87
Outrage after Keir Starmer says Israelis were 'massacred' but Palestinians 'lost their lives'
(www.middleeasteye.net)
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
87 points (88.5% liked)
UK Politics
3180 readers
262 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Ok, but that doesn't address the key point. He referred to the death of Israelis as a "massacre", while referring to the far, far greater number of deaths caused by a far, far more organised and well-equipped army (in addition to the small number of Israeli deaths post–7th October) as merely "lives lost". Why is the most well-organised genocide of the 21st century not worthy of the "massacre" moniker? Or even better, why not call it what it is: targeted genocide.
Downplaying it by lumping it in with Israeli deaths (which works entirely against the argument you're trying to make, btw) and saying it's just "lives lost" is insulting to the tens of thousands of Gazans slaughtered by the Israeli genociders.
Also: using terrorist tactics doesn't make you the bad guys. Not when you're doing it to overthrow oppressors. We don't call the black South Africans during apartheid terrorists today, though there many many attacks that could deserve that moniker. The original Irish republicans from 1919 don't get called terrorists. Nor do American revolutionaries—and the oppression they were fighting against was orders of magnitude less than what Palestinians face today. I might wish Hamas used more carefully-targeted attacks, but no one who actually thinks it through and who has basic morals can in any way end up on the side of them being the bad guys here.
No, he referred to Israelis and Palestinians as countless lives lost. Not just Palestinians
You're arguing against a straw man.
No no no. Please read his quote.
He referred to the October the 7th killings as a massacre - and it objectively was. He didn't refer to anything else as a massacre. He referred to all deaths in the war as "lives lost" - be they Israeli or Palestinian.
I'm sorry, to me, if you go to a music festival with the intention of killing as many civilians as possible, you are a bad person.
Clearly you feel that in some situations that's fine, but I don't, and I will never deviate from that opinion. Purposely killing unarmed civilians is wrong no matter who does it, no matter how just they feel their cause is.
Yes, Israel is absolutely committing genocide, but that doesn't mean shooting people at a concert is ok, and I'm very concerned people think civilians are fair targets so long as they're Israelis.
That's the problem. He selectively chose to take Israel's side by only using the term "massacre" for an action taken by Hamas, and being very circumspect in his language when talking about the tens of thousands of Gazans slaughtered.
You must be missing the part of my comment where I said it's fair to criticise Israel for their war crimes, but not to literally lie about the words he said and what he was referring to.
You're arguing with me but you aren't disagreeing with me.
But the title isn't a lie. It correctly points out that Starmer used the word "massacre" for the killing of Israelis but used passive language for the ongoing genocide.
Which assertion, specifically, are you saying is a "literal lie"?
He used the word massacre specifically for the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas at the music festival on the 7th of October. Not Israelis as a whole - he used the same language for those as he did for Palestinians who died.
The article did not state this. Middle East Eye said he used "massacre" for Israelis in general and "lost their lives" for Palestinians in general, which isn't true, hence being literally a lie.
The article also states that he put the 7th of October terror attack on Palestinians. He didn't. He specifically said Hamas. Being a member of Hamas is not the same as simply being Palestinian.
If the article had said "Starmer is right to call for a ceasefire and two state solution, but we feel he has been more ready to highlight attrocities from Hamas than he has for Israel" then I'd think that's a completely fair assessment. They didn't need to doctor his quotes into completely different viewpoints. That's shitty journalism.
No it didn't. To suggest that it did requires either a bad faith interpretation of the article, or a level of illiteracy that is frankly shocking for someone so confident in their ability to interpret the text.
I don't know which I'm dealing with here.
To be clear: it said the word massacre was used for Israelis. That is true. It didn't provide any qualifiers on that like "all" or "in general".
Yes it did. Did you even read the article?
I'm beginning to think you're the one who can't read properly. You're definitely arguing in bad faith.
Because it's not a genocide.
wrong.
no u
No, every respectable expert.
The literal source from that line is from an article titled "Experts, advocates deeply divided on question of 'genocide' in Gaza"
So it's obviously not EVERY respectable expert unless you're playing fast and loose with the term "respectable".
Find one. Find one academic focused on genocide studies who isn't Israeli and doesn't have close ties to Israel who is on the record saying Amnesty International and multiple United Nations bodies are wrong.