So, I hate to be this guy for Israel. But there are legal ways for this to have happened. I know the first picture in all of our heads is them running over prisoners. But it is a valid tactic to collapse your enemies trenches or building on top of them. The US has been doing that since at least Vietnam. Armored bulldozers are, of course, uniquely pretty good at this tactic. Although it is usually a tank with a bulldozer blade attached to the front.
Rachel Corrie was a civilian.
How can Isreal use TOTAL WAR while claiming HAMAS using hostages is bad ?
Yeah, I suppose it was traumatic, bombing food relief convoys and hospitals. You could have avoided a lot of that PTSD by refusing to follow illegal orders.
Also, get farked, CNN.
My interpretation of this is that some mid-level staffers at CNN pushed the story knowing exactly what was in it. Their bosses wouldn’t let them do obvious things, so they got a little subtle.
Some have labelled Israel as a rogue nation, but their actions are explicitly and implicitly condoned through other nation’s support and silence.
I don’t think that’s really the case though? I’m pretty sure most nations condemned Israel except for USA, but USA blocked all attempts from anyone to do anything. And when USA says that commiting genocide with their weapons is on the table, I doubt any country wishes to find out what would happen should any concrete action against Israel be taken. It’s a big part of the reason why everyone calls USA complicit in genocide of Palestinians.
Didn’t the US use to invade countries for much, much less of a reason than that? Sheesh.
These days I’m finding myself agreeing with the Iranian government more and more often because of Israel’s crap. I don’t like agreeing with the Iranian government.
I find myself asking “How did I fall for this? How did this seem normal my whole life until now?”
We didn’t hear the whole story during the Holocaust. Now we’re getting live videos and firsthand accounts of steam rolling crowds.
What the fuck is wrong with a person to be OK with this at all.
Mis/under -education (propaganda), lies through omission. Once the realization occurs, it’s a choice to live in denial and ignore it.
We didn’t hear the whole story during the Holocaust.
come again?
“We didn’t hear the whole story during the Holocaust.” (emphasis mine).
It seems meant in the sense of back then people weren’t hearing about what was going on in near real time, and only afterwards was the full dimensions of the horror discovered.
Mind you, I don’t think we are hearing the whole story of this Holocaust in near real time either: it’s not for nothing that Israel has blown up the Hospitals (were the dead were counted), has murdered over 1000 journalists and is blocking them and aid organisations from entering Gaza - all of which stops people outside from discovering the full scope of what the Israelis are doing in Gaza.
We are hearing enough to know its a Genocide, but the full dimension of the thing (possibly with it, in scope and in methods used, already being or well on its way to be a new Holocaust - I mean, just look at how this piece from CNN unwittingly reveals how they’re sistematically using buldozers to turn the appartment buildings they blew up into in situ mass graves for the victims, dead or even still alive) will only be discovered later if at all.
Just a bit of history, in WWII the Allies didn’t know for certain that the Holocaust had occurred. Remember that it was the 1940s, information could travel quickly but only so much. It wasn’t as easy for them back then to pickup the metaphorical ‘signal’ of the Holocaust happening to the ‘noise’ the rest of the war was making. So while there were rumors of mass executions of Jewish people as early as the summer of 1941, it’s often said that the Allies didn’t know about the Holocaust until winter 1945. Now when the Allies went from ignorant, to suspicious, to all but certain but with doubts and finally to certain without a doubt has been debated for decades and will probably be debated until the sun expands and swallows the earth whole. There was definitely a lot of hateful rhetoric being spouted about Jewish people in the 1930s that maybe should have been stopped before it nearly took over Europe, but looking back at history we have the advantage of hindsight.
I’m hoping they mean that we were using slower forms of communication without immediate evidence and we still stepped in to help…
But I’d rather them say that.
Aceticon and InputZero both did a good job elaborating.
Nobody of the normal populace knew. Do you really think the jews would get on those trains without putting up a real fight? Bringing their belongings, jewellery in suitcases to Dachau, Auschwitz?
Does that sound like actions of someone who knew what was going to happen?
