It's worth keeping in mind that, as near as I can tell, American conservatives don't have any moral qualms about Israel's war in Gaza. In fact, they're livid whenever Joe Biden so much as says that maybe Israel should be just a wee bit more careful about killing civilians if it wouldn't be too much trouble.
On the contrary: They think Israel should be bombing Gaza more; completely ignoring civilian casualties because they're all Hamas anyway; stopping aid trucks entirely; and turning the whole place into rubble.
I get it if you think Biden is just moving his lips but not really planning to ever put any real pressure on Netanyahu. I get it if you think Israel is in the right but needs to care more about noncombatants. But what I don't get is Republicans who apparently think it really would be OK to commit genocide and simply wipe Gaza off the map. Where does this bloodlust come from?
Am I being unfair? Surely this isn't true of all Republicans. But it sure seems to be true of a lot of them.
Considering what they think of Seattle, Portland, New York, et al it's not really surprising.
These are not good people and I'm not inclined to listen to their sincere thoughts on marginal tax rates or much else any more than I would ask Jeffrey Dahmer for meal planning ideas.
I was going to write something like this only substituting homeless and undocumented people in America. The GOP is perfectly OK with machine gunning both groups in this country. Why is it surprising that they’re OK with Israel doing similar to homeless and undocumented/stateless people in Gaza?
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It's social conservatism, --they're not us so they can, and should, just all die.
Obviously untrue.
The objective should not be to level Gaza. It should be to win the war by destroying Hamas and recovering the hostages, alive or dead.
If the only way to achieve that objective is to level Gaza then so be it. That is what we did in WWII to Germany and Japan.
Hamas is responsible for this war and can end it by surrendering. The blame for the deaths and destruction lies squarely with Hamas, not Israel.
The IDF has killed most of the hostages so far.
You have no evidence of that because we have no idea how many of the hostages Hamas killed.
Hamas and it's members bear criminal and moral responsibility for all hostage deaths just as a kidnapper bears responsibility if a police officer kills the kidnap victim while trying to rescue him
Do you realize how little weight anything you may have to say carries? Particularly when you use words like 'evidence'. Also, no, that's not how we won WWII you deeply ignorant little man. Not levelling everything in Japan was what Fat Man and Little Boy was all about (and possibly saving the lives of more than a few GI's as well.)
How does someone become as evil as you?
Unless you are advocating that Israel end its military occupation of the West Bank as soon as Hamas surrenders, you are lying when you say that it would end the war. The occupation is an act of war, and the war cannot end until it does.
But, like the Israeli public, you don't define "war" as an actual war. When you say that the war will end, what you actually mean is, "The Palestinians will simply submit to Israel's domination without causing so much fuss that it interferes with the daily life of Israelis. I don't care that the Palestinians are still experiencing war."
I suggest just taking them at their word. They say they want to wipe out Gaza and that is exactly what they want.
But mostly they want someone else to do it so they can hold it against them if they need to.
The GOP is full of bullying cowards. So it’s very on brand for them to want Gazans both extinguished and also not actually have to do it themselves. Immaculate genocide allows them to remain pure in love with Jesus.
The Palestinians don’t count with our pseudo-Christian right because they are neither white or Christian. In MAGA land that means the aren’t really human
Many Palestinians are Christians. Why the pope and roman catholic church backs palestinians since many are in the pope's flock. But they aren't white or protestant. So evangelicals are good with them dying.
It's hyperbolic speech intended to convey their strong support of Israel and dislike of Hamas. It's posturing. None of them would do it, and for many, it's a hypothetical. A TV show. A story. Nothing in it is "real" in the sense of in front of them. Most of the people who say this sort of thing wouldn't/couldn't actually be the ones to pull the trigger.
Some might say it's intended to move the Overton Window. I don't think most of the people who talk this way think about that at all, though it could probably have that effect.
I agree that it's posturing but they wouldn't do anything if Israel was doing that. It would end the Gaza problem after all.
