IDF kill Red Cross workers in Gaza

Vanellus · May 9, 2025

Friedrich Rubinstein said:
It is understandable that you are not comfortable answering that question.

You have made a wrong assumption. I have a life outside of this forum. However, having now just read it, the question completely ignores my previous post #118 so maybe I should treat it in the same manner.

Maybe you'll also ignore what this son of a Holocaust survivor has to say about Gaza:
Smearing Palestine protesters endangers us all

Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Wednesday and Thursday this week, will likely see Israeli and US politicians use the opportunity to suggest that their destruction of Gaza is somehow about protecting Jews from another Holocaust – and that anyone who protests against this destruction is really motivated by antisemitism. [edit: or supporters of Hamas - another common false slur used on this forum]

That’s certainly what happened last year, when both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former US President Joe Biden made such claims. In response, 10 Holocaust survivors issued a letter, stating: “To use the memory of the Holocaust like this to justify either genocide in Gaza or repression on college campuses is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.”

It’s not just Netanyahu and Biden who have misused the Holocaust in this way. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was clearly referring to the pro-Palestine movement when he talked about antisemitism on university campuses and “hatred marching on our streets” in a speech at the Holocaust Educational Trust last September.

This misuse of the Holocaust and antisemitism to discredit opponents of the Gaza genocide has now paved the way for the UK government to announce a new law banning protests near places of worship, including synagogues. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s justification for this was that several London synagogues had been “disrupted” by pro-Palestine protests on “too many occasions”.

What she didn’t mention was that there hasn’t been a single reported incident of any threat to a synagogue linked to any pro-Palestine demonstration. This is consistent with my own experience as someone who has, along with many others, carried signs highlighting my Jewish heritage at numerous pro-Palestine demonstrations.

My sign reads: “This son of a Holocaust survivor says stop the genocide in Gaza.” Along with other survivor descendants, I am not just warmly welcomed, but often cheered by thousands of our fellow demonstrators. Of course, synagogues deserve to be safe from any real threats. But the fact that some synagogue attendees have strong political disagreements with opponents of the Gaza genocide does not mean that anyone’s right to protest should be repressed.

Or will you label the ten Holocaust survivors and this son of a Holocaust survivor as the "wrong kind of Jew" or "self hating Jews"?

Friedrich Rubinstein · May 9, 2025

I actually directly addressed your post #118, where you claimed that 52,000 fatalities are "a large number" and that the "unspoken assumption" would be "that Palestinian lives don't matter". So I showed that anything below 80,000 fatalities is actually statistically LOW for this war, and that one can state these facts without assuming that Palestinian lives don't matter.

There is no conceivable reason to be upset about the 52,000 fatalities in Gaza unless you don't want Hamas to be eradicated or somehow expect Israel to miraculously produce a much better civilian to combatant ratio than anyone else in the world.

As for the opinions of random individuals with no relevant expertise: anecdotes and personal convictions are not an argument, while statistics and hard numbers are. If there are individuals whose opinion might carry some weight it is people like the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, one of the world's leading military academies. Not only has he studied urban warfare for many many years, but he himself has been to Gaza during this war himself multiple times to look at it first hand. Here is one of the articles he wrote about the IDF's conduct: Israel Has Created a New Standard for Urban Warfare. No One Will Admit It

Vanellus · May 10, 2025

Your post #119 did not address anything I wrote in post #118.

Ellesmere · May 11, 2025

"ENQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW"

1) Why does President Trump shed "CROCODILE TEARS" over the loss of young combatants from Ukrainian and Russian combatants, but when it comes to the deaths of over 50,000 civilians in Gaza, primarily women and children, the Trump Administration's "SILENCE IS DEAFENING?"

2) Why does Netenyahu deserve such a warm welcome at the White House, as compared to the hostility directed at Ukraine's Zelinskiy - apparently only Israel is deserving of America's financial support when it comes to providing weapons used for the renewed military hostilities in Gaza, despite contravening the peace agreements that America helped broker !

3) Why are President Zelinsky and Ukraine being held to a totally different standard - has Israel been forced to sign agreements allowing America to exploit that nation's natural resources, constituting a form of repayment for the military support it has received from the US in the past?

Friedrich Rubinstein · May 11, 2025

Comparing the war in Ukraine with the war in Gaza, and the US reaction to it, is farther away than apples and oranges. Not only does the US have a very different relationship with these two countries (a decades-long close partnership with Israel as opposed to virtually no connection to Ukraine), but the position of these countries in the war is also vastly different on almost every level - finance, economy, manpower, military capabilities, power-balance etc.

By the way, the "50,000" number is the combined death toll of civilians and Hamas terrorists. The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health doesn't differentiate there.

Ellesmere · Monday at 2:29 AM

Friedrich Rubinstein said:
Comparing the war in Ukraine with the war in Gaza, and the US reaction to it, is farther away than apples and oranges. Not only does the US have a very different relationship with these two countries (a decades-long close partnership with Israel as opposed to virtually no connection to Ukraine), but the position of these countries in the war is also vastly different on almost every level - finance, economy, manpower, military capabilities, power-balance etc.

By the way, the "50,000" number is the combined death toll of civilians and Hamas terrorists. The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health doesn't differentiate there.

