More Conversations with Adversaries (Part II)

The Rest of the Story

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of today’s article, which we had to break in two because it seems to have been too long to send out in one piece. We hope you enjoy today’s offering and don’t find it too long. Shabbat Shalom to all who are observing.

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Another defender of Israel jumped into the thread to carry on the discussion

Note that our interlocutor is using the same tactics against Rasa Elliott that he used against me. He accuses her of arguing that the killing is OK when she points out that Gaza, supposedly in the midst of an Israeli genocide is actually growing in population.

He also says that “More Palestinians were killed in the months before Oct 7 than were killed on Oct 7.” That would only be true if by “months” you mean 96 months (8 years), as we can see by looking at the first chart in this article here: CHARTS: Deaths and Injuries in Israel-Palestine since 2000 . And of course the 1300 Palestinians who were killed by Israeli forces over the 8 years before October 7 were not sitting peacefully in their homes when they died.

SHawn HArvey replies to Rasa Elliott:

SHawn HArvey:

Responding to Rasa Elliott:

that's what I'm saying.

This is a war that's been going on for over 70 years.

Pretending Oct 7 was the start of something is asinine.

He argues that since the conflict has been going on for a long time, there is no value in examining the evils of what Hamas initiated on October 7, 2024.

In response to the shift to the long view Rasa Elliott looks back seventy years too:

Rasa Elliott

Also, how many Jews did Britain allow to emigrate from Europe to Mandatory Palestine between 1939 and the end of WWII in order to please the Jew hating Hitler-aligned Muslim Grand Mufti? None? Correct! Yes the killing has been going on for a long time, but one side operates from pure hatred and actually intends genocide.

Image: Graphic posted by Rasa Elliott in response to SHawn HArvey

This exchange just below brings the conversation up to date:

Image: Final exchange between SHawn HArvey and Rasa Elliott in the thread we’ve been following.

It was when I revisited the thread to see if there was any response to my own last comment, that I discovered the exchange with Rasa Elliott which is reproduced above, and I wrote the following to SHawn HArvey:

David Roytenberg:

Responding to SHawn HArvey:

this exchange is worth studying in detail. It’s easy to observe how you keep changing the subject when one of your claims is refuted.

I appreciate your sincere efforts to articulate an incoherent position. You will be the star of my next article.

and he replied

SHawn HArvey:

Top contributor

Responding to David Roytenberg:

not changing anything.

Pissed off about the murder of children.

That's what this boils down to....and you keep trying to justify it.

But it's always fascinating how you keep denying the context of the events occurring.

Like Oct 7 was the start of something, and not a continuation of a 70+ year old conflict.....

and I offered the last comment in the thread (so far).

David Roytenberg:

Responding to SHawn HArvey:

I’m fully aware of the history. That doesn’t mean we can’t think about October 7 and its aftermath as a distinct episode in that history.

It also doesn’t mean we can ignore the ongoing crimes of Hamas and pretend everything that’s happening in Gaza is Israel’s fault. That’s very simplistic and it’s also of no help to ordinary Palestinians.

It is, however very useful to the war criminals who did October 7. They highly approve of the global blindness to their ongoing efforts to maximize the death of Palestinians in Gaza.

Until the world wises up and denounces their depravity, they will continue to sacrifice Palestinians for their holy cause of wiping out Israel.

Why this Matters

If this conversation were unusual and SHawn HArvey were a lone crank, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble of extracting and presenting here. And it wouldn’t be worth the trouble for the reader of wading through an argument that unfolded over a number of days (thank you if you have read it through to the end!). But the claim by SHawn HArvey that Israel has murdered 40,000 and his determination to defend the claim in the face of all logic and all evidence to the contrary, is something I’ve encountered before in just the past few weeks. So I think it’s important to be aware of it and worthwhile to see how far people will go to cling to their belief in it.

Another Example

When Ottawa Mayor Mark Sutcliffe posted on Facebook about his decision not to march in the Capital Pride parade, due to Capital Pride’s statement on Palestine, which made many Ottawa Jews feel unwelcome, he drew a lot of grateful comments from members of the Ottawa Jewish community. In response to those grateful comments, a poster named Shawn Gricken took the time to react to each one by telling them that Israel is committing genocide. When I engaged with him, he too insisted that Israel had murdered 40,000 in Gaza. His response to the argument I advanced above was just as removed from reality as the comments of SHawn HArvey.

I won’t go through the whole thread as I did with Shawn Harvey. Here is what he wrote about Israel killing civilians:

…

The population of Gaza is about 2 million people. At most there are 30,000 members of hamas. 40,000 innocent civilians have been killed, again, most of them women and children. Do you think that has done anything to lower the number of Hamas members? Do you not think that father that just had his two four-day twin babies murdered by the IDF might perhaps become radicalized against Israel after what they did to him and his entire existence?

