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State Department Declares “Ethnic Cleansing” in Sudan but Won't Say the Same About Israel's War in Gaza (theintercept.com)

submitted 10 months ago by shish_mish to c/world

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[–] ghostdoggtv 12 points 10 months ago

Today Iearned it's short for "State of Israel Department"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Well, we don't tend to make condemnations of ourselves, and at this point it's Biden & Blinken's genocide as much as Bibi's.

Blinken is just awful. It's beyond words what we're doing over there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Late last year, 50 humanitarian organizations asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken to make an atrocity determination related to a conflict that was drawing global attention.

“Based on the State Department’s careful analysis of the law and available facts, I have determined that members of the SAF and the RSF have committed war crimes in Sudan,” he said in a December 6 statement.

Such a determination can have important foreign policy implications, creating a legal designation for international crimes usually accompanied by limits on weapons and security assistance, economic sanctions, and other penalties.

On a near-daily basis, a State Department spokesperson takes questions from the media and is routinely pressed about the latest atrocity alleged to have been committed by Israeli forces, whether it’s gunfire aimed at civilians in a church; the bombing of hospitals, mosques, schools, universities, or residential buildings; or the cutting off of food, fuel, and medicine.

All told, the U.S. has given Israel $158 billion in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding, more than any other country since World War II, according to a March 2023 report by the Congressional Research Service.

These statements are inconsistent with the administration’s own conventional arms transfer policy, in which President Biden committed to ‘engage in appropriate monitoring’ to ensure that U.S. weapons are used in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian law obligations,” said Chappell.

The original article contains 1,010 words, the summary contains 227 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

Its not genocide when our friends do it

[+] rivermonster -3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 15 points 10 months ago (1 children)

"I accidentally self-defended 1 out of every 100 people in a population"

[+] [email protected] -7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Were you one of those people who thought that clean wars were possible? They are not. This is just a war and like all wars, it's horrible, with civilians paying the heaviest price. You don't need a genocide for that.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Killing a greater percentage of civilians in under six months than the US did by continuously bombing Japan for three years in WW2 with shite bomb sights, poor intel, only unguided munitions, and two atomic bombs, suggests that this goes far beyond just being an 'unclean' war.

[+] [email protected] -7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Apples to oranges. Just over half of the Japanese population was living in cities in WW2, compared to 77.6% in the Gaza Strip. There's barely any countryside in the strip where parents could send their children to, if they were allowed to. "Only" 67 (or 66, depending on the source) major cities were firebombed in Japan out of at least several hundred (Japan has 792 cities today). Also, Japan, unlike the Gaza Strip, had bomb shelters and air defenses, including sirens. There are not even air raid sirens in Gaza, there are no bomb shelters (tunnels are exclusively for fighters, as the group has publicly stated) and Hamas often prevents people from fleeing their homes.

I shouldn't have even bothered with this explanation, because your claim doesn't hold up anyway. Despite the above caveats, up to 900,000 people were killed in strategic bombing campaign against Japan. Out of 72 million, that's 1.25%.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I shouldn't have even bothered with this explanation, because your claim doesn't hold up anyway. Despite the above caveats, up to 900,000 people were killed in strategic bombing campaign against Japan. Out of 72 million, that's 1.25%.

Yep, and guess what 27,000 of 2.1 million is? Some amount of those 30% of adult men killed are combatants, so I suppose you're right. Using the high estimate of Japanese civilian deaths vs. current estimates of Palestinian civilian deaths, they're 'only' comparable instead of greater.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 10 months ago

I used high estimates for Japan in WW2, because that's what numbers released by Hamas are at the best of times if not totally made up. Remember when they claimed that Israel had bombed and flattened a small hospital, had a 500 dead number ready within hours, only for it to become clear from live TV footage on Al Jazeera of all stations it was a stray rocket from an affiliated group that, instead of hitting some random target in Israel, had hit the parking lot of that hospital? Al Jazeera then had the audacity to publish an "analysis" that claimed the rocket was shot down by the Iron Dome over Gaza, even though the rocket broke up during its boost phase. Iron Dome only intercepts rockets once they have used up their fuel and are on a predictable ballistic trajectory and they never do this over Gaza, because that's where those rockets with a failure rate of up to 20% are still in the boost phase.

