Ambulances Set on Fire in Suspected Anti Jewish Attack

[StartingStar]

Horrible news that ambulances run by a Jewish charity have been set on fire in Golders Green today.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyj1p49gdpo

AIBU to feel it's got to to with the rise in anti Jewish hate since the allowance of horrible slogans on the weekly marches and in everyday society? What on earth makes people commit such a horrible attack.

I'm 100% with the Jewish community and pray for peace.

As with 99% of stories like this important details have been excluded and replaced with lies. You make no mention that the IDF has reported (with evidence) that the man with the toddler was a Hamas terrorist and that the toddler was injured accidentally rather than tortured. He was then given to the Red Cross and returned to his family.

Why is it so hard to criticise children being hurt without making things up? Because it would require you to place some blame on Hamas?

Stories like this, and the people that spread them, embolden terrorists to keep using children as human shields, resulting in more innocent kids getting hurt.

Are you saying that it is perfectly acceptable to attack English ambulances for English citizens on the grounds that they are a charitable organisation run by a particular ethnicity / religion?

I'm wondering in turn about your agenda, since the WHO data doesn't break anything down by combatant/civilian.

What is very obvious is that it gives male deaths as 34k, and female as 11k. That's from your chosen data source.

Doesn't that disparity give you pause for thought?

Ok but once again, you are insinuating that antisemites only committed an antisemitic act because of Israel. That's incorrect.

Antisemites committed an antisemitic hate crime because they're antisemites. It has nothing to do with Israel. Israel is the excuse of the day, not the reason. The reason is normalisation of antisemitism, for example constantly feeling the need to contextualise every single antisemitic act instead of just calling it out and leaving it at that. But that's apparently too much to ask, and instead we've wasted hundreds of posts on just this one thread trying to explain that this antisemitic act SHOULD NOT need any added context. It was a horrific antisemitic act by horrifically antisemitic people. No justification, no context needed.

It was the same straight after the Bondi massacre - straight away there were people all over the world excusing it and attempting to add context. All "adding context" does is attempt to justify the act. Some acts just can't be justified though, no matter how desperately you want to. And I get it - people nowadays feel the need and as though they have the right to understand absolutely everything. But that's just not realistic. Some things shouldn't be understood because they're just that awful. So stop trying to understand them. And above all, stop trying to tell the community that was targeted that we need to understand them. We don't. We've lived this long enough that we know that antisemites will antisemite regardless of Israel. My family left Iraq a couple of decades before Israel was even created because of antisemitism.

This was the exchange:
EdithStourton · Today 01:17
Have you the slightest idea how Japan waged war through southeast Asia? How many Asian civilians were killed, not just during the fighting but in reprisals and as part of repression in Japanese-occupied countries? The plan was to conquer Australia.
This is a complete aside to the main thrust of the thread but seriously, your knowledge of WWII seems to be sadly lacking.
raffegiraffe · Today 10:00
I wish there was a laugh emoji
By the time the nuclear bomb was dropped japan was in no fit state to do that. It's resources were decimated.

And now to respond:
I assumed you were wanting to laugh about the plan having been to conquer Australia, and how by the war's end this was 'ridiculous'. It was by 1945, but it hadn't been in 1942. You have, at no point, engaged with the appalling behaviour of the Japanese Army, while us telling with complete conviction that the US was completely wrong to use the atom bombs.

I am pretty sure that you are either completely unaware, or have only the vaguest notion, of the Sook Ching, of the killing of Karen and Chin villagers in Burma, of the Rape of Nanking, of the use of Chinese civilians in medical experiments, of the 'comfort women', of the atrocious treatment of forced labourers on various projects, particularly railways, of... I could go on.

All of that shit was still happening in Japanese-occupied Asia in 1945. People were dying of hunger, and of dysentery in prison, and being worked 10-12 hours a day on starvation diets, and being death marched. Had Japan gone down fighting, the Allies would have had to drive the Japanese Army out of all of those countries, with many, many more deaths of troops on both sides, and of innocent civilians who had already suffered more than enough.

This is a total distraction from the point of this thread, and for that I apologise to the OP, but your lack of historical understanding, and your selective sympathy, are very obvious, and undermine your credibility in ways that you do not appear to understand.

Edited for clarity.

I empathise with you but I disagree with your stance. The OP asked "What on earth makes people commit such a horrible attack" - your answer is partial: they are antisemitic, which I agree with. But it doesn't answer the underlying questions of what made them act in this way now / what made them target ambulances specifically - the underlying motivations are obviously also bound up with wider geopolitical events.

We can't bridge divides and learn from events if we don't interrogate the thought processes behind actions rather than dismissing them as being awful/horrible/evil and dismissing any discussion into why they may have occurred in the way/time/manner they did as being justifications or dogwhistling antisemitism.

I do also understand that this is a time of high distress to Jewish people and that what many Jews are seeking at the moment is support rather than an academic exercise in geopolitics - if this was posted in a subsection of Mumsnet reserved for Jewish people I'd understand it being inappropriate to be anything other than supportive and enable Jewish voices to lead the discussion. However, the OP posted in AIBU which invites a wider audience and discussion.

