• okamiueru@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Terrorism doesn’t mean “scary thing.”

    It means a lot of things to a lot of people, in a lot of contexts. There are more than 250 definitions used in academic literature. More interestingly, it’s consistently used by people with significant bias, and inability to understand it from the perspective of “the enemy”. It is a word, after all.

    Now, king of the red herring fallacy of which you are, I’ll just point out that when a state commits war crimes against a civilian population, it’s reasonably well accepted to be considered as “state terrorism”. But, I’m sure you’ll regally conjure a ignoratio elenchi response.

    Not that this ever was a bar needed to pass in order to answer the rather simple question posed. So, to get back to where you sidetracked off from:

    Around 23k civilians in Gaza have been killed by Israel since October 7th. On 9/11 2001, around 2.6k were killed in those attacks. So, around 8.8 “worth” of 9/11s.

    Given 94 days since October 7th, it would be a “9/11 amount of civilian casualties” every 10.6 days.

    But why not use a different unit of measurement. How about:

    A “Hamas October 7th” every 5 days. For over 3 months straight.

    But hey, it isn’t terrorism if it’s genocide, right? But, you’re not sure about that last part. Perhaps it’s not systematic enough to check that box? After all, it’s not like they’re carpet bombing a region with a population density twice that of of San Fransisco, of which half are children. Given the average of 10 civilians killed per Israeli airstrike. There is some randomness for it to not be on-the-nose genocide, but not too much randomness to be obvious acts of terrorism. Just that pleasantly tempered amount of killing of children to argue in bad faith.