Hamas strike on Israel - Threadbans in op - mod warning in OP updated 19/10/23

They absolutely did and anybody with any shred of human decency and empathy in them is totally repulsed by such crimes. There's no defending any of it. Not remotely.

But it is relevant to point out that all this didn't happen in a vacuum, and that the death toll in this conflict is heavily skewed towards Palestinian death.

The crimes of the Provisional IRA were repulsive, but again, they didn't happen in a vacuum.

9/11 didn't happen in a vacuum either. It was grotesque evil, but it didn't happen in a vacuum.

Sadly, when you treat a people like **** for a very long period, the inevitability is some of them will start behaving like **** towards you. Some of them will become radicalised and start believing extreme ****. Because they're brutalised and they become nihilists. It doesn't make these crimes right, far from it, but it is necessary context.

Israel is a brutal regime towards those who are inconvenient to them. The existence of Israel itself didn't happen in a vacuum, but the great historical outrage that was perpetrated on the Jewish people does not make Israel's behaviour acceptable. Benjamin Netanyahu is a very bad man and is one of the last people you'd want in charge in this situation.

Nobody wants to do context or nuance with this topic.

And it isn't just Muslims that do these sorts of crimes. Palestinians themselves were the victims of Lebanese Christian militias at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982. The IDF, who were in Lebanon as "peacekeepers", allowed the Lebanese Christian militias in to butcher them. Thousands of innocent Palestinians were slaughtered. Serbs butchered Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica and elsewhere. It wasn't Muslims that perpetrated the Holocaust.

Israel sees things a particular way because of the history of the Jewish people, but it doesn't change the fact that Israel was created by a war which ethnically cleansed the Palestinian people off the land which now makes up Israel, and the fact that the remaining Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank are systematically oppressed by Israel.

The Palestinians also face an unsolvable problem which the blacks in South Africa faced for a long time but were eventually able to overcome and break down - that of western support for its oppressor.

But western support for Israel is much, much, much firmer than support for the apartheid regime in South Africa ever was, and the demographics are much more in Israel's favour than they were in favour of the apartheid regime, and the apartheid regime in South Africa had no great historical outrage to constantly reference to shore up international support.

It does not matter what Palestine does, it could become a nation of Mary Poppinses for 100 years, but it would still never enjoy any genuinely influential international backing. Justice for Palestine simply does not matter as far as western governments are concerned. Palestinians know this. This is why Hamas has become the pre-eminent power in Gaza. Utter desperation.

The situation is totally hopeless, and utterly depressing.

Politicians react because they have to

A lot of security is overrated too .

There's always a way to perpetrate the unexpected