LogFAQs > #979055240

Jen0125 posted...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68405119

"In an interview with CBS News on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the offensive in the face of international criticism, saying America would be "doing a hell of a lot more" if it had suffered such an attack."

Interesting defense. Not only is there zero substance to it beyond "everyone else is doing it!" (and even then, it's not actually "everyone else," it's "one country that already supports us"), it's also demonstrably untrue. 9/11 killed more than double the number of Americans than Hamas' October attack killed Israelis, and in the 20 years that followed, a combined ~70,400 civilians were killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, alongside ~85,600 combatants (https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll). Israel's killed 30k civilians in four months and has maybe 100 combatant kills to show for it (admittedly, I haven't seen any more recent figures than the 13 they had when civilian deaths were only at 8k, so that may need correction). That's not to say there isn't also plenty of room to criticize the US for the amount of collateral damage they inflicted during the War of Terror and other American offensives in the Middle East (holy hecknuggets there's room to criticize the US for that), but Israel is quite unquestionably killing citizens at a much higher rate and with much lower success eliminating their actual targets (and probably with greater damage to critical infrastructure that will lead to more indirect deaths, though that's hard to quantify). Netenyahu doesn't have to lean on "The US would do the same thing," because the US has already faced a worse attack and not responded the way Israel has.

Jen0125 posted...

Yeah my beef is with Zionists, not Jewish people as a whole. People that ignore the distinction are either ignorant or acting in bad faith.

In many cases, it is just ignorance. The fact that Israel as it exists today didn't exist before 1948 isn't nearly as common knowledge as one would expect such a major piece of geopolitical information to be, and for people that don't readily know that, it's pretty easy to think of ethnic Jews elsewhere in the world as just being Israeli immigrants within a few generations, rather than a historical diaspora going back thousands of years. It's certainly not helped by people taking the Bible as... well, gospel, ignoring the historical reality of the region and everything that happened between 1 and 1948.