That makes it worse. They are not willing to do the deed, but perfectly comfortable with enabling someone else to do it.
Not to bring up the Holocaust or anything Godwin’s Law related, but most of the Good Germans also didn’t want to actually kill Jews, homosexuals, the homeless, etc themselves. They just wanted Someone Else to do it out of sight so they could continue their lives of sweet innocent Christian bliss, like a Hummel figurine village come to life. And the Nazi Party obliged them.
Does it matter if it's intended to move the Overton Window if it in fact does more the Overton Window?
Republicans have been trying to exterminate all Muslims since Shrub was in office. This bloodlust isn't new, nor is it really just about Muslims. They want to do the same with Mexico and every other country South of the border.
If Trump would propose to kill every human being on Earth who isn't them, and actually had the means to do so without killing themselves in the process, I can assure you over 80% of Republicans would be totally fine with that.
yeah, this is most of it.
i'd also note that whereas the lesson that normal human beings learned from a century of colonialism and proxy wars was "don't do it anymore," the lesson that republicans learned was "it just makes things too messy compared with simply killing everyone." before october 7, the consensus even in *israel* was that they didn't want anything to do with the idea of claiming and reoccupying gaza - unlike in the west bank, there was simply no upside in taking over a big urbanized wasteland filled with people who hated them. to the extent that republicans became aware of this problem after October 7, their solution is the one they always favor: just slaughter everyone so it's no longer a problem.
of course you get it. we all get it. republican politicians and a large portion of their base range from low empathy to sociopathic monsters. throw in their inherent racism, xenophobia, and bottomless desire to p0wn the libs and of COURSE they're pro a palestinian genocide with zero regard for civilian death.
Isn't this just the opposite side of the actual language of Hamas? Hamas says, openly, that they want to erase every Jew from the face of the earth. When confronted with that sort of evil, what's the proper response? If someone wants to eradicate you, wouldn't you be smart to eradiccate them before they do it to you?
Not all Gazans are Hamas, just like not all Israelis are Jewish and not all Americans are Republicans.
It’s entirely possible that all the members of Hamas are sick evil fucks and yet some decent people were born there and are forced to live among them in Gaza. For example, I bet 100% of the infants in Gaza (alive or dead) have never expressed any desire to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. In most other conflicts, we usually don’t say “welp, better bomb the entire housing project and all its residents because a gang of vicious drug dealers lives among them.” (Although I do expect us to start doing so if Trump gets elected.)
Didn't we do that very thing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Honest question... What should Israel do if Hamas launches missles from within a refugee camp?
Should they ignore it?
Should they retaliate with ground forces?
Should they retaliiate with the same missles that Hamas sent thier way?
Those were industrial cities with a functioning civil government that could balance costs of projecting war versus not,
Palestine has no control over foreign trade, its airspace, water, or economy. Their farms are burned, their people randomly shot by snipers from the wall or encroached settlements. Their people are dispossessed and made into refugees in and out of their country. And they are completely without a vote when it comes to these facets of their country.
Hamas is an outgrowth of the anger at that situation.
Even more, more than sixty percent of the population wasn't of age the last time they held a vote.
Crissa -
You didn't answer my question, which I'll ask again....
Honest question... What should Israel do if Hamas launches missles from within a refugee camp?
Should they ignore it?
Should they retaliate with ground forces?
Should they retaliiate with the same missles that Hamas sent thier way?
The silence from the commentariat is telling.
Can/Will anyone answer that question? Because without that answer, there can be no negotiations or peace. What, exactly, should Israel do when missiles are launched from civilian areas?
No, Eddie, they do not want to answer these sorts of questions. They have been asked before in this forum and in other forums, and the overwhelming response to this sort of question by many of these critics is to ignore, deflect, or criticize the question.
Sort of like how all of Israel's supporters studiously ignore the voluminous evidence of Jewish settler terrorism in the West Bank. If Israel wants my support for taking action against Hamas war crimes, they need to stop engaging in their own.
