Summary
Elise Stefanik, President Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the UN, stated during her confirmation hearing that Israel has a “biblical right” to the occupied West Bank, aligning with far-right Israeli officials.
Stefanik sidestepped support for Palestinian self-determination, blaming their leadership for failures.
Her stance signals a shift from Biden-era opposition to Israeli settlements, with Trump lifting sanctions on Israeli settler groups and nominating pro-settlement figures like Mike Huckabee for key roles.
Stefanik also vowed to audit UN funding and block aid to Palestinian refugee agencies.
Sectarian violence should have no place in a secular government
In that case, Spain has a divine right to all parts of the US west of the Tordesillas Meridian. The pope said so.
So they don’t have a right to it is what you’re saying.
therefore american indians have a birthright to 100% of the united states, right? right?
Doesn’t say so in the Bible though, tough luck.
Not in that new-old-fashioned one, but the Book of Mormon’s got them covered.
No, no, not like that. The whites had manifest destiny!
Mormons seen nervously filing away all that “Native Americans are the lost tribes of Israelites” real quickly.
FREE PALESTINE 🇵🇸🙏
What’s left of it anyway : /
Giving the history of US voting in the UN on anything Israel related being No, this doesnt make any difference.
And so has Russia to the Donbas, and so has China to Taiwan, and so has North Korea to South Korea, ans so has Germany to Silesia and Prussia and so have native Americans to America.
I’d expect that she’s not saying “they lived on it a long time ago”, but rather “God gave it to the Israelites according to the Bible”.
I will have the terror of me precede you, so that I will throw into panic every nation you reach. I will make all your enemies turn from you in flight, and ahead of you I will send hornets to drive the Hivites, Canaanites and Hittites out of your way. But I will not drive them all out before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild animals multiply against you. Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have grown numerous enough to take possession of the land. I will set your boundaries from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates; all who dwell in this land I will hand over to you and you shall drive them out before you. You shall not make a covenant with them or their gods. They must not live in your land. For if you serve their gods, this will become a snare to you.
Like, divine will and such.
This particular god is obviously genocidal. People who worship him are immoral cowards at best.
Well, the guy is the god of the Abrahamic religions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions
Christianity is the largest Abrahamic religion with about 2.5 billion adherents, called Christians, constituting about 31.1% of the world’s population.[158] Islam is the second largest Abrahamic religion, as well as the fastest-growing Abrahamic religion in recent decades.[158][159] It has about 1.9 billion adherents, called Muslims, constituting about 24.1% of the world’s population. The third largest Abrahamic religion is Judaism with about 14.1 million adherents, called Jews.[158] The Baháʼí Faith has over 8 million adherents, making it the fourth largest Abrahamic religion,[160][161] and the fastest growing religion across the 20th century, usually at least twice the rate of population growth.[162] The Druze Faith has between one million and nearly two millions adherents.[163][164]
That’d be most of humanity.
That there are a lot of them doesn’t make the other poster wrong.
Yes, correct, if most of humanity worships a genocidal maniac, they are at best immoral cowards who prefer to downplay this and emphasize other aspects of their genocidal maniac God.
If they actively celebrate or justify the genocidal mania of their genocidal maniac God, they are even worse.
Mongolia has joined the chat
Funny to hear from one of the worse tankies I have seen on .world
Everyone to the left of Netanyahu is a tankie, according to centrists.
For real, centrists are often insufferable in their refusal to reflect on their beliefs unless you can prove to their face they hold a small percentage minority view and then they acquiesce like the intellectual cowards they are. That is the reason you call them centrists and not some other word that points to a set of beliefs with any degree of substance.
The Palestinian Genocide is one of these instances.
what a disgusting thing to say.
Just imagine what would be happening right now if we had elected that horrible genocide supporting Kamala instead!
You don’t understand, the job numbers were going up on her watch. But they were SOFT jobs numbers!
IKR. So many palestinians shouting to the mountains for their saviors who abstained for their sakes.
Felon rapist using Bible to promote genocide.
We did it, Patrick. We saved Palestine.
Let the shoulder patting commence.
As recently as yesterday, someone on Lemmy was showcasing to me the cease-fire Trump skillfully engineered in Gaza, with his straight-talking diplomatic skills, as an example of what Biden could have been doing any time he felt up to getting on Trump’s level, and a reason why Trump was better.
What was Biden actually doing (as opposed to just saying) regarding the West Bank which you liked better?
(My impression is that Biden’s sanctions on the settlers has no practical consequences, but I’m not 100% sure of that.)
Not nominating a UN ambassador who said Israel had a biblical right to it, for one thing.
Biden’s “stop or I’ll say stop again also here’s more weapons” level of ‘resistance’ to Netanyahu sure wasn’t anything to be real proud of, but I’ll take that over enthusiastic encouragement any day. Trump also has unpaused some of the military shipments that Biden had paused, today, on day one. Sending even more weapons than Biden was one of his key priorities for the next few years, apparently.
