Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: Romney: Palestinians don't want two-state solution, they want to eliminate Israel [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)It's enough to say that Hamas is violent and extremist. Using terms like "genocidal", which is far out of proportion to anything Hamas has ever actually done(and what they have done is bad enough, thank you very much)is an abuse of language.
Hamas is not trying to kill every Israeli. They aren't even trying to kill all the West Bank settlers(though they have killed too many). Genocide refers, specifically, to an attempt to wipe out an entire people. It just doesn't apply here and throwing such a term around here diminishes the suffering of all the groups of people who have been victims of ACTUAL genocides or attempted genocides.
I've made it clear that I don't support Hamas-the furthest I've gone is to argue that it would be necessary to negotiate with them, simply because this conflict can ONLY be ended with negotiations involving all the factions, since none of the factions can be wiped out militarily and excluding any from negotiations will simply guarantee that any that are excluded will keep on fighting-and how does THAT kind of result help anyone?