Yes, a lot of people knew what was going on. A lot of people, more people, didn’t know shit. The problem was not that. The problem was that they didn’t care.
You might well be right but I find it troublesome at best.
I mean, the gestapo simply couldn’t have rounded up that many Jewish people without huge help from the local population, as the area they had to cover with such small numbers made that impossible.
People knew that no one came back from the camps people were sent to or were even heard of again.
People did put up real fights where they could. The problem was the collective punishment the nazis used really curtailed much of this. Also, people don’t ever think they’re going to die. We understand it in an abstract way but, in turn, the concept is too abstract for us to fully realise.
Personally, I lean towards it being a far more uncomfortable truth. Although, i understand why others might not.
Poor guy. Did he also have to murder the little baby terrorists and their sobbing, horrified terrorist moms and terrorist sisters too? Poor fella. I hope he can muster the strength to do the right thing.
Fuck Israel and fuck conservatives (including neoliberals) who gleefully support this genocide. The wrong people are being erased.
Well, did he have a choice?
He called the families he murdered terrorists. He’s lying about being “traumatized”.
Every word uttered by a conservative is deception or manipulation. The only terrorists in this story are the settlers committing genocide on the local residents.
ah yes… “I was only following orders” - Otto Adolf Eichmann
Yeah you can go to prison
Ah yes, those hundreds of “terrorists” all nicely lined up in the road.
How the fuck do you run someone over with a bulldozer… no matter what i think of it’s not coming up good…
That link stays blue
Riskiest click of the day. But I’m so glad I clicked it.
You win this thread.
I swear this is almost trying to parody the title of the article about the 19 year old who was burned alive
I’m sure we’ll soon get an article about how the pilot felt sad about bombing a hospital.
Something about he at the end of a hard day of bombing schoolyards and hospitals filled with “human animals” going home to his young wife and 5 month old baby with a sad look on his face.
In the aughts, once the US torture programs started getting public attention around 2003, I did my obsessive thing on the German Reich and the Holocaust.
During Operation Barbarossa, the SS was experimenting with eradication methods. The most common was the pogrom, endorsing the locals to massacre the undesirables. When they weren’t undesirable enough or it was the whole village, the einsatzgruppen (death squads) had to come do it, usually forcing them to dig a mass grave and then executing them along the side.
It was messy and brutal and gross, and there was high turnover among the death squads (the US has a similar problem with its combat drone operators). And this was a major problem.
The SS experimented with other ideas, including deathwagons that would pipe the vehicle’s exhaust into an enclosed chamber to kill dozens at a time, but even that was too harsh and too slow.
This is how the prototype genocide machine was made at Auschwitz. The program was contrived so no one who interacted with the live prisoners also interacted with the dead corpses. The guy who pushed the execute button was two persons removed in the chain of command from the guy who signed off on the execution order, and none of those people had to face the prisoners or the outcome. The point specifically was to make the process of massacre less stressful for the people involved.
There was a Sonderkommando of Jews in Auschwitz forced calm down inmates before murdering them and to rob and cremate them afterwards. Exactly to keep the psychic toll lower on the SS and to ensure fewer witnesses.
My opinion of humanity was already so low…
It’s funny, I had the opposite reaction, I see this as pretty strong evidence of our decency. It’s really, really hard to get most people to behave this way, and the ones who do wind up fucked up from it (as they should).
True. It’s hard to make people kill, but it’s much too hard to teach soldiers to refuse an amoral order.
You would think it would be easy to find some poor conscript fuck who didn’t run over civilians in a bulldozer struggling with the fact that they were coerced into being part of a genocide, but no, CNN goes with the guy who crushed human beings. Even as attempted hasbara, that’s some high-level incompetence in CNN.
CNN has to run every story through the Israeli censor in their Jerusalem bureau. The only mainstream outlet that doesn’t go through that process is Al Jazeera, and Israel closed their offices.
Precisely: this is the story CNN and the IDF want you to see. No matter the CNN reader’s reaction, the policy will not change.
