noone actually excused those terrorist acts.

In Professor Joseph Massad’s newest article on The Electronic Intifada, he wrote that the attack that occurred in Israel on October 7th was a “stunning victory” and that Hamas’ actions were “astounding,” “awesome,” and “incredible.”

And he doesn’t teach at some no name place either. Dude teaches at Columbia

You made that clear when you said “by all available evidence”. I was pointing out that in my interpretation of the evidence no god predates mine as I don’t ascribe nearly as much weight to archaeological evidence and it’s interpretations as I do with better established sciences

As a reader of animorphs I’m fairly sure (~80%) that giant squids live deeper down than sperm whales

and it is only done if the majority of the town has two eyewitnesses testifying that over 50% of the individuals of the town worshipped idols after being warned that doing so carries the death penalty

You realize that’s not better right? It’s literally religious persecution as a law.

1- it’s definitely better to kill a town where the majority have been convicted of idol worship as opposed to a case where there is a single idol worshipper

2- all other factors being equal, any legal system that requires jurisprudence is better than a like alternative that calls for vigilantism

More absurdly, this would even apply to worship of gods that by all available evidence are in fact older than Yahweh

I disagree that such beings actually exist within reality given that I believe that he is the author of reality itself.

Former redditor here (as if my username isn’t a dead giveaway by itself)

Just a quick response to some of these claims from the perspective of Judaism

1. Kill People Who Don’t Listen to Priests-

this isn’t just any guy off the street not listening to some priest. This is about a sage in his own right who actually issues rulings in line with an opinion of his that was rejected by Jewish equivalent of the supreme court

2. Kill Homosexuals-

It’s actually more like “kill men who have been convicted of having sex with other males and btw we only accept testimony from multiple eyewitnesses who saw each other and the same thing at the same time”

3. Death For Hitting Dad-

Only applies if the hit draws blood

4. Death For Cursing Parents-

This requires a very specific formulation to get a conviction

5. Death for fornication-

This is the first one that’s straight up wrong. It falls under death for adultery, the punishment is just harsher because she’s a priest’s daughter and some rabbis say she needs to be fully married for it to apply while others say just betrothed as is the standard status in most cases with punishments for infidelity.

6. Death to followers of other religions-

It’s more like death to those who actively worship other gods. Followers of nontheistic religions, and Muslims would be fine as well as, in some opinions, christians and modalistic Hindus.

7. Kill nonbelievers-

This seems to be more of a one-time royal edict (that didn’t result in anyone dying btw) than an actual prescribed penalty

8. Kill the Entire Town if One Person Worships Another God-

This is an incredible misunderstanding of the text. In Hebrew it is called an “ir hanidachat” and it is only done if the majority of the town has two eyewitnesses testifying that over 50% of the individuals of the town worshipped idols after being warned that doing so carries the death penalty, and only if they were enticed/subverted to do so and only if the subverter/enticer was a group of one or more adult males from that town and a member(s) of the tribe in whose territory the town is and if a caravan sets up camp there and counting them as inhabitants makes it that less than 50% are worshipping idols then that saves the town.

9. Kill Women Who Are Not Virgins On Their Wedding Night

Believe it or not this also falls under adultery. She is only executed if in the course of investigating the monetary claim he makes against her, witnesses come forward and they saw her having sex with another man while betrothed to this man then she is executed.

10. Kill Followers of Other Religions

This sounds kinda like 6 doesn’t it? However in fairness it is discussing something slightly different. While 6 deals with people convicted of worshipping false gods this deals with one who tries to entice others to do so. This actually the only case where we endorse anything resembling entrapment and the Mishna that says so makes it very clear that it’s an exception in this regard rather than the rule. (To clarify “something like entrapment” I mean that thing many people think is entrapment where a police officer pretends to not be an officer and noncoercively offers one the opportunity engage in a crime and then arrests them for doing so)

I should also mention that 1,3,4,5,7?,8, and 9 only apply to Jews while 2,6, and 10 are left to the non Jewish courts outside of the land of israel

But even unjust violence on the part of the Palestinians does not change the position of victim and aggressor here, any more than the brutality that some Native American tribes exhibited against European colonists did.

I disagree. When the migrants are refugees you definitely become the aggressor when you start campaigns that explicitly call for their extermination.

And what do the actions of surrounding nations have to do with Palestinians?

because the palestinians supported these military campaigns

Besides, I’d say the oppression of Palestinians goes far beyond what anyone could possibly consider reasonable safety measures.

I disagree. What would you do when the enemy is indiscriminately firing rockets into civilian centers and fields of crops from hospitals, schoolyards, and apartment buildings? Let them keep at it and just call the occasional wildfire or dead civilian the cost of doing the right thing or bomb the launch site? If you bomb it do you do so without warning or give a 2-3 minute heads up that you’re going to do so? When people are constantly climbing the fence to commit terroristic acts on civilians do you just shrug or build a wall? That wall by the way has cut such events by over 80% and been lauded by analysts as a highly effective security measure.

Frankly, you sound like an American conservative talking about the “invasion” at the southern border.

except that there have not been multiple terrorist campaigns endorsed by the mexican government encouraging terrorism on US soil with the explicit goal of the extermination or eviction of every single american from the land. If that were the case I’d agree with them about what we should do.