According to Hamas, those 500 dead became 750, then 470, because apparently they are using an RNG. The 470 are still part of the total death toll that for some inexplicable reason is called reliable by far too many people and organizations that I once thought were trustworthy. That many people wouldn't fit into that small parking lot if they stood shoulder to shoulder. Hamas even doubled down that it was an Israeli bomb, had the audacity to claim that the rocket debris had "dissolved" when people were asking for an independent investigation.

I like to mention this particular example, because we have the receipts here, we can see exactly how Hamas' reporting of casualty figures works and we can clearly see it's bogus. It's not far-fetched to then have some serious doubts about the rest of their numbers.

Before you get angry with me: I'm not doubting that lots of people are getting killed in Gaza. I'm not denying that many if not the majority of them are civilians. What I have a problem with is trusting the terrorist organization that started this stupid war they have no chance in hell of winning to be even remotely reliable when they report their numbers, since they rely on psychological warfare, on creating international pressure on Israel through every dead Palestinian, real or not. I am revolted by people here and elsewhere uncritically citing these numbers, doing Hamas' propaganda work for them. Hell, so many of them are claiming that all of the dead Palestinians in Gaza or all but a few dozen are civilians, falling for the simple trick Hamas is using of not distinguishing between military and civilian casualties anymore.

Once these little lie have been accepted, widely shared until they are gospel and anyone critical of them gets tarred and feathered by a self-righteous outrage mob that thinks just because they are doing the noble thing and rooting for what they believe to be the plucky underdog fighting against "colonizers", they can't possibly be wrong, it's not that difficult to move on to the big lies from there, like that no Israeli civilians were harmed by Hamas on October 7 (which makes the Israeli response look that much more monstrous), that the hostages were treated well, that Hamas is fighting for the Palestinian cause instead of for a global Islamic caliphate and a second Holocaust.

[–] rockSlayer 13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Yea I'm sure those 10 thousand children were a real threat to Israel.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Yeah fuck Hamas for hiding behind those kids

[–] pjwestin 9 points 10 months ago

Yeah, what kind if monsters would use Palestinian children as human shields?

[–] Altofaltception 4 points 10 months ago

Israeli soldiers have worse aim than the stormtroopers in Star Wars - they can't shoot a grown man hiding behind a small child.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

Interesting how saying fuck Hamas is so controversial here

[+] Altofaltception -7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

It's because the Sudanese aren't white or white passing.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Pretty sure that's not the key difference here.

[–] Altofaltception 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Is it because an influential group's belief says that Israel winning in the middle east brings upon the rapture?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. I would've gone with a broader "Israel has influence over US politicians while Sudan does not", but that's the essence of it.

[–] Altofaltception 5 points 10 months ago

Evangelical Christians too, which is the direction I was going.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The largest demographic group in Israel, the Mizrahi, look indistinguishable from other Middle-Eastern people. You couldn't tell them apart from Palestinians or any other Arabs. Bringing American notions of race into this is a very foolish endeavor.

[–] Altofaltception 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Mizrahi being the largest demographic is a recent change. Ashkenazi have historically been the largest.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There used to be way more Ashkenazi Jews up until the 40s or so. I wonder what happened.

[–] Altofaltception -3 points 10 months ago

Not true either.

While the Israeli government does not track ethnicity of its Jewish population, many studies have been completed.

Ashkenazi Jews were historically the majority of Jews in Israel. However as immigration from European countries and the USSR increased, the demographics changed. The majority of French Jews are Sephardic and many Jews from the USSR are Mizrahi.

Of the 7 million Jewish Israelis, only 900,000 immigrated from the Arab world.

So a completely false narrative peddled by someone who clearly has an agenda.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

100%.