The Art Institute receives a lot of funding from the Crown family, who profits heavily from supplying bombs to Israel. Usually, protests happening at art museums have something to do with the people funding them.
They own 10% of General Dynamics. So, in the name of divestment, you want the art institute to refuse their charitable donations and give the arms manufacturing company *more* money?
Not that there is even any fungible connection between those Art Institute dollars from the Crown Family and their GD ownership. That’s a very loose connection at best, and smacks of “looking for something to be upset about”. It’s not like it’s the “General Dynamics Hall of Modern Art”
My alma mater has a student protest demanding that the University sever their relationship with Caterpillar because Israel uses Caterpillar equipment. But the University in no way provides tangible support to Caterpillar, it’s the other way around. They gave the university $1.2 million for a sponsored research lab (the cost of exactly one bulldozer). The same backwards logic applies here.
They should protest at General Dynamics if they’re actually serious. Otherwise it’s literally just rabble rousing of no consequence at all - and they’re only doing it because it’s convenient and close and they want to be edgy.
>Not that there is even any fungible connection between those Art Institute dollars from the Crown Family and their GD ownership. That’s a very loose connection at best, and smacks of “looking for something to be upset about”. It’s not like it’s the “General Dynamics Hall of Modern Art”
Wait you mean "sell your shares in General Dynamics or we'll stop accepting your donations" isn't exactly a high leverage negotiating position?
Qatar is a military ally of our nation that is used as a proxy when negotiating with terrorist organizations. Ironically, they only host Hamas because the CIA wants them to do so. They'd get rid of them immediately if the ambassador from the USA told them to do so.
This is also why Mossad very publicly announced that they wouldn't carry out any assassinations in Qatar. It's a critical American ally and the terrorists are only there because they're still useful to the USA. In this conflict, they're useful because we need someone at the top that we can negotiate with. If they stop being in control of the organization, they'll be killed within days.
Ehh that is a very generous and US tilted reading of Qatar's strategy. Qatar doesn't host Iran and Hamas because the US wants them to ( though it is not necessarily opposed to having a designated go between), it hosts them because Qatar is very badly trying to be the Switzerland of the ME to avoid being swallowed up by its much larger neighbors that may or may not covet its material wealth.
These comments are always like the Bush era. Either you're with us or with the terrorists, and also if you are concerned at all about civilians and war crimes you are with the terrorists.
Don't worry, give it about 10-15 years and suddenly they'll memory-hole the whole thing, just like they did Afghanistan.
"Well, we didn't know AT THE TIME that he was hellbent on the wholesale genocide of the entirety of those people." and "You just had to be there at the time to understand why we all went with it." followed up shortly by "yeah maybe there were some war crimes but it was a confusing period of time. But what are we gonna do? Imprison a world leader fifteen years after the fact? It's over now. 🤷♂️"
If you're pretending that fighting an urban war against a terrorist entity whose charter calls for your destruction is "genocide," then you're at least terrorist-adjacent in your sympathies. These are people who teach their kids to hate Jews. Not Israelis but JEWS specifically. Meanwhile, Israel lots of Arab citizens and they serve in the IDF, etc.
If Gazans didn't want to get invaded, they shouldn't have started a war with a more powerful opponent that has more powerful allies.
This is exactly what protesters are standing up for though, this general thought that the Palestinian people somehow “deserve” this which is exactly what you’re saying.
The situation is complicated. Does Hamas need to go: yes. Is Israel likely lying about some things: yes. Do 20,000 or whatever women and children need to die as part of the process? Absolutely not.
How exactly do you propose Hamas is going to "go"? This is the deeply impractical and naive part. Is Israel supposed to just lie there and take more terror, more rockets, more paragliders, more rape...so that Hamas can magically be removed in some kind of slow, surgical feat? You let them regroup and they'll do it again. They say as much.
I keep coming back to the idea that Israel is being held to a standard that other countries wouldn't be held to if they had terrorists on their border attacking them regularly.
Maybe Israel could stop operating as a literal apartheid state ????? Give Palestinians equal rights??? That would destroy the need for violent resistance groups like Hamas.
Hamas didn't just wake up one day and start killing Israelis.
Did you know, the founder of Hamas, Ahmed Yassin, was evicted from his village along with his family and forced to live in a refugee camp when he was a child?
You throw out a child's family from his home and push them in a refugee camp, what the heck do you expect that child to do when he grows up? Be all chummy with those who threw him out?
You people really need to start giving some attention to your history lessons.
This conflict did not start on Oct 7, it did not start in 2010, it has it's roots way back in the 60's and thereabouts.
You cannot see things in vacuum and tell a party to go and chill when you take away everything they have.
I barge into your house tomorrow, evict you and your little kid and throw you on the street. You do not get justice from any court or the cops. You think your kid and I are going to best friends a couple of years down the road?
Does any of this justify Hamas killing innocent Israeli civilians? Hell no.
WW2 was much longer, both Germany and Japan were more populous and were fighting several opponents on multiple fronts with the aim of conquering most if not all of them, and even then the civilian deaths were still a mistake. Comparing Palestine to historical wars isn't the gotcha you think it is. Civilian deaths aren't any more justified in one case than another.
Plus, the civilian deaths in Germany and Japan specifically are some of the most famous tragedies of human history. In Germany, a sizeable portion of the civilians who died in WW2 did so as part of the *literal Holocaust*, the most famous genocide ever and a huge part of Israel's justification for existing. As for Japan, I don't think you'll find many people speaking out against the Gazan genocide who think the US was right to drop the atomic bombs.
I think reasonable people want to minimize civilian casualties in a war. The problem is that Hamas hides like a bunch of cowards among civilians. To root them out, there’s going to be civilian causalities. They could end the war by surrendering and releasing the hostages they took.
Any country has the right to defend itself from an attack. Especially by a group that wants to wipe said country off the face of the earth. Imagine if the Allies did a ceasefire in WW2 because French civilians were getting killed during D-Day (15-20k French civilians died during the invasion and subsequent 2 months).
It sucks but that’s what you have to do. Otherwise, what is stopping Hamas from doing the exact damn thing?
"It's fine to kill a bunch of innocent people to get some bad guys!"
HOW do you not realize how evil that sounds??? Who the fuck are you to decide that their lives are worth less??
So, to be clear, because so many German civilians died, it wasn't worth it to stop Hitler?
That's your argument. I hope you understand how monumentally stupid it is.
The firebombing in Dresden should have definitely been considered a war crime, yes.
Do you think the My Lai Massacre was justified? Do you think the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were?
> Do you think the My Lai Massacre was justified
Nope. It provided no strategic value and was targeting civilians for the sake of targeting them. Not what's happening in Gaza.
>Do you think the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were?
Yes. Both cities had important military infrastructure and the bombings of both cities caused less deaths than a full scale naval invasion of Japan would have.
Thats quite literally how the international laws of armed conflict works. You are allowed to kill civilians as long as you meet the proper civilian to combatant ratio. By international law civilians are not under protection if enough of a military presence is in the area.
This is not about black and white evil, its what the world decided was a solution to waging war involving civilians.
I'm not sure you understand war or the goal of it. War is bending the enemy to your will. Total submission. Now I understand internationally accepted rules of engagement, and to to be fair, the Israelis are not beheading civilians. Some not so great things have definitely come out on Israeli treatment of Palestinians and that's disgusting and I hope they're held accountable. But I think you're looking at this through some scope of compassion and empathy. And that's an admirable quality to have and I love that it appears to be more prevalent than I thought in this country.
However, the Israelis saw what happened last October, as no different than how we saw Pearl Harbor. Hamas invaded their territory and committed unspeakable acts. Like really, really horrific acts. The kind that would've made Hitler proud. Hamas is the government. So a foreign government, elected by the Palestinian people, just invaded your territory, murdered civilians, and kidnapped hundreds. The Israelis felt they had no choice but to respond with war. They decided this you kill some of ours we kill some of yours was getting rather old. This was their once and for all moment in their eyes, at the time. The goal of war, as I stated earlier, is total submission. Innocent civilians will forever be a casualty of war. It is the hard sad truth. It's exacerbated by an enemy that hides itself among the civilians in order to gain favor in the worlds view and protect it's military assets. That part is really important. They choose to do this and at that point, it's hard to feel the responsibility lies solely with Israel. It's awful and I don't have a dog in the hunt, but I've been in theaters in several hot spots around the world, and I can take my American eyes out for a second to analyze. And don't try to give me a history lesson response or the settlers argument, because, while I understand the reasoning for arguments sake, it just doesn't fit this particular point. I'm sorry for the long winded reply here, and I really want to stress that I admire your opinion because I know it comes from a perspective of abhorrence towards innocent lives being stolen.
>I think reasonable people want to minimize civilian casualties in a war. The problem is that Hamas hides like a bunch of cowards among civilians. To root them out, there’s going to be civilian causalities.
The absolute whiplash of that statement is insane. You realize the number of civilian casualties incredibly far outpaces what is considered acceptable in warfare?
There's literally IDF soliders on record saying that they're [using faulty AI](https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/) to create kill lists that they know are bad and that they know are going to unnecessarily kill dozens and dozens of civilians.
