The Middle East Thread

Moral licensing is very powerful. Once someone has identified their team as the good guys, the intolerable things their side does becomes excused or justified by the greater good. And vice versa.

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No, I mean the intervieweeā€™s response just made absolutely no sense and was a word salad.

And your time spent on TAN hasnā€™t been adequate preparation for such situations? :thinking:

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I get you. But that is what happens when you are so locked into one narrative your brain forces you to try to reconcile the unreconcilable and it comes out as nonsense to anyone else.

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RIP cardiffpete

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Pete could have solved this crisis, but the guy who asked him had the wrong phone so he laughed in his face and walked out of the room.

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Corrected, you are welcome :innocent:

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The real problem is that itā€™s an ethno religious state.

I know a Jewish/ Israeli restaurant owner that sells traditional food. She has come out calling for peace publicly (not pro Palestine, just peace) and as a consequence she has been shunned by Jewish community. Half the world away, and in any other situation calling for peace would be seen as normal. Yet religion is so tied to Israel (or I should say exploited) it becomes one and same.

Even within the Jewish communities criticism of Israel is seen as an attack on religion. Which is wrong.

All the traditional customers have gone, ironically word has gotten out about this. Trade is now picking up (non Jewish community). However sad itā€™s so sad to see. That someone calling for peace is seen as an enemy.

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This is something that I donā€™t quite understand. I guess itā€™s the inherently tribal nature that we canā€™t seem to shake as a society.

When I say I want peace, I donā€™t want it to be just the Palestinians not being oppressed. I donā€™t want Israelis to be oppressed either. I just want people to coexist happily, and peacefully.

Such a waste of human potential.

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Further proof that people are fuckwits.

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A bit more lip service from the US. Who are they trying to fool, really?

I saw a report yesterday how a young 17 years old Gazean was extracted from Gaza in February and brought to Switzerland, where he has since been admitted as a refugee. The poor boy has lost a leg and is thus in a wheel-chair. His weight when coming into the country was 29 kg. Yes, 29 kg. I saw pictures from him as he is now, and itā€™s still frightening to see how skinny he is, even after months of treatment in hospital and being able to eat properly again.

We donā€™t see many pictures coming out from Gaza currently, but Iā€™m sure that there are many other living skeletons walking around in Gaza as we speak. And then, you have these freaking hypocrites giving Israel another thirty days (!) to obstruct aid for these people. :see_no_evil:

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Those comments from him have my brain in a knot. Because he canā€™t separate his ethnicity from the state of Israel and their actions, we should instead limit the coverage?

That seems nuts. I do realise Israel is a very unique case because of the link between ethnicity and the reasons behind the creation of the state, but still.

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Nekminnit, warships and aircraft deployed in the region. Biden has proven to be weak as piss.

That assumes that Biden is primarily interested in peace. His main aim is to prevent the conflict from affecting oil output. The fact that, aside from Iran, the main Arab nations donā€™t give a shit about Palestinians or Lebanese people, doesnā€™t exactly help.

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And I assume that the Iranians only see them as a useful way of prodding Israel.

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To be honest, I actually wonder if there is someone left to care about the fate of the Palestiniansā€¦ and you can add Lebanon to that, who cares about them?

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Syria , Lebanon and the land encompassing modern day Israel.

That area has always been fucked up (putting it plainly).

I donā€™t know where you take that from. Lebanon is the birthplace of a great antique civilization, called the Phenicians. At some point, they were dominating the entirety of the Mediterranean sea. Later, they came under Greek and Roman domination, but enjoyed a good bit of stability over many centuries.

During the Middle Ages, Western Europe came up with their crusades, and put some real suffering in that region, but they were soon ousted by the Arabs, who again brought an era of stability and prosperity. Later, the Ottomans exerted a long-lasting domination over the region, until the end of WW1, and a short occupation by the English Empire until WW2.

All this is of course over-simplified, but I wouldnā€™t call any of these eras ā€˜fucked upā€™. Of course, there must have been intermediary situations of instability and wars, as anywhere else. But to call the Middle East out as a perennial problematic region isnā€™t correct imo.

Of course, the current situation is as fucked as you want. Implanting a new religious state with totally foreign people amidst a settled area, with a settled religious belief: what could go wrong, eh?

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Iā€™m inclined to give @Sithbare the benefit of the doubt and believe that heā€™s referring to the past century, for which there is plenty of evidence as to how and why the region is messed up.

That said, itā€™s not as though itā€™s been unique in that regard.

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Of course, that is not exactly a new tradition for the region either. Israel is only the latest state to do so in that territory.