Yeah! No USA involvement there... take a second and imagine it was you and your family getting bombed and starved. stop being such a horrible person.
My family came here decades ago to escape oppression and chaos, not bring it here. And we don’t.
Every action I’ve seen from activists—both by Zionists and Palestinian hardliners—have been to sow discord for their own ends.
The children here don’t deserve it. If you want to be decent? Then convince neighbors like SA or the UAE to provide medical aid.
If your aim is to help, then the elected government has said find a different way so what’s your next move?
As a lifelong Democrat, I’m forced to conclude this appeal from a certain segment of hardline liberals isn’t in good faith.
You may not like it and it’s shitty, but Hamas’ attack last year changed things for me; and I’m guessing I’m not the only silent centrist who thinks this.
Every lie of omission by extremist liberals deepens my suspicions.
I’d say a no-compromise outlook is monstrous. That’s the position of a zealot and is rightly distrusted.
I entertained this discussion, but the bad faith is clear and I won’t be wasting any further time.
When a self-describe "proud Islamophobe" proposes a policy like this, I believe her that it is motivated by hating muslims.
"In fact, Hamas got 44% of party list votes in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections across Gaza and the West Bank, and lost three of the five districts in Gaza to the secular Fatah party. There has been no election since then."
Liberals lie by saying that it wasn’t a majority; yet omitting a key detail: Yes Hamas won, with 44%.
And if you’re gonna quote wikipedia: “ Tensions between Fatah and Hamas began to rise in 2005 after the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004. After the legislative election on 25 January 2006, which resulted in a Hamas victory, relations were marked by sporadic factional fighting. This became more intense after the two parties repeatedly failed to reach a deal to share government power, escalating in June 2007 and resulting in Hamas' takeover of Gaza.[35]”
44% of the party list votes and 41% of the constituency votes; the PLC had 132 seats half elected by party-list proportional method and the other half by vote-n/top-n win elections in electoral districts (while mechanically slightly different, this tends to basically approximate the partisan effect of plurality election of multicandidate slates, where party is the main driver of preferences, though in the PLC in some districts there was an additional twist of reserved seats for Christians which went to the highest voted Christian candidate regardless of where they placed overall.)
The reason Hamas was able to secure an outright legislative majority despite having a plurality of votes in both halves of the election is largely the wildly non-proportional results of the latter: with 41% of the district vote, they secured 68% of the district seats.
Also, those results are Palestine-wide, and Hamas IIRC (I can't easily locate data by district or split Gaza/WB) way overperformed in the WB largely as a protest vote against incumbent Fatah members.
A plurality of gazans did not vote for Hamas because half of them were not even yet born. They had no vote.
What’s terrifying is that what would be elected is far worse.
To your other point: The goal post is the statement (I'm paraphrasing here): "It was not a majority of Gazans that voted for Hamas, but instead a plurality". My rebuttal is that for sure half of the country did not vote for Hamas because the last election is before the median age of the country (half the country was not even born yet).
Could you explain how I shifted goal posts?
I think you might be assuming that we "know" without elections that the majority of the current population is "radicalized". The evidence of pluralities and majorities is given through elections, we don't have evidence for the current population. Maybe that is what you perceive as shifting the goal posts?
If you're going off of something other than elections as evidence for support of hamas at a plurality level of current Gazans - please share the data you are using to be "terrifi[ed] of .. what would be elected" (quoting you @nobodyandpround with slight paraphrase to make the grammar work). The population is roughly 2M people, it's difficult to get to any answer other than "we don't know" without a full blown and free election.
Which I’ve pointed out is quite wrong.