The US and Israel have murdered far, far more innocent people than Hamas. Hamas are resistance that killed < 2,000 Israelis (most of which were both in and killed by the IDF). The US has killed millions of innocent people in the last century alone, many for the benefit of Israel.
What the US/Israel have done in Gaza is orders of magnitude worse than anything Hamas has done and that's not even touching Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan...
> You can also easily park that full death toll on Hamas since they started it.
Doubtful - they were only founded in 1987. If you check news reports there's been back and forth killing in that region going back decades prior to '87.
I'm only going back to Oct 7 attacks. You can put the full death toll that followed on Hamas since that was their goal with the hostage-taking in the first place.
"Who started it" is a stupid and pointless question to begin with, but now we're reaching new heights.
If both sides are comitting warcrimes, both sides must be condemned and sanctioned. It's not about who is committing warcrimes harder or who was first.
This is correct approach, both sides are beyond abhorable in their own special ways and any decent human being with understanding of current situation and historical path leading to it has no reason to support either.
One side shouting the other is worse because XYZ is childish, not factual.
Anyone with a decent historical understanding would support Hamas, just like people who know history support the Haitian slave rebellion. People have a right to resist occupation and genocide.
What a strange world we live in. I never expected to see someone on HN openly supporting the murder of civilian men, women and children for the crime of living in a country that is at war with the perpetrators. That's a psychopaths twisted understanding of "eye for an eye" justice.
Thank god most of the world has since risen above that.
This isn't taking my argument in good faith. Occupation resistance is none of the things you've stated and the reality of Zionism doesn't match your description, even remotely. If people break into your house, murder your family, then move in. You have every right to fight back. This is a historical standard well accepted by international groups. The Haitian Slave revolt, Pueblo revolt and Warsaw rebellion are all other analogous examples.
We all live on land that at some point someone else considered their own.
Also I can tell just and unjust apart on my own, and I do not need some "international group" or "historical standard" to stand in for my frontal lobe and morals. Thank you very much.
But this is the point! Israel and the Zionists are reenacting the worst crime in human history (the genocide and colonization of the Americas). They are, in 2026 doing what the Spanish did in the 1600s and getting the same resulting rebellion from the occupied people.
Edit:
I'm throttled, but I'll leave you with my final thought...
I won't condemn resistance. I would never condemn people who fight occupation and genocide. I don't see us closing this gap, but I hope you can try to imagine what it was like if you were a slave, an indigenous American or a Palestinian. If you were really in their situation, what would you do? It's also worth mentioning that the Palestinians have tried peaceful resistance and the Israelis sniped thousands of them, including children.
More than 64,000 children have been killed in Gaza and only 19% of Israelis think the IDF have gone too far and 34% think they haven't gone far enough:
> But this is the point! Israel and the Zionists are reenacting the worst crime in human history (the genocide and colonization of the Americas). They are, in 2026 doing what the Spanish did in the 1600s and getting the same resulting rebellion from the occupied people.
Yes, but I will still condemn both sides, even if one is merely responding in kind. If it was in my power, I'd lock them all up. Hamas' and Israel's leadership, as well as anyone who directly comitted those acts.
Then I'd replace Israel/Palestine with something democratic similar to Lebanon's solution of accomodating multiple major religions.
> If you were really in their situation, what would you do?
I am perfectly confident that the average palestinian would not go through with killing a civilian Israeli woman or child even if you loaded and pointed the gun for them.
The same is true for the other side. The Israeli government/IDF and Hamas represent the worst of both.
The problem with your occupation argument is how selective you are about who you apply it to. Israel has 15+ neighbors whose borders have changed since post WWII. Ukraine didn't even exist. You choose to apply your occupier label to Israel, who you know the current occupants can trace ancestral homeland to for thousands of years, while letting literally everyone in the world off the hook.
I wonder where does that double standard come from? Oh if only we could identify some attribute that Israel has that the hundreds of other countries where your silly double standard does also apply do not.
No! We know exactly where your double standard comes from. It comes from your hatred of Jews. You have decided that Jews are the only people in the world that do not deserve to exist.
But they do exist. And they will continue to exist in spite of small-minded hateful people like you!