Note: this is not a justification of Hamas's war crimes, though the rocket attacks don't really qualify as such. 10/7 was evil, and the world would be a better place without Hamas. But the Israelis aren't really much better.
They should sweep for weapons, relocate as many people as possible, and use what intelligence services they still have functioning to root out Hamas militants* and weapons caches. Mindless retaliation** isn’t gaining Israel any credibility as a civilized country. There: an answer, and while imperfect, it’s not a war crime.
*you’d think Netanyahu would’ve at least bothered to gather enough data on his Hamas frenemies over the last 15-20 years to manage this.
**Americans should know this, after the dishonest and ultimately self-destructive conflation of 9/11 and Iraq.
Honest question: Can you name a time when this has happened? Put up or shut up.
The problem with your question is contained in your question: "refugee camp."
You may as well have asked what else Southern slavers could have done rather than killing a bunch of enslaved people after Nat Turner's murderous campaign.
Well, the Iron Dome makes that a fairly easy hypothetical. They shouldn't "ignore" the missiles; they should shoot as many as they can down, and mark the location from which they're launched for future reference. Once several strikes have been launched -- in head-slapping futility of course -- from a given place, when the next salvo is launched send the helicopters with soldiers trained in and committed to following the Geneva Conventions to kill or capture the Hamas rocketeers and their protective forces.
Will a few Israelis occasionally be killed if this course it taken? Yes, but unless Hamas gets non-ballistic missiles, it will be worth not losing international support. Israel is deadly close to losing all support outside of the US and within the US only having half of the public's support.
Do you not think that is EXACTLY what Ismail Haniyah expected Bludgeonman YesAYahoo to do in response to October 7th? Haniyah has played YesAYahoo like a violin.
Looks like Ed has gone AWOL. Whadda surprise.
Of course, if you actually pay attention, you would know that it is Israel that attacks first and the Palestinians respond.
"Didn't we do that very thing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?"
You mean, back when the peer nation-states of the Empire of Japan and the US were actively at war, and had been in said war for nearly four years, and used brand-new atomic weapons the world had never seen in order to end said grueling war, triggering decades of soul-searching and internal debate about whether or not that was a horrific war crime, and spawning global agreements limiting access to such weapons and entire political movements devoted to ensuring that such a thing never, ever happens again?
Because if so, that's not really applicable to a situation where a wealthy and powerful democratic state conducts a prolonged bombing campaign against a couple of million impoverished stateless civilians living in a tiny region the airspace, borders, and trade of which is controlled by said democratic state.
I mean, FFS, if you are pointing to the nuking of Japan--the shockinly violent and destructive capstone to arguably decades' worth of existential struggle among civilizations/the apotheotic end of the imperial age as a positive example or justification for anything, as opposed to just a horrific thing that happened and we should all work very hard to make sure never happens again, then you are really missing the goddamn point.
Didn't we do that very thing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
This analogy keeps coming up, and it's deeply stupid.
1) The signing of the 4th Geneva Convention in 1949 changed the legal regime of the laws of war in a major way. Many things that were legal in 1943-45 are not any longer.
2) The Allies weren't in a position to occupy Japan at the time the bombs were dropped. They were making plans to invade, but it was going to be a long and costly process. Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank 57 years ago, and have never really relinquished control of either since then. (The 2005 "evacuation" of Gaza was largely a sham. Gaza is a small enough place that the Israelis could exercise many of the functions of an occupation while sitting at the border.)
3) The Allies had a strategy for how to convert operational success into a political victory. Israel hasn't had a strategy since 1967. The Allies knew what they were going to accomplish by bombing Japan. The Israelis are killing tens of thousands of people in order to accomplish nothing.
