Has The Israeli Goverment BecomeThe Monster?

Bartholomew Gallacher

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Netanyahu had an interview with Fox News today. He claimed that Israel was faced by an imminent nuclear threat of destruction posed by Iran, and that's why they hit.

"We were facing an imminent threat, a dual existential threat," he said.

"One, the threat of Iran rushing to weaponize their enriched uranium to make atomic bombs with a specific and declared intent to destroy us. Second, a rush to increase their ballistic missile arsenal to the capacity that they would have 3,600 weapons a year…. Within three years, 10,000 ballistic missiles, each one weighing a ton, coming in at mach 6, right into our cities, as you saw today… and then in 26 years, 20,000 [missiles]. No country can sustain that, and certainly not a country the size of Israel, so we had to act."


More so, by this hit Israel is not only defecting itself, but protecting the world.

He also told that Trump is the number one person in the world Iran wants to see getting killed, with him - Netanyahu - being in 2nd place. Why? Because Trump is a decisive leader.

Netanyahu also stated the next level of escalation has been reached: he claimed that Iranian spy chief Mohammed Kasemi died in an air strike. And urged the Iranian people to get rid of their government.

 
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Cristiano

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Netanyahu had an interview with Fox News today. He claimed that Israel was faced by an imminent nuclear threat of destruction posed by Iran, and that's why they hit.

"We were facing an imminent threat, a dual existential threat," he said.

"One, the threat of Iran rushing to weaponize their enriched uranium to make atomic bombs with a specific and declared intent to destroy us. Second, a rush to increase their ballistic missile arsenal to the capacity that they would have 3,600 weapons a year…. Within three years, 10,000 ballistic missiles, each one weighing a ton, coming in at mach 6, right into our cities, as you saw today… and then in 26 years, 20,000 [missiles]. No country can sustain that, and certainly not a country the size of Israel, so we had to act."


More so, by this hit Israel is not only defecting itself, but protecting the world.

He also told that Trump is the number one person in the world Iran wants to see getting killed, with him - Netanyahu - being in 2nd place. Why? Because Trump is a decisive leader.

Netanyahu also stated the next level of escalation has been reached: he claimed that Iranian spy chief Mohammed Kasemi died in an air strike. And urged the Iranian people to get rid of their government.

That was for an audience of one: Trump. He is stroking his ego to get him involved in the conflict.
 

Cristiano

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I would, though, beware the all-too-common syllogism that runs
Absolutely. There is genuine anti-semitism and it is a problem. It must be called out and stopped when it exists. That is what makes the Israeli Government even more sinister in hiding behind it. They want to silence any critics to shield themselves and operate with impunity. In the US, they have a powerful lobby in AIPAC that has helped to make America complicit in that. I love Jewish people - hell I live in Miami Beach, which is majority Jewish leadership and has a large Jewish population. My singular focus of criticism is on Netanyahu, who is a fucking monster and a war criminal who is continuing to escalate to stay out of prison. He and Trump are cut from the same corrupt, narcissistic cloth and both countries will be better without them in power.
 

Bartholomew Gallacher

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How low can Trump go? This low:

U.S. President Donald Trump said on June 15 that he is considering his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin as a potential mediator between Israel and Iran.

"Yeah, I would be open to it," Trump said, as cited by ABC reporter Rachel Scott on X. "He is ready. He called me about it. We had a long talk about it. We talked about this more than his situation. This is something I believe is going to get resolved."

Since June 13, Israel has carried out several massive air strikes against Iran, particularly the country's nuclear facilities and scientists. The Israeli government justified the attack by saying that Tehran was on the verge of creating a nuclear bomb.

The situation has escalated, with Iran retaliating by striking Tel Aviv and other targets in Israel.

Reports have indicated that Israel approached the Trump administration to take a more active role in the strikes.

Scott said that Trump denied the U.S. was actively participating in the Israeli-Iranian conflict.

"We're not involved in it," he said, as cited by Scott. "It's possible we could get involved. But we are not at this moment."

Trump is seemingly eager to see a deal between Israel and Iran sooner rather than later.

"Iran and Israel should make a deal, and will make a deal, just like I got India and Pakistan to make," Trump wrote on Truth Social on June 15. "We will have PEACE, soon, between Israel and Iran!"

