the 20 years leading up to trump, calling every republican a nazi, has completely destroyed the meaning of the word. trump is actually doing a lot of fascist leaning stuff this time around, and you could possibly use that word appropriately but it is currently meaningless.
"flippantly tossing words around devalues them and debases the conversation." Agreed- and that's exactly what you are doing with the word, "no."
Soldiers are murdering an entire population- or as many of them as they can, seemingly- for political purposes that desire that population to simply not exist anymore. To say that is _not_ a genocide devalues the meaning of the word.
They're not "murdering an entire population"; although many thousands of Palestinians have been killed, it's still a tiny percentage of the total population.
But it's not necessary to murder an entire population for it to count as genocide. Any attempt to destroy a people counts, including forced sterilization, re-education, mass deportations, etc.
But it's also clear that Israel has explicitly targeted civilians, help workers, journalists, refugee camps, food distribution, and I've even read about them shooting people hiding in churches. None of those are valid targets.
* Hamas keeps its missiles, arms and other military equipment inside or underneath schools and hospitals
* UNRWA was functioning as an arms dealer by putting arms inside of bags of flour or other food items
* Hamas generally has its fighters not wear uniform, but instead wear civilian clothes or even niqabs (where only the eyes are visible). Making it extremely difficult for the IDF to determine who is a combatant and who isn't- and guaranteeing mistakes will be made.
* Hamas also uses child soldiers or orders children to throw stones at IDF soldiers - again ensuring IDF soldiers have to always be afraid the person in front of them is going to kill them and that they have to make split second decisions on what to do about it
Ah yes, the human shield argument. Like the "tunnels" and graphics provided by the IDF. Convenient isn't? Every hospital, apartment block, school and refugee camp has hamas in them, so everything is fair game.
ya it's pretty FUCKED UP that HAMAS does that, and Iran funds it, isn't it? or do you think Israel just wants to slaughter people weaker than them because they can? if that was their aim why did they wait until 10/8 to start doing it? they could have done it any time in the last 30 years.
> seemingly something happened by the democratically elected government of Gaza on 10/7
Gaza doesn't have a democratically elected government, and one of the reasons Palestine (of which Gaza is a region) does not have a democratically elected government is that Israel has exercised its power as an occupying power administering large parts of Palestine directly and controlling the rest indirectly to prevent elections which have been jointly agreed on by the two main factions.
And they’ve done that specifically to maintain the current violent and divided status quo, which they leverage as pretext to continue their long policy of genocide.
I love how no one mentioned trump or nazis in this immediate thread but the fact that you brought it up unprompted paints a perfect picture of exactly what kind of person you are. I don’t need to call you any names, you’ve outed yourself all by yourself.
It's genocide. And the reason we were using the word nazi for twenty years was to try to warn everyone what was happening, but nobody listened, and now you got nazis.
Calling everyone Nazis wasn’t to warn everyone. Fairly sure it was mostly just virtue signalling. Everyone using the word wasn’t around when WWII happened.
The result probably just desensitised people to what was going on since every little infraction the right did seemed to make them a nazi.
The current campaign against Gazans satisfies the criteria for genocide.
Here is the UN definition for genocide. While you normally can't prove a negative, each jot and tittle of the definition is clear in the Gazans' case, so I leave it to you to figure out why you're so cautious to call a spade a spade and call a genocide a genocide.
> The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. Lemkin developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jewish people during the Holocaust, but also in response to previous instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people. Later on, Raphäel Lemkin led the campaign to have genocide recognised and codified as an international crime.
> Genocide was first recognised as a crime under international law in 1946 by the United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/96-I). It was codified as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). The Convention has been ratified by 153 States (as of April 2022). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has repeatedly stated that the Convention embodies principles that are part of general customary international law. This means that whether or not States have ratified the Genocide Convention, they are all bound as a matter of law by the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited under international law. The ICJ has also stated that the prohibition of genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (or ius cogens) and consequently, no derogation from it is allowed.
> The definition of the crime of genocide as contained in Article II of the Genocide Convention was the result of a negotiating process and reflects the compromise reached among United Nations Member States in 1948 at the time of drafting the Convention. Genocide is defined in the same terms as in the Genocide Convention in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Article 6), as well as in the statutes of other international and hybrid jurisdictions. Many States have also criminalized genocide in their domestic law; others have yet to do so.
> # Definition
> Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
> ## Article II*
> In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
> Killing members of the group;
> Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
> Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
> Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
> Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
> *Elements of the crime*
> The Genocide Convention establishes in Article I that the crime of genocide may take place in the context of an armed conflict, international or non-international, but also in the context of a peaceful situation. The latter is less common but still possible. The same article establishes the obligation of the contracting parties to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide.
> The popular understanding of what constitutes genocide tends to be broader than the content of the norm under international law. Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:
> 1. A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and
> 2. A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
> 2a. Killing members of the group
> 2b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
> 2c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
> 2d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
> 2e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
> The intent is the most difficult element to determine. To constitute genocide, there must be a proven intent on the part of perpetrators to physically destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Cultural destruction does not suffice, nor does an intention to simply disperse a group. It is this special intent, or dolus specialis, that makes the crime of genocide so unique. In addition, case law has associated intent with the existence of a State or organizational plan or policy, even if the definition of genocide in international law does not include that element.
