I keep telling the libs in my life to watch DS9 in the (naive) hope they make the connection between bajor and palestine.
Israel is currently free to bomb Gaza!
Hamas are trying to put an end to that freedom!
The freedom to indiscriminately kill Palestinians is essential to Israel’s national identity and sense of freedom!
Therefore, Hamas are NOT freedom fighters!
Checkmate, Commies!
Terrorist is a political designation that has no clear definition. It is used as a catch-all term for undesirables as a way to commit war crimes indiscriminately.
Where do we draw the line between the two?
Is there any line they could cross, any at all in the future, where the label changes in your mind?
The problem with this line of thinking, as well as the point the OP’s meme makes, is that it’s drawing a line between the two in the first place, when in fact there can be significant overlap.
A quick dictionary lookup yields this for terrorism: “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” Note that “especially against civilians” doesn’t mean it has to be, just that civilians being involved makes it a stronger case.
Now, you may have already spotted the issue, but here it is anyway: this is an incredibly broad definition. Laws don’t bind those in other states, so ANY act of violence or intimidation is unlawful.
So…freedom fighters fight using violence, against the laws of the country that claims sovereignty over them… so they’re terrorists. Full stop. This doesn’t mean that we should or shouldn’t support them, it just means that the definition of terrorism is pretty useless.
If you chop the heads off people who are not even Israeli, or torture infants in their beds; you are not supported due to the acts against people completely outside any who oppose you.
Israel made that up while bombing hospitals. That being said, there were more secular, politically moderate non-fundamentalist organizations dedicated to Palestinian liberation, and Israel supported Hamas over those organizations in order to paint Palestinians as extremists and fundamentalists. Now that’s coming back to bite them in the ass. Turns out if you turn a city of 2 million into an open air prison and a concentration camp, and keep bombing their schools and hospitals, keep turning off their electricity and water, keep dumping your untreated sewage into their only open body of water, they will turn to militancy and fight you back, because the only other option is to be genocided. Try to keep up.
You should read “The World’s Biggest Prison” by Ilan Pappe who is Israeli. He will tell you the truth about how his own government treats Palestinians. If you aren’t willing to listen to Palestinians, maybe you’re willing to listen to him?
Israel is a genocidal settler-colonial apartheid state set up by the European and North American powers to colonize the middle east. Even early zionists like Theodor Herzl understood Israel in these explicitly settler-colonial terms.
I bet you believed Iraq had WMDs and Saddam threw people in a shredder too.
If you chop the heads off people who are not even Israeli
There is zero evidence that this did happen
torture infants in their beds
There is zero evidence that this did happen
only because they want violent death to Jews
That does not accurately describes Hamas’ motivations. The Palestinians had their land stolen from them, and are slowly being killed, over decades. They want that to stop.
only because they want vengeance
That does not accurately describe Israel’s motivations either; they don’t want vengeance, they want the land and the Palestinians gone
Beyond the fact you seem to have a comic-book-level outlook of these events, you’re also putting on the same level a successful military operation that resulted in a comparatively small amount of civilian deaths as collateral victims (not to mention we still don’t have a clue of many of those Israeli civilians were killed by the IDF, but it’s definitely in the double digits at least) and an ongoing genocide, which is pretty disgusting
If you chop the heads off people who are not even Israeli, or torture infants in their beds
none of these things happened
mad that bigoted shitbags like you aren’t hunted down like rabid dogs the way you so richly deserve, yes
