Growing up, did any of you hear some variation of the line, “You have to eat all your [broccoli][peas][lutefisk], there are children starving in [China][India][Africa]!” We were supposed to be grateful for the plenty that we are lucky to have, and feel pity for all the blameless children who weren’t so fortunate. In my case, it didn’t work particularly well (I was well aware that that pile of soggy broccoli on my plate wasn’t going to be scooped up and sent to China), but I did learn to feel guilt that we weren’t sharing with those in need.
Not everyone learned to feel that guilt, I guess. Some seem to think it’s fine to starve children.
Evidence gathered by Amnesty International demonstrates how over a month since the introduction of its militarized aid distribution system, Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide.
Heartbreaking testimonies gathered from medical staff, parents of children hospitalized for malnutrition and displaced Palestinians struggling to survive paint a horrifying picture of acute levels of starvation and desperation in Gaza. Their accounts provide further evidence of the catastrophic suffering caused by Israel’s ongoing restrictions on life-saving aid and its deadly militarized aid scheme coupled with mass forced displacement, relentless bombardment and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.
Even worse, the food aid stations are set up as bait, drawing out parents of starving children to be gunned down by Israeli snipers.
Gaza’s Health Ministry reports that as of July 24, Israeli forces have killed 59,587 people and injured 143,498, including 8,363 deaths since a surge in Israeli strikes began in March 2025.
Since May, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to access food, most near aid distribution sites run by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office. The GHF has rejected the U.N.’s figures as “false and exaggerated.”
UNICEF estimates that 17,000 children are among those killed since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, with another 33,000 injured. Speaking at a U.N. Security Council meeting on July 16, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said the toll is like “a whole classroom of children killed every day for nearly two years.”
Meanwhile, Israel, with the assistance of the US, is intentionally starving children.
A third of Palestinians in Gaza are going without food for days at a time, Smith said. He said about 100,000 women and children were suffering severe acute malnutrition in the territory.
OCHA, the U.N. humanitarian affairs office, reports that malnutrition has risen among children under age 5 in Gaza. Of more than 56,000 who’ve been screened, 9% were assessed as being “acute malnourished” in the first two weeks of July, up from 6% last month and 2.4% in February. In Gaza City, 16% of 15,000 children were found to suffer from acute malnutrition, quadruple the percentage from February.
Even before the war, an estimated 97% of Gaza’s drinking water was contaminated by the sea, sewage and farm runoff and was therefore considered unsafe. Since October 2023, Israeli airstrikes against critical infrastructure such as wells, desalination units, sewage pumps, tanks and pipelines have caused the system to collapse, according to Human Rights Watch.
I no longer support the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. Dismantle that horrible government and turn the entire country over to Palestinians, with independent UN monitoring to prevent retaliation. Although, to be honest, I think some retaliation is necessary for justice to prevail — Netanyahu, for instance, ought to spend the rest of his disgusting life in prison.
Additionally, it’s committing genocide. I don’t care to hear from people who are splitting hairs to deny that Israel is a genocidal monster of a state.
Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country’s western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it.
In reports published on Monday, the two groups said Israel had targeted civilians in Gaza only because of their identity as Palestinians over nearly two years of war, causing severe and in some cases irreparable damage to Palestinian society.
A number of international and Palestinian groups have already described the war as genocidal, but reports from two of Israel-Palestine’s most respected human rights organisations, who have for decades documented systemic abuses, is likely to add to pressure for action.
Unfortunately it’s not just your country that is unconditionally supporting Israel. Germany also hasn’t learned anything from the atrocities of the Third Reich. As our disgusting minister of the interior said recently: “Israel’s security is part of our raison d’état.”
So basically the same solution as the OG apartheid state of the Union of South Africa. Fitting and I’m all for it. It’s gonna be messy in the beginning as it still is in the republic of South Africa today, but to me, at this point, it seems to be the only reasonable solution left. Nobody needs to kicked out, but those who were born and raised in the general area corresponding to the Mandate of Palestine will have to find a way forward as a unified nation. It’s going to be tough, and it will still take many decades for the impoverished and mentally broken Palestinians to catch up with the privileged former Israelis, as is the case too for the blacks in South Africa, since the white minority STILL predominantly has the economic power. But the Israelis don’t deserve their ethno-state. The whole concept makes zero sense. They can continue to be a “nation” (s.l.) as part of Palestinian society, as the Afrikaners are in the republic of South Africa, if they want to. Or move somewhere else, if they don’t like it.
I had been considering making a video on it, but it’s too long ago I made (alternate) history videos… Maybe on another channel, where it would be more fitting.
Clarification: Of course I meant the same solution as for the apartheid state of the Union of South Africa. That is: The dismantling of the horrible Bantustans and making everyone full citizens of the entire nation who can go and live in principle wherever they want and practically can.
Xpost from Mano Singham’s blog.
.1. AFAICT, the Israeli’s are quite literally just using the Palestinians for target practice.
They are shooting into crowds of civilians trying to get food with tanks.
.2. This is mass murder and a crime against humanity.
It is also at the least ethnic cleansing and/or genocide.
.3. No one can or will stop the Israelis.
.4. Mano Singham in the above OP.
“We look back with horror at the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda and wonder how the world could have let such things happen and not done anything to end the slaughter.”
Well, here we are again.
I can’t say it any better.
Here’s the conversation the President of the United States ought to be having with Netanyahu:
Bibi, the US is sending massive amounts of aid to Gaza and we will blow up any Israeli ship or plane or other military force that gets in our way. I’m also immediately freezing all American aid to Israel until the humanitarian crisis has been resolved.
Not holding my breath, but that’s what should happen.
I’m not sure I quite agree with this post. Even though one can of course debate which people have a right to live where and for what reasons, the complete dissolution of Israel would probably create a lot of chaos and perhaps more problems than it would solve.
For a long time, I would have believed my own recommendation (a single state for adherents of both or no religions) to be radical and would have only stated it very carefully and not at prominent positions. But I’m beginning to believe that there is some wisdom in it. Both people have a claim on these lands which at least can be made plausible to people (whichever other flaws they may have). To me, it seems like the humanist way would be to just live together and find a way not to kill each other. It’s what would happen in Star Trek (see Kelpien/Ba’ul).
