Or exfiltrating enriched nuclear material from NUMEC in the US to get their weapons program underway (Apollo affair) in 1976, or violating the nuclear test treaty off the coast of South Africa (Vela incident) in 1979, or blackmailing Clinton in 1998 (Jonathan Pollard incident). Or any number of other things. And these are just the things we know about.
But we know why they are special and get away with things that any other country would be in serious shit for. AIPAC does not fuck around. They play to win. And the evangelicals support it because of their belief about the second coming of christ.
Fine, not wrong, but you missed the rather heavy factor of the western powers feeling they owe a huge debt to the Jewish people for turning their boats back during the Holocaust. It's a "no one helps you til you help yourself" scenario, now that a state exists with a mission to give Jews safe refuge and self governance, they have (some of) the world's sympathy.
its not merely because of a few lobbyists and evangelicals' wacky eschatology
No sympathy to anyone who justifies destruction of entire cities (like this https://x.com/SuppressedNws/status/1920242384111055286) as self-defense. Even in my small disgusting genocide supporting country in the center of europe, things are slowly starting to change at this point.
>They knowingly attacked and destroyed USS Liberty in 1967
Both sides agree it was an accident.
>Israel apologized for the attack, saying that USS Liberty had been attacked in error after being mistaken for an Egyptian ship.[5] Both the Israeli and United States governments conducted inquiries and issued reports that concluded the attack was a mistake due to Israeli confusion about the ship's identity.[6]
And if you scratch the surface, you will quickly realise that their apology is bullshit.
Israel wanted the US involved and conducted a false flag operation:
“Some intelligence and military officials dispute Israel's explanation.[79] Dean Rusk, U.S. Secretary of State at the time of the incident, wrote:
I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn't believe them then, and I don't believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous.[80]”
>I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander.
If the attack was due to mistaken identity, wouldn't you expect the Israelis to go all out? I also skimmed the section and there's not much in the way of arguments besides that and "Israel pressured US to admit it was an accident".
There was no mistaken identity. They knew it was an American ship and attacked it on purpose. It was witnessed and documented that they made the decision to deliberately attack an American warship, then tried to excuse themselves from responsibility.
They were targeting lifeboats and engaging in other dishonorable behavior we've since seen repeated in Gaza as well. "Going all out" is not warfare, it is sadism in violation of the Geneva Convention.
>There was no mistaken identity. They knew it was an American ship and attacked it on purpose. It was witnessed and documented that they made the decision to deliberately attack an American warship, then tried to excuse themselves from responsibility.
What evidence is of this? The article you linked only has an "anonymous source", and hearsay supposedly from a diplomat. If this is the bar for believing that a conspiracy is real, you should probably believe the moon landing is faked as well.
Not having happened. Not a cover up for something else. Just that it didn't happen, but the US was so hard up to beat the Russians at something that they staged it.
It's ridiculous. But the world we live in is also ridiculous, and the internet has enabled idiots to meet in numbers that have never been possible before.
To cover up that the moon doesn't exist, of course.
I'm sure we can come up with a ridiculous conspiracy hypothesis around what we're actually seeing when we think we're seeing the moon. Might need to involve time travel to explain historical records.
What's so special? A good chunk of the US population believes the Israelis were literally chosen by God over 2000 years ago to occupy that piece of land, and they're obligated to do whatever they can to help them.
> A good chunk of the US population believes the Israelis were literally chosen by God
There is more to it, not only that but they believe that the Jewish state of Israel is needed for Jesus to return to earth.
This belief comes from Thessalonians 2:1-4
"1 Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to Him, we ask you, brothers, 2 not to be easily disconcerted or alarmed by any spirit or message or letter seeming to be from us, alleging that the Day of the Lord has already come. 3 Let no one deceive you in any way, for it will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness—the son of destruction—is revealed. 4 He will oppose and exalt himself above every so-called god or object of worship. So he will seat himself in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God."
So the "temple" is required for the anti-Christ to arise, and for Jesus to return.
Now as to if that actually means the physical Third Temple of Solomon... this is up for theological debate. Some Church Fathers held that the anti-Christ would indeed arise from a physical Third Temple. While other Church Fathers held that the 3rd Temple in Christianity was technically the Church, and so the anti-Christ would arise from her.
Either way, if you side with the first view there is no qualification for a state to be present in order to rebuild the physical Third Temple.
Protestant Evangelicals in America by and large take the first stance I mentioned, and are pretty stalwart in their belief the State of Israel is the vehicle through which this will be achieved.
references to a Temple involve a holy Temple that is not possible on this Earth, also coinciding with physical structures that make it possible to emerge?
Evangelical beliefs and others start to be more of a political topic, subject to survey? A basis of the practice is that it is done in the open and lawfully, so Church leaders might be fairly plain about what they actually believe, when asked?
The same chunk of population "should" (??) think that the Israeli ancestors killed Jesus, and that the Jews will go to hell if they don't accept Jesus as their savior - so - people are weird.
Surprisingly, it's internally consistent. Evangelical Christians don't support Israel because they like the people who live there. Instead, they support Israel because, based on their interpretation of Revelation 20, they believe that Israel must be rebuilt or restored as part of God's plan for the end times.
This story does not end well for Israel or the people who live there.
They do; they have other theological reasons for supporting the State of Israel, despite often not being very well inclined toward the Jewish people or Judaism as a religion.
