I'm of the opinion that while e.g. xAI is in a pump game, OpenAI is at least trying to make money. But even if they're not, even if the DCs are as you say "a financial/political vehicle to pump the markets", they can still be physically real things.
That said, I have no idea how close to complete the Stargate UAE site is.
I wonder what's stranger. That they think Trump will care about OpenAI's datacenter in Abu Dhabi, or that we're getting this news from tomshardware.com
He may care in the end, because TACO. Looks like this is a pattern of modern war where both sides are testing the escalation levels by attacking the infrastructure. It‘s like MAD, but going up in smaller increments rather than hitting with everything after one or two limited strikes like nuclear. Basically, you hit my power plant, I‘ll hit yours. It‘s the same path Ukraine went on: they initially showed restraint in responses, but now they are matching Russian pressure by choosing the same civilian targets.
Indeed. Tit for tat is well known to be an effective strategy. It's almost guaranteed to create one side that feels weaker than the other, while giving that party a way out.
Nobody except Israel is setting civilian homes as targets for their rockets. Not all energy infrastructure is even remotely „dual use“ (and this label is itself propaganda used to justify strikes on non-military targets).
All Russian infrastructure of all types would be perfectly safe tomorrow if they just stopped brutally invading their neighbors. Let's be plain and clear here: the Russian moral position lies somewhere 10 miles below the floor of the deepest ocean trench. The moral high road is pretty easy to achieve.
I don‘t think „moral high roads“ have any relevance in context of this discussion. If such conversation triggers you, try to breathe and think why first.
Yes, I find that quite often morality becomes temporarily irrelevant when it's inconvenient for the party acting immorally.
Nevertheless, this is the one of the vanishingly few conflicts where there is a good guy and a bad guy. Sometimes the universe gives us a break from endless grey areas. This is one of those!
If you find the idea of an autonomous sovereign state defending it's borders 'triggering' I might suggest some soothing jazz and a warm milk.
This has happened in all ongoing conflicts but in only a few cases it is known to be intentional (Israeli strikes). I don‘t think USA or Iran does target residential blocks, but just like everyone else they may act on bad intelligence or it may be accidental.
And the reason is not just rules of engagement - such targets simply have negative value for attacker.
Dual use is nonsense, all power plants and highways are "dual use", hell so are farms, water treatment, dams... It's a term used exclusively to justify war crimes.
It's not a terrible target. Long-term it puts stress on US/UAE cooperation, and short-term it mirrors the destabilization inside Iran with escalation outside it.
From the armchair perspective, these sorts of strikes are exactly what I'd imagine that China is advocating for behind closed doors. A few well-placed drone strikes can cause more economic damage than any SAM shootdown or embassy attack could, tactically accelerating the war and strategically entrenching Chinese technology.
FYI the IRGC is importing more invaders to prop up it's unpopular occupation regime, this time Pakistani militia are now being recruited into Iran to oppress/occupy the Iranian population and act in service of the occupation theocratic government:
"The roaming of the Islamic Republic's proxies in Iran; entry of "Zainabiyoun" of Pakistan after "Hashd al-Shaabi" of Iraq and "Fatemiyoun" of Afghanistan
Reports of the presence of forces affiliated with the Zainabiyoun Division of Pakistan have been published in various areas of Sistan and Baluchestan province."
Huh?? You are replying to a comment about a Free Speaker who was murdered point blank on a US street for protecting another Free Speaker who was being pepper sprayed for exercising their Free Speech!
Of course these 2 compare about as standing on a random pedestrian's toe compares to massacring a small city. Both regrettable in absolute terms, but not remotely comparable.
(why not just the numbers? Because the ICE deaths were definitely not intentional. Nobody gave anybody the order to fire. But Iran's killing of protestors was 100% intentional by the regime. In other words, aside from 2 versus 40.000, all 40.000 Iranian deaths count as 1st degree murder, including the massacre on children Iran's islamists committed)
As an American citizen my concern is the American regime shooting American citizens.
I'm not Iranian and I'm not there, but I'm here where ICE can "unintentionally" shot me.
