Strider

Advocate for seeking truth via evidence, logic, and scientific method. Enjoys civil & respectful discourse. Trolls get blocked. Peace.

[💧Mary Kostakidis @MaryKostakidis]

Sidoti: Here is what Australia should do
‘•The first action should be a wide ranging review to identify the many ways in which Australia’s relations with Israel support Israel committing international crimes. 

•Trade and diplomatic measures include ceasing all defence-related trade with Israel, including dual-use products, components, materials and technology, and ending trade and cooperative ventures with companies developing military items for use by Israel. Australia should also withdraw Australian defence and trade officials from our Tel Aviv embassy and impose secondary sanctions on states conducting defence-related trade with Israel.

•Accountability measures comprise Australia affirming its commitment to enforce international criminal court arrest warrants for Israeli political and military leaders, along with imposing personal sanctions against these leaders and Israeli settlers responsible for violence in the West Bank.

•Legal enforcement actions include investigating and prosecuting Australian citizens who have served in the Israel Defense Forces since October 2023 for potential war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, while prohibiting Australian citizens from fighting in foreign armed forces. The full force of Australian law should be applied to Australians who commit international crimes, as the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has said.

•Settlement-focused measures would prohibit financial transactions with illegal Israeli settlements and end tax deductibility for Australian charities providing funding to organisations supporting illegal settlements.
Additionally, Australia should provide at least 15,000 humanitarian places for Palestinian refugees from Gaza and restore scholarship eligibility for Palestinians to undertake tertiary studies in Australia.
This is not a wishlist. It is the simple implementation of legal obligations. Australia wants to be a good international citizen. This is how it can be that.’

https://t.co/gnkldB6toX

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

Iran fires missiles at Gulf States—we all condemn—and the whole world stands up condemning Iran.

Israel wipes out entire villages and bombing cities thousands of years old in Lebanon, the World is silent.

Zero deaths in Gulf States.
3,324+ killed in Lebanon.

Double standards.

[Strider @JustInSyd2011]

@FranceskAlbs Wake up Australians too!

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

One of the more asinine liberal Zionist talking points is that you are technically allowed to criticize Israel, BUT it veers into antisemitism if you place more emphasis on Israel's abuses than on abuses in other countries.

If you believe Israel is worthy of disproportionately high levels of support, then you must necessarily also concede that it is worthy of disproportionately high levels of criticism.

You cannot simultaneously claim that it is appropriate and normal for the United States to be gifting billions of dollars in weaponry to Israel, AND that Americans should pay no more attention to Israel's humanitarian abuses than those seen in places like Sudan or the DRC.

You cannot simultaneously claim that it is right and good for the governments of the western world to unite behind Israel's relentless warmongering and provide it with myriad forms of military support, diplomatic cover and mass media apologia, AND claim it is a sign of prejudice against Jews for you to place more emphasis on Israel's acts of military aggression than on those of Russia.

You cannot simultaneously claim that it is fine and correct for western governments to be aggressively stomping out free speech that is critical of Israel in the name of combatting "antisemitism", AND insist that we should pay as much attention to the Israel lobby as we give to the lobbyists of nations like Qatar.

You can't make support for Israel absolutely central to the foreign and domestic policies of my nation's government, AND tell me that Israel should not be a special focal point of my scrutiny and opposition. You can do one or the other with logical coherence, but you can't do both.

It's fine if you want to try to argue that Israel is a super duper mega important ally whose fate is inseparable from the fate of my own country, but you don't get to then turn around and also tell me I should place no more emphasis on its violence and abuses than on those of nations like Iran or North Korea. That's not a thing.

If my rulers are going to insist on supporting Israel's nonstop wars, assaulting my free speech rights in order to defend Israeli information interests, and allowing obscenely powerful lobby groups to manipulate my government for the benefit of Israel, then Israel is going to receive a disproportionate amount of attention from me, because there is no other nation on earth for whom all of these things are being done.

There is no logical argument that I should do otherwise.

[Australian House of Representatives @AboutTheHouse]

After Question Time, the Speaker made a statement requesting that the Member for Goldstein apologise for reflections made on the Chair on X. The Member for Goldstein has returned to the Chamber and apologised for his remarks.

[David Shoebridge @DavidShoebridge]

Many people asked how it was that the Government decided to grant ECAJ $124 million more in funding this budget. Turns out that’s the number ECAJ asked for. Don’t know any other area in Government where this is how it works!

[💧Ron Jones❄💧 @RBJRON]

Have you noticed? All afternoon, the TV news has been about Isis brides returning to Australia, but there's never any announcements about Australians who were in the IDF who are killing Palestinians returning to Australia

[Tom London @TomLondon6]

I'm Jewish, British & 64

All my life, I wondered how the Holocaust could have happened. I understood that Hitler & other leaders were EVIL, but how did millions of ordinary people go along with it?

