That was precisely the turning point honestly. It’s been a bit hit or miss on Palestine (like most English-language anything online), but I remember commenters defending that attack as “pinpoint precision” or whatever they’ve convinced themselves.
Doctors have had to pull damaged eyes out of children. People with compromised devices were out on the roads, a few blew up in public buses. Imagine driving down the road and driver in the car in front of you loses half his skull and smashes into a shop. Not so cute huh
Still what happened that day, terrorizing as it was, was easier to live with than what’s happening now.
The human shield narrative is a whole other level of mental gymnastics for me. Is there something in the water preventing people from understanding militants are people and people live in houses and houses are typically built next to other houses?
Just to be clear, these groups are (politically) in the way of a lot of internal progress. I’ve been personally threatened and intimidated by them for some political stuff I’ve done in the past. And even I feel compelled to explain how the situation is more complicated than it looks. Fighting for the right thing often involves putting aside differences, even major differences, for the greater good, so that we may live to fight another day. Yes their internal, extremely regressive politics are very dangerous. The diplomatic quagmire they worsen is also a massive problem. But these conversations are complicated and they require a lot of preamble, and they’re for us to have.
The human shield narrative is a whole other level of mental gymnastics for me. Is there something in the water preventing people from understanding militants are people and people live in houses and houses are typically built next to other houses?
I’m pretty sure that that’s something that the average person just does not understand. As both an anarchist and a proponent of civilian firearm ownership, I’ve seen and participated in many discussions with people saying that “there’s no way you can fight the government, they have tanks/bombers/nukes/etc”. Like they think the government is just going to do precision drone strikes on all the insurgents and then it’ll be over. The inevitability of “collateral damage” doesn’t occur to them, and they have no idea how insurgencies work.
People on NCD probably do know better, but some have picked a side, and confirmation bias takes over from there.
