When Ed Sheeran played the victim card after the Macklemore fallout, he did what all Israel appeasers do: he pretended genocide is too complicated to understand.
“We’ll see what is remembered 50 years from now” is a remarkable thing to say while defending collective punishment, considering we already have a thorough and tragic historical record.
The last century gave us genocide, mass civilian killing, collective punishment, and entire populations being blamed for the actions of governments and armed groups.
The humanitarian laws written in response explicitly rejected the exact moral logic you are invoking here.
You are not offering some hardheaded lesson from history. You are resurrecting an argument the last century already taught us to reject.
Instead of predicting how history will remember this, maybe you should read some.
“We’ll see what is remembered 50 years from now” is plainly an appeal to future historical judgment. You used it to wave away criticism in the present.
You do not get to hide behind the fact that you left the prediction deliberately vague. The implication was the entire point of the sentence.
If you meant nothing by it, then it was meaningless. If you meant what any ordinary reader would understand it to mean, then yes, you were invoking how history would judge this.
No. The fact that people still commit atrocities does not mean those atrocities were never rejected.
People still murder. People still torture. People still commit genocide. That does not make murder, torture, or genocide accepted principles.
Collective punishment was explicitly rejected in international humanitarian law after the horrors of the last century.
And “but the Muslim world” is not a defense of your argument. It is just pointing at someone else.
You defended collective punishment. You minimized the suffering of innocent civilians. You justified that suffering as the consequence of political decisions made by a population decades ago.
Those were your words. They are still sitting there for everyone to read.
You cannot erase what you argued by pretending you argued something else.
Yes, these principles are violated constantly. But I think that is precisely why it matters that we continue to insist upon them.
You started by arguing that collective punishment is simply how international politics sometimes works. You pointed to Germany, to Gaza, and now to the prevalence of atrocities around the world.
But there is a danger in that reasoning. When “people do this all the time” becomes our answer to an atrocity, we begin normalizing the atrocity instead of opposing it.
Article 33 does not say collective punishment is prohibited only when the world is behaving itself. It prohibits it precisely because history demonstrated what happens when we accept collective guilt and the punishment of civilians as ordinary features of war.
Laws are only as meaningful as our willingness to uphold them.
It requires more than writing them down.
It requires the willingness to condemn violations where they occur, when they occur; friend or foe.
We must confront the scale of the destruction Israel has inflicted across Gaza. More than 170,000 structures, roughly 69 percent of Gaza’s prewar buildings, had already been damaged or destroyed by January 2025.
We should confront the conclusion reached by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry after examining the broader pattern of killing, deprivation, destruction, displacement, and official conduct: that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” - Frederick Douglass
Do not look at the frequency with which these principles are violated and conclude that resistance to them is futile. Draw the opposite conclusion.
Their violation is the reason we have to keep insisting upon them.
Demand better. Do not concede what is right simply because others have.
“We’ll see what is remembered 50 years from now” is a remarkable thing to say while defending collective punishment, considering we already have a thorough and tragic historical record.
The last century gave us genocide, mass civilian killing, collective punishment, and entire populations being blamed for the actions of governments and armed groups.
The humanitarian laws written in response explicitly rejected the exact moral logic you are invoking here.
You are not offering some hardheaded lesson from history. You are resurrecting an argument the last century already taught us to reject.
Instead of predicting how history will remember this, maybe you should read some.
I made no such prediction.
That is semantics after the fact.
“We’ll see what is remembered 50 years from now” is plainly an appeal to future historical judgment. You used it to wave away criticism in the present.
You do not get to hide behind the fact that you left the prediction deliberately vague. The implication was the entire point of the sentence.
If you meant nothing by it, then it was meaningless. If you meant what any ordinary reader would understand it to mean, then yes, you were invoking how history would judge this.
Current events worldwide demonstrate that the lesson has neither been learned, nor rejected- most particularly in the Muslim world…
No. The fact that people still commit atrocities does not mean those atrocities were never rejected.
People still murder. People still torture. People still commit genocide. That does not make murder, torture, or genocide accepted principles.
Collective punishment was explicitly rejected in international humanitarian law after the horrors of the last century.
And “but the Muslim world” is not a defense of your argument. It is just pointing at someone else.
You defended collective punishment. You minimized the suffering of innocent civilians. You justified that suffering as the consequence of political decisions made by a population decades ago.
Those were your words. They are still sitting there for everyone to read.
You cannot erase what you argued by pretending you argued something else.
Well then let’s just say these principles are honored more in the breach, than in the observance in today’s world.
Now that is a defensible argument.
Yes, these principles are violated constantly. But I think that is precisely why it matters that we continue to insist upon them.
You started by arguing that collective punishment is simply how international politics sometimes works. You pointed to Germany, to Gaza, and now to the prevalence of atrocities around the world.
But there is a danger in that reasoning. When “people do this all the time” becomes our answer to an atrocity, we begin normalizing the atrocity instead of opposing it.
Article 33 does not say collective punishment is prohibited only when the world is behaving itself. It prohibits it precisely because history demonstrated what happens when we accept collective guilt and the punishment of civilians as ordinary features of war.
Laws are only as meaningful as our willingness to uphold them.
It requires more than writing them down.
It requires the willingness to condemn violations where they occur, when they occur; friend or foe.
We must confront the scale of the destruction Israel has inflicted across Gaza. More than 170,000 structures, roughly 69 percent of Gaza’s prewar buildings, had already been damaged or destroyed by January 2025.
We should confront the conclusion reached by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry after examining the broader pattern of killing, deprivation, destruction, displacement, and official conduct: that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
Do not look at the frequency with which these principles are violated and conclude that resistance to them is futile. Draw the opposite conclusion.
Their violation is the reason we have to keep insisting upon them.
Demand better. Do not concede what is right simply because others have.