PugJesus, pugjesus@lemmy.world

It’s very understandable to handwave it away and dismiss it,

I very much disagree. Handwaving it and dismissing it misses the entire point of why deliberately murdering civilians is bad.

but yeah, we should just briefly accept that violence against innocent people is wrong and immediately turn it back to Israel, who, by far, hurt and kill way more innocent people than Hamas ever could.

I don’t know about ‘ever could’ - if the IDF was entirely incompetent instead of just vile, I wouldn’t trust Hamas not to simply play this card in reverse. Their long history of antisemitism remains… suspect. On top of being theocratic loons.

But that’s why Israel supported Hamas to undermine Fatah. Much easier target for Israeli PR.

Welp, looks like he started the whole thing off an old comment he found. He was looking for a fight by directly going with the most controversial statement he could find.

That’s not even the most controversial statement in the thread, man.

From my point of view, Israel is waging war on civilians mostly. Hamas is a non issue that can only deal the damage Israel let’s them.

I would agree. I would go so far as to say that calling it war is generous. It’s nothing more than a genocide. Hamas isn’t much more than a cat’s paw for Israeli domestic politics - which makes the defense of their targeting of civilians (something both morally abhorrent and without significant gain for the Palestinian people) all the more ridiculous. At least, ridiculous from an anti-Zionist point of view.

Terrorist groups can’t be defended, but they can’t be used as justification for wholesale slaughter of a civilian population either. That’s the main issue that I think gets people riled up.

The main issue in the real world (thankfully). Unfortunately, on the Fediverse, there’s a fairly large contingent of folk who think that ethnic cleansing is Good, Actually, if it’s pointed towards Israelis.

Thanks for the link.

np

First stop was Hungary, but yes.

The crusaders incurred a huge debt contracting with the Venetians, and when the lackluster crusade didn’t turn up enough people (rich OR poor) to fund the full debt for the transport fleet (which was much larger than it needed to be, since they were expected a larger turnout for the crusade), there was a ’no refunds’ policy taken by Venice. Venice demanded payment in other forms - first to subdue some local Christian cities they regarded as ‘rightfully’ Venice’s.

After that, the crusaders were still short on cash and running low on supplies, as the strongarming was only to cover the remainder of the contract that they couldn’t afford, and the contract’s duration for providing supplies to the crusaders was running low - in large part because of the time taken by the strongarming detour. They could have disembarked as-planned, but would have done so with almost no food deep in hostile territory, which was not the original plan - hardly an auspicious start to a ‘successful’ crusade. The deposed Byzantine Emperor contacted part of the crusade and offered to pay off their whole debt to the Venetians and provide troops and support to the Holy Land if they put him back on the throne. The Venetians, seeing a chance to fuck over the Byzantines, their traditional enemies, were strongly in favor of the plan.

Of course, this ran into one small problem - the Byzantine Empire was in no shape to pay off massive debts or provide large armies to military adventures at this time. It was only barely holding itself together. When the crusaders sacked Constantinople and put the previous Byzantine Emperor on the throne, they found out that his promises were largely empty, and that even the entire Byzantine treasury couldn’t pay what they were promised.

… so they couped (and killed) the Emperor they themselves had installed by coup, and instead founded what is usually referred to as the “Latin Empire” in modern histories, a Catholic crusader state which ruled over Constantinople and the surrounding area, with only the fringes of the Byzantine Empire remaining free from Catholic control. This section of the crusade never did actually tangle with the Muslims, and the section of the crusade that DID reach the Holy Land (largely made of crusaders who refused to do either sack, Hungary or Byzantine) disbanded because they were too few by that point to convince the local crusader states to start another war with the Muslim polities.

The Pope was reportedly legitimately unhappy about every part of this.