Iran’s Revolutionary Guards vowed on Sunday to target ‘Israeli’ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the war with ‘Israel’ and the United States continues.
“If this child-killing criminal is alive, we will continue to pursue and kill him with full force,” said the Guards on their website Sepah News.
I didn’t say that, for one. For two, I have no idea what “Stephen Universe reasons” means.
In general, I don’t cheer for escalation in the Middle East. I think bombing Iran was bad. I think bombing Israel would also be bad. I can agree that Netanyahu is bad without championing for more bombs.
The ideal would be that he is removed from office and tried for war crimes. Not that we have a continuing and escalating war.
Why?
Bombings are always the result of failure. Violence is the final refuge of the incompetent. Sometimes necessary certainly, but never correct with appropriate foresight.
And revenge being the reason behind any action is foolish. It’s like making the focus of prison punishment instead of rehabilitation. When you drop bombs, it should be with particular policy goals in mind.
I also think that it would be preferable if things in the Middle East got calmer, not more escalated. If I had the choice between less violence there and more, I will certainly chose the less.
So, we then have to define what we mean by “bombing Israel.” Wanton bombing I can see no argument for that isn’t simply punitive, which is clearly bad under the aforementioned criteria.
There may be an argument for a targeted strike to just target Netanyahu. You have to ask yourself what the goals and effects of such a strike would be. I think it is unlikely to greatly change Israel’s posture. Netanyahu is unpopular domestically, as is this war, but the nation of Israel has a history of rallying around martyrs that would probably overwhelm any gains by having Netanyahu out of the picture. This would also likely lead towards an even greater retaliatory strike against Iran (which, again, would also be bad.)
So what’s the benefit of bombing Israel other than “it makes me feel good to hurt a bad guy”? Why is it actually good?
Famously, bombings did not bring down Nazi Germany and imperial japan. Of course! Every intelligent person understands this!
I didn’t say bombings were always a failure. I said they were always the result of failure.
Or is your argument that there was literally zero chance to stop the fascist decline of Germany at any point prior to full scale war?
Some violence is self defense, like in this case. It may not be our favorite thing, but if you’re up against fascists in power the only thing that can stop them is violence. If you don’t, you’re just letting them genocide literally everyone they want, which isn’t just extremely cruel and abominable, but it’s also stupid, as the enemy of the state is a moving target and for every genocide they accomplish they move on to the next. It’s a matter of time until you or your loved ones are declared the enemy. What then? How can you resist genocidal violence if not with self-defense?
Killing Netanyahu wouldn’t be great self defense, on the contrary. What Iran and Iran-controlled factions are doing now is the better “self defense” violence: target assets that have a deep value for the US and their allies.
I didn’t say violence was always wrong. I said it was always the result of failure. There are of course plenty of times when violence is justified.
But let’s not lose sight of the fact that the country that was bombed literally murdered forty thousand protesters in the past month. To put that in perspective, the total number of protesters deaths in Minneapolis is under ten, and that’s a hugely tragic situation. And the leaders who ordered those forty thousand people murdered are the ones who were just blown up in that bomb strike.
And I’m still saying the bombing in Iran was a bad thing.
If the goal was regime change (which is a noble pursuit here in the same way it would be a noble pursuit to work to unseat Netanyahu), Iran was already well on its way to that, and there are dozens of things the US could have done to push for that without escalating to a full scale kinetic war. The bombing, if anything, is regressive to those goals.
And to your final point, yes, there comes a time when a situation has deteriorated to the point that there is some actor that is an existential threat to one or more people groups and the only mechanism to stop them is violence. There’s an argument that literally either side of this conflict represents one of those existential threats. But I’m unconvinced that any have progressed past the point of intervention via non-violent means.
Which is why I asked earlier “why is it a good idea to bomb Israel,” as so far the best answer I’ve gotten is “because Israel is bad,” which isn’t a reason. If that’s the standard, I’ve got a list of about 20 countries to give you that were gonna have to bomb as well. If it’s “we need to bomb countries that are conducting genocide,” then there’s a list of about half that we need to be actively bombing.
