Summary
Elise Stefanik, President Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to the UN, stated during her confirmation hearing that Israel has a “biblical right” to the occupied West Bank, aligning with far-right Israeli officials.
Stefanik sidestepped support for Palestinian self-determination, blaming their leadership for failures.
Her stance signals a shift from Biden-era opposition to Israeli settlements, with Trump lifting sanctions on Israeli settler groups and nominating pro-settlement figures like Mike Huckabee for key roles.
Stefanik also vowed to audit UN funding and block aid to Palestinian refugee agencies.
I wish I could live to see the day where citing the Bible in support of an argument gets you laughed out of the fucking room.
We did it, Patrick. We saved Palestine.
Let the shoulder patting commence.
As recently as yesterday, someone on Lemmy was showcasing to me the cease-fire Trump skillfully engineered in Gaza, with his straight-talking diplomatic skills, as an example of what Biden could have been doing any time he felt up to getting on Trump’s level, and a reason why Trump was better.
What was Biden actually doing (as opposed to just saying) regarding the West Bank which you liked better?
(My impression is that Biden’s sanctions on the settlers has no practical consequences, but I’m not 100% sure of that.)
Not nominating a UN ambassador who said Israel had a biblical right to it, for one thing.
Biden’s “stop or I’ll say stop again also here’s more weapons” level of ‘resistance’ to Netanyahu sure wasn’t anything to be real proud of, but I’ll take that over enthusiastic encouragement any day. Trump also has unpaused some of the military shipments that Biden had paused, today, on day one. Sending even more weapons than Biden was one of his key priorities for the next few years, apparently.
Edit: Also, Biden sanctioned settlers in the West Bank, which never happened before, which Trump also undid on day one. Also, Biden resumed shipments to Palestinian aid organizations which Trump had stopped. Has Trump stopped those again? I don’t know whether that rose to the level of a day-one priority, but I’m absolutely sure it is coming.
B-b-but, both sides. Genocide Joe.
I will never co-sign a genocide. That’s why I’m voting for Cornel West. Don’t thank me, I don’t have time, I have another comment to write.
Gotta meet your quota
He wasn’t moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, signalling in no uncertain terms his personal position.
I think a lot of people really misunderstood the no-lose scenario Trump engineered wrt Israel.
He got to call him Genocide Joe, while hammering on the debates saying, and I quote that Harris and Joe HATE Israel.
I have absolutely no doubt that both Russia and Israel timed their respective beligerences to try to politically hog-tie Biden knowing Trump could hammer him and once he was in give them both carte blanche.
Like, I have many many issues with how Biden specifically didn’t do the right things in the middle east, but he was attempting to thread a political needle to not hand Trump the ammunition he needed to get re-elected. In retrospect, and I’m sure Joe would agree, that given the reality that Trump was getting the big seat again, he should have just said “fuck it” and done the morally correct things.
And things, now, are going to get so much worse. Trump’s teams position is that it’s acceptable for Israel to just take and settle everything that the Palestinians had. There no longer is an alternative view that involves coexistence from the US government.
Specifically wrt to the middle east, there was a bad option and a worse option. Had Harris won, the political realities could have allowed the expenditure of political capital to do the right (or at least righter) thing. Trump won’t even consider it.
Kamala would’ve nuked it.
You know, hormones and the predisposition to genocide, or whatever.
Great work everyone.
As a bonus, we get to:- increase drug prices (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/initial-rescissions-of-harmful-executive-orders-and-actions/
The original EO is here, and was really difficult to Google:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2022/10/19/2022-22834/lowering-prescription-drug-costs-for-americans). - Declare everyone as biologically female (because at inception, all embryos are female. It’s only after 6-7 weeks that the y chromosome kicks in an makes it biologically male. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK222286/, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/ - note the “at conception” points)).
- Cancel climate change (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/declaring-a-national-energy-emergency/).
Hurray.
Everyone do anazielon salute
Edit: bullet points
- increase drug prices (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/initial-rescissions-of-harmful-executive-orders-and-actions/
Meanwhile, Palestine…
I’m surprised you’re still here, to be honest. Yes, I know what Palestine is like right now. I care a lot about it. I wrote my congresspeople, back when they were approving the aid, trying to tell them not to do it. I didn’t think it would do anything, and it didn’t. That’s why I didn’t want Trump to come, and make things quite a bit worse than even Biden’s already war-criminal level of performance.
Around 85% of the Palestinians in Gaza are still alive right now, as far as I know. How many once Trump is done with them?
50%?
80%? Will he solve the Middle East during his term, and bring an end to the killing? It seems unlikely.
Less than 10%, with a lot of it annexed to Israel?
That last one seems pretty probable to me. I think better than 50/50 odds. I don’t want to bet.
Realpolitiks hasn’t failed the West yet, why should it now?
I had a feeling you wouldn’t really want to engage with that conversation. It’s pretty fucking upsetting.
You’re so sure of yourself. A little humility goes a long way:
But those caveats should not obscure the fact that it was a Democratic president who so thoroughly failed in pushing Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders to accept a ceasefire deal—and that Biden’s incompetence is what has allowed Trump to take a victory lap before even taking office.
This failure had catastrophic consequences. According to the official death toll, Israel’s onslaught has killed more than 46,000 people in Gaza. Public health researchers estimate the actual death toll, which will only be known after buried bodies after pulled from the omnipresent rubble, is far higher.
I’m sure the Palestinians sleeping in tents tonight are wistfully reminding themselves that Biden was better because Trump might be worse.