And bringing numbers to make them look bad and justify the war doesn't help, because Israel killed much more in Gaza with the help of US government and corporations.
Plus, if these people even remotely cared about what's happening in the US, this is not what they'd be talking about. They want to support Iranian repression for their "pride". If anything, they want the US, long term, to become a dictatorial hellhole like Iran.
By what measure were the ICE killings not intentional? Lifting a dude you just shot to point out the holes in him to your friends not intentional enough for ya?
You should research how many civilians the US army killed in airstrikes alone before coming to false conclusions.
Yes, the mullah regime are monsters, but no lesser or bigger monster than the good-oiled machine the whole US economy is running on that is killing men, women and children by US service members through all of the command chain for glory, medals, and profit.
In Iran, not every commander went out to kill protesters, just like the majority of us soldiers wouldn’t rape and kill a pregnant Afghan woman.
Still, both militaries are very much comparable in the modern day atrocities they did to civilians. The US, unlike Iran on a global scale tho for decades. Iran didn’t go to war in Vietnam, for example, or nuke Japanese children and women.
Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist atrocities, and the subsequent launch of the War on Terror, Airwars has been seeking the answer to one important question – how many civilians have US strikes likely killed in the ‘Forever Wars’?
We found that the US has declared at least 91,340 strikes across seven major conflict zones.
Our research has concluded that at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes.
Between 2013 and 2020, for example, the United States carried out seven separate attacks in Yemen—six drone strikes and one raid—that killed 36 members of the intermarried Al Ameri and Al Taisy families. A quarter of them were children between the ages of three months and 14 years old. The survivors have been waiting for years for an explanation as to why they were repeatedly targeted.
In 2018, Adel Al Manthari, a civil servant in the Yemeni government, and four of his cousins—all civilians—were traveling by truck when an American missile slammed into their vehicle. Three of the men were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. Al Manthari was critically injured. Complications resulting from his injuries nearly killed him in 2022. He beseeched the US government to dip into the millions of dollars appropriated by Congress to compensate victims of American attacks, but they ignored his pleas. His limbs and life were eventually saved by the kindness of strangers via a crowdsourced GoFundMe campaign.
The same year that Al Manthari was maimed in Yemen, a US drone strike in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. The next year, a US military investigation acknowledged that a woman and child were killed in that attack, but concluded that their identities might never be known.
A 2021 investigation by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan revealed that the American air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of many innocents. Out of 1,311 military reports analyzed by Khan, only one cited a “possible violation” of the rules of engagement. None included a finding of wrongdoing or suggested a need for disciplinary action, while fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made. The US-led coalition eventually admitted to killing 1,410 civilians during the war in Iraq and Syria. Airwars, however, puts the number at 2,024.
During the Vietnam War, providing “solatia” was a way for the military to offer reparations for civilian injuries or deaths caused by US operations without having to admit any guilt. In 1968, the going rate for an adult life was $33. Children merited just half that.
In 1973, a B-52 Stratofortress dropped 30 tons of bombs on the Cambodian town of Neak Luong, killing hundreds of civilians and wounding hundreds more. The next of kin of those killed, according to press reports, were promised about $400 each.
Just a few days ago, they allegedly bombed a girls’ school and killed a bunch of children, again, allegedly based on false and outdated intel, something that can no longer be ignored as accidents but a pattern. Instead of putting safeguards in place so the stuff from the 2021 investigation doesn’t happen again, they now use even fewer humans in the killing loop and outsource a part of the decision-making to a technology that is by design flawed and hallucinating up to 35% of the time.
A chance we shouldn’t take if the result of error is innocent children getting turned to ash.
It’s the first time ever that I see cardinals and the church calling the secretary of defense/war a heretic. Think about that.
"Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx has strongly condemned the misuse of religious language to justify war and violence. In his Easter Sunday sermon, the archbishop specifically criticized remarks by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (who refers to himself as a “war minister”).
It is a “shameless blasphemy,” Marx said in Munich, to pray that in the context of a war—such as in Iran—every bullet may hit its target. Religion, he stressed, must not be instrumentalized to legitimize violence."