The Ukrainian government has condemned Iran as a major supplier of weapons to Russia — most notably the Shahed deep-strike drones.

"We would like to remind you that the Iranian regime supports Russia in its illegal war of aggression against Ukraine and provides Moscow with weapons to kill Ukrainians," the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said on June 13.


 

Mona Eberhardt

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Israel has claimed to have gained control of the skies over the Iranian capital and warned that “Tehran will burn” if more missiles are fired at its territory, but the Iranian leadership remained defiant, vowing a “more severe and powerful response” and threatened to widen the war by striking ships and bases of Israeli allies.
The mutual threats reflected the risks of a dramatic escalation in the conflict, as US-Iranian negotiations planned before the war in Oman were abandoned after Tehran said they would be “meaningless”, and Israel appeared to target Iran’s gas industry. Israeli rhetoric reflected its leaders’ growing confidence that they have gained the upper hand, and raised questions over whether Israeli war aims could go beyond the stated objective of crippling Iran’s nuclear programme.

The threat to destroy Tehran was delivered by Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, after Iran responded to the surprise Israeli attack on Friday morning with a barrage of several hundred ballistic missiles and drones, a small percentage of which succeeded in penetrating Israeli defences and killed three people in Tel Aviv and Rishon LeZion.
Katz, whose forces have already razed large parts of Gaza, held Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, responsible for Tehran’s fate.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jun/14/uk-moves-jets-to-middle-east-as-starmer-refuses-to-rule-out-defending-israel
“The Iranian dictator is taking the citizens of Iran hostage, bringing about a reality in which they, and especially Tehran’s residents, will pay a heavy price for the flagrant harm inflicted upon Israel’s citizens,” Katz said. “If Khamenei continues to fire missiles at the Israeli home front, Tehran will burn.”

Your points are correct. In addition to them, and regarding the "we need more space" reference in your signature, you might find this interesting: Israel needs 'Lebensraum' says blog by major national newspaper
 
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Mona Eberhardt

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Absolutely. There is genuine anti-semitism and it is a problem. It must be called out and stopped when it exists. That is what makes the Israeli Government even more sinister in hiding behind it. They want to silence any critics to shield themselves and operate with impunity. In the US, they have a powerful lobby in AIPAC that has helped to make America complicit in that. I love Jewish people - hell I live in Miami Beach, which is majority Jewish leadership and has a large Jewish population. My singular focus of criticism is on Netanyahu, who is a fucking monster and a war criminal who is continuing to escalate to stay out of prison. He and Trump are cut from the same corrupt, narcissistic cloth and both countries will be better without them in power.
Cristiano, the "you're criticizing Israel, ergo you're antisemites" argument (which is also part of the notorious IHRA definition) is precisely the same argument used by Greek nationalists and fascists whenever issues like the treatment of minorities, refugees, migrants, LGBTQI+ persons, people who are not of the Greek Orthodox Christian church, and so on. They always hide behind "anti-hellenism". This argument, which also laced with conspiracy theories and a "Chosen People" rhetoric, is very often used by the right wing here, from the "moderate" (yeah, right - his second-in-command, Makis Voridis, was chosen in his youth by imprisoned dictator Georgios Papadopoulos to lead the neo-fascist party EPEN, and he's remorseless about his career in Greek neo-fascism) PM Mitsotakis all the way to the neo-nazis of Golden Dawn and its spin-offs.
 

Ellie

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Absolutely. There is genuine anti-semitism and it is a problem. It must be called out and stopped when it exists. That is what makes the Israeli Government even more sinister in hiding behind it. They want to silence any critics to shield themselves and operate with impunity. In the US, they have a powerful lobby in AIPAC that has helped to make America complicit in that. I love Jewish people - hell I live in Miami Beach, which is majority Jewish leadership and has a large Jewish population. My singular focus of criticism is on Netanyahu, who is a fucking monster and a war criminal who is continuing to escalate to stay out of prison. He and Trump are cut from the same corrupt, narcissistic cloth and both countries will be better without them in power.
This coopting of religions is a global problem.

Not all US Christian Nationalists support violence, but one of them killed Minnesota Lawmaker Melissa Hortman.

Many think of Buddhism as a peaceful path. The Rohingya don't.

Some Muslims claim suicide bombing is permitted by their religion.