I am not no expert on the American evangelical version of Christianity so happy to hear better explanations, but not all evangelicals believe the same things so I do not think there is a reason to say they "should" believe those things. The argument that God's covenant with the Jews is still in effect implies the opposite, if anything.
Well in that case they "should" also believe that Jesus was Jewish just like the Israelis of today, no?
If Israelis are blamed for killing him they should also be praised for creating him.
That is a mischaracterise of the crusades, at least with regard to the crusaders.
The crusades were a reaction to the Arab and Turkish Empires, which by then (between them) invaded at some point (and mostly conquered) Spain, France, southern Italy, most of the Mediterranean, North Africa, Italy, Anatolia, and the Levant, and more.
I had not noticed the Palestinians aggressive expansionist empire.
I also wonder about this, my personal conclusion is israelis work very hard to create a dirt on politicians over the years, and politicians just afraid of losing everything in one day vs joining the club of other blackmailed, powerful politicians. cases: Epstein, Monica Lewinsky, AIPAC, and probably many more
1. I am not blaming you specifically, also I didn't mention race (Jews/Jewish), don't add the race card here please, I am saying Israelis because I don't have or know names of people who do it. Should I say Israeli Mossad? What if it wasn't Mossad, would you tell me that I am lying? If I say government, maybe it's not government, for example settlers, they are not affiliated with government, but government supports them.
2. As far as I remember Israeli government blamed Palestinians for electing Hamas and now carrying out mass extinction there, keep in mind Gaza was not a democracy.
In contrast, as a democracy in the middle east, don't you own what your elected officials carry out? If answer is no, then why they're blaming Palestinians for everything?
You can definitely know that something is done without knowing who, exactly, did it. “A person formally or informally affiliated or aligned with the Israeli state”, if we have to use the State Dept lingo for terrorists.
Many people don't deplore your government, they deplore the whole concept of political zionism as it is practiced - violent creation of Jewish state on the land inhabited by a lot of other people, driving many of them out, and avoiding solving resulting political issues repeatedly through the use of overwhelming force, insane militarization of society, long term occupations, blockades, assassinations, political imprisonment of opponents, and international political maneuvering and propaganda, for decade after decade after decade, in order to preserve Jewish majority rule over the territory.
More honest Israelis, like Meir Kahane, at least acknowledged that Jewish majority state is not compatible with democracy, when "greater Israel" is mostly occupied by non-Jews.
It doesn't matter whether you or other Israelis deplore your "current government". They can deplore it for all kinds of reasons, and replacement they'd prefer may not be much better wrt the issue above.
> I deplore my current government, and believe NSO are evil. There are plenty of Israelis that agree with me and protest weekly.
There were many like that in Nazi Germany but unfortunately they were a small minority that mostly needed to run away. That might be your predicament too so the people that want a peaceful resolution to the Gaza situation can't put their hopes on the likes of you, unfortunately. As a long time traveler, I met several great israeli people, but I also saw first-hand many of them that don't give a flying F to nobody, not only muslims but working locals and even other tourists.
If you're going to contradict someone making a claim ("Because it seems like it's barely in the hundreds"), then it is their responsibility to back it up.
I work on this area and spend a reasonable amount of time staying up to date. I made my claim - I have seen extremely limited news reports about Israeli protests that center the genocide. Indeed, these reports are extremely new and feature silent protests with several hundred protestors holding up pictures of Israeli kids. Now I could have led with that, but it's not my responsibility to spend my precious time informing people about stuff they could look up themselves online.
US's legitimization of it's leading role in the world is based on the story how they saved the world from the nazis. This story escalated ideologically, so now any critique of Israel is indirectly questioning USA as the world leader.
In any practical sense the Soviet Union did in fact do the lion's share of beating the Nazis. They opened an extra front and sent in a staggering amount of troops. I don't see why it is still so demonized, except when you view it directly through the lens of US propaganda.
Their death toll, such as it is, is not even a tenth of the incredible casualty rate of the British. It does not need to be said that they're nowhere near as demonised, except in India. The scope and depth of a civilisation's deaths is not actually all that relevant to how much people hate it.
It's unreasonable to expect a small companies to have rogue nation states in their threat model. Apple, Microsoft, ... yeah but not a smaller business.
NFL games are consistently among the most watched shows on TV/streaming in the US. People are already voting with their wallets and they are voting that the content is worth it to them.
The barrier of entry is much higher with commercial aviation. You can get started with a lousy car but a lousy plane will never be acceptable. The MAX fiasco could have killed Boeing. Maybe Boom will succeed by getting its feet wet in the supersonic flight niche. Time will tell.
Well, you could make a small plane if it's not lousy. Lilium and Electra are betting on something like an air taxi niche opening up if the fuel savings are worth it: https://www.electra.aero/https://lilium.com/jet
So would Google or any obscure forums.
Just like fraud, the optimal amount of negativity in a technology is never zero. Gotta accept some amount of issues to maximize the benefits to drawbacks ratio.
Why not just let the ads play per the social contract we have. Ask yourself, if everyone did what I do, would it ruin the service I enjoy for everyone? If the answer is yes, then stop doing it.
It's better to just stop using YouTube than install these hacks.
Also a natural byproduct of the association between intelligence on one hand and freedom and rights on the others.
Plants don't get any rights. Ants a little bit more. Dogs and dolphins even more so. Then humans. And then... a new class of intelligence as it appears will demand those same rights, in proportion to their intellect.
Sometimes I wonder what's so special about Israel that they keep getting away with everything.