Posted by NomDePlum 11/3/2025
you suggested that it's not appropriate and they been thrown under a bus. i'll say that your response is the one that started with hyperboles
I can understand the impulse, but not the conscious arguing for it.
To explain, there was a study of partisan bias I once read, wherein a mixed audience is shown some factually neutral piece of media, then asked to rate the bias of the piece along with some other questions. Naturally, the strongest partisans felt it was the most biased against them (something we've seen replicated in dozens of studies), but the more interesting outcome was that they teased out why the partisans felt the media was so biased. The overwhelming argument from both sides was that the media in question lacked additional context that would specifically justify the actions of their own side, even though that was not the focus of the video.
My big take away from this is that if a person is demanding additional, one-directional contextualization, especially if said context seems like it stretches/moves the topic of conversation, I'm probably reading polemic disguised as truth seeking.
I think you'll be insisting on additional context and moving the topic of conversation away from child molesting and your involvement therein to, oh, perhaps "fake news".
The sad truth is that it's fundamentally true that the reality on the ground is not a compromise between both sides. There is an actual reality.
Trying to contextualize or talk about fake news or doing anything else feels very shady to me in that context. You do often see this sort of hemming and hawing from people online during these cancellation campaigns, and I cannot even fathom what inspires them to do anything other than directly and aggressively defend themselves.
Depends strongly on what you mean of "make a video focusing on that". Is the video just repeating the accusations, without giving any evidence? Is the video a fake? Or does it show actual evidence of child molesting?
I think the moral judgement of this would depend strongly on whether actual molestation has taken place and whether or not the video shows evidence of that.
If it didn't show evidence or the evidence was fake, the case can be dismissed without any additional context and the blame would be on the author of the video for spreading libel.
But if it was true, what kind of context would you expect would change the outcome? "That kid totally deserved it"?
Incidentally, Israelis make the same demand on the world to ignore any "context" for October 7.
Also, to call shoving a metal tube up a prisoners ass to the point it causes an intestinal rupture “beat up” is incredibly disingenuous.
Reuters—UN adds IDF to list of grave violators against children (June 7, 2024).
Reuters—breakdown of verified Gaza deaths (women/children) from UN rights office (Nov 8, 2024).
Just allegations.
Nor am I surprised by your antipathy to Israeli courts, despite the fact that Israel’s courts rank highly on independence and rule-of-law lists, are broadly regarded as independent and capable of delivering fair process. Bodies that effectively vouch for this include Freedom House, global rule-of-law datasets (e.g., the World Bank WGI), and the practical trust reflected in extradition arrangements with other western countries.
That's the Supreme Court defending the starvation policy in Gaza. That exact court that liberal, progressive Israelis were fighting tooth and nail for during the last years, as the last bastion of democracy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c0k77xm651jt
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-14/ty-article-ma...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-08-12/ty-article-ma...
Even now, during the ceasefire, Israel only allows goods in through Kerem Shalom and Kissufim and keeps the other crossings shut, even though aid organizations urgently demand that they must be opened. Explain to me why.
Do you seriously think Israel had a policy of starvation? Obesity is common in gaza; there are restaurants everywhere; there aren't any pictures of starving families; all the pictures of starving kids have turned out to be of kids with serious pre-existing conditions; there have been only about 200 malnutrition related deaths in two years of war in gaza, orders of magnitude less than here in the US. And no belligerent in the history of war has ever allowed in more aid to the opposing side than Israel.
How would you even expect this to work? There was a two-year nonstop bombing campaign and an official "total blockade" for several months. How could there possibly be "restaurants everywhere" after that?
Also, Haaretz is an Israeli newspaper itself. Is the conspiracy running so deep?
There are plenty of restaurants in Gaza, as a quick Google search will reveal, so this is a question for you to ask yourself. Perhaps your premise is wrong.
Except some of them would be beyond the Yellow Line, in the area where the IDF troops are and which is strictly off-limits for civilians. And none of them have any reviews that are newer than from two years ago.
(Compare with the markers on the Israeli side where the latest reviews are often just weeks or days old)
Netanyahu in march officially ordered the IDF to block all aid [1] (though he later pretended he didn't [2]). That blockade was kept up for three months, until international pressure got too strong because even international staff reported being dizzy from hunger.
Where were all those restaurants getting their fresh meat and vegetables and chocolate sauce from after 3 months of blockade?
So either the IDF is grossly incompetent and can't maintain their own siege or that youtuber is lying and showing videos from before the war.
(I guess we have to extend "the enemy is both strong and weak" with "our own military is both strong and weak")
The videos also don't show even a hint of destruction, even though the restaurants are close to areas that were hit by airstrikes.
The youtuber was nice enough to include a callout of that in his own video, though I'm not sure he read it. [3]
Why would Gazans even put themselves at risk and go to the GHF distribution points if they could just go to the pizza place down the street?