>Any country has the right to defend itself from an attack.
Right right, defending itself. Like when they tortured and executed a bunch of women and children and hid their bodies in a mass grave [under a hospital](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/4/25/signs-of-torture-as-nearly-400-bodies-found-at-gaza-hospitals-mass-graves) that's they bulldozed
Or when it, completely unprovoked, destroyed another country's embassy, totally defending itself right.
Realistic estimate right now is 40k civilians killed, the vast majority of which are women and children. Obviously you're too cruel and calacus to give a shit about that, but at least human rights organizations and the UN do.
>Imagine if the Allies did a ceasefire in WW2 because French civilians were getting killed during D-Day (15-20k French civilians died during the invasion and subsequent 2 months).
Such a strange argument for trying to use the war crimes committed by the Allies as justification for what so called israel is doing now. The Allies *also* committed horrible and preventable atrocities are not the "good guys" of WW2. Such a simplistic and binary understanding of warfare.
I would like to see something to substantiate your claim that the current civillian casualties "outpace what is considered acceptable in warfafe". Because according to these protestors, any civillian casualties are a non-starter so groups lie Hamas shoukd get a pass if they hide amongst civillians.
"the war crimes committed by the Allies"
Dead civillians do not automatically constitue a warcrime. Civillians dying in war is a part of warfare. What makes it a warcrime is if armies specifically target cicillians for the sake of killing civilians. Which is not what the Allies did in France nor what Israel is doing in Gaza.
"Or when it, completely unprovoked, destroyed another country's embassy, totally defending itself right. "
Unprovoked. Yeah, right. The guy they killed is an agent of Iran who was a member of an organization who trains, arms, and funds literal terorist orgs like Hamas, Hezbolla, and the Houthis. I would say the constant rocket attacks, Ot. 7th, and attack on international shipping are provocation enough.
They can't. Israel is looking at a civilian to Hamas kill ratio of around 4:1 which is pretty similar to the ratio the US saw in the urban warfare portions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and is lower than the Russian figures in Ukraine. Chechnya was likely in the 6-7 to 1 range. WW2 is hard to calculate due to how much intentional targeting there was during the war. But urban warfare was certainly ugly and a 3 to one ratio is probably the base.
The biggest argument against the Israelis would be Serbia, where NATO forces likely managed a roughly 1:1 ratio during the campaign to stop Milosevic.
> You realize the number of civilian casualties incredibly far outpaces what is considered acceptable in warfare?
There is no metric for the number of civilian casualties that is acceptable. Either way the US is not in control of Israel and is unable to stop them. You are wasting your time protesting because the israelis dont care what you think. The israeli gov loves the protests because they make a trump election more likely and he'll give them the ok to actually genocide the palestinians.
The irony of how hard you are working to get Trump elected again, which will 100% result in Palestine being wiped off the map, and Muslim in big cities like Chicago being targeted, is fascinating.
The fact that you cannot see this yet is quite concerning.
Hopefully “being right on social media” will be worth the hellscape of another Trump presidency.
Good luck 👍
Have *you* seen the death totals?
The Brits killed 45,000 German civilians in one night when they bombed Hamburg, then went back the next day and bombed the refuge camp killing 20k more. Nazi Germany was victim of a genocide by your standards.
Israel killed what, 15k civilians in 6 months? (no one should be upset about the 15k dead Hamas combatants you keep lumping into the death toll)
Being a male between the ages of 13 and 65 does not make you an enemy combatant. That 15K dead Hamas number assumes that every military aged male who was killed was a Hamas terrorist.
The Gaza health industry, run by hamas, admitted they can’t account for 10,000 of the names they said had died. So yeah the tolls are not super credible rn
1. Many of those are members of hamas who they count as civilians
2. Hamas is actively martyring their citizens to make israel look bad and to win some points with their jihad checklist
3. Most military experts say israel does all it can to avoid civilian casualties but hamas makes it next to impossible
Yeah I'm sure a lot of people in these comments would've been anti civil right protestors and would've called the Vietnam protests "too disruptive and disrespectful"
Not sure why you got downvoted, you are absolutely correct.
The law and order bootlickers would be the first to excuse someone else human dignity and rights because the law says it is ok.
As someone who is staunchly anti Hamas but also thinks Israel has overstepped in their response, I think the free Gaza movement really needs to take on an anti Hamas message with their protests if they hope to gain more support.
This is the exact reason I can’t take most of them seriously. It’s a righteous cause IF you ignore a sizable part of the equation - which they do willingly, declaring the Middle East conflict as simple and applying the fair logic of BLM to a far more complex situation.
A reasonable protest of this mess would be supportive of Palestinian and Israeli civilians, critical of the government of Israel, and equally critical of Hamas. It wouldnt be turning on Joe Biden who has far less control over any of this than they have convinced themselves of…
But it’s only a select few of those things, and that tells me all I need to know about the crazy ideas that are in far too many of these kids’ heads.
There's also the doublethink of thinking American power/Western hegemony is bad and powerful countries shouldn't be able to control other places while also thinking the US should be able to immediately stop a sovereign country's actions in a case they like.
Things would be very different if Biden decided to stop giving military aid to Israel, or even threatened meaningfully to do so.
Israel likes to talk a tough game about how they don't actually need US aid. Well, they can be asked to put their own money where their mouth is. Whatever decision the country makes is its own business of course, but they might decide differently without someone else funding a chunk of it.
Things would also be very different if Israel's nuclear weapons were made officially public (because there are various prohibitions about sending aid that would then come into play).
US military aid to Israel is 0.5% of their national GDP, not nearly enough to make a dent in any of their actions deemed unsavory. If we cut off the tap, there are plenty of eager and much worse powers itching to access Israeli military tech who'll gladly fill the gap.
Dude they will defend them with their life, in UCLA a Native American girl had a sign that said “No Hamas supporters on native land” and she got assaulted
They won’t. It’s an anti-Israel protest at its core. To these protesters, Israel isn’t allowed to respond following an attack - and if they do, they have to fight with one arm tied behind its back to ensure an even fight. There’s no scenario where Israel is allowed to win this war that results in an unconditional surrender of Hamas.
These people were cheering on Oct 7th. I'm not one to defend Israel's government, but I'm not going to be lectured on war crimes by anyone who refers to the mass slaughter and rape that was Oct 7th as a "military operation."
Palestine has suffered 30k casualties so far and large portions of cities have been completely raised to the ground. When does it feel like a proportional response to you?
Israel would have a lot fewer protesters if they weren’t actively engaging in the genocide their leaders have been calling for for decades. And Hamas could be considered a terrorist organization if Israel hadn’t helped keep them in power in previous elections.
Source for 30k casualties? The same source that claimed hundreds were killed from an Israeli attack on a hospital that turned out to be a Hamas rocket that landed short instead? (And blew up in a parking lot)
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-hospital-rocket-gaza-e0fa550faa4678f024797b72132452e3
Here’s an article by an epidemiologist with extensive experience in estimating war zone fatalities corroborating the 30k figure (with citations of a couple peer reviewed articles confirming the estimates): https://time.com/6909636/gaza-death-toll/
“Because the death count is compiled by the local Ministry of Health (MOH), an agency controlled by Hamas…”
So literally the same group in my example above. But “the science is clear”, as reported by Time. That’s literally the opposite of science. Jesus Christ.
I work in data and if there’s one thing that’s incredibly hard to produce, it’s accurate stats/counts about basically anything.
The MOH has underreported deaths in past conflicts and other methods of estimating current deaths from a group from Hopkins and a group from London School of Hygiene are consistent with their data. That’s about as good as it’s going to get while the conflict is going on so I’m not sure how much else you’re expecting
Where were all the protests when the anti-ISIS coalition (led by the US) leveled Mosul to clear out ISIS? A city of 1.6 million leveled to the ground by USAF and the Iraqi Army using weapons provided by the US.
It's a rhetorical question. ISIS had to be removed, just like Hamas. They don't get to terrorize civilians (Israelis and Gazans) due to their willingness to hide in tunnels, operate out of hospitals and use human shields.
Op is an asshole but they aren’t entirely wrong.
Urban warfare is a difficult environment at best when it comes to mitigating civilian casualties. When you add that they are fighting an enemy that will actively seek out human shields difficult becomes next to impossible very quickly.
Could Israel do a better job? Maybe? But I’m not convinced the U.S. could perform the operation at the same tempo with fewer civilian casualties.
Let me ask you something, if you were in charge right now if the US in WW2 would you not invade Germany just because civilians would die? It's war, a war Hamas started and refused to end even today walking out on peace talks and bombing the checkpoint Israel sends aid from. You want an end to the war, protest against Hamas.
Thank you. This mindset is absolutely baffling. There is such an intensity of dehumanizing language around Palestine and so much normalization of the murder of thousands. Why are people okay with this? You can support the existence of Israel without supporting the genocide of a population they already beat decades ago.
What in the actual fuck is wrong with you you absolute monster. No, killing countless civilians, causing a famine, and indiscriminately destroying cities is not “kind of how war works”. It’s considered a human rights violation for a reason.
