Sheldon Adelson's widow. yeah, this all makes way too much sense. Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient in 2018, from #45. The wikipedia pic of her shows #45 solemnly placing the medal around her neck.
Sheldon Gary Adelson (August 4, 1933 – January 11, 2021) was an American businessman,[2] investor, political donor, and philanthropist.[3][4][5] He was the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corporation, which owns the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, and the parent company of Venetian Macao Limited, which operated The Venetian Las Vegas and the Sands Expo and Convention Center before selling the properties in early 2022.[6] He owned the Israeli daily newspaper Israel Hayom, the Israeli weekly newspaper Makor Rishon, and the American daily newspaper the Las Vegas Review-Journal.[7][8]
Adelson created the Adelson Foundation in 2007, a private charity focusing on healthcare and support of Israel and the Jewish people. He was a major contributor to Republican Party candidates[9][10] and was often dubbed a "kingmaker" due to the size and frequency of his donations.[11][12] He and his wife Miriam Adelson were Donald Trump's largest donors, providing the largest donation to Trump's 2016 campaign, his presidential inauguration, his defense fund against the Mueller investigation into Russian interference, and the 2020 campaign.[13][14][15][16][17][18] He was also a major backer of Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.[19]
In 2020, Forbes listed his net worth as US$29.8 billion.[20]
If anybody reading this is voting against Biden because of Palestine (effectively a vote for trump under fptp) these are trumps #1 fans and bill payers
The eradication of millions of civilians is definitely anti-peace.
A similar situation would be the US joining WW2 on the Axis side. I mean once Britain, France, Russia, China, and the Jews were finished off, there'd be peace for a while right?
Ponder what unconditional support for Israel would mean for Palestinians in our current landscape.
You joke about the WW2 thing, but yes, that would have resulted in peace as well. Peace is peace, regardless of who wins.
There was peace after Genghis khan conquered most of Asia too.
I don't ponder what unconditional support for Israel would mean for Palestinians in our current landscape, it would mean them being displaced to neighboring countries. Almost exactly the same as is happening in a half dozen other areas of the globe right now. You could displace every single Palestinian and it would still cause fewer refugees than the current number of refugees from Syria's civil war, which has killed over a half million people.
I haven't heard of a single university protest over Syria though.
Lots to unpack, let's hit the big ones. Do any means justify peace? Is mass murder of entire countries okay because it would result in less overall friction afterward? How long does peace need to last after for it to make it worth it?
Displacement. Is it fair to the people who have lived in a country for generations to leave because of other's actions? Moreso, many of them currently /want/ to leave (really really bad) but can't, what should they do? And also, how is that fair to neighboring countries, they're just required to take in refugees because Israel wants more land? (What if there weren't neighboring countries?)
Finally, (please educate me), are universities very invested in Syrian companies/industries? That's what the current protests are about, divestment from Israel. Are you required to care about all atrocities in order to care for one? What line marks which bad things in the world protesters should inclusively be knowledgeable about?
I'd argue that if Israel is attempting mass murder, they're absolute shit at it. Sure they've killed a couple of tens of thousand Palestinians, but there's something like 5 million of them, they're having babies faster than Israel is killing people.
As for Displacement, most Palestinians haven't lived there for generations, a lot of the current population comes from immigrants/internal migration from the surrounding region during the British Occupation, and also from the wars (Egypt owned Gaza for 20 years after the british left) The population of Palestine has grown so fast in the last 30 years that the median age is 19.6 (https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/state-of-palestine-population/#:~:text=The population density in the,2%2C311 people per mi2).&text=The%20median%20age%20in%20the%20State%20of%20Palestine%20is%2019.6%20years.)
How is it fair to neighboring countries? You mean the ones that invaded Israel because they weren't happy with the UN drawn borders after the wars? The ones that occupied those territories and brought people in? Most of the people are THEIR people to begin with.
If there weren't neighboring countries, Palestinians wouldn't exist. They would have been removed entirely 70 years ago without the invasion by those arab countries.
Most universities aren't heavily invested in Israeli anything... Israel only accounts for something like 40 Billion in total foreign direct investment, while Canada, the US, Mexico are each measured in Trillions of dollars. Unless a specific university went out of their way to pick up an Israeli-attached portfolio, it likely accounts for less than 1% of their total investments.
Here's a quote from the encampment people at my local university with their divestment demands: the university leases space to a marine company that has in the past helped produce equipment for Israel, the university has $4.3 million invested in Blackrock (a global asset management company) that in turn invests part of its funds in companies like Lockheed and Boeing which have relations with Israel, and the university has 250k invested in Scotiabank, which is in turn an investor in a single Israeli weapons company. The total endowment for this university is over 500 million dollars, so less than 1% is invested in companies that are themselves only partially invested in Israeli-attached companies.
If a fraction of 1% is enough to cause an encampment, then yes, there's likely some Syria-attached companies in the mix there too and nobody gives a shit about that (and it's been actively killing more people per year than Israel for more than a decade)
How long will that rate of death last when they're also causing mass famine while controlling the borders? You know starvation can cause number of deaths across a population to skyrocket, right?
It would be the same as ending the war Ukraine by letting Russia keep what they stole. Zero incentive not to keep doing it and it validates the side of the aggressor by saying “wow you both need to stop fighting”.
Right-wingers love to cite self-defense as reasons why they should own guns and be able to shoot people who simply knock on their front door but the second a brown person does it after years of being systematically oppressed/genocided suddenly they’re just as guilty as the oppressor, if not more so.
In short, wanting peace in that way is a pretty little lie meant to legitimize terror campaigns and invalidate the damage done to the victims. It’s full of horseshit.
In the same way that North Korea has “Democratic” in the name, sure. It’s all so surface level as to be essentially meaningless. While I agree that fairness does involve some arguing of that kind of a technicality it really only serves to validate the idea that Israel is justified in any way.
Israel wants to eradicate an entire culture and their people. They want to steal their land and are doing so with the help of major world powers. They bomb hospitals, shoot civilians, and terrorize Palestinians on the basis that they’re somehow owed that land. Hamas retaliated and now Israel is complaining by obliterating the entire country. The “peace” this lady wants is the peace for Israel to continue to do these things without retaliation. She doesn’t want peace, she wants submission.
The mega rich are just terrified of consequences and try, every day, to get their poor behaviour and lack of humanity written into laws and precedent so that they don’t have to ever to take blame for any of the rotten shit they pull.
Sure, if you consider the complete destruction of an entire ethnic group of people to be "peace". Can't fight if they're all dead. But if you truly do think that way, you are the problem and I recommend a long walk off a short pier.
The current war is in multiple places, it's hardly restricted to only Gaza. Even other countries (or at least nominally the "terrorist groups" in those countries) are firing missiles across the border into Israel. Lebanon, Syria, even Iran sent that massive drone attack.