Comment by shihab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shihab | Hacker News Reader

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Oh, I trust them alright-

+ "We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba" - Agricultural Minister of Israel.

+ “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly...We will eliminate everything - they will regret it" - Yoav Gallant, Defence Minister.

+ "dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip an option" - Heritage Minister.

+ "Nakba? Expel them all,” Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker for Israel’s parliament.

+ "There will be no electricity and no water (in Gaza), there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell." Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian.

+ "only solution left is "voluntary" evacuation of Gazans to countries around the world" - Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

+ "If it [Hezbollah] makes mistakes of this kind, the ones who will pay the price are first of all the citizens of Lebanon. What we are doing in Gaza we know how to do in Beirut," - Yoav Gallant, Defence Minister.

+ "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember" - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (that verse goes on to command King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel)

Please don't cross into pursuing battle in this thread. Your comment here has started to do that. Your previous two comments seem fine:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38619033

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38618814

(I hope this helps a bit in terms of making the distinction.)

I've explained at the top of the thread, and in a bunch of other posts, why this matters and what we're asking for here.

I've seen this list many times.

Firstly, some of it was taken out of context.

That said, some of the statements there are appalling, and I detest many of these politicians and condemn these statements. Some of the statements were widely panned, btw. Luckily, the worst of these politicians aren't the ones actually calling the shots (except Netanyahu).

Lastly, and most importantly - these lists have gone around many times, and they are bad, but they are also wartime propoganda. I find it far more relevant to see these statements in a broader context - the vast majority of statements that most of these politicans have made are explicitly against this idea.

That doesn't make these statements less heinous, but if politicians are saying 99 statements along the lines of "we only target terrorists and are doing our best to protect civilians", and 1 time out of 100 say the opposite, it's the 1 statement that makes the rounds for months, without any reference to the fact that it might be retracted, and/or 99% of the time the statements go the other way.

You can choose to insist on only believing the bad statements, because those "show what they really think" or something, but that's again dragging your personal view of Israel into it.

The IDF left premature babies to rot after forcing doctors away at gunpoint.

No one in the Israeli government seems to have felt bad about that.

The IDF, with the full backing of the Israeli and US governments, are murdering thousands and thousands of children, then saying things like "well you can't trust Hamas' numbers".

They're targeting journalists and poets. They're targeting historic buildings. They're targeting refugee camps and humanitarian corridors. More UN workers have been murdered than in any other conflict, ever.

That's the context I interpret the above statements in, and I don't know how those facts can be looked over.

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