The disruption in gas supply will be very short. Weeks, at most. The gulf states will be very happy to see the Islamic Republic gone, they are living in its shadow for a long time now. Now, Ukraine and Israel need very different kinds of support, and things like US withholding intelligence from Ukraine have nothing to do with Israel.
Iran has been bombing production facilities across a bunch of US allies. It's unclear how quickly those will be rebuilt. Also, the US is probably bombing Iranian production, which means countries like China will be looking for additional sources.
I wonder why Israel should get any support, do you support killing children and bombing schools?
Ukraine, I understand, because it was attacked, but Israel, who was oppressing people for so many years with prisons full with Palestinian kids and teenagers long before Oct 7th, I really don't understand.
Except, for Epstein reasons (blackmail), other than that, there is no reason US should support Israel, in any way
There is no moral justification for Israel's right to exist. Israel does not have a right to exist. They exist purely as a foreign invasion force originally started by European Jews - who didn't even practice or believe in Judaism - in order to make their own private racist mediterranean resort state by killing the native people and stealing their land.
What makes you think anyone would want support their existence over the rights of the existing Palestinian people that lived there and are currently fighting to reclaim their homes?
Religions do not have a right of inheritance. A person can't claim your home when you die because they also happen to be Christian. The only legal inheritance are those with title. And no one from Europe that decided to attack and invade Palestine can show any deed or title to the land they claimed to "own" 2000 years ago when they decided to move to Europe.
So, no. The state of Israel exists purely as a criminal enterprise of murder and theft. Let's not encourage its continued existence.
lol the Israelis would also disagree, otherwise they would have let the Palestinians live with them instead of literally going village-to-village, and door-to-door to forcibly remove the Palestinian residents or be killed if they didn't.
If the state of Israel doesn't believe in native rights, then you shouldn't believe in supporting their native rights either.
> Do you believe in the right of the Israelis to stay safe in their houses?
Yes, only if you clarify which house you mean, because some of them think Palestinian houses are theirs, Lebanon is theirs, Jordan is theirs, parts of Saudi Arabia is theirs, parts of Egypt is theirs.
More chances than not that you live in a country that benefitted from the American propensity to do the right thing, even at a huge cost to itself. Yes we have a different and more selfish America now, but all said, America still protects the world order that allows this conversation to exist.
Everyone is the hero in their own story - that's why nationalism can be so dangerous - yet seeing how it plays out in individuals is endlessly fascinating to me.
we don't need good boys, we need good laws where everyone is equal and punished equally for violating the common moral principles, e.g. for being a pedophile
> The disruption in gas supply will be very short.
Remember when W declared mission accomplished? That war was so short too.
> The gulf states will be very happy to see the Islamic Republic gone
Would they be happy to see a devastating civil war that gives rise to a successor of ISIS or Taleban? Will they happily accept tens of millions of refugees?
Absolutely nothing good will come from this dumbfuck war. We all will pay the price of it one way or another.
You can see by the Iranian violent reaction that’s spread far and wide over most of the Middle East countries about what exact kind of stability it brings to the area.
Amongst the countries attacked by Iran now are Qatar, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Oman, Kuwait and Saudia Arabia; indirectly, it’s dragging kicking and screaming into the conflict also Yemen (surely soon), Lebanon (already) and Iraq (already).
No, Hamas was never funded by Israel. In this instance, Hamas was funded by Qatar, and the Israelis were complicit by allowing it. But it's also important to remember that Hamas is the elected sovereign in Gaza, and this money was used in part to run Gaza's infrastructure. In the same way Taliban runs Afghanistan, Hamas runs Gaza.
The assumption in Israel was that it was beneficial to have Hamas retain something to lose, and not starve them dry outright. Of course that didn't pan out well, given what Hamas did in October 7th.
But saying Hamas was funded by Israel is an outright lie, and the irony it comes from the same people who blame Israel for not letting supplies into Gaza during war. So no matter if Israel does or does not, it's always to blame simply by being.
> the irony it comes from the same people who blame Israel for not letting supplies into Gaza during war.
Israel did in fact do that. In fact there were several months of Israel not allowing any food or supplies whatsoever into Gaza. That was about a year ago. (It's possible Israel may have been supplying rival groups unfriendly to Hamas with food/supplies/weapons in secret, but all regular humanitarian aid was shut off.)
In hindsight, from the perspective of the Middle East and Arab world in general: Obama’s tenure was a geopolitical nightmare, while under Trump’s first presidency the Middle East made a big step forward with the Abraham Accords.
