wow I've sure blocked or unfollowed a lot of people I used to really like and respect over their absolutely abominable opinions recently

The backlash is in full swing. People who speak out for Palestine, for Palestinians, for Gaza are being punished simply for using their voices to advocate against genocide and for the preservation of life. Many of the high-profile examples of people being punished for their speech involve absurdly banal statements. Some folks didn’t even mention Israel by name. The CEO of Web Summit has resigned after tremendous backlash over the comment, “War crimes are war crimes even when committed by allies, and should be called out for what they are.” It would be comical if the implications weren’t so disastrous. Forced out for saying war crimes should always be called out. This obviously correct statement should’ve received no backlash at all, and instead cost this man his job. And yet, as we’ll get into here, the response to such a mundane statement hints at Israel and Zionism’s immense fear over public opinion turning, and on an even greater scale exposes the vulnerability of Western hegemony in this moment. Paddy Cosgrave, the Irish entrepreneur and CEO who stepped down at Web Summit, is not alone. Authors, workers, and politicians who speak out against Israel’s actions in any way are being censured and forced out of their jobs. The famed 92nd Street Y in New York City canceled the talk of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen for signing an open letter condemning Israel's "indiscriminate violence" against Palestinians in Gaza. The editor-in-chief of eLife, a scientific magazine, told the world he is being replaced for sharing a piece from The Onion that called out indifference to the lives of Palestinian civilians. There is again a comic tragedy to someone firing an editor for sharing a headline from a satirical magazine that reads, “Dying Gazans Criticized For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas” and not realizing how they are proving the very point they hope to suppress. In short, by suppressing, firing, and attacking those who uplift the humanity of Palestinians and condemn war crimes, powerful people are making it clearer than ever that they are not in fact on the side of justice. Even more plainly, when they condemn Hamas as barbaric again and again, but then go after people who oppose crimes against humanity and say that thousands of innocent people in Gaza should not be slaughtered, they expose themselves as barbaric and depraved. I hesitate to even use the language of barbarism, as implying the absence of civilization has over centuries become synonymous with dehumanization. But as Israel runs ads in Times Square that say “Be Human. Stand for Israel” and relentlessly bombs Gaza, killing thousands, it becomes hard to ignore how nearly every move made both by the state of Israel and many Zionists has the opposite of its intended impact.

Have you seen that post going around showing pictures of dead Palestinian kids and directly comparing it to Auschwitz? My blood is boiling, dude. I know it's lame to get offended, but holy shit. People have no idea how war works and they clearly forgot how INSANE Auschwitz was.

If it's the one I think it is between two of the ones I've seen one is totally fake and the other is Syrian children that assad gassed.

Did the same thing with the starving child and several other photos of victims of various atrocities not committed by Israel in gaza.

Putin is near universally reviled by people in the west and the pain and death in Ukraine isn't getting anywhere near the coverage as this is and while I understand that as a species we do love a come from behind underdog story, why the movie Dodgeball did so well....... in all seriousness though it's wild and I could understand the visceral hate if Israel had been the one that started this, but since 1948 they've only initiated one war and that was supposed to be a preemptive strike, day 1 they started out under attack and have been in defense mode ever since.

Somehow that involves winning every war they've been in but honestly the folks coming after them have never been professionals, even still as outnumbered as they are they hold and push back and I guess all the people that are tired of losing on the ground decided that the PR machine would be better.

So we get lines of either fake dead children or dead children from a totally different conflict because for all their talk about Jews being white they can't tell the difference between a Syrian, a Saudi, an Egyptian, or a palestenian and if they can't tell nobody should be able to I guess.

They've been attempting to appropriate the Shoah for decades now, sinwar and crew finally thin they're going to manage it.

and if not, they'll try again.

Everyone believes their claims about mistreatment at the hands of Israel why do they not believe them when they say they're happy to send innocent people into the meat grinder.

The fact that they keep having to pull out pictures and video from other conflicts should say something about how many people aren't dying in gaza.

But we're not supposed to think about that.

Or they don't expect people to at least.

An army letting humanitarian aid through that they know for a fact is being hijacked by the people they're fighting against, but doing it anyways because some of it will get where it's needed isn't going to be in the market to slaughter children on purpose.

We had isis surrounded in their last stronghold, they had no food, people were eating grass, there were innocent men, women, and children in there, they didn't get truckloads of UN aid and nobody was screaming that they should, not much at least if they were.

This is just a weird thing going on, and sickening in places as well, like the Holocaust thing that started the essay that for some reason I just kept typing.

sorry bout that, lol

American liberals writing their blog posts on how Joe Biden is better than Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi etc because the victims of Biden's genocide are not Americans or white only demonstrates and showcases the racism of the American liberal/voter of the democratic party.

American liberals really think their lives are more important and are worth more than that of the mothers and daughters and sons and fathers of Gaza...

Biden being described again and again as the 'lesser evil' when 25000 women and children have been killed by the weapons, bombs and money he is sending to kill them. Why is Biden the 'lesser evil'? Because the dead women and children are only Palestinians?

How dare they.

To the rest of the world the utter evil of the genocidal maniac that is Joe Biden is plain and clear.

Trying to quantify evil based on who the victims are, the race, ethnicity and religion of the victims is the banality of evil. Evident in each and every liberal post about how everyone needs to vote for Biden because the slaughter of some 25000 women and children is the 'lesser evil'...

It's nauseous seeing liberals attack leftist leaders like Lula da Silva or Jeremy Corbyn and call them war criminals because asking for peace in the Ukraine/Russia war is equivalent to supporting Putin and then see these same folks talking about 'nuance' and 'complexity' with regards to Joe Biden's genocide of the Palestinian people.

