US warship and multiple commercial ships attacked in the Red Sea
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Thank you to the U.S. soldiers and all others who risk their lives to allow us in the west to live in relative peace.
During much of this unstable history Jews occupied this land and for some of it were killed or enslaved en masse.
There never was a coherent Palestinian state, it was completely understandable for Jews to want their own state here after one of the more successful attempts at genocide orchestrated by Hitler and the third Reich, and many if not most Jews would gladly live in peace alongside Palestinians, while they elect Hamas, who according to their own charter will not stop until Israel is destroyed:
"Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it."
To be clear, it is an absolute tragedy what innocent Palestinians are suffering as a result of the terrorists in charge are doing. Those monsters livestreamed their war crimes and hold innocent Palestinians hostage as human shields. They teach their children to hate Jews and shoot AK-47s. They divert international aid money from their poor to build tunnels.
If Hamas stops there is peace. If Israel stops there is no Israel.
People have immigrated constantly throughout history from place to place. Many palestinians bare the names of their 19th-18th century origins. Last names such as "Al-Masri" (The Egyptian), "Halabi" (Of the city of Haleb in Syria) are very common, to name a few.
The tragedy here, is the continued refusal of the palestinian leadership during the 1940s to accept any partition of the land, which led to a catastrophic result on their part. Had they accepted the 1947 partition plan, Israel and Palestine could have been a free, peaceful countries.
It would be a rather absurd plan to cleanse a territory in which you are not only a minority, but also surrounded by Arab countries which were pretty adamant about refusing to accept the jewish state.
In practice, what had happened is that the jews accepted the partition plan. The reason the arabs didn't accept it, is because they simply wanted it all to themselves, not because they feared ethnic cleansing.
Using the term "settler" or "Colonializm" to characterize jewish immigration to Israel is racist and antisemite. As I mentioned, Arabs immigrated en-masse to the land of Israel throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, yet you refer to them as natives.
"Other historians assert... " is hardly an evidence. More like an opinion. In truth, Israel today has more than 2 million Arab citizens.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...
"[Israel] will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
Compared to Hamas:
"The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
'The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"
Do you really wish for Islamic terrorists to succeed in their stated goal of Jewish genocide? If you were a woman or ethnic/religious minority, which country in the Middle East would be more hospitable than Israel?
Such as genocide? Like, actually murdering 15 thousand civilians, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-ham...? How many did the “terrorists” kill?
> While downing the first drone – believed to be launched by the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen – [the destroyer USS] Carney saw a ballistic missile land near MV Unity Explorer, a Bahamian-flagged bulk carrier. The destroyer then sailed to the bulk carrier once it put out a distress call. According to an initial account of the incident, several hours later, Carney was evaluating the damage to the carrier when it shot down another drone.
This time we seem to be trying to de-escalate and not trying to pull them into a larger war.
Not that Israel and Saudi Arabia would hate to see the military capability of Tehran neutralized…
It’s truly weird how much I see this mindless comment exactly duplicated with zero context.
Context: the Iranian Navy consisted of very few ships.
Because according to wikipedia- 5 Iranian ships were sunk during Operating Praying Mantis
Only one of the five vessels (the frigate) lost would typically be called a "ship".
They are also protecting commercial civilian ships being targeted. China has warships there too and they didn't bother.
Houthi are going after Israeli stuff anyway and only targeting the US because they completely neuter their capabilities. If the US isn't there missiles will still be flying over the Red Sea and civilian ships being hijacked.
Wouldn't the presence of US naval vessels in the area indicate that it's not a surprise?
Another comment said that shipping lane is used by other nations' vessels too, but the Houthi are specifically targeting Israeli ships (and by extension their American defenders, but only because we choose to be involved).
Ships from all sorts of countries sail the world, but it's not an innocent coincidence that ours are routinely targeted by Israel's enemies...
It's silly for us to play the victim when we put ourselves in harm's way specifically to defend Israel against these threats. It's like sailing through the Taiwan Strait with a carrier group and acting surprised when it annoys China.
We use our force projection to play global police, but then turn around and pretend like we're innocent... we're far from it. These are self-inflicted casualties because we're picking sides.
Sure, I agree with you there—although Israel isn't at war with the Houthi rebels. Again, the Houthi are fighting the Yemeni government and the Saudis. Although "Death to Israel" is part of their charter, so there is that.
