Comment by FireBeyond

8 hours ago

Israel likes to argue that Hamas embeds fighters with first responders, which even if so, they're still responding to injured. But Israel considers this not even collateral damage but justified.

Mind you Israel is currently funding a lobbyist organization in the UK to flag Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) as a terrorist group (because many years ago a couple of people who had affiliations with other anti-Israel groups were found to be also affiliated with MSF).

Yeah, I've heard about it, but presumable Americans soldiers still care about IHL at least to some degree, even though they've historically not bothered with the Geneva convention and have tortured people.

Responding here to answer the dead comment which feels entirely disingenuous.

No-one mentioned "using ambulances as cover". That is separate from "enemy combatants are acting in a first responder capacity, but are still enemy combatants, therefore the entire first response effort is a viable target". That is a war crime that Israel regularly likes to commit.

> These are the same people who view women as property, homosexuality as a reason for execution, and 13 years olds as viable brides.

Halacha? Acquiring your wife through kiddushin? Only a husband can issue a get (divorce document)? Women in agunahs (dead marriages)? Sounds like property to me.

Rabbinic law makes capital punishment effectively impossible, but the Orthodox sects do everything possible to punish: disownment, both family and social and actual exile from physical communities.

Don't girls reach halachic adulthood at 12?

And lets not throw stones here. Even in the US, you can get married with parental consent or a judge's consent at any age in Mississippi, New Mexico and Oklahoma.

You can get married at 15 in Hawaii and Kansas.

You are "grandfathered" into sexual consent (not as in "accepting of marital rape" but "it's no longer statutory rape if she's your wife") when you do so.

So we may not want to be lording it too much on some guise of moral superiority, particularly given that most of the marriages that happen at those ages are not "young couple got pregnant, want to do the right thing" but "older man in conservative/religious community saw young vulnerable girl and decided he had to have her".

  • These are edge case exceptions that just haven't been phased out yet. If you're trying to frame these things into Americans being ok with underage girls being forced into marriage you are absolutely nuts.

    The US is morally superior in every way that counts.

    • Clearly Americans are ok with it, because that's how they vote. West Virginia didn't raise the age of marriage to 16 until 2023, after years of staunch Republican opposition.

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    • The US and Israel have murdered far, far more innocent people than Hamas. Hamas are resistance that killed < 2,000 Israelis (most of which were both in and killed by the IDF). The US has killed millions of innocent people in the last century alone, many for the benefit of Israel.

      What the US/Israel have done in Gaza is orders of magnitude worse than anything Hamas has done and that's not even touching Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan...

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