So to recap the events of a couple of weeks ago:
- One Hamas fighter called a group of female captives sabaya
- The IDF translated that as “women who can get pregnant”
- Basically the whole world got up in arms about the translation, and rightly so
What was missing from the discourse IMO was the procession on to step 4: Someone comes in and explains exactly what the word actually does mean, and why even just bringing it up in this context was an important thing, neither of which are trivial questions.
This article does a pretty good job of that, hitting the high points of:
- IDF’s wildly inflammatory translation aside, it is a word with explicit associations to sexual slavery, which has been resurrected in the last 10 years after it had basically disappeared as the common practice of slavery had waned, and its use in this context is an important window onto Hamas’s rank and file’s mindset
- While of course bearing in mind that one random soldier saying one fucked-up thing isn’t indicative of anything other than that soldiers (especially ones deployed against civilian populations) sometimes do and say real fucked up things
Obviously the full article has lots more detail, but that’s the TL;DR
I would say that the reception it’s getting indicates that a lot of people at least here have a lot of trouble classifying Hamas as bad people. If I were simply posting a two-week-old story about the IDF desert detention camp, or a US policeman from last November who shot somebody when they shouldn’t have, I don’t think it would be receiving this level of anguished scrutiny about timeliness and relevance and headline.
I get it. I think because Israel are objectively the bad guys, there’s a tendency to interpret any story like this as supportive of them, and so start trashing it out of defense for the Palestinians. I won’t say that’s a crazy thing to do, but I don’t think it should be all that difficult to accept Hamas as bad people. I meant the Israeli government has been giving them funding and support against their domestic opposition, specifically because they can be relied upon to be violent and corrupt in a way that tears down legitimacy for the Palestinian cause. Someone on Lemmy who’s standing up in defense of Hamas in any particular war-criminal action they’re doing is not making the bold stand for Palestinian people that I think they may believe that they are making.
It looks like it’s getting the reception it’s getting because, as @[email protected] said, it’s two weeks old and it’s already been rebutted.
I realize rule 1 says within 30 days, but this sort of thing is a story that can change from one day to the next.
Very few people think Hamas are good. They just know, like I do, that Israel is not at war with Hamas. Not really. They’re at war with all of Gaza. They don’t care whether you’re a member of Hamas or not. They don’t care if you’re a baby or you’re 99 years old. And don’t give me the “Hamas hides amongst them” bullshit. That in no way justifies the thousands of dead children.
What do you mean by “it,” here? The IDF translation?
100% agreed. I usually put “war” in quotes because it’s much more accurate to describe it as a large-scale terrorist attack by the IDF (killing and threatening a helpless civilian population to influence their behavior) than anything remotely resembling a normal state-level conflict between armed combatants.
If you agree, what does it matter that Hamas says bad things?
Because sometimes there is more relevant information to be learned about the world and situations in it, aside from “who good guy” and “who bad guy”
And, again, I don’t see the relevance of this information. It changes nothing as far as I can tell.
Oh fuck off with this delusional bullshit. Nobody calls Hamas good people or has trouble saying they are bad people. 99% of the world would happily let every person in Hamas die. The only people who think anyone is supporting Hamas are the same ones who think it’s OK to blindly kill 30,000 civilians in response to 700 civilians being brutally murdered.
It’s not news because everyone knows that Hamas is evil and doing/saying evil things.