Nearly half of Israelis support the army killing all Palestinians in Gaza.

I think my point is that achieving political goals by pretending to comply with a religion's precepts corrupts adherents and removes any moral limits from original decent rules for life.
 
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Innula Zenovka

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This coopting of religions is a global problem.

Not all US Christian Nationalists support violence, but one of them killed Minnesota Lawmaker Melissa Hortman.

Many think of Buddhism as a peaceful path. The Rohingya don't.

Some Muslims claim suicide bombing is permitted by their religion.

Nearly half of Israelis support the army killing all Palestinians in Gaza.

I think my point is that achieving political goals by pretending to comply with a religion's precepts corrupts adherents and removes any moral limits from original decent rules for life.
I don't think people fight about religion, though, any more than they fight about language. It's about which community gets to control a particular piece of land. Until the end of WW1 most people (around 60-70% of the world's population, I think) lived in multinational empires. Then, after the defeat of the Central Powers -- the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires -- their empires were broken up into nation states, with the enthusiastic support of US president Woodrow Wilson who, while not a sheet-wearing member of the KKK, was certainly in full sympathy with the their ethno-nationalist views.

This meant that different communities who had, often for centuries, been living side-by-side as subjects of a multilingual, multireligious, multiethnic empire, found themselves as members of majority or minority communities in new nation states whose very existence was predicated on the idea of Hungary for the Hungarians, Poland for the Poles, Romania for the Romanians, Greece for the Greeks, Turkey for the Turks and so on.

It also, of course, meant that members of the various minority communities -- who had often been privileged minorities in the old empires (e.g. Turks in Greece, German speakers in Czechoslovakia) -- often found themselves members of unpopular minorities in their new countries and were forced to leave, either by government decree or by local (and often state-sponsored) persecution, not unlike the causes of Great Migration in the US.

The same pattern continued, of course, rather later during the decolonisation process in the British, French and other European empires.

Political Zionism grew out of this same intellectual tradition -- Poland for the Poles, Latvia for the Latvians, Ireland for the Irish, so why shouldn't the Jews have their own national homeland too? It was an idea that recommended itself not only to some European Jews (not all, of course -- the socialist Bund movement wanted equal citizenship for everyone in secular, socialist European states) but also to some right-wing nationalist European governments. One of the obvious candidates for its location was, of course, Palestine.

The post WWI Polish government, for example, were very supportive of the right-wing, nationalist, Zionist movement in Poland that later became the basis of Likud, partly because they agreed that, since Poles had a right to a Polish-speaking, Catholic Poland, Jews had a right to a Jewish nation state somewhere else, too, and partly because the more Polish Jews who emigrated to Israel, the fewer there were left in Poland. Their disagreement with the British government over European security issues provided further motives for causing HMG problems in Palestine, of course.

Post WW2, there were some 200,000–250,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust located in Displaced Persons Camps (primarily administered by the US and UK), plus a further estimated 50,000–100,000 survivors in non-camp settings. They were unable to return to their former residences, often within the Soviet Union or Soviet-occupied territories, for fear of further persecution (Stalin didn't much like Jews, and any Soviet citizen, Jewish or not, returning to the USSR from non-Soviet territory was likely to be relocated to a labour camp) or because their former homes and communities no longer existed. The US, UK, Canada and Australia were prepared to resettle some of them, but many were stuck in DP camps for years, with nowhere else to go, or they didn't feel safe anywhere other than Palestine and, later Israel.

Then, following Israel's independence, the various Muslim-majority countries in North Africa and the Middle East started to expel their Jewish communities, either officially or unofficially, either as they gained independence from France or Spain, or in response either to domestic events (e.g. Iran after the Islamic Revolution) or to international conflicts.

None of this, I would argue, has much to do with religion, and everything to do with the C20th post colonial idea that particular ethnic groups should have their own homelands. It's the sort of thing that sounds a much better idea when you're drawing lines on a map than when you're dealing with actual people in actual communities, be they in Kashmir, Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia or Israel.
 
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Casey Pelous

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The title of this thread poses a question.

Are we yet at the point where we can come up with at least a tentative answer?

I don't want to jump to any hasty conclusions...
 

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The title of this thread poses a question.

Are we yet at the point where we can come up with at least a tentative answer?