We are now at a point in history where after the crusades,
collateral damage is justified as "gods will", the commander in chief just today openly suggested war crimes and ended with "praise be to Allah". Absolute insanity.
I could keep going all day but I guess at this point in this comment most people will either feel sick or rather want to go back to chanting USA USA and looking the other way.
Okay. You only mention things on the US side. Iran is responsible for the bombing campaign in the Syrian civil war. Iran's islamists and hezbollah killed 80% of about 600000 civilians in that war, with Russian air support.
Which is at minimum 10 civilians for every civilian you accuse the US of, right there. Just in that one conflict, a few years ago. And on the list of Iranian islamist crimes we also find Yemen's civil war, the rise (and fall) of Daesh in Iraq (meaning Iran's islamists thought they would be able to reason and unite with another islamist faction, you know because they are religious nutcases too) ... nope. So they were both the cause and part of the solution to Daesh), the Iran-Iraq war, and of course they were involved in the Lebanese civil war (and still are).
So I'm very comfortable saying that 10x difference will easily become 40-50 taking all that into account (both the Yemeni civil war and the Iran-Iraq war had more victims than the Syrian civil war, and daesh also made large amounts of victims)
As for comparing with, say, the EU. The EU did nothing. Which is very cheap in terms of cost, but I doubt you will find many Ukrainians agreeing this minimized casualties. And I hardly think doing nothing is to be celebrated on a moral level.
Your arguments only hold merit if you compare the US against an absolute standard, where only 0 mistakes, 0 collateral damage is acceptable. You are taking an absolutist moral stance ...
How do you believe this shit. It took Israel a full year of 24/7 indiscriminate murder in Gaza to reach 30,000 dead civilians, and the entire place is rubble as a result. How in the god damn fuck do you think Iran killed that many people in one week without Tehran looking like Gaza?
Gullible brainwashed dolts can't even think for two seconds
We are in a really bad situation, of our own making no doubt.
We actually have no idea who's in charge of Iran (the stated ruler has yet to be seen and probably was severely injured in the same blast that killed Khamenei), but it's a pretty good bet that they are even more extreme and hard-line than before.
We've shown that Iran has complete and total control over the global economy via energy markets.
Every other country in the region wants Iran gone. Or to put it in more direct terms, the US kind of needs to "finish the job".
If we back down now, Iran wins, and that may actually be the worst possible situation to end up in.
To everyone who voted for Trump ... YOU VOTED FOR THIS. THANKS.
> To everyone who voted for Trump ... YOU VOTED FOR THIS. THANKS.
This conflict was obvious and inevitable (and called out by literally anyone with half a brain) and exactly what every single one of them voted for. Don’t ever let them pretend otherwise.
Trump would also have to navigate the loyalty the US state apparatus has to Israel. Iran has made it clear that the ceasefire option is off the table this time round. So I just don’t see the US extricating itself from this quagmire barring some extreme political upheaval.
But who knows, if you take Trump’s incompetence, plus the possibility of global economic collapse, plus the possibility of global food shortages, we just might see it.
Do you work in arms industry? Because unless you are the arms industry, wasting almost 1 billion dollars per day fighting a war that has nothing to do with us does not seem like "going pretty damn well"
Check their comment history. This account is either trolling or just spouting talking points, it is getting pretty tiring. They can't even be bothered to properly cut-and-paste, see the missing 'I' at the beginning of the comment above.
It started as "Weapons of Mass Distraction" from Epstein.
Completely overplayed. Epstein (and fiends) will be the cause of more mass slaughter, starting with a school full of little girls. Of course, little girls.
The world is being run by a gang of narcissistic, sociopathic fiends thanks to all the idiots who fell for their racist, misogynist, nationalist, religious fanaticism.
Buddhist leader Daisaku Ikeda:
To end the human institution of war, to relegate it to history with such barbarous practices as slavery―at one time also considered a natural, inevitable, “part of human nature”―we must establish respect for the inviolable dignity of human life as the core value of our age.