> It's silly for us to play the victim when we put ourselves in harm's way specifically to defend Israel against these threats.
I don't know that we're playing the victim here; our ships are clearly there to do exactly what it is that they're doing. Overall it's probably a net win for us—we get practice in anti-drone warfare.
Because of USSR
> inserting ourselves into these volatile conflict zones?
Because America was protecting those nations/regimes who allied with America against USSR
> We keep doing that and then acting surprised when we get caught in the crossfire
Because American former allies started to fight against each other, and not USSR
De-escalation seems like the right move here.
By all accounts Iran has many reasons to view the U.S.A as a violent oppressor. Personally I disagree with many parts of the ideology the Iranian regime is pushing. But comparing that situation to Nazi Germany and ww2 is very misguided and uninformed. I'd argue the closest to wide scale genocide that I'm aware of was recently in Ethiopia in the Tigray. Right after the President had received a nobel peace price. And we didn't see the U.S.A lift a finger. Viewing the military campaigns as bringing freedom and "western" values to savages is the kind of provably false propaganda the US military wants you to believe.
Hamas wouldn’t exist if not for continued Israeli occupation and genocide.
Against who? Some guys in the the Yemeni desert? Saudis have been trying that for years.
Without turning this into a regional, all-out war, how do we respond? Now if something like the USS Cole attack happens it will be out of our hands, we'll have to respond and damn the consequences, but until then we'll probably do things covertly.
If you have some sources talking about how how the US can't launch a regional conflict I'd love to see them.
The two major regional contingency capability (which was not a strategy, but a principal notionally underlying national security strategies for a couple decades) was concocted in 1993 as, basically, political cover for massive defense cuts -- that is, it was saying "despite the cuts, we will retain this capacity" -- and was very quickly recognized as a largely fictitious capability [0] especially as the US fought major regional contingencies after that point and it was clear that it could at most prosecute one effectively and be prepared to engage in a holding action elsewhere [1], even when "major" was much smaller scale than war with Russia or China, and was formally abandoned in 2012.
[0] Part of why this recognition was because the formal documents outlining the concept and how the capacity would be met had caveats which indicated that it wasn't really a capacity to fight two MRCs effectively and simultaneously.
[1] "Win one, hold one" was described as the likely best-case actual capacity years before the overlap of Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts concretely demonstrated the lack of genuine two-MRC capability against much less capable foes than Russia/China.
"Another"? The US has neither launched nor is it fighting a major regional war now.
Maybe this is just their retaliation. This self rightousnes ... as if the us main land was bombed.
Terrorists can not retaliate, at least not rightfully. They can gtfo of Yemen though.
Here are some things worth considering:
1. US support for Israel by itself creates negative sentiment and blowback in the Middle East. This is actually by design. The US seeks to destabilize the Middle East. It's one of America's "unsinkable aircraft carriers" [1] but it's more than that. Biden is on record as saying "If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one." [2];
2. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are also of key strategic importance to the US. Turkey is in NATO and is a key force against Syria, Iraq and Iran. The US placing nuclear missiles on Turkish territory also instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis; Saudi Arabia is a key counter to Iran's influence in the region;
3. US arms were used with the blessing of the US in a genocide in Yemen against these same Houthi rebels. The point here is that the Houthis have their own reasons to be mad against both Saudi Arabia and the US that have nothing to do with Iran;
4. Iran is not an irrational actor. They seek both to counter US influence in the region and increase their own influence. They're doing nothing that the US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia aren't guilty of doing. Iran is used a bogeyman by US propaganda to deflect away from atrocities committed by the US and its allies in the region. Iran wants normalization of relations but won't become a client state to do it. Nor should they have to. Let's not forget, the US played a huge role in the creation of the fundamentalist government of Iran by supporting the 1953 coup.
It seems like the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia have no concept of the idea of blowback. Committing and supporting genocide is always going to have huge negative consequences.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsinkable_aircraft_carrier
[2]: https://theconversation.com/biden-says-the-u-s-would-have-to...
Lets not down value the meaning of Genocide. There’s not a genocide ongoing in Gaza or Yemen.
War sucks, and the civilian casualties are roughly in line with other conflicts. You do realize significantly more civilians have died per militant death in ww2, Vietnam, Korea, Mosul, afghan/iraq, etc? The Israel-Gaza conflict has a fairly low Civilian-casualty ratio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio