Are Hamas as thick as they are evil?!

Israel does not have the trappings of a democracy - it is a democracy.

Trump won not because people were indoctrinated but because his campaign team understood the concerns voters had and spoke to them. Harris' campaign team did not. I cannot stand Trump but he deserved to win. Harris was a crap candidate who ran a truly crap campaign. Trumps team ran a tight, really well targeted campaign.

The fact that you need to call democracy indoctrination when people do no make the choices you think they should, speaks volumes.

Just to clarify. You are describing Hamas, proscribed terrorist organisation that committed 7 october as 'a liberation group'? It is illegal to support Hamas in this country.

'Genocide, genocide, genocide' ........... Oh, but here's thousands of energised, well-fed Gazans in rude health, clamouring with their fully charged smartphones to capture the misery and terror on the face of a tortured and emaciated hostage as he is put through a degrading handover ceremony prior to discovering that his wife, teenage daughters and brother have all been murdered by the very people who are forcing him to behave as if they are doing him a massive act of generosity.

The media coverage of this war has been despicable. Endless footage of crying children in hospital but the complete absence of the thousands of Hamas fighters clearly extant in Gaza, the constant presentation of Palestinian narratives as facts with no attempt at fact-checking or interrogation, the eagerness to ascribe the worst possible motives to Israeli actions without any attempt at context.

There was a Sky News report on the hostage-prisoners swaps two or three weeks ago where Anna Botting went to the home of a family whose teenage son was being held in an Israeli prison for posts made on social media. (I guess the UK can hardly lecture the Israelis for criminalising social media posts nowadays.) She interviewed the father who said that he himself had been in prison for a total of 15 years, the last time for two years after he had been arrested at a checkpoint. It was only at the end of the report that we were told in passing that the father had been in Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group even more extreme than Hamas. We were never given the facts about whether his son was 13 or 19 (it makes a difference) or whether he really was in prison just for social media posts or what those posts might have been. We never found out why the father had been in prison or why he had been arrested the last time. We basically got an emotionally manipulative narrative straight from the mouth of a jihadist terrorist, from which we were meant to draw parallels between his situation and the situation of an Israeli waiting to discover the fate of their hostage relative, with none of the journalists involved making any attempt to verify his claims or present the full story. The standard of journalism is at best pathetic, at worst complicit.

@onceuponatimelived I haven't discussed that on this thread and your response doesn't make sense as it's not related to anything I've said.

My posts were to let you know Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the U.K., and that it's a crime to support them online

Funny how it’s aways Nelson Mandela that’s wheeled out as an example of a good terrorist.

Never Carlos the Jackal, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Black September group, Anders Breivik or any other sordid mass murderers and kidnappers. They seem much better comparisons with Hamas.

The Palestinians have been brutalised by nearly 80 years of Israeli behaviour. Look at what Israel has done over the last year and a half. They are the oppressors and every neutral observer knows it.

I haven't seen that survey or its wording, and no link has been provided for anyone to evaluate its accuracy.

However, I would say that, even if that were the case, ascribing that survey result to 'indoctrination' by the government, rather than a response to an immediate neighbour who brutalised and murdered the most left wing and peace-loving, and Gazan supporting of your citizens and is openly dedicated to committing such atrocity again and again until all of you are murdered, rather suggests that the person ascribing the alleged views in the poll to government indoctrination rather than the brutality of a terrorist neighbour has indoctrinated themselves against the Israeli citizens.

Amongst the murdered people of the Kibbutz are those who used to advocate for the Gazans and ferry Gazan children to hospitals. The Gazans who were employed by people on the Kibbutz were feeding information back to Hamas to help them prepare for the attack. You can see why more Israelis may no longer feel a two state solution will not result in their safety, in a very real sense.

Well said.

It's beacause Jews value human life above all else. Hamas don't.

What, then, is your explanation for Israeli citizens cheering about dead Palestinian children, or turning a blind eye to hundreds of Palestinians being held in Israeli jails without charge or conviction? Just intrinsic evil? No. Of course indoctrination can happen even in supposedly free societies - 70 million people voted for Trump, after all. When a population is under constant threat, it's almost inevitable.

The two societies are very different, but both are being misled, and the fact that one has the trappings of democracy doesn't absolve it from this.

They're trying to save face and get the Palestinian crowds on side. It's all bravado I think. In reality, I think it's game over for Hamas because what they represent is a threat to all the West which means all the West will retaliate, Trump gets on board and everything escalates. The October attack has backfired and marked the end of them.

Basically what he said. Don't address the argument, attack the person.

Mandela was involved in sabotage of infrastructure not attacking innocent civilians on a large scale, like the IRA or Hamas. To equate Hamas with the ANC is pretty disgusting.

Hamas will never give up because their livelihoods, especially those of the fat cats at the top, depend on continued insurgency. They have no interest in a peaceful solution because they would lose power and income.

GouacheEnthusiast.

You were asked upthread if you are a Hamas supporter but declined to say. Why would that be?

How is illegally forcing Palestinians off their land and building settlements on it in any way tolerant? This has to be a joke!

You are correct. Not "thought of" - Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, and admitted to it. But was it the terrorism that brought down apartheid in the end? No. If you look at the history of the freedom movement in South Africa, the ANC was also more than willing to sacrifice / discipline their own people quite horribly, in the quest for "freedom". But it was the likes of Tutu and peaceful resistance that turned the tide. That doesn't always work. But lets not pretend that in armed resistance there is one side that is better than the other. I am from an Irish Republican family - some of my forebears fought for Irelands freedom in the early 1900's. I know better than most that neither side was without fault.

I am sorry, but this is completely false equivalence. Israeli society and government is not like that in Gaza. Israel is a democracy with a free press where its civilians are free to criticise the government and freely protest against them, and indeed public demonstrations have been taking place against the government.

Gaza is ruled by a dictatorship (by which I mean an organisation rather than an individual) which has not allowed any elections in two decades, and does not permit criticism or dissent.

Citizens are not indoctrinated in a multi-cultural democratic country with a free press and full human rights for its citizens. Citizens are indoctrinated in a dictatorship where the indoctrination of children through school and tv shows is well documented and where criticism of the regime is punished.