https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/fact-check-tiktok-03242023144611.html
Technically according to this article tiktok won't share data with the PRC - but their parent company bytedance is obligated to share data with the PRC when requested. Bytedance has authority to require tiktok to share data. Therefore through this channel tiktok is obligated to share data with the PRC when requested.
This story was updated on January 21, 2024 at 2:33pm.
In late November, the NPR reporter Leila Fadel interviewed the international-law scholar David Crane about a disquieting subject: potential genocide in Gaza. Crane was uniquely qualified to opine on this fraught topic, having served as the founding chief prosecutor for the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he indicted the president of Liberia for war crimes. On air, he explained why he did not think Israel’s actions met the criteria.
“If I was charged with investigating and prosecuting genocide,” Crane said, “I would have to have in large measure a smoking gun,” which he characterized as “a rebel group, a person, a head of state” explicitly directing those under their control to destroy a people in “whole or in part.” Precisely because genocide is the highest crime, proving it demands the highest standard of evidence. What is required, in relation to the current conflict, is not simply documentation of destruction or war crimes, and not just incendiary statements from individual soldiers or politicians with no role directing military operations, but rather a declaration of intent to eliminate Gazans—not just Hamas—by the top Israeli decision makers.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Crane said, had not made such a statement, which meant that legal intent could not be established. By contrast, he added, “Hamas has clearly stated that they intend to destroy, in whole or in part, the Israeli people and the Israeli state. That is a declaration of a genocidal intent.” Fadel was not convinced, and deftly countered with several damning quotes from the Israeli defense minister, Yoav Gallant: “We are fighting human animals.” “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” The segment ended inconclusively.
Last week, a similar exchange unfolded on BBC radio, when an anchor pressed British Defense Secretary Grant Shapps about Israel’s conduct in Gaza. “The defense minister said, ‘We will eliminate everything,’ in relation to Gaza,” the host observed. Wasn’t this a clear call to violate international humanitarian law? Under repeated questioning, Shapps allowed that Gallant might have overstepped in the emotional aftermath of Hamas’s slaughter of more than 1,000 Israelis, but insisted that the quotation did not reflect the man he’d been regularly talking with about “trying to find ways to be precise and proportionate.” Recommended Reading
As it turns out, there’s a reason the quote did not sound like Gallant: The Israeli defense minister never really said it.
On October 10, as the charred remains of murdered Israelis were still being identified in their homes, Gallant spoke to a group of soldiers who had repelled the Hamas assault, in a statement that was captured on video. Translated from the original Hebrew, here is the relevant portion of what he said: “Gaza will not return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate it all.” This isn’t a matter of interpretation or translation. Gallant’s vow to “eliminate it all” was directed explicitly at Hamas, not Gaza. One doesn’t even need to speak Hebrew, as I do, to confirm this: The word Hamas is clearly audible in the video. The remainder of Gallant’s remarks also dealt with rooting out Hamas: “We understand that Hamas wanted to change the situation; it will change 180 degrees from what they thought. They will regret this moment.” It was not Gallant who conflated Hamas and Gaza, but rather those who mischaracterized his words. The smoking gun was filled with blanks.
And yet, the misleadingly truncated version of Gallant’s quote has not just been circulated on NPR and the BBC. The New York Times has made the same elision twice, and it appeared in The Guardian, in a piece by Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch. It was also quoted in The Washington Post, where a writer ironically claimed that Gallant had said “the quiet part out loud,” while quietly omitting whom Gallant was actually talking about. Most consequentially, this mistaken rendering of Gallant’s words was publicly invoked last week by South Africa’s legal team in the International Court of Justice as evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent; it served as one of their only citations sourced to someone in Israel’s war cabinet. The line was then reiterated on the floor of Congress by Representative Rashida Tlaib.
Politicians and lawyers are not always known for their probity, but journalists have fact-checkers. How did an error this substantial get missed so many times in so many places? One New York Times article that cited Gallant’s mangled misquote sourced the words to an op-ed in another outlet, which sourced them to an X post that featured an embedded TikTok video. But the cascade of media failures appears to have begun with a 42-second video excerpt of Gallant’s talk that was uploaded by Bloomberg with incomplete English subtitles. The clip, since viewed more than half a million times, simply skips over “There will be no Hamas” in its translation. (Bloomberg did not return a request for comment at press time. Following publication, it removed the original video and issued a corrected version that includes the excised sentence about Hamas. The New York Times subsequently corrected its two pieces that contained the misquote.)
Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.
