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Thursday, April 18, 2024

Links - 18th April 2024 (2 - Hamas Attack Oct 2023)

Queers In A Muslim Rally | Nigerian Reacts - YouTube
Nah, their stupidity won't dawn on them. They'll just blame whitey

Terror-backing American military veteran, 77, who held 'Stand With Hamas' sign at Sheffield pro-Palestine protest after October 7 attacks refuses to pay £2,300 in fines and costs
Weird. We keep being told that no one supports Hamas

Multiple people arrested at pro-Palestinian march in Toronto - "the driver of a truck towing a trailer was taken into custody for contravening the Highway Traffic Act (HTA). The man was allegedly driving with occupants in the bed of the truck while it was in motion. He has been charged with stunt driving and his licence has been suspended for 30 days while the truck has been impounded for 14 days.  “For safety reasons, officers have been cautioning demonstration organizers (and drivers specifically) for over a month about not having people in the bed of the truck or attached trailer while it is in motion,” police spokesperson Cst. Laurie McCann tells CityNews.  “We made it clear that this stipulation would be in effect at all demonstrations. Demonstrators ignored that direction and the driver of the truck was arrested and charged accordingly under the HTA.”  Police say while they were seizing the truck, demonstrators became aggressive and assaultive towards officers.  It is alleged that one woman threw horse manure at officers while another woman intentionally used a flagpole to “spear” at an officer. Assia Rami, 24, and Celeste Xiaoying Furlotte-Bois, 27, of Toronto have both been charged with assaulting a peace officer with a weapon. Investigators say while officers were arresting someone, several people interfered with the arrest. Four males were taken into custody for breach of the peace"
Damn suppression of pro-Palestinian speech!

If Hamas Is Okay, Then Nazis Are Too - "Hamas, as a whole, is an evil entity. To question that is to question common sense morality that if one were to choose to do so while at the same time claiming he condemns the likes of Nazis, al-Qaeda, or ISIS as evil, then that person is either witlessly inconsistent or they’re intentionally being dishonest (of course, the world is full of both types). Certain individual members may not be despicable or even evil for that matter, but that does not mean that the organization as a whole is innocent... Sometimes, it is perplexing yet interesting to see how both people on each side of a particular conflict come to their terms as to who is the freedom fighter versus who is the aggressor/terrorist. But is distinguishing between the two that complex when you have a group who, out of nowhere, comes flying down on a mass of young people, and massacre them right in the middle of something as innocent as a music festival?... The 1988 [Hamas] document is a fusion of contradictions that seem to be intentional so as to cover up its anti-Semitism. Despite frequent negative references to “Jews”, the document also states that there is a distinction between the Jewish people (whom they apparently do not have a problem with, so they imply) and the Zionist movement. There are passages that state that their religion that is Islam is an inclusive religion and that under its banner, it, along with the two other Abrahamic faiths — Judaism and Christianity — can coincide with another and live in harmony together. What’s more intriguing is that the Hamas statement repeatedly compares Zionism with Nazism; it’s a stigmatic term for many of us in the Western world that’s used here to get us stirred about what brings further awareness to the perceived Zionist problem, because anything that is equated with Nazism we automatically will demonize. It mates Zionism with all other movements in the world that they implicate to have been largely negative occurrences, that the Jews were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolutions, and that they formed secret societies such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, and other organizations that were made “for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.” It seems like Zionism has been behind every single movement out there except for one, that being the Moslem movement, the Palestinian agenda. But at the same time, it contradicts this seemingly “we only hate Zionists” message. This is plain at the end of Article 29: “Israel, Judaism, and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. ‘May the cowards never sleep.’”...  in regards to the rallies, especially here in America, I see very little difference between pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas groups, as if they’re inevitably embodied within one another. A lot of these people who are cheering on Palestine and not condemning the actions perpetuated by Hamas, I’m sure, are secular in the sense that they believe in separation of church and state; good, I do as well. I’m sure they’re against religious nationalism, and that’s a good thing. With that being said, rather than cheering Hamas’ October 7 slaughterhouse, you’d think they would be condemning the bastards after reading Article 12, which says: “Nationalism, from the point of view of the Islamic Resistance Movement, is part of the religious creed. Nothing in nationalism is more significant or deeper than in the case when an enemy should tread Moslem land.” The 1988 Covenant also says (under Article 27): “Secularism completely contradicts religious ideology. Attitudes, conduct and decisions stem from ideologies.” It says this in reference to Hamas’ opponent that has similar goals, which is the Palestinian Liberation Organization, whose main difference from the former is that it’s secular (and thus, why the two cannot make substantial allies, particularly in the long run if the PLO sustains its secular worldview)... What does Judaization mean? Is it synonymous with Zionizing? But if that’s the case, why not use that term rather than Judaization? Again, what does it mean? Jews trying to evangelize non-Jews to their religion? The spreading of Jewish heritage and culture? Conversion to Judaism through force? Does it imply a sort of “Great Replacement Theory”, where the Jews will completely take over, and the Muslim population will consequently be in decline, and even worse, once declined, a slave to the Jews? After all, as it implies here, there’s only one group of people responsible for this so-called “Judaization” and that of course is the Jews."

