Comment by mardifoufs
2 years ago
Because it's Israel. It's also why no western country has ever really officially condemned Israel no matter what they do. They are on "our side" so it's okay. And those civilians kind of deserved it anyways or something, and we can just trust every single word the IDF says and use them as an actual source to pretend the IDF isn't into mass civilian murder.
The only thing that made this time a bit different is the crazy, almost hard to believe, switch from the Ukrainian conflict and how it was seen and portrayed... To western countries staying completely silent when again, it's our side doing it. Well it wasn't hard to believe but it just made it a lot more blatant.
Israel doesn't really care though since israeli officers routinely go on public tirades that amount to mask-off allusions to genocide ("wipe Gaza" "level the city to the ground" "make it unliveable"), with again 0 consequences at all. Even Russia at least tries to not have Russian military officers just say the quiet part out loud.
This is what I found the most shocking and disheartening in the first days after the October 7th massacre and the start of indiscriminate bombing of Gaza - the reaction and inaction of the West.
At the moment of the Russian invasion, so many countries banded together in supporting Ukraine, both in materiel and moral support. Russia became a pariah overnight. It was an awful situation but it was uplifting to see how we all cared about sovereignty, peace, self-determination and the well-being of civilians.
Then civilians in Gaza started getting slaughtered and... nothing, or worse - full support of it. The exact same freedom-loving world leaders had become mute.
I consider myself more cynical than the average person, but this still caught me off guard. Two horrible situations, two suffering peoples and such different outcomes.
As a father of a young child, it was a gut punch to see what we were suddenly trying to justify and it left me numb for days until I adjusted to the actual reality. The reaction to the Russian invasion had little to do with the welfare of Ukrainians; it was more about political affiliations.
The selectivity of Western calls to not commit war crimes predates the response to Oct 7. Two weeks earlier, the Azerbaijani dictatorship ethnically cleansed over 100,000 people from their ancestral land. Not a peep from anyone, in fact Azerbaijan is a "reliable, trustworthy partner" according to von der Leyen: https://neighbourhood-enlargement.ec.europa.eu/news/statemen...
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-passion-of-artsakh/
There is absolutely no equivalence between Ukraine and Gaza, in fact, it is disguising to suggest as much.
Yeah,true even Russia doesn't openly state that their goal is to level Ukraine to the ground and displace the population one way or the other.
Israel also gets away with encroaching and colonizing palestinian territory (that they don't even deny isn't theirs until they "settle" it). Again, Russia at least gets international condemnation when it does so
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Even when our own citizens are killed, they don't get condemned.
E.g. the IDF targeted and killed a Canadian UN peacekeeper in 2008 (because he got too squeaky) and the Canadian gov't barely lodged a protest.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/un-officer-reported-is...
The sinking of the USS Liberty is the most notable of those events.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
> The combined air and sea attack killed 34 crew members (naval officers, seamen, two marines, and one civilian NSA employee), wounded 171 crew members
The only consequence for them was "paying compensations" as if there was a price to put on human lives.
The example you're citing was actually investigated, and (IIRC) it was found that Hezbollah was firing mortar(s) from a position directly adjacent to the UN post. I believe that it was generally assumed that Hezbollah was using the Canadians as 'human shields'. Culpability in such situations is usually attributed to the shield-users, largely due to the consequences of attributing blame to the retaliators (i.e. encouraging further use of human shields).
Reputable URL from a non-Israeli/non-pro-Israeli source, or your words don't count, or are just disinformation.
There's only so many times the phrase "human shield" can be uttered by aggressors before it starts to lose its effectiveness.
They dropped a JDAM on the building. After repeated pleas on known channels to stop.
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