Israel shuts down local Al Jazeera offices

I’ve been seeing this argument pop up a lot lately, and I’ll try to address it (though frankly, I’m not that smart, so maybe somebody else can explain it better).

So what you are trying to claim is that the World Court never explicitly claimed, in direct words, that some of South Africa’s allegations for genocide was plausible, therefor the court never ruled that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide, and therefor, we have no authority claiming that Israel is committing genocide, and therefor, any claims of Israel committing genocide are unfounded.

First of all I want to address how weak this line of argument is. The ICJ is not the only authority which has claimed plausible genocide (yes, the ICJ did claim that; I’ll come back to that), second, we have plenty of evidence which indicts Israel for the crime of genocide, including, but not limited to South Africa’s filing at the ICJ (see sources on Wikipedia). Even if we take your or Joan Donoghue’s interpretation at face value, raxxorraxor’s claim that “the accusation is ridiculous and lacking any form of sincere analysis and judgement” is it self pretty much wrong.

Second, the court did rule that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide, by any reasonable interpretation of the ruling. Even though most people cite Article IV paragraph 54 (See [1]; quoted above) as the smoking gun (which it absolutely is) equally relevant is Article II Paragraphs 30-32 where the court decides it has jurisdiction over the case, citing Article IX of the Genocide Convention. The court would not have done that if it did not think it was plausible that Israel were violating the terms of the Genocide Convention. In other words, the court ruled that some of South Africa’s accusations were plausible. And put yet another way, the court decided that it is plausible that Israel is committing the crime of Genocide.

The problem with your interpretation, and your citing of Joan Donoghue’s answer in this context, is that she is actually answering a question relating to the provisional measures ordered by the court on January 26th 2024 (which is what Article IV is all about), and again on March 28th 2024. My personal opinion is that by answering the question this way she is actually being willfully misleading. It is beyond a doubt that the court decided that some of the accusations were plausible, her clarifying and stating that technically the court only decided on provisional measures, is obscuring the fact that it did rule to start investigating Israel for the crime of Genocide.

ICJ member often rules in alignment with their nation’s foreign policy, and Joan Donoghue has shown that to be the case under her presidency, I actually find it a miracle that the court ruled in favor of South Africa under her presidency. My personal belief is that the case against Israel is very obvious, and there was no way the court could rule any other way. This interview is she rectifying US foreign policy, and offering a plausible deniability to what the court actually ruled.

1: https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192...

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So, I'm/we're just supposed to accept your narrative "without proof" but "the other side" requires proof which there is plenty of - but you're clearly not going to be willing to spend the time to read/watch it?

Re: "If the goal of Israel was genocide, the number of civilian casualties would be FAR FAR greater than they are."

I've heard this fallacious argument regularly - one of the many counter-points the mob is trained with to parrot - stopping them from critically thinking deeper, and keeping the mob relatively done not teaching them anything to keep them in the dark:

If they weren't trying to deceive you then they should be teaching you about the broader scope/context of the situation, instead of narrowing-fixating your view on such a shallow metric. E.g. Current bad actors in Israeli government are very aware of the need to maintain public support, support of a weaponized mob to apply distributed "peer pressure" as part of the censorship-suppression-narrative control apparatus that exists; thank God Elon Musk existed to be able to pay a easy $44 billion to take that weaponized media channel out of the hands of censorious bad actors - so even if arguably more lies spread, also arguably it's more likely more truth will also spread.

Re: "this is kindergarten stuff"

So welcome to my kindergarten class, unless you already realized the broader context that Israel needs to maintain enough public support so the funding tap (that Netanyahu also has bragged on video that he will "milk America dry") to Israel/IDF continues? It doesn't seem you're taking into account that perceptions matter though, even though you believe the side that there is a massive global uprising against the actions of this current Israeli government.

Have you ever written out to extrapolate, let's say reverse engineer, how you'd potentially get to this point from a historical point? E.g. we could start at the point Israel was formed as a state, "given" 55% of the Palestinian land - which initially was made up of Arabs and Jews peacefully living together, all of them in that region were called Palestinians - not just the Arabs; I've heard estimates the population of Jewish people in the region was anywhere from 3-7%, being given a highly disproportionate 55% of the land.

And then when a "legitimate" war broke out, as was expected to happen - Israel being funded by the military-industrial complex and the captured coffers of and for the pillaging of the United States of America - they of course won being outgunned, and took 70%+ of the land.

Do you know yet or even believe that Netanyahu funded Hamas? As unbelievable as that sounds, it's documented - along with the purpose. Netanyahu is also very aware of and has spoken about on video about 5th generation warfare - psychological warfare tactics including but not limited to subversion. Are you aware of any of that, and what's your take on it?

