this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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Who has killed more civilians?
By multiple orders of magnitude?
This is like "Man, I don't like the sun and light bulbs, they're both so bright."
Ideally I don't think any civilian deaths should happen, so they're both wrong. I'm not going to say Hamas is somehow better because they killed fewer people. To me that seems like saying "oh you didn't kill too many people, that's fine then". Which would be completely wrong in my view.
They also don't have systemized rape and torture camps paid for with your taxes.
By any quantitative value system, Hamas commits less evil than the state of Israel
Comparing them is as useful as comparing the relative brightness between the sun and a lightbulb. The two sides are not comparable. One is committing genocide. Trying to gloss over that fact is propaganda trying to cover up the fact that we're paying for the weapons doing the killing.
Yeah I'm not into the whole "let's excuse Hamas" thing. In my view killing civilians is bad, which is why I think both Hamas and the Israeli government are bad. Neither should kill civilians at all - not 1, not 100, not 1,000, etc.
Good job responding to something I didn't say to try and discredit what I did.
Don't think that goes unnoticed.
I'm not excusing Hamas. The fact that you read what I did says that you are either responding in bad faith, didn't read my response very carefully, or are stupid. I'll go with the middle one to be generous.
I don't excuse Hamas. I don't control Hamas, and much more importantly, I don't pay for the weapons that Hamas use.
I pay, or rather my country pays, for the weapons that Israel uses to bomb apartment building, schools, and hospitals.
Hamas has killed somewhere between 1000-2000 civilians in this conflict, and that is being generous because we know that a large number of causalities were from Israel enacting the Hannibal directive and intentionally killing their own to keep them from being made prisoners (If Israel gets to grab 11,400 West Bank civilians without trial or due process and call them prisoners, then Hamas gets to do the same). Furthermore, if we count anyone who was in the IDF or the IDF's military reserves as active military, then the number of civilians goes WAAAAY down. Remember that the IDF considers the trashmen, police, and hospital administrators as active combatants with Hamas affiliation. So, once again, if that is the standard that Israel is setting then it applies to all parties, including Israelis.
Israel, by all best estimates, has killed somewhere between 100,000-200,000 civilians. That is between 5% - 10% of the ENTIRE POPULATION OF GAZA. In all honesty, the number is probably higher.
That is completely ignoring the systemized rape and torture camps that Israel has set up, and the Israeli media discovered. Also, something that there is no evidence that Hamas has set up.
Acting like those two numbers are equivalent, or pointing out that Israel is quantitatively a minimum of 2 orders of magnitude worse, or that the two sides are the same is either stupidity, or evil. Take your pick.
None of this is justifying Hamas. It is pointing out how much more fantastically, cartoonishly fucking evil the Israeli government is.
You should ask yourself why you view the above as justifying Hamas. You might discover something.
The fact that you seem so upset with me saying that killing civilians is bad no matter who does it implies to me that you think it's fine when some people do it. Or that it's fine as long as they don't kill too many people.
You're extremely stupid.
I'm upset that you want to equate ~1000 to ~150000. And it is extremely stupid to think that it won't be noticed that you think pointing out the disparity between those numbers is the same thing as defending Hamas. Why is that? You still didn't answer that. Almost like you're afraid to address that. At least have the courage of your beliefs.
By the standard of 'civilians have been killed' every country ever involved in a war is equally evil, which is occipitally not true.
"Killing is fine as long as your numbers aren't too high"
It's just a dumb take isn't it.
Edit: you'll try to say "that's not what I'm saying" but it's what you're suggesting, by saying that Hamas are somehow more moral. What I'm suggesting is that maybe they're both bad. Also, if Hamas had the same amount of weaponry that Israel has, do we really think Hamas would hold back?
I think the ICJ was correct to want to bring the leaders of Israel and Hamas to trial for war crimes. I don't think it makes sense to give one side a pass, or say they're better, when both have killed many innocent people who didn't deserve death.