Most ordinary Iranians, sure; certainly not the Islamic regime. It was their decision to train, fund and supply weapons to terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ and the Houthis since the early 80s.
In the past 60 years the Iranian regime has only closed the straight in retaliation to a second massive suckerpunch against it.
I'd say they are acting in a far more restrained and reasonable manner than the belligerents in the 'west'. And most rational people are in agreement with me on this.
Imagine what the US would have done in response to a massive surprise bombing attack that killed the president, most of the senior cabinet and military, struck bases across the country, sunk most of it's navy, and blew out a few elementary schools and apartment blocks and civilian infrastructure targets for good measure.
The last time something that was a tiny fraction of that happened, it started two wars and killed half a million people (most of them from a country that had nothing to do with the attack).
Iran's response was downright restrained.
Here's a radical idea. Don't start wars with countries if you don't like the consequences.
> In the past 60 years the Iranian regime has only closed the straight in retaliation to a second massive suckerpunch against it.
Well yes, because its a desperation move that hurts them just as much as it hurts everyone else. Its worth it to them as a last resort but at any earlier point it would have been a strategicly stupid thing to do.
> The last time something that was a tiny fraction of that happened, it started two wars and killed half a million people (most of them from a country that had nothing to do with the attack).
Arguably this whole thing happened because Israel thinks Iran is at fault for the oct 7 attacks and now views them as an unacceptable threat (note: even if you dont agree, it really doesn't matter so long as the people who are at war think this). Which was kind of like your hypothetical, so it should resonate with what you are saying.
> Iran's response was downright restrained.
Largely because they lack the ability to do much else that would be a strategic benefit to their situation.
> Here's a radical idea. Don't start wars with countries if you don't like the consequences.
Indeed, but that bites both ways. Violence begets violence and war begets war. The present situation was forged in the decisions of the past including many of Iran's.
US/Israel may have opened the current front, but the Iranian regime has been waging proxy warfare since the early 80s. They also attempted to assassinate our president. It's misleading to paint US/Israel as the aggressors for occasionally responding to years of indirect or unsuccessful attacks.
To look at it another way: if US/Israel hadn't responded directly, but instead paid Erdogan a large bribe to strike a list of coordinates in Iran, while also supplying the missiles and the training, would that get around your concern? Probably not.
Ever thought why? For you they are terrorists, and for them they are resistance groups to prevent what Israel did in the last 2 years..occupy their lands an murder their people.
Israel has never occupied Yemen. They are like a thousand miles away but the slogan on the Houthi banner contains “death to Israel” and “curse the Jews”.
They’re not even pretending not to be antisemitic.
> the U.S. makes excuses for Israel's attack on its own USS Liberty in 1967.
It's strange how this 59-year-old incident keeps getting brought up. Friendly fire happens all the time, and Israel apologized and paid reparations ages ago.
Except they don't happen all the time, because this incident killed 34 Americans & wounded 171. Is that not remarkable enough for a 'blue-ribbon' commission of investigation? If one of our European allies had done this, wouldn't a commission be held to review all the evidence and make a determination as to cause?
One needn't dig too deep to see there isn't too much wiggle room for mere misunderstanding. The nearly defenseless ship suffered 2 hours of withering attack by both waves of jets and torpedo boats; this with an American flag and its hull number in open display as it operated in international waters. The context was that this ship was an intelligence ship bristling with antennas and recording everything it could from the combatants in the ongoing six-day-war in 1967.
If there's any conspiracy, its how for years afterward whenever a congressman sought an investigation as requested by one of the family of those killed, the effort was silently killed despite its impact, over and over.
There are a lot of details involved and many actions to be assessed on both sides, but it should merit more than a Navy Court of Inquiry. When the captain of the ship received his Medal of Honor for saving his ship while injured, it was awarded to him by the Secretary of the Navy quietly at the Washington Navy Yard. The usual procedure is that the MoH be presented by the president in the White House in a ceremony. So, there's that.
> this with an American flag and its hull number in open display
Soldiers have uniforms with distinguishing colors/marks in open display, yet millions of soldiers have died by friendly fire. Lots of friendly planes have been shot down too despite IFF. No system for identifying friendly (or neutral) assets is foolproof.
> Even the NYT recently published an article about how the israelies use dogs to rape Palestinians.