Every war, when viewed from the undistorted perspective of life’s sanctity, is a “civil war” waged by humanity against itself.
In fairness, Iran has also been conducting its campaign with missiles and the Shahed drones. The Iran-Israel war has killed a lot of people who are neither Iranian nor Israeli but happen to live in Palestine or Lebanon.
That would be true if they were keeping the native population there alive. We know they were importing presumably loyal people from deep Russia. What happened to original occupants? You can guess.
Trump has avoided a ground invasion up to this point for this exact reason, even trying to take one of outerlying islands would have heavy casualties due to drone warfare. There's speculation that the mess over the weekend was the result of a SOF mission gone wrong.
> the US has lost what, <20 people by now, in over a month? Putin loses >20 people per hour of his war
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Russia's economy and military have been flogged by their war in a way America's has not. Moreover, we have midterms this year and a Presidential election in 2. Moscow has no similar 'fuck it' exit option.
> Russia’s economy and military have been flogged for years to get to the current point. The US is just on month two
Russia's military power has been vastly diminished by its war. If America committed to a ground invasion and then stuck with it through the next President, yes, we'd probably see similar degradation of American martial ability over years.
> two powers have wildly different militaries and strategies. Comparing body counts is never gonna be a super helpful metric by itself
Agree. But it does point to the extent to which one system will go to reduce loss of life.
The American people are already getting flogged when they buy fuel and groceries. The longer this war continues the worse it will get. Nonetheless, the American people themselves are mostly safe at home, the precedent for Iran launching any sort of attacks against the American homeland is basically nonexistent. Even sending terror cells, you'd think Iran would be on this for how often their western critics accuse them of funding terrorism, but in America? Crickets. This war is bullshit.
No. I'm calling out bullshit. If someone says Bob is a terrorist, and I say no, Bob is not a terrorist, I'm not damning Bob "with faint praise" by calling out a nonsense comparison.
There is plenty bad America is doing and threatening in this war. We don't need word games to discuss them adultly.
Downvotes from ziofascists are always a great reward. Let's go for some more, do tell me, where have been the Iranian terror cells in America? We know the US funded terror cells in Iran, the president bragged amount arming groups in Iran to overthrow the government. When has Iran done this to America?
It hasn't happened. The narrative of Iran being a funder of terrorism is essentially bullshit, particularly in relation to America, and no less in relation to Israel (a state founded on acts of terrorism against the British and Palestinians.)
You're trying to educate the wilfully ignorant. I do it too, in the dim hope that maybe, just maybe, one hypocrite will actually look up the reality and get educated.
It's a fools errand, especially on Hypocrisy News, a politer version of Reddit.
Maybe it's simply because Ukrainians aren't killing Russians within territory they control, so they don't have as many bodies to exchange. Looking at body exchanges to determine the number of dead people on either side seems just...like a weird metric?
It’s a reasonable metric but it should be evaluated based on what’s happening on the ground. For example, if Russia is advancing and Ukraine is retreating, and KIA is same in each side, then Russia would pick up many more bodies to exchange than Ukraine.
Article says "Russia is likely handing over more bodies than it receives since its troops have captured more Ukrainian bodies than vice versa, since they have been on the offensive for most of the war."
That could be bullshit. But it holds water as a hypothesis. If Ukraine were suffering 20:1 casualty ratios against itself on the field, Russia would have won already. There are no weapons that can overcome a small belligerent losing more bodies than the larger one.
Come on now, don't be shy, say what's on your mind. Who are "these people"? Ukrainians, the ones who live in Ukraine? The only country in the world with a "the" in front is The Gambia, using The in front of Ukraine is doing it for no reason other than to show your disrespect for them, but then - why even pretend to have a civilized discussion? Just say whatever thing you have on your mind instead of speaking in riddles.
>>If you actually know better, kindly disabuse me of my ignorance.
Your ignorance seems so deep rooted that I'm not sure how I could actually achieve that. Do you want a lecture on how using "the" for Ukraine in the current geopolitical context is just beyond stupid, or how equating support for Ukraine with supporting neo Nazis is only something a truly exceptionally ignorant person could do? In the sense that you can only do that by ignoring everything that was done to address it in the last 4 years, and yet only people who keep bringing it up are those who also usually are keen to say things like "oh actually Poland was the one that started WW2".