London officer says swastikas 'need to be taken into context' - "The London Metropolitan Police is facing outrage after a video posted online showed an officer telling a woman that swastikas need “to be taken into context” and may not necessarily be antisemitic at a massive anti-Israel march over the weekend... The unidentified police officer in the video then seems to double down on what his colleague said"
Swastikas associated with causes the left disapproves of are bad. Swastikas associated with causes the left approves of are good.

Colin Wight on X - "The Met police trying to justify the flying of a Swastika on the streets of London. Not because they support it, but because they don’t/can’t do anything about it without causing a major public disorder incident. They’ve lost control of the streets and they know it."
Clay Reith on X - "As with the harvard professors.. in and of themselves, I am sympathetic to very lenient policies around hate speech/symbols.. even ones as egregious as Nazi related ones.  However, it is the isolated leniency.. and examples of the extreme opposite approach in other contexts.. that is fucked."

Israel has evidence that Gazans killed in February aid disaster died from overcrowding - "Israel has evidence from Hamas confirming that the Gazans killed in the Gaza aid delivery disaster on February 29 died as a result of overcrowding and not from IDF fire... The command investigation revealed that IDF troops did not fire at the humanitarian convoy itself but at several suspects who approached the nearby forces and who posed a threat to them. According to the investigation, while the trucks were traveling towards the distribution centers, a violent gathering of about 12,000 Gazans developed around them, who looted the equipment they were transporting."

Brianna Wu on X - "Five days ago, Israel offered to release 800 prisoners to Hamas for just 40 of the hostages they kidnapped. Hamas turned them down. Because they don’t care about how many civilians get slaughtered. Every dead Palestinian is helpful in the deluded fever dream of destroying Israel"

Nico Perrino on X - "Congressman Jamie Raskin tried to give a speech at @UofMaryland  on democracy and "the threat to reason in the 21st Century.”   It was relentlessly heckled and drowned out by people protesting Israel's invasion of Gaza.   The speech was ultimately shut down by the university president.  “What you saw play out actually was democracy and free speech and academic freedom," said UMD President @President_Pines .  No, President Pines is wrong.   What you saw play out was mob censorship.  It was a bastardization of free speech and the antithesis of democracy.   These shout-downs happen far too often on college campuses — and with the approval of college administrators."
Good luck to those shutting down speech the left approves of.

