Bulletins and News Discussion for December 11th to December 17th, 2023 - What's Yours is Mine - COTW: Canada

I've noticed that even the more conservative people that I have regular interactions with are getting a little antsy about it.

Like, the problem that Israel has is that they want two, contradictory things: they want to make the October 7th attacks look like horrific terrorist unjustifiable mass atrocities, but also don't want to appear weak in the face of those same "terrorists", and so don't want to highlight their massive L. They tried to do this by saying that actually all the people killed were civilians and all the places Hamas went were peaceful villages where they gunned down innocent people and took them hostage, but that narrative just wasn't really able to hold together for too long in the face of other evidence. It doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than a few seconds, and there's like, actual videos released by Hamas of them entering barracks and killing soldiers and shit. I've seen a few of them, they are undeniably soldiers.

If this had happened, say, 20 years ago when social media wasn't such a prevalent thing, then I think public opinion would be much more in favour of Israel, because the Gazans wouldn't have been able to communicate as well with the outside world, and everything would have come from journalists and maybe the odd leak from a whistleblower. But now that there's hundreds and hundreds of videos taken inside Gaza of men, women, children, and actual fucking babies being killed in indiscriminate airstrikes and being shot at and executed, anybody who's paying even slight attention to the conflict is just inundated with a stream of awful videos showing that Israel is very obviously committing genocidal war crimes, and so as long as you aren't approaching this already from the perspective of "Palestinians are worthless subhumans who are lower than bacteria" like a few well-known Zionist figures seem to think, and have even the slightest sympathy towards your fellow man, then by like week 12 of watching non-stop airstrikes and war crimes and atrocities, you start to be like "...uhh... maybe Israel should... chill out a little?"

And because Israel is so loathe to post even the vaguest L, to the point of saying that there's been like 3 fucking deaths and 5 vehicles destroyed in 2-3 months when it's literally like 2-3 orders of magnitude higher if combining all fronts, then it just comes across as this totally heartless enemy doing this shit for no reason. Honestly, if Israel was even a little more honest with its numbers, then I wonder if sympathy would start increasing a little. If they said that, idk, 500 or 700 or 1000 soldiers had been killed so far like they have, then people might be able to point at that and go "See! Hamas does deserve to be destroyed and the civilian casualties are worth it, look at the lovely professional soldiers being killed by them!"

I think it is really important to tell people about the drop in causalities in November where an israeli official admitted that they counted 200 Hamas in the initial reports because they were badly burned and mixed in with the settlers. Also the IDF air force admitted to shooting anything that moved and strafing the parking lot at the rave. There is testimony of a tank commander and Yasmin Porat that the IDF fired artilery and tank shells into israeli homes where hostages were kept. Finaly in the revised 1200 deaths 400 were police and military.

I have no doubts that 90% of the civilians killed in the october breakout were killed by the IDF. We need to shift the narrative from justifying the civilian deaths by Hamas to "Hamas did nothing wrong."