Edit: Also, Biden sanctioned settlers in the West Bank, which never happened before, which Trump also undid on day one. Also, Biden resumed shipments to Palestinian aid organizations which Trump had stopped. Has Trump stopped those again? I don’t know whether that rose to the level of a day-one priority, but I’m absolutely sure it is coming.
As it stands in terms of manifested actual political effects, not virtue signaling and token efforts, Trump managed to push for the ceasefire Biden was unwilling to apply pressure for.
We will see, how the politics of Trump look, when it comes to material on the ground effects, but Biden proudly stood by and gave more bombs while watching daily how women and children are murdered with them and millions of people have their everything destroyed.
So so far Trump did much more for Palestinian lifes than Biden. That is not a big achievement of Trump. It just shows that Biden indeed is genocide Joe, who chose every day to continue this, despite all it taking to end it being a phone call.
Also as Biden delivered weapons while Israel was murdering US aid workers he directly violated US laws.
Trump managed to push for the ceasefire Biden was unwilling to apply pressure for.
So so far Trump did much more for Palestinian lifes than Biden.
You know they’ve still been shooting people in Gaza past Sunday, right?
An Israeli sniper just shot a kid. Yesterday or today I think. They also air-struck a refugee camp in the West Bank, which hasn’t been happening recently.
I don’t even know why I’m still here, having these conversations. This place is very weird. On most of Lemmy, it’s kind of isolated spots of “yay Trump he fixed it, Israel’s gonna be good now” from time to time, but mostly it just gets laughed out of the room. On [email protected] it’s like a mob of it.
An Israeli sniper just shot a kid. Yesterday or today I think.
That is, unfortunately, just what happens when Israel accepts a ceasefire. It’s definitely not good, but it’s better than when the genocide was going full steam ahead.
They also air-struck a refugee camp in the West Bank, which hasn’t been happening recently.
The ceasefire doesn’t cover the West Bank. Again not good, but this is how Israel does things and isn’t an indication that the ceasefire is going to fail.
So your answer to the question is “nothing”? And yes, the sum total of four settlers Biden sanction do qualify as “nothing”.
I know. It never stops.
Not that it’s the point, but here’s a summary of the sanctions at one point. 11 individuals, 11 entities, I don’t know what changed about it after that: https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-issues-new-batch-of-sanctions-targeting-west-bank-settlers-amid-rampant-violence/
He also paused some weapons shipments, he re-funded Palestinian aid organizations, he tried to get them food, yada yada yada I’ll just repeat what I said about it before since you seem to have missed that part of it:
Biden’s “stop or I’ll say stop again also here’s more weapons” level of ‘resistance’ to Netanyahu sure wasn’t anything to be real proud of, but I’ll take that over enthusiastic encouragement any day. Trump also has unpaused some of the military shipments that Biden had paused, today, on day one. Sending even more weapons than Biden was one of his key priorities for the next few years, apparently.
I would broadly agree with you that the sum total of what Biden did was infinitesimal. He was hitting a boulder with a rubber mallet. He was throwing water bottles at a house fire that he helped ignite. The difference is, Trump is showing up with gasoline, a whole truck full of it, and spraying it on and wants to burn five other houses in addition to this one. Biden at least wasn’t doing that. That makes Trump way worse, even though Biden is bad. I don’t know how that simple logical construction turns into this post-graduate equation that people can’t fathom, or means that they claim I’m saying Biden wasn’t abetting a genocide, but that’s how I see it.
I eagerly await the strawman through which this fairly crystal clear explanation, in my view, gets turned into something else which it isn’t.
I had the same thing happen. The idiot then quoted Sartre at me, the one about anti-Semites, as a sorta gotcha. Called me a BlueAnon, and told me that it was even more shameful I was one because I’m Canadian. Literally all I’d said was that the Biden administration negotiated the cease fire. Honestly? It was kinda funny watching them wind themselves up to a froth.
Kamala would’ve nuked it.
You know, hormones and the predisposition to genocide, or whatever.
Great work everyone.
As a bonus, we get to:- increase drug prices (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/initial-rescissions-of-harmful-executive-orders-and-actions/
The original EO is here, and was really difficult to Google:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/10/19/2022-22834/lowering-prescription-drug-costs-for-americans). - Declare everyone as biologically female (because at inception, all embryos are female. It’s only after 6-7 weeks that the y chromosome kicks in an makes it biologically male. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222286/, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/ - note the “at conception” points)).
- Cancel climate change (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/declaring-a-national-energy-emergency/).
Hurray.
Everyone do anazielon salute
Edit: bullet points
Declare everyone as biologically female (because at inception, all embryos are female. It’s only after 6-7 weeks that the y chromosome kicks in an makes it biologically male. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222286/, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/ - note the “at conception” points)).
