President Trump proudly announced a war crime:
"Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day."
Americans in the Democratic anti-Trump coalition of people who watch MSNOW and read The Atlantic and Heather Cox Richardson and attend town meetings for Oregon Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden feel disapproval, but not surprise at Trump's post.
That's him, not us. God knows we didn't vote for him.
But we Americans did. We pledge allegiance to the flag, one nation indivisible, and we pay our taxes. We are citizens. We have immeasurably more influence on American leadership and policy than do citizens in Iran whose electricity may be shut off.
The notion that Palestinians living in Gaza tolerated Hamas is the justification for mass destruction of civilian targets. They had to know about the tunnels and maybe helped build them.
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| Hospital in Gaza |
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| Residence in Lebanon |
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| University in Iran |
Israel, and by extension the U.S., accepted that idea of collective guilt. The U.S. tolerates and enables Israel's bombing of Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
Accountability goes in both directions. Israeli citizens who were enjoying a quiet evening on October 7, 2023 weren't innocent civilians, not under that rule of collective guilt. They tolerated the brutalization of people in the West Bank. They voted for Benjamin Netanyahu or the far-right policies in his coalition, or at the very least they paid taxes and acted as citizens in a country carrying out Netanyahu's policies.
There is a lot of hypocritical argumentation regarding responsibility and collective guilt. People who consider the Israelis killed on October 7, 2023 to have been innocent and the raid to be an outrage accept the necessity of bombing and civilians.
Tomorrow, at 8 p.m. EDT, unless Trump changes his mind, he will initiate the bombing of civilian infrastructure in Iran. This isn't Israel doing it. It is the USA. This probably will cause tens of thousands of Iranians to die, perhaps invisibly to Americans, one at a time as hospital ventilators turn off and food spoils and water doesn't get pumped or it gets contaminated, but just as dead as if they had been covered in rubble or lined up in front of firing squads.
The U.S. has signed treaties that declare targeting electrical generation stations to be forbidden, a war crime, a moral wrong.
Do we care? Isn't it just one more thing we have gotten accustomed to and tolerate, like bombing boats in waters off Venezuela? Or ignoring the War Powers Act? Or letting Trump ignore Congress on tariffs and program cuts? Or letting ICE ignore the 4th Amendment requirement that it have a judicial warrants? Some Americans sympathize with Trump; others enable him, All of us are tolerating him. Trump is still in office, our leader, and we are citizens.
Americans elected a Senate that approved Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense. We have watched him fire top military people who showed signs of independent resistance to illegal warfighting. We didn't revolt, impeach, or call a general strike, and we still say the Pledge of Allegiance.
Americans cannot have it both ways. If civilians in Vietnam, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran can be killed because we oppose the policies of their leaders, then we need to look in the mirror and accept the reality that President Trump is not acting alone. Do not be outraged or surprised when terror attacks happen here or Americans are held hostage. Don't presume we are free of moral guilt. Trump isn't committing a war crime. Americans are.
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17 comments:
With Trump as our leader there is no doubt that we are one of the bad guys.
Trump has handed us a situation comparable to where German citizens found themselves facing Hitler’s bellicose behavior. How do we stop this madness?
The "notion" that Palestinians living in Gaza tolerate Hamas? Independent polling in spring 2024 reported that over 70% of Gazans approved the October 7, 2023 atrocities. Israeli forces pursuing the Hamas operatives responsible for October 7 did not target civilians, especially women and children. Rules of war? October 7 was like two or three My Lai massacres, except to break a longstanding truce, and with far more torture and rape plus kidnappings.
Blame Trump (and Hegseth) for crass, oafish, ad hoc bellicosity to be sure. Trump appears to be steering the ship of state by the seat of his pants. His Easter morning post was a stupid travesty. Will his knee jerk again tomorrow? Will he announce yet another supposed deadline concerning the Strait of Hormuz which, much like our erstwhile allies, he also claims we don't need or care about anyway? And I thought he'd declared victory weeks ago....
The wider palette of reflexive, Blame America (and Israel) First equivocating, on the other hand, as a familiar, longstanding progressive refrain (yes, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were essentially our own fault!) helps Trump keep the support he still retains. We almost always have it coming, it seems, while our antagonists almost never do. There must be a middle ground---J.D. Vance and even Marco Rubio have been notably quiet of late.