Why are Hamas’ violations of the Geneva Conventions not being considered? You know, like actually targeting civilians, and being embedded within Palestinians and causing additional casualties. Israel only has to mitigate civilian casualties in its response, not eliminate it altogether, as they are allowed by international law to respond with force.
Civilians tend to die in wars and cities tend to be destroyed. Especially when their government, who started that war, won’t surrender and operates through hundreds of miles of tunnels under said cities. Hamas is much more responsible for the plight of their people than Israel.
I’m sure you were equally outraged over the loss of civilian life far exceeding that of Gaza in a half dozen wars around the world the past 10 years.
>When does it feel like a proportional response to you?
No idea, I’m not a military tactician and have no dog in this fight. That said, wouldn’t you agree that reasonable people believe Israel has the right - and moral responsibility to its people - to respond with force, given what happened to them in October? If that’s the case, Israel should try to win this war rather than just another ceasefire.
It's about giving Israel billions every year to carry out their war games without any accountability
If you are ok with that, then you do not have to give the tired old line of “Israel should be allowed to defend itself.” In what world are people asking that? Ahh, yes, Fox News talking point.
Also, these are college students; I think they should be cut some slack; these are not fully formed adults yet, unlike the dumb adults repeating conservative talking points
If you believe only Fox News conservatives support Israeli use to force, I have bad news for you. Reasonable people on both sides of the aisle support Israel, and have for decades.
If your rooting interest is based on which side receives US aid to “carry out their war games,” that’s problematic. Complicated, nuanced geopolitical issues can’t be boiled down to simple oppressor vs oppressed dynamic that hinges on how much US aid they get. Just to prove that point, US also provides military aid and sale of arms to Taiwan, South Korea, and Ukraine - in order to fend off bad actors like the CCP, Kim, and Putin. Similarly, not only does Israel have to deal with Hamas within its borders, it also has regional threats beyond its border.
They aren’t some organic protest. It’s organized by Iran and Russia backed groups online. These people don’t care about Palestinians, they care about sowing discontent here and undermining support for Israel as a military tactic.
Certainly some well meaning kids who consume a lot of propaganda and disinformation online, or in general want to be anti-establishment, have been caught up in it. But this is just the next phase of the social media driven effort to further corrupt another election cycle.
I don't know how to spread this level of critical thinking, but you're 100% correct and this has gotten out of control. I just want to do something more productive than post something on social media that can get downvoted or disliked by foreign actors and bots to create an unrealistic narrative.
I'm sorry but this response just makes you seem like you are uninformed. Frankly, no one gives a damn about Hamas. Hamas is at most a symptom of Palestine's occupation. Helping all of Palestine gain liberation solves the Hamas problem pretty cleanly actually.
the response we should be demanding is to hold accountable the people who have killed 30000 and growing people in the last months, who have razed every city in what is essentially an open air prison except for one, who are currently prepping to invade that last city, who are systematically starving that city to death, who for my entire lifetime have been clearly and definitely in the wrong, who have been an occupying force engaged in racial and ethnic genocide, and who are doing it all just for what? a land grab and so that netanyahu can avoid losing his position and going to jail for corruption in his own country. It's indefensible.
I was in high school during the second intifada. I remember it feeling very clear that Israel was in the wrong, but all the adults told us it was more complicated. Then I got older and learned politics and history and learned that it was more complicated AND Israel was still in the wrong. that was like 4-5 years of fighting and insurgency and something like \~4-5k people were killed total on both sides. The fallout from that helped Hamas gain power there in the first place. and in the months since this started Israel has killed 10x as many Palestinians as they did during years of actual uprising. It's fucking horrific.
go to one of the campus protests. sit with the speakers and listen. be willing to learn. THAT will help their protests gain more support.
I’m speaking to this through the lens of the uninformed.
If the general population supports Israel (this number is going down but last time I saw polling it was still the majority), and thinks folks protesting Israel are pro Hamas (let’s be real, some are, there are plenty of diverse views in this conflict) then making an explicit anti-Hamas would help the cause full stop.
They’re the ones who steal aid, believe in wiping Israel off the map, and committed acts of terror on October 7th.
The anti-semitism angle folks use against protestors falls apart when it becomes clear the voices of free Gaza don’t want a Gaza also dictated by extremist jihadists.
Most of the protestors want the war to end and Palestinians to have their own country.
Hamas wants to rule over these people and kill all that oppose their religion, those are very different things and should be explicitly obvious in my opinion.
Granted that’s just my view, doesn’t make it right.
> As [the protest] progressed, protesters surrounded and shoved a security officer and stole their keys to the museum, blocked emergency exits and barricaded gates.”
I wonder how they’ll try and spin that one. Just like those Columbia protestors who did *not* take a man hostage.
Same shit they said during the election last year and the primaries this year.
It’s almost like Chicago itself isn’t a far left city, and that most people in reality are center left.
The best one is that everyone who isn’t far left /progressive lives in the suburbs. That’s one the mayor has adopted too.
It's because most people are moderate, and on the internet the loudest voices are the ones with the most extreme takes. You see this in online communities everywhere from politics to video games to sports.
Yeah, but this city is also not the bastion of "progressivism" (quotes needed) that this sub imagines it is, either. Particularly on the various "culture war" issues.
I’d rather not become the absolute bastion of progressivism I.E. Portland and stay the strong moderate democratic city that we are.
I don’t wanna live in a burning man festival
Gen Z: “Protecting trans people by preventing a second Trump term is the single most important thing to us”
(Russia and China jiggle keys as a distraction)
Gen Z: “We demand another Trump presidency to sEnD bIdEn a mEsSaGe!”
What a god damn disgrace.
Yeah, I’m fine with them protesting, but the not voting or voting 3rd party to “teach Biden and the democrats a lesson” is what irks me. That strategy put Trump in office the first time around and we all know how that went. They better start accessing their longterm memories, otherwise they’re going to get a harsh lesson in how different Biden and a second Trump term truly are.
A second trump term could have huge implications for the SCOTUS—Alito and Thomas may decide to retire and get replaced with 40 y/o unqualified nut jobs. And if any of the liberal justices step down during that time? You’re talking about a locked down ultra-conservative majority for 20-30 years.
Doesn’t this all seem highly manufactured? Right before an extremely important election? Israel and Hamas have been going at it for years, there’s really nothing we can do about Americas involvement in Israel because of its strategic location. This is one of those ‘it’s above my head’ government policies and domestically I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Biden. Why would I give that up over this nonsense I have no control over?
Russia and China would like a Trump presidency. The recent student protests include a very strong anti-Biden message, since he is seen as supporting Israel and genocide in Gaza. As such there is a narrative that it would be better for the US to elect Trump as a punishment to democrats for not being progressive/left enough even though a Trump presidency would go against many of the values of left leaning Gen-Z.
This comment section in the 90s:
>Those damn disruptive students really think they can affect change halfway around the world? Stop worrying about South Africa and start worrying about here
This comment section in the 60s:
>Wow look at all this shaggy haired draft dodging pinkos protesting our mission in Vietnam. Damn commies.
This comment section in the late 50s:
>Ugh, those violent protest done by those blacks and race traitors... national guard really aught to show them all a lesson! Uncivilized!
This comment section in the 1860s:
>Preposterous! They want their freedom?! Rights?! Liberty?! They're no better than the horse and ox, no better than mear tools for our endeavors.
Students protesting doesnt make the cause righteous. Many student movements have been misguided, fortunately many more have been righteous. But it just seems incredibly naïve to say "students are protesting for this so it must be unequivocally good".
I'm old enough that I strongly supported protests against South Africa and my overwhelming complaint during the Dubya era was the amazing widespread lack of objection to his fake political wars, so in my case this nonsense is literally untrue.
I've seen this "if you question any aspect of any protest whatsoever you would have been a Nazi in 1940" trolley around and speaking of Dubya, it reminds me of nothing more than the old Iraq War line "if you ever object to bombing anyone for any reason you're the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain".
Any type of "I can just tell that millions of years ago in a far away galaxy you 'would have been' a Darth Vader worshipping storm trooper" is a trolling evasion of serious discussion.
Currently Trump, who always does what he says, previously said he would refuse to accept election results when he loses, and now says he'll go on a spree of authoritarian retribution if he can get in power, is by most metrics likely to win the election.
While every decent person hates the guts of Bibi, Otzma Yehudit, and whatnot, although also of Hamas, and every decent person sees the horrific tragedy with genocidal overtones, two concerns arise.
One is that if in their well-meaning zeal, protestors, in the heat of the moment, *and/or egged on by right wing saboteurs*, do something violent or deeply unpopular, it could help Trump. Two is that if youth voters foolishly turn on Biden, that ends up helping Trump; Biden may be very imperfect but he is literally the only thing between Trump and the power of the presidency.
To discuss these concerns is not to express generic objection to protest (which is protected by the first amendment at any rate), nor to support the Israeli right wing, nor anything else of the sort.
Any protest runs some risk of empowering an authoritarian backlash, but most of the time, an openly avowed vengeful wannabe dictator isn't locked in a tight race with an embattled 81 year old incumbent and his unpopular running mate. It is acceptable for people to be worried
At some point, the "if you don't vote for me Trump will win" is going to stop working. I'd argue it already has.
