Israel has continued bombarding Gaza’s south despite telling 1.1 million people in the north of the besieged enclave to relocate there ahead of an expected ground offensive.
“We were displaced from Tal al-Hawa to Rafah at the request of the Israeli army, and this is what happened to us. My son is a 3-month-old martyr,” the father of a child killed in an attack in Rafah told Al Jazeera.
1.67 "9/11"s worth of death, in retaliation for 0.47 "9/11"s worth of dead on Oct 7th.
Or, with 9/11= 2977 and the Iraq war killing 187,000 civilians, we get a ~63:1 misplaced retaliation vs. initial attack ratio. So the one could extrapolate from the 1400 dead on Oct 7th that 88,200 innocent people in Gaza will need to be killed to quench the IDF’s rage.
Why not count the Afghans too? People keep forgetting that happened for some reason… Which is weird considering they were the first ones to be attacked in retaliation and Iraq wasn’t an answer to 9/11…
People absolutely saw Iraq as retaliation for 9/11 too. The bush admin repeatedly lied about Iraq having ties to Al Qaeda.
Those pesky weapons of mass destruction hidden all over Iraq just had to be destroyed! Evidence? What evidence? We don’t need evidence!!
Weapons of mass destruction
We ma-de … it up?
🤯
People are ignoring the afghans are about to be openly genocided to the tune of 1.4 million by the Pakistani government.
Too busy focusing on Israel.
Nothing will ever quench their rage. It’s all they have.
Equally importantly, they never cared about the lives of people in Gaza. We see this all the time in war… If killing 63 number of enemies will save even 1 of our own lives, we’ll do it. Doesn’t matter if it’s 63, or 6,300, or 630,000, because the enemies’ lives aren’t worth anything to them.
Israel has been governed by far right ultra-nationalist racists for decades now and Arabs are üntermensch in their eyes, especially Palestinians, hency why they have an Arab Israeli Citizenship separate from the Jewish Israeli Citizenship and with fewer rights and why they have very openly called them “human animals”.
It’s “Untermenschen”, plural and the prefix doesn’t have an umlaut.
It’s also a misnomer because antisemitism is a central point of Nazism. The correct term here is “gentile”, the Zionist version of infidel.
It’s a class of people, so in the singular (i.e. “Subhuman”), though the correct way to do it in German would be Untermensch (i.e. first letter capitalized). This is consistent with how racial superiority mindsets dehumanize the “other” so they don’t address them as individuals and instead will describe then as type of people hence singular (the type) not plural (multiple individuals).
If you look up the Nazi version of how they describe those they saw as inferior races, it’s Der Untermensch, not Die untermenschen.
(Cheers for correcting my spelling, by the way).
The inherent racial superiority of one’s own ethnic group is a common theme in far-right ideologies and the use of Untermensch by the Nazis was most definitelly not limited to Jews (ask any Slav or, even better, Roma).
Most definitelly from the outside the de facto behaviour of those in the Israeli government (and in other groups’ such as the military and colonists) seems rooted in the broader feeling of cultural and racial superiority, transcending the “mere” religious kind, so in my opinion the use of Subhuman (or Untermensch, to show the cross-cultural ressonances) rather than merely “Gentile” or “Infidel” seems appropriate.
That said, whilst the rabid racism in Israel does ressonate with that in Nazi Germany, the broader expression of the far-right in the former is most definitelly not the same as in that historical latter and not just because the racial group they treat as superior, and those they treat as inferior, are different: so far Appartheid is the more correct form of describing the expression of racism through the machine of the State and Civil Society in Israel, IMHO, even if the underlying mindset when it comes to beliefs of inherent racial superiority is the same, because its’ expression has been mainly through second class citizen treatment, bullying by the State or with endorsement of the State and frequent closing of eyes by the Authorities to murders across racial lines one way (but not the other) like in Appartheid, not outright extermination like in Nazism.
Hopefully it will not go beyond that, though once this new invasion of Gaza really gets going, it might very well be that we get a genocide of historical proportions, at which point merelly describing it as Appartheid will not be enough.
If I translated your sentence to German, I would either use Untermenschen or untermenschlich. Referring to a group of people with a singular noun feels weird. But then again, it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the point and is thus the correct usage.
Well, after reading your previous post I looked it up and there is literally a book called “Der Untermensch” and that’s described as “how the Nazis described the Jews, Slavs and Roma” (all of which were persecuted by them).
I am not fluent in German and didn’t live in Germany long enough to pick up that kind of subtle language rules, so wasn’t aware that it sounds really wierd in German. It would also sound really wierd in my own motherthougue, Portuguese, and we would be using the equivalents of the words you used in German, though using the singular form is gramatically valid and definitelly carries an old-fashioned racist tone.
I suspect that using that form (at least as a book title) was most definitelly purposeful and for maximum distancing from the target group, a bit like an 18th century racist might title a book “The African”.
You missed something in your math there. IDF is considering the October 7th attack as “10 time worse than 9/11” so up those numbers close to 900,000. Maybe make it 911,911 for the fun propaganda value. With more than half of the 2.2 million Gaza population (although maybe we should start counting the West Bank killings as it is ramping up, too) being children and seeing how Israeli government doesn’t discriminate , maybe they can quench their bloodthrist with young blood alone, even.
America has a population that is 35 larger than Israel. If America had lost the same percentage of their population as Israel did on Oct 7th, it would be ~49,420 dead, or the equivalence of 16 "9/11"s. That is why Biden said 10 times worse than 9/11.
Iraq currently has a population of 43.5 million. 187k is 0.42% of it’s population. If we do it by percent of population, Gaza has 2 million people, so the retaliation would kill “only” 8,600.
Oh, so good news, the blood fugue is close to an end. I was worried this would get worse. /s
Why would you calculate this as a percentage of population? Do you really think the population numbers of a nation have any relevance to the value of a human life?
A certain side thinks “they have no value if their skin is a brown hue”
Biden called it “Ten 9/11s” because of percent of population. I would have called it “0.47 9/11s”, as each human life is equally valid. But as impact on the whole, Oct 7th was a larger percent of the population of the country than 9/11, so it is having a much larger impact with only half as many dead.
I also hope that the numbers that die in retaliation are as low as possible, and percent population numbers gave a smaller needed “revenge” killing. Wish it was zero, but we are, underneath it all, rage-full apes with explosives.
It’s baffling to me why this blood ratio is circulating so much in the news. Did the Las Vegas shooter kill the American equivalent of 1.8 Israelis?
I remember protesting the Iraq war as a teen. What a fucking monster the U.S. has become.