Middle East thread

No, never. I don't celebrate death.

Yes you do, lmao, are you joking? You call Russian soldiers Orcs and routinely celebrate the deaths of people you have, childishly, decided are terrorists because the news told you they were.
 
Please enlighten me how the death of soldiers killing civilians equates to the death of innocent civilians. I do try my best to avoid celebrating death, and if I did I am ashamed.
 
Not being dragged by you into anything, learned my lesson. Have a good one!
 
Moderator Action: Keep it civil please.
 
Fair enough Ordnael, absolutely no obligation to respond. I will not tag or quote you further on this tangent.

Just to recap for thread readers, the original context was "states not described as terrorists states perform the same actions as those that are terrorist states, therefore resulting in no real difference in the label". I think this is something the Western world is going to have to end up reckoning with - regardless of the quality or morality of motives at stake.

The thing that personally drives my morals, and separately, my logic, both relate to unfairness - perceived or otherwise. If something is unjust, then people will object on moral grounds. Justifying "good" countries doing "bad" things because they're "good" countries leads to an open question over what constitutes a "good" country, morally. More often than not, the defense isn't actually a moral defense - it's a practical one. Sometimes it's might makes right, sometimes it's just the status quo - "that's the way things are".

Which are explanations of how we got here, but they're not explanations for how we continue. They don't answer anything ahead of us. If "the way things are" is the defense of the present, then anything in the future changes the way things are. Making a new status quo, that defends itself by being the status quo. Similarly, for might makes right, any changes or threats to the current order are made through an application of strength. People who support might makes right, or at least defend any given situation by invoking it, have no argument (without moving the goalposts). They can't. And that's the weakness in continuing to rely on either (or both) of these things.

Demographics that suffer under another don't forget as easily as we think they do. Our news cycle might be a 24-hour hellfest that switches our attention from one thing to the next, but living under something leave much deeper scars. "oh but they have a bad government" isn't a justification. Just the same that a "good" government doing bad things is still resulting in bad things. The ends should not justify the means. Morality is not additive. "oh but they have a bad government" is a rationalisation, made to ease the dissonance encountered by the simple fact that multiple things can be true at once. A bad government can have racist objectives, and still be the victim when a stronger power bombs them into the dust for objectives that have nothing to do with a) the government being bad or b) the racist objectives, but actually because of the third, unmentioned factor which is "the country doing the bombing has geopolitical reasons for allowing it to happen".

And Western countries, in my opinion, are going to find this dissonance only gets worse over time. It won't get better. The divides will get worse. Because, at its centre, all it is is "one rule for us, and one rule for them". Because a lot of us have bad governments, objectively, nevermind subjectively. If the justification is "they're bad", then other demographics will look at us, and assume the same (in the reverse).
 
I still disagree with you on many things but I actually, genuinely appreciate this exposition on your reasoning. :thumbsup:

Wish I was this articulate, but alas the language barrier is limiting as well and I dislike using my English relying on Google translate.
 
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israel is not the "Jewish Nation" . One of thousands of propaganda points , this revolves around the idea that a god gave a defined territory to the 12 tribes , which incidentally is not Euphrates to the Nile . Like all that 7 years of disasters should have prevented the need for Exodus and stuff , right ? Israel was a Left thing that would have nothing to be liked by the defenders of a certain side in the war up North . Israel , despite all the ills that could have referenced in its early times as they were very systemically ethnically cleansing everything even before its official existance has been hijacked by American Evangelism which has some certain amount of support within Israel in an alliance with mutual eventual hate and discord guaranteed by opposing religious dogmas . Israel has had run out of the use of the Holocaust long before October 7th and an Israel with an actual Leftist Goverment will find enough to hang Benjamin Netanyahu simply on grounds of how October 7th could have happened . The recent victories and whatnot of Israel is not transferable into gains in the war up North . Let us try not to deceive each other , right ?
 
