Social media platform X suffers global outages
bbc.com
bbc.com
funny - trending where exactly?
(That's what he meant, right, with the bathroom-sink thing? I'm slow to catch on sometimes.)
https://bsky.app/profile/jaz.bsky.social/post/3kh2253dzi22s (https://skyview.social/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile... if you don't have an account)
Germany did something similar in dealing with Covid. Everyone not in line with the officially accepted narrative was attacked, ridiculed, smeared. I started discussions with "although I have been vaccinated", to have permission to speak.
The conflict started and due to the scale of the Hamas attack and the German government supporting Israel due to its historic connection it is Israel focused.
That's what I get from the media landscape.
"Attacks on intellectuals" is I guess giving them prizes, while they can do comparisons between a military exterminating a terrorist organisation that uses civilian infrastructure to attack Israel and its military and systematic murder of millions.
As a Jewish person I’m very happy there is at least an attempt to protect me from hate in this country.
Btw: Israel is currently governed by an ultra-right fascist government with members like Ben Gvir (convicted terrorist), Smotrich, and the likes. They have incited pogroms (says the IDF) or have openly called for annexing all of West Bank. So criticism of this government is--according to IHRA--antisemtic.
What is antisemitic: "Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust." "Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor." "Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel."
What can be used as a guidance: "Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with conspiring to harm humanity, and it is often used to blame Jews for “why things go wrong.” It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and action, and employs sinister stereotypes and negative character traits."
Are you reading this differently than I do? This doesn’t anywhere say you can’t criticise Israel.
But the point is that no one would criticise another country that protects its people against brutal massacre, hostage capture and constant (over 9000 rockets in the last 2 months) rocket fire saying the military action is "genocide", for example. It is not genocide, and unlike most other countries, I assume (maybe if Finland or New Zealand had to protect themselves I imagine), it provides humanitarian routes and drops leaflets with safety advice, calls civilians etc. and then Hamas uses these humanitarian areas and prevents the people from moving to the safer areas. And demanding "cease fire", calling this genocide, or simply chanting "from the river to the sea" is all 100% antisemitic.
Please, I encourage you to take a good long moment to think about what you just wrote. You are effectively saying that it is the Jewish position that Gazans should be killed. 1% of Gazans are already dead. Do you mean to say that Jews who call for a ceasefire, like many I know do, are antisemites?
What are you saying? It is pretty clear what I mean no?
What gives you the right to call me antisemite? You don't know anything about me. The intellectuals I have listed are jewish intellectuals (Ilan Pappe, Candice Breitz, Masha Gessen, Deborah Feldman, and many others). They too are antisemites?
You are very typical for the discussions going on in Germany. Attack anyone that deviates from the mainstream narrative.
If you think critizing Israel is critizing you as a Jew, that's a you problem, not a problem of Jewish people. I know plenty of anti-Zionist and Bundist Jews who will happily condemn the continued mass killings of Palestinians. The blood Hamas spilled has been repaid several times over with the blood of Gazan children alone.
"even" the BBC that refuses to call Hamas terrorists?
I will listen to other countries talking when they are faced with rocket fire from civilan objects, while their citizens are held hostage. I’d listen to what Ukraine has to say, for example.
Using language such as "IDF murdered Israeli hostages" is plain antisemitic, like so many similar small things. For what is the definition of "murder" – it’s "the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another." So you are saying that in the heat of the battle, while Hamas operatives are constantly using speakers with calls for help in Hebrew recorded (https://www.ynetnews.com/article/rj0qiptia) and are attacking without wearing uniform (breaking the law of war with just that already), the soliders "murdered" Israeli hostages. That is the perfect example of the antisemitic approach to discussing this conflict.
This isn't specific to Israel/Hamas, the BBC avoid a lot of emotive and loaded language.
Israel is outright starving the population of Gaza, as a means of war tactics, which is illegal according to Geneva Conventions. That’s what the defence minister Gallant said after his speech in October: „these are human animals. We will cut water, food, electricity, fuel“.
The US was widely criticized for its military's civilian death toll during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the occupations thereafter. Rightfully so, in my opinion. But the US military - like most state militaries - had explicit limits and for every target the US military command defined the acceptable number of casualties. You wouldn't bomb a busy market with families and children to kill one Taliban soldier for example.
Israel also has rules of engagement and limits on civilian casualties. The difference is that if the US had used the same numbers during its occupations, Iraq and Afghanistan would be depopulated. And any US soldiers doing what is permissible in the IDF would be court martialed.
> This is a war, Israel is not responsible for the Palestinian population beyond following the rules of war, which they are.
The rules don't apply to Israel (nor the United States for that matter - nor Russia): https://asp.icc-cpi.int/states-parties
Also
> Israel has every right to do everything within its power to stop them.
This contradicts the idea that they have to "follow the rules of war", whatever that is supposed to refer to. You can either claim they're adhering to whatever international laws, treaties or conventions you think they're adhering to or that they're allowed to do whatever is in their power. These two claims are mutually incompatible.
