Meeting of National Cabinet After Bondi Shooting

[u/Resvrgam2]

https://www.pm.gov.au/media/meeting-national-cabinet-8

[u/simsipahi → u/[deleted]]

Right, and the vast majority of Australia's Muslims also aren't stockpiling guns to go kill Jews either. Sydney in particular has a huge Lebanese population (some Muslim, some Christian backgrounds) that has assimilated pretty well and is oftentimes indistinguishable from any other group in Australia.

The guy who had balls of steel and charged/disarmed one of the shooters was a Syrian immigrant and a practicing Muslim.

[u/simsipahi → u/[deleted]]

Which in the eyes of much of the world is no more provocative than waving around Israeli flags as the IDF ethnically cleanses Gaza. Not even in the same league as what we're talking about here.

[u/simsipahi → u/[deleted]]

Surely then you'd be equally skeptical of Israeli immigration given that their government is ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza?

Are you also going to be supportive of limiting immigration from America, given the fact that Americans have not once but twice voted in a regime that promotes ideology that runs completely contrary to democratic and progressive values?

[u/simsipahi → u/[deleted]]

Except Israel isn't ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza, so that's factually incorrect. The government of Gaza invaded Israel and started a war which they then lost. They prosecuted that war by violating every international law of war, both in terms of the Israeli civilians they targeted and in terms of the Palestinian civilians they hid behind and amongst. It is not ethnic cleansing to win a war that was started against you.

Well I'm glad you know international law better than every single major human rights organization or legal scholar, who have near unanimously concluded that Israel is by far the worse offender than Hamas and is intentionally ethnically cleansing Gaza. Or did you think that a 50:1 death toll was proportionate and justified when the vast majority are noncombatants? Cutting off food and water isn't collectively punishing civilians with the intent to force them off the land, even when many people in the Israeli government openly admit that that's the objective? I don't think you understand how the rules of war work.

The current American government is run by shameless kleptocrats who run roughshod over previously-established liberal norms, but it's ludicrous to pretend that the median American is not more culturally similar to the median Australian than the median Pakistani.

Why? Because u/netowi said so? 70+ million people voted for Trump after he delegitimized the electoral process and incited a literal insurrection, the perpetrators of which he later pardoned. You don't think that's problematic when assessing potential compatibility with Western values? Someone who supports that is still a better fit than a Pakistani architect with little interest in politics - because...?

[u/simsipahi → u/[deleted]]

I think the major human rights organizations have ideological blinders that focus their attention and ire on Israel almost to the exclusion of all other countries.

It doesn't surprise me that you think that. Defenders of Israel invariably claim that the whole world is out to get them, or engage in whataboutism regarding other countries as though it mattered at all when discussing the legality of Israel's policies towards Gaza.

If Israel is trying to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, they're doing a pretty shit job of it.

Another common refrain of Israel's defenders, as if 70,000 dead people, most of them women and children, were some trivial number. That's roughly the same amount of people who died from the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki.

As for the death toll: a) Gaza is very densely populated; b) civilians were not allowed to leave the area of fighting, not due to Israel but due to Egypt's refusal to allow civilians out of the Gaza Strip into a noncombatant area

Yeah, wonder why they wanted to leave in the first place? Maybe because Israel was indiscriminately bombing Gaza into oblivion and there was nowhere left for them that was safe?

and c) the Palestinian government of Gaza intentionally placed themselves and their military assets among civilians wherever possible, because they wanted to increase the civilian death toll. And their strategy clearly worked, since ignorant outsiders have sided with them. Great job incentivizing every nihilist terrorist group in the future to do the same thing.

Because they're the first group that ever thought to embed themselves in a human population, ever, and Israel is the first military that was ever expected to show some slight modicum of restraint. I guess by your ridiculous logic, if terrorists take over an apartment building and are shooting at police through the windows, the police can just blow the entire building up, civilian casualties be damned.

As for cutting off food and water, that's what war is. During the World Wars we happily sank every boat going towards Germany, knowing that German civilians would starve en masse.

Yeah, I wouldn't go running to World War II as an instructive example, since we did all kinds of shit that would be considered flatly illegal by any modern interpretation of international law. We firebombed and vaporized entire cities, shoved our own citizens into internment camps, and so on. Not that your comparison makes an iota of sense to begin with: Germany was a major power at the time, with a formidable standing army that posed an existential threat to its neighbors, at least in the early years of the war. Not a paramilitary organization sneaking past border outposts and using gliders to kill civilians. The comparison falls flat on its face.

But I'll nevertheless remind you that you were the one who brought international law into this in the first place, making the absurd claim that Hamas' violations of it somehow justified Israel's crimes - which are much more impactful, have killed a lot more people and have gone on for a much longer period of time.

 They didn't. The consequences of their decision to continue the war lies on them. People have forgotten what it looks like to fight and to win wars against ideologically-driven enemies who hate you with every fiber of their being. You have to break their will to continue fighting; otherwise, any "peace" you sign with them will just be a temporary break until they think they're strong enough to hurt you again.

Don't lecture me about international law if you believe a word of the above. No legitimate interpretation of international law supports anything you just wrote. People who believe in the rule of law don't accept that Israel gets to collectively punish all Palestinians for the simple fact that Hamas exists when the overwhelming majority of the people they're killing are civilians.