Gaza has a lot of hospitals relative to their population. This is partly because Gaza has smaller hospitals. Hamas has intentionally built terrorist tunnels under hospitals to make targeting terrorists in them a war crime due to a hospital being in the way. Hamas forces Israel between a rock and a hard place. If Israel doesn’t hit the terrorist/military targets to avoid hitting hospitals, then Hamas can continue to operate there. If Israel does hit the targets, then Hamas propaganda can scream about how evil Israel is for hitting hospitals. Hamas is sacrificing its own people and civilian infrastructure as a tactic against Israel. Many in the West aid Hamas by screaming about hospitals hit while ignoring Hamas’s tactic.
DC has record low crime, yet Trump is acting like it is out of control and using exaggerations to take over the policing of the city. He describes how people do what they want to police, yet he pardoned the January 6th attackers who were actively trying to hurt police.
A doctor in Gaza says all his patients are noticeably not eating enough food. He says Gaza has violent gangs that work for Israel.
“Huge numbers of Palestinians need something to eat. Can Israel do more to get them some food?
“It’s as if anything that doesn’t qualify as famine isn’t a problem,” one humanitarian organization official told me. A second aid official said the Israelis in particular talk about such hunger crises as if “it’s a binary — on, off — rather than a sliding scale. It’s a sliding scale.”
Words are among the many tools being weaponized by multiple sides in several ongoing global conflicts. “Famine,” “genocide,” “terrorism,” “antisemitism,” “occupation” and “apartheid” are just some of the terms whose definitions inspire public relations, legal and policy fights.
The war of words is increasingly exhausting and alarming to policymakers and others who deal with humanitarian issues. Several told me they worry the semantics — especially in a conflict such as Gaza — could hurt efforts to save lives or forge peace, including by hardening the positions of people accused of wrongdoing.
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Activists who push to use the term “genocide” often seem to suggest that if any label short of that is used, it means that a group’s suffering doesn’t matter.
This is unfortunate, Malinowski and others say, because other legal terms that could apply, such as “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity,” are still very grave offenses whose perpetrators should be held accountable.
A government’s decision to accuse another country of genocide often comes down to politics.”
President Trump literally arrested a legal resident based on his speech. This is a huge, massive infringement of basic democratic rights by a president who ran on free speech.
Because the man was educated, in custody, people getting deported would talk to him and ask him questions. A man who had been in the country for over 20 years and had four children under 11, was showing up to his immigration hearing when he was grabbed to be deported. Another person asked him what a paper he signed was. The paper said he was to be deported. Another 19-year old asked if it would be safe for his mom to visit him, the answer was no. The immigration detention center had a lot of crying people in it. These people were depicted as criminals by the administration when they were picked up at their immigration hearings and their jobs.
Khalil missed the birth of his child because Trump decided to arrest him based on speech. The justification required the Secretary of State to go along with it. Marco Rubio did, losing what little dignity he had left. Khalil requested to be temporarily let out for the birth of his child. HIs request was denied.
I disagree with a lot of what he says about Palestine and Israel, but his detention was an insult to the principles that democracy stands on.
Israel is committing war crimes. However horrible a terrorist organization is, whatever that organization will or will not agree to, holding a civilian population hostage is not justifiable. The U.S. makes mistakes in its wars, but has not tried the mass starvation of civilians.
Israel is preventing baby formula from being brought into Gaza.
Why does Jubilee bring so many openly fascist and anti-democracy people to debate? Do they want a debate about serious policy or about overthrowing democracy? Are such people really fair representations of MAGA and the right?