4) The Allies (leaving the Soviets out of that term here) intended for the occupation to be of a relatively short duration, during which they would establish a new governing infrastructure and civil society. They made it clear that they did not plan to annex territory, save for ending Japan's colonial rule of Taiwan and Korea, returning them to their local populations. At its end, which turned out to be the signing of the Treaty of San Francisco in 1951, full sovereignty would be returned to the Japanese and the occupation would end.
The Israelis, on the other hand, have occupied Gaza and the West Bank for 57 years. They show no inclination to ever allow the Palestinians to have full sovereignty. They have annexed a good deal of the West Bank officially, have de facto annexed a lot more than that.
I'd be a lot more likely to support Israel's operation in Gaza if it were, in fact, similar to what the Allies did in 1945. But it's not.
Honest question... What should Israel do if Hamas launches missles from within a refugee camp?
What Israel should do is a much more complex question than you intend. The Israeli government condones, and even encourages, settler terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank. A large part of what they should do involves not engaging in war crimes of their own. If they were to do that, I'd be willing to have a very different conversation as to what they should do specifically in response to Hamas rocket attacks.
Without making those changes, the only action they really have the standing to implement is to use Iron Dome to shoot down the missiles.
What should Israel do? Come on, Ed! All of Gaza has been a "refugee camp" since 2006! Where have you been? And when have Hamas missiles actually hit any Israeli targets? Much ado about very little.
A smart and decent Israeli government would take the Palestinian pushback as an indication that it's time to give up the "From the River to the Sea!!" Greater Israel wet dream, and re-start negotiating a viable, fair, decent two state solution.
Beginning with incarcerating a whole lot of those terrorist "settlers" aka illegal squatters who have been brutalizing the Palestinian population for basically ever.
Yeah. Surrender! Admit they've learned their lesson: they can't totally obliterate Palestine and its people and they were wrong to try.
If someone wants to eradicate you, wouldn't you be smart to eradiccate them before they do it to you?
The problem with taking this in the meaning that you intend, which is that Palestinians' rhetoric justifies similar rhetoric by the Israelis, is temporal. It was the Zionists who first said that they intended to completely displace the Palestinians from their land.
If you are going to argue that eliminationist rhetoric justifies the same response, you have it backwards as to who is justified.
"Hamas says, openly, that they want to erase every Jew from the face of the earth." Sorry, but you are a bald face liar. They want the foreign invaders to leave their country. That's both a perfectly natural and morally sound desire. That is not remotely similar to what you monstrously claimed.
Just the usual lies: Hamas has agreed to an Israel on the 1967 borders and does not advocating eliminating every Jew.
This is just the Goebbels technique, say your lie loud enough and hope people will believe it.
I'm sure as far as Republicans are concerned, Palestinians are much darker than Israeli's. Besides, the more room Israel has over there, the more of the ones hear can leave.
The Republican party has taken performative cruelty as a guiding principle. That is why Noem thought she could help her case for Veep by bragging about shooting a puppy. It turned out she was wrong in that case because Republicans care more about puppies than people, and certainly than Palestinians.
It is hard to know how real this is. It seems reminiscent of the play "Playboy of the Western World" in which a character becomes a hero in an Irish bar on the news that he killed his father, but when they see him actually kill his father in person they get disgusted. (In fact in both cases he only knocks his father out thinking he has killed him). That is to say I suspect most Republicans would be disgusted if they saw what was actually happening in Gaza, but fortunately for them they are not likely to have to do so.
I suspect you’re wrong in your conclusion - Republicans were totally onboard with Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Perry killing other Americans exercising their first and second amendment rights but in the “wrong” way, and the victims in both cases turned out to be other white people, the one racial group that is supposed to be on top here. If Republicans are cool with other white people being murdered for being undesirable in some way, they’ll totally be cool with Gazans being murdered. They’ll cheer it on in fact.
But yes: if a million people deemed undesirable for whatever reason are slaughtered, but no cameras film it and/or no media sites air it, then for Republicans it’s exactly the same as if nobody died at all.
