#hamas

[mossadspypigeon]

[eretzyisrael]

[guerillas-of-history]

Yahya Sinwar gives a speech during a rally in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, in 2011.

(Adel Hana/AP)

[joemerl]

I'm not sure if I agree with the Arendt philosophy here. After all, one of the perpetrators chose to take this picture. One of them chose to keep it. You don't make a souvenir for an everyday haircut.

This massacre may have been routine, but it was something they were proud it. Same reason Hamas recorded October 7th.

Source

[girlactionfigure]

🚨BREAKING: Switzerland officially bans terror group Hezbollah, this comes after last week’s ban of terror group Hamas.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Deirdre Bardolf

Published: Dec 14, 2024

Civilian death counts in the Israel-Hamas war have been inflated and distorted to portray Israel as deliberately targeting innocent civilians, a new study found.

The report from the UK-based Henry Jackson Society found that news outlets failed to distinguish between civilian and combatant casualties and relied on manipulated statistics from the Hamas-run Health Ministry when reporting on the war.

Gaza officials claim more than 44,700 people have been killed following the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, but does not acknowledge that upwards of 17,000 were Hamas terrorists — a fact the media often omits, the study found, citing Israeli and US military and intelligence reports for its data.

The “Questionable Counting” study, published on Saturday, charged that the ministry overstated casualty data by including natural deaths and over-reporting the numbers of women and children killed.

Men were included on lists of women killed in the conflict, while adults were included on counts of child deaths, researchers found.

“This misclassification contributes to the narrative that civilian populations, particularly women and children, bear the brunt of the conflict, potentially influencing sentiment and media coverage,” said Andrew Fox, the study’s author.

Around 5,000 natural deaths appear to have been added to the list of casualties, including cancer patients who later appeared on lists of those still receiving treatment, researchers said.

The errors have “led to a narrative where the Israel Defense Forces are portrayed as disproportionately targeting civilians,” the report states.

The investigation looked at all articles with Gaza fatality statistics published from February through May 2024 across eight major outlets: CNN, BBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Associated Press, Reuters and the Australian ABC.

==

yOU'rE kIDDiNG!! hOW cOuLD tHiS hAVe hAppENeD?!?

The only thing shocking is how low the combatant to civilian rate is. And that's entirely due to the skill of the IDF.

[sayruq]

Some quotes:

[ash-tea]

[i-am-aprl]

Hamas just released its proposal for a permanent ceasefire. Israel has dismissed all of their proposals as “unrealistic” — and that has been echoed across the U.S. corporate media.

Here are the actual proposals from each side.

[mysharona1987]

You’d think this would be a bigger story, tbh.

[troythecatfish]

[fuck-hamas-go-israel]

I made my original response as a tongue in cheek comment about how people like to use Israel as a scapegoat for unrest in the Middle East, but I’d just like to add that true enough, there are people blaming Israel for the fall of Assad.

There are conspiracies that the CIA and Mossad have funded the rebels to overthrow Assad. And on video reports of how Assad lived in luxury while his people suffered under tranny, there are comments like “Assad was a good guy, this is just Israeli propaganda to make people think badly of Islam” as well as “don’t let this distract you from Gaza”.

Antisemitism truly makes people brain-dead.

exactly

[eretzyisrael]

by Orli Peter

The terrorists exploit Western values by weaponising our emotional empathy. Through graphic imagery and tales of victimhood, they provoke “pain empathy”, the visceral emotional reaction to witnessing suffering. Our brains are wired to respond more deeply to the image of a single suffering child than to statistics about millions of people, a phenomenon known as the “identifiable victim effect”. Studies reveal that small charities can raise more money than bigger ones simply by showcasing such poignant imagery. These images involuntarily affect our brain functioning. With exposure to these images, we respond with emotional empathy. The more emotionally empathic we already are, the more vulnerable we are to its weaponisation.

Hamas and its sympathisers skilfully exploit pain-empathy circuits in the brain, flooding the media with real or manipulated images of dead children, even misrepresenting gruesome scenes from other wars – including the Shoah in cases of “Holocaust inversion” – as Palestinian casualties of Israel. Terror leaders have openly stated that higher death tolls benefit their cause. They work to increase civilian casualties by broadcasting messages in mosques and on social media, instructing Gazans to ignore Israeli evacuation warnings, and by physically blocking evacuations through roadblocks or even shooting those attempting to flee. In a blatant display of its anti-humanitarian values, Hamas increases civilian casualties in order to weaponise Western pain-empathy to gain support for their agenda.

But while the militants centre their narrative around victimhood to promote pain-empathy in Western audiences, they simultaneously promote a narrative as victor to excite their base. For example, militant propagandists sent the Western media images of Gazan suffering, while Hamas broadcast GoPro videos of torture and murder to their supporters to invigorate them. They highlighted their victimhood and suffering under the “occupation” of the “colonisers”. They played it brilliantly.

During the 2008 war in Gaza, the international media focused on gruesome and graphic coverage of casualties, sometimes called “war porn”, and transformed a complex conflict into a global emotional spectacle. CNN and the BBC amplified sympathy for Hamas, illustrating the devastating effectiveness of such psychological strategies.

While emotional empathy fosters connectedness, it can also have negative consequences, such as lying to benefit our group, prioritising our group’s interests over principles of justice and connecting so much to another group’s priorities that our empathy is self-destructive.

The ability to truly empathise – combining emotional resonance with cognitive understanding – requires a nuanced, fact-based model of others’ motivations. Without this balance, our empathy becomes a tool for manipulation. What can we do? We must refine our cognitive frameworks to resist propaganda, anchoring our emotional responses in accurate understanding. While individual stories of suffering evoke deep empathy, they must be rescaled to reflect the true scope of the issue. Similarly, the compelling imagery of “blazer-wearing” revolutionaries for peace must be critically examined within the broader context of extremist violence and manipulation.

[sophia-zofia]

[guerillas-of-history]

Hamas militants participate in a rally after Nakba Day in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, May 17, 2015. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

[girlactionfigure]