Israel/Palestine thread

Micro,

Am I correct you went to the UCLA liberated zone? Is Victor's analysis correct from what you saw, that the pro Zionist side had more problematic messaging and behaved much worse?

Destroying all the infrastructure and tunnels has clearly hampered Hamas ability to move. For example, hundreds of fighters never get trapped in the hospital complex without all the surrounding infrastructure destroyed. Also, Hamas went from firing hundreds of rockets/day at Israel to none. By all accounts they still have plenty of rockets, they just have no ability to move them or stage them.

So clearly destroying Gaza is achieving military ends. The issue is just whether the juice is worth the squeeze.

I went to UCLA on Saturday, but the events shown were from Sunday. I was only there for about 40 minutes and saw a few conversations between sides which weren't lovey dovey, but like a 2 on a 1-10 hostility scale. It was mostly quiet, but there was one period with a little drumming and chanting. I really couldn't make out most of the chants, but didn't hear anything about supporting 10/7 or Hamas. There were a lot of signs and none mentioned Jews at all aside from the ones from the Jewish group inside the blockaded area - the "not in our name" kind of signs. I didn't go inside the blockaded area. There was a fairly long line to get in and they wanted you to sign off of their rules, which as far as I heard (and I listened to them talk to people coming in) was not to photograph people's faces without their consent and not to fight. But, you could see everything from outside the barricades anyway.

The reason the protests at the UCs have mostly been out of the news is because, unlike other campuses, at least so far, the police have not been rioting. There were a fair amount of security and police around, but they were just on bikes with no riot gear or weapons and I only saw them chatting with people in a pretty friendly manner.

^^^Yay, hard data.

naw thats fake news. the new story is that all the patients and drs found murdered happened months ago.

That sounds like a lot of laws being broken. Obviously if you are running a UC you dont care, because you just pass the buck onto the state taxpayers. But the biggest actual problem with college students doing takeovers and running autonomous zones with barricades and blatantly violating Constitutional rights is the extreme legal liability of permitting this to happen.

And that is with nothing bad happening. Obviously if it turns into a Chaz type situation where people get hurt the liability will be a nightmare.

UCLA wasn't two groups calling for genocide of the other? I'm beginning to suspect Tankie Twitter might actually be a bunch of rage bait intended to stir up extreme views.

Not being a fascist, I don't need the fainting couch over the broken laws, but they aren't in anyone's way. The barricades don't block any building or the sidewalk at all.

eta: I looked on the map satellite view and they did block the sidewalk between Royce Hall and the Powell Library, and it's a 270' detour to walk around. If you look on satellite the area is the center of the Western ~half of the area betwen the UCLA Flag Pole and the Shapiro Fountain. The east/west sidewalks are clear.

extreme views like Palestinians shouldnt be genocided and should be able to live freely. we understand why those views would be extreme to yourself.

I mean, if you want to argue for judicial reform to stop spurious lawsuits, I am all for it. But given our societal penchant for spurious lawsuits, I suspect an avalanche of lawsuits to come out of this, most initiated by bad faith lawyers looking to exploit the lawlessness for an easy payday.

You can of course view this as my acknowledging how flaccid and non dangerous the protests themselves actually are, that I view the biggest thing coming from them is a **** ton of lawsuits against the state.

Needless to say, the idea that a bunch of over-educated, narcissistic hypochondriacs are going to spur any sort of revolution is laughable.

When some of them will be judges deciding cases, or prosecutors deciding who to sue and why, they can warp the application of the law in ways we can only barely imagine currently . Imagine SF "feel free to steal up to 1k" but to everything.

And that's just 1 angle of how society can become sick like if it had cancer, because of the existence of these people

People like rafiki must absolutely hate when they post about being upset about protestors you are going to swoop in and get into how you agree with them and want all the protestors shot.

If they don't resist arrest i don't see why they should be shot.

Fact is we need to try each hamas supporter as a material ally of a terror organization, throw the book at them, ruin their lives forever if possible legally (and i think it would be, if federal prosecutors intended to, at least in the case of clear pro-hamas support).

Why do you say "we"? What group are you a part of that you think should try protestors at UCLA?

Would the kids protesting on UCLA qualify as Hamas supporters?

Lucio doesn't quite get the difference between lying and bullshitting. When IDF apologists call the protestors Hamas supporters, he thinks it's a factual claim about the world and not just bullshit people say to throw smoke on the issue.

but you dont understand.. they are going against the key western values of mass killing of brown people. what will the world come to if we don't keep to traditions.

not many of them i suppose, some could? charge those who can be charged, apply the law and we see what happens.

Yes drivel also works for said dribbling. 👍

no i actually think that there are pro hamas people like viktor among the protesters, and they don't even hide it.

Anyone of those saying 10 7 was a good event for example.

By my job isn't investigating terrorist-adjacent people, that's law enforcement job. They should be all investigated, at least those promoting verbatim Hamas propaganda and claims and requests at the very least.

What i am asking is to treat them AT THE VERY MINIMUM like we would treat a group of neo-nazi some of which are actually known to manage neo-nazi sites and organize neo-nazi protests and so on. Not all of them are necessarily the same threat level, no crime is necessarily be committed in that specific moment but they are a direct terror threat at a minimum, and possibly material support to an actual international terror organization, this is where you spend taxpayers money to keep taxpayers safe and you use the power of the state to verify and if possible defuse the threat with as much legal tools you can

(not sure which campus was this btw)

can we all agree we have a moral imperative to do everything legal (and to change the laws to do more) to make sure this person is never again part of civil society?

If we agree this person (and everyone who is on board with that statement) deserves to spend a loooot of years in jail then we move from here.

It's only a crime in the USA to provide material support. Perhaps someone at the protest also sends money or missile parts to Hamas, but everything said or written at the protests is protected speech in the USA. A lot of Euros have more restrictions on free speech, so you might not understand that.

Israel isn't engaging in "kill 'em all". If they were, they could easily turn Gaza into a parking lot. They haven't.

Al qaida videos to enlist people in the organizations are banned in the USA though.

And incitement to actual violence is not protected by the 1a in general afaik, and asking "solidarity for rockets" is exactly that, am i right?