Genuine question, because I literally don’t know this: Is the green in Israeli-occupied territory natural green that comes from good tending, or is it artificial green like all the grass in Las Vegas?

the former

Should it be there or is it a massive waste of water turning a desert into an unnatural and unsustainable oasis?

the former

And if it’s the former, could the lack of green on Palestinian soil be because of the bombings and destruction of infrastructure/social frameworks that could support greenery?

it’s possible although then I would blame the terrorists who destroy infrastructure and revel in their brethren’s suffering as they exploit it to demonize Israel rather than Israel themselves who, as I stated, actually left all of the infrastructure for the gaza strip intact when they pulled out.

Nor do any of those points matter to innocents stabbed to death in a synagogue or blown up trying to buy some pizza. The issue is that Israel tried just existing but literally the day it was established it was attacked in an extermination attempts by literally every country surrounding it. Being oppressed doesn’t make it ok to turn around and oppress others but being under a constant state of siege does make it ok to take actions to ensure your safety as well as that of your citizens. Would you say that literal thousands of rocket attacks, hundreds of suicide bombings, bouts of stabbings, bouts of shootings, and more in addition to at least 3 military actions jointly taken by surrounding nations doesn’t count as a state of siege? If not what does?

regarding recency, we absolutely can make the argument of environmental importance to the land. See what twain wrote of it in our absence. Even now there is a literal green line separating land under our control vs under palestinian control. And I can tell you the green is definitely not on the palestinian side.

And I never said nobody is calling for native americans to be exterminated (although I do believe that it is true that there is nobody around today so bold as to outright say their continued existence here is intolerable in the literal sense that they should be rounded up and killed if they don’t leave and the dissolution of reservations is an absolute condition of their policy that they refuse to revise in any way despite the government of the gaza strip saying just that about israel) I said america’s leaders are not calling for their complete removal or extermination which is currently has been so for a while (~20 years) albeit not nearly as long as it should have been(~200 yrs).

Why does the fact that Jews have not been safe in any society on the planet in the past 2000 years matter? Why does it matter that they were forced off the land? Why does it matter that this bothered us and we’ve been demonstrably hoping and trying to return for the past two millenia? Because if any of those weren’t true I might cede that in some capacity we gave lost our claim to it. However the fact remains that we were forcibly dispossessed of our land and have a right to go back. Of course not at the expense of entirely uprooting those who moved in after us but enough that they and we really should share the land nicely.

If I could ask my own question in return I’d ask why recency of claim matters more than any of the factors I mentioned above. And for the record I agree that native Americans should have far more land rights than they do today. But at the very least they can dwell in a portion of their homeland without the leaders of the rest of those who reside who openly calling for their complete removal and/or extermination and that’s more than can be said for today’s Jews in Israel.

How much Palestinian propaganda have you been reading? Americans weren’t forcibly expelled to begin with and even if they were they haven’t been actively demonstrably yearning and attempting to return ever since so the analogy fails on two counts. A third count as well actually because Americans haven’t had bigotry, prosecution, and murder sprees and mobs and pogroms constantly plaguing them everywhere they’ve been since they left europe.

Regarding the downvotes- good to know although ironically you are the person who would uld be least wrong to downvote me. You’re at least articulating what you disagree with than giving a cowardly anonymous thumbs down like those who have been downvoting.

Israel are not colonizers though. Israel is one of the indigenous people finally returning to their homeland. You can say they should share and I agree but the immediate attempt at their annihilation right when they were established definitely indicated that many of their neighbors were not keen on sharing nicely. It’s awful that the children in Gaza are suffering but the blame for that lies with the terrorists who use those children as human shields, tore down the infrastructure, and diverted construction materials meant for humanitarian aid to be used to enable further terrorist attacks, not the country that forced it’s own citizens out and left a fully functioning set of infrastructure for the new inhabitants.

Edit- I was hoping to get away from Reddit culture of disagree=downvote and was looking forward to productive respectful discussions here. So far it seems not to be working out but maybe we can still turn it around

Have you ever been there? Do you know what apartheid actually means? Every single Palestinian without citizenship doesn’t have it only because they refused. And furthermore, in 2005 Israel actually forced its own citizens out of the Gaza strip, whole family’s dislocated at gunpoint by their own government. And when the Palestinians moved in, the terrorists among them tore down the infrastructure and somehow convinced their brethren that the Israelis were to blame. Israel is not the one who’s indiscriminately shooting rockets from hospitals and schoolyards. Israel is not the one encouraging citizens to enter houses of worship and go on killing sprees. Israel is not the one who is encouraging and applauding suicide bombers attacking bus stops and pizza shops. Israel is the one who is sending out texts and dropping leaflets warning people to get out of buildings that they suspect are housing military equipment used to attack them before bombing said buildings. It is easily within Israel’s capability set to kill every last Palestinian and I imagine just about any other country put through what Israel’s been put through would be a lot more aggressive. They aren’t always in the right. There are things they have done wrong. But an apartheid state they are not.

Forgot to mention, the terrorists in charge of the Gaza strip also diverted equipment meant to be used for construction and instead chose to use it to dig tunnels to get through to Israel to carry out attacks and kidnappings.

Straight up. Israel and Ukraine are under constant attack these days and absolutely not be criticized for defending themselves even if they don’t always go about it exactly the right way.