Genocide is bad and needs to be stopped. That goes without saying, obviously. But the answer isn’t just “have the US bomb every country that’s perpetrating a genocide.” It turns out that that will often do more harm than good, and sometimes there are more effective “non-bomb” solutions that will do much more in the long run. Even if “bombing the bad people makes the lizard brain feel good.”
Ah ok: you’re a Zionist who was just pretending to do the “both sides thing”. You couldn’t help but give yourself away though, lol
Acknowledging that Iran killed forty thousand protesters makes me a Zionist? I’m not sure I follow.
Are you saying that Iran didn’t kill forty thousand protesters? Are you saying it’s not a big enough deal to even be worth mentioning?
If all you’re saying is that them killing forty thousand protesters wasn’t a sufficient justification for bombing them, I agree with you and literally said that in the next sentence.
So what about saying that makes me a Zionist? Which, to be clear, I am not.
Nobody except Zionist trolls are claiming “40000000 dead protesters!”
Deleted my first response after a deeper dive.
The lowest official number is three thousand from the government that actually did the killing, and that number is already unconscionable. It’s wild to kill three thousand of your own citizens for protesting.
The HRANA published a list of people killed and it was seven thousand names. That list had minimal overlap with the list put out by the Iranian government. So the real total was probably ten thousand minimum, and that is only names. Identifying dead bodies is hard, so there are certainly still people unaccounted for.
All that to say, what is an acceptable number of protesters for the Iranian government to have mowed down, and do you believe they exceeded that number, or were they in the wrong?
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
deleted by creator
It took months for Israel to kill 40,000 Palestinians when they were bombing Gaza, how can you believe that Iran could pull that off in days? Israel wasn’t able to hide what they did either because Palestinians have phones, so where’s the video evidence coming out of Iran? They disposed of 40,000 bodies and we can’t see it from satellite images or phones? It’s nonsense.
If you swallow the Zionist propaganda that Iran is somehow even more bloodthirsty than Israel, you’re a Zionist.
Iran likely killed somewhere between Iran’s official count of 3,000 people and the HRANA count of 7,000, a lot of them rioters that were armed by CIA/Mossad and were shooting cops and burning down government buildings. There were certainly unarmed people who were also shot, but the situation on the ground was chaotic and it’s hard to distinguish armed targets during a riot.
The “protests” were the original US/Israeli plan to overthrow the government, and they failed. This war is the backup plan.
Okay, doing a deeper dive, I’d say the minimum is around ten thousand, with a max around thirty-five. The official Iranian government number is around three thousand, and HRANA reported around seven thousand, but both were in the form of lists of names, and it seems there was minimal overlap between the two, so the lists are likely additive. And that also assumes they were able to identify every person killed. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_massacres
But short of the forty thousand initially stated for sure. I was quoting a number heard not researched. Though, even if you take the the three thousand number as gospel, that’s still an insane number of your own citizens to have killed. Compare again to the sub-10 number of protesters killed in Minneapolis.
Also, Israel killed around seven thousand in December of 2023, so no, I don’t think that it’d be terribly hard to accomplish disposing of the bodies of forty thousand people logistically. I don’t recall seeing giant piles of Palestinian corpses on satellite feeds or anything. And Israel hasn’t taken steps to lock down citizen communication with the outside world.
But this isn’t a bloodthirsty-ness dick measuring contest. Both sides have a distinct indifference to human life that’s unconscionable. And your defense that “it’s okay Iran murdered those people because they were rioters and looters and most of them were actually paid militants,” has some real “Donald Trump takes on the George Floyd protests” energy.
The Iranian people have had a growing discontent against their government for decades. I just read a book of interviews with Iranian citizens from around 2005, and they were pretty fed up with their government then, and the abuses have only gotten worse. Iran has been on the precipice of a revolution for a long time. I think it’s unnecessarily conspiratorial to lay it all at the feet of the US.