Gad Saad on X - "Reminder of the positions held by Noble Pro-Palestine Supporters:
1) October 7th did not happen;
2) October 7th did happen but it was very exaggerated (in terms of the victims);
3) October 7th did happen but it was perfectly justified because occupation;
4) IDF soldiers rape Palestinians but Hamas did not rape anyone;
5) October 7th happened but it was orchestrated by Israel in order to have the clearance to commit the "genocide";
6) Since 1948, Israel has been committing a daily genocide on Palestinians;
7) Prior to 1948, Jews and Noble Palestinians lived in perfect harmony;
8) Islam loves the Jews; the only problem is Zionism;
9) Zionism is infinitely worse than Islam;
10) Zionism has engaged in much greater colonization than Islam ever did;
11) In Israel, non-Jews have no rights;
12) Jews have no historical claims to the land; the historic clock starts when the Noble Palestinians say it starts;
13) If you are an LGBTQ person, it is best to support Gazan society rather than Tel Aviv;
14) If you are a woman, Gazan society provides you many greater freedoms than Israeli society;
15) Jews are inherently evil; Hamas can't be violent because Islam prohibits violence.
16) All Jews around the world are complicit in the "daily genocide of children" UNLESS they condemn the existence of Israel and they participate in "Free Free Palestine" protests;
17) The Hamas leadership that has stolen billions of dollars into their accounts are actually Jews; Jews love money; True Muslims would never steal from their people.
18) Zionism has committed many more terror attacks around the world than Islam;
19) 9/11 was committed by Jews.
20) The 44,000+ terror attacks in nearly 70 countries since 9/11 alone in the name of Islam are false flag operations orchestrated by Mossad
21) There is no Jew-hatred around the world (Jews are always crying victimhood) but there is a huge problem with Islamophobia;
22) The best way to combat Jew-hatred is to dismantle Israel. Jew-hatred would immediately cease.
23) Islam has historically love, cherised, and protected the Jews.
24) There is no evidence in the Islamic holy sources of any violence or antipathy toward the non-Muslims; those who think there is have misunderstood, mistranslated, and misrepresented Islam."

Israel is fighting a humane ground war - just ask experts - "A psychological phenomenon known as the “illusory truth effect” dictates that statements are more readily believed when they are repeated many times, regardless of their credibility. Remarkably, this applies even if the subjects know the statements to be false. Such repetition, which has long been the mainstay of the propaganda techniques beloved by demagogues, has become common among our supposedly credible broadcasters, leaders and diplomats, who repeat lies invented by Hamas and even base policy upon them.  Such repetition has made the falsehoods deeply familiar to the public. Number of Palestinians dead? 30,000. Proportion of women and children among the casualties? 70 per cent. Adjective to describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza? Disproportionate. Crime of which Israel is guilty? Genocide. But none of this is true.  Rather than swallowing such easily disprovable claims, it would be better to rely upon the verifiable evidence of experts like John Spencer, the world’s foremost authority on urban warfare. Chair of urban warfare studies at the United State Military Academy at West Point, he served as an infantryman for 25 years, including two combat tours in Iraq. Israel, he says, protects civilians more effectively than anyone else in the history of warfare. Spencer recently visited Israel and Gaza – including the IDF’s civilian harm mitigation unit – to observe the facts on the ground. “All available evidence shows that Israel has followed the laws of war, legal obligations, best practices in civilian harm mitigation and still found a way to reduce civilian casualties to historically low levels,” he concluded... The credible casualty figures stand testament to these efforts. Gaining exact data is impossible, but the true ratio, Spencer concluded, is about 1 combatant to 1.5 civilians. By comparison, when Britain, the US and other allies destroyed Islamic State in Mosul in 2016-17, the ratio was about 1 to 2.5; and according to the UN and the EU, the global average is 1 to 9. “Given Hamas’s likely inflation of the death count, the real figure could be closer to 1 to 1,” Spencer wrote. “Either way, the number would be historically low for modern urban warfare.”  What madness has possessed us? We would never dream of trusting data from the Kremlin or Islamic State. The statistics coming out of Gaza are obviously bogus. A paper by three distinguished academics, published this week, found that “the casualty figures concerning women and children are statistically impossible”, at one point even involving “the statistical equivalent of the resurrection of over a thousand men”. The 70 per cent figure has been decisively debunked. Yet this very misinformation is still used by the UN, White House and the media. The BBC even relied upon it to supposedly disprove Israel’s claims to the contrary. “The BBC ‘factcheckers’ and other western media could easily have determined this for themselves, using publicly available information,” the academics lamented."
The terrorism supporters hate the US too, so they just dismiss Spencer