Come November elections, liberals will be voting for evil. Not lesser evil, not bigger evil. Evil. At the least acknowledge that. It's the very least liberals can do instead of constantly telling the people of the global south on this platform that some lives matter less. That killing Palestinians is the 'lesser evil'.

You’re not supposed to utter these words, but what the heck: Osama bin Laden had a point. No, his grievances, as well as those of his followers and sympathizers, didn’t excuse the mass murder of 9/11—not by a long shot. After all, I am a native New Yorker whose family and neighborhood were directly touched by the horror of those inexcusable attacks. Still, more than 17 years after the attacks on the Pentagon and twin towers, it’s worth reflecting on bin Laden’s motives and discussing the stark fact that the United States government has made no moves to address his gripes.

Now is as good a time as any. The U.S. military remains mired in wars across the Greater Middle East that have now entered their 18th year. The cost: $5.9 trillion, 7,000 dead American soldiers, at least 480,000 locals killed and 21 million refugees created. The outcome: more instability, more violence, more global terror attacks and a U.S. reputation ruined for at least a generation in the Islamic world.

Need proof? Consider the regular polling that indicates that the U.S. is considered the greatest threat to world peace. Not China, Russia, Iran or even North Korea. The United States of America.

Why, exactly, is the U.S. so unpopular, from West Africa to South Asia? This can be explained in part by the mere presence—sustained, at that—of U.S. troops in the region. As a historian, I can assure you that folks don’t usually take well to being occupied. Nevertheless, it’s more than that. And here’s the rub: Washington, unwilling to even consider the grievances bin Laden and his acolytes clearly communicated, has instead doubled down on militarism in the region—thereby turning al-Qaida’s fringe complaints into a mainstream sense of injustice throughout the Muslim world.

Let’s review the three core grievances in bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa—essentially a declaration of war—against the U.S., and then look over Washington’s contemporary policies on the issues:

Bin Laden objected to the presence of U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia specifically and across the region more generally, due to their proximity to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Furthermore, bin Laden criticized the U.S. backing of Saudi Arabia’s despotic royal regime.

But rather than pull its troops “offshore,” the U.S. military has expanded its empire of bases, both in the Mideast and throughout the world. Despite the slaughter in Yemen and the murder of a Washington Post journalist, Washington still inflexibly backs the Saudi monarchy. The U.S. has even negotiated record arms contracts with the kingdom, to the tune of $110 billion. Clearly, Washington has only doubled down on this front.

The al-Qaida chief lamented the starvation blockade that the West—led by Washington—imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. Make no mistake: Saddam was no friend of bin Laden—in fact, they were mortal enemies. But the well-reported deaths of some 500,000 Iraqi children, victims of the sanctions during that period, are what motivated bin Laden’s concern. The blockade was so hard and its civilian toll so gruesome that the United Nations aid chief, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest in 1998. Optically, the U.S. government response came across as both coarse and callous. When Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked in a “60 Minutes” interview in 1996 whether the price of a half-million dead children was worth the benefits of the sanctions, she cold-heartedly replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”

Today, in addition to the unwarranted 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which caused at least another 200,000 civilian casualties, the U.S. is complicit in a new blockade, this one imposed by Washington’s Saudi allies in Yemen. Recent reports indicate that some 85,000 Yemeni children have already starved to death in the 3–year-old war on the poorest Arab country. Undeterred, the U.S. continues to provide munitions, intelligence and in-flight refueling to the Saudi military. This veritable war crime has galvanized an increasing anti-American regional public just as intensely as the 1990’s sanctions on Iraq once did.

Bin Laden, like many global Muslims, felt sympathy for the generations-long plight of the occupied Palestinians and abhorred America’s one-sided support for Israel’s military and governing apparatus. The U.S. has been almost alone in its willingness to flout international law, U.N. resolutions and a basic sense of humanity in its backing of Israel since 1948.

Here again, nothing has changed. Washington has simply doubled down. Israel remains the principal recipient of U.S. military aid, with almost no strings attached. U.S. media and Washington policymakers rarely mention the slaughter of mostly unarmed Palestinian demonstrators protesting along the Gaza fence line in the past eight months. The results have been striking: 5,800 wounded and at least 180 killed since March. American mainstream media may not take much note of this, but guess who does? A couple of million Muslim citizens worldwide. In fact, the ongoing protests kicked off partly in response to President Trump’s near unilateral decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move that essentially announced that in American eyes, the Holy City belongs to the Jews alone.

The reasons behind American intransigence and obtuseness in Mideast affairs should come as no surprise. The U.S. is a nation built on a millenarian, exceptionalist ideology and has long been driven by a mission to spread its message across the globe. A populace—and government—infused with these ideas is unlikely to demonstrate the humility to take a proverbial look in the mirror and admit fault. This became especially unlikely in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when passions reached a fever pitch and chauvinistic nationalism became the name of the game. Even then, however, credible voices questioned America’s rush to war, including scholars such as Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk, and even comedians like Bill Maher.

Seventeen years into the nation’s longest war, there are plenty of crucial reasons to review bin Laden’s grievances, consider his arguments and show the strength of character to acquiesce on certain points. This is sobriety, not surrender. After all, self-awareness is a sign of strength and maturity in nations, as well as in individuals.

After years of counterproductive U.S. policies and Mideast interventions, the nation is left with a stark choice: admit error and alter policy, or wage an indefinite worldwide war on a significant portion of the Islamic population. The former option would lessen violence and ultimately lead to a safer homeland, but it would require confronting an uncomfortable truth that most Americans simply can’t face: Bin Laden was a monster, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong on all fronts.