This is their official creed
"God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam". This motto is partially modelled on the motto of revolutionary Iran, which reads "Death to U.S., and death to Israel"
I am not trying to justify or defend a group whose motto is "curse on the Jews" but I don't think the designation of terrorist is particularly useful for understanding the situation.
"We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way" -- Toby Keith
Maybe this quote would be helpful for understanding the anger Americans felt post-9/11, but it wouldn't be helpful for understanding US geopolitics.
I think the real distinction is that terrorists are non-state actors who use violence (bad). States are legally allowed to use violence (necessary).
But the common parlance of terrorist usually means "US designated terrorist" which really means "group we refuse to bargain with".
The Taliban were a terrorist group, now they are a government. The Iraqi army was a legitimate army, then many became ISIS, a terrorist group.
The US doesn't target civilians- that's a war crime.
That is what I mean by the state monopoly on violence. You can't legally beat your neighbor. A cop can. You can't shoot protestors, a national guardsmen may be able to.
The state devises a legal framework to justify its violence. Operating within this framework is designated as "peacekeeping action" or "law enforcement". Operating outside of it becomes "violence". Even though the actions are the exact same. It's all just kind of arbitrary is my point.
My point is you can either be realistic and save yourself a lot of headache, or you can be idealistic and waste a lot of time and money because of your own hubris.
You can be one thing, then change to another thing. It doesn't rewrite history.
A terrorist intentionally targets civilians, and non-terrorist does not. That's it.
A non-terrorist might kill civilians, but not intentionally.
When a leader targets their own people, we don't call them terrorists. My point is that the distinction comes down to whether the state is recognized as legitimate or not, and it's really just arbitrary.
Of course we do, look at what we said about Assad in Syria.
It's not arbitrary at all, people just say that to try to engage in moral relativism. The line as not as fuzzy as you are making it out to be.
Recently Russian media began communicating their expectations for Houthis to specifically attack British ships, after Ukraine used Storm Shadows to destroy a Russian ship loaded with Iranian drones which was docked in Crimea.
Disclaimer: I learnt about this 3 minutes ago.
What I'm trying to ask: what is the outcome these attackers are expecting, and how does it benefit them?
It's not really that complicated. They just hate Jews (and the US), it's quite literally in their slogan.
They don't really have a goal other than "try to kill Jews", and this is the best they are currently able to do.
They are asking Israel to let humanitarian aid into Gaza to ease that blockade.
What I want to say - this kind of pressure often works, in some ways.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/07/houthi...
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2024/1/6/24027735/yemen-h...
A google for keywords including some of "attack ships red sea houthi" will provide some context
Shipping companies, rather than abiding by the selective blockade of Israeli bound ships, are re-routing all ships instead because they believe making this a global problem will resolve the matter with military intervention without them having to "pick" a side. Some of these companies also have deep ties to Israel (or based in countries that have de-facto signed off on Israeli aggression) so abiding by the blockade is not politically feasible. One exception is COSCO and they seem to going through the canal just fine.
You probably set a record for most false information in one post.
1) So far it can't be called a Genocide, just mass murder along with an attempt at ethnic cleansing and forced expulsion.
2) Gaza still is not occupied and hasn't been since 2006. It is under a very severe blockade instead, and now is being invaded.
3) The Houthis are attacking Israel bound ships and whatever ship that has economic ties with Israeli nationals or economic groups.
> If Israel wanted to commit genocide then the entirety of Gaza would be leveled and 99% of the people dead indiscriminately.
No, that's how it is defined. Plus, they're clearly working on it.
https://twitter.com/JerryHicksUnite/status/17440291718508259...
That is a good short primer to just how far off it is to call this war or self-defense. And it's in the West Bank, too:
https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1744466142918238591
And the ethnic cleansing on the ground matches the genocidal rhetoric by politicians. Rhetoric Israel is obliged under the convention against Genocide to prohibit and prosecute, not engage in.
"Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!! Stop with this impotence. You have ability. There is worldwide legitimacy! Flatten Gaza." -- Revital Gottlieb, Member of the Israeli Knesset (Likud), 07/10/2023
"I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly" -- Yoav Gallant, Minister of Defense, 09/10/2023
"Those are animals, they have no right to exist. I am not debating they way it will happen, but they need to be exterminated" -- Yoav Kisch, Minister of Education, 09/10/2023
"This [attack] is not enough, there should be more, there should be no limits to the response, I said it a million times, until we see hundreds of thousands fleeing Gaza, we, the IDF has not achieved its mission, this is a phase that should happen, I am saying this cause these are instructions that were said to the IDF" -- Yoav Kisch, Minister of Education, 09/10/2023
"I don't care about Gaza. I literally don't care at all. They can go out and swim in the sea. I want to see dead bodies of terrorists around gaza." -- May Golan, Minister for the Advancement of the Status of Women in Israel, 13/10/2023
"There are no innocent civilians in Gaza" -- Isaac Herzog, President, 13/10/2023
“There is no humanitarian crisis.” [..] "the humanitarian crisis at the moment is in Israel." -- Tzipi Hotovely, Israeli Ambassador to the UK, 16/10/2023
"Without hunger and thirst among the Gazan population, we will not succeed in recruiting collaborators, we will not succeed in recruiting intelligence, [or]... in bribing people with food, drink, medicine, in order to obtain intelligence." -- Revital Gotliev, Member of the Israeli Knesset (Likud), 23/10/2023
"We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness... we shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah." -- Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister, 25/10/2023
"One of the options is to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. I pray & hope for their [hostages] return, but there is also a price in war." -- Amichai Eliyahu, Minister of Heritage, 05/11/2023
"We’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents... This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism" -- Binyamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister, 24/12/2023
When you combine that with the gleeful cruelty IDF soliders are displaying in the videos they are making of themselves, the fact that over 30000 people have already been killed, thousands of children, half a million set to starve or die of disease in the next year, the targeting of refugee camps and journalists, the videos of snipers shooting at people out of nowhere, gunning down a woman fleeing with her child, gunning down youth just standing around in the West Bank, etc. etc. etc. the picture becomes clear and "it's not genocide because it could be worse" rings very very hollow.
Palestinians are declared as non-persons and just hunted, starved, bombed. And the attempt to do this before the eyes of the world and to sanctify it is the worst attack on Western civilization, enlightenment and human rights since Hitler was on the cover of Time magazine.
To effectively accuse a party of attempting a genocide according to the Convention, you have to prove:
(1) that whatever horrible things they are doing have the effect of destroying a group; note that destruction doesn't necessarily involve killing --- for instance, Russia's kidnapping and "re-parenting" of Ukrainian children is widely viewed as a genocidal act. But either way, the outcome involved has to be the elimination of the group; displacement doesn't necessarily qualify.
(2) that the horrible things were done with the intent of destroying a group; the Convention leaves no wiggle room here, as you might find in US criminal law, for recklessness or negligence. It's genocide if you did it deliberately in order to destroy the group.
What you're going to find in these discussions is that many people acknowledge the Netanyahu war cabinet as deeply reckless, inhumane, savage, murderous, choose-your-own words --- but that at the same time what they're doing simply doesn't fit the Convention's definition.
These long lists of quotes aren't especially persuasive as rhetoric (and they're too easy to skim, and, not for nothing, and this has nothing to do with you personally, but they are also a hallmark of crank HN comments --- I'm not calling you a crank, just giving you something to avoid pattern matching with). That said:
Netanyahu's "We’re facing monsters, monsters who murdered children in front of their parents... This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilization against barbarism" isn't genocidal on its face. You can battle things without destroying them. Churchill's "Fight them on the beaches" speech didn't promise a genocide of Germans. You could argue that it's dehumanizing. If you read it charitably as applying only to Hamas, and not to the broader population of people you could accuse of supporting Hamas, it might not even be that; you have to be human to be dehumanized, etc.
On the other hand:
"One of the options is to drop an atomic bomb on Gaza. I pray & hope for their [hostages] return, but there is also a price in war." This is a straightforward appeal to genocide! Of course, the flip side of it is (a) Eliyahu has absolutely no power over what the IDF does, and (b) nobody seriously believes the IDF will deploy nuclear weapons against Gaza (in fact, the emerging consensus seems to be that they're going to back off on airstrikes). But, like, if you had Netanyahu or Gallant or Gantz saying this, you'd have a stronger argument.
I do not expect you to agree with any of this. There are non-legalistic conceptions of genocide that reasonable people use. If you believe someone is engaged in a genocide, it is vanishingly unlikely that an HN comment, even the greatest HN comment ever written, is going to change your mind. I only hope to illustrate one flavor of good-faith opposition you're going to find to your argument.