Thread by @AGHamilton29 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Is Israel Committing “Genocide” or indiscriminately killing Palestinians in Gaza?  I’m tired of people going through this discussion without any accompanying facts or logic so I’m going to put some thoughts into one thread and people can decide for themselves... In the current war, the Gaza Health Ministry started collecting casualties the same way via the CCS when the war began. They showed ~9K deaths before Israel launched their ground invasion at the end of October. Then, as the data below shows, the casualty rate dropped significantly in the CCS data after the initial period of fighting in November. What is also clear from the CCS data, as shown below, is the proportion of male casualties (the category most, but not all, Hamas militants would fit into) increased significantly over time. Then the Gaza Health Ministry discretely changed its collection method in early November. They added a new source for data which they called “reliable media” reports that had not been used in the past. This is essentially reporting from local, mostly Hamas-controlled, media outlets regarding casualties and, as it turns out, also allows citizens to self-report casualties online. You can obviously see the challenge of getting accurate data with such a methodology. This new methodology gradually took over as the main source of casualty data for the GHM over time. You can see the shift below. There is no way to check the reliability of the total casualty numbers being provided via this new methodology of reliable media reports, but there is clearly an issue with the data when you compare demographic breakdowns.  The portion of male casualties using the traditional CCS system has averaged around 51.7% of total casualties since November 3rd and trended above 70% in March. Meanwhile, the average portion of male casualties during that same period, according to the media report methodology, is only 8.4%. That disconnect is impossible to explain and the latter number makes no sense in the context of an ongoing war. What’s even more revealing is that the percentage of female casualties is not that far apart in the 2 methodologies, but the data for Children vs Males is almost flipped. That’s really beyond red flag territory.  The reason this disconnect is important is that exactly who Israel is targeting is a central question in determining the appropriateness of their approach in the war effort.  So now on to the "genocide" question... First, it is obviously inappropriate and absurd to compare what is happening to the systematic and purposeful eradication of Jews and other minorities during the Holocaust. As suggested by one podcast host recently, such a comparison requires complete ignorance about the numbers and method of killing during those events. More than a third of the world’s Jews were wiped out during the Holocaust to the point that the Jewish population has not fully recovered almost 9 decades later.  However, plenty of civilians were killed at the same time as the Holocaust during the war effort so what’s the difference between civilian deaths in a war and genocide? The key element for genocide is not that a lot of people are killed, but the intent of those doing the killing... No reasonable person thinks allied forces bombing civilian areas in WWII were engaged in a genocide comparable to the Holocaust. Or that the U.S. army actions in Afghanistan or Iraq, despite tens (or hundreds) of thousands of civilians killed constitutes a genocide.  It is for that reason that South Africa was forced to include a bunch of out-of-context and misleading quotes from Israeli officials, often specifically targeted at Hamas, in their ICC complaint to argue the intent element of genocide in Gaza... Israel’s overall behavior during this war is inconsistent with an intent to wipe out Palestinians in Gaza. Especially given that they can actually wipe out most of Gaza in much less time than this war has gone on. An entity seeking to commit genocide would not usually provide advanced warning, evacuation routes, drop flyers, send text messages, provide aid etc. to the people they are trying to genocide.. More importantly, the data speaks for itself. The numbers show that the claim of an intentional genocide doesn’t stand up to any level of scrutiny... the typical ratio of civilians killed in other conflicts that included urban warfare has previously been around 80%-90% and Hamas has specifically developed their military infrastructure within the Gaza civilian infrastructure to ensure Palestinian civilian deaths any time they are targeted. In fact, Hamas leaders like Ismael Haniyeh openly admit that they view Palestinian civilian deaths as a victory for their cause.  (I am not going to even get into Palestinians killed directly by Hamas/militant attacks as part of this discussion) Just consider the math here: If about 1.5% of the population has been killed in Gaza during the war, but conservatively around 30% of those have been militants, how would that be feasible if Israel was just bombing and killing people indiscriminately?  If it was just random bombing, you would proportionally need to kill about 30% of the total Gaza population (~630K) to coincidentally take out 30% of the subgroup of Hamas’ militants."