Also
> This is a war
What is? When did the war start? October 7? Was it not a war when Hamas was launching rockets before October 7 and the IDF were bombing civilian buildings they declared to be "used by Hamas"? Who are the sides of this war? Israel and Hamas? Then WTF do you call what's happening in the Westbank? Also you do realize that "Hamas" is both a terrorist group and the official administration of Gaza (and that it was "elected" two decades ago and there haven't been elections since and most people in Gaza were either not born or not old enough to vote at the time)? And you're aware that there are other Islamist terrorist groups operating within Gaza such as the Muslim Brotherhood and that Hamas has no control over them (i.e. is unable to negotiate ceasefires on their behalf)? Heck, what is the goal of the war?
According to Netanyahu, Israel wants to end Hamas and any threat to Israelis once and for all. This not only mirrors the rhetoric he used against Hezbollah (before withdrawing from the war in Lebanon) but is also completely open ended and undefined. At least when the US invaded Afghanistan they had an explicit end state (ousting the Taliban) - as insufficient as that goal turned out to be when they exited (and the Taliban returned). Heck, even Russia had a clearly defined goal when invading Ukraine (several, actually, some contradictory but most of them very much well-defined and not open ended).
Israeli state media and Israeli politicians have at numerous times framed this "war" as an ethnic cleansing (i.e. removing Palestinians from Gaza and expelling them from the territory of Israel). I guess at least that's a well-defined goal with a clear end state compared to Netanyahu's rhetoric.
If you think that criticising Israel is making you look good because it is now fashionable to have an opinion on things you don’t have personal involvement with, then you are wrong, and your demonising comments are making the world a worse, less-safe space.
It's horrible that Israelis live under constant threat and the 1200 victims of the Hamas attacks on October 7th should be mourned. But it's hard to feel mournful for Israelis when Israel has killed an order of magnitude more in the months since (and even more over the years prior). Even the Americans gave the world more time to sympathize with the victims of 9/11 before engaging in retaliation against the countries it deemed responsible (in lieu of Saudi Arabia).
I'm German. Criticising Israel doesn't make me "look good". It's not something to do in polite conversation in my country and even the political left frequently eschews the topic and insists on passivity because of our country's history. I don't celebrate Hamas as I don't condone the murder of civilians and believe that calling all Israelis "colonizers" or saying that makes them complicit and thus valid military targets is morally bankrupt. But that is the same reason I object to the IDF's disregard for human life and its dishonest claim to be the "most humane military". I don't stand with the pro-Hamas Islamists that celebrated the October 7 attack in the streets of Berlin, I stand with the Jewish Bundists and anti-Zionists that don't want to be used as shields by Israel to justify its military's thirst for blood.
We can simplify this. You really only have two options: you can claim that the pictures of levelled city blocks in Gaza are fake, that the death toll is a complete fabrication (i.e. wrong by multiple orders of magnitude) and that the UN organisations, the international aid organisations, all non-Israeli journalists and Jewish anti-Zionists and Bundists are lying and helping to spread misinformation to make Israel look bad. Or you can claim that the pictures and the numbers are real and the death of all of these humans is justified because you either consider all Palestinians a threat to Jews or think the life of one Jew is worth the death of tens of Palestinians. The first one makes me think you're delusional, the second one makes me think you're a monster. I don't see a third option but maybe you can elaborate.
Does the idea of the cure being worse than the disease mean anything to you? If you value the lives of Palestinians and Israelis equally, the IDF killing 16 times as many Palestinians as Hamas killed Israelis should concern you. And that for years the IDF has each year killed an order of magnitude more Palestinians than the Hamas killed Israelis should also concern you. The corpses don't care if they were murdered by terrorists or legally killed as collateral damage by an organized military.
It may well be the case that Netanyahu's fascist-fringe coalition has a subtextual goal of vindicating October 7th with a disproportionate retaliatory civilian casualties. But a subtext is all that is. Any Israeli leader pursuing the IDF's current stated military goal, even in a hypothetical Labor coalition, would be incurring the same "disproportionate" casualties, simply because of how the conflict is structured.
You can't simply add casualties up, death for death. If you did that, every one of the retaliatory casualties would be immoral as well. The question isn't what the comparative numbers are, but rather whether legitimate military objectives outweighed the civilian toll in each strike. That's how international war crimes law sees it, and it's I think the only sane way to look at the situation.
(None of this is to say that the IDF's campaign in Gaza is wholly defensible; I have no idea if it is, and it sure looks to me like it isn't).
Germany is religiously pro-Israel and any attempt to bring more nuance into it than "Israel good, terrorists bad" is seen as antisemitism. This also nicely fits with the idea that antisemitism is mostly a problem of Muslim immigrants or of the political left (to be clear: the dishonest framing of the NSDAP as a "left-wing" party is largely an American thing so this is entirely about the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, not about labelling the left as Nazis).