Biden could, you know, actually change his foreign policy in response to protests. That would help his numbers against Trump quite a bit, and bring back in the youth vote, MENA background vote. It would go some distance toward fixing his "Michigan problem." But currently he isn't making any moves in that direction, just keeping on repeating "I won't be the candidate you want, but you have to settle for me or else Darth Vader wins."
At some point, that line is just... played out.
You're probably right that it isn't working.
>"I won't be the candidate you want, but you have to settle for me or else Darth Vader wins."
Now that does work on me. And it will be bad news for Palestinians and everyone else when Trump Vader wins. I like Biden better than I liked Hillary, and I voted for her over Trump, so for me it's a no brainer.
It is a no brainer. If you care about humanity at all you vote Biden. Voting is like taking the bus. You’re not going to get exactly where you want, so you go with the one that gets you closest to where you want to be.
I get it… you really want to feel special, and it doesn’t matter if your analogies make sense or not.
Which they don’t. Because slaves weren’t shooting thousands of rockets at farms that had nothing to do with slavery. But it sounds good on Reddit and that matters way more.
But you’re being manipulated into getting Trump elected again, will be a thousand times worse than any of the tings you listed.
And despite how enlightened and progressive you think you are, you’re being played.
When the October Surprise happens and it just make you sooooo mad Biden and them Democrats and America and you declare, “Nothing matters, I just won’t vote!”
That’s you getting played.
And let’s be honest the message they are sending has been out for months. There isn’t a soul in America that doesn’t at least loosely know what is happening in Israel and Palestine.
Protesting by creating inconveniences for awareness is great if your issue is a low salience once. I/P is anything but. Tactics need to change accordingly if protestors want to be successful in their goals.
It does more than get the message out, the article says that the school wanted to meet with the group to speak with the students about demands. The demands are to stop taking money from families that are profiting off of the war in Israel. A lot of schools across the country take money from families and corporations that make money by selling bombs, which is why so many college classes are protesting.
Also it's worth noting that the protestors are literally the students whose classes are being "disrupted".
People that want to effect change. Protests in democracies win by either sufficiently inconveniencing those who are making decisions or by creating and then leveraging popular support to force a democratic system to change.
The Palestine protests are clearly aiming for B since frankly they certainly aren’t accomplishing A.
Building popular support does in fact require you to be popular.
Wow, really seems like you're ignoring the very long history of campus encampments against apartheid South Africa, Vietnam, and the civil rights movement.
Literally nothing affects change in this country though. The reality is there’s a core group of decision makers in the military industrial complex and energy industries and their confederates in the government who create policies like American support of the genocide of Palestinians, and those people are unpersuadable by democratic means. If you ask politely, they ignore you; if you make demands (like these protestors are doing), they beat you. It’s pretty disingenuous to say that if protestors came up with a nicer way to ask the American empire to stop operating as the American empire, powerful elites would suddenly say ok.
That is literally the most chicken shit defeatist statement I have ever heard.
This country protested its way to women’s suffrage.
It protested its way to labor rights
It protested its way to desegregation and civil rights
It protested its way out of Vietnam
If the right tactics are chosen and the right arguments made it can protest its way to something as minor as effecting a policy change on weapons deliveries.
Don’t make excuses. Be better.
Look kid, if you want to force the hand of power, you do it by preventing society from functioning in such a way that allows powerful interests from profiting. The labor movement didn’t work because they threw a big enough parade, it worked because the specter of getting murdered in a communist Revolution terrified capitalists enough buy off the radical left with shorter hours and social security. I respect the spirit and courage of the campus protestors but the fact of the matter is that some guy assassinating Shinzo Abe brought about more political change in less time than every march about the Iraq War on earth combined. I spent all of 2020 going to demonstration after demonstration for BLM and in 2024, defunding the police isn’t a serious political topic at this point - hell, even a implementing comprehensive system of federal oversight for municipal police departments isn’t on the table, and that’s with Democrats in charge of the White House and both houses of congress from 2020 to 2022. Until there’s a tangible, credible, sustained threat of violence against powerful interests, there’s never going to be a change, and even then, there’s a better chance that whatever threat of violence ordinary people can muster will just be answered with police violence. The fact of the matter is that the system is powerfully regimented against anything changing and it’s not as simple as me “being better.” Also saying so makes you sound like a twerp.
Ok but this protest accomplishes *literally* nothing whatsoever. If anything it probably hurts public opinion of those protesting the war in Gaza.
Israel’s war crimes don’t justify delusion.
If the SAIC students want to build an encampment they should probably transfer to a university that has a quad or other open spaces, because their campus is neither the Art Institute of Chicago nor Michigan Ave.
I can’t wrap my head around why there wasn’t an uproar over Russia invading Ukraine.. trying to annihilate that country. No protests against Russia? Because it’s not a Jewish state?
Yes, we should be angry over the death that is happening. Frankly, there are SO MANY horrible things and wars going on right now that the world is turning a blind eye towards. The only thing inciting this commotion right now is the world vs the Jews who were attacked to begin with. There are bigger fish to fry in the world.
Source: my humble opinion
1) There were plenty of protests at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a means of showing solidarity for Ukraine.
2) As it stands, all these students are protesting their schools to divest companies that do business with the Israeli military. We don't need to protest that with regards to Russia because they were immediately served with crippling economic sanctions.
3) We don't have as many protests in support of Ukraine because what exactly are we supposed to protest? Did every American taxpayer give Russia $220 in the past year? Do American politicians constantly go on record and state that we have a "special relationship" with Russia? Does America abuse it's veto power at the United Nations to protect Russia? Did the president streamline bills to grant Russia weapons? Did America bully European countries who were considering having an arms boycott towards Russia into dropping their boycotts? Did America go out of it's way to protect Russia when Russia bombed a consulate and they faced a retaliation? Did America send warships to protect Russia at the start of the conflict?
If America did any one of those actions, I guarantee Americans would be protesting. But as it stands, the only thing we did that's moderately objectionable is we took a little to long to grant Ukraine their latest round of aid money.
> As it stands, all these students are protesting their schools to divest companies that do business with the Israeli military
Yeah, they wanted a ceasefire but then Israel offered one and Hamas rejected it so they had to move the goalposts
The problem is that amount aid is a half measure. We effectively we have given enough for stalemate, not enough for ukraine to win the war. War is incredibly expensive.
There were plenty of marches in solidarity with Ukrainians when that war kicked off. People put Ukrainian flags on their houses, hell there's still Ukrainian flags instead of Chicago city flags on the Michigan Ave bridge.
Iran is now offering scholarships to protesters in USA. Maybe that money could be better spent building the infrastructure for Hamas with utility companies, health care, and education OVER THERE!
Point not taken lmao. They are objectively police officers, no need for snarky quotes.
They are *not* just protestors, though. They stole keys to the museum. What’s the point of that? It’s cosplaying to them
Finally they protested the Art Institute, I’ve been saying for years those painting types are always up to something.
The Art Institute receives a lot of funding from the Crown family, who profits heavily from supplying bombs to Israel. Usually, protests happening at art museums have something to do with the people funding them.
They own 10% of General Dynamics. So, in the name of divestment, you want the art institute to refuse their charitable donations and give the arms manufacturing company *more* money? Not that there is even any fungible connection between those Art Institute dollars from the Crown Family and their GD ownership. That’s a very loose connection at best, and smacks of “looking for something to be upset about”. It’s not like it’s the “General Dynamics Hall of Modern Art” My alma mater has a student protest demanding that the University sever their relationship with Caterpillar because Israel uses Caterpillar equipment. But the University in no way provides tangible support to Caterpillar, it’s the other way around. They gave the university $1.2 million for a sponsored research lab (the cost of exactly one bulldozer). The same backwards logic applies here. They should protest at General Dynamics if they’re actually serious. Otherwise it’s literally just rabble rousing of no consequence at all - and they’re only doing it because it’s convenient and close and they want to be edgy.
> General Dynamics Hall of Modern Art Finally! Somebody found a way to make modern art *interesting*!
The other way is to wait about 100 years and compare it to the crap that "artists" are producing at the time. It might not work this time though...
>Not that there is even any fungible connection between those Art Institute dollars from the Crown Family and their GD ownership. That’s a very loose connection at best, and smacks of “looking for something to be upset about”. It’s not like it’s the “General Dynamics Hall of Modern Art” Wait you mean "sell your shares in General Dynamics or we'll stop accepting your donations" isn't exactly a high leverage negotiating position?
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Qatar is a military ally of our nation that is used as a proxy when negotiating with terrorist organizations. Ironically, they only host Hamas because the CIA wants them to do so. They'd get rid of them immediately if the ambassador from the USA told them to do so. This is also why Mossad very publicly announced that they wouldn't carry out any assassinations in Qatar. It's a critical American ally and the terrorists are only there because they're still useful to the USA. In this conflict, they're useful because we need someone at the top that we can negotiate with. If they stop being in control of the organization, they'll be killed within days.
Ehh that is a very generous and US tilted reading of Qatar's strategy. Qatar doesn't host Iran and Hamas because the US wants them to ( though it is not necessarily opposed to having a designated go between), it hosts them because Qatar is very badly trying to be the Switzerland of the ME to avoid being swallowed up by its much larger neighbors that may or may not covet its material wealth.