Accusing Israel of genocide is a perverse moral inversion - "to make the case that genocide is taking place, one would have to ignore the scores of military lawyers, engineers and humanitarian aid coordinators working within the Israel Defence Forces, who spend hours every day, planning how they might strike targets in a way that minimises collateral harm, facilitating the entry of aid into Gaza, collecting intelligence about civilian presence around targets and aborting attacks accordingly. One would also have to ignore the fact that Israel has begun formulating proposals for how Palestinian civilians in Gaza might yet govern themselves, freed from the tyranny of Hamas, when this conflict is over.  These are not the actions of a state motivated by murderous intent, waging a war without limits. They are the actions of a State fighting a defensive war it did not seek, in what must surely be the most challenging urban context ever faced by a modern democratic state. The simple enduring fact is that this war would end tomorrow if Hamas released Israel’s hostages and laid down its weapons. That alone should preclude any allegation of genocide."

The numbers of dead in Gaza don't add up – and there is no easy explanation - "In December, a widely shared letter published in Lancet argued there was “no evidence of inflated mortality reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health”. The authors came to this conclusion by comparing total claimed deaths in the strip with a separate database detailing the number of UNRWA workers reported killed.  Because the work was published as correspondence rather than a formal study, it was not peer reviewed and the authors themselves acknowledge that the UNRWA database is not likely to be exactly representative of the wider Gazan population.  But is their conclusion right? Casualty data shared with The Telegraph by UNRWA suggests that there are significant discrepancies between the two datasets – discrepancies that may tell us something about the conduct of the war and the accuracy or otherwise of the Gazan authorities reporting. The UNRWA data provided to The Telegraph covers the period between October 7 and January 4 and documents the deaths of 150 UNRWA workers in Gaza. As previously reported, it shows that half of those deaths occurred in the three weeks immediately following the Oct 7 massacre and before the Israeli land incursion into Gaza started.  But perhaps the most notable feature of UNRWA casualties dataset is that men account for 62 per cent of the deaths, despite representing only 41 per cent of the UNRWA staff in Gaza. In other words, male UNRWA workers appear much more likely to be killed than female workers. For women, one in every 132 workers have been killed, while for men the chances of being killed are more than twice as high – one in every 57.   This pattern is not replicated in the death data reported by the Gazan hospitals. According to that data, men in Gaza do face a higher risk of death than women, but by nothing like the extent found in URWA’s data.  What could explain this difference? Why are male UNRWA workers apparently being killed at a significantly faster rate than Gazan men in general? There are several possibilities:
The data for the general population may underreport adult male casualties, perhaps because a significant number of those killed in active combat are not being documented.
Male UNRWA workers may be working/living in more exposed areas than their female counterparts (although if this is the case, it is not evident from the location information given in the UNRWA data).
Male UNRWA workers may have been more frequently flagged by Israeli intelligence and killed (either in combat or at home) by the IDF, which has long alleged links between UNRWA and Hamas...
if the analysis is limited to female workers, the discrepancy between the two datasets falls away. There is a nearly perfect match between the number of female UNRWA casualties and the total death count based on hospital records alone. This is particularly interesting in light of the growing gap between the death toll documented by hospital records and the total claimed number of deaths. We have also compared the geographical distribution of UNRWA female staff deaths with the detailed information collected by the Palestinian NGO “Shireen Observatory” and found a very close match between the two. This appears to further strengthen the case for using the UNRWA female staff deaths numbers, and the closely matching numbers from hospital records, as a proxy for the actual mortality numbers in Gaza. If we did this, it would suggest that around 18,000 (not 32,414) had died in Gaza since Oct 7."

