it’s difficult to credit multimedia these days, and it’s about to get MUCH more difficult. With AI and graphic rendering and audio/video imitation algorithms and ‘deep fake’ technology we’re quickly approaching the point at which clips of public figures making statements or footage of recognizable people committing acts will be nearly worthless. They’ll be precisely as inculpatory as cartoons.
In the wake of Oct. 7th, I saw footage of crowds of Gazans cheering and beating a hostage. I saw footage of a young German Jewish woman all but naked, and bloody, being paraded triumphantly before the same crowds. Try as I might I cannot find those videos on YouTube now. Incidentally it was subsequently announced that the German girl had been killed, beaten to death in captivity or dead of her injuries. I saw photos of cars and homes burned in Israel, often with the dead still in frame.
Al-Ahli hospital, damaged by a misfired PIK rocket. We know this because: (1) several angles of live footage (2) radar telemetry data from the IDF (3) the explosion happened in the parking lot (the most compelling piece of evidence, in my opinion (4) Hamas members are supposedly heard discussing the rocket error. None of these pieces of evidence are conclusive alone and some can be fabricated. Together, though, they create a compelling case which supports IDF claims.
There was a compilation of footage (taken from dead Hamas fighters’ bodycams and Ring video footage and dashboard cameras, etc.) collected by the IDF and shown to journalists and politicians within a week of 10/7, to emphasize the horror of that day. I didn’t see any of the footage but I’ve heard some of it described and it sounded truly horrifying. I believe that it WAS truly a collection of Hamas atrocities for the following reasons:
1.) In dozens of cases Hamas used the victims’ phones to record the final moments of their victims. In several cases this automatically posted the clips to Facebook or other social media apps.
2.) International journalists who I know of and respect describe seeing children with arms cut off and a vehicle with a burned family inside. It took days for the Israelis to collect all of the bodies and nearly a week to get confirmation of who had been kidnapped and who died on that day. I saw footage of an American man whose 8 year old daughter had been killed weeping in relief that she was dead… and not in the clutches of Hamas.
3.) Hamas fighters often had helmet- or body-cams. You can see them in photos. If they behaved with discipline and decency they could release their footage to the world and completely erode popular sympathy for Israel. They have not done this.
4.) In fact, Hamas’ leaders have not denied ANY of the atrocities, that I know of. I watched an interview with Ismail Haniyeh where he got up and cut the interview short rather than answer questions about civilian casualties.
5.) Israeli medical examiners have announced publicly that bodies (including those of infants) show signs of mutilation and abuse. I have no special trust in Israeli officers or doctors but I DO grant a certain level of trust to developed countries. That is to say, if Israel announces something publicly I give it heavier weight than, say, Syria. This has nothing to do with with religion or land claims and simply reflects the fact that Israel is a modern, competent, pluralistic democracy. I similarly credit Singapore more readily than Sudan. Israeli medical examiners have never made up claims of mutilation or abuse before (that I know of). More importantly, fabricating these claims would be a HUGE risk. It’s not as if they get a lot of extra consideration by releasing stories of infanticide and mutilation. The death toll remains the same. If it were to emerge that Israel had fabricated these claims, however, the world would turn against them in disgust.
6.) It is not an open question whether or not Hamas took small children hostage. That has been repeatedly confirmed. It has been confirmed by music festival survivors that they were raped (although, again, I cannot find the videos of those survivors on YouTube at this time; YouTube is notoriously loathe to host content relating to SA on their platform, even if it has news value).
Could these be crisis actors? Could Israel be risking massive public embarrassment and backlash to promote stories of rape? It’s possible, but given the incentives involved I strongly suspect that Hamas fighters raped women. They have all the footage required to disprove those claims, if they are false. I rather doubt that they will release it
7.) Israel has never fabricated extensive stories of rape and mutilation. Its’s been in a bloody struggle for 75 years and yet these accounts are unprecedented. You can have zero faith in Israeli accounts… but if these are lies they are lies of a new kind and scale which should beg the question of why.
..,So while I have not seen the videos of parents tortured in front of their children or mutilated infants, journalists and our Secretary of State and President have. The footage was released in the aftermath of the attacks and couldn’t have plausibly been created using actors. It could conceivably be created using AI but this would be an unprecedented deployment of the technology and, again, if the footage was shown to be faked Israel would forfeit any trust and sympathy it now has.
As we move into an era of common deep fakes and information warfare it will become impossible to decide whether individual pieces of footage are real or whether certain claims are true. Many people will simply defer to their confirmation bias. If they’re Zionists they’ll believe the claims of Israelis. If they’re Muslim they’ll believe the claims of Hamas and Fatah.
As someone with an extensive background knowledge of geopolitics, however, I don’t need to know the provenance of clips of bombings or the validity of speech footage. I know that Israel is a modern democracy which tries to avoid civilian casualties. They deploy knock bombs, send out text messages, and issue evacuation orders. All of those measures seriously affect the military value of their bombs, but they do these things anyway. I KNOW that Israel isn’t trying to kill civilians (as a primary aim) because if they were there would’ve been 500,000 Gazan casualties rather than 5,000.
