Yet I've seen pro-Palestinian voices on his show. Can't fault him for only inviting one side.
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Bringing Murray after him was a disgrace.
But what is better, not giving them voice? or using them in a very facetious way trying to diminish the pro-Palestinians point to push his agenda? Because a proper journalist should invite all POV and try to remain as neutral as possible, not side with one side and berate the other
Also this idea that he's the arbiter of morality, and his morality starts on Oct 7th is such a dumb way to host a debate. Its classic Piers - make himself the centre of the story, and the room. He's literally the most unimportant person when he has his guests on, but it has to be 'do you condemn x, I do?'. He should be called out for it.
I don't like Piers, and find his interview style a little infuriating, but I do appreciate he's actually offered his platform to those on the Palestinian side, which is a lot more than you can say for most outlets. Granted he's doing it out of the views he generates instead of a genuine commitment to a balanced discourse, but I'll take it. The Bassem Youssef interviews were pivotal ones I think, and I'm glad he's given the likes of Professor Finkelstein a stage too.
It would, if accurate. We've previously had figures posted and used to show Israel isn't even getting who it claims to be after. Can't remember off the top of my head but something like 500 out of 5000 was the claim.
It would not justify the deaths of innocent people. Nothing does, each one is and always be a tragedy. But it would paint a different picture in terms of whether or not Israel is even achieving what it's claims to want.
It should also bring more questions, for both Israel and Hamas. Where they killed being the first, when and who else suffered because of it?
I think some of you get so caught up in your anger towards Israel, you forget there's another set of bad guys who's actions are contributing significantly to the suffering of people in Gaza, to the point it now widely claimed in here that Israel is intentionally targeting civilians which must imply they're not even going after Hamas.
These figures would challenge that view.
What a disgusting interview. Calling Hamas actions heroic because to His knowledge at that time there were only 50 victims? Really? WTF? How can he look in the mirror?
Denying the nature of atrocities - it is up for a question? It is shocking.
Utterly deplorable words. And in some countries such statements would be prosecutable by law (crime endorsement).
Denying the nature of atrocities - it is up for a question? It is shocking.
Utterly deplorable words. And in some countries such statements would be prosecutable by law (crime endorsement).
Which countries are those?
Correct, it has no relevance to this discussion. A thread on an Internet football forum I'd wager will play no part in any possible peace between Israel and Palestine.
Fair enough.
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This forum still has a promotion system as far as I know. If the mods/scouts thought that Newbies posts were worth reading then I'm sure they'd be promoted by now and they could post it themselves.
Which person was interviewed?
Finkelstein
Thanks!
To be fair he said he was under the assumption those 50 were killed in a firefight, so he interpreted as Hamas breaking the siege and engaging Israeli security forces. Hence his parallels with the Warsaw Ghetto. I don't think he at any point commended or endorsed the murder of civilians.
Should note that the article itself and the Israeli military source do not present the 5,000 figure as a proper estimation, but rather in very speculative terms.
The paragraph itself states: "A senior Israeli military official said the assault had “significantly hurt” 10 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, which before the war each had about 1,000 soldiers. Including the roughly 1,000 militants killed in Israel after Hamas launched the October 7 attack, Israeli officials estimate that 5,000 of Hamas’s roughly 25,000 fighters have now been killed. “It’s not 10,000, but it’s not 1,000. It’s something in the middle,” the senior military official said."
Gaza immediate reporting of death tolls from past wars have a strong track record of accuracy, and there's a strong logic and incentive for them to remain accurate now. They're reporting that two-thirds of the 14,500 killed are women and children, meaning nearly 5,000 would be men. If the Israeli military is broadly referring to these numbers too, then it's possible that practically every killed man is being considered as a Hamas member.
I don’t know why Israelis insist on “shame on you” and disrespecting when they talk with others. Not gonna help.
I believe the correct term is ethnonational group. But does the exact term really matter as we all know who we are talking about?
You are one of the most often reported posters in this thread and one the modmins have almost unanimously noticed as being biased and quite inflammatory in your postings at times. Far from the only one of course.