I reluctantly agree with PZ’s position. Ever since Oct. 7, I’ve been experiencing acute cognitive dissonance when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the one hand, I’ve always had a deep sympathy for the Jewish people. Much of the world felt the same way after learning of the horrors of the Holocaust. But, the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was an emotional decision, not one based in logic or the realities on the ground. Basically, people said, ‘Hey, the Jews need their own country! A place where they can feel safe. So, let’s dump them in the middle of Palestine. It’s their ancestral homeland, after all. The Bible tells us so. The current inhabitants? They are of no concern. Besides, Palestine is mostly a wasteland, and the Jews will make it bloom.’ (People actually said that.)
After 77 years of conflict, the traumatized have become the traumatizers. The victims are now the victimizers. In the Israeli mind, one Jew is worth a thousand Arabs.
Over the past three years, I’ve made a 180 degree change in my beliefs concerning Israel. I now feel its creation was a mistake of historic proportions. Perhaps one of the greatest political mistakes of the past century. Ask yourself this — how is it that the UN can create a new nation out of whole cloth, against the wishes of its inhabitants and all the neighboring countries? The UN itself was only three years old at the time. It had no legal authority to do such a thing. Imagine if the UN said that American Indians needed their own homeland and voted to give them Ohio.
Today, many Jews insist that god gave us this land. The fact that they’ve been gone for 2000 years is irrelevant. This is what happens when the Old Testament is seen as a property deed.
You really got under that jackass Coyne’s skin with this one PZ! All his foodie pics should conjure the mental caption “As Gazans starve.”
Since Israel allegedly made the desert bloom, or so they say, they could do without ANY aid from the US. Pull the plug. A cold turkey crash course in self-sufficiency is warranted IMO based on their behavior over the past couple years alone. That Bibi is still in power speaks volumes.
— W. H. Auden
Forgot the obligatory mention of Coyne’s avoidance of coming to terms with the very Israel critical (anti-Zionist?) stuff his eloquent New Atheist hero Christopher Hitchens had written over the years. Yeah that!
drdrdrdrdralhazeneuler@6,
You’ve misunderstood the post. What PZ is advocating is precisely a single state for all living in Israel/Palestine. It should of course be secular, but by phrasing it in terms of religions, you’re (I’m sure unintentionally) misrepresenting the situation. Israel is not a theocracy (although it could become one) but, quite explicitly, an ethno-state. Anyone of Jewish ethnicity has a so-called “right of return” there; they don’t have to follow Jewish religious law (Judaism is a religion of practice more than of belief), let alone believe in a deity. While the majority of Palestinians are Muslims, there are significant numbers of Christians and non-religious people.
Doing to the Gaza people exactly what the Nazis have done to the Jewish people themselves! Shame!
@drdrdrdrdralhazeneuler, I think you wouldn’t be wrong in 1944 to wish that Nazi Germany would disappear. You wouldn’t be wrong to argue that it has no right to exist. In what way is the situation different now? People don’t die in death chambers but during air raids. The bodies in the photos from Gaza look similar to those of the holocaust. Arguing for the disappearance of the nazi germany doesn’t mean the destruction of all Germans. Arguing for the destruction of Israel means the creation of a better state in its place.
Thank you for this. It expresses my view also.
Here is a link to find Canadians currently in the IDF (and probably complicit in War Crimes).
The Maple is a lefty Canadian website. I did not find any signs of Henry Ford style (real) antisemitism there.
#8: You made me look. Ick.
Apparently, I’m now pro-Hamas (nope, I deplore terrorism, as was employed by Hamas) and anti-semitic (the usual dishonest conflation of Judaism with the Israeli state) and declares that . It would? You mean like how the Israeli government is engaged in the mass slaughter of Palestineans? I guess that’s a standard Zionist perspective, assume the other would do what they would do themselves.
#6: “complete dissolution of Israel would probably create a lot of chaos”…unlike the current bloody situation?
Whatever ends up occurring there after this holocaust, surely Netanyahu and his coalition is the second coming of Hitler and his coalition.
#17: Very probably worse than the current bloody situation. Israel is a nuclear power. That (and many of their other capabilities) means that getting rid of it without mass casualties would be massively difficult, even for very clever people or a very broad alliance.
I would advocate for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. And I do believe that that is within range.
PZ @17: Feeling that raw line from Superman. “People were going to DIE!”
I’m with you, PZ. In the real world, people are being killed in a genocide. That’s a consequence happening right now that the world needs to stop. I can’t imagine the “chaos” that follows from dismantling the Israeli state could be worse than the “orderly” systematic genocides that’d follow from inaction or complicity.
“We’re doing to them what we know they’d do to us!” is the attitude of a savage beast. It dehumanizes the intended victims and conveniently rationalizes any monstrous depravity done by oppressors. Feeding that rhetoric only escalates the horrors and removes deescalation as an option. It tells the victims that maybe they should stoop to similar atrocities just to survive.
Sending Netanyahu to the Hague for a war crimes trial would be a big step toward a peaceful resolution.
@zakalwe
“People don’t die in death chambers but during air raids.”
Around 300 000 mostly innocent civilians in Nazi Germany died during allied terror air raids with phosphor bombs that produced fire storms and were directed solely on civilian targets, to be precise: on densely populated city centers with largely wooden houses. This was done to force Germany to surrender. Bomber Harris, cited by Wipipedia: “the aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive…should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany. …the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.” See also Hiroshioma and Nagasaki, with similar aims.
If you want to make comparisons of the Israeli bombing policy with WWII, the example of the allied bombing policy might be relevant. As an aside, there were heavy bombing campaigns and starvation blockades by war parties supported by the West more recently, one being the Saudi war in Yemen that officially ended in 2022. The UN says around 230 000 people, mostly children, died. One didn’t read much about that one here.
