hashim

Came for this, thanks. I try everything I can not to read the Daily Heil, whose politics haven't really shifted that much since Harold Harmsworth used it to push his propaganda for Hitler.

That's a weirdly flippant response to what's a serious issue, but I'll give it the courtesy of a reply anyway - maybe not, but a business not making enough profit might go under, or they might only have to fire someone to prevent that from happening.

For businesses whose profit margins are already slim, which is most traditional businesses trading online, making less money than they usually would will put them into the red, and even for those that are still in profit, making less money than you usually would means you have less money to pay the expenses that you usually do, expenses that are predicated on you making a certain amount of revenue.

I'm guessing you're employed and your salary is guaranteed regardless. Would you have the same outlook if you were the self-employed founder of an online business and every minute of outage was costing you money?

Genuine question, are you an LLM bot or are typical Western liberals just this bad at reading comprehension? Everything I've written has already addressed your NPC-like "response" to it. Yes, they support Hamas and want a one-state solution, for the reasons spelled out to you in several paragraphs at length, to which your ultimate response was essentially "whatever idc Hamas does hostages that's aLl I nEeD tO KnoW". Since you've already decided that the little you already know is everything you'll ever need to know on the history of Palestine, and consider Oct 7 "beyond comprehension" but the countless examples of the same atrocities committed by Israelis since the 19th century elicited no such response, you are therefore both proudly ignorant and proudly racist, and should simply drop the act of pretending to care about Palestinians. But then I suppose that's the part of the liberal conceit that sets you apart from conservatives, that you have to at least feign sympathy so you can spend the next few decades behaving in the exact same way as they do. Because when it comes to Israel, the only real difference between right-left is in how much you need to pretend to care about occupied/dead brown people. I suggest you go back to doing what you know best, virtue-signalling about Ukrainian occupation and how much the Ukrainian people need to be saved from Russia.

Sure it is, the people that had been living there - Muslim, Jew and Christian - for almost a thousand years in relative harmony never actually existed and had no name or identidy whatsoever until Israel arrived in 1948 to give them one.

Is that what you see happening? Because I see most Western powers continuing to fund and enable Israel to act with impunity while reserving their harshest criticism for Hamas - the resistance movement set up in 1984, 40 years after Israel invaded Palestine, by the children who had grown up knowing nothing else. An occupier does not get to set the terms of how a desperate occupied people resist, least of all after 80 years, which was a lot longer than Vietnam lasted, and is much worse than South African apartheid. There's a reason Mandela was vehemently pro-Palestine. We can talk about how Hamas and the Palestinian people chose to resist their occupiers and hold them accountable for their relatively benign crimes once the occupation is ended. Right now, Westerners can't even admit that occupation exists, so we're nowhere near that, and virtually any criticism of Hamas is actually an attempt at deflection and maintaining the status quo of the last 80 years.

No, what it comes down to is whether you can admit that Palestine and Gaza are being occupied by a colonial power that doesn't have the right to be there, has consistently engaged in ethnic cleansing, genocide of entire villages and war crimes since its foundation, and that resistance to it will continue until that fact changes considerably. No-one living in a Western bubble, least of all Israel, gets to set the terms by which a people who Westerners have helped occupy for the last 70 years resist - just ask the Viet Cong. Whataboutism is the fallacy of pointing to irrelevant examples, so no, pointing out hypocrisy is not that. As for asymmetry, I assume you're talking about the fact that one is a heavily armed Western-funded superpower and the other is a handful of militias using the few arms they can get hold of from the only real ally they have in Iran, and not much stronger than they were in 1948 and 1967 when they were villagers being waged "war" on by said superpower.

You're right, that historical event of WWII involving at most 20,000 Arabs absolutely gave Europeans the right to occupy a land they have no link to and conduct a genocide killing hundreds of thousands and ethnically cleansing millions more. Wait, were the Irgun and Haganah time travellers who predicted this historical event? Is that why they started moving towards their goals of Zionist occupation, colonialism and terrorism in the 19th century?

What about this, does this make the Zionists anti-semitic too? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement It's almost like Zionists are closer in ideology to the Nazis than they want to admit.

You think Russia is a Western power and ally?

Yes, that can only have been the Arabs, as long as we ignore this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Plan and all subsequent Zionist programmes to fulfil the stated goal of Zionism since the 19th century, to import as many Jews as possible into Palestine to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population (Muslim, Jew, and Christian) living there for almost a thousand years.