People indigenous to the land shape the land. Colonizers invade. Ashkenazis ethnically cleansed almost all of Palestine and now they're trying to finish the job via genocide. This is very straight forward and very well documented.
Looking at your comment history, oh boy you sure are one sided. No doubt version of history in your head conveniently justifies it, its just... not a complete history, is it.
This is one of the most one sided issues in modern human history. Stealing land is wrong, murdering people who live on that land is wrong. The number of people who support Zionism is rapidly dwindling and won't exist outside of Israel once the baby boomers are gone. Israel will go the way of Rhodesia within the next decade.
There was no "genocide" until Hamas poked that bear.
You could make the case for occupation, but then you would have to pack your bags and hand your house keys over to descendants of whoever lived there 80 years ago or risk being called a hypocrite.
There was no genocide nor apartheid until Europeans invaded Palestine and started ethnically cleansing, killing and raping the indigenous Palestinians.
How is it bad faith? This whole situation is a cycle of revenge going back at least to the 1920s with conflicts between Arabs and Jewish settlers in Mandatory Palestine. Israel is killing civilians, but Hamas attacked them, but the IDF was enforcing segregation, but they had to show force after the intifadas...
And you can trace that back to the Balfour declaration being unclear, and rabbis who started religious Zionism feeling entitled to the land, and antisemitic massacres in Europe that inspired Theodor Herzl to campaign for a Jewish state. Or even further back until you end up in Biblical times.
You can't just pick a start date and decide who is responsible for all this.
I wouldn't call Palestinian resistance "revenge". If someone stole your land, trying to get it back isn't really revenge imho. I think going back to the creation of Zionism is the best starting point. Ashkenazis are mostly European, so it doesn't make sense to go back to biblical times (which were mostly fictional anyway). This is a pretty textbook case of European colonization.
Hamas is no threat to America, and yeah the Israeli's murdered their families and stole their land, so that's a reasonable and fully human reaction we would all have.
Much of the reason Hamas is full of fire and brimstone for the US is that the US continues to supply Israel with the bombs and weapons used on their people.
Yes, and political cover in the UN and beyond for Israel's aggression. I also don't think Hamas blames US citizens, they blame the government, and rightfully so.
> You can also easily park that full death toll on Hamas since they started it.
Really? Hamas started the handover of a chunk of the British Mandate of Palestine to a new state? I'm pretty sure the British started it and Israel used the fact that the country that controlled ~1/3rd of the planet ran the table.
Every perpetrator of genocide throughout history has said exactly this. If we don't do it to them, they will do it to us! It is nonsense in every case, and only speaks to the genocidal worldview of those who believe it.
Reading MSM newspapers is definitely indoctrination. With Europeans getting more and more hawkish on Russia (and other things), this seems like a great way to get everyone thinking "right".
How about making teenagers seek out independent media? We've seen the results of people being raised reading MSM newspapers and it's not pretty. Propaganda packaged as "serious news", is some of the most dangerous media that exists.
> Finally, we show that both free news access and media education improve media literacy skills (+0.08 to 0.26 sd), with larger effects among students taught by teachers with prior experience in media education.
They taught the teenagers how to question and interrogate the claims presented in the newspapers, which is far more effective than blindly branding 'MSM newspapers' as propaganda. (The study was conducted in France; are you sure that conventional French newspapers are propaganda of any inclination?)
Who decides who we're sanctioning and who is a "terrorist"? Not me, that's for sure! My money is my business and I don't need the state nanny watching who I send it to.
> Government should require regular, mandatory reporting by technology service providers to document abuse of their systems including financial support of violence, harassment, and terrorism.This includes implementation of mandatory financial abuse reporting requirements for internet services operating in the United States, including social media services, infrastructure providers, banking institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, crowdfunding sites, video streaming platforms, and the like.
> [These companies] should be required to investigate and report the details of harms and abuse of their service. There should be … penalties applied to services that refuse these tracking and reporting responsibilities.