I know too little about the starvation situation in Gaza to judge whether we have a situation like, for example, the Warsaw Ghetto or Theresienstadt or Soviet Gulags in Gaza now, although its very plausible that things would be far worse on the hunger front than they currently are without outside intervention putting pressure on Israel. A pressure that was mostly absent in Yemen or the recent war in Ethiopia where around 600 000 people perished under the administration of a Nobel peace price laureate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Tigray_war
What I do know is that with the numbers given by the Hamas health ministry, we aren’t anywhere near the relative and absolute quantity of the mass killing of Jews done by the Nazis in Poland/Ukraine reached.
You rightly said one would have wanted to destroy Nazi Germany. The Allies certainly did. But the stress lay on “Nazi”. To destroy Germany as such, and it was an ethnostate in those days, just like most European states were, wasn’t the war aim at all.
In those ethnically mixed areas where during the course of the war, the Germans’ erstwhile enemies (re)gained political control, like in Czechoslovakia, the ethnic Germans there were ethnically cleansed. The complete number of ethnic Germans who were expulsed or fled is close to 15 million. The number of deaths from violence, maltreatment, malnutrition and exposure was probably somewhere around 2 million.
There were many, many expulsions and ethnic cleansings in WWI and WWII, many a border shifted and new ethno-nation states were established that hadn’t been there before. The Palestinian fate during the Nakba is not very special. Most others to whom this happened, like many Turks in the Balkans and Greeks in Turkey, just cut their losses and tried to rebuild their lives elsewhere. Fighting partisan guerilla wars is a sure way to make life really, really difficult for your people.
Whoever thinks that dismantling and disarming Israel now will not lead to worse violence and killing than we have as yet seen is very naive. One may wish for it, if one really dislikes Israel, but please don’t pretend it’s for humanitarian reasons.
@19
Apartheid South Africa was also a nuclear power with 6 nuclear weapons. The weapons were dismantled as apartheid ended.
That is not a reason.
That is a rationalization.
The Israelis are saying that they aren’t any better than Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, ISIS, al Qaeda, or the Nazis.
They are just stronger and better armed than the people they are massacring.
It is also probably not true.
It is likely that right now if you asked the Gaza residents if they would settle for a peaceful and remotely livable solution, they would take it.
Oddly enough, old enemies can end up good friends.
At the end of the war, we defeated the Nazi Germans. These days most of the time, these two nations are on friendly terms. Germany was our ally during the cold war in NATO.
Same with Japan. We did drop two nuclear weapons on them after they bombed Pearl Harbor. We’ve been friends and allies ever since. Toyota is the second largest car maker in the USA.
Vietnam. That is a strange one.
We killed around 1 million Vietnamese for no good reason and lost the war anyway. They still have our mines and agent Orange herbicide.
They are also on friendly terms with the USA and an important manufacturing center for the USA.
I can’t explain how and why this happened.
Israel right now is a far right ethno estate. Coyne is a racist motherfucker who like all the other non-white racists uses the race card as form of defense. Actually, I should scratch the “non-white” part because the white fascists have also learned to use “anti-white racism” and “white genocide” in their talking points.
I’ve said this before, but it is important. In my organization, we know and work with may decent and honest Jews and many decent Honest Muslims. But, Naziyahoo (and those that support him, pointing at you U.S. and Zionists) is an abomination. We try diligently to be pacific (in the most basic sense of the word) But, I hope to hear Naziyahoo is dead, as much as I hope to hear that tRUMP is dead.
After all these centuries of building hatred, and all the evil incendiary money and weapons being poured on this unquenchable conflagration, there is NO solution to this disaster.
@4 raven
The 800-pound gorillas in the room apparently won’t stop them. You know damn well they easily can, though, and it is an indelible impeachment of Western “civilization” so-called that they choose not to.
In the end it is as Merz says, though perhaps not in the way he meant it: “This is the dirty work Israel is doing for all of us.” This was the plan all along since 2023, probably decades before that, waiting for an opportune moment, unaltered and preserved between ruling administrations. They want to see if they can get away with it, and all signs point to the likelihood that they will. The public is okay with genocide once again; the protests against it weren’t large enough.
And soon the chickens will come home to roost — we’re doing this to Gaza as a tech demo in preparation for using it as crowd control for undesirables in the U.S. and Europe.
You rarely disappoint, beholder.
“The public is okay with genocide once again; the protests against it weren’t large enough.”
It takes a special kind of idiocy to reckon that people protesting something means they are OK with that something.
“And soon the chickens will come home to roost — we’re doing this to Gaza as a tech demo in preparation for using it as crowd control for undesirables in the U.S. and Europe.”
We’re not doing this to Gaza; Israel is.
USA is complicit, more than anyone else.
—
Honestly, you for fucking sure come across as [defeatist | demoralizer | alarmist], with your always counselling despair and blaming anyone but the actual malefactors.
(Israel, not Germany)
Apparently even previously MAGA-friendly Joe Rogan has his hard limits when it comes to osculating Bibi as an invited guest:
Kulinski still drags Rogan hard because Rogan teabagged Trump after saying he wouldn’t host him before he eventually did. Rogan is still a POS (though I’m ok with him on NewsRadio). I can only take Kulinski in small doses anymore as I find many of his tropes and mannerisms off-putting, but he puts out some interesting takes from time to time.
Two words: Warsaw Ghetto
Where I live if you put out food for bears, deer, elk etc to lure them in so you can shoot them you go to jail.
And yeah, fck Coyne. Some Jew he is. The fcker never goes to temple. He just likes to play martyr.
ealoc @23
I only found out about this a year or 2 ago. Was it not big news at the time? I remember Mordechai Vanunu but not this. I am totally unsurprised that Israel helped South Africa develop nuclear weapons.
Some points some person Friesen made that Coyne latched onto in the blog post where he disses PZ:
Hypocritical given fuckface Coyne and his fanbase probably think Jewish right of return is sacrosanct. And it’s a bias implicitly built upon the Palestinian demographic time bomb that factored at least partly into Arik’s calculus of Disengagement. Well maybe Arik’s own corruption allegations played a role 20 or so years ago which is ironic given Bibi’s recent calculus. And Hamas was quite the enemy of convenience for Bibi weren’t they?
One wonders what Bibi was aware of as Hamas conveniently took the flames off his own tuchus.
