Comment by gameboy45
2 days ago
interesting hearing his justification for working w Saudi but not Israel: He says he would never work with Israel now. “I think it’s an illegitimate and criminal government,” he told me during our gun safety training. “I mean, [Benjamin] Netanyahu is a war criminal.”
When I pointed out that Saudi Arabia has its own abysmal human rights record, Masad drew a contrast.
“I just think about how Replit is going to be used. Like, Israel is actively committing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and if you sell to the government there, it’s possible that they’re going to use it for that,” he said, pointing to the country’s use of Microsoft cloud services to track Palestinians’ phone calls. (After an investigation by The Guardian, Microsoft said it disabled the services that made the tracking possible in September."
Seems like a silly excuse. If his concern is that Israel could use Replit for military purposes, then SA is perfectly capable of doing the same. And SA has - directly or indirectly - killed more people in Yemen than Israel has in Gaza.
I mean, if he was really consistent, he'd also not be operating a business in America, given America is responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent civilians (more than Israel and SA combined) in recent history.
I'd love to hear an argument for this being true that doesn't involve counting all of the deaths caused by Sunni-Shia sectarian violence in Iraq, suicide bombings in civilian markets, ISIS etc. as caused by America.
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"responsible" is a weasel word. By that logic China is also "responsible" for Cambodia genocide 1975-1979, and who are responsible for Sudan famine?
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Am I in some weird alternative universe where Israel did not just engage in a genocidal campaign against a population of Palestinians that are descendants of refugees from their prior genocidal campaign? Israel just finished killing probably over a hundred thousand civilians. The displaced the majority of Gaza. They destroyed the vast majority of its hospitals and universities and public infrastructure. They killed foreign aid workers even after those foreign aid workers cleared their routes with Israelis. Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians on camera. Then those solders were celebrated on public Israeli television and by the Israeli government. Attempts to prosecute those solders resulted in punishment for the prosecutors.
Is Saudi Arabia a human rights violator? Yeah and so is a bunch of western governments. But no modern government comes close to the abuses of the Israeli government and Israeli military. This is the view of the free people of this world.
> from their prior genocidal campaign
Not only there is not a good argument for considering 1948 war a genocide on Palestinians but there is a much stronger argument Arabs have tried to genocide Jews (especially to those who think who think there was a genocide in Gaza because of starvation as a weapon of war + intent):
1. In 1948 Arab forces besieged Jerusalem and they were starting to run out of food.
2. Azzam Pasha, General Secretary of the Arab League, famously threatened "a war of extermination and a momentous massacre", Fawzi al-Qawuqji, commander of the Arab Liberation Army said that "we will have to initiate total war. We will murder, wreck and ruin everything standing in our way, be it English, American or Jewish.". Hell, several have even extended the threats to not just the Jews of Mandatory Palestine, but to Jews of the Arab world as a whole, such as Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Said("if a satisfactory solution of the Palestine case was not reached, severe measures should be taken against all Jews in Arab countries.") or the head of the Egyptian delegation to the General Assembly, Muhammad Hussein Heykal("the lives of 1,000,000 Jews in Muslim countries would be jeopardized by the establishment of a Jewish state." ). As Matiel Mughannam, head of the Arab Women's Organization in Palestine put it in an interview with Nadia Lourie in January 1948, "The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders.... [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the `holy war' has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred. " (See Benny Morris' 1948 for sources on all of these)
5 replies →
More than 70000 including 20000 children? Wow thats a lot.
You say that like it's unrealistic. The accepted death toll for the conflict in Yemen is nearly 400,000 people.
If your primary cause is Palestine then it's pretty internally consistent?
Pecunia non olet.
[money doesn't stink]
It truly does though. Any significant pile of it stinks of exploitation and death.
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> blowing up kids
not to refute the difference in extent but this is somewhat notable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahyan_airstrike
The Saudi war against Houthis was more brutal than the Gaza war. 70,000 dead from only starvation for starters. But not only is it not genocide it doesn't even enter conscious awareness as a thing that happened. I wonder why.
Because Americans mostly don’t care about world events unless they involve us directly.
Gaza is a welcome aberration.