Having "a decades long close partnership with Israel as opposed to virtually no collection to Ukraine" only begs the question as to why President Trump is far more preoccupied with imposing a peace treaty on Ukraine that included he and his Vice President publicly berating Zelensky during his abbreviated visit to the White House - accusing him of being ungrateful given that apparently he has not "no cards to play!"

Apparently Trump has failed to notice that despite "not having cards to play" the Ukraine has still managed to hold advances by the much larger and better equipped Russian military to a bare minimum over the past 3 years!

Most military experts had made the same assessment as Trump, underestimating Ukrainian resolve while predicted that Putin's forces, presumably "holding all the cards," would literally "steamroller" over their opponents in a matter of days!

Unfortunately American Republicans failed to provided Zelensky with the same level of military support to defend his nation against Russian aggression that they were more than willing to extend to Netanyahu to direct against members of Hamas - all cleverly disguised as 1,000's of innocent women and children civilian victims!

With access to modern military weapons systems , there is a distinct possibility that Ukraine would have possessed "the necessary cards" to reclaim all of its territory subject to Russian occupation that Trump is so willing to relinquish to the Russians as an incentive for future aggression!

one might have assumed that the deaths of 1,000's of innocent women and cholfren in GaZA the Trump Administration

Friedrich Rubinstein · Monday at 8:26 AM

Again, comparing the war in Ukraine with the war in Gaza is just a distraction and doesn't add anything meaningful to the conversation. Israel is winning on all fronts, fighting an insurgency, while Ukraine is the underdog that only survives because of 100% Western money and equipment, fighting a conventional war. Israel has enough money to buy all their weapons, whereas Ukraine relies on handouts. The comparison falls apart right there already, and all the resulting differences in approach and support are a result of it.

Why do you put that much emphasis on the "1000s of women and children" in Gaza? Why don't you mention the thousands of Hamas terrorists that have been eliminated? Do you think that the war should stop because of the civilian deaths? Here are some numbers from other wars in recent history, it demonstrates how low the civilian death toll in Gaza is:

All of these are under the Geneva conventions, fought with the same rules that Israel is under:

Korean War: 2 million civilian deaths
Vietnam War: between 400,000 and 2 million civilian deaths
Ethiopian Civil War: 1 million civilian deaths
2nd Congo War: up to 5.4 million civilian deaths
Syrian Civil War: 300,000 civilian deaths
Iraq War: hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths

It is time to drop the double standards. Rooting out the bad people in a society costs the lives of civilians, just like in every other war in human history. And in comparison, there are not many civilian casualties in Gaza.

Vanellus · Monday at 12:24 PM

Friedrich Rubinstein said:
By the way, the "50,000" number is the combined death toll of civilians and Hamas terrorists. The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health doesn't differentiate there.

The number does not include those missing under the rubble, or who have died because of malnutrition, lack of medical facilities or having to drink polluted water.

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251265727/un-gaza-death-toll-women-children

The death count also does not include the untold numbers of people dying from preventable disease, malnutrition and other consequences of the war.

Friedrich Rubinstein · Monday at 1:17 PM

Vanellus said:
The number does not include those missing under the rubble, or who have died because of malnutrition, lack of medical facilities or having to drink polluted water.

https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251265727/un-gaza-death-toll-women-children

We have no idea what the number includes, because Hamas doesn't provide evidence for anything and neither the UN nor anyone else has been able to verify these numbers independently. What we do know is that after Hamas recently removed 3,400 names from its fatalities list (including more than 1,000 children), now 72% of fatalities are combat aged males in Hamas' own statistics. We also know that Hamas is falsely categorizing adults as children and men as women in their lists, as has been shown in previous reports, as well as adding people who died of natural causes and those that died by Hamas fire and not the IDF.

Either way it is self-evident to the outside observer that not a million people have died in this war unlike in some of the examples listed above. Far from it, even the UN, human rights groups and aid groups still say there are 2.1 million people in Gaza right now - the same number as prior to the war. Nobody seriously believes that this war has drastically reduced the population in Gaza.

Vanellus · Monday at 5:03 PM

Ellesmere said:
View attachment 364861

"ENQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW"

1) Why does President Trump shed "CROCODILE TEARS" over the loss of young combatants from Ukrainian and Russian combatants, but when it comes to the deaths of over 50,000 civilians in Gaza, primarily women and children, the Trump Administration's "SILENCE IS DEAFENING?"

2) Why does Netenyahu deserve such a warm welcome at the White House, as compared to the hostility directed at Ukraine's Zelinskiy - apparently only Israel is deserving of America's financial support when it comes to providing weapons used for the renewed military hostilities in Gaza, despite contravening the peace agreements that America helped broker !

3) Why are President Zelinsky and Ukraine being held to a totally different standard - has Israel been forced to sign agreements allowing America to exploit that nation's natural resources, constituting a form of repayment for the military support it has received from the US in the past?

There's a well known influential Israeli lobby group in Washington called AIPAC. I don't think Ukrainians living in the US have a similar lobby group. Also, there are some on the religious right in the US who think that supporting Israel makes Armageddon and the Second Coming more likely - as if God needs their help!

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IDF kill Red Cross workers in Gaza

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