It's baffling that you trust the people giving Israel the bombs to do the genocide.
Conflict between Palestine and Israel escalates
- Thread starter dreng3
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((Quick note that aside from the multiple failings of the NYT's 'Screams without Words' article, The Intercept has acknowledged that sexual violence was indeed perpetrated on October 7th. And the Guardian article, though it does cite ZAKA, also includes quite a lot of their own investigation and survivor testimony)).
conspicuously without saying what led to that conclusion.
some of that apparently anonymous "survivor testimony" appears to be copy-pasted directly from the NYT article without credit. which is odd. much of the rest is vague or unverifiable. and the context is that the Israeli government, and a good share of its people, are gleefully perpetrating a genocide, and hordes of brown rapists are kind of a popular trope amongst genocidal fascists which the Israeli government and much of its public manifestly are. So the wisest reaction is to suspend judgment, I suppose. Israeli society does not appear to value truth much at the moment.
K. So long as people stop misconstruing the expose as The Intercept debunking the idea sexual violence took place, because that wasn't their claim nor their intention.
Much of it /isn't/ from NYT, of course, as anyone who has read the article can see.
The 'anonymous' and 'unverifiable' criticisms are interesting, because of course journalists have to give vulnerable sources anonymity if they are to report things like survivor testimony safely and ethically. You're kind of acknowledging that it wouldn't be possible to report something critical of Hamas' actions and for you to believe it, unless they broke fundamental ethical rules to do so.
Logically, "we have to protect vulnerable sources" as an excuse for a lack of evidence is consistent with both telling truths and telling lies and the events have already been the subject of much lurid fantasy; both truths and lies can be believable and unbelievable. That there might have been rape by soldiers or other combatants is very believable because men. But believable doesn't mean true. It is odd that you think "it would require someone breaking ethical rules for us to have proper evidence" is something other than a reason to suspend judgment, especially in a context in which the accusations are leveraged to justify mass slaughter.
This is using your own assumption as the premise.
That's right. Then, we can look to the actors themselves to judge credibility-- Hamas is not reliable in the slightest, and already has blood-drenched hands before we even get as far as October 7th (from the brutalisation of Palestinians as well as Israelis). On the other hand the Guardian, who have published numerous pieces condemning the IDF and accusing them of war crimes, haven't been credibly linked to anything like the massive hoax required for this.
I think evidence can exist without outing sources and putting them at risk.
It's odd that you think the application of very basic ethical and safety standards casts doubt on a report's veracity.
it isn't. if you don't have access to the evidence, then it is not evidence for any but the most metaphysical purposes; there is a lack of evidence. And ethics might be a very reasonable excuse for that lack of evidence, but it remains an excuse and not a substitute.
The Israeli government and other interested individuals have repeatedly lied about October 7 and western media (not to mention governments) have amplified those lies multiple times, so there we go. Credibility-- of the actual people whose credibility is at issue-- judged. Frankly, suspending judgment rather than dismissing as false until proven otherwise is kind.
There is a tradeoff being made. Veracity is not always the most important thing. But neither is it created out of thin air if only you have 'ethics' or some other excuse to gesture at. Why are you so ready to believe any accusation made against people now facing genocide?
Kibbutz Be’eri Rejects Story in New York Times October 7 Exposé: “They Were Not Sexually Abused”
A Kibbutz Be’eri official said the New York Times's story of sexual violence against two girls is “not true”: “They were not sexually abused.”
theintercept.com
And the credibility of the Israeli government somehow determines the likelihood that either Hamas engaged in sexual violence or the Guardian engaged in a massive hoax? Rather than the credibility of Hamas or the Guardian themselves?
This is true. Yet initially, your insinuation was that their failure to name their sources was a failing on their part, or indicated duplicity/ a hoax.
* against a specific group who have engaged in brutalisation of both Palestinians and Israelis for decades. Believing that specific organisations will continue to act in accordance with their long and ignoble track record is not unreasonable, and is an approach you are happy to take yourself for others.
I always took the tales of sexual assault as somewhat overblown.
The aim of the incursion was to kill people, take hostages and get back before a proper response was fielded. The attackers were both on a timer and in hostile territory where they could be in a fight every minute.
But do i believe that rapes etc did happen ? Sure. Hamas is a militia not an army and most of its members really really hate Israelis and want to hurt and humiliate them. That is a recipe for rape.
So my basic expectation was and is, that rapes happened but in numbers more than an order of magnitude smaller than that of killings. And this seems to align with what nowadays the UN thinks has happened.
But then the israelis started to talk about mass rape and played up the rape angle more than the other violence. Did that make any sense ? Rape as strategy of the whole incursion ? It did not and was obviously bullocks. Furthermore, if those mass rapes had happened, we would have heard way sooner of them not months after the event. It seemed just that the Israel side needed a new thing to be outraged towards the Hamas after the number of dead lost its power due to way more palestinians having been killed. It was like "sure, we killed ten times as many but look at the rapes instead".
Not that it seemed to have worked as most people see rapes as significantly less bad than murder and i agree with them.
The aim of the incursion was to kill people, take hostages and get back before a proper response was fielded. The attackers were both on a timer and in hostile territory where they could be in a fight every minute.