@gfactor86 by contrast has been thread banned from both the Israel/Palestine thread, the Islamophobia/Anti-Semitism thread, and now the stabbing in Ireland thread for his input on the issues. Plus warnings and numerous posts deleted. He is now on thin ground entirely of his own making. It may just be that the pro-Israeli posters push the boundaries even further than the pro-Palestinian posters, but I also suspect that we moderate pro-Palestinian posters more sympathetically as they are usually mainly protesting the civilian deaths/suffering aspect of the whole thing - which is as it should be I'd say.
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Based on this post I started watching the Bassem Youssef interview. First answer was gold
50 victims when the world was aware that Israeli military had been a large share of it (and I may be wrong but I think when Israel released the names of the dead a few weeks later a huge proportion had military designations in front of their names).
But let me ask you, when Nat Turner and his accomplices hacked and beheaded 50 odd civilians in 1831, do you now view that in the same way?
I've pushed for him to be dealt with in the scouts thread but that has nothing to do with your continuous abrasive behavior, don't deflect because there's no double standard. At least you have apologized to @That_Bloke. I have defended you in the past because of your posting historial pre October 7 and contribution to the the thread but I insist on you following thread guidelines since you keep getting signaled or called out. You have been afforded far more chances than posters usually do.
Are the mods taking down your post or have you just completely stopped responding to posters?
On the last pages, when you have written something in this thread, gets an answer with some pushback to what you wrote and then nothing from you in return. Its seems like you starts a conversation and then just drops out of it when your views are challenged.
It says a few posts above that the user is banned from the thread.
I do not believe these numbers. If they mean 5000 of all the 14000 died are Hamas fighters, then they mean all the men killed until now in Gaza are combatants. Do you really believe that?
Obviously the pressure is getting stronger by the minute and they have to justify their atrocities.
People only talk about the death count, what about the city that is uninhabitable for 1.7 m civilian. When this war stops, kids have no schools to go to, sick people no hospital, and ordinary Gazan has no roof upon his head and will have to sleep in a tent for gods know how many months if not years.
70% percent of the Gazan population are already displaced Palestinians from the Nakba and the Naksa and they already had to rebuild their lives away from their actual homes, how is this fair on them.
Altogether unjust.
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Mixture of the two. He's been thread banned I think but does have a habit of ignoring points he can't answer.
I don't see how that follows.
Hamas attacked a bunch of civilians, intentionally. But that does not imply they weren't going after the IDF nor that there wouldn't be many IDF casualties. You can have multiple objectives.
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Even if we believe the IDF numbers of Hamas combatants who died until this moment (which I do not believe), it is stil the same combatant to civilian death ratio to the Hamas attacks. How does that make the IDF any different from Hamas?
His explanation for why he posted what he posted was fair. Whether he should have deleted it after or not is a fair conversation to have as well.
His point regarding Nat Turner's rebellion is a fair one as well as his response to Pier's question regarding what his parents would think of what he posted. Its an uncomfortable discussion point for people because it puts them in a moral quandary. Nat Turner's rebellion killed loads of innocent people including women and children, yet to a large number of people he is seen as a hero and an example of resistance. If Jews within the concentration camps had been given the opportunity to break out of their camps and take revenge on the Nazi soldiers and their families, there is a high likelihood that they would have.
If say for example in 50 years time Gaza and the West bank are unified as 1 Palestine, the people there have been restored their rights and they are able to live their lives to the fullest, how would actions like October 7th be seen to those future Palestinian people? There would be a good chance that Oct 7th would be viewed to them as Nat Turner's rebellion is viewed now. Alternatively, if there is no Palestine in 50 years Oct 7th would be viewed as one of the greatest terror attacks ever because at that stage history will be written by Israel.
Now that is not to endorse Oct 7th or what Israel is doing, however it highlights the silliness of the stance of people like Piers. Piers knows full well that if he was born in Gaza, living under those conditions, treated like animals then most likely he would have been one of those breaking through into Israel.
I maybe missed something in the past few days, but what are these indisputable evidens of the Hamas Command center?
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There was an article two days ago in Politico which starts: "The Biden administration has been providing Israel with the location of humanitarian groups in Gaza for weeks to prevent strikes against their facilities. But Israel has continued to hit such sites."
A UN official is quoted as saying "we don’t see eye-to-eye on what they consider collateral damage or military necessity and what we consider a very high civilian toll, whether it’s in life or in infrastructure, including ours. The response we get is, ‘Well, your school is in the middle of what we consider to be a military or an operation area."