I actually commented at more length on this exact article a while back, when one of my bots posted it:
https://ponder.cat/post/1337717/1524546
Now that the Israeli military has done several more attacks in Gaza since the ceasefire (including by a sniper who killed a child), and attacked a refugee camp in the West Bank for good measure, I stand even more so behind my assessment that taking the cease-fire seriously without having a reason to think it will continue is just poor pattern recognition.
You could have had Kamala Harris, who you could say might have been worse or might have been better than Biden. Instead, we have Trump, who is catastrophically worse, in every objective sense, by such a wide margin that I don’t want to think about it. Congratulations, I guess.
I don’t want to talk about this any more. I’m not sure why I engaged with it for this long.
Edit: I was thinking to myself, what the fuck? What are all these weird comments, why am I back in this experience of having this type of conversation?
And then I thought, ooooohhhhh, I resubscribed to [email protected] for some one-off reason, and this came up in my feed without me realizing that was where it’s from. There’s a reason I unsubscribed, because it is filled with an unusually high proportion of this stuff. Okay, peace. I’m back to unsubscribing, because I remember how infinitely more pleasant my Lemmy experience is without quite so many of the aggressively wrong people who always adhere to exactly one viewpoint and never stop replying. Cheers, you can carry on without me with what you’d wanted to say.
I’m sorry if I make you feel like you need to leave, it’s just a different way of viewing the world. I understand your sentiment about the threat of Trump, but I don’t excuse the Democrats role in allowing this to happen.
therefore american indians have a birthright to 100% of the united states, right? right?
Doesn’t say so in the Bible though, tough luck.
Not in that new-old-fashioned one, but the Book of Mormon’s got them covered.
No, no, not like that. The whites had manifest destiny!
Mormons seen nervously filing away all that “Native Americans are the lost tribes of Israelites” real quickly.
The white Native Americans who sailed over from Jerusalem. The dark-skinned ones are cursed.
Ha, i forgot about that
Didn’t trump want to get rid of birthright citizenship? We can just retroactively do it to 1500AD, and give the land back. What’s that? Not like that?
Hmmm I’ll have to check what Moses said about that
And so has Russia to the Donbas, and so has China to Taiwan, and so has North Korea to South Korea, ans so has Germany to Silesia and Prussia and so have native Americans to America.
I’d expect that she’s not saying “they lived on it a long time ago”, but rather “God gave it to the Israelites according to the Bible”.
I will have the terror of me precede you, so that I will throw into panic every nation you reach. I will make all your enemies turn from you in flight, and ahead of you I will send hornets to drive the Hivites, Canaanites and Hittites out of your way. But I will not drive them all out before you in one year, lest the land become desolate and the wild animals multiply against you. Little by little I will drive them out before you, until you have grown numerous enough to take possession of the land. I will set your boundaries from the Red Sea to the sea of the Philistines, and from the wilderness to the Euphrates; all who dwell in this land I will hand over to you and you shall drive them out before you. You shall not make a covenant with them or their gods. They must not live in your land. For if you serve their gods, this will become a snare to you.
Like, divine will and such.
This particular god is obviously genocidal. People who worship him are immoral cowards at best.
Well, the guy is the god of the Abrahamic religions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abrahamic_religions
Christianity is the largest Abrahamic religion with about 2.5 billion adherents, called Christians, constituting about 31.1% of the world’s population.[158] Islam is the second largest Abrahamic religion, as well as the fastest-growing Abrahamic religion in recent decades.[158][159] It has about 1.9 billion adherents, called Muslims, constituting about 24.1% of the world’s population. The third largest Abrahamic religion is Judaism with about 14.1 million adherents, called Jews.[158] The Baháʼí Faith has over 8 million adherents, making it the fourth largest Abrahamic religion,[160][161] and the fastest growing religion across the 20th century, usually at least twice the rate of population growth.[162] The Druze Faith has between one million and nearly two millions adherents.[163][164]
That’d be most of humanity.
So, what’s your point?
That there are a lot of them doesn’t make the other poster wrong.
Mongolia has joined the chat
Who gets Alsace-Lorraine?
Germany, because I’m German and my God told me so.
Sectarian violence should have no place in a secular government
what a disgusting thing to say.
Who released the leopards?
In that case, Spain has a divine right to all parts of the US west of the Tordesillas Meridian. The pope said so.
You know what the bible also says, Elise?
"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.
– 1 Timothy 2:12
Please STFU Elise Stefanik as is your biblical right, nay duty, thus sayeth your lord.
Bible is not historically accurate. (≖_≖ )
FREE PALESTINE 🇵🇸🙏
I’m sure she’s not as amenable to all the biblical rights that men have over her.
These fucking cunts either pretend to believe in fairy tales or really do believe in fairy tales, and I’m not sure which is worse.
Right doesn’t it feel like seeing grown ass adults believing in Santa Claus?
Bitch, stop using those antique salt-crusted scrolls for modern law making, and put them back in the museum. Where they belong.
Trump And the Gang…as a non north American, i knew my investment on a popcorn machine wouldn’t go to waste! Need so much popcorn for the next 5 years watching Trump’s shenanigans and the (north) American people doing nothing irl except commenting on social media about his BS and how things could have been better. WAKE UP MOFOS! This guy’s gonna destroy your country! This is no time to be a keyboard warrior!
There is not much we can do about it at this point. The citizens have made their choice. And the ones that made the choice are the ones with the most guns.
Fertiliser is cheap.