But do i believe that rapes etc did happen ? Sure. Hamas is a militia not an army and most of its members really really hate Israelis and want to hurt and humiliate them. That is a recipe for rape.
So my basic expectation was and is, that rapes happened but in numbers more than an order of magnitude smaller than that of killings. And this seems to align with what nowadays the UN thinks has happened.
But then the israelis started to talk about mass rape and played up the rape angle more than the other violence. Did that make any sense ? Rape as strategy of the whole incursion ? It did not and was obviously bullocks. Furthermore, if those mass rapes had happened, we would have heard way sooner of them not months after the event. It seemed just that the Israel side needed a new thing to be outraged towards the Hamas after the number of dead lost its power due to way more palestinians having been killed. It was like "sure, we killed ten times as many but look at the rapes instead".
Not that it seemed to have worked as most people see rapes as significantly less bad than murder and i agree with them.
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Try reading the whole sentence. Here it is again:
The Guardian treated the New York Times as authoritative enough to include its words in their article without any apparent investigation. So yes, their credibility in particular (not just because they are part of the category 'western media') is also shit. And much of their article relied on Israeli institutions (which is to say Netanyahu's government).
Your capability of reading what isn't said seems to vastly outperform your capability of reading what is.
Generalised statements about 'western media'-- as if its a monolith-- are not a substitute for actually evaluating the credibility of the specific speaker. And even when we charitably broaden your statement to include them, you still... refuse to glance at the (grotesque) track record of Hamas when evaluating how likely it is that Hamas did something.
Reporting things a government has said is relevant and newsworthy. The Guardian routinely does the same for statements from the Gazan Health Ministry testifying to the massacres perpetrated by the IDF. Pretending that equals independent endorsement is asinine.
Your capability to make insinuations vastly outperforms your willingness to make the same claims explicitly, because then you'd need to substantiate them.
The Guardian article contains reports of their own interviews and first-hand research. So when you're here claiming that it's all untrustworthy because they didn't out their sources, you are insinuating a hoax. At least have the bravery to stand by that.
As an aside -
Or as all those anti-Semites up to and including Hitler would’ve called it, “international Jewry”.
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Did you use this same reasoning when evaluating the 40 beheaded babies hoax? Well, Hamas has done some atrocities while resisting Israeli occupation, so they probably really did behead 40 babies if some Zionist invaders whose government is actively prosecuting a genocidal siege, bombardment, and ground assault said so? The existence of that hoax and others is a very good reason to suspend judgment about more prima facie believable accusations.
Apparently all that must be done to get you to believe something is to employ this pattern:
Have one person say something that is not very believable and few are willing to stand by
Have another person say something that is not so unbelievable but also not established by available evidence
After just these two events it seems you can be depended on to make the inference to the reasonable centrist explanation that the second thing must be true.
I am claiming that you should reserve judgment because you don't have the required information of the appropriate quality to make a well-informed judgment-- to actually know something rather than to believe it without sufficient justification whether true or false; you can only be correct or incorrect by accident, and that is not a place you should want to be as regards a positive belief in an accusation that has been deployed to demonize a population that is suffering mass murder. The anonymity of accusers is one part of that lack of sufficient justification. The pattern of hoaxes is another. The demonstrable western media bias (yes, including The Sacred Guardian) is more. Whatever insinuations you think I'm making are a product of your own insecurity in your position-- possibly reasonable lines of attack that may indeed leap to mind given the premises I have laid out, but that I also have not employed. Confine your objections to the arguments I'm actually making, not ones that I could make. Pretty much any set of facts can be an enthymeme if you examine it hard enough. So don't, or at least don't attribute your own meandering doubts to me.
Anyway. That The Guardian's Jerusalem correspondent has intentionally perpetrated a hoax is one possibility, and one that should not be immediately dismissed given what we've seen in the New York Times (and its willingness to stand by its hoax); she resides in an apartheid state that is perpetrating a genocide, after all. One that has killed literally scores of journalists (and many of their families). But there are other possibilities: her sources could be lying. Her sources could be reporting false second hand information. Maybe some or all of it is true. The point is that you don't know and have not been provided sufficient evidence that you could know, and yet you speak with conviction.
Your willingness not only to believe accusations that are being employed to demonize a population that is actively being starved to death (and killed in a variety of other ways) but to then go on to argue against the notion of suspending judgment as if it would be somehow contemptible is super interesting. As if the mere existence of an accusation demands immediate judgment one way or another. As if there is some kind of urgency in assigning blame for specific lurid atrocities to the declared object of Israel's military campaign. What urgency would there be except to prompt a hasty conclusion of the mass murder before any treasonous notion of a ceasefire can take hold? You are absolutely not required to believe one way or the other. It is most reasonable at present to decline the choice; it will remain acceptable (if not most reasonable) to decline the choice even if further information justifies one or the other position because we are never morally or logically required to investigate any matter in sufficient detail to be confident that we or someone else have the correct understanding unless we advocate certainty in that understanding.
I don't think that's quite the same concept, even if it sounds kind of similar (especially with the conflation of Zionism and Judaism).
And just to be clear, this is an insinuation. It is at least a little bit suspect if the Israeli government will tolerate your presence as a journalist. There, now it is plainly stated.