Israel has had run out of the use of the Holocaust long before October 7th
I agree
how October 7th could have happened .
I still don't understand how the infamous Mossad allowed that.
On the rest of your comment I have nothing to say as I am not that knowledgeable about the whole Jewish state creation. Errors were made, Israeli civilians born after that, not their fault, there are some dangerous fanatical settlers over there that should be brought to justice!
 

Israeli forces kill 22 protesters demanding its withdrawal in Lebanon​

White House announces deadline extended for Israeli troop presence in Lebanon

Israeli forces in southern Lebanon on Sunday opened fire on protesters demanding their withdrawal in line with a ceasefire agreement, killing at least 22 and injuring 124, Lebanese health officials reported.

Hours later, the White House said that Israel and Lebanon had agreed to extend the deadline for Israeli troops to depart southern Lebanon until Feb. 18, after Israel requested more time to withdraw beyond the 60-day deadline stipulated in a ceasefire agreement that halted the Israel-Hezbollah war in late November.

Israel has said that it needs to stay longer because the Lebanese army has not deployed to all areas of southern Lebanon to ensure that Hezbollah does not re-establish its presence in the area. The Lebanese army has said it cannot deploy until Israeli forces withdraw.

There was no immediate comment from the Israeli government, but Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati confirmed the extension.

The announcement came hours after demonstrators, some of them carrying Hezbollah flags, attempted to enter several villages to protest Israel's failure to withdraw from southern Lebanon by the original Sunday deadline.

The dead included six women and a Lebanese army soldier, the Health Ministry said in a statement. People were reported wounded in nearly 20 villages in the border area.

The Israeli army blamed Hezbollah for stirring up Sunday's protests.

The Hezbollah-Israel conflict was fought in parallel with the Gaza war, and peaked in a major Israeli offensive that uprooted more than a million people in Lebanon and left the Iran-backed group badly weakened.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-lebanon-troop-withdrawal-deadline-passes-1.7442002
 
New Syria
And the guy posing with the children's head in the famous photo is now a Julani councillor.
20250130190955-82aeeabe.jpg


Meanwhile Israel keep building new military bases on captured Syrian land
 
It's quite flamboyantly distasteful that the annexation of Syria by jihadists is just fine or even to be celebrated. Of course Syria is now dead and will follow the fate of Iraq and Libya. Mass murders and pogroms and a genocide of the sizable christian community there is not out of the question either - far from it.
Maybe if we didn't have so many people in the "west" with two working brain cells, it would have been a bit more difficult to whitewash all these crimes with team-talk.
 
Two? Ok, Mr. Fancypants.
 
Well, hyperbole aside, a system with one state obviously can never signify change at all, but one with two states can give the impression of producing any quantifiable pattern of change. Eg all these words in this reply can be written fine with 01 code, but the code itself has no awareness of what they are (they could also be written just with groups of lengths of 0, but not if 0 was constant as a state).
 
Ah, the impression.
 
It's quite flamboyantly distasteful that the annexation of Syria by jihadists is just fine or even to be celebrated. Of course Syria is now dead and will follow the fate of Iraq and Libya. Mass murders and pogroms and a genocide of the sizable christian community there is not out of the question either - far from it.
Maybe if we didn't have so many people in the "west" with two working brain cells, it would have been a bit more difficult to whitewash all these crimes with team-talk.
Agree. There's not really a horse to back in Syria, from the Western perspective.
 
Agree. There's not really a horse to back in Syria, from the Western perspective.
There is Israel. Syria has died. Let's see if Trump leaves the kurds to be killed for a second time because they didn't take part in D-Day. Or at least if he will allow others too to be killed on account of that ^^
 

Israel challenges Syria's new leaders with demand for demilitarisation of south​

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded the complete demilitarisation of much of southern Syria.

It is an announcement that could make conflict between Israel and the new leadership in Syria, after the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad, more likely.

In a speech to Israeli military cadets on Sunday, Netanyahu said that Israel would not allow the forces of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) - the Islamist group that led the overthrow of Assad - nor the new Syrian army that is being formed to "enter the area south of Damascus".