Hamas headquarters has been located under Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza for over a decade. It’s common knowledge. It’s a war crime to place military hardware and installations in schools or hospitals and Israel would be well within just war conduct to destroy that entire hospital today. It doesn’t do this because it fears the popular and international response.
The awkward fact is that Israel does far more, operationally-speaking, to avoid Palestinian casualties than Hamas. The awkward fact for the anti-Zionists is that Israel doesn’t especially want Palestinian civilians to die. Hamas does.
I know that Israel is, despite a long and bloody history, the most moral actor in this conflict, just as I know that 2 million Muslims happily live within Israel while no Jews (amd a rapidly diminishing number of Christian’s) live in Israel’s Arab neighbors. It will become harder and harder to determine which missile was launched by who or which party fired which first shot, etc. Nevertheless, the general placements of moral ranking are clear. If Israel was the moral and ideological equivalent of Hamas they would use their Air Force to kill ALL civilians in Gaza, which could be done in less than a week. They would brutally murder the ~20% of their citizens who are Arab Muslim. They would bring the democratic institutions of Israeli society to a halt and kill their political opponents. Israel is stronger than Hamas, militarily, but it is also superior morally and those two factors aren’t necessarily connected. Many weak sides in conflicts have retained some moral standing (the ANC against the Afrikaners, Gandhi’s Congress Party independence movement against British imperialism, the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, King’ SCLC against American Jim Crow, etc). Hamas has decided, for historical and emotional and tactical reasons, to abandon moral sensibility. That is too often ignored in the West. The claims of Palestinian nationalism are one issue… Hamas’ moral stature (or lack thereof) is another. They have no moral standing, because they have abandoned it in decades of brutality against Israel and, to a much greater extent, against their own people.
You can criticize Israel’s history in the region and you can oppose its political goals but you cannot plausibly claim that their priorities or values are equivalent to Hamas. Even in the wake of 10/7 their operational planning reflects more concern for Palestinian lives than that of Hamas… which rather makes me wonder at the Westerners behaving as if Hamas represents or protects the people of Gaza. Unfortunately, my cursory knowledge of the reason doesn’t extend to deep insight into the mindsets of ignorant Western activists. Unlike the military situation in Gaza they are, I’m afraid, a mystery to me.
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Data Points of Moral Superiority
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it’s difficult to credit multimedia these days, and it’s about to get MUCH more difficult. With AI and graphic rendering and audio/video imitation algorithms and ‘deep fake’ technology we’re quickly approaching the point at which clips of public figures making statements or footage of recognizable people committing acts will be nearly worthless. They’ll be precisely as inculpatory as cartoons.
In the wake of Oct. 7th, I saw footage of crowds of Gazans cheering and beating a hostage. I saw footage of a young German Jewish woman all but naked, and bloody, being paraded triumphantly before the same crowds. Try as I might I cannot find those videos on YouTube now. Incidentally it was subsequently announced that the German girl had been killed, beaten to death in captivity or dead of her injuries. I saw photos of cars and homes burned in Israel, often with the dead still in frame.
Al-Ahli hospital, damaged by a misfired PIK rocket. We know this because: (1) several angles of live footage (2) radar telemetry data from the IDF (3) the explosion happened in the parking lot (the most compelling piece of evidence, in my opinion (4) Hamas members are supposedly heard discussing the rocket error. None of these pieces of evidence are conclusive alone and some can be fabricated. Together, though, they create a compelling case which supports IDF claims.
There was a compilation of footage (taken from dead Hamas fighters’ bodycams and Ring video footage and dashboard cameras, etc.) collected by the IDF and shown to journalists and politicians within a week of 10/7, to emphasize the horror of that day. I didn’t see any of the footage but I’ve heard some of it described and it sounded truly horrifying. I believe that it WAS truly a collection of Hamas atrocities for the following reasons:
1.) In dozens of cases Hamas used the victims’ phones to record the final moments of their victims. In several cases this automatically posted the clips to Facebook or other social media apps.
2.) International journalists who I know of and respect describe seeing children with arms cut off and a vehicle with a burned family inside. It took days for the Israelis to collect all of the bodies and nearly a week to get confirmation of who had been kidnapped and who died on that day. I saw footage of an American man whose 8 year old daughter had been killed weeping in relief that she was dead… and not in the clutches of Hamas.
3.) Hamas fighters often had helmet- or body-cams. You can see them in photos. If they behaved with discipline and decency they could release their footage to the world and completely erode popular sympathy for Israel. They have not done this.
4.) In fact, Hamas’ leaders have not denied ANY of the atrocities, that I know of. I watched an interview with Ismail Haniyeh where he got up and cut the interview short rather than answer questions about civilian casualties.