On Coyne’s own blog there were intimations of something in the air from an acquaintance as he had traveled to Israel before October 7th. Now he’s looking to be at least MEMRI adjacent. And he attracts right wing nutters like botflies.
Another point:
I would go with the fait accompli part which probably makes me something of a crypto-Zionist. Expedience. Israel exists. I don’t buy the moral necessity part given the extremes of Zionism through the ages which have now exceeded Ze’ev Jabotinsky‘s own Revisionist ideology. At least he had the integrity to recognize nascent Israel as a colonization project unlike the many liars today. There were BTW multiple Zionisms as there are many ways of being anti-Zionist, though I lean more into Israel critical.
And the nearly extinguished part Coyne quotes does much heavy lifting. That was important in the 40s and into the 50s in the aftermath of the Shoah and also to accommodate Jews uprooted from their Arab homelands. I think a Jewish homeland should still be a thing. Whether it’s as a two-state thingy which is my unpopular preference…hopefully. Hamas shows there are assholes on the other side of the equation just as there exist settler extremists in the West Bank (fuck the idea of Judea and Samaria that goons in Coyne’s comments keep vomiting up).
As for “only one of its kind” there is the US no? Hitch-22 is on the nose (long set up):
And an outcome:
And Hitch’s coup de grâce (ouch):
I wonder if Coyne would consider Hitchens antisemitic for this and especially his essay in Blaming the Victims or the easy to find stuff Hitchens says on Youtube.
Jerry Coyne is a right wing crank.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Jerry_Coyne
Hemidactylus, Hitchens was kinda complicated, but kinda not.
Most friendly to Arabs, not too friendly to Islam.
Went there and actually copped it.
https://harpers.org/archive/1991/01/why-we-are-stuck-in-the-sand/
FWIW, I got bubblebot to adumbrate that article:
“Here’s the core signal from Hitchens’s “Why We Are Stuck in the Sand”:
He dissects decades of U.S. foreign policy in the Persian Gulf as cynical and duplicitous—realpolitik masked by diplomatic euphemism and military gestures. Rather than supporting democratic or secular Arab reformers, successive U.S. administrations backed feudal monarchies and manipulated factions like the Kurds, often abandoning them once strategic advantage shifted.
Hitchens’s own injury in Kurdistan underscored the human cost of these machinations. He portrays American policy as addicted to short-term interests, using covert signals and tilts to manage proxies, yet rarely offering moral clarity or principled support to Arab peoples—especially those resisting authoritarianism without theocratic baggage.
His conclusion: the real casualty isn’t just regional stability, but the credibility of democratic governance itself.”
[oops: link is https://harpers.org/archive/1991/01/why-we-are-stuck-in-the-sand/ ]
@7:
I’m afraid that you fell for the “nice” version of European great powers forming a “State of Israel in the Palestine Mandate,” formerly part of the Ottoman Empire. The real conversation among the decisionmakers was closer to this:
We really, really don’t want to return highly-productive land within the Great Nations of Europe to Jews it was stolen from (or at least stolen from their ancestors). Let’s instead send them where they think they want to go on a religious basis — a religious basis from 2000 years ago, in an environment utterly foreign to their thoroughly European skills, cultures, etc. Plus, that way we don’t have to deal with this Saturday sabbath thing any more around here, because we can propagandize them into all wanting to go. Hell, we’ll just encourage their own internal propaganda, and help misguided zealots turn “Next year, in Jerusalem” from a holiday pilgrimmage to daily living in a desert! They’ll think it’s gonna be great!
Oh, there are people there already? Screw ’em; it’s too important to remove reminders of our great nations’ own histories of antisemitism from daily view. Besides, most of the people in Palestine now (that is, 1915-1945) are themselves refugees who’ve been kicked out of other areas — often on religious grounds — so they can just either suck it up or move further along — western Cyrenaica [Libya], maybe.
• • •
This may not be the story that has made its way into general histories, but it fits the actual behavior of European governments and “governing classes” — especially the immediate reaction to the Balfour Declaration — all too well. Whatever “generosity of providing a homeland” there was probably was less motivating than getting them out of European view.
@24 Raven:
Infinite Thread: Trump halted an Agent Orange cleanup
@4 raven:
Infinite Thread: IDF soldiers ordered to shoot deliberately at unarmed Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid
Lately I learned that there is no thing as the right of a state to exist. Which makes sense, since states aren’t actual things; they do not exist like trees, rocks, and human bodies do. They are mere agreements between one state and an other that there is some imaginary line that separates them and that none should interfere with what happens on the other side of that line. An agreement that, I may notice, was violated more times by the US than by any other country in human history.
*no such thing
I came to the conclusion that I did not support Israel’s right to exist some time ago. I think governments exist to serve their people. They often don’t serve them well and certainly not evenly or fairly but that is their sole purpose for existence. Fine tuning this and hashing out the details are where politics comes from.
Israel claims the Palestinians as its people. But it does not serve them. Instead, it starves, mass murders, and commits genocide upon them. Even if one conveniently begins history on October 7th, 2023 there are problems with the actions Israel has undertaken. Where is the opposition that the IDF is “defending” against? It seems to be nonexistent and has been for some time. Yet the attacks and atrocities continue. How do the acts of around 1,500 people justify the mass murder of tens of thousands of people? This would be like me asking you to stand still so I could shoot you because someone from your city committed a murder once. The argument seems to be that simply being part of the same economy or being under the same government means you’ve supported that person. Many people in the US should be especially disturbed by this facile justification considering what the US under Trump and others has done recently.
I’ve never understood the argument that “they would do it to us if they could.” Wherever this pops up it always seems to be an admission of guilt and a justification of horrible acts to avoid punishment. Why would the solution to acting like a terrible person be to continue acting like a terrible person? And even aside from the target of this villainy what sort of message does that send to everyone else? It’s a nonsense kneejerk reaction. And where’s the end point of that lie? When can the horrible acts stop? The answer is staring us in the face here. It does not end unless one side or the other no longer exists. And like this genocide you can’t possibly justify that ending based on anything that actually happened before it.