> (and recent google reviews)
Then show me some from this summer, because I don't see any.
Btw, Israel is still partially blocking aid, this time with buerocratic excuses: They ban aid organizations they don't like (quasi-terrorist organizations like Save the Children), then forbid any other aid org to take over their cargo. [4]
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-halts-aid-into-gaza-ove...
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-false...
[3] https://youtu.be/DFjhyAsHYFo?si=mf_jaY_k5i37TmAy&t=1m45s
[4] https://www.haaretz.com/gaza/2025-11-04/ty-article/.premium/...
The ingredients (chocolate, vegetables, fresh meat) are let in by Israel, which has let in 1.8 million metric tons of aid during the war, more than any belligerent in history. Educate yourself.
>Obesity is common in gaza
This maybe works as a claim if humans exist in non-linear time where 2020 and 2025 are perceived simultaneously. In fact, though, it's not a claim that any current data evinces.
>there are restaurants everywhere
And as we all know, a restaurant under rubble without sufficient access to ingredients or consistent utility supply is still operating at full capacity and its patrons don't need to have funds, able bodies, or the absence of the threat of random artillery strikes to avail themselves to their services.
>there aren't any pictures of starving families; all the pictures of starving kids have turned out to be of kids with serious pre-existing conditions
Adults have more developed organs and digestive systems than children and those pre-existing conditions are ones that would either have been managed with sufficient access to food or had resulted from prenatal nutritional deficiencies caused by insufficient access to food. Your previous point was solipsistic, this kind of immaterial distinction, though, is just cynical.
>there have been only about 200 malnutrition related deaths in two years of war in gaza
Outside of a comment on Threads, I can't find any source for this. I wonder how many qualifiers you'll add to the ynetnews editorial you'll quote in support of this one.
>no belligerent in the history of war has ever allowed in more aid to the opposing side than Israel.
Per Israel and its material partners, yeah. Not so much per every internationally recognized human rights watchdog, aid organizations that aren't staffed by mercenaries and funded by the IDF and the US, or genocide scholars and other academics in related fields. It's unclear whether simple credulity or ideological priors are at play in accepting such a premise.
> Obesity is common There are countless videos of obese people in Gaza today.
> Restaurats everywhere. Google it! Not restaurants under rubble, but restaurants serving faties today. Here's a short list of open restaurants: - Manaqish restaurant - Ghazetna restaurant - Hotdog restaurant - Zaitouna cam restaurant - Chef Hamada - O2 restaurant
> No pictures of starving families. Yes, of course adult bodies are more resilient, but in real famines (unlike the one in Gaza) adults die too. And the kids that look starving had preexisting conditions.
>there have been only about 200 malnutrition related deaths in two years of war in gaza A googleable claim.
>no belligerent in the history of war has ever allowed in more aid to the opposing side than Israel. It's a factual matter, nobody debates it. You can't find a country that sent more aid to a belligerent on a per capita basis.
I did, and here's what I found: https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10173130920930377&set=...
You should credit Mr. Fuld, plagiarizing hasbara seems a bit gauche.
>And the kids that look starving had preexisting conditions.
Caused by prenatal nutritional deficiencies that wouldn't have occurred if they weren't born under siege. It's pretty wild that Zionists are still engaging in this transparently cynical fuff.
>A googleable claim.
Yeah, this time it comes from an unsourced post on Threads. Not that it would matter, much like the charge of genocide, ICL doesn't require a particular threshold of deaths.
>real famines
I'll defer to the FAO, WFP, Oxfam, EU JRC and any number of actual authorities on what constitutes one of those.
> It's a factual matter, nobody debates it.
Nobody with a material interest in supporting Israeli expansionism, yeah.
In the meantime, what I will say for other readers is that just as cholantesh ignores the foundations of western jurisprudence, cholantesh also ignores one of the foundational principles of the enlightenment, and the motto of the royal society: nullius in verba - take nobody's word for it. One doesn't make a case by appealing to authorities like the Church of England or agencies with three-letter acronyms, but thinks from first principles to generate good explanations. Various evidence-free circular theories, like "kids look starving due to prenatal nutritional deficiencies" sound incredibly stupid (really, 10 year olds? kids with cerebral palsy?), and classifying arguments as belonging to forbidden categories ("hasbara talking points") is a dollar store technique for throwing reason out the window.
Take the sarcasm out of your position and this is essentially what you're saying: "Yes, I reject the past 400 years of progress in jurisprudence because it's not always perfect, and I would prefer for us to return to medieval times."
However... your non-sarcastic interpretation is clearly in bad faith, and ratchets up the hostility even further.
Why post this jeering reply?