Take the claim, also cited by NPR’s Fadel among others, that Gallant referred to Gazans as “human animals.” The defense minister has used this harsh language several times, and it’s reasonable to wonder whom he’s referring to. But as can be seen from the same Bloomberg video, Gallant uses this phrase to talk about Hamas, telling soldiers who fought off Hamas on the devastated Gaza border: “You have seen what we are fighting against. We are fighting against human animals. This is the ISIS of Gaza.” (Hamas’s atrocities on October 7 have been likened to acts of the Islamic State by both Israeli and American officials, including President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.) One can certainly take issue with Gallant’s language—for one thing, a nonhuman animal never executed a grandmother in her home and then uploaded the snuff film to her Facebook page—but not with the fact that the defense minister’s words referred specifically to Hamas.
So much for Gallant. But what about Netanyahu, a man in thrall to the hard right and not exactly known for rhetorical restraint? On January 5, the New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg argued that President Biden was being naive to Netanyahu’s ambitions to displace Gaza’s population. “As Israeli news outlets have reported,” she wrote, “Netanyahu said this week that the government is considering a ‘scenario of surrender and deportation’ of residents of the Gaza Strip.” Goldberg is an excellent journalist well versed in this topic, and she based her claim on a usually reliable source: the English live blog of Haaretz, Israel’s leading progressive paper, which summarized a news item from Israeli TV. But once again, something crucial was lost in translation.
The original Hebrew media report did not say that Netanyahu was considering the surrender and deportation of Gaza’s residents. It said that, in a meeting with families of the Israeli hostages, Netanyahu expressed openness to the surrender and deportation of Hamas’s senior leadership in exchange for the remaining captives—a theoretical proposal for ending the war that has been raised by the United States but rejected by Hamas. The title of the TV segment was “Recordings of the Prime Minister in a meeting with the families of the abductees and a statement regarding the possible exile of senior Hamas officials.” That was also the headline in the Israeli media. Haaretz quietly corrected its blog days later, though the uncorrected Times column still links to it as evidence, and viral screenshots of the erroneous English translation continue to circulate on social media.
The mistake matters: Far from being decided on the question of Gazan displacement, Netanyahu turned out to be malleable, and has since come out publicly against it under heavy pressure from the Biden administration. Diplomacy like that depends on an accurate understanding of the state of play.
Finally, there is an error of biblical proportions. On October 28, Netanyahu gave a short Hebrew address to the public about the unfolding war against Hamas, in which he cited a verse from the Torah. “‘Remember what Amalek did to you,’” he said. “We remember and we fight.” Netanyahu is a secular Jew, but he is also a student of the Bible, often alluding to it in his public statements. Here is the context of that biblical quote, Deuteronomy 25:17–18, which refers to an enemy clan that pursued and murdered the Israelites: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey
Given that Hamas does not operate in the West Bank I'm dubious that what you are describing in a West Bank hypothetical would occur. Illegal settlements in the West Bank are awful and should be stopped by Israel - but they are not directly tied to the current conflict with Hamas.
Yes this is a useful Wikipedia article. Especially the point just a little past the first line which specifically rebuts the point you are making:
"The territorial sea is sovereign territory, although foreign ships (military and civilian) are allowed innocent passage through it, or transit passage for straits"
And just to jump ahead to preempt your next argument, innocent passage is defined in the UN convention on the law of the sea here:
https://www.un.org/depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/part2.htm
Furthermore the Houthis are not making claims that the vessels attacked are violating innocent passage. Only you are for some reason.
I would ask you to step back and honestly consider if your words would be persuasive to an uninvolved observer
Certainly the best option who's running though
Ty for clarifying, West Bank settlements are absolutely abhorrent, but I've seen too many people use the phrase claimed territory to refer to all of Israel. I appreciate the response and clarification
That's true to an extent. But there is something to be said about having a more expansive and easy to navigate system for supporting windows and osx systems. If you have a computer issue odds are you can go into any staples or other chain office supply store and get tech support for a Windows computer.
I do believe learning tech literacy and putting some effort into being more familiar with the often expensive and critical piece of tech that one uses likely every day - but it doesn't do Linux any favors to downplay the specific and limited advantages commercial operating systems have.
Oh that's all? Thank goodness forcible displacement using coercive threats on a civilian population isnt a war crime. I don't understand why you are splitting hairs on the goals of this openly genocidal group. Supporting Palestinians doesn't mean you have to go to bat for Hamas.
I wouldn't recommend citing an Iranian Revolutionary Guard operated propaganda website as a credible source. Perhaps you should examine more critically where you are getting your news from.
I mean given that new nuclear plants haven't been made in quite some time it's too be expected that the average cost rises as costs for maintaining older plants also rises as they reach the end of their projected life cycle. In a few years when solar arrays have risen maintenance costs it won't change the fact that it's an essential power source, so the same logic should be applied to all clean energy.
With approaches to reducing emissions we should take a "yes and" approach. Yes nuclear is a way to reduce emissions and we need to invest in solar wind and hydro. This is true regardless of what we put at the front of that sentence!
That the deal Hamas agreed to is a new version of the deal Israel hadnt yet seen.