It's an overlap of ideologies. GOP is largely influenced by Christian Nationalists, who are all about prepping Israel for Judgement Day. Throw in the Islamophobes who lean into the racist bits. This of course ironically includes the antisemitic. Finally the militant wing who love a good bombing campaign against terrorists, regardless of the impact on civilians.
A perfect blend ready to call for the erasure of the people who've spent generations living there.*
*(Often referred to as Palestinians, since they never had a country bestowed to them by the powers that be.)
I don't usually have to remind Kevin of recent history, but this is hardly new. Republicans are always huge fans of genocide directed at brown people. (Jews have honorary, limited white-people privileges for this special case, but don't push it.)
Anyone remember "More rubble, less trouble"? That was Baby Bush's Iraq II.
I was a teenager for Iraq I, Daddy Bush's big adventure, but have clear memories of calls for nuking Baghdad. ("Make that desert a sheet of glass".)
None of this is new.
As for where it comes from? Well, the same place it always has. "They" "deserve" it because they're not "us".
Let's not forget the classic, "Kill all the Arabs and take their oil!"
Trump once endorsed this plan when he said after the Iraq War that American oil companies should be given all the rights to the Iraqi oil since we were the ones who spent blood and treasure* "liberating" it.
*-I HATED this term. Even Colin Powell used it. Were we living in the Eighteenth Century? Were we really equating the lives of our young men and women with the gold that the rich refused to part with? I guess we were.
Definitely.
Not all Republicans want to kill all Palestinians. But Evangelicals absolutely do, for weird theological reasons, and they are a large enough constituency within the R Party that leaders feel it necessary to toe their line.
This country was founded on Protestant values. Those values trickled through the vein of Evangelicals. To this day, the Evangelicals think witches float which is why so many in the South drown. And also, the Resurrection will happen any day now, and since the Palestinians are Muslim, they obviously don't figure in the thousand years of peace, so their lives don't count.
/S
I sometimes read Conservative opinion pieces and actually interact with some of them. Many of them live in a world of extreme resentment and demonization of Dems/poor foreigners/the woke etc. They view things as being on the edge of catastrophe and see the need to fight back with no holds barred as an obligation and a means of survival.
So this sort of response is almost... predictable?
Yes…. They want whatever Trump tells them they want. They have already shown they will dump whatever beliefs they once held dear when Trump tells them to. Pro-Israel, anti-“Arab” is not that much of a stretch for them.
I just read all of the comments on this article. I'm literally shocked by how nasty and simple minded the conversation is. Republicans equals evil and dumb besides. we know what to do and Israel is at fault for everything. it's almost like most of the commenters are actually trolls.
Have you not been paying attention to what Republicans actually do?
You seem to want to ignore the fact that the republican party really has turned pure unadulterated evil. I mean they always had a line of evil running in them (see the Nixon campaign sabotaging the vietnam peace talks by promising they would make a better deal when elected, when the Reagan campaign bribed the iranians into continuing to hold the 53 american diplomats hostage, etc. etc.) But in the last 5 years, with the demonizing of McCain and Romney, the last vestiges of humanity were driven out of the party.
"Where does this bloodlust come from?"
It comes from Israel.
Defense minister Yoav Gallant said, on October 8, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”
There you go. It's a war on everybody.
Now add that to the evangelical base of the Republican party, who support anything Israel does because they believe Armageddon will not happen and Jesus will not return until Jews control the entire Biblical land of Israel.
What more do you need? Israel says they're killing everyone because they're animals only fit to be starved to death, and the People of Jesus see Israel taking control of Gaza and inching just that much further toward the second coming.
It ain't rocket science.
"because they believe Armageddon will not happen and Jesus will not return until Jews control the entire Biblical land of Israel." The actual belief is that Armageddon begins with the destruction of Israel (originally by the soviet union, presumably by Russia or some other northern empire)
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." -- Frank Wilhoit, musical composer
Their just waiting to be raptured