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Outrage after Keir Starmer says Israelis were 'massacred' but Palestinians 'lost their lives'
(www.middleeasteye.net)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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Middle East Eye is being quite deceptive here. It's interesting they don't give Starmer's full quote, only snippets that they framed in a certain way.
Here's what was actually said by Starmer:
When he said "lives lost" he was talking about people from Israel and Palestine, not just Palestine, you can see that in the quote.
When he said "They" we was talking about the citizens of both Israel and Palestine. You can see that in the quote.
He said that Hamas committed a massacre on the 7th of October - which is literally and unambiguously correct. They attacked indiscriminately at a music festival. You can see that in the quote.
I'm so tired of people equating Hamas and Palestine. They are not the same thing no matter what Middle East Eye says. It's very possible to stand with the people of Palestine, as I do, while also hating a terrorist institution that is based there. Frankly I think the view that Hamas and Palestinian are the same thing is racist.
We don't automatically class Irish as being IRA, so why are some insistent that we do that with Hamas and Palestinians? It's perfectly reasonable to dislike Hamas, given that they are literally a terrorist group.
This entire article completely misrepresents what was actually said. No wonder they avoided showing his actual quote.
If your view is that Starmer should have called out Israel on war crimes then thats one thing, and completely fair IMO, but this? Publishing straight-up lies? That's not journalism, that's pedalling misinformation. I'd never expectMiddle East Eye to not have some bias, but falsifying quotes is disgusting.
Ok, but that doesn't address the key point. He referred to the death of Israelis as a "massacre", while referring to the far, far greater number of deaths caused by a far, far more organised and well-equipped army (in addition to the small number of Israeli deaths post–7th October) as merely "lives lost". Why is the most well-organised genocide of the 21st century not worthy of the "massacre" moniker? Or even better, why not call it what it is: targeted genocide.
Downplaying it by lumping it in with Israeli deaths (which works entirely against the argument you're trying to make, btw) and saying it's just "lives lost" is insulting to the tens of thousands of Gazans slaughtered by the Israeli genociders.
Also: using terrorist tactics doesn't make you the bad guys. Not when you're doing it to overthrow oppressors. We don't call the black South Africans during apartheid terrorists today, though there many many attacks that could deserve that moniker. The original Irish republicans from 1919 don't get called terrorists. Nor do American revolutionaries—and the oppression they were fighting against was orders of magnitude less than what Palestinians face today. I might wish Hamas used more carefully-targeted attacks, but no one who actually thinks it through and who has basic morals can in any way end up on the side of them being the bad guys here.
No no no. Please read his quote.
He referred to the October the 7th killings as a massacre - and it objectively was. He didn't refer to anything else as a massacre. He referred to all deaths in the war as "lives lost" - be they Israeli or Palestinian.
I'm sorry, to me, if you go to a music festival with the intention of killing as many civilians as possible, you are a bad person.
Clearly you feel that in some situations that's fine, but I don't, and I will never deviate from that opinion. Purposely killing unarmed civilians is wrong no matter who does it, no matter how just they feel their cause is.
Yes, Israel is absolutely committing genocide, but that doesn't mean shooting people at a concert is ok, and I'm very concerned people think civilians are fair targets so long as they're Israelis.