Europeans are people, then and now, whose families have lived in European lands for hundreds of years, but believe they have the biblical right to "return" to a land they have no connection to and "settle on" (steal) the land and houses of Palestinians whose families have lived in those lands for almost a thousand years. This is common sense, and you know full well you would never entertain such a claim from a holy book of any other religion. No amount of semantic games and moving the goalposts changes this fact, or the fact that most "returning" Israelis were European Jews who changed their names to conceal that fact.

It's convenient that your knowledge of what "started" begins on October 7th and all the events of history prior since 1948 never happened, or you just don't care they did. Average Westerner knowledge of Western history, I understand.

Yes, they have consistently toppled governments, meddled in the affairs of other countries, and enabled and funded colonalism and imperialism wherever they went. Although the good news is that Israel is and will be the last true Western colonial state. Also, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just forgot the wars they themselves started, like Iraq over the lie that was WMD and the small matter of 500,000 dead Iraqis - I can assure you the Western governments involved have not condemned it, but they did give Blair a Nobel Peace Prize, so that's something.

Your last sentence is laughable and too historically ignorant to bother responding to, but since its AI-generated I thankfully don't need to give it that courtesy.

Has Sudan also been going on 70 years with the help of the Brits and active funding of the Americans, then? Have hundreds of thousands died in any country and even more expelled (ethnically cleansed) in the world since 1948 apart from Palestine? No? Then your whataboutism is childish and your deflection is obvious.

Yes, antisemitism, in the same way it was anti-Americanism for the Viet Cong to resist the American occupation of Vietnam and that famous terrorist Mandela to resist apartheid South Africa. Desperate people who have heinous things done on them for 70 years do desperate, heinous things, and no-one is more desperate and more wronged than the Palestinians. Again, 70 years. It's almost like Europeans don't belong in the Middle East. Remind me what Netanyahu's real name is again? Also, since I'm sure you wouldn't want to be intellectually dishonest, I'm sure you no doubt equally agree that any criticism of Saudi Arabia, if it were doing anything remotely as heinous as Israel has for the last 70 years, would be Islamophobia, right? Right?

Fair enough, that particular kibbutz is not military, but most in the vicinity around Gaza were, and as I'm sure you know, the killed hostages along with most adult Israelis were either serving or former members of the IDF, the army of the occupying state that was formed by the merging of the Irgun and Haganah and still shares much of the same people and ideologies.

Yes, both of those kids were killed by Israel as clearly stated in your link, along with many others, because Netanyahu preferred carpet bombing as many Gazans as possible and didn't care whether it included hostages.

So standing soldiers of the occupying army taken from a military kibbutz mere miles from the world's largest open air concentration camp? Hind al-Rajab was 6 years old and was found with hundreds of bullets inside her body. This is not a game Israel can afford to play, so let's just rewind to the beginning and ask how many the Irgun and Haganah killed and bombed to strong-arm the British into giving them Palestine? Or we can skip ahead a few decades and start here: https://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Palestinian_expulsion_and.... It's almost like Europeans have no business occupying the Middle East.

Or worse, shipped to Guantanamo Bay/Bagram Prison, where the US can do whatever they want even to US citizens because they're no longer in US jurisdiction.

The distinction is consent, and it's a pretty big one, because it's the difference between Microsoft sharing it among their services (they don't need to sell it to themselves) for the reasons outlined in the EULAs, and companies that aren't Microsoft using it for whatever reason they want. You can be assured they're following the EULAs because the consequences of not doing so would make them vulnerable to millions if not billions in fines if only one sufficiently motivated individual, like an ex-employee, leaked the evidence. More targeted (i.e. relevant) ads are really not the evil many make them out to be. Ads in a paid product are also not quite evil, but they are incredibly idiotic and a step backwards. Either way, makes no difference to me because at this rate it seems my next OS will be a Windows-like Linux distro anyway.

At least, not without the Palestinians being virtually wiped out, cause that's how long we'll be waiting for Israel to do the right thing. We don't even know for sure how many are dead, but the vast majority of deaths during genocides are counted after it's over, least of all when there's so much rubble and so many whole families have been wiped out.

What part don't you understand? EVERYONE is Hamas, including the several kids that Western doctors have testified to being hit by snipers, and the little girl named Hind Rajab that they shot 300 bullets into. And the hospitals? Crawling with Hamas.

The answer is simple - racism, same reason the Brits gave them the land in the first place when they knew it already had brown people on it that had been living there for almost a thousand years. How many deaths did it take for most Westerners and Western governments to start caring about Ukraine and start moving towards action? Barely a handful if any. How many deaths has Israel racked up since 1948 while the self-appointed human rights arbiters of the world wring their hands and say it's just not quite genocide yet?