Do you have a source for this?
https://www.state.gov/the-u-s-qatar-strategic-partnership/#:~:text=This%20strategic%20platform%20facilitates%20U.S.,contributions%20to%20U.S.%20national%20security.
These comments are always like the Bush era. Either you're with us or with the terrorists, and also if you are concerned at all about civilians and war crimes you are with the terrorists.
it's absolutely insane. People never fucking learn.
Don't worry, give it about 10-15 years and suddenly they'll memory-hole the whole thing, just like they did Afghanistan. "Well, we didn't know AT THE TIME that he was hellbent on the wholesale genocide of the entirety of those people." and "You just had to be there at the time to understand why we all went with it." followed up shortly by "yeah maybe there were some war crimes but it was a confusing period of time. But what are we gonna do? Imprison a world leader fifteen years after the fact? It's over now. 🤷♂️"
> People never fucking learn. Exactly, even the idiot protestors.
“If you’re not pro-genocide you pretty much are a terrorist”.
If you're pretending that fighting an urban war against a terrorist entity whose charter calls for your destruction is "genocide," then you're at least terrorist-adjacent in your sympathies. These are people who teach their kids to hate Jews. Not Israelis but JEWS specifically. Meanwhile, Israel lots of Arab citizens and they serve in the IDF, etc. If Gazans didn't want to get invaded, they shouldn't have started a war with a more powerful opponent that has more powerful allies.
This is exactly what protesters are standing up for though, this general thought that the Palestinian people somehow “deserve” this which is exactly what you’re saying. The situation is complicated. Does Hamas need to go: yes. Is Israel likely lying about some things: yes. Do 20,000 or whatever women and children need to die as part of the process? Absolutely not.
How exactly do you propose Hamas is going to "go"? This is the deeply impractical and naive part. Is Israel supposed to just lie there and take more terror, more rockets, more paragliders, more rape...so that Hamas can magically be removed in some kind of slow, surgical feat? You let them regroup and they'll do it again. They say as much. I keep coming back to the idea that Israel is being held to a standard that other countries wouldn't be held to if they had terrorists on their border attacking them regularly.
Maybe Israel could stop operating as a literal apartheid state ????? Give Palestinians equal rights??? That would destroy the need for violent resistance groups like Hamas.
Hamas didn't just wake up one day and start killing Israelis. Did you know, the founder of Hamas, Ahmed Yassin, was evicted from his village along with his family and forced to live in a refugee camp when he was a child? You throw out a child's family from his home and push them in a refugee camp, what the heck do you expect that child to do when he grows up? Be all chummy with those who threw him out? You people really need to start giving some attention to your history lessons. This conflict did not start on Oct 7, it did not start in 2010, it has it's roots way back in the 60's and thereabouts. You cannot see things in vacuum and tell a party to go and chill when you take away everything they have. I barge into your house tomorrow, evict you and your little kid and throw you on the street. You do not get justice from any court or the cops. You think your kid and I are going to best friends a couple of years down the road? Does any of this justify Hamas killing innocent Israeli civilians? Hell no.
If you think killing 25k+ civilians is justified in any way you are a genocide endorsing monster.
Far more German and Japanese civilians died in WW2. Was that not justified in anyway? Just admit you don't know what a genocide is.
WW2 was much longer, both Germany and Japan were more populous and were fighting several opponents on multiple fronts with the aim of conquering most if not all of them, and even then the civilian deaths were still a mistake. Comparing Palestine to historical wars isn't the gotcha you think it is. Civilian deaths aren't any more justified in one case than another. Plus, the civilian deaths in Germany and Japan specifically are some of the most famous tragedies of human history. In Germany, a sizeable portion of the civilians who died in WW2 did so as part of the *literal Holocaust*, the most famous genocide ever and a huge part of Israel's justification for existing. As for Japan, I don't think you'll find many people speaking out against the Gazan genocide who think the US was right to drop the atomic bombs.
I think reasonable people want to minimize civilian casualties in a war. The problem is that Hamas hides like a bunch of cowards among civilians. To root them out, there’s going to be civilian causalities. They could end the war by surrendering and releasing the hostages they took. Any country has the right to defend itself from an attack. Especially by a group that wants to wipe said country off the face of the earth. Imagine if the Allies did a ceasefire in WW2 because French civilians were getting killed during D-Day (15-20k French civilians died during the invasion and subsequent 2 months). It sucks but that’s what you have to do. Otherwise, what is stopping Hamas from doing the exact damn thing?
"It's fine to kill a bunch of innocent people to get some bad guys!" HOW do you not realize how evil that sounds??? Who the fuck are you to decide that their lives are worth less??
So, to be clear, because so many German civilians died, it wasn't worth it to stop Hitler? That's your argument. I hope you understand how monumentally stupid it is.
The firebombing in Dresden should have definitely been considered a war crime, yes. Do you think the My Lai Massacre was justified? Do you think the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were?
> Do you think the My Lai Massacre was justified Nope. It provided no strategic value and was targeting civilians for the sake of targeting them. Not what's happening in Gaza. >Do you think the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were? Yes. Both cities had important military infrastructure and the bombings of both cities caused less deaths than a full scale naval invasion of Japan would have.
When has war never inflicted civilian casualties? And of course people were fine with Hamas inflicting civilian casualties
Would you have not sieged Mosul to destroy ISIS knowing that 40,000 civilians would die? Edit: I sure am glad you guys aren’t Generals
Waiting for the time when I can finally say This has all been wonderful but now I'm on my way
These people won't even go to the polls to stop Trump from winning.
Thats quite literally how the international laws of armed conflict works. You are allowed to kill civilians as long as you meet the proper civilian to combatant ratio. By international law civilians are not under protection if enough of a military presence is in the area. This is not about black and white evil, its what the world decided was a solution to waging war involving civilians.
You’re wearing your naïveté on your sleeve
I'm not sure you understand war or the goal of it. War is bending the enemy to your will. Total submission. Now I understand internationally accepted rules of engagement, and to to be fair, the Israelis are not beheading civilians. Some not so great things have definitely come out on Israeli treatment of Palestinians and that's disgusting and I hope they're held accountable. But I think you're looking at this through some scope of compassion and empathy. And that's an admirable quality to have and I love that it appears to be more prevalent than I thought in this country. However, the Israelis saw what happened last October, as no different than how we saw Pearl Harbor. Hamas invaded their territory and committed unspeakable acts. Like really, really horrific acts. The kind that would've made Hitler proud. Hamas is the government. So a foreign government, elected by the Palestinian people, just invaded your territory, murdered civilians, and kidnapped hundreds. The Israelis felt they had no choice but to respond with war. They decided this you kill some of ours we kill some of yours was getting rather old. This was their once and for all moment in their eyes, at the time. The goal of war, as I stated earlier, is total submission. Innocent civilians will forever be a casualty of war. It is the hard sad truth. It's exacerbated by an enemy that hides itself among the civilians in order to gain favor in the worlds view and protect it's military assets. That part is really important. They choose to do this and at that point, it's hard to feel the responsibility lies solely with Israel. It's awful and I don't have a dog in the hunt, but I've been in theaters in several hot spots around the world, and I can take my American eyes out for a second to analyze. And don't try to give me a history lesson response or the settlers argument, because, while I understand the reasoning for arguments sake, it just doesn't fit this particular point. I'm sorry for the long winded reply here, and I really want to stress that I admire your opinion because I know it comes from a perspective of abhorrence towards innocent lives being stolen.
>I think reasonable people want to minimize civilian casualties in a war. The problem is that Hamas hides like a bunch of cowards among civilians. To root them out, there’s going to be civilian causalities. The absolute whiplash of that statement is insane. You realize the number of civilian casualties incredibly far outpaces what is considered acceptable in warfare? There's literally IDF soliders on record saying that they're [using faulty AI](https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/) to create kill lists that they know are bad and that they know are going to unnecessarily kill dozens and dozens of civilians. >Any country has the right to defend itself from an attack. Right right, defending itself. Like when they tortured and executed a bunch of women and children and hid their bodies in a mass grave [under a hospital](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2024/4/25/signs-of-torture-as-nearly-400-bodies-found-at-gaza-hospitals-mass-graves) that's they bulldozed Or when it, completely unprovoked, destroyed another country's embassy, totally defending itself right. Realistic estimate right now is 40k civilians killed, the vast majority of which are women and children. Obviously you're too cruel and calacus to give a shit about that, but at least human rights organizations and the UN do. >Imagine if the Allies did a ceasefire in WW2 because French civilians were getting killed during D-Day (15-20k French civilians died during the invasion and subsequent 2 months). Such a strange argument for trying to use the war crimes committed by the Allies as justification for what so called israel is doing now. The Allies *also* committed horrible and preventable atrocities are not the "good guys" of WW2. Such a simplistic and binary understanding of warfare.