I think you're misinterpreting a very specific messaging mission the neo-liberals went on. They promoted a particular brand of "feminism" to get Hillary Clinton elected. This is no longer part of their platform, and it's no longer needed as it turns out Islamaphobia, Epstein and AIPAC (and similar endeavours) were better control levers that transcend party lines. Gaza is destroyed and we're at war with Iran, mission accomplished, if not delayed a bit.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the institutional paper that lied to get us into the Iraq war isn't "turbowoke". The NYT is a propaganda outlet for the military industrial complex, not some sort of leftist activism.
It’s an outlet for elite American opinion, for the American ruling class. The particular opinions change over time but it’s fundamentally progressive because that is the ideology of the American elite and has been since the founding (the American Revolution was by definition revolutionary/leftist/progressive).
The Iraq war was predicated on the idea that you could or should “bring democracy” to Iraqis, this is fundamentally progressive view of the world.
An actual conservative approach would be something like 18th and 19th century European colonialism.
There is zero progressive representation among the elite. The American Revolution wasn't "progressive", it was one of many steps that led to the genocide of Indigenous Americans. Using the military to murder Muslims isn't "progressive" either.
You should talk to actual lefists, they hate neo-liberalism even more than the right.
This is a prole leftist take and proles by definition are very ignorant and don’t understand elites or what they’re seeing (if someone could they would be an elite). A prole leftist is basically just a sad walking disaster that is angry and wants free stuff and wants others to suffer. They’re not engaging with leftism on an intellectual level, they’re not romantically captivated by it.
As far as mass murder goes, generally speaking the purpose of the Great Leap Forward, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and other types of leftist movements isn’t to kill massive amounts of people but that is a very common result of putting progressive ideas into action.
You're incorrect and historically inaccurate. Using the US military is not a leftist position, it's imperialism.
> don’t understand elites or what they’re seeing (if someone could they would be an elite
You can't become and elite through observation. You have to be born into it, or successfully do the bidding of those who are. Even then, you'd only be "new money".
> Great Leap Forward, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution
None of these extend beyond the borders of the nation in question. That's my point, imperialism is not and never has been leftist.
I'm not a prole nor an elite, I am however a leftist and I assure you that neither the Democrats or The New York Times are even remotely leftist. They're right wing neo-liberals.
Leftism and “imperialism” are orthogonal concepts. “Imperialism” isn’t even a thing, it just basically means “conquering other land” or “imposing your views/culture”.
Imperialism is definitely a thing and it indeed means conquering other land. It's not orthogonal to leftism at all. Lenin literally called it the "highest stage of capitalism".
The USSR practiced “imperialism” by definition, forced deportations, annexations of territories.
Again, “imperialism” is just conquering territory + negative valence. It’s not actually a thing itself, it’s some other actual thing + It feels bad/it’s against my interests. There are lots of words used in political discourse that are like this. It’s just juvenile nonsense.
Capitalism only functions when you have people willing and able to buy your stuff, a state that protects fair dealings, and maintains a peaceful public order. It a luxury maintained by having a safe, stable society. Imagine trying to run a business in a world where the workers can just decide to cut you out of your investments, and then you have to hire PMCs to retake your factory, but then the PMCs renege on your contract and decide to run the business themselves. A society where you need to build your own roads, spread your own pro-business propaganda, and lack any recourse when your suppliers decide to take your money and run.
That's capitalism: owning capital attracts more capital, until eventually an all-powerful oligarchical class emerges that is then emboldened to dismantle the liberal democracy that built them, in order to secure their position at the top.
Hitler was sponsored by the industrialists of its nation. So was Mussolini. So is Putin. So is Trump.
"Capitalism is incompatible with democracy" is the one lesson I hope people finally learn by the end of this century.
Conservatives have many forms of "cancel culture". They want to deport people from places they don't like (or from a race they don't like), they want to enforce Christianity in public places, they want to make being "antifa" illegal...
And the ultimate form of cancel culture, conservatives (including the neo-liberal variety) will straight up murder you if you're Muslim and live in the Middle East.
That costs money though (or takes time, which is money). When you need to eat and put a roof over your head, you realize our system is not setup to allow you to do this.
Bit of a strawman here, particularly the last one. Find a single US administration in recent history that hasn't killed thousands in the middle east? I'll wait.
What the US/Israel have done in Gaza is orders of magnitude worse than anything Hamas has done and that's not even touching Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan...
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