>>Of course, propaganda machine kicked in post SMO
Well that's one thing we can agree on, looking at the kinds of stuff you write.
It seems to hover around 30k dead a month recently, so 1000 people a day, divided by 24, that's actually ~41 people an hour.
But you know, even if we assume these numbers are wildly innacurate and only half those given...that's still 20 per hour?
>>X and Telegram channels are full of videos of freshly dug graves in The Ukraine.
No doubt, but what does that have to do with anything.
>>Edit: since Hypocrisy News is rate limiting me I can't reply to the redditor asking for a source:
So on one hand you call BBC a highly biased source, and then you link an article from it? So which one is it? Is it biased, or is it the source of your information?
How can you make such a confident assumption? Like I said in another comment - it could be simply that Russians are being killed in places where Ukrainians can't or won't retrieve their bodies from. As Russians are the aggressors and moving into Ukrainian territory, this seems almost expected?
>>Even a highly biased source like the BBC admits to a highly skewed KIA ratio favouring Russia
Except they aren't doing that at all, because unlike you, they aren't equating bodies traded with KIA ratios. Maybe nuance isn't my forte, but then again, I'm not sure what yours is.
...anyway... Seriously bros, this is a war where one side is making wildly inflammatory, specific and credible threats against the civilian infrastructure of the other and this is a response to that, hardly even a response in kind. If they strike these assets it will cause financial burden for rich people, not plunge millions of civilians into darkness as the POTUS is credibly threatening to do.
Iranian attacks on US soil: Fuck all! So why is America fighting Iran? Insane ziofascist cultists picking fights on the other side of the planet to provoke the Apocalypse so they can all be raptured to paradise. (Translation: boomers are getting old and they want to see burning flesh one more time before they die.)
> In a Truth Social post on March 30, Trump warned that the U.S. would obliterate "all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!), which we have purposefully not yet 'touched.'"
Iran was having a water crisis before all this, to the extent of considering relocating the capital city away from Tehran's current location. Bombing Iranian water infrastructure will kill a lot of civilians, just as similar things happened in the Yemeni civil war (which Iran is a participant in). It's disheartening how much the prospect of mass murder is met with a shrug.
> AFAIK there is no exemption that says it is OK to commit war crimes if the other side does.
Of course not, but I still think the expectation that someone doesn't commit war crimes against you disappears relatively quickly when you're openly and proudly admitting you'll open to violating the rules of war and saying international humanitarian law doesn't matter.
> Wasn’t that in response to Trump posting that he’d hit theirs?
It's Iran. They haven't been following international law since 1979. That isn't an excuse to commit war crimes against them. But Iran really doesn't have any legs to stand on when it comes to complaining about targeting civilian infrastructure–they and their proxies have been doing this for decades.
>They haven't been following international law since 1979.
History doesn't start in 1979. Why not go back to 1953? Overthrowing another country's elected government is no more conscionable under international law.
This "both sides" game does not carry much weight when one side, the US and Britain, made the bad faith move on Iran first.
Stubbing one's toe and complaining "both sides" - the pebble and me.
Complaining I am being hit back because I hit first, does not elicit support. Especially, when one is less than forthcoming about who made the move on a sovereign country first. Made a move just because that country had resources you are interested in.
If you want the resource then buy it. Norway nationalised it's oil, Iran had equal sovereign right to do so.
You and I agree on many things. This one is not one of them.
> This "both sides" game does not carry much weight when one side, the US and Britain, made the bad faith move on Iran first
Trying to disentangle who did what first in the Middle East is a fool's errand. Practically any living human can trace descendence to someone who was harmed by any other group in that region because that's where the first civilisation was born and almost every one after it had cause for crossroads.
> Complaining I am being hit back because I hit first, does not elicit support
If one dude stabs another, they're at fault. If that dude stabs the first one back, I'm sympathetic to their cause of action but not how they prosecuted it.