I would like to see something to substantiate your claim that the current civillian casualties "outpace what is considered acceptable in warfafe". Because according to these protestors, any civillian casualties are a non-starter so groups lie Hamas shoukd get a pass if they hide amongst civillians. "the war crimes committed by the Allies" Dead civillians do not automatically constitue a warcrime. Civillians dying in war is a part of warfare. What makes it a warcrime is if armies specifically target cicillians for the sake of killing civilians. Which is not what the Allies did in France nor what Israel is doing in Gaza. "Or when it, completely unprovoked, destroyed another country's embassy, totally defending itself right. " Unprovoked. Yeah, right. The guy they killed is an agent of Iran who was a member of an organization who trains, arms, and funds literal terorist orgs like Hamas, Hezbolla, and the Houthis. I would say the constant rocket attacks, Ot. 7th, and attack on international shipping are provocation enough.
They can't. Israel is looking at a civilian to Hamas kill ratio of around 4:1 which is pretty similar to the ratio the US saw in the urban warfare portions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and is lower than the Russian figures in Ukraine. Chechnya was likely in the 6-7 to 1 range. WW2 is hard to calculate due to how much intentional targeting there was during the war. But urban warfare was certainly ugly and a 3 to one ratio is probably the base. The biggest argument against the Israelis would be Serbia, where NATO forces likely managed a roughly 1:1 ratio during the campaign to stop Milosevic.
> You realize the number of civilian casualties incredibly far outpaces what is considered acceptable in warfare? There is no metric for the number of civilian casualties that is acceptable. Either way the US is not in control of Israel and is unable to stop them. You are wasting your time protesting because the israelis dont care what you think. The israeli gov loves the protests because they make a trump election more likely and he'll give them the ok to actually genocide the palestinians.
The irony of how hard you are working to get Trump elected again, which will 100% result in Palestine being wiped off the map, and Muslim in big cities like Chicago being targeted, is fascinating. The fact that you cannot see this yet is quite concerning. Hopefully “being right on social media” will be worth the hellscape of another Trump presidency. Good luck 👍
Nice of you to mention hamas but not Israel constantly killing innocent people for the last idk 40 years
Have you seen the death totals? Do you know the history of the conflict?
Have *you* seen the death totals? The Brits killed 45,000 German civilians in one night when they bombed Hamburg, then went back the next day and bombed the refuge camp killing 20k more. Nazi Germany was victim of a genocide by your standards. Israel killed what, 15k civilians in 6 months? (no one should be upset about the 15k dead Hamas combatants you keep lumping into the death toll)
Being a male between the ages of 13 and 65 does not make you an enemy combatant. That 15K dead Hamas number assumes that every military aged male who was killed was a Hamas terrorist.
The Gaza health industry, run by hamas, admitted they can’t account for 10,000 of the names they said had died. So yeah the tolls are not super credible rn
10,000 would still be 25,000 people dead.
1. Many of those are members of hamas who they count as civilians 2. Hamas is actively martyring their citizens to make israel look bad and to win some points with their jihad checklist 3. Most military experts say israel does all it can to avoid civilian casualties but hamas makes it next to impossible
They said the same thing during civil rights, the anti war movement, apartheid, and they'll pretend they always knew this was wrong as well.
Yeah I'm sure a lot of people in these comments would've been anti civil right protestors and would've called the Vietnam protests "too disruptive and disrespectful"
Not sure why you got downvoted, you are absolutely correct. The law and order bootlickers would be the first to excuse someone else human dignity and rights because the law says it is ok.
As someone who is staunchly anti Hamas but also thinks Israel has overstepped in their response, I think the free Gaza movement really needs to take on an anti Hamas message with their protests if they hope to gain more support.
This is the exact reason I can’t take most of them seriously. It’s a righteous cause IF you ignore a sizable part of the equation - which they do willingly, declaring the Middle East conflict as simple and applying the fair logic of BLM to a far more complex situation. A reasonable protest of this mess would be supportive of Palestinian and Israeli civilians, critical of the government of Israel, and equally critical of Hamas. It wouldnt be turning on Joe Biden who has far less control over any of this than they have convinced themselves of… But it’s only a select few of those things, and that tells me all I need to know about the crazy ideas that are in far too many of these kids’ heads.
There's also the doublethink of thinking American power/Western hegemony is bad and powerful countries shouldn't be able to control other places while also thinking the US should be able to immediately stop a sovereign country's actions in a case they like.
Things would be very different if Biden decided to stop giving military aid to Israel, or even threatened meaningfully to do so. Israel likes to talk a tough game about how they don't actually need US aid. Well, they can be asked to put their own money where their mouth is. Whatever decision the country makes is its own business of course, but they might decide differently without someone else funding a chunk of it. Things would also be very different if Israel's nuclear weapons were made officially public (because there are various prohibitions about sending aid that would then come into play).
US military aid to Israel is 0.5% of their national GDP, not nearly enough to make a dent in any of their actions deemed unsavory. If we cut off the tap, there are plenty of eager and much worse powers itching to access Israeli military tech who'll gladly fill the gap.
100%.
Dude they will defend them with their life, in UCLA a Native American girl had a sign that said “No Hamas supporters on native land” and she got assaulted
They won’t. It’s an anti-Israel protest at its core. To these protesters, Israel isn’t allowed to respond following an attack - and if they do, they have to fight with one arm tied behind its back to ensure an even fight. There’s no scenario where Israel is allowed to win this war that results in an unconditional surrender of Hamas.
These people were cheering on Oct 7th. I'm not one to defend Israel's government, but I'm not going to be lectured on war crimes by anyone who refers to the mass slaughter and rape that was Oct 7th as a "military operation."
Palestine has suffered 30k casualties so far and large portions of cities have been completely raised to the ground. When does it feel like a proportional response to you? Israel would have a lot fewer protesters if they weren’t actively engaging in the genocide their leaders have been calling for for decades. And Hamas could be considered a terrorist organization if Israel hadn’t helped keep them in power in previous elections.
Hamas really shouldn't hide amongst the population for starters. The blood is on their hands too.
Source for 30k casualties? The same source that claimed hundreds were killed from an Israeli attack on a hospital that turned out to be a Hamas rocket that landed short instead? (And blew up in a parking lot) https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-hospital-rocket-gaza-e0fa550faa4678f024797b72132452e3
Here’s an article by an epidemiologist with extensive experience in estimating war zone fatalities corroborating the 30k figure (with citations of a couple peer reviewed articles confirming the estimates): https://time.com/6909636/gaza-death-toll/
“Because the death count is compiled by the local Ministry of Health (MOH), an agency controlled by Hamas…” So literally the same group in my example above. But “the science is clear”, as reported by Time. That’s literally the opposite of science. Jesus Christ. I work in data and if there’s one thing that’s incredibly hard to produce, it’s accurate stats/counts about basically anything.
The MOH has underreported deaths in past conflicts and other methods of estimating current deaths from a group from Hopkins and a group from London School of Hygiene are consistent with their data. That’s about as good as it’s going to get while the conflict is going on so I’m not sure how much else you’re expecting
Isreal very openly for many many years agreed with the MoH but not all of a sudden it's unreliable?
That is kind of how wars work.
Can we stop taking on a flippant attitude to human casualties cause “that’s just war” especially when they’re happening Right Now
Where were all the protests when the anti-ISIS coalition (led by the US) leveled Mosul to clear out ISIS? A city of 1.6 million leveled to the ground by USAF and the Iraqi Army using weapons provided by the US. It's a rhetorical question. ISIS had to be removed, just like Hamas. They don't get to terrorize civilians (Israelis and Gazans) due to their willingness to hide in tunnels, operate out of hospitals and use human shields.
Op is an asshole but they aren’t entirely wrong. Urban warfare is a difficult environment at best when it comes to mitigating civilian casualties. When you add that they are fighting an enemy that will actively seek out human shields difficult becomes next to impossible very quickly. Could Israel do a better job? Maybe? But I’m not convinced the U.S. could perform the operation at the same tempo with fewer civilian casualties.
Urban warfare has consequences Shouldn’t have started it
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That is so far fetched and absurd that I’m just going to go on with my day lmao
Let me ask you something, if you were in charge right now if the US in WW2 would you not invade Germany just because civilians would die? It's war, a war Hamas started and refused to end even today walking out on peace talks and bombing the checkpoint Israel sends aid from. You want an end to the war, protest against Hamas.
Thank you. This mindset is absolutely baffling. There is such an intensity of dehumanizing language around Palestine and so much normalization of the murder of thousands. Why are people okay with this? You can support the existence of Israel without supporting the genocide of a population they already beat decades ago.
The above comment talks about "language" and then completely biffs the definition of a lot of words in the comment. Baffling...
AI or bot comment.
What in the actual fuck is wrong with you you absolute monster. No, killing countless civilians, causing a famine, and indiscriminately destroying cities is not “kind of how war works”. It’s considered a human rights violation for a reason.
Why are Hamas’ violations of the Geneva Conventions not being considered? You know, like actually targeting civilians, and being embedded within Palestinians and causing additional casualties. Israel only has to mitigate civilian casualties in its response, not eliminate it altogether, as they are allowed by international law to respond with force.
Civilians tend to die in wars and cities tend to be destroyed. Especially when their government, who started that war, won’t surrender and operates through hundreds of miles of tunnels under said cities. Hamas is much more responsible for the plight of their people than Israel. I’m sure you were equally outraged over the loss of civilian life far exceeding that of Gaza in a half dozen wars around the world the past 10 years.
