PistoldPete

It shouldn’t be a controversial statement .. in fact it’s one that even Alpha acknowledges. The Hamas attack was a crime of such depravity ( and with attackers glorying in the fact that they were killing Jews) that I am in doubt that it crosses the legal threshold of genocide.. of deliberate intent of killing members of an ethnic group simply because of their ethnicity. Israels response may have caused a greater loss of life, many of them civilians . But as I have said many times it is not genocide.. the legal experts state the difficulty in showing intent to kill people just because they are Palestinians. so on the one hand you get people like Gary Lineker staying completely silent on the Hamas atrocity , but at the same time telling us all to watch a video of some academic saying Israel’s response is genocide. I cannot see that the attitude of people like Lineker is anything but prejudiced in the extreme.

It is true that there a lot of people who do not want to recognise that October 7 took place. When the video was shown by a Jewish businessman the showing had to be done secretly to avoid protests . Posters of the missing hostages are regularly posted in London and torn down within hours by protesters. There are a very large number of people who do not want to recognise Jews as the victims.

The big problem is that you are saying the actions of Israel are comparable to Hamas. They are not . Nowhere near. If you cannot see that then yes you must be biased beyond belief.

In the case of WW2 there were various reasons for Allied actions. 1) A genuinely expansionist enemy that was attacking territories in the Baltics, all over Europe and Russia. 2) An evil ideology of eugenics that mercifully was a phase that passed along with Hitler. 3) Albeit with hindsight, a war that ultimately brought peace across Western Europe for the last 80 years and hopefully forever. But despite those justifications, if Allied forces had rounded up 1,400 German civilians and executed them in cold blood that would be murder, genocide even given all that.

I referred to Nazi Germans specifically to acknowledge the fact that we were at war with the Nazis, not with the Germans as a people. The horrors of the war are that innocent civilians ( French as well as Germans) were killed in large numbers.

Nazi Germans were killers, murderers, genocidal all of those things. They killed millions of Jews, gays, disabled people and anyone else who got in their way. Appeasement with Hitler was no use, only when Hitler was defeated could a process of appeasement and reconciliation begin. That process has led to peace in Western Europe for the last 80 years and probably forever. Before that West European countries had been warring for centuries. Quite a change and none of that would have been possible if Hitler hadn’t been defeated.

I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t see it as a tit for tat retaliation ie you killed x of our civilians so we will kill y of yours as retaliation. The stated aim is to take Hamas out of the equation so that there is no recurrence. Whether that will work as I say I don’t know, but that’s the objective as I see it and how Israel has stated it.

Well instead of tit for tat scaling up (which incidentally I don’t see Israel’s response as that anyway) we go down a tit for tat scaling down .. the hostage/ prisoner exchange is a good start. The big step is Israel ( without Netanyahu) recognising Palestine and vice versa. The devil I think is in the detail which is why I think previous attempts at a two State solution have failed.

Interesting that Warne brought JJ on ahead of Waghorn. And of course it paid dividends straightaway. All our ageing strikers have played a part so far but I’ve always thought we needed some fresh legs. Hopefully JJ can stay fit and play a big part and if so maybe extend his loan after Jan.

Well as I say I have relatives who fought in the wars and I know full well they didn’t want to talk about it. The traumas of what they saw and yes what they did stayed with them for the rest of their lives. I know that it preyed on their consciences . War is horrible and nobody wants it. But calling our armed forces murderers is really too much.

I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that. I would like to see some meaningful discussions right now about what the end game is. Calls for a ceasefire are pointless without that.

I actually think that Israel’s attacks are less reckless than say the Allies on Dresden. But it’s different times now we have computers to help teach targets. I don’t regard either as murder but probably Dresden was a reckless error by Churchill. in answer to another question what is proportionate can only be decided in context of the end game. Hiroshima and Nagasaki unimaginably horrific though they were ended World war 2 which had cost 55 million lives. If the ultimate aim is ever lasting peace in the Middle East who knows what is proportionate.

Good away win , good use of subs how good does it get. Pompy may have won but we’re still coming for them.

So were the Allied forces all murderers? Lots of civilians killed in the World Wars, millions I think. Pretty offensive to bandy around words like that plenty of us have relatives who fought in the wars.

So I could call you a murderer or paedo and that would be ok? I mean who cares about the legal minutiae that you might not actually be a murderer why quibble about such minor legal technicalities?