As somebody who has done courses in gender studies it is painful how plain wrong and unscientific this is. Sure will be true for a lot of the other ones (especially climate). The sex ideology one (and contrary to their claim they of course are the ones with an ideology, because that is what you have when you ignore reality and make up your own truth based on falsehood) will do a lot of harm on the short term. There are real people out there who’s whole existence just got denied. My heart goes out (without a Sieg Heil, but in an empatic way) to all the Transpeople, Intersex People, Non-Binary People and all others who just got their identity denied. Please stay safe and hold tight. There are sane cis people out here who know you exist and stand by your side. For what ever that will be worth in the time to come.
As somebody who has done courses in gender studies it is painful how plain wrong and unscientific this is
And this is exactly why they’re doing everything they can to make sure people can’t learn this stuff in the future.
Correction on your one point - they declared that everyone is neither male nor female, since no one at conception produces reproductive cells. That starts happening later.
- increase drug prices (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/initial-rescissions-of-harmful-executive-orders-and-actions/
Meanwhile, Palestine…
I’m surprised you’re still here, to be honest. Yes, I know what Palestine is like right now. I care a lot about it. I wrote my congresspeople, back when they were approving the aid, trying to tell them not to do it. I didn’t think it would do anything, and it didn’t. That’s why I didn’t want Trump to come, and make things quite a bit worse than even Biden’s already war-criminal level of performance.
Around 85% of the Palestinians in Gaza are still alive right now, as far as I know. How many once Trump is done with them?
50%?
80%? Will he solve the Middle East during his term, and bring an end to the killing? It seems unlikely.
Less than 10%, with a lot of it annexed to Israel?
That last one seems pretty probable to me. I think better than 50/50 odds. I don’t want to bet.
Realpolitiks hasn’t failed the West yet, why should it now?
Are you fucking for real dude? That’s your defense?
I’m not even going to ask you to elaborate on how you believe that just invoking the term “realpolitik” explains your position, because frankly I just don’t care enough to know.
Absolutely:
Realpolitik prioritizes practical considerations over ideological or moral concerns. This can involve making alliances or compromises with states that may have conflicting values or interests.
How else could we explain America allowing a genocide with 46,000+ deaths? It’s the reason people supported the Democrats, and a genocide, despite the threat of Trump and fascism. The ends justify the means.
I had a feeling you wouldn’t really want to engage with that conversation. It’s pretty fucking upsetting.
You’re so sure of yourself. A little humility goes a long way:
But those caveats should not obscure the fact that it was a Democratic president who so thoroughly failed in pushing Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders to accept a ceasefire deal—and that Biden’s incompetence is what has allowed Trump to take a victory lap before even taking office.
This failure had catastrophic consequences. According to the official death toll, Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 46,000 people in Gaza. Public health researchers estimate the actual death toll, which will only be known after buried bodies after pulled from the omnipresent rubble, is far higher.
I’m sure the Palestinians sleeping in tents tonight are wistfully reminding themselves that Biden was better because Trump might be worse.
I actually commented at more length on this exact article a while back, when one of my bots posted it:
https://ponder.cat/post/1337717/1524546
Now that the Israeli military has done several more attacks in Gaza since the ceasefire (including by a sniper who killed a child), and attacked a refugee camp in the West Bank for good measure, I stand even more so behind my assessment that taking the cease-fire seriously without having a reason to think it will continue is just poor pattern recognition.
You could have had Kamala Harris, who you could say might have been worse or might have been better than Biden. Instead, we have Trump, who is catastrophically worse, in every objective sense, by such a wide margin that I don’t want to think about it. Congratulations, I guess.
I don’t want to talk about this any more. I’m not sure why I engaged with it for this long.
Edit: I was thinking to myself, what the fuck? What are all these weird comments, why am I back in this experience of having this type of conversation?
And then I thought, ooooohhhhh, I resubscribed to [email protected] for some one-off reason, and this came up in my feed without me realizing that was where it’s from. There’s a reason I unsubscribed, because it is filled with an unusually high proportion of this stuff. Okay, peace. I’m back to unsubscribing, because I remember how infinitely more pleasant my Lemmy experience is without quite so many of the aggressively wrong people who always adhere to exactly one viewpoint and never stop replying. Cheers, you can carry on without me with what you’d wanted to say.
I’m sorry if I make you feel like you need to leave, it’s just a different way of viewing the world. I understand your sentiment about the threat of Trump, but I don’t excuse the Democrats role in allowing this to happen.
… genocide joe and kamalacaust after getting their “ceasefire”.
I’m sure she’s not as amenable to all the biblical rights that men have over her.
These fucking cunts either pretend to believe in fairy tales or really do believe in fairy tales, and I’m not sure which is worse.
much surprise that Trump decided to side with the powerful and the rich