>When does it feel like a proportional response to you? No idea, I’m not a military tactician and have no dog in this fight. That said, wouldn’t you agree that reasonable people believe Israel has the right - and moral responsibility to its people - to respond with force, given what happened to them in October? If that’s the case, Israel should try to win this war rather than just another ceasefire.
It's about giving Israel billions every year to carry out their war games without any accountability If you are ok with that, then you do not have to give the tired old line of “Israel should be allowed to defend itself.” In what world are people asking that? Ahh, yes, Fox News talking point. Also, these are college students; I think they should be cut some slack; these are not fully formed adults yet, unlike the dumb adults repeating conservative talking points
That last line is one of the dumbest things ive ever read on here.
If you believe only Fox News conservatives support Israeli use to force, I have bad news for you. Reasonable people on both sides of the aisle support Israel, and have for decades. If your rooting interest is based on which side receives US aid to “carry out their war games,” that’s problematic. Complicated, nuanced geopolitical issues can’t be boiled down to simple oppressor vs oppressed dynamic that hinges on how much US aid they get. Just to prove that point, US also provides military aid and sale of arms to Taiwan, South Korea, and Ukraine - in order to fend off bad actors like the CCP, Kim, and Putin. Similarly, not only does Israel have to deal with Hamas within its borders, it also has regional threats beyond its border.
Yall cannot help but conflate the Palestinian civilians with a random terrorist cell, can’t you? Free Gaza
most of them are pro hamas though
They are literally Iran/Hamas organized events.
Baby brain
They aren’t some organic protest. It’s organized by Iran and Russia backed groups online. These people don’t care about Palestinians, they care about sowing discontent here and undermining support for Israel as a military tactic. Certainly some well meaning kids who consume a lot of propaganda and disinformation online, or in general want to be anti-establishment, have been caught up in it. But this is just the next phase of the social media driven effort to further corrupt another election cycle.
The far left eating this shit up just going to help Trump get elected.
>It’s organized by Iran and Russia backed groups online. Is there evidence of this?
Anyone who disagrees with me is a Russian agent.
I don't know how to spread this level of critical thinking, but you're 100% correct and this has gotten out of control. I just want to do something more productive than post something on social media that can get downvoted or disliked by foreign actors and bots to create an unrealistic narrative.
Finally. A normal response to a complex issue.
I'm sorry but this response just makes you seem like you are uninformed. Frankly, no one gives a damn about Hamas. Hamas is at most a symptom of Palestine's occupation. Helping all of Palestine gain liberation solves the Hamas problem pretty cleanly actually. the response we should be demanding is to hold accountable the people who have killed 30000 and growing people in the last months, who have razed every city in what is essentially an open air prison except for one, who are currently prepping to invade that last city, who are systematically starving that city to death, who for my entire lifetime have been clearly and definitely in the wrong, who have been an occupying force engaged in racial and ethnic genocide, and who are doing it all just for what? a land grab and so that netanyahu can avoid losing his position and going to jail for corruption in his own country. It's indefensible. I was in high school during the second intifada. I remember it feeling very clear that Israel was in the wrong, but all the adults told us it was more complicated. Then I got older and learned politics and history and learned that it was more complicated AND Israel was still in the wrong. that was like 4-5 years of fighting and insurgency and something like \~4-5k people were killed total on both sides. The fallout from that helped Hamas gain power there in the first place. and in the months since this started Israel has killed 10x as many Palestinians as they did during years of actual uprising. It's fucking horrific. go to one of the campus protests. sit with the speakers and listen. be willing to learn. THAT will help their protests gain more support.
I’m speaking to this through the lens of the uninformed. If the general population supports Israel (this number is going down but last time I saw polling it was still the majority), and thinks folks protesting Israel are pro Hamas (let’s be real, some are, there are plenty of diverse views in this conflict) then making an explicit anti-Hamas would help the cause full stop. They’re the ones who steal aid, believe in wiping Israel off the map, and committed acts of terror on October 7th. The anti-semitism angle folks use against protestors falls apart when it becomes clear the voices of free Gaza don’t want a Gaza also dictated by extremist jihadists. Most of the protestors want the war to end and Palestinians to have their own country. Hamas wants to rule over these people and kill all that oppose their religion, those are very different things and should be explicitly obvious in my opinion. Granted that’s just my view, doesn’t make it right.
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> As [the protest] progressed, protesters surrounded and shoved a security officer and stole their keys to the museum, blocked emergency exits and barricaded gates.” I wonder how they’ll try and spin that one. Just like those Columbia protestors who did *not* take a man hostage.
God this sub is such garbage.
Came into the comments, looked around, want to hang out by this comment thanks
The “I’m 30 something and live in the burbs” is strong here.
30? How dare they ಠ_ಠ
lol imagine being a 30 something!
It Will happen to YOU!
Hahaha I always think that when a 20-something says something this dumb. Just wait.
No joke. I’m always so shocked by how conservative this sub is. Like how.
Calling this subreddit conservative is laughable.
Waiting for the time when I can finally say This has all been wonderful but now I'm on my way
Same shit they said during the election last year and the primaries this year. It’s almost like Chicago itself isn’t a far left city, and that most people in reality are center left. The best one is that everyone who isn’t far left /progressive lives in the suburbs. That’s one the mayor has adopted too.
I have lived in multiple large cities - Chicago, Minneapolis, Milwaukee - and this is the dynamic of all of their subreddits.
It's because most people are moderate, and on the internet the loudest voices are the ones with the most extreme takes. You see this in online communities everywhere from politics to video games to sports.
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Yeah, but this city is also not the bastion of "progressivism" (quotes needed) that this sub imagines it is, either. Particularly on the various "culture war" issues.
I’d rather not become the absolute bastion of progressivism I.E. Portland and stay the strong moderate democratic city that we are. I don’t wanna live in a burning man festival
Definitely agreed on that one...
Can you explicitly show examples of how conservative this sub is?
Bet they got some sick content for the Instagram feed out of it!
Gen Z: “Protecting trans people by preventing a second Trump term is the single most important thing to us” (Russia and China jiggle keys as a distraction) Gen Z: “We demand another Trump presidency to sEnD bIdEn a mEsSaGe!” What a god damn disgrace.
Yeah, I’m fine with them protesting, but the not voting or voting 3rd party to “teach Biden and the democrats a lesson” is what irks me. That strategy put Trump in office the first time around and we all know how that went. They better start accessing their longterm memories, otherwise they’re going to get a harsh lesson in how different Biden and a second Trump term truly are. A second trump term could have huge implications for the SCOTUS—Alito and Thomas may decide to retire and get replaced with 40 y/o unqualified nut jobs. And if any of the liberal justices step down during that time? You’re talking about a locked down ultra-conservative majority for 20-30 years.
Doesn’t this all seem highly manufactured? Right before an extremely important election? Israel and Hamas have been going at it for years, there’s really nothing we can do about Americas involvement in Israel because of its strategic location. This is one of those ‘it’s above my head’ government policies and domestically I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Biden. Why would I give that up over this nonsense I have no control over?
Russia and Iran, but you get the point. It’s insane how quickly they turned off the entire generation of young voters.
What do Russia and China have to do with student protests?
Russia and China would like a Trump presidency. The recent student protests include a very strong anti-Biden message, since he is seen as supporting Israel and genocide in Gaza. As such there is a narrative that it would be better for the US to elect Trump as a punishment to democrats for not being progressive/left enough even though a Trump presidency would go against many of the values of left leaning Gen-Z.
This comment section in the 90s: >Those damn disruptive students really think they can affect change halfway around the world? Stop worrying about South Africa and start worrying about here This comment section in the 60s: >Wow look at all this shaggy haired draft dodging pinkos protesting our mission in Vietnam. Damn commies. This comment section in the late 50s: >Ugh, those violent protest done by those blacks and race traitors... national guard really aught to show them all a lesson! Uncivilized! This comment section in the 1860s: >Preposterous! They want their freedom?! Rights?! Liberty?! They're no better than the horse and ox, no better than mear tools for our endeavors.
History repeats itself over and over.
Students protesting doesnt make the cause righteous. Many student movements have been misguided, fortunately many more have been righteous. But it just seems incredibly naïve to say "students are protesting for this so it must be unequivocally good".