It doesn’t really surprise me that Israel is acting this way. As individuals an abuse victim will sometimes inflict the abuses they know so well on other people. And something similar is why people feel like they’ve made the same mistakes their parents did when raising their own children. But they do not have to. We can try to learn from those experiences and be better. It is to the great shame of the nation of Israel that it has taken a lesson as important as the holocaust and refused to learn from it.
That the foundation of Israel would unavoidably lead to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is a no-brainer. Israel is supposed to be a mono-ethic, mono-cultural, mono-religious state. How else were they going to achieve that without wiping the indigenous inhabitants of the earth? We could have seen this coming 78 years ago.
The official death toll has now passed sixty thousand lives lost :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/02/infinite-thread-xxxvi/comment-page-3/#comment-2273355
From this weeks episode of Media Watch :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/episodes/gaza/105582952
Ruth @22, the other option is a two state solution. Supposing that somehow you manage to make place for such a state, you have the problem that its immediate neighbor has had a history of genocide against its people. That neighbor also has all the weapons it wants. So either you give this new Palestinian state all the weapons it needs to defend against its neighbor or you force the neighbor to disarm. If you can’t achieve any, then you are have not eliminated the chance of yet another genocide. So basically the same suffering and destruction as that that you claim dissolving the state of Israel will trigger. I’ve noticed that somehow the pain and suffering that is happening now to Palestinians somehow is not so bad as the hypothetical suffering that could happen to Israelis.
“ I no longer support the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist.”
Like @40 Ianir I came to that conclusion some time ago. But by different reasoning; nations do not have rights, people do. And yes, by that reasoning the USA does not have a “right to exist” either. Also, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 3). That includes Jews, Palestinians, Kurds, Central American refugees, LBGTQ+ people, and so on. “Everyone” is pretty clear.
That document is a good read; unfortunately too many countries that voted for it seem to ignore whatever provisions are inconvenient at any given time. Text is here .
This might be a language issue but I don’t understand what does “Israel has a right to exist” even mean. Israel is not a person, it is a political entity, how can it have rights? Does Yugoslavia have a right to exist? How about Czechoslovakia?
lotharloo, it’s exactly the same as ‘human rights’, which you presume exist via your phrasing.
An artificial abstraction, not an actual entitlement.
A set of wonderful values, useful until they are not.
(If it makes you feel good, a go-for-it type of thing, but unless sustained by force of law, not really a thing)
lotharloo, if something has a right to defend itself then we can talk about its right to exist.
Israel is a state for the Jews. That means if you are not a Jew, that state is not for you. They have indeed Palestinian citizens, but Israel makes sure that the Jewish population is in the majority. This entire conflict with Palestinians would have been solved if Israel would give any Palestinian the Israeli citizenship. Even now, doing that and letting all Palestinians move wherever in Israel would stop the conflict. However, a state with that many Palestinians in it will not have Jews as a majority so it stops being a country for the Jews and becomes a country for all its citizens, but with a large proportion of Jews. That is what I assume @pz means when it says Israel doesn’t have a right to exist, it doesn’t have a right to exist as a country only for the Jews, it should become a normal 21st century country, a country for all of its citizens.
A two-state solution is a reward for the theft of land by the Zionists. The only solution is a single state where every citizen has equal rights.
I propose, instead, a zero-state solution: Stop pretending that “tribal allegiance” actually defines “nation-state.” That includes everybody in the Levant, which has millennia of demonstrating that one cannot trust any one tribe given complete autonomy (or sufficient dominance in a state-like entity) to not be atrocity-laden assholes.
Of course, it’s not just the Levant; Northern Ireland is another really obvious example, as are at least half a dozen postcolonial “nations” in Africa. Then there’s the breakup of the Soviet Union to consider. Yeah, all of those are
counterexamples.@ ^ rietpluim : Yet the two state solution is the one that has been internationally favoured and most sought and is being sought even now with a growing momentum to establishing it. There’s a number of other different solutions that have been proposed too such as the “Palestinian emirates” (Bantustans really!) plan* and one involving a sort of confederation between Jordanians and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza although these are not popular and have many ethical and political issues and also won’t happen.
Realistically, the problem I see for your 1 state solution is that Israel exists now and has a population of ten million people most of whom – 80%** – were born there. Plus Israel has a very powerful well equipped and technologically advanced military including its arsenal of nuclear WMDs and its not so secret ultimate Scorched Earth policy, the Samson Option*** in which if Israel is facing destruction it would take the rest of the world as we know it with it. How do you make Israel or any other nuclear armed power then do something that it’s govt would see as suicidal?
There’s growing momentum and pressure on Israel to allow a Palestinian state to exist alongside it. It has over-reached with its Gaza genocide and become an international pariah. Netanyahu’s govt is close to collapse and he and his extremist far right govt cannot last forever If the ends then Netanyahu will have to face fresh elections and possible defeat and his corruption trial.
A new more moderate govt in a nation that shows bene clearly shown that the world won’t accept the genocide against Palestinians will hopefully be forced to allow a Palestinian state. A two state solution is something I can see them being realistically forced into accepting by global pressure, sanctions and politics. I’m not so sure that they could ever be forced to accept a one state solution that effectively ends their existence.
Thinking of which, the whole region will soon be – indeed already is – facing the consequences of Global Overheating. I don’t know of any specific projections for sea level rise impacts on Israel but Gaza is coastal on flat plain by a fast broiling sea as is Tel Aviv. Heatwaves are already pushing the boundaries of what life can survive in parts of South West Asia. I’ve seen on fb a map showing areas of our planet that will become uninhabitable and region that may well include the whole so-called “Holy land.” It might be wise for everyone there to start planning on how they all leave and where they can all go to survive. Nobody wins, nobody gets to keep the land because the land becomes unfit for anyone to permanently settle or live on – or shallow but increasingly sea floor. So, there’s that and consequent flow of refugees fleeing that to ultimately think of here if we want a really cheery scenario. (Does that really need a sarc tag?)
Finally an old Isaac Asimov quote seems to sum things up perfectly :
Page 421, I Asimov :A memoir, Bantam Books, 1994.