His actual cloaked argument, insofar as it exists, is that Israel does not uphold these standards you value. You clearly disagree, and of course the sarcasm is unproductive, but he's not advocating barbarity (but levying an accusation of it).
richardfeynman 15 hours ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Israels top military lawyer arrested after she adm...
The video in question is troubling and should be investigated, but it does not clearly show rape, so I think that for someone to say "this shows rape" and "no matter what evidence comes out in trial I can dismiss that because it's a trial in Israel" is medieval peasant thinking.
That the video doesn't show rape and/or was doctored are also contested allegations, so your pearl clutching about double standards rings extremely hollow.
>There's been no trial and the footage, which was doctored, does not clearly show this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806468)
>I also pointed out that the video doesn't clearly support the allegation, and the video has been doctored. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806559)
There is no assertion in these sentences that treats the video being doctored and not showing a rape as contested allegations that need to be established as fact over the course of a trial. Maybe you've changed your mind in the past couple of hours, though.
"Right, because over the course of the past 400 years, those institutions have always worked everywhere and no one's ever been at the margins of the justice system, been arrested arbitrarily or ignored by the police, had to languish in jail without a charge, been denied access to competent attorneys, a fair and speedy trial, or been subject to institutional biases and unwarranted imprisonment. Certainly that would never happens in a territory where it has happened routinely for 70+ years."
To me that sounds like you're saying that the standards of jurisprudence developed since the enlightenment are unnecessary because they sometimes fail, and that therefore a trial would be superfluous; it's fine to prejudge rape in this instance. This is at least my reading of your comment; I admit your comment is dripping with sarcasm so it's hard to tell what you actually meant.
I've also been consistent that the accused should be presumed innocent and has a right to due process. If you disavow your prior comment and agree with these common law principles then congratulations you've found a point of agreement with a zionist, and you disagree with the others in the thread who argue that a rape definitely occurred and the accused can be presumed guilty.
Correct, you made a straw man: literally no one is saying there shouldn't be a trial in this thread. You know who isn't? The Israeli government, the military whose members are accused of a crime, and a large and vocal segment of the Israeli population. The same cohort _do_ want a criminal case levelled against a whistleblower who was being intimidated for trying to do her job. The fact that this case is being pursued with significantly more vigour makes most reasonable observers question the level of commitment Israeli society has to the values you're evangelizing. But I mean, how sincere your commitment is is still up in the air, because again, you've never walked back your unsupported claim that the video is doctored.
Of course I didn't walk back my claim that the video is doctored, and of course it's not unsupported. Here is one of many articles alleging the video is doctored and pointing to the specific person (Guy Peleg) who doctored it by splicing together different clips from different days: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/sde-teiman-the-leak-that-sho...
This is just reporting, and it will need to be tested in court. But my claim is not unsupported.
It's not actually required for someone involved in a discussion to waste their time responding to straw men.
>This is just reporting, and it will need to be tested in court.
Ah, so we've moved on from strawmanning to moving the goalposts.
By the way, there is no serious debate about whether the video was altered. Any casual watcher an see it's spliced clips. The question is only whether it was altered maliciously, to paint a specific picture. That is what needs to be tested in court.
No, of course not, the fact that you keep trying to derail the argument by mischaracterizing what the people you disagree with are saying makes it a straw man. No one here has rejected the common law convention or said there shouldn't be a trial. A sizable contingent of your ideological brethren have. You refuse to confront this, and that's your own cross to bear.
>By the way, there is no serious debate about whether the video was altered. Any casual watcher an see it's spliced clips. The question is only whether it was altered maliciously, to paint a specific picture. That is what needs to be tested in court.
Not especially, the material question is whether it depicts the assailants performing the acts that resulted in the prisoner's injuries. Notably, you've stopped even trying to argue that point.
Here is a member of the Knesset explicitly endorsing the anal rape of Palestinian prisoners
Imagine thinking it’s narcissistic to put your career and life at risk to protect your fellow military prosecutors. You need an education on what narcissism is.
You can learn more about the intended norms through the Guidelines and FAQ, at the bottom of almost every page but here are the links:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Regarding relevance to the community:
> What to Submit
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
And regarding comments about whether it's on- or off-topic:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.
"Mistrust authority—promote decentralization"
("A hackers ethic" in Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 1984)
I think it fits.
If I lived in the US I'd care whether the people designing cop drones are ruled by genocidal rape maniacs or puppy loving nerds.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you classify this as "critical of Israel (?)" then I can guarantee you pretty confidently that an article critical of the PA (or Hamas or whatever) would get flagged at a pretty similar rate here.
> he
come on, couldn't opt for gender neutral pronouns? Just had the help identify the person huh. Of those who were involved with treatment, i imagine an already small number, leaking gender and details of what was shared and the scope of their specific involment may cut it down to a very small number of plausible people, if not the exact person.
Tech companies are doing direct dealing with nation-states and being active participants in military policy. This is no longer possible.