Infection_Ag11 said:
jaborch99 said:
Look, if your only framework is "Hamas bad, Israel good, so anything goes"- you're missing half the picture.
Hamas absolutely committed horrifying acts. No honest person defends that. But using those horrors to justify the ongoing, collective punishment of millions - including the blockade, the bombing campaigns, and the deliberate throttling of aid flat-out ignores basic decency and international law. You can't say you care about justice and brush past the images of dead and starving children, or the credible reports from NGOs and even the U.S. government warning about famine, displacement, and mass civilian deaths.
If Israel's aim was actually to wipe out Hamas - the group, the leadership, the tunnels - after 20 months of scorched-earth tactics and with all the resources of a modern military, why haven't they succeeded? Instead, what has succeeded is erasing entire neighborhoods, cratering Gaza's infrastructure, and letting hundreds of thousands get caught in the crossfire with no way out. If you think that's all excusable - and that every adult in Gaza is equal to a Hamas militant - then you're just buying war propaganda. That doesn't make you "tough on terror"; it just makes you a cheerleader for endless war.
And let's not forget: The bigger game here isn't about "good guys vs bad guys" - it's about real people on all sides, and about the U.S. government writing blank checks (with your tax dollars) for policies that do nothing but fuel more suffering, more blowback, and more endless conflict. The same endless war logic we've seen fail over and over again.
If you're genuinely serious about justice, liberty, or any values the West is supposed to stand for, then the only morally coherent stance is this: Stop supporting collective punishment. Demand a ceasefire. Send humanitarian aid in, unimpeded. Stop treating Palestinian civilians as expendable. Call for real diplomacy instead of more bombs and more excuses. Otherwise, don't act surprised when the next round of violence comes - because as history shows (see Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria...), this kind of "solution" always begets more chaos, more enemies, and less security for everyone.
And for those quoting "Blessed are the peacemakers" - that's not just for decoration. It's a radical call to break these cycles, not perpetuate them.
This is a warped, perverse and immoral understanding of justice.
Again, this is no different than arguing that a murderer should go free in order to prevent the murderer's children from becoming fatherless. That is a perversion of justice. It's mindless social media pseudo compassion at its absolute worst.
Look, I get where you're coming from with the murderer analogyit's a gut-level kind of justice that demands punishment regardless of consequences. But that black-and-white thinking doesn't hold up when you're talking about millions of civilians trapped in a war zone, not just the guilty few.
Justice isn't about vengeance for its own sake. It's about proportionality, fairness, and protecting the innocent. Dropping collective punishment on an entire population because their government is evil doesn't make you a heroit makes you complicit in creating more hatred, more cycles of violence, and more innocent suffering.
If you really want justice, then stop cheering for policies that tear apart families, starve children, and destroy infrastructure with no clear end game except endless war. Holding people accountable is one thing. Blaming an entire population and treating them as collateral damage is something else entirelyand it's a failure of moral imagination and strategic thinking.
So yeah, call out Hamas for their crimes. But don't pretend collective punishment is justice. It's exactly the kind of pseudo-compassion that leads to more bloodshed down the road, not less.
Justice isn't delivered by firing indiscriminately, it's delivered by breaking the cycle, protecting the innocent, and demanding real solutions. If you think punishing millions for the crimes of a few is justice, then honestly, you're just indulging in a cheap version of it.