> Norway nationalised it's oil, Iran had equal sovereign right to do so
If Iran nationalised its oil and then didn't go on a vendetta against Israel, together with various spawned proxy groups dotting the region, every one of their neighbors wouldn't be standing by today while they get pummeled.
> Trying to disentangle who did what first in the Middle East is a fool's errand.
Not at all and we are talking Iran not ME in general. Your sentence recalls to the mind that famous quote by Upton Sinclair about self imposed lack of comprehension.
It's ridiculous to think of a just prosecution when only one side is held accountable and the other gets hegemony enforced immunity.
When Iran nationalised their oil US used a military coup to upend their parliamentary democracy and place a puppet dictator in place, who among other things ran torture camps for dissenters. Iran's action are a retaliation against US and its proxies who have meddled and attacked Iran's sovereign destiny and financial health.
Sort of? I don't think that's really how war crimes work. Unless we're objectively in eye-for-an-eye territory, in which case we're not really talking about international law anymore. (To be clear, I think everyone talking about international law in this conflict is posturing. We've been collectively setting new norms for years, and between Russia, China and America, the rules seem to have inched closer to total war.)
It doesn't matter. Killing 34 something children like Hamas did vs 20 000 something children like Israel did in the same conflict.
Or threatening some water facility in a country with functioning air defense vs threatening entire population of 92 million with complete anihilation ("A whole civilization will die tonight" like Trump just said on behalf of all americans - credible threat from a nuclear superpower with enough nukes to spare), in a country where they can't really defend against this other than spreading the costs on enemy-allied countries.
There's bad, and there's 100x worse. And yeah, people should focus on stopping the 100x worse first, is my belief.
> people should focus on stopping the 100x worse first
That's fair. When I see conflicts like this, I tend to sit back and observe. There are enough conflicts on the planet where both sides are not being bastards, and where the diffences in scale of bastardly doesn't clearly map to differences in capability (versus will).
My personal opinion is that, it's because with the previous political and cultural trends, West had (maybe still has) actually quite high chances of collapsing and falling in the long term due to its own indecisiveness, lots of words mixed a lack of actions against coordinated and targeted efforts of Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Belarus, Cuba, China, Syria and North Korea.
I remember national state TV in Russia talking about "we are ready to nuke United States if needed" in 2014 [1].
So, domestically, government made sure people believe that the West is the mortal enemy and we were are already at some kind of cold war since Crimea annexation, it's just West didn't notice, seems like.
Then, there were also artifical immigration crisis at EU borders created by Russia and Belarus.
And many other various hybrid and asymmetrical attacks.
So, USA recognized the danger and started dismantling the problem piece by piece, to ensure a long term peace and safety of its people. Could it be better organized and coordinated with allies? Probably, yes, but the meaning stays.
If the west collapses it will be because of its internal problems. Inefficiency, bad government, inequality.
I think you are right that the West is complacent about its enemies because it cannot really shake the belief in its superiority that came from winning the cold war and dominating the world in the decades after, I just do not think that is the biggest threat.
> Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Belarus, Cuba, China, Syria and North Korea.
Putting these all in the same list conflates very different situations.
- Big actual threat with body count: Russia.
- Russian proxies: Syria (very lethal, but mostly within Syria, not a "threat to the west", complicated by Daesh and AQ)
- Nasty autocracy but stable cold war: NK
- Autocracy, but largely minding their own business and with no real capability to threaten: Cuba, Venezuela
- Major trading partner: China
> USA recognized the danger and started dismantling the problem piece by piece
Trump era has systematically downplayed the threat from Russia. And let's not forget how many members of Trump campaign staff were jailed due to Russian influence.
Is Russia really a threat? It has a small economy. Its no threat at all to the US, and could be easily be beaten by the European NATO countries. It has struggled to take on just Ukraine with western backing.
China has a far bigger economy and far bigger armed forces. It has a history of aggression and has border disputes with multiple countries.
I strongly suspect that people who downplay the risk from China have not yet internalised the fact that no-white countries are powerful too now.