Fathom – Statistically Impossible: A Critical Analysis of Hamas’s Women and Children Casualty Figures - "How reliable are the casualty figures issued by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry? The answer offered in this article is blunt: not reliable at all. The authors are Tom Simpson, a generalist economist who researches population models and other topics, Lewi Stone, who has decades of experience working as a biomathematician at Tel Aviv University and recently at RMIT University in Melbourne where his research interests include digital humanities, and Gregory Rose of the University of Wollongong, who has published extensively on international law in the Arab-Israel conflict... at least early December the cumulative number of women and children deaths has appeared as a steady 70 per cent of the total. It turns out this ‘70 per cent’ figure is contradicted by the statistics that the MoH itself provides in its own reports... To begin with, note that two very different sources inform the MoH’s death counts. The first source is Gaza’s still-functioning hospitals, which are concentrated in the south of the Gaza Strip. Supposedly, these hospitals and morgues register specific corpses on-site before adding them to the counts. Even these statistics have been manipulated – consider the debunked 471 death count of the Al-Ahli hospital bombing, whose deaths were supposedly registered at hospitals. However, these hospital-registered deaths at least involve a recording process with a pretence of verification. The hospital-reported deaths are detailed in the MoH’s reports, providing disaggregated statistics on the age and gender of casualties.  According to these statistics, hospital-registered deaths contain substantially fewer women and children than implied by the 70 per cent figure...  If we restrict analysis to 2024 deaths alone, this figure drops all the way down to 42 per cent. This is still a large proportion, but it should be remembered that women and children (the latter defined as persons under 18 years of age) make up of 75 per cent of Gaza’s population. As such, this 42 per cent figure actually reflects a significant avoidance of civilian casualties on the part of the IDF... Using the MoH’s ‘rule’ that 70 per cent of total dead are women and children, we can calculate the implied ratio of women and children deaths in the unregistered ‘media sources’ category, which turns out to be 92 per cent (see Appendix 4 of this article for details of calculation). This 92 per cent figure is statistically absurd. It would mean the IDF targeted women and children with impossible efficacy while going out of its way to avoid killing men... By subtracting the MoH gender breakdowns from the GMO gender breakdowns, we can reverse engineer the precise gender breakdowns that must have been used in the ‘media sources’ category i.e., the unregistered deaths. And so, according to the figures provided by these various Hamas-affiliated organisations, of the unregistered ‘media sources’ deaths in 2023:
– 4,678 deaths were children
– 1,941 deaths were women
– 10 deaths were men...
the MoH and GMO data contains many other significant anomalies. Several of these oddities have recently been noted elsewhere, for instance by Salo Aizenberg, Gabriel Epstein, and Abraham Wyner. Perhaps the most bizarre examples of disinformation occurred in early December, when the GMO was the leading provider of Gazan casualty statistics. Between 1 December and 8 December the recorded number of dead men declined from 4,850 to 3,499, with multiple individual declines occurring over the period (2 December, 5 December, 8 December). It was the statistical equivalent of the resurrection of over a thousand men! Over the same period, the total number of reported women and children casualties increased from 10,664 to 13,991. These mass resurrections of Gazan men blew out the women and children death ratio from supposedly 68 per cent to 80 per cent. Figure 4 depicts these ‘December miracles’ in more detail."

Starfish on X - "Best example is the UN condemnation of Israel in December 2023 for “ killing Palestinian journalist”, Mustafa Ayyash, and “all his family”.  As an Easter miracle, Mr Ayyash and all his family were resurrected and arrested on terror charges in Austria on the 28th of March 2024. They have been living there all this time.  UN, how do you explain this?  Media, why don’t you want to report on this Easter miracle?"
NMH 🇮🇱 on X - "It’s INCREDIBLE at how much they just LIE & LIE & lie even more… Apparently he was able to escape with his wife to Austria, but he lost FORTY ONE members of his family… Did he at least bring his 175 year old grandfather with him? @CherylWroteIt @OliaOnX"
Weird how once again, the "journalists" in Gaza turn out to be terrorists. Of course, the terrorism supporters will still condemn Israel for "targeting journalists"

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