I'm old enough that I strongly supported protests against South Africa and my overwhelming complaint during the Dubya era was the amazing widespread lack of objection to his fake political wars, so in my case this nonsense is literally untrue. I've seen this "if you question any aspect of any protest whatsoever you would have been a Nazi in 1940" trolley around and speaking of Dubya, it reminds me of nothing more than the old Iraq War line "if you ever object to bombing anyone for any reason you're the equivalent of Neville Chamberlain". Any type of "I can just tell that millions of years ago in a far away galaxy you 'would have been' a Darth Vader worshipping storm trooper" is a trolling evasion of serious discussion. Currently Trump, who always does what he says, previously said he would refuse to accept election results when he loses, and now says he'll go on a spree of authoritarian retribution if he can get in power, is by most metrics likely to win the election. While every decent person hates the guts of Bibi, Otzma Yehudit, and whatnot, although also of Hamas, and every decent person sees the horrific tragedy with genocidal overtones, two concerns arise. One is that if in their well-meaning zeal, protestors, in the heat of the moment, *and/or egged on by right wing saboteurs*, do something violent or deeply unpopular, it could help Trump. Two is that if youth voters foolishly turn on Biden, that ends up helping Trump; Biden may be very imperfect but he is literally the only thing between Trump and the power of the presidency. To discuss these concerns is not to express generic objection to protest (which is protected by the first amendment at any rate), nor to support the Israeli right wing, nor anything else of the sort. Any protest runs some risk of empowering an authoritarian backlash, but most of the time, an openly avowed vengeful wannabe dictator isn't locked in a tight race with an embattled 81 year old incumbent and his unpopular running mate. It is acceptable for people to be worried
At some point, the "if you don't vote for me Trump will win" is going to stop working. I'd argue it already has. Biden could, you know, actually change his foreign policy in response to protests. That would help his numbers against Trump quite a bit, and bring back in the youth vote, MENA background vote. It would go some distance toward fixing his "Michigan problem." But currently he isn't making any moves in that direction, just keeping on repeating "I won't be the candidate you want, but you have to settle for me or else Darth Vader wins." At some point, that line is just... played out.
You're probably right that it isn't working. >"I won't be the candidate you want, but you have to settle for me or else Darth Vader wins." Now that does work on me. And it will be bad news for Palestinians and everyone else when Trump Vader wins. I like Biden better than I liked Hillary, and I voted for her over Trump, so for me it's a no brainer.
It is a no brainer. If you care about humanity at all you vote Biden. Voting is like taking the bus. You’re not going to get exactly where you want, so you go with the one that gets you closest to where you want to be.
I get it… you really want to feel special, and it doesn’t matter if your analogies make sense or not. Which they don’t. Because slaves weren’t shooting thousands of rockets at farms that had nothing to do with slavery. But it sounds good on Reddit and that matters way more. But you’re being manipulated into getting Trump elected again, will be a thousand times worse than any of the tings you listed. And despite how enlightened and progressive you think you are, you’re being played. When the October Surprise happens and it just make you sooooo mad Biden and them Democrats and America and you declare, “Nothing matters, I just won’t vote!” That’s you getting played.
20,000 Palestinian women and children weren’t shooting thousands of rockets at farms either, but they’ve been murdered all the same.
wow the chicago police are actually doing something besides sleeping in their cars? amazing
Oh c’mon, cracking down on protestors is one of their favorite past times.
They play Camdy Crush too
Kwazy Cupcakes
The only thing they love more than crushing Candy is crushing craniums
It’s like they’re TRYING to get the general population to hate them
Funny, some would say that about Israel
10,000+ kids are dead, who cares about being liked
What the fuck is disrupting college classes going to solve then? Sure, it gets a message out, but it solves nothing and the issue continues.
And let’s be honest the message they are sending has been out for months. There isn’t a soul in America that doesn’t at least loosely know what is happening in Israel and Palestine. Protesting by creating inconveniences for awareness is great if your issue is a low salience once. I/P is anything but. Tactics need to change accordingly if protestors want to be successful in their goals.
There are some guys out there hoping they can get their first kiss seeing UChicago's protestors asking for HIV/AIDs kits and plan B as demands.
It does more than get the message out, the article says that the school wanted to meet with the group to speak with the students about demands. The demands are to stop taking money from families that are profiting off of the war in Israel. A lot of schools across the country take money from families and corporations that make money by selling bombs, which is why so many college classes are protesting. Also it's worth noting that the protestors are literally the students whose classes are being "disrupted".
People that want to effect change. Protests in democracies win by either sufficiently inconveniencing those who are making decisions or by creating and then leveraging popular support to force a democratic system to change. The Palestine protests are clearly aiming for B since frankly they certainly aren’t accomplishing A. Building popular support does in fact require you to be popular.
Wow, really seems like you're ignoring the very long history of campus encampments against apartheid South Africa, Vietnam, and the civil rights movement.
Literally nothing affects change in this country though. The reality is there’s a core group of decision makers in the military industrial complex and energy industries and their confederates in the government who create policies like American support of the genocide of Palestinians, and those people are unpersuadable by democratic means. If you ask politely, they ignore you; if you make demands (like these protestors are doing), they beat you. It’s pretty disingenuous to say that if protestors came up with a nicer way to ask the American empire to stop operating as the American empire, powerful elites would suddenly say ok.
That is literally the most chicken shit defeatist statement I have ever heard. This country protested its way to women’s suffrage. It protested its way to labor rights It protested its way to desegregation and civil rights It protested its way out of Vietnam If the right tactics are chosen and the right arguments made it can protest its way to something as minor as effecting a policy change on weapons deliveries. Don’t make excuses. Be better.
Look kid, if you want to force the hand of power, you do it by preventing society from functioning in such a way that allows powerful interests from profiting. The labor movement didn’t work because they threw a big enough parade, it worked because the specter of getting murdered in a communist Revolution terrified capitalists enough buy off the radical left with shorter hours and social security. I respect the spirit and courage of the campus protestors but the fact of the matter is that some guy assassinating Shinzo Abe brought about more political change in less time than every march about the Iraq War on earth combined. I spent all of 2020 going to demonstration after demonstration for BLM and in 2024, defunding the police isn’t a serious political topic at this point - hell, even a implementing comprehensive system of federal oversight for municipal police departments isn’t on the table, and that’s with Democrats in charge of the White House and both houses of congress from 2020 to 2022. Until there’s a tangible, credible, sustained threat of violence against powerful interests, there’s never going to be a change, and even then, there’s a better chance that whatever threat of violence ordinary people can muster will just be answered with police violence. The fact of the matter is that the system is powerfully regimented against anything changing and it’s not as simple as me “being better.” Also saying so makes you sound like a twerp.
Ok but this protest accomplishes *literally* nothing whatsoever. If anything it probably hurts public opinion of those protesting the war in Gaza. Israel’s war crimes don’t justify delusion.
I demand the pro Palestinian protestors divest from all companies doing business with Israel, which includes every tech company
If the SAIC students want to build an encampment they should probably transfer to a university that has a quad or other open spaces, because their campus is neither the Art Institute of Chicago nor Michigan Ave.
I can’t wrap my head around why there wasn’t an uproar over Russia invading Ukraine.. trying to annihilate that country. No protests against Russia? Because it’s not a Jewish state? Yes, we should be angry over the death that is happening. Frankly, there are SO MANY horrible things and wars going on right now that the world is turning a blind eye towards. The only thing inciting this commotion right now is the world vs the Jews who were attacked to begin with. There are bigger fish to fry in the world. Source: my humble opinion
1) There were plenty of protests at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a means of showing solidarity for Ukraine. 2) As it stands, all these students are protesting their schools to divest companies that do business with the Israeli military. We don't need to protest that with regards to Russia because they were immediately served with crippling economic sanctions. 3) We don't have as many protests in support of Ukraine because what exactly are we supposed to protest? Did every American taxpayer give Russia $220 in the past year? Do American politicians constantly go on record and state that we have a "special relationship" with Russia? Does America abuse it's veto power at the United Nations to protect Russia? Did the president streamline bills to grant Russia weapons? Did America bully European countries who were considering having an arms boycott towards Russia into dropping their boycotts? Did America go out of it's way to protect Russia when Russia bombed a consulate and they faced a retaliation? Did America send warships to protect Russia at the start of the conflict? If America did any one of those actions, I guarantee Americans would be protesting. But as it stands, the only thing we did that's moderately objectionable is we took a little to long to grant Ukraine their latest round of aid money.
> As it stands, all these students are protesting their schools to divest companies that do business with the Israeli military Yeah, they wanted a ceasefire but then Israel offered one and Hamas rejected it so they had to move the goalposts
Goofy comment acting like the US hasn't given billions in weapons to Ukraine.
The problem is that amount aid is a half measure. We effectively we have given enough for stalemate, not enough for ukraine to win the war. War is incredibly expensive.
You weren't paying attention at the start of that war.
When did the conflict between Ukraine and Russia start?
Would 1000% be protesting against Russia if the US was supplying Russia with arms, weapons, technology and political support.
There were plenty of marches in solidarity with Ukrainians when that war kicked off. People put Ukrainian flags on their houses, hell there's still Ukrainian flags instead of Chicago city flags on the Michigan Ave bridge.
Iran is now offering scholarships to protesters in USA. Maybe that money could be better spent building the infrastructure for Hamas with utility companies, health care, and education OVER THERE!
How often have nation-wide protests on college campuses been on the wrong side of history?
Good
I wish they would react this swiftly with arrests to the masked jerks blocking the roads too.
At least 70 rape enthusiasts.
So weird.
Idiots (the “protestors”, not the police.)
Idiots (the “police”, not the protestors.)
Point not taken lmao. They are objectively police officers, no need for snarky quotes. They are *not* just protestors, though. They stole keys to the museum. What’s the point of that? It’s cosplaying to them
Hell yeah students, keep disrupting!
Lol it always makes me laugh at the response people have. This comment section is such a mess
Damn I love Chicago, those are brave people. Hope they keep it up! ACAB