Hacker News Reader

Comment by gameboy45 | Hacker News Reader

interesting hearing his justification for working w Saudi but not Israel: He says he would never work with Israel now. “I think it’s an illegitimate and criminal government,” he told me during our gun safety training. “I mean, [Benjamin] Netanyahu is a war criminal.”

When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.

“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."

View on HN

Seems like a silly excuse. If his concern is that Israel could use Replit for military purposes, then SA is perfectly capable of doing the same. And SA has - directly or indirectly - killed more people in Yemen than Israel has in Gaza.

More than 70000 including 20000 children? Wow thats a lot.

You say that like it's unrealistic. The accepted death toll for the conflict in Yemen is nearly 400,000 people.

I mean, if he was really consistent, he'd also not be operating a business in America, given America is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians (more than Israel and SA combined) in recent history.

I'd love to hear an argument for this being true that doesn't involve counting all of the deaths caused by Sunni-Shia sectarian violence in Iraq, suicide bombings in civilian markets, ISIS etc. as caused by America.

Well there's Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya etc which would tally ~300k civilian deaths alone. Given the blatantly false pretences that America invaded Iraq under, and the sectarian violence that significantly flared post-Saddam, I don't see why you'd not want to involve Iraq in the stats?

I accept US responsibility for a great many of the civilian deaths caused in Vietnam. I don't accept US responsibility for Islamists of different varieties blowing up each other's markets and places of worship with weapons provided by Iran and Syria.

So you don't accept the fact that a lot of this sectarian violence flared after the toppling of Saddam, which was because of the US? And how many of the deaths do you attribute to the sectarian violence, as opposed to the direct actions of the US in the region?

The VAST majority of the deaths were from sectarian violence.

That was caused by a power vacuum and US's intentional act to oust the Ba'ath Party, remove all control from a country and it will fall to chaos especially when blood feuds are involved .

This response seems to remove all agency from the actual people killing each other.

This seems to be a theme of people with certain political inclinations. "It's really America's fault they're blowing themselves up in crowded markets because...."

After toppling Saddam Hussein the US took political control in the country and decided who got to decide what. The slaughter that followed was a direct and rather predictable result of this.

Do you believe the violence would have happened without the US invasion?

Probably not the same violence. But Saddam would have kept genociding the Kurds if he stayed in power. And maybe launched another war against Iran.

So local carnage (which the US happily watched prior, and supports Turkey perpetuating) versus carnage spanning the whole region.

Hey, get with the times. Whitewashing jihadis is in vogue these days.

You might be into that. The rest of us like to analyse things honestly, especially given America is going down the route of making the same moves as history. If you don't see that, then it'd probably be better for you to go read something than to offer pithy comments on here.

Let's not forget Laos and Cambodia, where unexploded munitions dumped by the US decades ago are killing and maiming people even today - https://www.humanium.org/en/unexploded-bombs-still-endanger-...

"responsible" is a weasel word. By that logic China is also "responsible" for Cambodia genocide 1975-1979, and who are responsible for Sudan famine?

Am I in some weird alternative universe where Israel did not just engage in a genocidal campaign against a population of Palestinians that are descendants of refugees from their prior genocidal campaign? Israel just finished killing probably over a hundred thousand civilians. The displaced the majority of Gaza. They destroyed the vast majority of its hospitals and universities and public infrastructure. They killed foreign aid workers even after those foreign aid workers cleared their routes with Israelis. Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians on camera. Then those solders were celebrated on public Israeli television and by the Israeli government. Attempts to prosecute those solders resulted in punishment for the prosecutors.

Is Saudi Arabia a human rights violator? Yeah and so is a bunch of western governments. But no modern government comes close to the abuses of the Israeli government and Israeli military. This is the view of the free people of this world.

> from their prior genocidal campaign

Not only there is not a good argument for considering 1948 war a genocide on Palestinians but there is a much stronger argument Arabs have tried to genocide Jews (especially to those who think who think there was a genocide in Gaza because of starvation as a weapon of war + intent):

1. In 1948 Arab forces besieged Jerusalem and they were starting to run out of food.

2. Azzam Pasha, General Secretary of the Arab League, famously threatened "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre", Fawzi al-Qawuqji, commander of the Arab Liberation Army said that "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish.". Hell, several have even extended the threats to not just the Jews of Mandatory Palestine, but to Jews of the Arab world as a whole, such as Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Said("if a satisfactory solution of the Palestine case was not reached, severe measures should be taken against all Jews in Arab countries.") or the head of the Egyptian delegation to the General Assembly, Muhammad Hussein Heykal("the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state." ). As Matiel Mughannam, head of the Arab Women's Organization in Palestine put it in an interview with Nadia Lourie in January 1948, "The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders.... [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the `holy war' has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred. " (See Benny Morris' 1948 for sources on all of these)

Typical hasbara whataboutism, equating a statement by one guy that may or may not have been said 70 years ago to a livestream slaughter we just witnessed, where more than 50% of Israelis say "not enough force was used", not just offhanded remarks by radical leaders, which there are literal gigabytes of from Israelis of all walks of life. Just open up any popular political figure's Twitter and you'll see the most horrific statements, and not just statements, but action.

It isn't whataboutism to point out a wrong claim. Which statement is "a statement by one guy that may or may not have been said 70 years ago"? I gave four. I have made no claims about the current situation (and there was also plenty of action in 1948).

It is when your trying to deflect. Your source is Benny Morris lmao, that's one unreliable source for all "four statements"

These are famous quotes. Are you arguing that somehow Benny Morris made them up and tricked everyone to think they are real?

Please. There is literally documentaries with retirement age Israelis laughing about the horrible things they did to ethnically cleanse Jaffa and Haifa and various parts of historic Palestine. You accepting real war crimes that have happened repeatedly — from before Israel to now — at the hands of blood thirsty European Zionist settlers against Palestinians because of some rhetoric of Arab leaders? The way Zionists can act like victims when their victims get angry and fight back. It’s like that famous quote by that Ukrainian settler of Palestine that was a prime minister “we will never forgive the Arabs for making us kill their children” or something like that. Psychopaths.

If your primary cause is Palestine then it's pretty internally consistent?

Pecunia non olet.

[money doesn't stink]

It truly does though. Any significant pile of it stinks of exploitation and death.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com