Netanyahu from a fairly young age also has had the stance that should not be a two-state solution, that Palestinians don't have a right to a state: does that make it more or less likely that he'd be willing to do unwarranted harm against them to support his fundamental beliefs?

P.S. If you're not willing to actually invest time into seeking out the truth, you're highly likely an ideologue and indoctrinated into narratives you've been trained with over many decades. Most ideologues are more lazy than not - refuse to engage at any depth - and then cite things generally, if they put in that much effort because they feel the need to be the last one to respond usually ; or whether that is because they "don't have time" - the consequences are the same.

So what's your time limit for video clips? 2 minutes?

Do you think you can learn an alternative perspective without going into any depth about it, or spending say 20+ hours studying what the other side.

Obviously I'm not going to waste more time providing you more links to videos or articles, if even the ~5 minute video is too long for you.

You're also falling for the propaganda that this is a war, it's not: they are an occupied land, recognized by international law and they are required by international law to have a higher duty of care for those they occupy; if you want to claim they're not occupied, then how did Israel turn off their water, electricity, etc. the moment they wanted to?

If this conversation did actually continue, and we kept engaging, then I am 80% confident that I'd be able to predict other rhetoric that then presents itself as more recent layers of learned reflexive narrative talking points of belief are deconstructed.

The problem is, this conversation in general, where everyone has the opportunity to put their points forward in a long-form format - over a lot of time, to create a single corpus for the layperson to follow along with and learn from - is prevented from happening; already pointed out to what the pro-Israel / arguably pro-genocide supporting side's (mislead primarily via manufactured consent) most recent "tip of the spear" move was Ben Shapiro/Daily Wire getting a gag order on Candace Owens - in secret - while publicly pretending to arrange a public debate between Shapiro and Owens - because propagandists know that too bright of a spotlight shown on their incongruent logic will start to shatter the veil of their blind followers.

The fun part to all of this - or by fun I guess I mean what is exciting and good to look forward to, to work towards for the much brighter future coming:

- In the future we'll train our own personal AI Avatars - and those avatars that are better trained will obliterate others less trained, if put up head-to-head in a conversation, say on Israel-Palestine; and then automated systems, trained initially by us, will be able to highlight the points of cognitive dissonance and/or incongruences in logic - in narrative statements presented; because this is tiring, but it is work - and work that is the most important work if you care about human life, human life as sacred vs. "kill Hamas at all costs" vs. - the reason you don't go full genocidal fascist behaviour is because it's possible - and in this case is the case - that heartless sociopath-psychopath authoritarians will pull strings towards manufacturing consent to deceive others into doing their evil bidding for them; it only took a handful of people to run the concentration-death camps in NaZi Germany - the rest of the Gestapo "just" gathered up the Jews, the crippled, etc, and loaded them onto trains - probably able to tell themselves

Conclusions,

How do you process the incongruence that interviews like this one - with head head of Israeli intelligence, is actually on the side of the Palestinians for what Israel/IDF has done and is doing to them: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5pI0nLBxR3/

Is it a fake video, fake interview? Do you think an ex-head of IDF's intelligence agency wouldn't know exactly 100% of the truth?

You can see all [dead] comments if you turn on 'showdead' in your profile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> So, I'm/we're just supposed to accept your narrative "without proof" but "the other side" requires proof

No, not at all, the number of Palestinians in Israel is a matter of public record. The Hamas strategy of human shields is extremely well documented. It's trivial to get footage of Palestinians driving on Israeli roads without hassle. Literally only need to go to a supermarket 15 minutes outside of Jerusalem, even in Jewish areas like mishor adumim.

> unless you already realized the broader context that Israel needs to maintain enough public support

Huh? There's no "broader context" to accusations of genocide. Either Israel has a policy of murdering all the Palestinians or it doesn't. It doesn't.

(Though there isn't really a genetic difference between Palestinians and Jordanian/Egyptian Arabs, not sure if that would even be genocide- but that's semantics, Israel is obviously not trying to wipe these people out, even if their identity is based on recent tribal affiliations)

Eh.. honestly, I'd go through your response point by point, but you are both clueless _and_ passionate, which is a combo I don't feel like dealing with.

If we're going into "you should watch", I literally worked on a documentary series about the formation of the state of Israel called "Faith and Fate", produced by Rabbi Berel Wein. It covers the period leading up to the state of Israel. It speaks to some of the issues you brought up like pogroms against Jews in Israel in the 1920's, the white paper, yearning of the indigenous people to return to their homeland for a couple thousand years, etc. etc.