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.
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.
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.