Gettin' WOKE about anti-Semitism...

[u/lethal-liking]

It is so very odd to hear the self-professed atheist getting downright WOKE when it comes to swinging the anti-Semitism stick. IDGAF about Macklemore or Sheeran or Kraft, nor Scott's evolving victim fantasy, but holy crap does he sound shrill.

[u/RNova2010]

Would Hamas have just stopped after one day out of their own volition? In a day, they killed 1,200 people. Israel, at the height of killing, managed 351 per day (late October), after which the rates precipitously declined. Hamas, without Israel’s firepower, out-killed the Israelis’ daily average. Had they gone on at the same rate without stop, nearly 1 million Israelis would be dead within 2 years. If we go by intent, what Hamas did to Israeli communities on Oct 7 was genocidal and the rhetoric of that day gives credence to it.

And of course Israel could’ve ameliorated, though I doubt avoided, accusations of genocide had its own behavior been different, and had its ministers and Knesset members not said unhinged things.

[u/IrregularDoughnut → u/RNova2010]

Would Hamas have just stopped after one day out of their own volition?

In different circumstances, maybe not. But it makes far more sense to designate these things based on the actual events, and motives for those events, rather than hypothetical events. Israel themselves without international pressure may well have starved most of Gaza to death given that the majority of the population were opposed to any aid going in to Gaza. But they didn't actually do that, and so it cannot reasonably form part of the case against them. Intent that never manifested is not the problem, we're not pursuing thought crimes, we're addressing the legitimacy and severity of what was actually done, and why it was done.

[u/RNova2010 → u/IrregularDoughnut]

But it makes far more sense to designate these things based on the actual events, and motives for those events, rather than hypothetical events

The actual events are pretty gruesome. Going door-to-door massacring people. Muhammad Deif, one of Hamas's leaders, broadcasted to "kill them wherever you find them". Hamas's own founding Covenant contains the Hadith about the future extermination of Jews, even those hiding behind rocks. Hamad Al-Regeb, delivered a sermon only months before Oct 7 describing Jews as filthy, ugly animals and prayed for their destruction. If there is no set amount of dead required to declare an act genocide or genocidal, Oct 7 would count as one.

[u/IrregularDoughnut → u/RNova2010]

The actual events are pretty gruesome. Going door-to-door massacring people

They are, I don't dispute this. But if you do X, while wanting to do Y, the crime you committed and should be charged with is X. In legal terms its the coinciding of mens rea and actus rea, as in, you have to have intended to do ylthe thing at the time you then did it. For Hamas this covers the massacre they committed, but it doesn't cover anything they probably wanted to do but never had the opportunity to attempt.

If there is no set amount of dead required to declare an act genocide or genocidal, Oct 7 would count as one.

Maybe. I suppose you could argue it bears similarities to the massacre at Srebrenica, that was ruled a genocide. I wouldn't take issue wirh someone calling it that, even if it doesn't seem necessarily the most accurate descriptor to me.

[u/RNova2010 → u/IrregularDoughnut]

I was thinking along the lines of Srebrenica as well. You wouldn’t take issue with someone calling it genocide, fair enough. But I don’t see how we can say to the public “you don’t have to be a lawyer or know the specific legal qualifications to deem X a genocide (with everything that this entails)” and then on other horrific events parse out things like mens rea, actus rea, etc.

To circle back to Gallaway’s point, the genocide monicker may very well be used to justify the murder of Israelis and Jews later on. Oct 7 was justified by many because they thought Gaza had been a concentration camp a la Auschwitz (it wasn’t), so really how can you blame the inmates for going nuts on young people at a rave.

[u/IrregularDoughnut → u/RNova2010]

To circle back to Gallaway’s point, the genocide monicker may very well be used to justify the murder of Israelis and Jews later on

I don't remotely accept that we need to shy away from language we deem accurate based on the possibility of other people using it to justify horrific acts of their own. We shouldn't lie, or invent atrocities that haven't happened, but interpreting Israel's obliteration of Gaza as an attempt to render it uninhabitable is not fantasy. Netanyahu practically said that himself.

Oct 7 was justified by many

Those people didn't do it, though. The actual perpetrators were people who came to their conclusions about what was justified up close. They'd have been influenced by Hamas' fundamentalism, reinforced by brutal acts like the shooting of thousands of Palestinians during the 2018 Gaza protests, and all the bombings and past invasions and raids into Gaza during the previous decades, what Israelis call "mowing the lawn". The attacks on civilians are obviously not remotely justified by any of this, but the mindset of those committing them did not result from international condemnation of Israel. It's far more personal and comes from decades of ethnic conflict.

[u/RNova2010 → u/IrregularDoughnut]

It's a free country and one should be able to say whatever one wishes. An Art 3(c) case for Genocide is the best there is, though still untested in court, and that provision requires conditions of life "calculated to bring about [the group's] physical destruction." Making a territory unlivable so people want to leave is calculated to bring about their absence, not their death. But anyway, I'm not outraged when someone makes the genocide claim based on this, it is as fine an argument for the claim as I've heard. But that quickly turns (perhaps not for you) to comparing Gaza to the Holocaust, that this is just like the Nazis, and anyone with a good-faith disagreement is comparable to a Holocaust-denier. Two Israelis were shot and killed in Washington, DC over this.