I’m as tankie as they come but I love shitting on Russia. Call it CIA brainwashing, its my absolute pleasure.

Let it be noted that this is an opinion article.

Editorials and Opinion pieces do contribute to social discourse regarding news, and may be correct, but unlike their normal news, they can say whatever they want about the news from the authors they hire.

Opinion pieces allow news sources to use sensationalist and inflammatory articles to drive engagement without harming their credibility, because of that giant OPINION label.

NYT and WSJ’s editorials and opinion pieces tend to be quite left and quite right leaning respectfully, to an almost satirical level. In my opinion, the WSJ’s comment section under its editorials are much worse.

I’m not disparaging the article in any way, just saying for those that may not already know.

Al Jazeera had been live streaming and live reporting the entire thing, and there are multiple angles and phone videos from them and other sources that show the entire incident, from the rocket barrage, to the booster failure, to the hospital explosion.

The Associated Press has the complete analysis to your question, including the videos I mentioned, posted yesterday.

Alot of the videos in there were confirmed 8 hours after the incident, this is the first mainstream media outlet that put it all together.

The AP was one of the first to report what the Gaza Health Ministry said, “Israel strikes hospital, killing 500”, then edited their article 3 times in 1 hour, with new titles and recharacterizing the report as “they said” to try and cover the increasing uncertainty of the situation. Along with the casualty number dropping. Now some might say “But any death at all is bad, 50 or 500!”. That’s true, it’s still really tragic, but it’s also a 90% error, which is a disaster for journalism.

The article covers the JDAM theories, the Israel warned them, the Hamas announcing their launching rockets a little after the incident. All things that would make the situation more murky.

I admit I do sound like I’m defending Israel with this. This particular event is a flashpoint for me personally since I’m heavily invested in the state of journalism in an age where the flood of information can overwhelm news and lead to innaccuracies.

The rocket turning around video is a different video from last year.

Unfortunately I got banned from World News on lemmy.ml because posting this was “War Crime Denial” apparently.

Rightfully so.

I didn’t think making fun of terrorists could be controversial until today nyaa~

Context:

NYT, WSJ, and other news media have started to report that US Intel confirms it was a failed militant rocket through infrared imagery.

Downvotes are legitimately, copium.

Morally, it’s a complicated situation.

Geopolitically, Israel probably has the support of most Western nations simply due to the fact that they engage in diplomacy and have proper decorem, with a government system that is a relatively modern system despite political leanings.

Additionally, Israel has a better human rights record DOMESTICALLY than Palestine and the Gaza region. It’s still dominated by religion, terrorist leaders, and its own population’s semi-justified bitterness. Freedom of expression and freedom of press is heavily restricted, just like any other Islamic religious state in the middle east.

The sole responsibility of the escalation and subsequent destabilization of the region lies with Hamas. The sole responsibility of the withdrawal of Palestinian aid from countries like Austria, lies with Hamas.

And with all the videos popping up over the treatment and killing of Israeli civilians, it’s hard for the Western world, and especially Western governments to garner the sympathy for the Palestinian people that they had 1 week ago.

Both sidesing isn’t correct, whataboutism isn’t correct, blindly supporting either side isn’t correct, supporting efforts to contain the conflict is correct. The best way to do that is to monitor Israel’s progress in containing Hamas.

We know that Hamas hides in schools and civilian buildings, using their own civilians as a shield. That’s a warcrime it itself. So it’s going to be messy as hell.

The US sent the USS Gerald Ford into the Mediterranean as a deterrent. If any country starts to try to 3rd party the conflict, oh shit oh fuck WW1 vibes. That’s how tender this situation is.

And with 1 other active conflict in the world, this is shaky ground.

Well to be quite fair, it’s better to judge a country by it’s progress and current state of affairs than by its past actions. Because if we judged every country by their actions in the past, not many countries would have clean hands.

From 2016-2021, I was ready to move away. I was quite disillusioned by everything. What changed? Soccer 💀. Soccer made me comically nationalist for our national teams.

Honestly being in that environment of being able to be innocently prideful of my home without thinking about the past helped put things in perspective.

I’m now prideful to be American, and proud that my home heavily invests in NATO. I’m an adult now, and I’ve been working to push for some more improvements in things like infrastructure. I don’t cringe at 4th of July celebrations anymore, and I feel great that I’m making an impact.

You probably won’t see me putting a flag outside my home, but I have a lovely high quality flag.

Our national park system is the best in the world, our ecosystem, nature, and geography are spectacular and diverse. And NASA is phenomenal.

Don’t allow yourself to wallow in this cynical disillusionment. It’s not good for your mental health to focus on the terrible parts of America without having the ability to change those parts.