Hey as a US mainstream news anchor that sounds like good enough justification for me, I might use that!

Maybe I can spin it as “advanced military simulations in a security software known as Counter Strike show that just because a military killed its own hostages in the attempt to rescue hostages doesn’t mean it isn’t winning according to complex AI military intelligence analysis, I have on IDF spokesman to comment”. Then I could have the IDF person point at the scoreboard clearly showing the counter terrorists winning even though they murdered all the hostages on the way to getting the bad guys. I just need to find an IDF spokesperson who doesn’t repeatedly look into the camera and say “killing all the Palestinians and taking their land IS LITERALLY THE POINT” because it just doesn’t sell well with US audiences seeing the IDF as the good guys in focus groups.

My boss said it really didn’t matter what I said on air so long as Israel are the good guys and I am finding it really hard and exhausting to manage to find things that makes Israel look like the good guys while committing genocide in Gaza, sigh.

It isn’t a war, you can’t consider this a war when one side utterly controls all of the infrastructure including water, electricity, internet and the ability of aid to reach the other side while ALSO having one of the most advanced militaries in the world and the other side has… tunnels and shitty rockets?

This is genocide, not war, it is frankly absurd to frame this like a war instead of a mass scale societal punishment for a terrorist attack by a small subset of that population and also an attempt to wipe Palestinians off the map so settlers can take their land.

Like seriously, the Israeli hostages got naked and wrote things on their body because they knew how murderous the IDF was and wanted to take every precaution not to get executed on sight and they still got executed on sight.

I don’t think you understand how just because you can’t comprehend a state without a rightwing security apparatus that engages in disastrous manipulation of the sovereignty of other nations with literally zero oversight from voters doesn’t magically justify the incredible amount of suffering and hardship caused by giving those rightwing, ignorant nutjobs the power to wreck and overthrow democratically elected (or not) governments of countries because they felt it was a slippery slope for them to be talking about socializing healthcare or whatever…

I don’t care that you can’t visualize it, that doesn’t justify the awful impact the CIA has had on the world.

What was insanity was the stupidity of the fear of a red communist wave taking over the planet like some kind of cartoon, what was insanity was the Vietnam war that even when it became unpopular the US government basically just refused and colluded to keep us there.

I mean tell that to the countless people murdered or living in countries that had their democratically elected government overthrown for no good reason in favor of violent rightwing nut jobs because the CIA wanted to do it.

I think it would be better if we just didn’t have an intelligence agency in the US given the absolutely incomprehensibly careless way the CIA and other clandestine US agencies have caused massed suffering around the world.

I don’t disagree, but also the existence of the CIA is a mistake of historic proportions so I don’t really care what this guy has to say.

I agree with the spirit of what you are saying but I think there is a real point to make about how Israel can’t really be a terrorist state because it holds such an unequal power over its perceived enemies in Gaza both from the perspective of military might and also from the perspective of control over basic infrastructure like electricity and running water.

So long we see terrorism only through the lens of a morale choice to engage in warfare in a dishonorable way and not also as a form of armed resistance resorted to by actors who literally don’t have the capacity to fight what we nebulously define as a war (which this current conflict is not, it is genocide), than we will always be unintentionally ceding the conversation to authoritarian rightwing hawks who can label anyone a terrorist for resisting a far superior military force.

Hamas are called terrorists primarily as a form of morale condemnation, and while in no way am I condoning terrorism it really has to be understood as first and foremost a military strategy undertaken by political actors without the capacity to fight a traditional war. The second Hamas amassed its troops (as required for any large military operation) Israel would carpet bomb the area. If Hamas rolled out a line of absurdly obsolete tanks with no optics, fire stabilization, night vision, or modern armor and with virtually no ammunition and tried to launch a ground war into Israel, rightwing/pro-Israel talking heads would supposedly find that more honorable than terrorism… but obviously Israel would be able to utterly wipe that force off the face of the earth in minutes with the combined military industrial complex of the US and Israel.

Israel cannot be a terrorist state because its military can mount an armored offensive with some of the most advanced tanks in the world all the way through gaza and back while facing no serious resistance, with air superiority the whole time. When Israel commits violence, it is authoritarian state violence. It is genocide. I think calling it terrorism muddies the point. Terrorism is the attempt to create a political force when an actor does not possess control of a society, Israel possesses full physical control of Gaza.

I agree though, all the negative connotations you attribute to Israel by calling them a terrorist state I agree with!

Neither do I, which is why I support not allowing hate speech because the end goal is always violence or the threat of violence whether the people spewing it are conscious of it or not. The lame hateful racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic jokes that punch down at stereotypes are an advertisement for an ideology of hate (like a lightbulb for moths) and a test to see if that hate will be allowed to flourish in a community.

Ok but what if someone figured out where you lived, doxed you and got a mob of angry racists to threaten your family? Maybe it was a joke, but given the amount of extremist angry conservatives these days maybe that threat of violence is real.

Do you think that is ok? What if so many people were hate messaging you that it utterly overwhelmed your ability to even go on your favorite social network? What if you woke up one day and one of those internet users drove by your house and left a note threatening your life on your door?

These aren’t hypothetical questions, this is what awful people do when you don’t curtail hate speech (and actively support it like musk does). There are REAL WORLD violent consequences for it and if you have never felt the fear from being targeted by a mob of irrationally angry strangers that want to hurt you than you just don’t really have any meaningful perspective to talk about “free speech” like you are.

Sure some of the hypotheticals I brought up are also illegal, but there is always a throbbing tumor of bigots spewing hate speech at each other at the heart of this kind of thing that these actions grow out of. These people need to be isolated, shamed and alienated from normal social circles for their behavior or things become dangerous for real human beings. You don’t negotiate with these people, you show them the door when they start spewing hate speech.