I don't want to jump to any hasty conclusions...
I mean... there is a lot of monsters involved. I hate "bothsidesism" but It's hard to ignore that Israel has committed war crimes and it's hard to ignore that Iran has been pouring gas on the fire anyway they can.
 
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Innula Zenovka

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The Israeli government has long behaved monstrously. Likud are the political successors to the far-right, pre-independence Zionist terrorist organisations the Irgun and the Stern Gang, in the same way that, in India, Narendra Modi's BJP is a successor to the RSS. It's what right wing ethno-religious nationalists do, whether they're Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Hindu.

However, I don't think it's a case of "bothsidesism" to accept that Jewish Israelis have every reason to fear that Hamas are just as bad and, in consequence, act accordingly.

The Mizrahi Jews, refugees from North Africa and the Maghreb and their descendants, forced out of those countries by post independence nationalist governments, are one of Likud's core constituencies, and they have every reason to fear Arab and Islamic nationalists, since they're the very reason they or their parents or grandparents had to move to Israel in the first place.

That doesn't, of course, make what the Israeli government is doing right, but neither does it mean ordinary Israelis are unreasonable in fearing that a Palestinian state run by Hamas "from the river to the sea" would be every bit as genocidal as is the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.
 
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Innula Zenovka

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Evernote Link

Leaving aside the question of whether it amounts to genocide -- which, as the article explains, is difficult to prove as a war crime -- it's clear that, between them, Israel and the US have abandoned the idea of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions in Gaza. It's particularly scathing about the role played by Joe Biden and his administration.
 
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Ellie

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Israeli tanks fired into a crowd trying to get aid from trucks in Gaza on Tuesday, killing at least 59 people, according to medics, in one of the bloodiest incidents yet in mounting violence as desperate residents struggle for food. Video shared on social media showed around a dozen mangled bodies lying in a street in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. The Israeli military, at war with Hamas-led Palestinian militants in Gaza since October 2023, acknowledged firing in the area and said it was looking into the incident. Medics said at least 14 other people were also killed by Israeli gunfire and airstrikes elsewhere in the densely populated enclave, taking Tuesday's overall death toll to at least 73.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-tank-shelling-kills-45-people-awaiting-aid-trucks-gaza-ministry-says-2025-06-17/

Doesn't matter what you call it, this wholesale murder of starving civilians must stop.
 

GoblinCampFollower

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Or what?

Currently, there doesn't appear to be any penalty, or anyone interested in applying a penalty, for this situation.
Well... yes.... I'm sure Ellie knows that. I do think morality can exist independent of what can actually be enforced though. Obviously power has a major impact on what morals actually matter in the physical world though.

Mind you, I'm not saying morality exists in the way that laws of physics exist. Morality isn't objective, but I think it still matters. I certainly don't believe there is any guarantee that goodness wins.
 
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Innula Zenovka

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This is significant -- to the extent that an op-ed piece by a British journalist can ever be described as significant, of course -- in that Nick Cohen has, as he notes in the piece, written " whole books about the endorsement of radical Islam and Arab dictators by sections of the left".
 

Ellie

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The international community must look beyond the veneer of these aid compounds and confront the grim reality they represent. We must condemn a system that uses the promise of food to force a desperate population through militarized chokepoints. But more urgently, we must demand an answer to the most pressing question this data raises: Where are the missing 377000 Palestinians?

Everyone knows they're mostly buried under rubble, somewhere.

Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, says she found Trump's numbers "puzzling" — and a potential confirmation that the death toll is actually much higher, something researchers, doctors and public health experts have long said was the case

I take Beebo's point; there's no real way to stop the slaughter unless the US butts out and/or some way is found to put pressure on or remove Netanyahu, who still faces prison if convicted, and seeks to delay that case for as long as possible.

At this point, when I rarely see a mainstream news report on the topic, I see Israeli spokespersons repeating tired lies; no genocide, no targeting of civilians, no this, no that, and oops, we made another mistake and killed more aid workers...and we're investigating it ourselves!

Time to take another look at all the lies the global mainstream press uncritically published word-for-word around events of October 7, 2023, this time with skepticism due to all the lies spouted since then, as they were used to manufacture consent, an excuse to bomb the hell outta Gaza and kill all these Palestinians.
 
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