The problem with Covid was that although Merkel initially talked about following the evidence, the start of the pandemic fell right into the leadup to election season and she had already made it clear that she did not want to run for another term and this created an additional internal struggle for the positions of both chancellor candidate and leader of the party. This resulted in the various minister presidents of the Länder (states) to use the pandemic to demonstrate their political savvy which was made worse by the federal system delegating various decisions to the individual Länder rather than allowing the federal government to call these shots.
In the end the response to COVID in Germany was a mixture of overly draconian measures (e.g. banning meetings between different households even in the open, making demonstrations illegal and shutting down playgrounds) and ineffective half-measures (e.g. appealing to "personal responsibility" and letting schools figure out their own hygiene rules without giving them a budget). This also played into the existing Q-Anon-adjacent movement (the second largest one internationally after the US), anti-vaxxers and other fringe extremist groups like the German monarchist-flavored sovereign citizen Reichsbürger movement giving rise to the ("non-partisan") Querdenker or Querfront movement which was primarily focused on COVID denialism but used it as a jumping off point for various conspiracy theories and New Age beliefs. This movement in turn saw a surprising amount of popularity with celebrities and thus resulted in anyone opposed to any anti-COVID measures for any reason to be lumped in with the movement, much to its benefit. The Querfront movement seamlessly moved on to being a "peace movement" in opposing the military support of Ukraine against the Russian invasion, although this incidentally quieted down after the EU sanctions against Russia forced Russian state media to pull out of most European countries.
The problem with getting info on Gaza from Twitter however is that Twitter is now filled to the brim with disinfo and misinformation. While the pro-Israel propaganda is mostly easy to spot because it originates with the IDF or Israel government affiliated accounts, the anti-Israel propaganda is mostly spread by random people for engagement and clout.
The reports mention what is happening in Gaza, the shelling, the ground invasion, the civilian casulaties, the humanitarian crisis (no water / electricity / no food etc.). I think one problem in this war is that there is a lot of propaganda going around, and there is not enough reliable impartial information. So just because the Hamas is reporting that Israel bombed a hospital (as an example), that the media will immediately pick up on that. For example, bombing a hospital sounds bad, but what if the hospital was acticely used by Hamas terrorists for ammunition storage, and even fighting from there? Is is now OK for Israel to attack the hospital? I don't think the media should immediately pick that up, because that information is not verified, and could as well be propaganda.
In my opinion, one of the reasons the palestinian people are suffering so much is because of Hamas, and how they use civilian infrastructure and hide in the population as their strategy. There is no way for Isreael to "win" without massive civilian casualties. And we should also not forget that Hamas is not innocent, they are not "just defending" their country. They started a war, which they are now loosing. You cannot attack another nation state, and then expect them not to do anything about it?
Also keep in mind that Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization in Germany, while Israel and Germany maintain good political relations. It makes sense that Germany is more supportive of Israel.
Axel Springer has a guideline document that demands pro-israel stance and fired journalists[2] who question that or tells pro-Palestinian staff to quit[3]
Axel Springer SE is a leading digital publishing company based in Berlin. Axel Springer SE, is well known for publishing numerous successful newspapers and magazines, including "Bild," one of Europe's most popular daily tabloids, and "Die Welt," a leading daily newspaper.
Journalists associated with Axel Springer have on many occasions mocked the victims of Israeli bombardement, comparing the destruction in Gaza to Dresden, questioning Geneva Conventions (civilians are protected; withholding water, food, medicins is prohibited), questioning the number of killed in Gaza, citing "experts" who argue that it's legal to bomb hospitals.
Germany declares all pro palestinian protests as illegal (long before 10/7), criminalises the protestors, scares them with raids, police brutality, with press, that smears them (Greta Thunberg and others speaking for the Palestinian cause).
[1] https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/staatsraeson-in-den-med...
[2] [Axel Springer Fires Lebanese Employee Who Questioned Pro-Israel Stance - The Intercept](https://theintercept.com/2023/10/26/axel-springer-fires-empl...)
[3] [Axel Springer: German publisher tells pro-Palestinian staff to quit | Middle East Eye](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-axel-spr...)
or are you simply saying all of that evidence is fake?
what is "pro-palestinian" to you, saying that "Israel is bombing innocent people" that is pro-palestinian? You think that Gaza ruled by Hamas is pro-palestinian?
You obviously can read and write English well. Germany doesn't, as far as I know, have some kind of national firewall blocking Germans from visiting foreign sites.
You should then be able to read American, Canadian, Australian, and UK media easily. There are also a large number of Arab newspapers in English [1]. And similar in many other countries.
I'd expect channels like those to be more useful than Twitter when it comes to becoming and staying well informed on any major issue.
Slammed is a pretty strong word for a juvenile temper tamtrum that he shared with the world.
"Popular website down for an hour", film at 11