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by runarberg 895 days ago
Sorry, I’m not that good at making my argument clear.

What I’m rebutting—or rather making a poor attempt to rebut—is your hinting that the international double standard doesn’t exist, or at the very least is understandable. The interviewee in the al-Jazeera interview makes a much better argument for the existence, the importance of recognizing, and the inexcusableness of this international double standard, better than I ever could.
1 comments
tptacek 895 days ago
The international double standard does not in fact exist. The two situations are not comparable. That observation does not exonerate Israel.
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runarberg 895 days ago
This particular criticism is not directed at Israel, but at countries supporting Israel, such as the USA and the UK. The point is that human rights violations are enabled and even supported by third countries when Israel is the perpetrator, but not when Russia is the perpetrator.
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tptacek 895 days ago
Again: the situations are not comparable. Russia was unprovoked and has a stated objective of annexing a sovereign country. Israel is in fact under military threat (was, in fact, attacked, gravely), from territory it has occupied since 1967. It is unsurprising that the international responses are not equivalent.

A short way to sum this up is: regardless of the distaste many in the west (myself included) have for the means by which Israel is pursuing it's goal, the west is unanimous in support of that actual goal: no western state believes Hamas should be left to govern Gaza, even as many probably do quietly hope to haul Netanyahu to the Hague (if the Israelis don't imprison him first).

Meanwhile: every western state actively, viscerally opposes Russia's goal.

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runarberg 895 days ago
Again: When it comes to crimes against humanity, that doesn’t matter. Signatories to the Geneva convention convention are expected to uphold international humanitarian laws even when greater crimes are committed against them. The same applies to the Genocide convention. The international community is supposed to punish signatories which violate these convention, and in the case of Israel, they routinely don’t.
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tptacek 895 days ago
It in fact matters a great deal, as you can see.
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