So they do the thing because it is a demonstration that they can do the thing without repercussions. Bullingdon Club type mentality.
I hope not that he dies but that he lives to watch everything he cares about crumble to dust as he is powerless to the winds of change
Dude killed himself (the one the article is about).
Dude also killed a lot of people
Bulldozed over them. Alive and dead. Couldn’t take the gore no longer.
I have empathy for him, honesty. He belived the propaganda about defending the country an all that. Then was ordered to to horrible things. He experienced the difference between a lie told and a lie lived and just couldn’t deal with it.
He not the bad guy here.
But he is no good guy either.
reminds me of this bit:
“not only will america go to your country and kill all your people but they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
For context, this is from Frankie Boyle’s 2016 Hurt Like You’ve Never Been Loved.
I reread that in his voice.
“IN THE HUNDREDS”
Good god someone please operation overlord these mother fuckers.
The last sentence is fucked up. If you’re running over hundreds of people how in the fuck do you know they are terrorists. These people are intentionally and knowingly committing war crimes then come back home and cry about how this all made them so sad.
Anyone who runs is Hamas. Anyone who stands still is well disciplined Hamas.
If the IDF is killing people, then they are terrorists. Not the other way around. You are to be checked for antisemitism/glorification of terrorism. Please report to your nearest IDF bulldozer.
Relevant, from a comment I wrote below that is buried under too many other comments:
If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.
Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.
You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.
Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.
This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.
Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.
I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets
Remember the amount of suffering a single human can help to alleviate is finite. You can’t save everyone, and you absolutely can kill yourself in attempting to save everyone. War is bigger than any one person, and there is a point where you have done what you can do and you have to make peace with that
Ask Rachel Corrie, who was similarly run over by a bulldozer protecting Palestinian land. It’s been over 20 years and the US still doesn’t give a single shit about Israel murdering it’s own citizens.
Yeah I remember reading about her. She was an incredibly brave woman. The most horrifying part was reading about the IDF soldiers who had a pancake party to mock her death.
Not just soldiers.
was reading about the IDF soldiers who had a pancake party to mock her death.
Yeah, they’ve really got PTSD from what they do. /s
Give me a fucking break.
Look at how well Israeli propaganda is working abroad. Now imagine how well it must be working on the israeli population.
Anyone who runs is a terrorist anyone who doesn’t run is a lazy terrorist.
i sincerely hope his actions haunt him for the rest of his pathetic life
I’m pretty sure they did.
Six months after he was first sent to fight, he was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder […] Before he was due to redeploy, he took his own life.
Wait… He crushed HUNDREDS of people with a bulldozer in less than 6 months‽ What the actual fuck.
Yeah, the IDF bombed buildings, then the bulldozers came in to clear the streets so the tanks could go through. At no point was anyone allowed to try to rescue anyone from the rubble, and those people are definitely not counted in the official death statistics. We’ll never really know how many people were killed.
Too cowardly to do anything useful to make amends. Just let another conscript fill his space.
Brave enough to drive over Palestinians and call them “terrorists in their hundreds”. Not brave enough to stand up to criticism from his countrymen. This is what spending billions of dollars on an asymmetrical war gets you: a system in which the weakest people can still take the lives of hundreds before being thrown away themselves.
Indoctrination is a hell of a drug.
Not saying these guys should be absolved, but they’re doing this because they think they’re the good guys/helping out.
We should be lamblasting their leadership and all of Israel’s parliament that’s enabling this.
But sometimes, soldiers are just soldiers/grunts. US Soldiers have similar PTSD after Afghanistan and Iraq. Not absolving them of sins, but when you’re trained for most of your adult life to take orders and not question them, and then those orders include killing innocents, it’s difficult to break from the indoctrination/control a group has had over you in the moment. Usually it’s not until you’re finished with your tour and you’re back home and had time to decompress that you realize the horrors you witnessed and perpetuated.
Again, not justifying it in any way, but if we don’t humanize Israeli soldiers, we run the risk of turning them into boogeymen like we did the Nazis. They were human too, and by not acknowledging that and how far humanity can go when they are supporting nationalist movements, we do great harm to any attempt to catch and correct these sort of things early.