.* See – and note this is NOT something I support or an advocating here :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Emirates_Plan
.** See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel#Demographics
.*** See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
@ ^ Sigh. Ofc, spellcheck doesn’t catch missing words so for clarity :
If the war ends then Netanyahu will have to face fresh elections and possible defeat..
…the land becomes unfit for anyone to permanently settle or live on – or shallow but increasingly deeper sea floor.
Plus Asimov quote can be found online in more context here :
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/93498-the-earth-should-not-be-cut-up-into-hundreds-of
Many countries have have recognised Palestine -and France and England are now going to be soon added as well as us here in Oz too it seems :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-30/anthony-albanese-waiting-for-right-moment-on-palestinian-state/105593298
Plus see here : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-30/will-australia-follow-the-uk-and-france-and-move/105593350
As well as the list of nations recognising Palestine here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_Palestine
JM:
How is it exactly like that? If someone violates John Morales right to exist, we call it a murder and it is immoral. But countries ceasing to exist is not necessarily a murder; it is simply a drastic political event which could be good or bad.
Countries are political entities and they might not even have any particular values attached to them. The exact definition obviously gets very technical and you get a lot of historical examples of things that get called “countries” that lie at extremes of the definitions but basically, the things you need for a country are borders, a government, sovereignty, likely a flag and so on. For example, the British has been very historically good at manufacturing “countries”.
@zakalwe:
Yeah the “right to defend itself” also confuses me for a similar reason, although probably less so because at least you can argue that there are defined guidelines as to how a country can respond to external threats but still it is a bit confusing to call them “rights” the same we consider various human rights.
@StevoR:
Right now the most likely outcome is the combination of genocide plus ethnic cleansing: kill around 500k to 1M Palestinians in Gaza, make the place unlivable, then negotiate some deals with the surrounding Arab countries, facilitate migration until a minority is left in the region, i.e., thin out the Palestinian numbers until Israel can absorb the remaining ones. I am not sure if you have seen the polls coming from Israel, but the vast majority Israelis support ethnic cleansing: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-05-28/ty-article-magazine/.premium/yes-to-transfer-82-of-jewish-israelis-back-expelling-gazans/00000197-12a4-df22-a9d7-9ef6af930000
This is from the same survey:
So basically 1 in 5 Israelis supports “no moral constraints”, i.e., fucking kill them all. That’s insane.
Link here: https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jewish-israelis-support-expelling-gazans
@tedw: I don’t have any problem with that. I think the same logic applies to any group of people. That’s why the whole “corporations are people” thing is so absurd. Groups don’t need to be fetishized and given some sacrosanct rights of their own. We already know that whatever extras they’re given will be used and abused by whoever controls the group at that moment. Just because some random jackass can puppet around a group and pretend to act in the interests of everyone in it doesn’t really justify giving them extra rights you or I wouldn’t have. Trump is a great example of that. Even the terrible ideas he campaigned on he somehow manages to screw up and make noticeably worse.
lotharloo, remember there’s a commenter using the handle ‘JM’ here, and they are not me.
Anyway, silly question given you yourself quoted the answer.
Q: “How is it exactly like that?”
A: “An artificial abstraction, not an actual entitlement.
A set of wonderful values, useful until they are not.”
Exactly the same as pink means girls and blue means boys.
Exactly the same as the “laws of war”.
They are only ideas, not actual things.
Legal fictions, sometimes enforced by violence, other times ignored.
Tell ya what: I hereby give you the right to live for a thousand years. :)
—
Anyway, I had a chat with the chatbot, which is not as slow as some people.
Quoth it:
Israel does claim a “right to exist”—but not as a codified legal entitlement under international law. The claim is political and moral, not juridical.
🔹 Official Basis: Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence asserts its legitimacy through historical continuity, international endorsements (e.g. Balfour Declaration, UN Partition Plan), and moral imperatives following the Holocaust. While it doesn’t use the phrase “right to exist,” it functions as the foundational articulation of that claim.
🔹 Diplomatic Usage: Since the 1970s, Israeli leaders have increasingly used the phrase “right to exist” in diplomatic contexts, especially as a precondition for peace negotiations with Arab states and Palestinian entities.
🔹 Legal Position: Scholars like John Dugard and others argue that no state has a legal “right to exist” under international law. States exist through recognition and membership in international bodies—not through inherent legal rights.
So yes, Israel does officially assert a right to exist—but it’s a political and rhetorical construct, not a legal one. Your earlier challenge was valid: the phrase implies a legal claim, but the actual assertion is rooted in historical narrative and diplomatic framing, not enforceable law.
Canada has now said that itwillrecognise Palestine as well further building momentum to international acceptance of a Palestinian nation :
Source : https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-31/canada-to-recognise-palestinian-state/105593946
@55- 56 lotharloo : Yeah, the polling and predominating public opinion of Israelis -and of Palestinians too – is horrendous but perhaps understandable given their education and lived experiences and will not decide whether palestinian statehgood occurs here.
@StevoR
They keep saying so, but the two-state solution seems more like an excuse for Western nations to stand around and do nothing.
You’re never going to get your “more moderate” Zionist government. This is what Zionism looks like. Everything you’re suggesting sounds you’re afraid of making the genocidal monsters angry, so you’re walking on eggshells. Meanwhile the rest of us have realized, at some point or another, that the genocidal regime is illegitimate and it should have all support to it cut off.
— ah, yes, the ‘they’ who do things.
“Meanwhile the rest of us have realized, at some point or another, that the genocidal regime is illegitimate and it should have all support to it cut off.”
And so you did everything you possibly could to make sure that Trump won the election, because you wanked on about ‘genocide Joe’.
(This is what it looks like when you’ve shredded any vestige of credibility, O provocateur)
@ Trump enabler & probable bad faith troll beholder :
Because the concerted recognition push from middle ranking powers like France, Canada & here in Oz is “nothing”in your view? People speaking out stromgly, criticising Netanyahu and using the rthreat of recognition which netanyahu is shouting and screaming about is “nothing”to you? Because nothing would satisfy you -except maybe youaresatisified with Trump’s plan that you beholder ehelpe to enable? You do know that the blood of every Gazan that has been genocided under Far Worse Genocide Trump is on your hands since YOU worked solomg and hard pre-election tosee him elected right?
