In 2020, the online news organization The Intercept revealed that HRW’s then-Executive Director, Ken Roth, accepted a $470,000 donation from a Saudi billionaire based on the condition that HRW would not use the money to protect the rights of the persecuted LGBTQ-plus community in the Middle East.
Roth was compelled to return the donation after The Intercept report.
Neither i24 nor memri are unbiased sources, but if this is true, it certainly would account for a lot of the anti-Israel bias that has been coming out of human rights watch lately.
Yeah, it can’t be the genocide.
It’s them inappropriately defining this as genocide or whatever other buzzwords will generate outrage. This is clearly about defense for Israel and not eliminating an ethnic group.
Yes, those 5000+ children that Israel has killed were a real risk to Israeli security.
Is that tragic? Yes. Is it genocide? No. Words mean things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
Sure sounds like what they’re doing to Palestinians in Gaza to me. Or do you think they’re going to let the innocent people they didn’t murder come back now that they’re occupying it?
You know, because Israel is famous for giving Palestinians their homes and their land back.
What is being done in Gaza is genocide.
The “genocide” debate here is activists trying to seize the high ground after Hamas’s hideous acts. Their hope, after an assault of such barbarity, is to label the response “genocidal” and hope that people chase that shiny lure instead of remembering why this war happened at all.
So all the children they killed were part of Hamas?
Quite the strawman. People deploying the word “genocide” are either ignorant of what the word means or are intentionally misusing it for political purposes because they would otherwise be faced with having to discuss why this war began at all. Word play debates do little to alleviate people’s suffering. Denial of the other side’s humanity & dueling victimhood, eliminate empathy. We’ve had FEW cases of legal genocide since 1948, the question is how do these debates help long term?
Israel is neither trying to destroy Arabs nor Muslims, What they are doing is defending themselves against a hostile nation that declared war on them by slaughtering their civilians. Sometimes keeping themselves safe means annexing land, and a genocide this does not make.
Israel’s intent is not to destroy any group, if that were their intent, they would have done it by now. They certainly have the capability. Their intent is to keep themselves safe from people who are trying to kill them and refuse to surrender.
Palestinians are a specific ethnic group. Interesting that you aren’t acknowledging that. And the majority of Palestinians that have been murdered were not part of Hamas.
As far as calling Gaza or Palestine a nation, that’s laughable. When has Israel ever acknowledged their sovereignty?
No, Palestinians are Arabs.
Collateral damage is not genocide.
Look up the definition of nation, I’ll wait. You seem to have it confused with statehood.
Given than this hasn’t happened yet, it feels a little premature to go tossing around words like genocide.
It seems like most people claiming Israel wants to reoccupy Gaza genuinely don’t realize that Israel voluntarily disengaged in 2005, closed the existing settlements, and withdrew all military. Or that part of the reason that Hamas was able to execute the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history was due to Israel’s willingness to ease border restrictions.
How long do we have to wait for them not to let Palestinians back into Gaza before we can call it genocide?
Seems like the people who say it’s too early to talk about gun legislation in America every time there’s a mass shooting.
It not being a literal active war zone is probably a good first step, I’d say. That, and “back into Gaza” implies they’ve been forced out of Gaza, which isn’t true.
If Israel were truly attempting to eliminate the Palestinians as a people, it would take a few hours. It’s not like they lack the firepower. I’ll readily concede that they’ve been much less careful about preventing civilian casualties, and they absolutely should be criticized for that, but that’s a significant and meaningfully different thing from deliberately targeting and killing civilians.
Religious rhetoric always sounds borderline insane to me so maybe they are secretly peaceful, but the Israeli government is using some pretty violent biblical examples if what they want is peace. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netanyahu-amalek-israel-palestine-gaza-saul-samuel-old-testament