Israel's fight is with hamas. Not with the innocent civilians of palestine. They have no more say over Hamas being in charge of large swaths of Palestine than Afghans do about having the Taliban in charge. Same exact thing. (I actually cleaned up some typos here that made the last paragraph hard to understand. Ed.)

…

I’ve left out the part where he cites some horrible quotes from Ben Gvir and then finished up by saying I am no better than a Holocaust denier. As with the other Shawn I challenged the claim that 40,000 civilians have been killed.

David Roytenberg:

Responding to Shaun Gricken:

some of what you say is true. Some Israeli leaders and Ben Gvir in particular have said some terrible things.

But you just wrote that Israel has killed 40,000 civilians.

Even Hamas, which has been found repeatedly exaggerating the numbers of dead and in particular inflating the number of women and children has not claimed that Israel has killed 40,000 civilians.

If you make stuff up you can prove anything. So try to be factual.

Hamas claims a total death toll in Gaza of 40,000 since the beginning of the war.

Of these, Israel reports they have killed 17,000 combatants. So even if Hamas numbers were accurate, the number of dead civilians would be 23,000, not 40,000.

You say Israel should be fighting Hamas and shouldn’t have killed 40,000 civilians. If that were true I would agree with you that Israel is committing genocide.

But Israel has been fighting Hamas. And Israel hasn’t killed 40,000 civilians. You are working with a false picture of what is happening in Gaza.

If you think about it, what you say makes no sense. Do you really believe Israel has fought in Gaza for 10 months, lost hundreds of dead among their own troops and killed no Hamas fighters?

Before you compare me to a holocaust denier ask yourself whether you have any idea what is really going on in Gaza.

But Shawn Gricken is very sure:

Shaun Gricken

Responding to David Roytenberg:

Israel has killed 40,000 civilians at least. That's an independently fact check number by multiple groups. Nobody believes anything Hamas says at face value ever. They could claim that sand was dry and water was wet, and nobody would believe them without looking into it first.

If you really want to start talking about people getting caught in lies, Israel has been caught in lie after lie after lie about killed militants. They have not once been able to provide any proof that there's been militants in any of the schools, hospitals, or mosques they have bombed. Let alone the graveyards that they have bulldozed, and they have been openly caught lying about who they have killed and where.

The 40,000 number is an independently fact checked number. This is not a number that includes militants. This is the amount of civilian deaths. Nobody is counting the amount of militants dead besides hamas, because nobody gives a shit about terrorist deaths. Nobody. I don't. You don't. Nobody does, and nobody should. Because they're fucking terrorists. That is why that 40,000 deaths number is civilians. Not militants. Your refusal to believe this shows that you refuse to believe evidence that has been independently checked and does not come from Israel or Hamas.

Again, you are denying things to fit your narrative. Your actions are no better than a holocaust denier.

I'm fully aware of what's going on in Gaza. I have lost friends on both sides of the border.

The list of atrocities in war crimes at the Israeli government and the IDF for committee against the Palestinian people is growing by the day. None of this can be considered self-defense. How dangerous could two four-day-old babies be?

Again, the facts are presented in front of you and you refuse to believe them. Even though the Israeli war minister has been on Israeli television gloating to the Israeli people about his plans for death camps, and the Israeli government's plans to forcibly remove Palestinians from their land to control it for themselves. He is openly gloating about war crimes, and you say it's not happening. So yes, I will compare you to a holocaust denier.

The big issue here, is that I don't believe in your magical sky fairy any more than I believe in anybody else's magical sky fairy. Your fundamental belief in your magical sky fairy won't let you see and believe the truth that is happening right in front of you, so you can uphold your fundamentalist sky fairy beliefs.

Leaving aside the childish attack on believers in the last paragraph, the supreme confidence of this particular zealot and his certainty that he has a direct channel to the truth is truly impressive. Folks who want to read the whole thread can check it out here.

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This article is already very long. I am not going to publish the comments of a well-meaning woman I encountered on Mira Sucharov’s page during our discussion of her comment endorsing the Capital Pride statement, other than to say that she wrote “I hope we can all agree that bombing, terrorizing and starving 40,000 civilians is wrong.” Unlike others she didn’t argue with me when I suggested that Israel hasn’t killed 40,000 civilians, but she insisted that regardless, we should be compassionate to Mira who is being compassionate to Palestinians. In response I said that I thought that by promoting the genocide libel, Mira was not being compassionate to Israelis or Ottawa Jews who have to deal with the consequences of the world wide campaign of defamation.

This woman acknowledged the parallel’s between Israel’s war with Hamas and Sri Lanka’s war against the Tamil Tigers, but insisted that Sri Lanka had committed war crimes and that the world is pursuing the perpetrators. This didn’t address my point about the entirely different way the world addressed Sri Lanka’s war against the Tamil Tigers back in the ought’s when it was going on.

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