Your takeaway from WWII is that the guy shoving the kids into the gas chambers should not be condemned? What the fuck is wrong with you?

I still don’t really understand what you mean. What does “it” refer to? And what are nice normal countries?

I’m not sure I understand what you mean. To be clear about my own position in this:

1. Chanting death to the idf is, to me, morally equivalent to chanting death to the SS. Both are ok, even though the SS had forced conscription.

2. Forced conscription is bad, but not really on topic.

Sure, but that’s a whole different convo from finding “your honor, I had to murder the 5 year old; the alternative was a couple of months in prison and flipping burgers for the rest of my life” at all agreeable.

So this is pretty much exactly the line of reasoning that the nazis used to defend their participation in the holocaust. It wasn’t convincing then, and no, it isn’t convincing for the current genocide either.

Love that the “just following orders” defense is making a comeback. Just as valid today as during the Nuremberg trials.

Sorry no. You can’t be an apartheid state and call yourself a democracy. That’s not how words work.

Between this and USAID I can’t say I’m unhappy about it. Of course dismantling imperialism is a good thing, but I also don’t understand. The republicans should be all about illegal invasions, bombing civilians, and installing puppet dictators, so they should love USAID and NATO, yet here we are. Is this just incompetence?

Ah, sorry a lot of folks here are getting a bit wacky with apologia, and I could see them actually putting forward the nobel peace price as an argument for Obama not being a war criminal, so I did take it a bit too seriously. Poe’s law I guess. My apologies!

That said, he is a war criminal though, and I feel like you’re cherry picking little bits out of all the presidencies to confirm your point.

Here’s an example in the other direction, maybe it’ll help you see how unconvincing an argument you’re making:

• Clinton: illegal bombing of Yugoslavia, sanctions in Iraq that have been estimated to kill 500k children.
• Obama accelerated the drone program, killing 10s of thousands of Afghanis. Under his leadership, and entire wedding party was murdered in Yemen. Pledged 3.8 billion dollars a year for a decade in military aid to the apartheid ethnostate Israel as they were regularly bombing the Gaza strip. Pledged not to persecute the CIA operarives who carried out the torture of uncharged civilians.
• Trump withdrew from Afghanistan.
• Biden sent 17.9 billion dollars in nilitary aid to Israel as they were carrying out the genocide in Gaza. Bombed Syria.

You’ll note that I omitted Bush. He was really bad. Like, Hitler bad. Not a redeeming quality about him.

At any rate the point is that every single president since Eisenhower, every single one, no exceptions, has been a war criminal, and pretending that any one of them was pro peace is a joke.

The other half voted for Biden (yes, I know, different election, but they did, minus rounding errors). 17.8 billion in military aid to Israel under his leadership, in addition to the 3.8 billion a year for an entire decade that Obama set up. It is not the president, it’s not the GOP, it’s the country. When Harris bragged at the DNC that she would make the US military the most lethal fighting force on the planet, do you feel like she was implying that she would have them sit on their hands?

Obama fixed things by making a treaty with Iran, and got the Nobel Peace Prize (though not in that order which was a bit weird, but whatever)

I don’t understand how anyone could be so blatant about their own mental gymnastics.

Don’t care if yanks go get blown up in the Middle East. It’s all in service of enriching Halliburton and the military industrial complex. Yawn. It is 2003 again?

The last time they did this, a million Iraqis died.

Ukraine gave up their nukes, look what happened to them. Libya gave their nuclear weapons program up, and look at them today. North Korea didn’t, and they’re still standing, for better or for worse. Iraq was accused of having nukes, but didn’t have them, and got destroyed. Seems that if you want any semblance of sovereignty outside of NATO, you better have some nukes.

So for any nations reading along I’ll summarize the basic conclusions:

1. Get nukes
2. If you have nukes, do not give them up
3. If you’re accused of having nukes, drop everything and get nukes asap

Do you think Israel would be bombing Iran if they had nukes?

There is broad support in Israeli society for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. There are polls showing as much (I think one of them showed a rate of 82%). This is not one man’s whim, this is not the will of some small shady elite, this is a consequence of material conditions in Israel. If you don’t take those away, some other face will lead the charge.

Plus I’m not convinced that an assassination of Netanyahu would lead to a different party taking charge. I can’t imagine their system of governance is set up this way. But this is entirely beside the point. The point is that one man’s death doesn’t change history. The allies didn’t win WWII because Hitler killed himself, Hitler killed himself because the allies won WWII.

Great man theory nonsense. Was Netanyahu in power during the Sabra and Shatila massacre? During the Nakba? During the June 1967 war? Was Trump president when the US invaded Iraq? Was he president when the US sent billions of dollars in military aid to Israel to commit their genocide with? It’s the countries, not the leaders. They’re just the personification of a system. You could shoot each of these men in the head today, and nothing would change.

No, Israel sucks here, the Palestinians have the moral upper hand, and the Israeli apartheid state has no right to exist. They’re committing a genocide, and have been ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people for over three quarters of a century. The Palestinians have been exercising their right to resist the ethnonationalist, apartheid, genocidal, colonial occupiers, which is perfectly legitimate under international law.

I bet you would have been against the Warsaw uprising as well.

Because he’s a racist.

But they don’t. There’s Jewish voice for peace, there’s Norman Finkelstein, Code Pink, and so on. Countless Jews oppose settler colonial Zionism, and many more oppose the genocide. Do not fall for the lie that Israel and Judaism are the same thing.

I don’t fault you for thinking what you do though. The propaganda that tries to equate antizionism to anti-Semitism is incredibly insidious and convincing. A German Christian man gets murdered for collaborating with this genocidal state, and all mass media outlets call it antisemitism. The planes that drop the bombs that have murdered tens of thousands of children have the star of David painted on them. The moment anyone criticizes Israel, immediately folks bring up the Holocaust as a counterargument. What are people supposed to think? Everything is geared towards making people believe Jews are Israel and Israel is Jews.

I recently saw a photo of a hand drawn picture here on lemmy protesting the genocide. It was very heartfelt and nice. I don’t fully recall, but it had a girl in a Hijab in the center holding hands with people next to her, and it said things like “not in our name”, and 'stop the genocide". Along the center of the picture, they had drawn stars of David. And my immediate gut reaction was to think that this was incredibly distasteful; it was like drawing swastikas on a picture remembering the Holocaust. I had completely forgotten that the star of David is a religious symbol, and that it is not owned by the Israeli state. The propaganda has worked on me too, and I know better.

The person who had drawn this was convinced that the genocide was wrong based on her Jewish identity. Her religious beliefs told her that what Israel is doing is wrong. And my instinctive reaction on seeing a symbol indicating this was disgust. I felt so ashamed when I recognized what I was feeling. This is what people mean when they say Zionism breeds antisemitism. This is what people mean when they say Zionism makes the world less safe for Jews. An entire generation is growing up watching a livestreamed genocide, and CNN, Fox News, all politicians, the entire nation of Israel are all telling them “this is what Jews want”. How could they not grow up to be antisemites?

Your comment is incorrect and immoral. But I hope the mods keep it up as an illustration of what Israel has really done for Jews after all these years.

Germany has always been a big supporter of Zionism: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement

This is from before the Holocaust started, so I doubt the underlying reason for their support is guilt for the Holocaust.