Emily Hand, a 9-year-old Irish girl, was released by Hamas yesterday. The taoiseach of Ireland released a statement:
Twitter went nuts. This girl wasn't "lost"! She was kidnapped! Held hostage! How dare the leader of Ireland insult Israel this way!?!
Here's the next paragraph:
This is typical of the discourse these days. The LA Times has another example today. A few days ago a Jewish professor at USC confronted a group of protesters and declared, “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are killed.”
Some people will find that objectionable on its own. But that wasn't enough:
Within hours, Strauss’ comments were posted online, shared and reshared on X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
As his remarks raced across the internet, his condemnation of Hamas was often excised, leaving only his “hope” for “all” to be killed. Captions and comments online framed his demand for “every one” to be killed in myriad, at times deceptive, ways. One Instagram post shared to millions of users claimed falsely that Strauss told the students, “[I] hope you get killed....”
He was quickly banned from campus amid calls for him to be fired.
I guess the moral of the story is not to believe everything you see on the internet. Or anywhere else, for that matter. But that's hardly news, nor is it advice that anyone pays attention to when it doesn't suit them. Welcome to the world of human beings.
It's the social conservative wanna-be-a-mob mentality.
A Prime Minister's prepared releases are or at least should be very thoroughly vetted. What possessed him and his staff to lead with "lost" in the first place?
It seems very Irish.
"...What possessed him and his staff to lead with "lost" in the first place?"
Perhaps because Israel initially told the family that the child was dead and then later missing.
Then if anything, that would/should have been "An innocent child we thought was lost ..."
I don't know if there are similar uses of the word "lost" in the Old Testament, but the parable of the prodigal son ends "be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found". The brother in question was not dead or lost in a literal sense, but squandering his inheritance in wild living. I guess JC should have vetted his sayings more thoroughly.
For most modern Americans, the phrase echoing the parable of the prodigal son is most familiar from the hymn: “Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”
I don’t know how familiar the Irish are with “Amazing Grace,” but I’m sure the PMs office was trying to evoke either it or its Biblical origin.
> What possessed him and his staff to lead with "lost" in the first place?
The statement was alluding to a quote from the Bible.
Luke 15:24: For my beloved son was once dead, but now he's alive! Once he was lost, but now he is found! ' And everyone celebrated with overflowing joy.
I'm not a Christian, but even I recognize the fricken' reference "I once was lost, but now am found," Crrrrikey, these faux "Christians" with their bullshit.
"Amazing Grace." Maybe the angry xitter-posters aren't southern?
Amazing Grace? The hym written by an abolitionist Englishman?
The most misleading thing on the Internet (well, that I saw) was the misinformation that the horrific crash at the Canadian border was somehow related to Muslim terrorism. It was repeatedly amplified by Fox News and many Republican politicians including the repugnant Ted Cruz. I’m sure lots of people still believe it. See Digby’s post on the subject:
https://digbysblog.net/2023/11/26/your-post-truth-future/
My wait in line at the pharmacy.
Guy: [makes bad joke] You just gotta laugh. The whole world is falling apart.
Me: [nothing]
Guy: I blame Biden.
Me: How's that?
Guy: It all started when Biden paid that $6 billion to Iran.
Me: That's old news, but you know something, that never happened.
Guy: It's what I heard.
Me: You should try another channel.
A debunked story from six weeks ago is still this guy's reason to blame Biden for everything.
We should have done the American thing, and stolen Iran's $6,000,000,000 fair and square.
And AI is going to make this better....We live in a world of fools.
Didn't an Israeli government figure make this rejoinder? Might be attributable to bad translation (unlikely) or misinterpreted cultural reference (lack of knowledge of Amazing Grace or New Testament parable it's based on).
I've got to say, this conflict is toxic to discourse. Everyone and everything gets sucked in and destroyed.
I think the problem is the algorithms in Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. People who want to be outraged will be fed info to keep them outraged.
It's who can generate the most rage the quickest. Doesn't matter if it's true, as long as it makes people angry enough to do what the rage generators say.
Anyone outraged by this statement was looking for something to be outraged about.
The ammount of bad actors spreading misinformation on this is an order of magnitude higher than for Ukraine. I am very tangentially involved in NAFO and OSINT and it is an unmanageable flood.
"Taken out of context" is a phrase and a concept that LONG predates the internet.
Welcome to the world of human beings.
More and more....is there another species I could join?
As long as we're misinterpreting, and in acknowledgment of the just-passed Thanksgiving holiday, let's ponder the Taoiseach's sentiment, "We hope she will soon recover from the traumatic experience in the loving embrace of her family."
Actually, my Thanksgiving was fine. Just a few family, and we didn't pour on the loving embracing.
Twitter didn't go nuts over the taioseach's statement as far as I know but the Israeli government did. Its impoliteness toward a national leader simply expressing joy over the deliverance of a child was staggering even by entitled standards. I've never before seen a country do so much to destroy international sympathy toward it.
The office of the taioseach, by remaining strictly polite, effectively said "Then F you."
I know it's the US government's official -- and idiotic -- position that Hamas should be completely destroyed, consistent with the idiot professor's remarks, but if someone were to say that the entire Netanyahu administration should be killed, would that be fine, too?
I mean, isn't the Netanyahu administration pretty much as bad as Hamas?