Anyhow, your one state plan – (1) what have you done to try and help make that happen?
(2) Who is actually pushing for that and what are the chances of it happeneing?
(3) Why am I even asking questions I fully expect you to just ignore asd you always do?
Answer for (3) is ofc because it further exposes your bad faith and lack of character and credibility her egiven the predictable non-answer from you.
The current govt sithe most extreme one Israel has ever had. Every other historical Israeli govt is more moderate than this one so we’ve already sene more moderate govts notablythos e of Ehud Barak , Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres
Clarity fix & expanison :
The current govt is the most extreme far right wing one that Israel has ever had. Every other historical Israeli govt is more moderate most of them much more so than this one. For examples those of Ehud Barak who genuinely came close to a two state solution in the early 2000’s along with Bill Clinton & Yasser Arafat.* The govt of Yitzhak Rabin who was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli extremist incited by Netanyahu’s hate campaign following Rabin’s proposing and supporting a two state solution following the incitement of Netanyahu in and Shimon Peres***, Rabin’s deputy who also tried to make peace with a two state solution and follow in Rabin’s footsteps as well.
Given the above reality, expecting less extremist and more moderate Israeli govts to follow when Netanyahu’s govt eventually falls is entirely reasonable – especially with Israel paying a heavy price in global reputation and hopefully in economic sanctions & isolation for what it is doing now.
These (Rabin’s, Pere’s & Barak’s) are hardly obscure govts or figures and I find it hard to believe you are genuinely that ignorant of the past history here and the uber-extreme nature of the present Israeli govt – especially given your supposed self-proclaimed prioritising of this issue above all others e.g. Democracy, Climate, stopping Fascism in your professed excuse for your enablement of Trump. So, again, evidence for your disingenuous bad faith dubious nature on this blog.
So, beholder, are satisfied with Trump’s plan that you, beholder, helped to enable by attacking the ONLY ALTERNATIVE candidate for the Presidency?
You were warned. This is just what I and others predicted and said would happen. But you insisted on supported Trump via Stein instead. Why?
Is this not the outcome you expected and if not why not?
You cannot now seriously expect anyone to take seriously the idea that Kamala Harris let alone the former President Joe Biden would have done worse on Gaza. After all, the Trump Gaza plan we’re seeing occur here bears whose name and why? Trumps because to global shock and horror , he was the one who proposed it. Just as Trump was the one to actually move the USA’s embassy to Jerusalem and have a settlement named in his honour during his first term – points I brought to your attention before the election as you campaigned against the Democratic party and thus de facto in favour of Trump’s far worse and more genocidal fascism.
Your absence of criticism of Trump on Gaza despite his predicted Far WORSE genocide is noted. Of course, it would now be hypocritical of you given your efforts in making this and so much more and worse happen. You do know that the blood of every Gazan that has been genocided under Far Worse Genocide Trump is on your hands since YOU worked so long and hard pre-election to see him rather than her elected right?
But now, beholder, you accuse me of “walking on eggshells in fear” for the same people that you worked to elect and empower. Go figure huh?
.* See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Camp_David_Summit
.** See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Yitzhak_Rabin
.*** See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimon_Peres#Oslo_peace_process_with_Palestine
@62 StevoR
Yes. Too little, too late, with so many strings attached that they’re implicitly declaring there’s no way it can happen.
Zero-calorie words from accomplices to a genocide. And yet people like StevoR eat it up because it soothes your cognitive dissonance and allows you to imagine that Israel, ultimately, will do the right thing.
Because going on drunk rambling holy screeds is your style. Even I will admit that’s part of the fun in responding to you.
@63, StevoR
to clarify:
are you saying that “if the one candidate is worse (perhaps crossing some threshold of horribleness), then attacking (does this mean any criticism at all? perhaps even if it’s true? or does the criticism also have to cross some threshold? or does attacking mean something else?) their only opponent (whoever that is, as long as they are overall less horrible to some degree) will be regarded as enabling the worse candidate”?
Brian Pansky @65: To clarify: beholder, and a few others, urged progressives not to vote for Kamala Harris because she was not progressive enough. In effect, he favoured a Trump victory.
He, and the others, are accelerationists; they want things to get worse so that they can, somehow, magically, then get better. They really don’t give a shit about the suffering that entails for millions in the US and abroad.
Hope that helps.
Thanks for the, er, “clarification” there, Rob. Your desperate historical revisionism is still in full swing, I see.
If you repeat a falsehood a thousand times, does that make it true?
“If you repeat a falsehood a thousand times, does that make it true?”
You’re the expert at repeating falsehoods thousands times, and you still don’t know?
(Heh)
@68. beholder : What Rob Grigjanis said was true NOT false.
In the last – both senses of word – American election, beholder constantly and viciously attacked the ONLY ACTUAL ALTERNATIVE to Trump and his cult’s Fascist party.
Thereby helping enable a Trump victory via indirect but effective means – undermining the vote of and chances of the actually MORE progressive party and helping outright Trumpist fascism to triumph when we left and progressives absolutely had to unify behind Kamala Haris and do everything possible to ensure that she NOT he became POTUS. A terrible betrayal with unthinkably, incalculably bad consequences that we are now seeing occur every day. An outright evil choice – that’s what you made and did and worked and de facto in reality, in effect in practice voted for beholder,.
People can, of course, go back to those old threads and see for themselves.
Very Trumpian this denial of history and pretence of doing something other than what you actually did and your refusal to accept and face up to it..
How stupid do you, beholder, think the rest of us are? Do you think we can’t go back and check? Think we don’t have memories. We have and we can and you stand condemned by the evidence.
@65. Brian Pansky : To clarify I wa s specifuically tlaking about a specific election with specific choices and consequences that stem from them.
Specifically ther choice between the candidates and their policies for the 2024 United States of America election where we had a relatively progressive – in specifically USA terms – Democratic party with its Presidential nominee Kamala Harris versus outright fasdcist and the hiostorically worst POTUS ever Far Worse Genocide Donald Trump running.
