this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
507 points (98.1% liked)
Canada
9472 readers
933 users here now
What's going on Canada?
Related Communities
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
- Alberta
- British Columbia
- Manitoba
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland and Labrador
- Northwest Territories
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut
- Ontario
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Saskatchewan
- Yukon
🏙️ Cities / Local Communities
- Calgary (AB)
- Comox Valley (BC)
- Edmonton (AB)
- Greater Sudbury (ON)
- Guelph (ON)
- Halifax (NS)
- Hamilton (ON)
- Kootenays (BC)
- London (ON)
- Mississauga (ON)
- Montreal (QC)
- Nanaimo (BC)
- Oceanside (BC)
- Ottawa (ON)
- Port Alberni (BC)
- Regina (SK)
- Saskatoon (SK)
- Thunder Bay (ON)
- Toronto (ON)
- Vancouver (BC)
- Vancouver Island (BC)
- Victoria (BC)
- Waterloo (ON)
- Windsor (ON)
- Winnipeg (MB)
Sorted alphabetically by city name.
🏒 Sports
Hockey
- Main: c/Hockey
- Calgary Flames
- Edmonton Oilers
- Montréal Canadiens
- Ottawa Senators
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Vancouver Canucks
- Winnipeg Jets
Football (NFL): incomplete
Football (CFL): incomplete
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
- Main: /c/CanadaSoccer
- Toronto FC
💻 Schools / Universities
- BC | UBC (U of British Columbia)
- BC | SFU (Simon Fraser U)
- BC | VIU (Vancouver Island U)
- BC | TWU (Trinity Western U)
- ON | UofT (U of Toronto)
- ON | UWO (U of Western Ontario)
- ON | UWaterloo (U of Waterloo)
- ON | UofG (U of Guelph)
- ON | OTU (Ontario Tech U)
- QC | McGill (McGill U)
Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.
💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales
- Personal Finance Canada
- BAPCSalesCanada
- Canadian Investor
- Buy Canadian
- Quebec Finance
- Churning Canada
🗣️ Politics
- General:
- Federal Parties (alphabetical):
- By Province (alphabetical):
🍁 Social / Culture
- Ask a Canadian
- Bières Québec
- Canada Francais
- First Nations
- First Nations Languages
- Indigenous
- Inuit
- Logiciels libres au Québec
Rules
-
Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I hate Hamas but the way Israel is dealing with this is horrible.
It doesn’t have to black and white or antisemitic to say that.
And yes, Hamas is playing an asymmetrical game and using the rules of engagement as a shield, but that’s still not an excuse for leveling entire cities and indiscriminately killing civilians, or blocking aid that you could instead be supervising.
The main thing is that Isreal intentionally blocked and prevented critical aid from reaching a starving population of civilians. Thats the core of the genocide case because it demonstrates motive and intentionality to hurt only the civilian population. The report that revealed this was what flipped my opinion from supporting isreals response and war objectives.
People call bombing buildings and killing civilians genocide but its an expected part of this type of war. If the enemy hides among the civilian population you can kill the civilian population. If the enemy hides in buildings and booby traps them, you can destroy the buildings.
Bibi is a fascist authoritarian, a war criminal, and is so corrupt he's facing jail when he leaves office. He is no better than Hamas.
Zionism is literally religious nationalism — which shouldn't be tolerated by ANY religion — therefore Israel IS a fascist state. Society needs to stop acting like it's okay for the abused to become the abuser because they were abused. It was never okay, and it still isn't.
He is never leaving office. In the very unlikely event that the Israeli people start to turn on him I am like 90% sure he will try to pull off a coup and/or a false flag op rather than leave peacefully and face the music
that's why he needs this war to keep going and the genocide to continue
The only people using human shields are the IDF
Dude, both sides are committing these war crimes
But the number of crimes is magnitudes greater committed by the Israelis
Really? The only "evidence" I've seen of Palestine using human shields is Israeli accusations, while I've seen multiple instances of video evidence, taken by Israel itself, of the IDF doing it.
This is unquestionably false.
You can make an extremely compelling argument about the horrors that the govt of Israel and the IDF are doing without resorting to obvious falsehoods made in defence of Hamas.
I’m not saying we need to adopt some “all sides bad” enlightened centrism bullshit. If you want to focus only on the atrocities of the govt of Israel because that’s your passion: go for it. Call them out for what they are.
But please don’t defend Hamas or pretend they aren’t also committing atrocities. They do use human shields, constantly. And the atrocities done by Hamas do not take away from the absolute horrors of what the government of Israel is actively committing.
When these falsehoods emerge, it makes the argument against Israel appear delusional and undercuts your implied objective. And it’s not necessary! There is so much widespread harm that we can point to, we don’t need spread falsehoods for that.
Speaking of obvious falsehoods, I'm going to ask you to provide a single verifiable report of Hamas using human shields from anyone not directly tied to the Israeli state.
Not the distortion of humanitarian law which assumes that the mere presence of unarmed people suspected of being affiliated with Hamas means any civilians around them are "shields", because unarmed people regardless of affiliation are not lawful combatants.