Preventive war (attacking to neutralize a future, non-imminent threat) is considered illegal under modern international law. The UN Charter restricts the use of force to UN Security Council authorization or self-defense against an actual, imminent armed attack, making preventive actions, which target potential future dangers, unlawful.
It also allows any one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, including the US, to unilateraly veto any binding resolution that imposes sanctions for violating said law, with no established rules or even informal expectations that they recuse themselves when conflicts of interest arise.
Israel and Iran are involved in active hostilities for a long time now, direct or by proxies. Furthermore, US and Israel are making the case for a preemptive war with the advent of the Iranian nuclear program (whether you believe it or not, that’s beside the point), and those are legal.
Ok, call it a "special military operation" if you want. A war by any other name would smell just as bad.
And what is Congress - or any other part of the US government - going to do about the pedophile not following rules? Stop him? How? Every potential check and balance has either been defanged or is controlled by his supporters.
Probably nothing. Also it’s not like the Democrats have much moral high ground to stand on here either (considering that Obama did more or less the same thing several times).
But congress can of course stop Trump from doing this and a whole bunch of other stuff. The problem is that it just chose not to and to give up much of its powers to the executive over the years (in practice if not legally) due to partisan reasons..
Why can't you be at war without officially declaring it? We have had lots of wars not declared by congress. Korean War, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq. This seems like a weird way to think.
Being required legally doesn't change the actual fact of war. Sure it is breaking the law. I don't see how Libya is the one in the long list to set this precedent of illegally non-declared war.
Iran effectively controlled Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq through its proxies and puppet regimes. Right, it didn't annex territory, but it complete subjugated these countries and their population to their goals.
Nothing racist or exaggerated in Hizbollah in Lebanon having far more military power than the country itself, and taking orders directly from the Iranians, dragging Lebanon into a war it never asked for.
This is why I still haven't embraced agents in my work but stick with halfway manual workflow using aider. It's the only way I can keep ownership of the codebase. Maybe this will change because code ownership will no longer have any value, but I don't feel like we're there yet.
When it comes to Israel, polling was always lower in younger populations, although yes - the trend worsened.
Israel chose to trade popularity for having real geopolitical gains on the ground. Popularity could be won back later, but removing the Iranian ring of fire around it is a real and tangible achievement that would last decades and change the Middle East.
> No. Any other questions, or do you want to just continue feigning interest in having an actual conversation?
This is an actual question. It seems to me that you only care about Arabs dying. Jews can die left and right in the hands of Arabs and you won’t blink an eye. Am I correct?
I just want to clarify it for others who reads your comments to see.
Not really sure what to say here. Maybe it’s a lack of empathy or imagination because the victims are Palestinians?
Perhaps a good thought experiment would be to swap out Israel and Palestine with some other similar (real or fictional) conflict to help you think through your apparent confusion.
Yes, because "what choice did Iran have" other than:
1. Routinely calling for death to Israel and America, turning it into part of the national curriculum and sowing hate
2. Funding, training, supplying and directing multiple violent proxy organizations around the region which attacked Israel and undermined their own countries (Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in West Bank and Gaza, other organizations in Iraq)
3. Enriching Uranium to clearly non-civilian grade in multiple militarily hardened facilities;
4. Directly attacking multiple Jewish targets around the world (like the AMIA and then embassy bombings in Argentina)
5. Attacking neighboring countries with ballistic and cruise missiles, like the attacks on Saudi Aramco in 2019
6. Holding international shipping and energy markets hostage by threatening to attack ships and tankers in the Persian Gulf
7. Abusing their own citizens, including public executions, persecutions and extreme violence
8. Providing support to Russia in their efforts in Ukraine, and especially drones used for indiscriminate dumb attack waves against civilians and infrastructure
Now we have people arguing that if they had just gotten nukes then they could have continued doing all of that.
Probably in all of it. Iran wouldn't have a MAD arsenal, they'd have a small handful that they could pop on a ballistic. We know we can shoot down Iran's missiles. And we know they can't reach America. I'm entirely unconvinced that we wouldn't have launched an attack on Iran even if they had nuclear weapons, because we think we can intercept them, and if we can't, they aren't hitting the homeland.
And on the off chance this defense doesn’t work? No system is perfect. Put another way, would the risk calculation for an attack on Iran be as easy as it is right now?
The point of having nuclear capabilities is to make the risk calculation more difficult. It doesn’t mean you need to have state of the art capabilities.
Assuming I get your point, I would nevertheless say I think most White House admins would care: would not one of those someones in the Middle East who gets hit perhaps include Israel?