By picking apart pro-Palestinian rhetoric here, I'm going to come off as supportive of Israel. I'd caution you against drawing those kinds of conclusions. My personal belief is that all these discussions on HN are cursed, and that as soon as anyone openly declares for "a side" here, conversational potential basically ends. I'll go as far as saying that I believe Palestinians exist as a distinct people and deserve self-determination. I try to pick apart pro-Israel stuff here too; be aware, though, that pro-Israel seems at times to be a minority position on HN, so there are fewer examples of it.
I know it's repetitive, but I don't think of it as being pro-Israel or being pro-Palestine. Especially since this right-wing messianic stuff paints Israel into a very, very dark corner. Blind support of it is helping Netanyahu and some very cruel and ultimately sad people, maybe some arms manufacturers, but not really anyone else, not even in Israel.
> displacement doesn't necessarily qualify
Not necessarily, but possibly. E.g. from Wikipedia on genocide:
> The term Bosnian genocide is used to refer either to the killings committed by Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995, or to ethnic cleansing that took place elsewhere during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War.
Just scattering people in the world to never return, to settle their land, is destroying them as a national group in my books. But we'll see.
The bulk of the quotes I saw can basically be summarized as "we don't care, ethnic cleansing is fine, genocide is fine too, as long as Israel controls the land afterwards", and if anything beyond that is said, everything is blamed on Hamas, case closed.
That is bad enough, but that messianic stuff goes a farther than that IMO. When Netanyahu invoked Amalek, which he and others did more than once, that implies wiping out everyone, children and even animals, showing no mercy, blotting out their memory. And his reference to "fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah"..
> "Destruction has been decreed, overwhelming and righteous. The Lord, the Lord Almighty, will carry out the destruction decreed upon the whole land."
I can't tell you what exactly Netanyahu means by that, but you'd have to squint harder than I am able to to not be pretty sure it's not within international law.
> "When there is absolute evil, one must not look back, one must not express empathy. The actions of the oppressors on Black Sabbath [meaning October 7th] are tens of times worse than the actions of Sodom and Gomorrah. The war is not about territory or Economy but a war for the loss of evil from the world and the perpetuation of the absolute good." -- Avishai Levy, Lieutenant Colonel and Rabbi of the Northern command, 03/11/2023
I do think we have tacit approval of genocidal statements, combined with the atrocities we know about, which in turn are probably just the tip of the iceberg. If the stuff people proudly post on social media is so sickening, singing "Gaza is a cemetery" and all that, obviously not fearing for their military careers at all, what are people doing that they don't film? We know enough to know it needs to be stopped and investigated, of that I'm confident.
Specifically, it has a very similar structure to "the US could have won in Vietnam if they'd just used nuclear weapons".
It's less often applied to the US destruction of Korea because the US did, in fact, run out of things to bomb. However, there were elements in the US military who were very upset that they couldn't use nukes there.
In retrospect, the wholesale slaughter of, say, the peasantry of south Vietnam is a horrific crime, and the fact that more folks weren't murdered doesn't do much to make me feel like it was a moral thing to do. From a US perspective, that take has been pretty persuasive, but even a cursory look at what the US did to the people of that country is chilling. The fact that they could have simply immolated everyone in the country doesn't make it one bit less of a crime.
The fact that Nazi Germany "only" killed 13M civilians in camps
(and didn't just, say, summarily execute them on the street, but instead simply legally deported an excess non-citizen population, until they had no place to put any more "surplus" non-citizens)
doesn't make me feel any better about what they did in order to ensure a "German" majority in their nation.
I can say for sure, as I drove between the Ute and Dine "reservations" to my parent's home near a Mescalero reservation, that the fact that there are still remnants of those folks living here doesn't do a lot to make me feel better about their treatment in the past. I suppose that the US could have done even more horrific things, but I'm thoroughly mystified how that would make any of this horror less terrible.
All those actions still feel like horrifying crimes against humanity, and the fact that the people who did them could have been even more destructive and cruel doesn't do much to change my opinions on any of them.
I'd bet that the justification will probably sound just as convincing to the IDF and related folks when they run out of folks to murder. The idea that we could have done worse is often a fantastic consolation for guilty people.