The airliner shootdown? The polonium poisonings? Miscellaneous sabotage attempts in Europe? In addition to, you know, the active war.
There's a lot of things that China "might" do but hasn't so far translated into significant violence, beyond the low-intensity border dispute in the mountains with India. Do they have power? Yes. Are they making threats? Other than a war of words with Japan, not really. What is this "history of aggression"?
Between China and the US, only one of those two has made threats to the territorial integrity of Europe.
> So, USA recognized the danger and started dismantling the problem piece by piece, to ensure a long term peace and safety of its people. Could it be better organized and coordinated with allies? Probably, yes, but the meaning stays.
By becoming part of the problem? Trump threatening to invade Greenland was a wake-up call for Europe. Actively supporting forces that want to tear down democracy in Europe isn’t particularly helpful either.
If we become like China and Russia then why is our civilization in any way better?
Iranian proxies are responsible for well over 1,000 American deaths since 1979, and there were dozens of foiled plots on American soil and hundreds of individual militia attacks in Iraq and Syria, directed by Iran.
For reference, how many times has the US interfered with Iran's government and how many people in Iran has the US killed since 1979? That's the only way to get a fair view of this discussion. Just wondering if all this happened in a vacuum or, god forbid, Iran maybe has some reason to dislike the US.
When the comment is a response to another that justifies current attacks on Iran because Irani proxies killed US, it matters a big F'ing deal that those were in retaliation of the US historically scuttling Iranian parliamentary democracy and killing 50K Iranians by way of chemical munitions alone through its proxy.
Saying “what about the US attacking Iran?” does not change the above being false. In fact the US attacking Iran does not change the above false either.
Even if we accept both things as true:
1. Iran has historically attacked the US
2. The US has historically destabilized/attacked Iran
It doesn’t change the fact that “Iran does not use any of these (proxy groups) to attack America” is a false statement.
Skip me with your emotional arguments because I’ll just think you’re posturing and just trying to advance your agenda :-)
There is a difference between "attack" (that has a connotation of being unprovoked and in bad faith) and "retaliation" against acts of drawing first blood.
More so if those primary attacks had 50K killed by way of proxies (100K according to more realistic estimates).
Sometimes, what one dishes out, comes back. If it does, rest of the world thinks it is only fair. Yes Iran has been retaliating, very weakly, to counterbalance attacks on itself by the US and its proxies.
There is not much doubt on who acted in bad faith first.
The US hurting its toe by kicking a stone and then complaining that it is the stone that attacked is not a good argument.
It's like saying "A home owner shot armed burglar in self defense," then crying "self defense is whataboutism! That home owner needs to face mob justice!" Nah. Those tactics of yours simply do not work anymore. Everyone sees through it. Iran wouldn't be doing any of this if they weren't constantly being bombed and attacked and having their leaders assassinated. The strait was open 2 months ago and had no issues. Two countries decided to ruin that and they deserve to face the consequences.
this was a reply to people saying "Iran is not attacking the US". It is of course convenient to bend this discussion into a different direction, but this was a reply to blind propaganda that sees only one side as responsible for bad things.
[To the downvoter, downvoting is not going to change the historical facts]
It was the US that upended Iranian parliamentary democracy with a military coup, sponsored chemical weapons attacks on Irani population (through its proxy Iraq). This killed some 30k to 50k by way of chemical attacks alone. Credible sources estimate 100K killed by these chemical weapons attacks alone.
US shot down their passenger jet. US has imposed crippling sanctions that have decimated the economic well being of the country compared to what it could have been.
Iran Air Flight 655 was an international scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai via Bandar Abbas that was shot down on 3 July 1988 by two surface-to-air missiles fired by USS Vincennes, a United States Navy warship. The missiles hit the Iran Air aircraft, an Airbus A300, while it was flying its usual route over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, shortly after the flight departed its stopover location, Bandar Abbas International Airport. All 290 people on board were killed. No apologies yet.
Talking about Iranian proxies alone is one-sided if you don't consider what US-Israel proxies have been doing to them. US Israel have inflicted 10 to 100X more Irani deaths than what Iran has done in retaliation.
