Philosophy Now Forum

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 7:09 pm

accelafine wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 7:07 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 7:04 pm

So a person dies of a heart attack and you think that hilarious.
What a wanker !

Yep. I don't care about psychopahtic old cun ts who applaud the torture of children. He had an easy death. Why the f would I give a shit about that?

But you are okay with 4000 Palestinian children?
Because, what, they are just animals?

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2023 4:39 am

Gary Childress wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2023 11:22 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2023 7:56 pm
There would be. But it wouldn't be easy to say how you'd do it with any equity, or with any chance of success.

Hamas killed 1400 innocent civilians...men, women, children, babies, grandmothers...with rape, torture, disembowling, burning, shooting...and still has 240 innocent civilian hostages -- or maybe only 238, since two more were found dead today. And they're still shooting rockets, and trying to kill the Israelis. Meanwhile, they throw their own people into harm's way in order to protect themselves, and shoot their own civilians when they heed Israeli warnings and try to leave the danger areas.

So if you can tell Israel how to deal with these people, who have sworn to die killing Jews and will kill themselves and all their own people in a heartbeat, so that Israel can deal with them in a more humane way, I'm sure Israel will listen. For it does not serve Israeli interests to be involved in civilian deaths of either side, and Israel would gladly solve their problem with no further loss of civilian life.

So what do you want them to do, that Hamas will allow them to do?

Perhaps you are right. Hamas has demonstrated that it is beyond the point where other human beings can reason with them. Unfortunately, civilians that they are hiding among are caught in the line of fire.

Only because Hamas is holding them there. It was never by accident that they build their terrorist infrastructure directly under hospitals, schools and mosques...it was strategic. They were daring Israel to come after them, at the extreme peril of Palestinian civilian lives. And when Hamas butchered 1400 innocent citizens of Israel, they were forcing Israel's hand.

The whole things has been staged and orchestrated by Hamas.

Walker wrote: ↑Thu Dec 14, 2023 5:11 pmWow. Looks like a good explanation from Immanuel Can can also effectively persuade the once unpersuadable Gary Childress. What's next? Gary telling us that God is good?

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 7:43 pm Just the excuse he needed to lay waste thousands of homes and to slaughter 20,000 civilians.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 8:34 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 7:43 pm Just the excuse he needed to lay waste thousands of homes and to slaughter 20,000 civilians.

Well, come on, now. NOBODY says the causalty figures are even close to that high. You're doing drama.

On 7 October 2023, more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, mostly civilians, were killed and 248 taken hostage during the initial attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip.[1][2]

As of 10 December, over 19,000 Palestinians and Israelis in all have been killed in the Israel–Hamas war, including 63 journalists (56 Palestinian, 4 Israeli and 3 Lebanese) and over 100 UNRWA aid workers. Over 17,700 Palestinians (the majority of whom were women and children) in the Gaza Strip have been killed according to the Gaza Health Ministry. A further 248 Palestinians were also killed in the West Bank by Israel military and settlers, and nine Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in the West Bank in the same period. Casualties have also occurred in other parts of Israel, in southern Lebanon, and Syria. The casualties of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war include combatants and civilians from Israel, Palestine, and numerous other nations.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 9:14 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 8:34 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 7:43 pm Just the excuse he needed to lay waste thousands of homes and to slaughter 20,000 civilians.

Well, come on, now. NOBODY says the causalty figures are even close to that high. You're doing drama.

You are as blind as a bat.

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 9:14 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 8:34 pm

Sculptor wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 7:43 pm Just the excuse he needed to lay waste thousands of homes and to slaughter 20,000 civilians.

Well, come on, now. NOBODY says the causalty figures are even close to that high. You're doing drama.

You are as blind as a bat.

Now tell me how killing ONE child is not immoral

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 10:56 pm So now you're going to argue that, in its attempt to weed out Hamas, who killed 1,400 innocent civilians, and still holds 238 captive, that the IDF has killed 20,000 civilians for fun? None have been killed by Hamas, even by its provocation of the war and its insistence on killing Jews? And Hamas is not culpable for what it did with the hospitals, schools and mosques, or for shooting its own people when they tried to flee, and that Israel wanted all this all along, though it works against them in terms of international image?

And Hamas didn't want any of this? And it would be unreasonable to ask such wonderful humanitarians as Hamas to lay down their arms and stop killing civilians, because they're actually freedom fighters who can be trusted to accept a peace brokered on their behalf?

