Or perhaps @led_scholes
Israel - Iran and regional players | Please post respectfully and stay on topic
- Thread starter Raoul
- Start date
Or you can argue the specific point instead of trying to deflect it, good try though.
Point being: whatever the nuance, whatever your "superior Olympian understanding of the middle east", I'm not shedding a tear that a bunch of Iran backed shia fanatics who are proscribed across the world, just got their arses handed to them.
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He's not entirely wrong though. Some of the Lebanese Christian militias during the Lebanese civil war, namely the Lebanese Front coalition were allied with Israel.
Even today it's a country whose social fabric is held together by tenuous sectarian power sharing agreements. The scars from the civil war still persist and sectarian resentment still exists within the Lebanese people.
The fact ghislaine maxwell was a moderator on that sub says it all.
Wtf? Is that true?
Surely it will take time to get a somewhat accurate number of how many civilians were injured or killed.
Calling that a "fact" is quite a stretch.
No, I do not.
Lebanese share sympathies for other Lebanese who have been either maimed or killed by an indiscriminated attack from an enemy who already invaded and occupied them, still bombs them and always has been oggling at a juicy part of their land (South of the Litani River). If you think that Lebanese are actually cheering on the wolf who's about to invade and destroy their country once again, then you'd be wrong. If History taught us anything, is that a common threat tends to push people to stick together.
I also remind the self-rigtheous smartasses coming with "muh, Hezbollah = terRoriSts" that they originally are a resistance movement directly born from the Israeli Occupation of Lebanon in 1982. There's a reason why they're strongly implemented in Southern Lebanon. I know it might screw with their binary vision of the world, but that's how things actually are.
I know there was no malice in your comment but you made the Lebanese look like a bunch of strangers bundled together 50 years ago, with zero relation to each other or any common purpose or sense of national identity. I find such claims dangerous and that's why I reacted to your post.
It's not far from the hardcore pro-Israel supporters claiming that there was no Palestine or a Palestinian people, and you know we got some of them on this forum. They'll just happily jump at this kind of shortcuts.
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All of this is true but that's not why I reacted to his post (see my reply).
And I highly doubt that the Lebanese will make the same mistake as 40 years ago. Things have changed a bit since and the stakes are different.
Given what Hezbollah is today, an Iranian proxy, rather than what it was 40 years ago (when they were merely bombing the US embassy and pioneering suicide bombs), I would imagine theres more than one middle eastern state that would secretly be applauding Israel's actions.
Well the ones with Hezbollah pagers probably are let's be real. If you consider Hezbollah to be terrorists and not freedom fighters that is.
I'm absolutely sick and tired of your repeated nonsense and propaganda and narrative pushing without any care for the facts and you then disguise it with veiled concern trolling.
You do this time and time again, in every thread semi-related or semi-relevant to the Middle Eastern conflicts:
When the figures are out in full display, time and time again you repeat the shit of, "So I don't actually know the figures, but I heard its [insert wildly reductive figure here]"
You are either perpetually ignorant or just consistently time and time again trying to downplay stuff and twist facts to pursue an agenda. In this case, the fecking numbers are plastered on every major news outlet. Like the front page of BBC news. You and I both know it's more than one child or innocent - heck there was a video of a guy being blown up and three other people around them in a shop went down with him. There's videos out there of teenagers with bloodied mashed faces.
Then you literally make up a number of 99.9% and then run with it before saying, "well actually I don't know the figures." Then you participate in outrageous straw-mans such as "What % is a war crime?" as if % of civilian death is somehow the ultimate barometer of what is a war crime or not.
If you're just pro-Israel just admit it and own it rather than do a pointless song and dance with unlimited whataboutism. Or keep doing what you're doing with the fake concern and faux "I'm just trying to start a discussion" and consequently get thread banned from (yet another) thread.
Poor thing. It must be hard on your delicate sensibilities when someone holds a different opinion. I've not claimed to know what percentage of the injured are not Hezbollah. Such a thing is unknowable. But it seems obviously far less than when the IDF kills a hundred Gazans to get to a Hamas commander hiding underneath them. There is an obvious and self evident difference. But obviously not if you consider everything Israel does is evil because it has no right to exist in the first place, which is clearly your starting point.
I honestly don't know why you bother with him.
Insane troll logic has always been his M.O. You'll never get a honest discussion.
He is. A hardcore one.
If you think that's bad you should see the Red Cafe Palestine thread.
How do you know that percentage?
Yeah, this shan't be disputed even on the Caf. But the collateral...
makes you wonder how much people care about people.
There's a very common rationale whithin the Israel society that goes: "it's fine that these kids are dying, because in 10 years time they will be the ones killing us, if only given the chance".
But then:
a) you can say the same about my nephew who's 5 years old, and in 13 years will be enlisted to the Israeli army.
b) Where the hell is one's hope in humanity and change?
as if conflicts around the world were never ever resolved.
Are you being serious right now?
You think that because I think the way that Israel has conducted the way is utterly, horrifically, abysmal to the standards that should be expected of a modern state, I don't think it has the right to exist?
Jesus christ. Israel has the GDP per capita of a rich Western European nation and it's behaving like what would happen if you gave modern jets to some rag-tag fundamentalist militiamen in Iraq.
What is it with you people and "If you don't support us, it must mean you don't think we have the right to exist."
