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Comment by rick312 | Hacker News Reader

False. Eden was bartending at a music festival when she was taken. She was not taken from a military base.

Kfir Bibas was 9 months old when he was taken and Ariel Bibas was 4 years old when he was taken. Neither had been in the military. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_and_killing_of_the_...

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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.

The defense of murder, rape, Holocaust denial, blood libels -- all grist for the Bitchat for Gaza and HN mill. Man, what a tidal wave of antisemitism we're experiencing.

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?

Thing is, that motivation doesn't make the heinous acts any less heinous.

When Viet Kong tortured and executed civilians who happened to be opposed to their ideology, that was wrong.

When South African revolutionaries bombed churches, that was wrong.

We should absolutely be holding Israel to account for all its crimes, but that does not imply whitewashing Hamas.

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.

I'm not a "Western power". I am a person, and as such I am entitled to make my own personal judgments on ethical matters.

(But, yes, what Israel is doing is occupation, and most Western countries are explicitly or implicitly supporting it, including materially. And that is also wrong.)

I'm really interested in your reasoning, specifically this part:

> It's almost like Europeans don't belong in the Middle East.

What is "European" in this case and where do they belong? Do we measure by skin tone, genetics or language? What about birth place?

Wherever and whoever you are, your ancestors have definitely killed to be there, which lead you to being here somewhere.

So, where do we send white people? Can we do the same for asians/christians/arabs/blacks/people with glasses? And most important, what do we do with mixed heritage people? How pure must the blood be to consider them of some certain "race"?

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.

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