Excellent
They rest of the world is beginning to hate us. If you voted for Trump, that's what you got. Maybe the gas prices will change their minds. Who knows? I just paid $4.91 for premium gas today. Sucks to be me, I guess. He's done all of this in just over a year. With 3 more years left, what kind of crazy crap will he do next? Greenland will be easy. Not a shot will be fired. Just a few boots on the ground. The United Nations will condemn it. But, Trump doesn't care about that. Cuba? Probably not. That would piss off Putin, his buddy. Canada? Not happening. Notice there's no African countries on his list. Why not Somalia? Or Kenya? Or Tunisia?
Whatever he does, we're responsible. Like it or not.
It’s hard to understand how anyone can observe the rubble that once was Gaza or see the death toll of over 73,000 Palestinians and conclude that Israel “did not target civilians.” As horrible as the Oct. 7 Hamas attack may have been, the notion that the Israeli response was somehow proportionate is simply preposterous. And just as inhumane is their ongoing limitation of essential relief supplies, such as food and medicine. This is an ongoing atrocity.
Hamas set up the Gazans up as human shields. They built, bomb shelter tunnels under civilian institutions, like hospitals and schools, and civilians were not allowed into them — only Hamas fighters.
Israel’s only way to go after those Hamas fighters was to go through those human shields. International law, by the way, assigns moral responsibility for the harm to those human shields to the side that placed them into that position. It is Hamas that bears the responsibility for harm to those human shields.
If the Arabs/iranians stopped fighting, there would be no more war; if the Israelis stopped fighting there would be no more Israel.
Peter does a great job of attempting to create a false moral equivalence between Israel and its Arab/Persian enemies. But it’s still a false equivalence. A fair look at history would demonstrate this.
The Jewish community in Hebron had been living there peacefully since biblical times, until a vicious Arab pogrom wiped that community out in 1929.
The Jews accepted the UN partition of 1947, and would have been happy to live in that small area. But instead, they were attacked by Arab armies from as far away as Iraq, and Jewish victories in that war led to the armistice lines of 1948, which gave the Israelis much more territory than they would have had under the UN plan.
The Israelis would have been happy to live in those new boundaries, but Instead, the Arabs planned another attack in 1967, and this resulted in another war, at the end of which Israel had gained the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the entire Sinai Peninsula.
In 1973, the Egyptians started yet another war with Israel, which they lost to the point that Cairo was about to fall to Israeli troops. After this, Egypt offered peace, and the Israelis were happy to return the Sinai Peninsula to them in return, because peace is all they have ever wanted from the Arabs.
Israel has offered a two-state solution a number of times to the Palestinians, and they have always turned it down, including in 2000, when they turned it down by initiating a wave of 140 vicious terrorist suicide bombings known as the Second Intifada. This continuous wave of terrorism in response to a peace offer convinced most Israelis that the Palestinians only want a peace that would come with the eradication of Jews from the area. The previously strong peace movement in Israel, along with the liberal Labor Party, died as a result of this realization by the Israelis.
And finally, 10/7/2023 was a conclusive demonstration of what the Palestinians really want: the eradication of the Jewish presence in the area, by either expulsion or vicious terrorist murder.
There is no moral equivalence between the Israelis, who would be willing to accept peace and live side-by-side with the Palestinians, and the Palestinians, who so far have been absolutely unwilling to accept the presence of a Jewish state in their midst.
It is truly said that if the Arabs/Persians stopped fighting, there would be no more war; if the Israelis stopped fighting, there would be no more Israel.
It is only hard to understand if you purposely ignore the use of the Gazan civilian population as human shields by the depraved terrorist jihadists of Hamas.
"Target" as in the purpose or the objective of the action. Hamas targeted civilians specifically; Israel did not.
Your numbers and your view of the food/relief supply process are reliant on Hamas and Hamas-suborned sources.
As MT has noted, your "proportional" inquiry is faulty and inapt given how it started and how Israel reacted.