The article states that "those who’ve worked for aid groups in the region say Israel is deserting practices it has used previously to protect humanitarian groups."
This is weeks after a similar article in the Washington Post about Israel's standards. In that article, the director of the Ceasefire Center for Human Rights is quoted as saying "the Jabalya strike, because it was a planned attack, shows that Israel must have a tolerance for civilian casualties which is orders of magnitude greater than that that was used by, say, the U.S. Air Force in the war against ISIS."
The same author wrote a longer piece for Lawfare which concludes: "the accepted circumstances of the Oct. 31 Jabalia attack and the light shed by the IDF statement on planning for the attack suggest that Israel’s tolerance for civilian casualties is now completely out of step with that employed by the U.S. and its coalition partners in the war against ISIS and other counterterrorism operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over two decades."
A UN official is quoted as saying "we don’t see eye-to-eye on what they consider collateral damage or military necessity and what we consider a very high civilian toll, whether it’s in life or in infrastructure, including ours. The response we get is, ‘Well, your school is in the middle of what we consider to be a military or an operation area."
The article states that "those who’ve worked for aid groups in the region say Israel is deserting practices it has used previously to protect humanitarian groups."
This is weeks after a similar article in the Washington Post about Israel's standards. In that article, the director of the Ceasefire Center for Human Rights is quoted as saying "the Jabalya strike, because it was a planned attack, shows that Israel must have a tolerance for civilian casualties which is orders of magnitude greater than that that was used by, say, the U.S. Air Force in the war against ISIS."
The same author wrote a longer piece for Lawfare which concludes: "the accepted circumstances of the Oct. 31 Jabalia attack and the light shed by the IDF statement on planning for the attack suggest that Israel’s tolerance for civilian casualties is now completely out of step with that employed by the U.S. and its coalition partners in the war against ISIS and other counterterrorism operations in Iraq and Afghanistan over two decades."
So watched that Norm Finklestein segment on Piers and feck me that's not an interview, it's an interrogation.
Firstly, this guy is older than Old Spice, he needs more than the measly 20 or so minutes allocated to him.
Piers introduces him as a controversial voice. He is one but let the audience decide. The lower third ticker also said things like "critics describe him as a self-hating Jew". The picture they painted before he even got to speak a word was disgusting.
Piers normally tries to bully his pro-Palestinian guests for the first half about something they may have said/done controversial (as he did with the first Hijab interview, the Piker interview etc) then has a handful of set topics which he asks his guests but here, the interview was very different. He just kept trying to character assassinate without actually ever discussing the Israel-Palestine talking points beyond "would you condemn Hamas?".
It's clear that Piers had no intention of interviewing this dude. A few posters alerted me to Norm on this thread and I have been looking into him a fair bit and he has dedicated his life to this conflict. He is the perfect person to ask all the questions Piers normally asks his guests but here, he just wants to talk about a statement Norm put out prematurely. He had zero interest in hearing anything Norm had to say on the real issues that affect the conflict and the discourse around them.
And if that wasn't enough, he then lets Douglas Murray unload on Norm uninterrupted and unchallenged for five minutes straight to finish out the show. I wonder why...
Piers said he wants Norm back on the show so hopefully we get a proper debate that's at least an hour long if it does happen because the one yesterday was a mockery of a "debate".
Firstly, this guy is older than Old Spice, he needs more than the measly 20 or so minutes allocated to him.
Piers introduces him as a controversial voice. He is one but let the audience decide. The lower third ticker also said things like "critics describe him as a self-hating Jew". The picture they painted before he even got to speak a word was disgusting.
Piers normally tries to bully his pro-Palestinian guests for the first half about something they may have said/done controversial (as he did with the first Hijab interview, the Piker interview etc) then has a handful of set topics which he asks his guests but here, the interview was very different. He just kept trying to character assassinate without actually ever discussing the Israel-Palestine talking points beyond "would you condemn Hamas?".
It's clear that Piers had no intention of interviewing this dude. A few posters alerted me to Norm on this thread and I have been looking into him a fair bit and he has dedicated his life to this conflict. He is the perfect person to ask all the questions Piers normally asks his guests but here, he just wants to talk about a statement Norm put out prematurely. He had zero interest in hearing anything Norm had to say on the real issues that affect the conflict and the discourse around them.