You are either ignorant or deliberately underplaying that. Most likely the latter.
Only westerners can be bad actors or at all in historic events racism of the charts? It takes two to tango and iran is dancing its heart out.. and could have had the most peacefull life, if its religion would not involve destroying all "unbelievers" in the middle east - first and foremost aimed at israel.
An illuminating documentary. Everyone should give it a watch to understand the Zionist belief system.
There is very little room to doubt who the bad actor is and was. No matter how many canards you can try and thrust, how many attempts you make to color this as a religious holy war.
That the Islamic revolution was and is against Jews is a lie. In any case the Islamic revolution happened because of excesses by the US sponsored Shah who was put in charge after the US dismantled Iran's parliamentary democracy.
Even today Tehran hosts Dr. Sapir Hospital and Charity Center, a Jewish charity hospital, the largest charity among the religious minorities in Iran. It is doing well, thank you.
Ayatollah Khomeini himself wrote a personal note thanking the hospital for its help after the revolution succeeded.
Synagogues in Tehran are doing very well in the Islamic regime, thank you. Except for one that US+Israel bombed recently in Tehran.
This is in contrast to Israeli false flags, such as the Lavon affair and Baghdad synagogue bombings by Israel to drive a rift between Jews and the country they were residing in. Israel has a long documented history of bombing synagogues in other countries in false flag operations.
In fact Irani Jews have often criticized Israel when Israel has acted against Palestinians. Chief Rabbi of Iran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yehuda_Gerami has denounced Zionist and Israeli policies.
""" It comes as a surprise to many visitors to discover that Iran, a country so hostile to Israel and with a reputation for intolerance, is home to a small but vibrant Jewish community that is an officially recognized religious minority under Iran's 1979 Islamic Constitution.
"Khomeini didn't mix up our community with Israel and Zionism - he saw us as Iranians," says Haroun Yashyaei, a film producer and chairman of the Central Jewish Community in Iran. """
Could he say anything else or other?
He must sing the dhimi and hostage song for his life depends on it. I know what happens to the ghetto after the friday prayer. Pieces be upon the true believers..
"When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you.
If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies. This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.
However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy[a] them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you"
Not to mention Israel's acts on Middle Eastern Jewish people
Interesting to see this chemical attack talking point suddenly in the last week. But yet posters here will claim the bad actors are pushing 'zionist' talking points and ignore when an obviously coordinated Iranian talking point is suddenly injected into every thread within a week.
The us is the peace guarantor for maritime trade in the region. Its the protector of several oil powers. When the hoothi shoot on ships, they hit the us.
America never invaded Greenland. Nevertheless, we're facing blowback because we threatened it.
Iran has been chanting "death to America" for decades. That isn't casus belli. Not by a long shot. But pretending Iran hasn't been playing the part of belligerent for years is rewriting history.
30K to 50K Iranians killed by chemical weapons attacks by US proxy, Iraq. Credible sources estimate 100K killed and 30K-50K is a conservative lowball estimate.
This is an active unhealed wound in Iran. Families of the dead still grieve those killed in cemeteries and graves that are there in almost all their major cities.
Iran has every reason to not like the US which has been destabilising and killing and crippling them economically for several decades.
Iran Air Flight 655 was an international scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai via Bandar Abbas that was shot down on 3 July 1988 by two surface-to-air missiles fired by USS Vincennes, a United States Navy warship. The missiles hit the Iran Air aircraft, an Airbus A300, while it was flying its usual route over Iran's territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, shortly after the flight departed its stopover location, Bandar Abbas International Airport. All 290 people on board were killed.
Iran's targeting strategy has been a capability restrained tit for tat, for the most part. This is true except for attacks on other gulf states right after US-Israel decapitation strike.
Blame is a weird word for geopolitics. I think Iran fucked up hitting those targets pre-emptively. Someone at home had to show their hard-liner boss that they were just as hard-line as he is. So they did something macho. The consequences be damned.
The mirroring of dysfunction on each side of this war is uncanny.