MT, this is true, but misleading, I think. How do you explain Israeli behavior in the Westr Bank? I believe it is shameful, hypocritical, and evidence of bad faith, to the world and the USA. It is strong evidence that a peaceful two state solution has always been a lie told to gullible Americans, and that behavior is treacherous and disqulifying, Americans believe talk of a two state solution even as Israel worked to make it impossible. My view is that the USA has been manipulated very successfully by Israel, and it has traded on the inertia of smpathy for it following the holocaust, plus its influence in American politics. I do not condemn them for having influence. I condemn them for undermining a two state solution and stringing the USA along. If Israel really thinks that Iran is an exential threat, then it -- and not the USA -- should take care of business and clean up the neighborhood. Do what it needs to do to make an ally of Saudi Arabia and the other countries in the region. It may have to make some uncomfortable compromises in its own policies, but it is Israel's deal, so they should suck it up and live with it and do it. Then, having regional allies it should make war on Iran on its own, win if it can, use whatever weapons it wants, and then pay the international consequewnces either of winning with nuclear bombs or of losing. Israel has agency. Isreal can take care of itself. The USA should not be an enabler or protector, since Israel wants to do what it wants to do. Israel should grow up. Israel is not a good ally. Israel is a stubborn, ethnocentric troublemaker. They have a right to ethnocentrism and to demand a Jewish homeland, but only if they can defend it on their own. If Jews in the diaspora really want to help Israel, there are any number of Amerian billionaires who support Israel and they can pony up $500 billion or a $trillion and make war. But they are involving American taxpayers in a fight for a country that looksb--to anyone born after 1980--as a rouge, apartheid state. Not a peaceful multinational Switzerland. It's a bad neighborhood? Well, they should work at making some friends. But don't pull me and the non-Jews who would be "other" in their Jewish homeland country, into their own ethnic and tribal fight. Israel wants to be Israel? Great. Just do it.
Right, the Israelis didn't 'target' civilians. As we can see by what's left of Gaza, they just indiscriminately bombed civilians.
“Other” in Israel? It is easily the most diverse, tolerant and small “d” democratic nation in the region. The “ethnic fight” is self-defense.
“Target” was defined.
The West Bank, future potential Palestinian component of a two-state solution, is high ground that looms over the 8-mile-wide coastal plain that contains most of the Israeli population, its urban areas, its industrial base, and its important airports.
Polls have consistently shown that if elections were held in the West Bank, Hamas would be elected with an overwhelming majority. Ceding that strategic high ground to Hamas would be suicidal.
There will be no two state solution until the Palestinians display an actual willingness to live in peace alongside a Jewish state. To date, they have shown no such willingness, and Israel will not commit suicide to gain the approval of western elites who judge Israeli actions from the elevated moral high ground of those who have never experienced having to live next to a jihadist Islamic death cult bent on nothing less than their total destruction.
It is way too easy for someone living in the safety of Medford to tell Israel to "make friends" with Hamas. I would suggest that Peter and anyone who agrees with him go and read the Hamas Charter and see if there is anything short of suicide that would enable Israel to "make friends" with Hamas, or Hezbollah, or Iran.
Israel is a great ally to the United States. What other ally do we have that is fully capable of not only defending itself, but helping us in military operations? Contrast that with the Europeans, who, for the most part, have shirked their required military level of spending under NATO for decades, relying on us to defend them.
Accusing the Jews of manipulation is very close to an old antisemitic trope. Claims like this should require more of a factual basis than "my view."
It is not antisemetic to say that Israel is led by a far right coalition of people who, even within the politics of israel, are understood to be belicose. And Trump himself admitted that Israel forced his hand with the attack on Iran. It is not antisemetic to observe the very obvious fact that Sheldon Adleson and his widowother very proinent people donate hundreds of millions of dollars to American politicians. They have a right to do this. In the American system people can donate money to influence policy and elections. I do it myself. But it is not antisemetic to observe that people who want a strong tie between US policy and Israel's security interest make multimilliondollar campaign contribuiotns. It is simply denial of an obvious fact that prominent self-identified American Jews are usine their assets to shape policy, in exactly the same way that abortion defenders donate to abortion-supporting politicians. Saying it is antisemetic to observe the obvious is, however, in fact a form of manipulaiton of the kind that MT hates. He protests colleges saying that everyone in his classes has to be given a good grade, otherwise he is discriminating against them. He protests saying that the truth iis the truth. I will ake the same argument: some very prominent extraordinarily wealthy American Jews have donated tens of millions of dollars to Ameircan politicians to advance the idea that the USA should essentially pair its foreign policy with Israel's leadership as it represents the interests of Netanyahu and the most belicose factions within Israel. If Ameircan Jews do not want that fact obdserved, then because it represents an old trope of "underhanded influence" then the solution is to work to change the fact, not shame people for observing the fact. (Or, alternatively, to change policy and say that PCC was excactly right in insisting that all CS students deserved an A- grade whether or not they learned anything, so that there would be perfect racial and ability equality in grading. But be consistent.)
Whackos in the U.S. believe all this Middle East conflict will bring about the Second Coming. Whackos in Israel believe they're entitled to all the land promised them by Yahweh in the Torah.
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