I have no idea what strategic value the nation of Israel has for the nation of the USA, but there is clearly strong cultural and political relevant of the former to the latter.
The difference between shooting down a conventionally armed missile and shooting down a nuclear armed missile is that the former will explode in the air or not at all, whereas the latter is quite likely to still be able to detonate when it hits the ground.
There is a hardline element in the IRGC that personally profits from autarky. If the Iranian markets opened to the world, it would decimate their incomes.
Anyone raising their weapon against Israel in the last 20 years was armed, supplied, funded, trained and directed by Iran. There’s a special division called Quds in the IRGC responsible just for that. The list includes Hizbollah, Assad’s former regime in Syria, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Houthis, Hizbollah in Iraq and others.
Israel being an ethnic supremacist state for more than the last 20 years [0], on a determined mission to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population from their ancestral land [1], this comment unintentionally makes Iran sound like the good guys in this story. (I do not support any form of theocracy).
So we agree that the first move in this conflict was a 20th century European nationalist group setting up a new state by force in the middle of an inhabited nation? With the blessing of the colonial power in charge.
Doesn't defend what happened to Jewish people in Egypt and Lebanon, but certainly puts some context around it.
As for the depopulation of Jews from Yemen and Iraq, that was Israeli policy and they managed it by themselves.
You seem confused and didn't seem to read the message you are replying to. I think the main point should be repeated to avoid the reading issues problem:
>So we agree that the first move in this conflict was a 20th century European nationalist group setting up a new state by force in the middle of an inhabited nation? With the blessing of the colonial power in charge.
It had someone living there, those someone's weren't asked and their land handed over to someone else. If we see it from the perspective of it having being a British colonial project, then it's even worse having gone from one colonial master to another without asking the natives.
Yes, Israel was founded specifically to be a safe haven for Jews after 2/3 of them were murdered in Europe, and it passed this (somewhat ridiculous) law in 2018 because it knows full well that once Jews cease to be the majority in Israel, they'll cease to be, period.
You can view it as racist, you can hate it, you can want to see Israel destroyed in favor of yet another 100% Arab country, it really doesn't matter, because the fact is you're all hypocrites who only have the safety that you have because of genocides, brutal wars, land capture, regime toppling and forced conversions. That's the only thing we learned from the rest of the enlightened world. Kill, destroy, erase, force convert, and somehow be deemed a beacon of freedom and democracy.
In real life, Israel is more ethnically and religiously varied than all its surrounding countries, and non-Jews in Israel have rights that even I, as a Jew, don't have (such as freedom of religion). Jews are a minority in the Galilee, and there's no law for the Judaization of the Galilee.
Cultural Arabs and Ethnic Arabs are not the same thing.
Ethnic Arabs are from the Arabian peninsula. Islam's expansion started a slow process of Arabization whereby indigenous people in lands that ended up under the control of the Muslim caliphate/empire started speaking Arabic (mixed with their local dialects) and adopting aspects of Arabic culture, not dissimilar to the previous process of Romanization and Hellenization from the Greeks and Romans.
TL;DR People who today call themselves Palestinians are biological descendants of ancient Jews and other peoples local to the region of Palestine who eventually converted to Christianity and/or Islam, some remained Jewish, started speaking Arabic, and never left the land.
That's what genetic studies and history converge on, and what the early zionist leaders including Ben-Gurion also happened to believe in (Ben-Gurion wrote a thesis on this subject), until it became inconvenient for Zionism to continue to do so.
>Ben-Gurion, along with Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (the second President of Israel), argued in a 1918 booklet (written in Yiddish) that the Arab peasants of Palestine were not descendants of the Arab conquests, but rather the "remnant of the ancient Hebrew agriculturalists".
If you'd rather modern science, then there are genetic studies out of Israeli universities leading weight to this hypothesis (they tend to not get much attention among modern zionists as you can imagine). It's also the general consensus among historians of the region, inside and outside Israel. It's not really a contested position amongst academic historians.
>I love how you turned the elimination of hundreds of religions and ethnic groups into some beautiful cultural influence.
It was not always a clean process, varied a lot by century and location, but on the whole did not involve ethnic cleansing or massacres of ethnicities. The percentages of Arabs you quote above are, again, people who started calling themselves Arabs after cultural shifts, and not, as you seem to believe, a result of mass migration of ethnic Arabs from the Arabian peninsula to replace the local populations.
I don't think we have much else to exchange in good faith on this topic, so I'll leave you here.
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