You say shit like "It's about as targeted as it can get" which is just so unpatently untrue.
"Really. What percentage of the injured and killed were Hezbollah. 99.9%? Isn't that quite good? Or is everything Israel does evil by definition?"
You literally said this. Why the hell did you say 99.9% if you didn't know the figure at all, is that some weird estimation of yours?
Ah you know what, this is a waste of time.
For what i read here, commercial stores blowed up because they had them to sell in the general population.
So if that is true, no, not every single adult is from hezbollah
@glazed , this post was made in this very thread a while ago. Hilariously, as a response to you accusing me of god knows what the first time round.
I literally spent 3 months in Israel working with the IDF in the late 2010's on shared Intelligence operations.
If you think that I'm an antisemite who thinks Israel should not exist you can kindly piss off.
Being held to account/leaders facing consequences Balkans style =/= Israel should not exist.
I get this but there is a war on here against Hezbollah, a low level one to be sure, and people are shocked that civilians are dying in this war? I'm saddened by it but I'm not shocked.
This is interesting, I wasn't aware of that.
looking back and thinking about the people you came across,
Does it surprise you that the same army is capable (morally) and willing to act the way it has for the past year?
People aren't shocked by civilians dying,
A few were being dramatic on the scope of this operation as if this was some uncharted ground of cruelty but they're not correct and it's only a few.
What people are shocked out is the increased, complete callousness Israel shows towards potential collateral.
You have Israel on one side blowing up commercial hardware to get to Hezbollah. Which other Western-values nation does this?
Afghanistan would never have happened if a certain somebody hadn't decided to take flying lessons, so that blame is not on the US.
I don't know enough specifics about the Saudis in Yemen but Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria would undoubtedly have been over sooner had the Iranians not been in there. To be fair Western politicians knew about it and did nothing to try and stop them.
And yes every nation has people in these conflicts but they are almost always trying to steer the conflict in a direction. The difference with Iran is they just want chaos, they work to undo any progress anybody else makes.
It's also a full justification as to why the US stayed there for more than twenty years.
Lindsey Graham would be proud.
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Yes, and no.
The guys I worked with were professional soldiers, full time officers who are careerist soldiers. They don't moonlight as IDF reservists due to legal reasons/citizenship requirements - they understood the Western military culture well, were quite cerebral, mature, non-emotional and generally quite sympathetic (or about as much as one could be given their job). For context, two of these guys went back to the UK and are colleagues of mine in my current job in the private sector.
I also encountered many of the reservists and conscripts - It's hard to sum up their mentality. Imagine you took the MAGA infested shitholes, forced all of them to join the US Marine Corps Cult Culture and then sent them out to battle. I had very little respect for these people. In any normal country, a lot of these people would not be allowed to be soldiers.
The core of the IDF NCO/Officers behaving this way surprises me.
The reservists/conscripts behaving this way doesn't surprise me at all.
Wait one second:
How the heck does Iran have anything to do with the underlying Pashtun tribal conflicts vis-a-vis the Taliban and the innate ability to unite as a nation state?
Amongst the many baboons who nowadays roam the shatterted streetss of Gaza with an erection,
there are also friends and family members of mine who are not like that, but well... it doesn't matter in the context and atmosphere of this thread and most discussion outsside of Israel and the US republican crowd.
There used to be times were IDF pilots in reserve duty would refuse to serve because of the brutal way the air bombings are performed.
These times seem long gone now.
They're all muzlims, forget that Iran wanted to actively help the US defeat the sunni Taliban.
Yeah, I'm not saying everyone was like that but when you have a huge culture bloc, many of these people would just keep silent for fear of ostracization. Especially since 2023 these people have become morbidly rabid.
The US's drone strikes killed maybe 17k people..similar reasons - military targets embedded in civil society so high collateral (a word I don't like tbh).
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I already asked you to clarify this. How exactly would have Iran's lack of involvement ensured a quicker resolution to those conflicts?
Again, it was Sunni extremist factions in Iraq who were largely responsible for the terror attacks on the Iraqi people, the same factions btw who consider Iran a mortal enemy. The Syrian civil war was a complex battleground with various nations involved, but the biggest players were the Russians and the US as sponsors for their respective allies. I think you just chucked Iran's name into Afghanistan for good measure, not knowing their animosity towards the Taliban.
You're essentially echoing the reductionist neocon stance of Iran being the culprit behind everything going to shite in the Middle East. You're either deliberately being obtuse or don't really understand the nature or history of these conflicts.
Both.
Civilians? Absolute bollocks.
I saw a YouTube video in my feed about pagers blowing up in the region last night and, based in the title, thought it was just a resurgence in popularity of some older communications technology. Boy was I wrong!
Yeah.
and, if you're a decent human being but still requiered by law to go to Gaza/South Lebanon and shoot people from the other side and be shot at,
there's no way you can realisticaly know that your bullets reached what you wanted to be their destinations.
people don't battle in labs,
and it's not going to be a war a la WW1/WW2 where you only had soldiers in the battlefield (at least on the infantry front).
seems like modern wars always involve civilian populations.
Nope you are right, I got my figures wrong. Looks like it was more like approx 4k or so people killed with maybe 20% civilians in that depending on who is counting, but I will look for accurate figures.