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yes_really

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You selectively quoted the comment in your reply, leaving out some crucial information in order to set up a straw man argument.

You are wrong again. I quoted the comment as "he wouldn't take their word as to whom they're fighting" to highlight how the comment is denying that Israel is fighting terrorism. It is quite simple. There is no crucial information to be left out. Also it doesn't make sense to call that a "straw man argument" given that I simply repeated his comment and highlighted why it was absurd.

I just helpfully pointed this out to you, because ...

Oh yeah, you were so helpful!

If you are arguing in good faith, why are you not reading what you are arguing about

I literally just rebuked you for falsely accusing me of arguing in bad faith. You now falsely accuse me of failing to read.

I obviously read the comment. I literally quoted the comment in my reply.

You are wrong. My question was not "in bad faith". It is unfortunate but multiple people really do believe that it is bad that Israel is able to detect and stop terrorism through technology. There are multiple comments even in this post that openly support terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Instead of assuming you can read my mind and falsely accuse me of saying stuff in bad faith, it would be better if you weren't so arrogant.

To your other point, I called it a bizarre conspiracy theory because it is in fact a quite bizarre conspiracy theory! The comment didn't say that Israel was using the facial recognition for doing X in addition to stopping terrorism. It simply denied that it was even being used to stop terrorism at all ("would not take their word as to whom they're fighting").

Again, that's a completely bizarre conspiracy theory. There has been an immense amount of terrorism against Israel (and it would have been much more without Israeli intelligence). If that happened in any country there would be a huge intelligence effort to stop that terrorism and it would be natural and justified. Compare to e.g. what the US did when it suffered 9/11 (why do we need to take our shoes off at airport security?). Yet for the case of Israel the comment implies that somehow all the terrorism doesn't matter, the Israeli people don't care about suffering terrorist attacks multiple times larger than 9/11 and a constant threat to be genocided if another October 7th turns into a full war. What the Israeli Jews really did, according to that comment, is to just pretend to fight terrorism ("would not take their word as to whom they're fighting"), to fight some mysterious thing instead! Do you not realize how that's absurd?

Unfortunately there is an unimaginable amount of ignorance on the internet so I think it's good to be very explicit about even the most basic things. I would also reply if it were some other insane comment saying that e.g. the Holocaust didn't happen or that "Hitler was right".

Now can you be explicit about what you are implying? You are implying that I found the comment persuasive. If I chastised some absurd comment saying that the Holocaust didn't happened or that "Hitler was right", would you say that implies I actually think those things are true?

If the "carnage" was so well "documented", then it'll be quite easy for you to provide proof. Do you have any proof at all that Israel engages in systematic *terrorism* (i.e. "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims")?

Again, I'm not talking about collateral casualties in valid military strikes. I'm talking about sustained, deliberate attacks against civilians with the objective of killing as many civilians as possible. Do you have any evidence at all that Israel did this?

Then anything I say about the right of the invaded and occupied to resist occupation under international law will land on deaf ears.

There is absolutely no part of international law that allows terrorism from Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, or Houthis to "resist occupation".

And it is really quite worrisome how you are openly supporting terrorism.

Completely bizarre how you are equating killing Hezbollah combatants (a terrorist group known for indiscriminately firing tens of thousands of rockets targeting civilians) with the Nazis exterminating millions of (obviously peaceful) Jewish people simply for being Jews.

The original comment was "To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?", and the reply said he wouldn't "take their word as to whom they're fighting".

I asked if the person was denying that Israel intelligence seeks to detect and stop terrorism from those major terrorist groups and from individual terrorists. How on earth is this a "bad faith argument"?

I heard many bizarre conspiracy theories about Jewish people. But this one, I can't even understand what you mean.

To be clear, do you deny that there are multiple terrorist groups targeting civilians in Israel such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and multiple individuals who attacked civilians indiscriminately with bombs, knives and guns?

Do you deny that Israel uses its intelligence services to detect and stop these terrorist attacks?

Also love the refusal to even agree that words have meaning. You put scare quotes around 'terrorism'. Are you saying that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and a series of small terrorist groups, and a series of individuals did not commit terrorists attacks in Israel?

Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." - are you saying exploding bombs, knife attacks, and firing rockets indiscriminately against civilians is not terrorism?