They did it because of the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel's history committed by Hamas and Palestinian civilians, and Hamas' subsequent command to globalise the intifada. And the latest antisemitic permission structure has now been set and accepted, just as it always has, which allows horrific acts to be 'awful but understandable'. It's really not any more complicated than that.

I do also understand that this is a time of high distress to Jewish people and that what many Jews are seeking at the moment is support rather than an academic exercise in geopolitics

Jews have learned the hard way not to rely on your support, so don’t worry about it, we’re all good.

Sigh...
No, where have I said that?please show me
This is such ridiculous abnormal behaviour..
"You said this so you must be saying that.."

What made them act that way 100 years ago then? What caused pogroms against Jews throughout the ages? And why do you think that now, unlike then, there is an explanation for it? What makes you think modern antisemitism is different from older antisemitism?

Antisemites act antisemitically because they're antisemitic. It really is that simple.

You're doing Jews all over the world a disservice by trying to justify antisemitic acts.

As mentioned previously, my family left Iraq due to antisemitism before the modern state of Israel even existed. They were chased out. Some were murdered. At no point have I ever thought that the sensible response to this would be to go out and kill / harm / terrorise Iraqis. I also haven't tried seeking revenge on Germans for killing off one whole side of my family except for my grandma.

My husband's family likewise, although they were chased out of Iraq more recently after their friends and relatives were hanged to death in the town square for the crime of being Jewish. At no point have they sought revenge on anyone. They were forced to give up all their land, all their belongings and then fled to Iran who helped give them safe passage to Israel. I know, very ironic. They then moved to the UK. Most of these relatives who safely made it out of Iraq can very clearly see the writing on the wall (sometimes quite literally thanks to prevalent antisemitic graffiti) and are getting increasingly anxious. They know their children and grandchildren are going to suffer similar fates to theirs, despite their best efforts at keeping us all safe.

Antisemites don't need an excuse to be antisemitic, and they really don't need more help explaining their actions. They have already recruited millions upon millions of useful idiots who are willing to defend their actions no matter what. There are more useful idiots doing the antisemites jobs for them than there are Jews in the world. Which is utterly depressing.

The people of Gaza didn't burn those ambulances

The Jewish people in the UK aren't in a war with Hamas.

The Jewish people in the UK are not to blame for the war between Israel and Hamas. Not in the slightest so how you put it :

"But to people who may have lost family members, whose homeland is being terrorised from the air, whose homes being destroyed, who may be grieving, angry and feel helpless in the face of such enormity, it could have felt like the only thing left."

Nothing to do with Jewish people here who volunteered on ambulances. What pathetic justification and/or excuses.

This

💯

I'd not seen this before.

Look, it’s not my data and I don’t have an agenda with it, it’s just the best estimate we have available. According to a subsequent poster Israel now accepts that this death toll is realistic and the WHO figures have proven reliable in the past, the US administration uses them. You’ll have to go to that poster if you want a source for that. I’m not going to deal with low quality data, even if it would bolster ‘my argument’ (I’m not making one, I was simply correcting an error on the thread). So, the agenda here is yours alone.

edit sp.

No it isn’t… why is it so hard to accept that the data supplied by Hamas include every Palestinian killed - including Hamas fighters? Also including natural deaths, people Hamas killed etc.

Those repeating 70k Palestinians were killed without making it clear that number includes Hamas operatives killed by the IDF are helping to spread Hamas propaganda, normally without meaning to.

Why do you even need to say the 2nd para here?

Whats the link between the ambulances and IDF atrocities?

If you believe the link is that they are Jewish, aren't you making the same link as the terrorists?

Do you believe that link is correct?

If you don't believe that link is correct, then why are you using it to explain why the attacks happened?

Wouldn't it be better to just sever the link and say, No, this is wrong, we do not accept it?

This thread is the same as every thread on every antisemitic attack. Why do people keep insisting on making the faulty terrorist way of thinking link and using it to explain the incident, rather than just blaming the antisemitism?

Can you please explain how the Crusades were Terrorism?

And so it continues, 100s of posts on. Jewish charity ambulances were burnt out, but somehow they're to blame.

Yes, I'd like an answer to that as well ?

They may have been misplaced religious fervour, but they certainly weren't "terrorism".

Would you like to consider the disparity I pointed out between the number of male deaths and the number of female deaths? The WHO data shows this.

You say you dont have an agenda. So what possible explanation could there be?

ETA, I'm not disputing the total number here.

The sack of Jerusalem would certainly qualify as terrorism I think? Even by the standards of its time it was notoriously bloody and many women and children residents were murdered.

Can you explain why it qualifies as terrorism?
Amd which one are you talking about?

Terrorism is a coordinated action designed to provoke terror, destruction and death.

The Crusades themselves were a response to Islamic conquests of Christian lands, often accompanied by forced conversions.

Because they killed lots of innocent people as a way of re-Christianizing Jerusalem. I would say as they slashed and murdered their way through the streets they probably intended to terrorise the people.
Wouldn't you agree?