"We demand the complete demilitarisation of southern Syria in the provinces of Quneitra, Deraa and Suweida from the forces of the new regime," he added. "Likewise, we will not tolerate any threat to the Druze community in southern Syria."

He also said that Israeli forces would remain indefinitely inside the Syrian territory that they have seized since Assad's fall last December - which would be a shift in Israeli strategy.

Until now, Israel had described its move into a UN-monitored demilitarised buffer zone in the Golan Heights as a temporary measure to ensure the security of Israelis on the other side.

The rationale appeared to be to prevent extremist groups from moving down to the Golan in the power vacuum.

But with his latest comments, Netanyahu has made it clear that he believes that the new authorities in Syria - with their background in jihadism - could represent a similar danger.

Israel seized most of the Golan from Syria during the 1967 Middle East war and later annexed. The move was not recognised internationally, although the US did so in 2019.

Syria's new interim President, HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has tried to reassure Israel that he does not want conflict and that he is ready to uphold the long-standing disengagement agreement between the two countries concluded after another war in 1973.

He has also stressed that he will not allow Syria to be used as a base for attacks against Israel.

But Sharaa has also called on Israel to withdraw from the buffer zone it has taken, as he tries to assert sovereignty across the whole of Syria's fractured landscape.

Clearly, Netanyahu does not trust these assurances.

Like much of the international community, the Israeli prime minister is waiting to see if Sharaa makes good on his moderate, emollient stance in action as well as words.

From the perspective of the new Syrian leadership, freeing the country from the influence of all the foreign powers that jockeyed for position during the long years of civil war is seen as vital to ensuring a more positive future for the country and a definitive break with the past.

Some foreign players, such as Iran and Russia, have seen for now at least the curtailment of the overweening influence they once had.

Under President Donald Trump, the US might also further disengage from Syria - a role which has helped underpin Kurdish-led forces in the north-east of the country.

There has, though, been growing influence from Turkey - which provided essential support for HTS in its lightning campaign against Assad.

How big a part it chooses to play could be a determining factor in how Syria develops in the post-Assad era.

But Israel may present a more immediate challenge to the independence of Syria's new leadership.

To have Israeli troops increasingly infringing on the country's territory - as well as carrying out numerous strikes on targets associated with what's left of Assad's military arsenal - does not fit with the vision of a re-unified, sovereign state that Sharaa is trying to convince Syrians both inside and outside the country that his leadership can provide.

Netanyahu's move to forbid Syrian forces from operating freely within the country's borders may be a step too far for the new order in Damascus to stomach, however non-confrontational an image it is trying to maintain.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgenz02lp8o
 
Mass murders and pogroms and a genocide of the sizable christian community there is not out of the question either - far from it.
Baseless bombastic assertions, I don't know where the source of this misinformation came from or what its aim is. This kind of "crusade" call vibe has been perpetuated by amateurish right-wing media until it blabber to the big influencer figure like Candace Owen because it fits their crusade complex narrative.

Syria is a new nation, and they are desperately seeking good rapport to avoid being isolated as a pariah nation. This is also the main reason why they just stand back and watch while Israel bombards their region to pieces, while other right-wingers appointed that fact as a prove that they are "Israeli puppet", equally brainless laughable narration. They do that because they have been advised not to retaliate because any form of retaliation will be used to put pressure against them. Then why the heck should they attack the Christian community? Christian leaders in Syria have repeatedly denied this. During December, they showcased and displayed how they celebrated Christmas. The government even went as far as giving an additional holiday during Christmas to desperately show goodwill to the international community.

If there are any people or tribes that would be eradicated unjustly first, it would be the Alawite community, as they are the core community that has been a supporter of the Assad regimes, not Christians. But even they are not doing that. It seems some people are falling to their knees, begging for there to be a pogrom in Syria so their dystopian dream can come true. In that case, I would say pray harder. Maybe God will hear your prayer and make it come true so they can sleep soundly at night knowing they are right. What else can I say aside of that for this crusade complex? And what what's your aim for this? another military intervention in Syria? lol crazy.
 
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