Let's remember that this is not an isolated incident, it's a repeated pattern of the IDF intentionally targeting and killing civilians and aid workers:
- Flour massacre
- World Central Kitchen drone strike
- Gaza aid distribution massacres
- Rafah paramedics massacre
And many others. Each one of these alone is a war crime. But unfortunately the west is happy to look the other way. Had it been the other way around, we'd never hear the end of it.
It was horrific waking up every day there for a while and reading about how the IDF had, yet again, waited for starving Palestinians to line up at places they speculated would have humanitarian aid and opened fire on the whole crowd.
The idea that people think this is some kind of holy war is something beyond nauseating.
I think we as a people have to keep working to weaken and replace religious identity with belief in a private god. Belief in a divine power must not leave one's home, and must not extend into the public sphere where it can lead to divisions. This is where polytheistic religions win because they allow for a private god while being entirely compatible with someone else's private god. If I can look at a person's clothing or hairstyle and guess their religion, it means the tenet of privacy is violated, and division is sowed.
Fwiw, ancient Egyptian religion in the Levant region was polytheistic. So many ancient religions were polytheistic, thereby more flexible, decentralized, and pluralistic. Monotheism in contrast is largely inflexible and risks breeding conflict in the name of religion.
As for the adherents of Yahweh, i.e. now called Judaism, they have been using violence to displace other forms of the polytheistic Canaanite religion for three thousand years. What is happening now is just more of the same. Even two thousand years ago, the Jews pressured the Romans to crucify Christ. The point is that there is zero tolerance among monotheists for innate religious diversity.
An analogy for monotheism is everyone worshipping the dollar, whereas polytheism is whereby people have more choice, even multiple choices.
Believe it or not, jews and christians were practicing their religion freely and were protected during the Islamic golden age. What we're seeing today is extremists (in any religion) rising to position of power (or taking up arms), thus skewing the view that this is how all followers of that religion believe. It's much more nuanced than that. Most people are peaceful and happy to coexist as long as they're respected and their rights are not violated. Take that away and extremisim will rise.
This would be 1000x more impressive, or should I say believable, if the Palestinian government had ALSO called for ICC action on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_and_killing_of_the_... ... After all, they know exactly who is to blame for kidnapping, torturing, and eventually killing a mother and 2 children, one of them a baby.
And Dyab Abou Jahjah, the person behind this "remembrance" effort, by the way, is famous in Belgium for claiming he went back to Lebanon to "help massacre Christians and Jews" (his words, not mine, just translated)
Here he is spending an entire debate justifying murder because "people are occupied". He is doing what you frankly often see muslims do: he obfuscates every fact about Hezbollah (it is "resisting" Israel, not firing rockets at villages. It does not have Iranian support. Hezbollah is merely defending innocent Lebanese, and sometimes Palestinians (if you don't know: Hezbollah massacred Palestinians in Lebanon). Hezbollah did not go massacre Syrians in support of Assad. It did not go massacre Kurds and it did not go massacre protesting Iranians. And it is absolutely not the case that Israel's attacking was the direct result of Hezbollah's actions and all of Lebanon, including most of Hezbollah's own members, hate them for it)
And yes, before you ask, I don't think anyone in the audience is unaware this person is lying.
Let's remember that this is not an isolated incident, it's a repeated pattern of the IDF intentionally targeting and killing civilians and aid workers:
- Flour massacre
- World Central Kitchen drone strike
- Gaza aid distribution massacres
- Rafah paramedics massacre
And many others. Each one of these alone is a war crime. But unfortunately the west is happy to look the other way. Had it been the other way around, we'd never hear the end of it.
It was horrific waking up every day there for a while and reading about how the IDF had, yet again, waited for starving Palestinians to line up at places they speculated would have humanitarian aid and opened fire on the whole crowd.
The idea that people think this is some kind of holy war is something beyond nauseating.
I think we as a people have to keep working to weaken and replace religious identity with belief in a private god. Belief in a divine power must not leave one's home, and must not extend into the public sphere where it can lead to divisions. This is where polytheistic religions win because they allow for a private god while being entirely compatible with someone else's private god. If I can look at a person's clothing or hairstyle and guess their religion, it means the tenet of privacy is violated, and division is sowed.
Fwiw, ancient Egyptian religion in the Levant region was polytheistic. So many ancient religions were polytheistic, thereby more flexible, decentralized, and pluralistic. Monotheism in contrast is largely inflexible and risks breeding conflict in the name of religion.
As for the adherents of Yahweh, i.e. now called Judaism, they have been using violence to displace other forms of the polytheistic Canaanite religion for three thousand years. What is happening now is just more of the same. Even two thousand years ago, the Jews pressured the Romans to crucify Christ. The point is that there is zero tolerance among monotheists for innate religious diversity.
An analogy for monotheism is everyone worshipping the dollar, whereas polytheism is whereby people have more choice, even multiple choices.
Believe it or not, jews and christians were practicing their religion freely and were protected during the Islamic golden age. What we're seeing today is extremists (in any religion) rising to position of power (or taking up arms), thus skewing the view that this is how all followers of that religion believe. It's much more nuanced than that. Most people are peaceful and happy to coexist as long as they're respected and their rights are not violated. Take that away and extremisim will rise.
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This would be 1000x more impressive, or should I say believable, if the Palestinian government had ALSO called for ICC action on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_and_killing_of_the_... ... After all, they know exactly who is to blame for kidnapping, torturing, and eventually killing a mother and 2 children, one of them a baby.
And Dyab Abou Jahjah, the person behind this "remembrance" effort, by the way, is famous in Belgium for claiming he went back to Lebanon to "help massacre Christians and Jews" (his words, not mine, just translated)
Here he is spending an entire debate justifying murder because "people are occupied". He is doing what you frankly often see muslims do: he obfuscates every fact about Hezbollah (it is "resisting" Israel, not firing rockets at villages. It does not have Iranian support. Hezbollah is merely defending innocent Lebanese, and sometimes Palestinians (if you don't know: Hezbollah massacred Palestinians in Lebanon). Hezbollah did not go massacre Syrians in support of Assad. It did not go massacre Kurds and it did not go massacre protesting Iranians. And it is absolutely not the case that Israel's attacking was the direct result of Hezbollah's actions and all of Lebanon, including most of Hezbollah's own members, hate them for it)
And yes, before you ask, I don't think anyone in the audience is unaware this person is lying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M7_oTcIMbY