Chen Goldstein-Almog, who, along with her three surviving children, was among the hostages released by Hamas in exchange for the release of prisoners by Israel in November.

The strangest part of her seven-week ordeal, said Chen Goldstein-Almog, formerly an Israeli hostage of Hamas, were the long, almost intimate conversations she had with her captors.

They talked about their families, their lives and the extreme danger they all faced.

One of the gunmen holding her even apologized for the killing of her husband and one of her daughters by other Hamas gunmen, she said.

“It was a mistake and against the Quran,” he told her, Ms. Goldstein-Almog remembered.

She said a long silence followed, and the room she and three of her children were being held in immediately filled with tension.

“I didn’t respond,” she said. She was distraught about their deaths, but at that moment, she said, “I didn’t feel I could express any negative feelings.”

Ms. Goldstein-Almog, 48, and the three children were kidnapped on Oct. 7 from the Kfar Aza kibbutz, near the border of Gaza and one of the worst hit during the Hamas terrorist attacks. Her husband and eldest daughter were killed.

She and the surviving children — another daughter, Agam, 17, and two sons, Gal, 11, and Tal, 9 — were released in late November as part of the exchange of prisoners between Israel and Hamas that has since ceased.

In an interview this week, she shared details about her ordeal.

She said she and the children were held together, treated “respectfully” and not physically harmed. But she said that over the course of various moves during their captivity, she had met other hostages who were badly treated, including two women who said they were sexually abused.

Mostly, they were held in a room in an apartment in Gaza, she said, with the windows closed except for a bit of fresh air in the early mornings. But the heavily armed captors also moved Ms. Goldstein-Almog and her children to different apartments, tunnels, a mosque, even a destroyed supermarket, she said.

With the Israeli military pounding Gaza, each transfer was terrifying, and the men holding them, she said, didn’t always seem to know what to do.

Describing one move, she said: “It was the middle of the night. Everything was dark. They started deliberating among themselves. I could see the helplessness on their faces.”

“When we were out into the street, in total darkness, there was a shot above us,” she continued. “We were pressed against the wall, and I could see a laser pointer, as if we were being targeted from above.”

And she was thinking: That’s our air force up there.

“It was crazy,” she said, “this absurdity.”

Her conversations with her guards sometimes went on for hours, she said, maybe because she was once a social worker and knew how to keep someone in a long, deep conversation — her only way of trying to make sure, she said, that she and the children would be safe.

The guards taught her son Gal 250 words in Arabic to keep him occupied and brought him a notebook to study. She said the family and the guards regularly discussed what to eat. Most days they survived off pita bread with cheese, usually feta. In the early days there were also a few vegetables. She said the guards told her they were members of Hamas.

The lead guard seemed educated and spoke Hebrew, she said. In the apartment where they stayed the longest, he sometimes invited the family to join in cooking in the kitchen, though even in these moments, the guards carried pistols. The guards would escort them to the bathroom on request, and allowed them to sleep.

Each member of the family had emotional ups and downs. Sometimes they would talk about what happened on Oct. 7, or would realize no cease-fire was near. The captors didn’t like it when the children cried, she said. They asked immediately for them to stop.

“And if for a moment, I would sit and sink in my thoughts,” she said, the lead captor “would directly ask me what I was thinking. I couldn’t move from room to room without an armed guard accompanying me. Once, my two sons were arguing, and the guard raised his voice at one of them, which was scary.”

There were even moments when the guards cried in front of them, she said, worried about their own families.

“We were in daily danger,” she said. “It was fear at a level we didn’t know existed.”

She couldn’t stop replaying the death of her husband, Nadav, 48, whom she started dating in high school and who was killed in front of their eyes along with their oldest daughter, Yam, 20, a soldier just two months from the end of her service.

At the end of their captivity, the lead guard turned to Ms. Goldstein-Almog and gave her a warning: Don’t go back to your kibbutz, he said. Don’t return to a place so close to Gaza. Go to Tel Aviv or somewhere farther north, she remembers him saying. Because we are coming back.

Ms. Goldstein-Almog’s response?

“Next time you come,” she said she told them, “don’t throw a grenade. Just knock on the door.”

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Dec 16, 2023 12:48 am The way I look at it is that Hamas, and all Palestinian resistance fighters,...