NOW, seeing how so many in the West rationalise & defend the Gaza Genocide, I think I have my answer and it is profoundly disturbing

[Mohamad Safa @mhdksafa]

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States for the seventh time won the war that wasn’t a war, so the United States can open the Strait of Hormuz that was open before the not war.

The not war that started to get the uranium that was completely obliterated, so that the Iranians can’t build the nuclear bomb that they weren’t building for the not war that the United States started.

Then the United States which has nuclear weapons threatening to use nuclear weapons to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons because having nuclear weapons is dangerous.

If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Basically every Israel-Palestine debate goes like this:

"Israel did X."

"Yeah, because the Palestinians did Y."

"Yeah, because Israel did Z."

"Yeah but only because the Arabs did A."

But if you bring the debate back far enough in time, eventually you get to the part where the western world forcibly dropped a brand new ethnostate on top of a pre-existing civilization without the permission of — and to the extreme detriment of — the people who were already living there.

Sure you can go further back and say "Oh yeah well the Jews lived there thousands of years ago," but that's just silly. There's no valid reason to believe some Jewish guy in New York City even has any meaningful lineage connecting him to that land more strongly than any random Muslim in Turkey or wherever, and even if there was, it would still be absurd to cite ancient history as the basis for a territorial claim. I'm only a few generations removed from my ancestry in Ireland and Scotland, but it would be ridiculous for me to show up demanding the home of someone who lives there.

So the original source for the grievance is clearly the artificial creation of an ethnonationalist state in the mid-20th century, and the push by Zionists and western imperialists to make it happen.

And how has that decision worked out? You see the results before you. Generations of nonstop violence and abuse, culminating in the slaughter and chaos throughout the middle east today.

This means that creating Israel was a mistake. A mistake that needs to be corrected.

Zionists will collapse into a shrieking pile of vitriol and hyperbole when you say this, claiming you're calling for the extermination of Jews, but this is false. Certainly ending a national order premised on putting the interests of Jews before Palestinians and righting the wrongs of the past would inconvenience a lot of the Jewish people who've been living there, but there's no basis for the claim that it would entail their deaths. Apartheid South Africa was dismantled without the extermination of millions of white people, and there's no reason to believe the dismantling of apartheid Israel would entail the extermination of Jews.

The Israel experiment has been tried, and it has failed. It is time to try something else.

[Zachary Foster @_ZachFoster]

If 41 Jews were killed in 24hrs, it would be called the nth worst antisemitic massacre since the holocaust.

When 41 Lebanese are killed by Israel in 24hrs, it’s called a ceasefire.

[Dr Sheep Person Podge @noplaceforsheep]

It’s quite something to watch the Jewish state of Israel up to its neck in the blood of those it’s slaughtering, while simultaneously demanding that Jews everywhere receive special protection from any conceivable kind of harm.

That every human deserves to be safe from harm is not a concept with which they are familiar, it seems.

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

The blood-drenched Butcher Netanyahu is due to address the UN General Assembly at 11 pm tonight our time. I really do hope that the Australian delegation walks out on him, with the rest of the civilised world. @SenatorWong RT if you agree.

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

Americans are rightly fed up with foreign influence in our government.

Focus our resources and spend our money on our nation—not someone else's blood feud thousands of miles away.

[Dan Bilzerian @DanBilzerian]

I’m number 1 in the world.

It’s rare in this life that you can be better than 8 billion people at anything.

Thank you Israel for appointing me the number 1 antisemite in the world, you absolute cunts.

🏴

[Tricia Dearborn @TriciaDearborn]

How "concerned" does Wong have to be before she DOES something?
Denounce Israel's actions. Apply trade and diplomatic sanctions.
"deeply concerned" doesn't do it.
"gravely concerned" doesn't do it.
How far on the Concern-O-Meter does the arrow have to move before there's ACTION?

[MFWitches @MFWitches]

Say the word, Penny.

Say the word, go on it’s not that hard once you start.

The word is ISRAEL.

ISRAEL is the word you’re looking for.

ISRAEL is causing the humanitarian crisis in Lebanon right now.

The question is: why are you so beholden to ISRAEL?

Just what in the hell is going on?

[Mike Carlton @MikeCarlton01]

Really ? Unacceptable ? Is that it ? Burnt toast is unacceptable. Cold coffee is unacceptable. Cowardly diplomatic waffle is unacceptable.
The Israeli murder of UN peacekeepers is surely a little more than that. How fucking pathetic.

[Strider @JustInSyd2011]

@SonnyHood3 @PeterCronau @jamiemcintyre21 Left position has precedence in flag protocol.

Australian citizens & politicians should ALWAYS display AUSTRALIAN flag on the LEFT and the flag of whatever country they're friends with on the right.

Reversing positions shows allegiance to the foreign flag over Australia's.