Comment by refulgentis
2 years ago
> not in their charter.
18 August 1988.
2017: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/hamas-2017-document-full.
> They are accepting 10% casualties according to the article (probably bullshit).
I genuinely can't parse this. What does it mean to "accept 10% casualties". Casualties means injured/dead. Do you mean 10% of the total population injured? 10% of those injured in a strike are non-combatants? Steel-manning while gently guiding back to the material: lets ignore the 100:1 extreme in the material, and say 10:1. That would mean roughly 90% are non-combatants. Not the inverse.
I'm a Zionist and I'm shaking my head at the majority of what you wrote, there's no need to be this rude to anyone, ever. The condescension harms you more than them, you're trying to win them over, you shouldn't be ranting and pretending they don't know what a % mark means, its detrimental to your argument because it increases perception you're missing their point
More widely, at some point we have an obligation to engage with people and avoid silly side debates like "the charter says kill all the jews, here's the 1988 charter, oh you know they have a new charter? sure they revised it, but the revisions are stupid pandering to ignorant Western sympathizers" and "find me a document allows for saving a Jew authored by Gaza's government. Let me know where this document is."
There's a really unfortunate tendency to conflate any criticism of this war with "Hamas good" or even "Hamas okay" or "Hamas bad but not that bad" etc etc. Not claiming any of that. I'm on the right of Israel opinion polls because I want the war to continue until Hamas is eliminated because I do believe that the 1988 charter describes how they see Israelis to this day.
But I, like everyone else, contain multitudes, and see a straight through line from IDF concerns about targeting rules getting looser and looser and looser over the years since the 90s, what I've seen since October, and now this information we have in the TFA. I'd rather acknowledge that publicly and remain clearly morally superior than start long arguments over if its okay using things like 1988 charter.
What you're saying requires a belief that you are the official speaker of Hamas. And that they don't mean what they say, they mean whatever you say they mean.
It's a stretch. I can't say I believe you. I'll go with the documentation and official statements pending some more compelling evidence to establish your authority.
Dude this post doesn't make any sense, like it's not even attempting to respond to any of it. If you're on tilt, bless, this is overwhelming for me too. But it's bizarre to tell me I'm "trusting Hamas" when I virtue signalled 4 times I don't believe them.
If it's any help to either of you, I'm completely lost in what you're both arguing about, and sometimes on HN you can get caught up in an endless over-explaining trap that sends the thread off into the right margins and really makes whatever important point you were originally trying to make impossible to find.
We all have trouble (me especially) accepting the idea that our interlocutors here sometimes just aren't going to agree with us, no matter how many ways we restate our case. Sometimes the most persuasive thing you can do is just leave off.
No I'm saying that I'm trusting Hamas. I'm not trusting your implied claim that the new charter doesn't say that. It clearly does.
I gave a short response because it seemed like you were claiming that a new charter doesn't call for the killing of Jews. The new one only calls for the killing of the ones in Israel for now, because they are Zionists, even if not by choice.
I am pointing out that the implication is not for you to make. The meaning is expressed by the authors. The same ones who entered a neighboring nation and gave inarguable meaning to their already stated purpose. Furthermore, they NEVER deny the original 1988 meaning either. As a point, they don't.
As for 10% casualty; it means when making 10 calls for 10 kills, if 1 is a bad call that's acceptable. If 2 are bad, that's not acceptable. That was stated pretty clearly in the article. I didn't read it a second time, but I'm sure it's there.
So, Israel, even as demonized in this hearsay article, still sounds 90% better than Hamas.
Stated another way, even if Israel were to state that they intend to only save one Gazan civilian, it's still better than the stated purpose of Gaza. Your earlier comparison then is problematic.
I'm sorry for the percent sign explanation. When you tell me the article doesn't say that, I make a genuine effort to understand what you've missed. The article says 10% casualty, and I said 90% as a cup half full expression. Since you said the article didn't say that, I guessed that you didn't see 90 in the article. I tried to help you look for the 10.
I'm not calling you an idiot despite the seemingly implication. Not everyone understands how percentages work and I can't be expected to make any assumption about what you do or don't know.
Common sense being uncommon as it is.
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