mwguy

Ya Iran is literally calling themselves the Axis. They need a better marketing team.

You realize lots of people want to give the Palestinians money, but not Haitians, Guatemalans, or Costa Ricans? If you’d like to hold a Red Cross donation tour, you’re welcome to, but that’s not the same pool of money available for Palestine.

Most of the aid going to Palestine (both the Gaza Strip and West Bank) comes from government entities and not individuals. Honestly, the impact of individual donations is notable but not significant in the grand scheme of things. If public entities stopped providing funds, depending on the estimates, Palestine would lose 80% of its aid dollars. The US can absolutely choose to fund other nations instead of Palestine. And we (the US) have in part done so with things like Taylor Force Act which has cut about $0.5B in aid to the Palestinian Authority since 2018 because of its Marty Fund paying out when they killed an American.

What follows is a bunch of unsurprising anti Islamic sentiment that I’m not responding to.

None of what I said is anti-Islamic in the slightest.

How can we watch people starved and oppressed to the point of desperation for decades, then turn our backs because they’re… acting out of desperation? People need basic security before they can make long term decisions, so punishing them for not having security is barbaric.

The naivety of this statement is that there is a shortage of aid dollars around the world. A dollar spent in the Gaza Strip supporting organized rape, and Jew killing is a dollar not spent in Costa Rico, Guatemala or Haiti building Jungle proof infrastructure that will be used by the locals to peacefully trade and coexist with its neighbors. Every dollar the UNWRA gives to the Strip is a dollar not going to people in poverty who won't embezzle it for warfare.

There's actual, peaceful people living in poverty who would use these aid dollars for the betterment of themselves, their families, their communities and their nation. People living in open multi-party democracies. People who don't believe that a child molestor for 15 hundred years ago entitles them to kill their neighbors. It's barbaric choosing to continually find the second group over the first.

Let’s keep the ceasefire and hold an election then.

A ceasefire doesn't make elections possible.

How does Hamas turn bandages and water into bombs?

They steal the supplies and then they sell them back to Palestinians (and smuggle them out) for cash.

Why not use the preexisting NGOs?

The current NGOs have proven that not only can they not ensure aid doesn't go to Hamas' military/terrorism activities; in the case of most of them funding those activities is part of the goal. As they've regularly had reports of the misuse of aid over the last 20 years and have done nothing about it.

We should ask Palestinians what they would prefer, but this is why peacekeeping forces exist.

The Palestinians will kill your troops and use your aid dollars to reward the families of those who do so.

Ultimately, there are plenty of starving, impoverished people in the world and limited aid dollars from the West. We should quit investing those dollars I'm Palestine and start investing them in places where they'll be better used.

The West has invested like 6 per capital Marshall Plans into the Gaza Strip and it's been squandered. How much more should we waste before we decide to help people that will use that aid to better themselves?

I don’t want to give Hamas money, because I don’t support Hamas. I want to give Palestinian people access to food, water, healthcare, safe shelter and education, ideally through NGOs, until an election can be held.

You can't do both as long as Hamas rules the strip. You can give Palestinians aid in the West Bank and in Lebanon and Jordan; but not in the Gaza Strip.

What the last few months have shown is that aid meant for individuals is stolen by Hamas to fund terrorism. Unless the UN or EU puts troops on the ground to police the aid; funding the Strip will be finding terrorism to a large degree.

You don't actually believe this, do you?

We just did it in Venezuela. And politicians in the US have been looking for a reason to normalize relations with Cuba since the fall of the USSR.

Elections are hardly some crazy thing to ask for.

Do you think "free, multiparty elections" would be held without overwhelming US interference?

Probably. Without the support of the USSR, we don't have as much of an existential threat posed by Cuba. Especially since the support for the embargo in the US has fallen below 50% in recent years. Neither party will end it while the Castro Dictatorship is in power because of the political pull survivors concentrated in Florida have. So whomever does it needs a "see it worked" in order to do so.

Just as a reminder: before the revolution,

Bautista predats the Cold War. We supported a lot of dictatorships in the Cold War that we wouldn't end up supporting long term. Gaddafi and Saddam are excellent examples of dictatorships we supported and then opposed post Cold War.

Hold free, multiparty elections and we'll lift our sanctions, just like we did in Venezuela.

For the most part they have shown and told this war. More than they have historically. And in the case of Al Shifa, that being a dual use hospital has been well known and documented for years in the press.

You can't continue to give Hamas more money and claim to support elections in Gaza. Giving them money is defacto support for a non-democratic Gaza Strip.

So your definition of "war crime" is unique and different from the Geneva Conventions definition of war crimes.

So when you say :

However the answer isn't to respond with more war crimes.

What yiu need to realize is that people arent responding to war crimes with more war crimes. Theyre responding with force which is much less violent than what the Geneva Conventions would allow them to respond with.

Hitting a colocated facility isn't a war crime.