They published allegations from a questionable source with no evidence. I think most people would agree that "Israel trains dogs to rape on command" is rather absurd and implausible on its face.
The evidence is there, but some people refuse to accept. The claim is not implausible, unfortunately - it happened in other countries (e.g. Chile). Either way, their history of war crimes and atrocities goes all the way back to the start of the invasion, and continues to this day for everyone to see:
The first link is about a dog attack, but absolutely nothing about dogs being "trained to rape". The second link is nothing specific, just an entire subreddit devoted to anti-Israel propaganda.
The first article just shows a sliver of the crimes they commit, documented by a western source. I found an article that talks about how similar crimes with dogs raping prisoners was done in Chile, so it's not far fetched at all that the israelis are doing the same.
You said "the evidence is there" about Israeli rape dogs, not some other allegation. An incident that has nothing to with rape isn't evidence, nor is an incident that happened in an entirely different country.
This is a very weird way to frame a highly targeted attack against Hezbollah, which achieved a far better civilian casualty ratio than what's possible with conventional warfare.
> Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon [...] which Israeli historian Ilan Pappé said was unprovoked
"Unprovoked" is wildly inaccurate, and not even the most anti-Israel historians like Pappé claim that. The provocation was very clear: the PLO paramilitary bombarding Israeli towns from southern Lebanon.
If Mexican cartels started bombarding San Diego, would anyone say that a US response was "unprovoked"?
That's a provocation of sorts, maybe. However, I'm curious how Israel's invasion was supposed to stop that. Either they would occupy part of Lebanon, but open up their soldiers to attacks from irregulars, which doesn't seem any better for Israel. Or, they would expel tens of thousands of people AND occupy parts of Lebanon, which would still expose the Israeli occupiers to attacks from just outside the new border.
If Israel was going to kill tens of thousands of people, it had an obligation to have a plan which wasn't completely stupid. I don't see what WASN'T stupid about it.
The headline seems pretty dishonest. It seems like what he actually said was along the lines of "if someone isn't aligned with our values, they might decide that working here isn't a good fit."
There's no transcript though, mostly paraphrasing from an outlet whose almost sole focus is smearing Israel, so it's hard to know what was actually said.
TRNN is another outlet with an explicit anti-Zionist stance, and they seem to be just summarizing this Jewish Insider article [1] while adding some anti-Israel spin.
Considering the extra details in the Jewish Insider article, what he said was basically "if someone rejects the Jewish peoples' right to self-determination and rejects Israel's existence, then we have a fundamental difference in values, and they might decide that working here isn't a good fit".
That's pretty far from the MEE's dishonest summary of "support Israel or resign", or TRNN's dishonest summary of "demands allegiance to Israel". One can criticize a government without rejecting the country's very existence. Israelis themselves do it all the time.
Yes, that is a better article. It spells out Döpfner's position a lot better than the others. The important bit of information is that this is all in response to Politico journalists issuing a joint letter saying that Döpfner using the platform to further his own political agenda will weaken their reputation as an impartial news source.
Except a country that is founded on bringing in a new group of people from other places to destroy another and replace them shouldn't exist, especially when it has to keep the people that were already there in whats essentially camps without rights.
Anyone supporting the "existence" of that is a clown.
If Israel "smears itself" by being super evil, then why do we constantly see its critics resorting to disinformation? Shouldn't there be plenty to criticize while sticking to the facts?
But you don't. You see one group that justifies people moving from europe to rob pillage rape and kill the natives to make a new state for themselves, and the people that were already there just defending themselves from this.
Why is it that when someone points out anti-Israel disinformation, the topic suddenly changes to some other anti-Israel talking point? If Israel and its supporters are super evil, shouldn’t its critics be able to pick a point (such as the headline claim here) and defend it as truthful, rather than repeatedly shifting as we see here?
They can just get married abroad. There are even online ceremonies now.
A decent number of Israeli Jews have to do that as well, since Israel recognizes Jewish marriages only under orthodox rabbis. Some Israeli Jews are not even considered Jews under strict orthodox rules.
Israel's domestic civil unions have restrictions on interfaith couples, and common-law/reputed spouse outside of that system doesn't grant the same citizenship pathway, though they can become residents.
A marriage isn't just a state recognition of a civil union as religious, interfaith marriages between recognized religion and non-recognized have to marry abroad to get the similar rights, with special exclusions on this pathway if the immigrant spouse is from the West Bank or Gaza.