When you end apartheid, you end 'terrorism'

Your theory has really not been borne out by reality.

Somehow Hamas committed October 7th and has fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately into Israel since Gaza was given in its entirety to the arabs.

Somehow Iran has been financing and arming multiple terrorist groups even though it obviously is its own country far away from Israel.

Somehow Hezbollah has fired tens of thousands of rockets at civilians as well.

Somehow the Houthis have been committing terrorism sa well and their flag is literally "God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel".

Yeah, I'm sure if Israel just stopped all the security measures on the West Bank, all terrorism would stop!

Oh, I don't think the US should just topple all dictatorships!

If the US could press a button and have all dictatorships automatically become stable, liberal democracies, I'm pretty sure they would do that and we'd all be happy.

But the US cannot just topple the government of all dictatorships at once. If it tried that, it would just cause immense chaos, and all those countries would unite against the West.

The US has to ally with some dictatorships against other dictatorships, like it did with the USSR against the Nazis and how it does with Saudi Arabia against Iran.

Iran hates us since the Islamic Revolution (when we supported the Shah), and finances multiple terrorist groups such as Hesbollah, Hamas and the Houthis. Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship, but at least it's not a revisionist state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionist_state) and has a more peaceful objective towards its neighbors.

If the US refused to ally with dictatorships, the only country in the entire Middle East that it could ally with is Israel. It would have to fight all other countries at once.

The US should not be the decider of who stays in power on another country.

As opposed to what? Who "should" be the decider? China? Russia? Maduro? The Venezuelan Military?

The alternative is not that Venezuelans choose who stays in power democratically. The alternative, as we just saw until now, is that the Maduro dictatorship maintains power through force.

> It’s bad because it overrides society’s determinations about which foreigners to allow into the country and how many.

No it doesn't. What if I want more foreigners? What if I want people to come here?

Then that's your preference, that's not society's determination! We theoretically live in a democracy. Policy should be determined by the Rule of Law determined democratically, not by @ivraatiems's preference.

> The Nazis prioritized the killing of Jewish people, sometimes even over war objectives [...] > Do you think Israel engaged in this kind of campaign to kill as many people as possible of any ethnicity?

Yes.

You just said Israel engaged in campaigns of trying to kill as many Gazans as possible just like the Nazis did with Jewish people. Do you have any evidence at all of this? We live in the most information-rich era in history. Do you have an evidence AT ALL for this? Again, not a military campaign with military objectives that accepts more civilian casualties than what you'd like, but a systematic campaign with the OBJECTIVE of killing as many Gazans as possible?

It is bizarre how you can be at the same time so arrogant and so wrong. If Israel were trying to "exterminate as many Palestinians as possible", Israel would simply perform semi-indiscriminate bombings in the wake of October 7th. This would kill many more Palestinians and would spend much less geopolitical capital. Instead, Israel spent two years performing a very targeted military campaign against Hamas. This resulted in many FEWER civilian casualties (in fact, it had a much LOWER rate of civilians-by-combatants casualties than average urban wars).

The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible, with a total of 6 million Jewish people murdered. They prioritized the killing of Jewish people, sometimes even over war objectives (as evidenced by letters where trains were used to facilitate the murder of Jewish people instead of transporting war supplies). Do you think Israel engaged in this kind of campaign to kill as many people as possible of any ethnicity?

The Gaza population has been increasing and almost doubled since Israel ceded the territory in 2005. Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties when hitting valid military targets. Israel announces beforehand where targets will be hit, even though this obviously gives advantages to the enemy. Israel even just cancels their attacks if the civilian casualties would be too high. The ratio of civilians-by-combatants casualties in the Gaza war has been much lower than other wars in the urban environment.

This is a disgusting comment. There exists no parallel here. The nazis engaged in a systematic, colossal campaign to exterminate as many Jewish people as possible. You are saying that this is somehow equivalent to Israel simply existing. Iran became hostile to Israel and to the US in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution.

Also, the US entered WWII because of Pearl Harbor, and engaged in a normal war against the Axis. Iran engages in terrorism by financing and arming terrorist groups that perform terrorist attacks on civilians. The US action in WWII defeated the nazis. The actions of the Iranian dictatorship caused deaths and terrors targeted at civilians in other countries and destroyed the lives of its own people in Iran.