Beholder sided with Trump. They claimd they did so via a third party spoiler & useful tool of the Fascists Stein who had ZERO real chance of doing anything other than being a third party spoiler taking votes from the relatively progressive pary and benefuitting the outright fascist one.
Who did you side with, support and vote for? Kamala Harris vs Trump. Who do you think should have been supported and who opposed in those specific circumstances out of those two – and ONLY two – options?
Are there legitimate criticisms to be made of Kamala Harris and the Democratic party? Of course. Was there a time and a place for them – yes and the lead up to and election campaugn was NOT the right time or place for them inthe circumstacnes where EVERYTHING possible had to be done to stop Trumpist Fascism. Should the entire Left wing of politic sinthe UDSA have unified behind, supported and worked tosee Kamala elected? Yes. Shoudl Stein, West and the other useful tools of Fascism have dropped out and refused to be useful tols of fascism? Obviously!
What part of this exactly do you find unclear?
@64. Trump enabler and de facto Trump voter and bad faith troll beholder :
Again, you ignore the alternatives and lack of alternatives. What would satisfy you and how likely is it? No national leader that I am aware of ha s seriously advocated the 1 state solution. No body is pressing for it. It is simply not going to happen.
Metaphorically speaking, beholder, you demand a unicorn, demanding the value of Pi be altered to something it isn’t then throw a destructive tantrum when you find you cannot get it that stops you getting a metaphorical horse. Your ideal won’t happen – so you are attacking the chances of getting something good that might actually happen if enough people work to make it so.
Words do not have calories. They do have consequences like you throwing away all your credibility and helping Trump get elected by attacking the alternative. The right thing is obviously a subjective judgement and there are things that are right that are also basically appealing to wave a magic wand so X happens vs things that are right that can actually be accomplished in the real world. For instance, electing Stein was a magic wand example versus electing Kamala was an example of what could have been done if people like you and maybe Musk hadn’t prevented it.
Not drunk – tired and my hands are stuffed with clumsy fingers and I suck at typing. Yes, I guess I have a style of response -as do you.
My style is honest and in good faith and based on evidence and what is actually possible in reality.
Yours is none of those things.
PS. Awfully ironic I think that beholder talks about me suppsoedly writing “holy” screeds when he is a fully apid up spokesperson for the catastrophic in reality “Purity Disunity “mob that got Trumpelected twice due to their refusal to face reality and make prgamatic effectiev choices to see the less bad beat the worst of all possible worsts.
Also I swear this computer switches bloody letters around on me, typos-wise. Sigh.
I got the bot to translate your writing into non-typoed intended meaning, StevoR:
‘Awfully ironic, I think, that the beholder talks about me supposedly writing “holy” screeds when he is a fully paid-up spokesperson for the catastrophic-in-reality “Purity Disunity” mob that got Trump elected twice due to their refusal to face reality and make pragmatic, effective choices to see the less bad beat the worst of all possible worlds.’
I don’t see that happening anytime soon. There is no appetite for moderation in Israel and the opinion polls confirm this. The main appetite is replacing Netanyahu because he is tainted by scandals. The Israeli politics by large has no big problem with the general policies of the current right wing government.
@ ^ lotharloo : Yes – but public opinion polls and polls generally are always only a snapshot intime and can and do change fairly rapidly. They can also be wrong eg polling saying HRC would beat Trump and the Indigenous Voice to Parlt here in Oz would pass easily with about 80% support before the Referendum occured. Two very painful examples sadly.
Beholder and other fools who think the two parties in the USA are the same; please note that No Other Land filmmaker Awdah Hathaleen, was recently murdered allegedly by Israeli settler :
(Emphasis added.)
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Awdah_Hathaleen#Killing
So one party and govt has sanctioned settlers who have literally killed Palestinians whilst the other regime currently in power and already known to be the most anti-Palestinian ever have lifted those sanctions.
The. Parties. Are. NOT. equally. Bad. Never were.
^ Also worth noting that one party – the Democratic party is the one that has Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib sitting as one of their Congressional representatives whilst the alternative Repugs party (that beholder & the “Purity Disunity mob effectively chose instead) has got the genocidally anti-Palestinian sociopath Randy Fine as one of their sitting representatives. See :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/05/22/tragically-were-going-to-have-to-nuke-florida/
.***
Note a youtube clip worth seeing / hearing. Powerful sorta poem-y thing here – Chris Hedges: The Gaza Riviera a baker’s dozen minutes long.
Plus Owen Jones new clip here – Israel Is Shooting Babies In The Head – Gaza Doctor Nick Maynard – 31 min long. The title of which says it all here.
Though I have to say that the news from Israel are becoming ever more repugnant. This could become a real genocide, and one of the real bad ones. Taking proportionality into account, they may yet outdo us Germans (at least if the entirety of Gaza is starved to death). I pray this shit ends. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/02/gaza-famine-starvation-crisis-israel
The good cop is not the same as the bad cop! The cops are not equally bad! Wait, they switched roles again?
How stupid do you think the rest of us are, StevoR?
Topic is Israel, beholder.
StevoR has you down pat; all you have is empty bluster.
All you’d have to do to prove him wrong is to quote any comment by you that contradicts his claims about your comments. Or even just dispute the substance of them, instead of empty negations and bullshit bluster.
The ‘fun’ in responding to you is that sense of virtue when one is upholding truth and being quite correct.
Indisputably correct, that’s the way to be.
But sure, you like to pick on drunken people — though I gotta say you’re getting the worst of it, the wrong end of the stick. After all, you’ve yet to show how StevoR has been wrong about you in any way.
(You are exposed, and you can’t hide)
@79. Trump enabler, de facto Trump voter and bad faith troll beholder : Projecting much?
Your lack of addressing a single one of the points and questions I raised for you is again notable. Clearly you cannot face reality or give actual honest answers to good questions here. As per usual from you.
Weird and utterly irrelevant rambling about supposed cops is not a valid or legimtiate response here – it is you who very clearly considers the rest of us reading and commenting here to be stupid. I do not.