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74 votes
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Takeaways from AP's report on affordable housing disappearing across the US
32 votes -
Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of October 7
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate...
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.
6 votes -
How ‘snowflake babies’ could change IVF politics
8 votes -
Russia is changing its nuclear doctrine - atomic coercion, Ukraine and the nuclear threshold
17 votes -
A year after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, four Americans are still being held hostage
11 votes -
A lawmaker representing Greenland in Denmark's Parliament was asked to leave the podium of the assembly after she refused to translate her speech delivered in Greenlandic into Danish
19 votes -
Swedish government accused of trying to ‘outlaw poverty’ over begging ban – critics say proposal may not be lawful and would not tackle root cause of vulnerability
36 votes -
‘Paper or plastic?’ will no longer be a choice at California grocery stores
32 votes -
More people than ever are trying to hack the US government--and they love it
11 votes -
Where environmentalists went wrong / It’s time for “effective environmentalism"
27 votes -
You're running for office on a somewhat petty, yet univerally-understood single issue. What is it?
Imagine that on the campaign posters, it will say your name and then this policy. For example: Vote for <your username> ... Rain boots for everyone. (No American / Englishman / Indian / etc....
Imagine that on the campaign posters, it will say your name and then this policy. For example:
Vote for <your username> ...
- Rain boots for everyone. (No American / Englishman / Indian / etc. should have soggy socks.)
- A Speedy DMV. (It should take 10 minutes to renew your license at the DMV.)
- Rice in every restaurant. (Rice is good with everything. At least some Asian KFCs will serve fried chicken with rice!)
It should resonate deeply with people, without the expectation that it should solve any of the deeper problems in life.
80 votes -
China is ready for war (and thanks to a crumbling defense industrial base, America is not)
20 votes -
Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of September 30
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate...
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.
15 votes -
Donald Trump trials - Megathread - US Federal Jan 6 case with Special Counsel Jack Smith
Court of Appeals disclosed congressmember Scott Perry's texts re Trump, then removed them
31 votes -
Georgia voter cancellation site
30 votes -
Young Donald Trump appointed US judge declares centuries old qui tam case practice unconstitutional
32 votes -
USA: Kyle Rittenhouse's texts pledging to ‘murder’ shoplifters disillusion his ex-spokesperson
47 votes -
Hamas was created and supported by Israel to oppose the seculars, divide Palestinians, and destroy the two-state solution
This is a historical analysis of the subject, as such, it deserves its own topic. I'm using several sources. By using different sources of good to high quality, my aim is to create a historical...
This is a historical analysis of the subject, as such, it deserves its own topic. I'm using several sources. By using different sources of good to high quality, my aim is to create a historical explanation based on convergence of evidence—the idea that difference sources supporting the argument makes for a much more robust case.
I quote the passages I deem most relevant. Also, in order to boost credibility, I give a Media Bias/Fact Check profile about factuality of the each main source.
The Japan Times — Israel's historical role in the rise of Hamas
MB/FC Profile — Factual Reporting: High
The international focus on the war in Gaza has helped obscure the fact that Israel in the 1980s aided the rise of the Islamist Hamas as a rival to the secular Palestinian Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel’s policy was clearly influenced by the U.S. training and arming of mujahideen (or Islamic holy warriors) in Pakistan from multiple countries to wage jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
(...)
Hamas, for its part, is alleged to have emerged out of the Israeli-financed Islamist movement in Gaza, with Israel’s then-military governor in that territory, Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, disclosing in 1981 that he had been given a budget for funding Palestinian Islamists to counter the rising power of Palestinian secularists. Hamas, a spin-off of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, was formally established with Israel’s support soon after the first Intifada flared in 1987 as an uprising against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
Israel’s objective was twofold: to split the nationalist Palestinian movement led by Arafat and, more fundamentally, to thwart the implementation of the two-state solution for resolving the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By aiding the rise of an Islamist group whose charter rejected recognizing the Israeli state, Israel sought to undermine the idea of a two-state solution, including curbing Western support for an independent Palestinian homeland.
Israel’s spy agency Mossad played a role in this divide-and-rule game in the occupied territories. In a 1994 book, “The Other Side of Deception,” Mossad whistleblower Victor Ostrovsky contended that aiding Hamas meshed with “Mossad’s general plan” for an Arab world “run by fundamentalists” that would reject “any negotiations with the West,” thereby leaving Israel as “the only democratic, rational country in the region.” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official involved in Gaza for over two decades, told a newspaper interviewer in 2009 that, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”
(...)