Of course everyone should be free to call their civil union whatever they like and the government shouldn’t differentiate at all if your civil union has a religious blessing as well. Just because some governments appropriated the religious terminology and/or the civil union developed from a union sanctioned by a priest doesn’t mean that a government needs to guarantee everyone a religious marriage. To the contrary. Everyone should be able (and required) to register the civil union if they want to be treated as married by the state. I’m not here to defend the status quo of all the laws in Israel - I’m here to emphasize that your reading of the laws about civil unions and marriages in incomplete and the standards you apply to Israel are a hundred times higher than those you seem to apply to any other country. Honi soit qui mal y pense.
It's not like it's designed to be discriminatory. In practice it's Jews that are most affected (if they don't conform to strict Orthodox rules), so if anything it's discriminatory against Jews, which wouldn't make much sense.
For a much more serious example of lack of religious freedom, we could look to Palestinian law, which only permits Islamic or Christian marriages. Not to mention that selling land to a Jew is high treason.
What is the alternative that Israelis could support instead? Just ignore Hezbollah's attacks? Give up on returning to their homes and schools in northern Israel?
Wars aren't supposed to be even. By this logic, the Nazis were the victims of WWII, and the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War. And if Israel wants to be "better", it should just disable its air defenses to let Hezbollah "catch up".
If we're interested in an actual end to the violence, the focus should be on enforcing UNSC 1701. It's not like Israel can just ignore attacks against it.
Actually, wars are not supposed to be driven by "Dahiya doctrine" or "Rafah model" either, if we're talking about what wars are supposed to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahiya_doctrine
And yeah, if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say. Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this. When Israel kills 1 child or more per every active combatant... then that was apparently violated.
Maybe explain how does killing 20 000+ children and counting help Israel? Or how burning/blowing up entire villages and cities in Lebanon and Gaza help them? They did this to hundreds of villages in 1947-48 and that created the whole problem they have now. Continuing the same strategy is supposed to solve it? Seems like Israel got inspired by the whole Nazi style "preventive security" thing.
Heinrich Himmler: "The best political weapon is the weapon of terror... we do not ask for their love; only for their fear." (looks like Himmler could have coauthored Dahiya doctrine and would be fond of it, if still alive by then)
You're also not supposed to initiate aggressive wars against your neighbors either, like Israel did against Syria, Iran, and many others in the past with its "pre-emptive" strikes.
If Israel wants to be better, maybe they should not intentionally murder 10s of thousands of children as a policy (20-300 allowed killed civilians per strike in a population where half of it is children).
You're listing a lot of standard anti-Israel talking points which aren't relevant to the thread. Setting aside all the tangents and returning to the topic at hand -
> if you look at 1:1000 civilian or 1:500 child kill ratio and you respond with "wars are not supposed to be even", well... what to even say
You're not making an argument here. Again, do you think the Coalition was extremely evil in the Gulf War, considering the 1:100 or so ratio there? How about when NATO bombed Yugoslavia, with an "infinitely bad" casualty ratio of 1:0? Does that make NATO infinitely evil?
> Actually there's a proportionality and distinction rule to follow, which is supposed to prevent this.
The principle of proportionality has nothing to do with how many of their own civilians the military in question has lost.
Germany lost fewer civilians than Poland or the Soviet Union, so not really victims by that logic.
And while it's true that German civilian casualties were a couple orders of magnitude higher than American civilian casualties, the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison.
While not directly relevant to the Israel/Lebanon conflict, it's probably also worth drawing a distinction between casualties of war and state-sanctioned killing outside the scope of combat.
Germany killed six million Jews in the Holocaust.
The Allies tried and executed ten high-ranking Nazi officials, including six civilians.
By that measure, the ratio of civilian killings is at least a million to one.
> the war wasn't fought in the US, so it's not really a fair comparison
What's unfair about it? In both cases, one side suffered less civilian harm because there wasn't much fighting in its own territory.
I think the point stands that "Israel must be bad because it only lost 2 civilians" makes as little sense as "the Nazis must be good because they lost a lot more civilians than Western allies".
If a framework for trying to judge morality penalizes states for effectively protecting their own civilian population, then it's a very bad framework.
Most ordinary Iranians, sure; certainly not the Islamic regime. It was their decision to train, fund and supply weapons to terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ and the Houthis since the early 80s.
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