There’s no switch that gets flipped that turns people into monsters. The worst atrocities ever committed upon humanity were by other humans. We need to acknowledge that they’re all human, or we risk repeating history.
They made a choice, do not absolve people of what they are doing and continue to do, especially if it’s fucking genocide, that’s literally how these things happen as well as the Holocaust.
At some point, people have to stand up and say no, voice their concerns, and just simply do the right thing.
Literally read what you wrote, the world already did what you are scared about to the Palestinians and is continuing to do so, are you tone deaf?
How about we fucking Humanize Palestine
I don’t think it’s either/or, having empathy for someone who killed himself because of the horrible things his country persuaded him to do doesn’t preclude having empathy for his victims, and it doesn’t mean absolving the crime. It is reality that everyone involved is victimized by war.
the world already did what you are scared about to the Palestinians and is continuing to do so
Part of how this was done is by using the emotional weight of atrocities for dehumanization of those claimed to be responsible. You might say that we don’t need to acknowledge the humanity of everyone universally, because the murderers have crossed a clear line by their own free will. But there is a concerted effort to obfuscate that line and drag everyone into plausible complicity; mandatory military service, suppression and murder of journalists, manipulative propaganda campaigns, it’s all effective and hardly anyone is genuinely immune.
Which isn’t to say the framing in the OP article is right; saying slaughtering people like that is “difficult to accept”, “psychological trauma”, calling all the victims “terrorists”, makes what should be an issue of recognizing and reacting to injustice into a problem of medical treatment to get people to be ok with doing the evil things the state directs them to do. That’s more manipulative propaganda, and many people will be convinced by it. The simplest counter that is least subject to being twisted is the conviction that everyone is always human and should be treated with empathy, without exception.
You can preach empathy all you want, but your words reek of defense of an ongoing genocide. Would you do the same during the Holocaust?
“Oh hey sorry for the genocide but we need to have empathy for these Nazi soldiers so let them keep doing what they do.”
Straight garbage dude.
Nah, you’re wasting your time I’m afraid. All supposed morals, righteousness, and outrage immediately go out the window when they can point to something bad a person has done.
And for the record, yes, what the person in the article did is abhorrent. It’s also not remotely surprising that it would fuck him up afterwards. But if anyone is celebrating him taking his own life, then you’re not any better at all.
Every time someone reduces an argument to “someone did a bad thing” and “people who disagree”, it’s the same argument. We’re talking about fascists and genocide, not pizza.
You are arguing for the dehumanization of the people of Israel. Dehumanizing the enemy is a reprehensible thing to do no matter the side no matter the conflict
No Im not. You are defending the ongoing dehumanization of the people of Palestine.
How is “they are responsible for their own actions” dehumanizing? If anything the person you are responding to is arguing that IDF soldiers have free will.
Do not buy into the “we didn’t know!!!1!” and “we were indoctrinated!!!” bullshit. This is the exact same bullshit that “former” nazis sympathizers peddled after the war. It’s a lie. A transparent one at that.
Yes, the nazis’ methods of dehumanization were very effective. But that does not, for even a femtosecond, absolve anyone of cold-bloodedly murdering a Jew (or a Palestinian). It didn’t happen on accident, that soldier got in that position through a long series of conscious choices, and it came down to it he chose to run over hundreds of people from the comfort of his bulldozer. That is both very human, and one of the most unspeakable crimes of hate. Human in all the worst ways our species has ever devised.
Some crimes are just beyond forgiveness, because it isn’t in anyone’s power to forgive. Killing hundreds in an act of genocide is one such crime. To be human is many things, but being owed forgiveness is not one of them.
I’m sorry for the emotional message, I am assuming you are playing devil’s advocate in good faith but I can’t just let the dehumanization of innocent murdered civilians be compared to the harsh condemnation of the soldiers who killed them.
Yeah this is exactly what I am talking about thank you, and like you said this is literally Nazi sympathetic shit
If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.
Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.
You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.
Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.
This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.
Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.
