@CocoSmiles
@DLaurier #40438
I would argue with you, but your whole comment is shit and not worth the time.
As @Vgal said, You represent some of the very worst of anti-zionism.
Sorry Coco, but I’ll have to disagree with you a bit here.
As much as I loathe DLaurier and his shitty takes regarding anything Israel-related, he is not entirely wrong here.
@DLaurier
A terrorist is a freedom fighter defending a people that we are oppressing.
A terrorist is any native who in any way inconveniences his colonial masters.
Recently the term has been extended to include people who are actually evil and malignant. However it has traditionally been applied to the heroes who dare to resist foreign rule and oppression, and/or domestic classist or racial oppression.
The word itself has been made a scare word by Hollywood propaganda, which has created the image of the masked maniac in black pajamas who mindlessly kills for no reason.
It is applied to Mayan peasants who resist the mercenaries sent by hotel developers who want to bulldoze Mayan farming villages to build resort hotels.
It is applied to Palestinian doctors who illegally vaccinate Palestinian children against polio and measles.
It is applied to Irishmen who seek revenge for the rape of a sister at the hands of Englishmen.
This has indeed happened more than a few times. We can discuss how much and to which extent, but that’s an argument I’m both not enough qualified to make with precision, and one that would take lots of time and further research.
The situation in the past, however, wasn’t nearly as clear-cut as DLaurier claims it was. For instance, brutal and excessive nativist terrorism is not a new phenomenon, and not every one of them was a ‘freedom fighter’ hero. The same holds true today.
DLaurier has a very simple way of looking at the world, it seems. There are colonizers, and there are colonized. Vile European-origin masters, and oppressed natives. Native freedom fighters, and white European terrorists. Every native liberation movement is always right, and anyone they fight against is nothing but a complete monster.
(even though what qualifies as ‘native’ isn’t always all that clear cut, I’d say…)
I wish that was an exaggeration, but from what I’ve seen of DLaurier’s posts over the years, the above is what he genuinely believes. No parody.
Finally, a bit on Hamas.
These ‘freedom fighters’… let’s see, what is the result of their ‘just’ struggle in the Gaza Strip?
A Gaza that is constantly on the brink of disaster.
- Dead locals, from fruitless wars against Israel.
- Piles of rubble left over from these previous wars, with bulidings repaired rather slowly, partly because a whole lot of concrete has to go into making tunnels. Tunnels not meant as shelters for Palestinian civilians, but as a logistical support for the Hamas regime and their fighters.
- Poverty, with sometimes lacking basic services.
- Lack of imports of some basic goods, due to Israeli and Egyptian blockade.
- Lack of ability for most citizens to travel outside of the Gaza Strip, due to the blockades.
- Restrictions on fishing and on use of land near the border, due to Israel’s impositions, the de facto state of war and the associated risk to Palestinians from getting shot there.
- A population that has to obey Hamas and the other ‘resistance’ groups, or else. You express dissatisfaction? Bam, you’re now a Zionist traitor. Enjoy a couple bullets to the knees, if you’re lucky. But I’m sure that’s just proper revolutionary justice!
- The certainty that there will be more wars, and that your home might get bombed when that time comes. And you can be just as certain that your situation won’t improve at all afterwards.
- And finally, the aquifer Gaza gets its water from is dying. Due to being excessively drained, its salinity is rising to dangerous levels, leading to the point where Gaza might soon become uninhabitable.
All of that for the sake of a quasi-theocratic regime’s eternal struggle against the Zionist enemy. A struggle where ‘great victories’ are things like “we kidnapped a soldier of theirs” or “we actually managed to kill one of their citizens with our rockets, as opposed to the usual effect of hitting an emptied building or a farm field”.
And, outside of Gaza, they can try to stab a soldier, settler or just plain regular Israeli Jewish civilian - it doesn’t matter which. Or, if that’s too costly for your heroic organization, just claim responsibility for when a ‘lone wolf’ civilian does it for you (a civilian who got radicalized by the situation Hamas helped create).
This is what your precious ‘native resistance’ has stooped down to, DLaurier. These ‘freedom fighters’ who are supposedly destined to ‘liberate all of Palestine’ and drive the Zionist enemy into the sea are actually fighting for peanuts and scraps of ‘glory’, making themselves out as some great heroes and martyrs while in fact they’ve long since been reduced to an assortment of authoritarian thugs who don’t give a damn whom they kill, as long as it’s someone and it looks good in their media.
Their chance of winning in their conflict is non-existent, their position getting worse with time.
A sane organization with their people’s best interests in mind would have compromised and gone for a truce, even an unfavorable one, a long time ago. The fact that they’re fighting a long-lost war which damages their people far, far more than it does their enemies doesn’t speak well of Hamas. The methods they use makes that impression even worse.
