DdCno1

I’ve watched that beheading and worse things. I wish I hadn’t. Imagine having the audacity of calling Hamas saints by comparison. What a despicable and inane thing to do.

Like the other user said, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa only became successful after it abandoned violent resistance - and citing Haiti as an aspirational example is downright hysterical.

There’s also a massive difference between demanding outright perfection and not applauding people who behead Asian guest workers (who, as I’m sure you are aware, but equally willing to ignore, are not “evil Zionist colonizers”) with a rusty gardening hoe while live-streaming the torture-murder on the Internet. Coincidentally, you seem to have no trouble with demanding outright perfection from the IDF, who, by the way, has a roughly similar soldier kill rate in this conflict according to most estimates - but I bet you are not willing to applaud them for that.

As for what Gaza actually was, here’s what this supposed “concentration camp” looked like before the war:

https://youtu.be/W1r1z3x53ZU

At some point you might learn that simplistic, childish concepts of pure good and evil rarely apply in this world. Yes, the Allies were the good guys in WW2. Being the good guy doesn’t mean you’re perfect, because absolutely nothing is.

The fact that a large number of people in the West are denying this and portraying Hamas as freedom fighters is very worrying.

Don’t rob people in the ME of their own agency. The West has messed up a lot, but so have the locals. Both are at least equally to blame.

The point is that Nicaragua would have never done anything like this on their own, because they have barely anything to do with the ME. The West on the other hand does. That’s not entitlement, that’s just a fact. We have a vested interest in what is going on there. Nicaragua is used as a pawn and it’s incredibly transparent that this is happening. Same with South Africa.

It really isn’t. Nicaragua is a tiny nation that does barely any trade and is of no significant importance to the Middle East diplomatically nor militarily. This does not apply to the West.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are not just deliberately doing the old “just asking questions” thing and are legitimately having difficulties with understanding relatively simple concepts.

There is a difference between their internal numbers and their outside communication. It’s quite easy to keep an accurate head count during peace time and they did that, for taxing purposes alone - and to maintain the level of control that they wanted as the rulers of an oppressive police state. Just in case you didn’t know what kind of place Gaza was before the war.

However, they actually have no idea right now, because it’s war, it’s chaotic, with shifting front lines, people being displaced, caught under the rubble, disfigured bodies with no identifying marks, families getting torn apart and not knowing what happened to their loved ones, etc.

You know, the same chaos as in every other war. You can’t keep accurate records under these conditions, especially considering that everything even remotely resembling an official Hamas government office has been bombed to smithereens or overrun by ground troops - but Hamas pretends that they do, with precise casualty figures published incredibly frequently. That’s not how this works. Israel needed months for an accurate count of their deaths from just October 7th, despite the fact that the fighting within Israel lasted only for a day or two. Ukraine has huge “unknowns” about their population in occupied areas and where there has been or is fighting.

Yet Hamas of all people somehow are omniscient record keepers - and barely anyone is willing to question it. We then get a game of telephone of increasingly reputable parties repeating Hamas numbers to one another, until people can naively say that “the BBC” or “the UN” is reporting something, oblivious to the actual source of the information. It’s as if nobody learned how to properly trace sources at school or university.

Democracy Matrix doesn’t disregard “legal corruption”:

https://www.democracymatrix.com/fileadmin/_processed_/a/0/csm_RegulationIntermediate_Equality_1f52ae705f.png

Neither does the Democracy Index, which has “political participation” as a criteria.

You can’t just make up your own definitions. Democracy is a well-defined term. There being an imbalance just like in every society doesn’t make a country not a democracy. That’s not how this works.

Think about this for a second. Hamas has an interest in accurate internal head counts for e.g. tax purposes - they were the de-facto government of the strip, after all. Their public statements cannot be trusted.

Head count of the survivors vs. pre-war records.

They are not. Everything indicates that they remain uninhabited. Ghost cities are usually built in regions with cheap lease prices for land, which are cheap for a reason: Poor infrastructure, few jobs and opportunities.

Nonsense. The US didn’t build entire fake cities that are totally empty, because they solely exist as investment scams and are not suitable for people to live in.

A flawed democracy is still a democracy - and Germany is widely regarded, despite some corruption, as one of the best-functioning democracies in the world (5th best according to the Democracy Matrix - which is admittedly from a German university - and 12th best according to the Economist’s Democracy Index). There are no serious scholars doubting this.

Ideally an independent party, like an NGO with no affiliations to Hamas and Israel.

For starters, they didn’t blow up the embassy. Please try again.

It’s fine to admit that we simply don’t know until the war is over. Only then can a true count be possible, without terrorists interfering.

They are relying entirely on numbers provided by Hamas. There is no independent third party counting casualties in the strip.

Just like the SED.

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