You're right, I was operating on the assumption this was the last of their ties before I'd properly read the article and looked into the issue, unfortunately it looks like it's still on the boycott list until they actually divest from Israeli military at the least. Apple is therefore not as unethical as the genocide-enabling companies (and isn't one of them to the best of my knowledge), but it's still far more unethical than most people in tech tend to acknowledge - their pricing practices are akin to price-gouging, including 2-3x markup on like-for-like hardware and locking you into their own accessories before the EU forced them to standardise, and the whole "walled garden" ecosystem was never anything but an excuse to limit what consumers can do with their software/hardware. They almost single-handedly raised the prices of mobile phones for the vast majority of people because other manufacturers saw what their consumers were letting them get away with. And that's before we even get started on the sweatshops.

So in your warped logic, the few thousand combined killed by all of the groups you named are more evil than the 60,000 killed by Israel (likely 100,000+ after Israel finally lets the UN in) and the true cost of the genocide can be calculated. Also, Israel just accidentally ended up with a collateral damage rate of 50%, just like several medical doctors have attested to it accidentally sniping tens of kids and people waiting for aid, and accidentally shooting 300 bullets into the vehicle holding Hind Rajab. I suggest you wake up and start moving toward the right side of history, along with the UN, Amnesty International, Oxfam and virtually every other major human rights organisation, because very soon it'll be too late and history isn't going to forget active enablers and propagandists like yourself.

I'm sure the Gazan friends you spoke to will be overjoyed you had face-to-face conversations with them before going online to advocate for their genocide, and that those conversations you had make them clearly savage enough to justify said genocide.

Are you really so wrapped up in your tech bubble in Tel Aviv that you can believe that? Here's some reading on a story even I knew off from the top of my head: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/feb/28/ethiopian-wome.... And here's the rest of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Israel. Israel is easily the most racist "Western" country in the world, ahead of even the modern US. Hmm, maybe a genocide against Israelis would actually be justified because Israelis are just racist savages that think black people should be forcibly sterilised against their will?

No, it's just been so isolated that only Israel can control who and what goes in and out, to the point NGOs have described it for decades as the world's biggest open air concentration camp. I don't condone the horrible things Hamas did (that were actually proven and not later disproven hasbara, like the rapes), but I'm also not arrogant enough to tell an occupied people how they should be resisting their occupiers, especially when the target is a military outpost (which is essentially what the kibbutz was) mere miles from Gaza and being used as a base largely by standing members of the IDF and their families (i.e. the occupying force). Desperate people take desperate measures, who knew? The Irgun and Haganah probably should have thought about that before they violently persuaded the British into giving them a "homeland" that already had a people - including Jews and Christians - living in relative peace on it for almost a thousand years.

Sure, that must be why the very text of the Balfour Declaration specifies "Palestine" and why coins from the 19th century have been proven to show the same. I'm afraid the hasbara isn't gonna work anymore.

So the problem is that you don't believe Palestinians are on their "own turf", because Israel "legally" won it from the villagers there in 1948 after having the British install them to it. Got it. Once again, the Palestinian homeland is exactly where the kibbutz (which is a military camp and outpost) was, mere miles from Gaza, and all of the people involved were actively standing members of the IDF (i.e. the occupying army akin to the Americans in Vietnam). You keep calling it a terrorist attack while appearing completely clueless that it's a largely meaningless political term. We considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist while he was locked up for 30 years, and for the UK at least he was only removed from that list in 2013.

No, the Palestinian narrative for those of us actually knowledgeable of history has not changed since 1948. As for Israel being consistent - how are those hostages doing? Cause it definitely doesn't care about any of them now (those it hasn't killed itself), and Netanyahu and others in the cabinet have admitted they want to occupy the land once more.

I'm not American, but you must be if you think racism magically stops outside of America. The racism most Americans and Zionists have towards brown people and the Islamophobia they have towards Muslims are some of their most prejudiced, and at least equal to any form of anti-Semitism you've ever experienced, but for some reason, you only believe in one of those. To be clear, "brown people" don't have to be "brown" just like black people aren't all black, it's a generic term that indicates a rough place of origin, and the point that you're clearly trying to obscure is that racism towards Palestinians is still racism no matter what colour they actually are.

Unrelated, I knew I recognised that name, thank you for everything you do, I've made a few commits to T4P myself in the last few months and can't imagine the regular work that must go into it.