+1 for barefoot shoes for lifting and just chilling

Maybe for the same reason that Hamas fires rockets into Israeli territory all the time, or pledges to kill as many jews as they can.

Regional tension has been going on for far longer than that, but Hamas is the elected government currently in Gaza. They began the current fighting. End of story.

There was a ceasefire on Oct. 6. Then Hamas and other Palestinian fighters started the present conflict in Gaza on Oct.7. I won’t recount how because Lemmy doesn’t like to hear when what they perceive to be a victim group commits unthinkable atrocities. But then they took these hostages back into Gaza, and hid them in tunnels under civilian infrastructure. This is fact. Hamas started the present war, but everyone only blames Israel. I believe this qualifies as what you call victim blaming bullshit.

This echo chamber doesn’t want to hear about the fact that Hamas is a murderous terror group that intentionally endangers Palestinian civilians to further its religious and political cause.

Does Hamas try to contact civilians who live in harm’s way to leave targeted areas? Nope, that’s the IDF.

Hamas is the elected government, one which has openly stated that its aim is to wipe the jews out of the Middle East completely. It enjoys broad support among the population in Gaza, despite having demonstrated on October 7 that it has no qualms about shooting teenagers with assault rifles at a peace rave. We saw the footage that they themselves took; no doubt there. They own it. That’s the goal. Many Palestinians who were not members of Hamas appear to have streamed across the border to take part on that day, too.

And, yes, Hamas, as the government in Gaza, also happens to be tallying casualty figures that Lemmy eats up without question.

I have come to dislike snappy one-liner responses in these posts, as well as the quick judgments based on uninformed opinions. Back in January, Brett Stephens, a journalist currently with the New York Times who lived and covered stories in Israel for years, had this to say about UNRWA :

"Last Friday, Israeli officials presented the U.S. government with an intelligence dossier detailing the involvement of 12 UNRWA employees, seven of them schoolteachers, in the massacre of Oct. 7. As reported by The Times’s Ronen Bergman and Patrick Kingsley, the charges range from kidnapping an Israeli woman to storing rocket-propelled grenades to murdering civilians in a kibbutz.

Awful enough — and the U.N. rightly moved swiftly to terminate the employment of nine of those identified by the dossier. But that may be the least of it. “Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that around 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The figures are worth bearing in mind the next time you weigh the credibility of information about Gaza sourced to the U.N. Also worth bearing in mind is that this has been going on for years. As Bassam Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group noted over a decade ago, “In order for UNRWA to survive, they accept [Hamas’s] conditions because they want to continue their activities.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/opinion/unrwa-un-palestine-agency.html

I am a Gen-Xer who was raised Catholic in America. The old-school church values of my childhood in the 1970s were mostly liberal democratic, promoting humility, circumspection, and Golden Rule, love-thy-neighbor attitudes. (Setting aside the entire organization’s liability for the systematic raping of children, that is, which is a lot to ask.)

But with the more extreme politics of groups like Opus Dei, the modern Catholic Church in America, by contrast, has become a right-wing propaganda machine. It promotes a noxious brand of pseudo-religious pomposity and holier-than-thou windbaggery, practiced by preening, empty-headed bigots and jackasses who couldn’t find real spirituality if it bit them in the ass.*

*Just my opinion, but I’m fucking right.

Aiming guns at soft targets and slaughtering them makes them, by definition, terrorists.

Brilliant game