> Importantly, the victims of genocide are deliberately targeted - not randomly – because of their real or perceived membership of one of the four groups protected under the Convention (which excludes political groups, for example). This means that the target of destruction must be the group, as such, and not its members as individuals. Genocide can also be committed against only a part of the group, as long as that part is identifiable (including within a geographically limited area) and “substantial.”
"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Read. Note that numbers don't matter, intent does. Kidnapping a single kid can almost be genocide and an attack with 1000 civilian victims can fail to qualify as a genocide. Now go and google "Hamas charter" and read. Intent is pretty damn clear.
Israel is not intending to destroy an ethnic group. They're simply not. Hamas, in contrast, is. The organization's entire existence is centered around their intent to commit genocide.
This is also the reason Russia's actions in Ukraine, meant to destroy the Ukrainian nation and identity, ARE warcrimes but Ukraine's (much more limited) actions inside Russia don't qualify. Despite the fact that Ukraine is killing people in Russia. Of course propaganda bots are trying to confuse both issues.
So in other words, by the UN definition, by the ACTUAL criteria:
1) Israel's war in Gaza is NOT a genocide.
2) Hamas' attack on 10/7, intended to wipe Israel off the map by killing Jews, was genocide.
3) a whole number of Hamas' actions outside of the 10/7 attack ALSO qualify as genocide, as the intent is clear (such as their actions when they got elected, to give an example of something that DOES qualify as genocide against Palestinians ... but of course committed by Hamas)
The simple fact is that Hamas, and frankly a lot of Palestinians, just like Russia, want to commit genocide. That is what makes the difference according to the criteria.
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Sure, openly written documents can help with evaluation of intent, but how can we ever define someone's intent (something that is only in people's hearts)? We know of many legal cases where the intent is obvious but not easily provable.
Isn't intent usually decided by a jury/court, taking the actions of the alleged perp into account? Most law breakers won't just admit their guilt, and most legal systems don't let defendants unilaterally declare themselves innocent.
> Hamas explicitly states that committing genocide in Palestine and Israel against Jews and "Palestinian traitors" ... is the start. They clearly state their intent to do so worldwide, on essentially everyone, as that will bring the islamic second coming. Yes, really, that's what it says.
Nice, it's like the "preventive" strikes of Trump on Iran. Israel is basically committing genocide on Palestinians so ...Palestinians don't do genocide on them AND the world? Thank you Israel, for saving the world, by committing untold atrocities, a genocide and ethntic cleasing (in the name of good, of course).
Again, I will reiterate: Israel currently does to Palestinians what answers ALL criterias of a genocide. Is it a genocide? Yes. Can we call it a genocide? Yes. Would we continue calling it a genocide and compare it to what Nazis did to the Jewish population? Yes.
That's rich coming from a defender of Israel, the apartheid state that indiscriminately kills children and does a genocide on a whole population. What's even richer is that Israel is the one known for doing so:
Besides, two wrongs don't make a right. And it's Israel occupying another country, not the other way around. It's also Israel who killed 20x more innocents in the last years.
Israel also attacked 4 countries: Syria, Iran, Palestine and Lebanon in just the last 2 years, yet somehow those genocidal warmongers are allowed to have nukes?
Nah, the ICC has issued an arrest for Netanyahu because of his war crimes, and there IS genocide in Gaza. Go cry somewhere else, you won't take the world's eyes away from this Nazi style genocide.
What Israel is doing checks the first and third items in your list. They kill members of the group, and not just in Gaza; in the Westbank, it's common for illegal settlers to attack Palestinian towns, including killing people. The IDF does nothing to stop them, but if Palestinians try to defend themselves against this aggression, IDF shows up to stop that.
The wall separates farmers from their land, and has made it nearly impossible for Palestinians to live their life, to go to work, etc. And Gaza is a ghetto; an open-air prison, with way too many people, and no way for them to build a normal life. Israel has also kicked Palestinians out of their homes in order to give them to Jews.
I'm not denying that Hamas is also genocidal; they clearly and openly are. And probably more so in intent, but a lot less so in capability. Israel has been killing and disrupting a lot more Palestinian lives than the other way around.
Do you think these are all accidents? Read what I wrote. The intent is clearly there.
If Hitler said "I'm not going to kill any Jews" while murdering a million Jews, would you believe he didn't have the intent to kill them? And there's plenty of people in Israel who do talk openly about destroying Palestine, destroying Gaza, killing or deporting all Palestinians, and even arguing that Palestinians aren't a real people (like Putin does with Ukrainians). All of that shows intent.
the 20 years leading up to trump, calling every republican a nazi, has completely destroyed the meaning of the word. trump is actually doing a lot of fascist leaning stuff this time around, and you could possibly use that word appropriately but it is currently meaningless.