Fall offline? It didn't happen spontaneously. An accurate headline would say something like "as Israel bombs Gaza flat". Passive voice is always a sign of intended deception.
Israel bombed so much (Score:4, Insightful)
Part of me worries that's the point. Israel demanded those people flee in the face of a ground assault. I can't see any reason to do what they did except for an occupation. It looks like what Russia is doing in Ukraine honestly. I mentioned this elsewhere but the Israeli people aren't terribly interested in the land, it's their far right government that wants it.
I suspect this was a last ditch effort to take the land before public sentiment changed so much that it wasn't practical anymore. We know that the Israeli people have been trying to rid themselves of their far right government, so much so that Netanyahu tried to seize their Supreme Court. And we know he was thwarted by protests.
As right wing governments & organizations lose power to changing times and a better educated population I think we'll see more and more insane things from them. Both from organizations like Hamas (who started this mess with a large attack) and from the Israeli government (who've been propping up Hamas for years).
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If the tunnel network is anywhere near as expansive as they claim, then between airstrikes to damage key nodes and the underground fighting that's going to come, there may be nowhere safe and stable on the surface.
Since when do they care (Score:3)
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If you look at the aerial maps of some of the bombing the devastation is pretty appalling. Looking at many of them it looks pretty clear that Israel's claims that they are only targeting Hamas arent accurate as they shouldnt need to destroy entire neighborhoods to do so. The Israelis are clearly out to hurt the Palestinians in Gaza as a whole for the actions of Hamas and given the death counts so far to a degree far greater than Hamas hurt them.
Nobody said anything about the Jews (Score:3)
And I don't think this counts as shooting back. The shooting has already stopped. This is just bloodlust. The same thing Americans did when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Again I think the people of Israel know that but once you have a right wing extremist government it's like herpes. It's nearly impossible to get ri
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Anne Frank at least got her diary published. (Score:5, Insightful)
Every dead Palestinian kid just gets a "fuck them, they elected terrorists" and "I'd sooner weep for the Hitler youth than palestinians" in the Slashdot comment section. The bombs just keep coming until the death count can never be accurately estimated.
Can't wait for someone to express outrage that one dead Jewish girl who didn't deserve to die is getting compared to an unknown amount of Palestinians of the same age. Take a break from playing PR useful idiot for those killing civilians because you hate those playing PR useful idiots for the other side killing civilians.
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How do you think Isreal should have responded?
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You do realize the Palestinians/Hamas are still sending bombs into Israel, right?
Hamas uses families as human shields, that doesn't mean Israel can't take out the military targets in Gaza.
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Such moral equivalence bullshit.
If Hamas never attacked, there would be no fight. Remember who STARTED this, and who started it by deciding in 1947 a 2-state solution WASN'T preferable to attempted genocide.
If Hamas stopped fucking killing people, there would be peace.
If the IDF stopped fighting, all of Israel would be dead. *It's in Hamas' CHARTER.*
!War (Score:2)
Israel population growth (Score:2)
Come on Israel, the rest of the developed world is at replacement level fertility of 2 or below.
Re:Israel population growth (Score:4, Insightful)
The Palestinians say the exact same thing.
The say the exact same thing because the Palestinian territories is where they live and they are watching where they live get slowly taken from them by Israel. That is an absolutely garbage false equivalency you attempted there.
When you oppress and make powerless a people for over half a century all while literally taking their homes from them you shouldnt be surprised if the worst of them lash out and does something horrible. Israel planted these seeds and has been tending this garden for decades and now they act surprised when exactly what they've planted has bloomed? I feel horrible for the people Hamas killed, hurt, or kidnapped but Israelis have absolutely had a hand in creating what happened.
the genocide (Score:2)
will not be streamed on the web...
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Hamas won 2006 parliamentary elections elections and in 2007 violently (as in, killed 160+ officials) seized control of the Gaza Strip from the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority.
Turns out when your leaders start by killing their competition, they might not have your best interests at heart. Which is why a lot of Hamas leaders are cowardly hiding far away from Gaza, in Qatar for instance, telling others that it's allright to die for "the cause". Duh.
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This is why the US has checks and balances.
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In theory yes, but without term limits for Congress or the Supreme Court, checks and balances are hard to really maintain over time. Balance, once shifted, is hard to shift the other direction - or even back to center.
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It's also very reasonable to make the claim his actions exacerbated this situation
- He tossed out the Iranian nuclear deal which was the most progress we had made with Iran in decades thus eliminating any leverage the US would have had moving forward to soften relations and get future concessions from. It just further isolated them and let them associate with radicals. With economic leverage the US and other nations would have had means to say "hey, maybe stop supporting Hezbollah". This was probably the
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And was the first president who didn't do a goddam thing except be America's Hamas and Israel.
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Trump lovers, as bad as they are, are still better than the Palestinians.
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The only thing more horrific and scary than the Hamas/Israeli attacks is January 6th. May we never forget the true victims in all of this chaos -- the congress members who were interrupted by protestors.
Never Forget.
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100% of Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas. In fact even a majority are fine with a two state solution according to surveys.
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If what you said were true, they would be overthrowing Hamas, not intentionally acting as human shields.
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In fact, recent polls state 70% is in favor of Intifada (terrorist action) over a two-state solution.
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You're falling into the bigoted trap of conflating the beliefs of an extreme faction of Judaism with both Israel and and Jews in general (the majority of which don't live in Israel and have never been there).
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Yes, the Arabs who continue to vote against Israeli expansion into Palestinian territories but whose votes are drowned out by the Zionists and their openly stated entitlement to the land the Palestinians live on.
Yes, right next to that handful Arabs.
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Gazan Palestinians ARE Hamas. They voted for Hamas. They support Hamas. There is no serious distinction. They choose to stand as human shields. OK. Good choices.
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Dude you're basically exactly like a Hamas or Nazi person .. once you lose your compassion for non-combatants, kids, civilians you're no different just that you received different propaganda. Once you start saying shit like a certain population needs annihilation, maybe you should consider whether you've become as bad or worse than the people you supposedly despise.
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Dude you think exactly like a Nazi. I care about all civilians and children but you call ME a Nazi? What philosophy of mine mirrors Nazism? You are the adherent of the Hamas and Nazi philosophy of dehumanizing your perceived enemy population’s children. Dumbass. You are so fucking annoyed by Hamas that you justify all kinds of actions you perceive as a way of hurting them. Knowingly killing a child is always wrong, in spite of what you fear they might grow up to be. If they were hiding behind your own