Not the absurd claim that suspected tunnels underneath civilians justify the massacre of those civilians in order to target military infrastructure.
Not the unverified testimonies of people with a history of fabricating lies on behalf of the Israeli government.
Just any single instance of someone in Hamas forcing a nearby civilian to endanger their life on their behalf, from a source that is not ultimately the Israeli government or military itself.
Quoting from the UN report "Anatomy of a genocide", I have edited out the annotations but there are sources for every single one of the claims listed if you would like to verify yourself:
The part of your question that I bolder here shows that you’re well aware that as I stated, Hamas uses human shields frequently. You just think that’s it’s justifiable, and you’re free to do that.
But don’t say it doesn’t happen. It happens every day.
No, I am well aware that the Israeli state has a long and well documented history of lying and fabricating evidence to support its genocidal goals. Just because Israel defines the entire civilian population as human shields does not make it so.
As I suspected, you will be unable to provide any independent sources or imagery of Hamas militants engaging in anything that would be recognized as human shielding under international law.
Conversely, I can provide several different examples from several different sources, which paint a clear and ongoing picture of flagrant war crimes being perpetrated by Israel. This is just the stuff that more closely aligns with "human shields", using civilians, as well as civilian structures, uniforms, and vehicles, for protection. Israel has been openly violating international law for decades, their disregard for Palestinian life and basic human rights is excruciatingly well documented.
You'll note that most of these articles do parrot all the lines from Israeli officials as their editorial boards force them to, some even repeat the claims of Hamas using human shields, but you will find none of those are tied to anything but Israeli testimonials. It's reported matter-of-factly without a shred of evidence. The Israeli crimes however, usually include video or photographic evidence of them being perpetrated.
Surely if the practice of human shielding was common for Hamas, it should be easy enough for you to provide at least one photo or video of this happening, right? All I ask is that you provide one such example, anything that shows this actually happening that isn't just an Israeli official, civilian, or militant saying it's happening. If it's common, it should not be hard to do.
Bruh it’s happened so much there’s an Israeli High Court case that specifically forbids the practice. Hasn’t prevented the practice, there are multiple documented instances, from different conflicts, that the Jewish group B’Tslem has a white paper on just the subject of IDF using human shields:
I am not saying that Israel and the IDF have not used human shields. They absolutely do and you’re 100% correct to condemn this. And I join you in this condemnation.
What am also saying is that people should stop lying in order to defend Hamas. Because you can condemn the govt of Israel without doing that. And the condemnation is more compelling when it’s not accompanied with lies of convenience.
Your comment here being a good example of how that’s done properly. Everything you said is true and it paints a damning picture that is impossible to argue against.
Except that they provided actual evidence of Israel using human shields, while all you've done is go "trust me bro, Israel would never lie to you"
I have repeatedly and consistently agreed that Israel uses human shields, because it is true.
You know just as well as I do that Hamas uses their own people as human shields. Their entire operation is to hide amongst their civilian population and infrastructure and use that as cover to attack and kill.
The difference is that you agree with the objectives of Hamas, and so you don’t want to acknowledge the horrors of the tactics they use. Seeing the situation as black and white with “your side” as the unassailable heroes and the “other side” as villains.
But I reject this childish outlook, because it’s not a movie it’s real life. The govt of Israel are indeed villains, but so are Hamas.
I see that there are still no links to evidence of Hamas using human shields in your post, and so I'm not reading it.
Citation needed.
That's a recent article. You may not have seen it.
Summary: every IDF group has a prisoner assigned to it.
It's a bit of hard read but it's out there.
What atrocities? You would think if it was actually bad Israel would allow freedom of press in Palestine. How many reporters have been injured or killed, and by whom?
They're not, for the most part. This is Israeli propaganda that really took hold, but there was never any evidence for the human shields stuff.
Yep it's actually Israel that has routinely and systematically employed captured Palestinians as human shields. For some background, there is this recent article in Haaretz stemming from anonymous IDF soldier reports, titled "In Gaza, Almost Every IDF Platoon Keeps a Human Shield, a Sub-army of Palestinian Slaves".
If anyone is distorting rules of engagement and humanitarian law, it's actually Israel. Something that has come up again and again, especially in the writing of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, is the concept of "humanitarian camouflage" and how the Israeli state has very deliberately misused terms of international humanitarian law to cynically redefine civilian people, structures, and infrastructure as military targets. I am going to quote from an article she co-authored (available here):
I highly recommend reading the three reports issued by the UN on these matters, "Genocide as colonial erasure" which focuses more on historical context, "Anatomy of a genocide" which covers more of the present patterns of conflict, and finally "More than a human can bear" which covers the widespread and systematic use of gendered and sexual violence inflicted on Palestinians.
You realize Hamas is a government, right?
They employ social workers, civil engineers, etc.
Its fine to hate their military, but dont hate the guy picking up the garbage or laying water mains.
I hate the taliban too, and they’re a government.
I don’t have anything against the common Palestinian just trying to live their life or working in the hospitals.
I think it’s very clear who the problem people are.
Yeah, the ones running Israel