Israel, by contrast, persisted with its covert nexus with Hamas. With the consent of Israel, Qatar, a longtime sponsor of jihadi groups, funneled $1.8 billion to Hamas just between 2012 and 2021, according to the Haaretz newspaper.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in power for much of the past decade and a half, told a meeting of his Likud Party’s Knesset members in 2019 that, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” adding, “This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
The Intercept — Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas to Bombing It
MB/FC Profile — Factual Reporting: Mostly Factual
But did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.
They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.
(...)
“When I look back at the chain of events, I think we made a mistake,” David Hacham, a former Arab affairs expert in the Israeli military who was based in Gaza in the 1980s, later remarked. “But at the time, nobody thought about the possible results.”
The Times of Israel — For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces
MB/FC Profile — Factual Reporting: High
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.
The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
(...)
Most of the time, Israeli policy was to treat the Palestinian Authority as a burden and Hamas as an asset. Far-right MK Bezalel Smotrich, now the finance minister in the hardline government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, said so himself in 2015.
According to various reports, Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
While Netanyahu does not make these kind of statements publicly or officially, his words are in line with the policy that he implemented.
The same messaging was repeated by right-wing commentators, who may have received briefings on the matter or talked to Likud higher-ups and understood the message.
Reuters — EU's Borrell says Israel financed creation of Gaza rulers Hamas
MB/FC Profile — Factual Reporting: Very High
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said on Friday that Israel had financed the creation of Palestinian militant group Hamas, publicly contradicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has denied such allegations.
Opponents of the Israeli government and some global media have accused Natanyahu governments of boosting Gaza rulers Hamas for years, including by allowing Qatari financing of Gaza.
"Yes, Hamas was financed by the government of Israel in an attempt to weaken the Palestinian Authority led by Fatah," Borrell said in a speech in the University of Valladolid in Spain without elaborating.
45 votes -
Robert Caro on the art of biography
5 votes -
California bans legacy admissions at private universities
29 votes -
California just passed the Freelancer Worker Protection Act (SB 988)
17 votes -
Arkansas sues YouTube over claims it's fueling mental health crisis
16 votes -
EU supreme court will hear arguments on whether Danish law limiting the concentration of ethnic minorities in certain neighbourhoods violates EU anti-discrimination law
5 votes -
Denmark became the world's first country to offer legal recognition of gay partnerships on 1 October 1989 – a day when "something shifted in human affairs"
13 votes -
Emotions are running high in EU foreign policy – and that's ok
5 votes -
Melting glaciers force Switzerland and Italy to redraw part of Alpine border
11 votes -
Norway may put a fence along part or all of the 198-kilometer border it shares with Russia – move inspired by a similar project in its Nordic neighbor Finland
17 votes -
Massachusetts bill could fully legalize kei cars and override RMV ban
58 votes -
A weakened Hezbollah is being goaded into all-out conflict with Israel – the consequences would be devastating for all
27 votes -
As the Taliban starts restricting men, too, some regret not speaking up sooner (gifted link)
52 votes -
Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of September 23
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate...
This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.
This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.
15 votes -
UK music festival The Great Escape has withdrawn its partnership with the Faroe Islands after it was criticised for working with a country which allows “barbaric” whaling
8 votes -
USA: "The undecided voters are not who you think they are"
37 votes -
Mexico’s snub to King Felipe rekindles colonialism row with Spain: President-elect refuses to invite Spanish king to her inauguration after lack of apology for crimes of conquest
27 votes -
Kentucky sues Express Scripts, alleging it had a role in the deadly opioid addiction crisis
15 votes -
Your politics are boring as fuck
17 votes -
Anti-immigration mood sweeping EU capitals puts strain on bloc’s unity. From Germany’s border checks to France’s vow to restore order, rejection of open borders could threaten Schengen zone.
13 votes -
The attempt to reform Intel
8 votes -
Comprehensive bipartisan plastics recycling bill tackles plastics pollution in US
27 votes -
Cameroonian separatist leader Lucas Ayaba Cho arrested in Norway for his alleged role in the ongoing armed conflict in the Central African country
5 votes -
Russia and Iran plot to arm Houthis with advanced anti-ship cruise missiles – Reuters
17 votes -
Thai king signs same-sex marriage bill into law
45 votes -
US Republicans’ electoral college edge, once seen as ironclad, looks to be fading
23 votes -
How cities run dry
2 votes -
In the US, more than 200 pregnant women were prosecuted the year after Roe v. Wade was overturned
23 votes -
Aug 2024 - "America isn’t ready for the wars of the future" by Mark Milley (ex-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) and Eric Schmidt (ex-CEO of Google)
13 votes -
How the Islamic State weaponizes imitation in its propaganda
4 votes -
Mexico's Senate just approved changing the constitution
18 votes -
11th Circuit rules in favor of forced trans sterilization for drivers licenses in Alabama
23 votes