5.) Israeli medical examiners have announced publicly that bodies (including those of infants) show signs of mutilation and abuse. I have no special trust in Israeli officers or doctors but I DO grant a certain level of trust to developed countries. That is to say, if Israel announces something publicly I give it heavier weight than, say, Syria. This has nothing to do with with religion or land claims and simply reflects the fact that Israel is a modern, competent, pluralistic democracy. I similarly credit Singapore more readily than Sudan. Israeli medical examiners have never made up claims of mutilation or abuse before (that I know of). More importantly, fabricating these claims would be a HUGE risk. It’s not as if they get a lot of extra consideration by releasing stories of infanticide and mutilation. The death toll remains the same. If it were to emerge that Israel had fabricated these claims, however, the world would turn against them in disgust.
6.) It is not an open question whether or not Hamas took small children hostage. That has been repeatedly confirmed. It has been confirmed by music festival survivors that they were raped (although, again, I cannot find the videos of those survivors on YouTube at this time; YouTube is notoriously loathe to host content relating to SA on their platform, even if it has news value).
Could these be crisis actors? Could Israel be risking massive public embarrassment and backlash to promote stories of rape? It’s possible, but given the incentives involved I strongly suspect that Hamas fighters raped women. They have all the footage required to disprove those claims, if they are false. I rather doubt that they will release it
7.) Israel has never fabricated extensive stories of rape and mutilation. Its’s been in a bloody struggle for 75 years and yet these accounts are unprecedented. You can have zero faith in Israeli accounts… but if these are lies they are lies of a new kind and scale which should beg the question of why.
..,So while I have not seen the videos of parents tortured in front of their children or mutilated infants, journalists and our Secretary of State and President have. The footage was released in the aftermath of the attacks and couldn’t have plausibly been created using actors. It could conceivably be created using AI but this would be an unprecedented deployment of the technology and, again, if the footage was shown to be faked Israel would forfeit any trust and sympathy it now has.
As we move into an era of common deep fakes and information warfare it will become impossible to decide whether individual pieces of footage are real or whether certain claims are true. Many people will simply defer to their confirmation bias. If they’re Zionists they’ll believe the claims of Israelis. If they’re Muslim they’ll believe the claims of Hamas and Fatah.
As someone with an extensive background knowledge of geopolitics, however, I don’t need to know the provenance of clips of bombings or the validity of speech footage. I know that Israel is a modern democracy which tries to avoid civilian casualties. They deploy knock bombs, send out text messages, and issue evacuation orders. All of those measures seriously affect the military value of their bombs, but they do these things anyway. I KNOW that Israel isn’t trying to kill civilians (as a primary aim) because if they were there would’ve been 500,000 Gazan casualties rather than 5,000.
Hamas headquarters has been located under Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza for over a decade. It’s common knowledge. It’s a war crime to place military hardware and installations in schools or hospitals and Israel would be well within just war conduct to destroy that entire hospital today. It doesn’t do this because it fears the popular and international response.
The awkward fact is that Israel does far more, operationally-speaking, to avoid Palestinian casualties than Hamas. The awkward fact for the anti-Zionists is that Israel doesn’t especially want Palestinian civilians to die. Hamas does.
I know that Israel is, despite a long and bloody history, the most moral actor in this conflict, just as I know that 2 million Muslims happily live within Israel while no Jews (amd a rapidly diminishing number of Christian’s) live in Israel’s Arab neighbors. It will become harder and harder to determine which missile was launched by who or which party fired which first shot, etc. Nevertheless, the general placements of moral ranking are clear. If Israel was the moral and ideological equivalent of Hamas they would use their Air Force to kill ALL civilians in Gaza, which could be done in less than a week. They would brutally murder the ~20% of their citizens who are Arab Muslim. They would bring the democratic institutions of Israeli society to a halt and kill their political opponents. Israel is stronger than Hamas, militarily, but it is also superior morally and those two factors aren’t necessarily connected. Many weak sides in conflicts have retained some moral standing (the ANC against the Afrikaners, Gandhi’s Congress Party independence movement against British imperialism, the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, King’ SCLC against American Jim Crow, etc). Hamas has decided, for historical and emotional and tactical reasons, to abandon moral sensibility. That is too often ignored in the West. The claims of Palestinian nationalism are one issue… Hamas’ moral stature (or lack thereof) is another. They have no moral standing, because they have abandoned it in decades of brutality against Israel and, to a much greater extent, against their own people.
You can criticize Israel’s history in the region and you can oppose its political goals but you cannot plausibly claim that their priorities or values are equivalent to Hamas. Even in the wake of 10/7 their operational planning reflects more concern for Palestinian lives than that of Hamas… which rather makes me wonder at the Westerners behaving as if Hamas represents or protects the people of Gaza. Unfortunately, my cursory knowledge of the reason doesn’t extend to deep insight into the mindsets of ignorant Western activists. Unlike the military situation in Gaza they are, I’m afraid, a mystery to me.