And if that wasn't enough, he then lets Douglas Murray unload on Norm uninterrupted and unchallenged for five minutes straight to finish out the show. I wonder why...
Piers said he wants Norm back on the show so hopefully we get a proper debate that's at least an hour long if it does happen because the one yesterday was a mockery of a "debate".
Yeah agreed on all fronts. Finkelstein is definitely a voice worth listening to on this conflict considering his decades of scholastic dedication to the issue, as well as his unique perspective of being the son of holocaust survivors.
And yeah it was clear what Piers set out to do from the onset. Its why the first Bassem Youssef interview was such a masterclass. Youssef countered his predictable traps with dark humour and sarcasm, and reversed the dynamic of the interview where Piers couldn't simply corner him with the usual 'do you agree Hamas are to blame for all this suffering' shtick. The second face to face interview that followed was then more of an organic discussion that really started to address the underlying issues and context surrounding the wider conflict.
I do sincerely hope Finkelstein is interviewed again and is actually questioned on the wider issues instead of cornered regarding of a premature statement he's made. Though I suspect TalkTV won't be happy with the facts that Finkelstein would illuminate.
I don't think it was that bad. I agree more time would have been beneficial, but it would also have been weird not to have Finkelstein comment on the statement he made shortly after the October 7th attacks. I haven't read the statement, but the parts that were read aloud during the interview would obviously be seen as quite controversial. By Piers Morgan standards, I don't think there was a lot of unnecessary interruption, and Finkelstein even ended the interview with an acknowledgement of that (although that could be tactics to appear more sympathetic to the audience).
I've only really been superficially introduced to Finkelstein as part of the debate since October 7th, and I can't quite place him yet. Some seem to have him down as a crackpot, but a lot of what I've seen so far, is not that unreasonable to me. Interesting character.
explicitly targeted by................, nobody knows.
We know your tricks western media. I would say it is not working as intended like before. Social media broke media agencies.
I completely agree, it should have been discussed but here, Piers spent the most part of a short interview talking solely about this. Piers actually asked a good question at one point but instead of letting Norm answer, he went to an ad break and then returned and carried on talking about that statement when the conversation had already moved on.
It should have been "here is a statement you made straight after the Hamas attack. Do you stand by this? If not, why is it still up on the Internet?"
Then that topic is addressed and moved on from straight away.
It's entirely fair to disagree with what he posted even with the limited informations he had. He didn't want to delete for it because it was something he thought at a given time and it's a part of him, for the better or the worse. He sees himself not only as a chronicler who tries to document as accurately as possible everything that happened in Palestine in general and Gaza in particular, but also as a part of the story. Deleting the tweet would distort the future perception of who he is/was and harm the historical accuracy. In consequence, he stood for what he posted and admitted that it was perfectly justified that people wouldn't agree with that and call him out on it.
You can't say that. No one knows. True despair is something that pushes the human mind to its limits and beyond, but not everyone is going to react to it the same way. And I saw something similar first hand. In my opinion, all what Finkelstein did is introducing an element of reasonable doubt to knock people off their moral perch, comfortably judging from their sofa an oppressed people living in awful conditions for decades, who lost any kind of hope. Put the events back into their historical context and force people to look at something they're unconsciously very uncomfortable with and would rather turn a blind eye to. After that, it's up to the person.
Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky (who was his mentor) are two brilliant intellectuals whose voices are well worth listening when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Finkelstein has been absolutely demonized and ostracized in the US for his views, especially after his debate with Dershowitz in 2005, a brilliant advocate and a morally questionable human being, some even calling Finkelstein a Holocaust denier.
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Agreed, good points. In war, things can be both morally reprehensible yet tactically (and legally) justified.
Morality and war do not make easy bedfellows.
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Yeah, no doubt Piers is overly focused on 1) Past controversial statements and 2) Whether someone that is anti-Israel / pro-Palestinian will condemn Hamas and call them a terror group. On the second part, I don't think I have heard a better response than what Yanis Varoufakis said early in the conflict.
But let's see if he has him on again. I think he will, because it will get views.