The building appears to be among many devastated in Trump’s ‘major combat operations’ as long expected attacks arrive
Iran’s parents had just dropped their children off for class on Saturday morning when they found themselves racing back to school gates, as bombs began to fall across the country in a joint US-Israel attack.
At one elementary school, according to Iran’s state-controlled media, they arrived to find devastation. At least 80 children had been killed in the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, the IRNA news agency reported, with dozens more unaccounted for.
In one video circulating on social media, purportedly showing the immediate aftermath of the strike, smoke rises from the burnt-out walls, and debris lies spread across the road. Hundreds of onlookers gathered at the site, some in obvious distress. Screams can be heard in the background. The report of the bombing, its death toll and the video’s source could not immediately be independently verified by the Guardian. Persian factchecking service Factnameh was able to cross-reference the video with other photographs of the school site, and concluded that the video was authentic. Reuters said it had also verified the footage as being from the school.
How can you live with such a callous disregard for childs lives? What has become of your country?
Become?
We’re talking about the only UN member that hasn’t ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, because they don’t want to have to stop executing children.
Hurting children has always been a core value of the USA, up there with shooting each other, rampant egoism, and their twisted version of christian fundamentalism.
I wonder how you will feel after you realize you and your allies have been a big part of the American empire, too?
See history of the US dollar and international trade.
Your country likely contributes a significant amount to the US economy, and we go to war together, too.
how do you live with that?
Ok, so in essence you are saying the person who sold shoes to a murderer is equally guilty of the crime committed?
No, I’m in essence saying that the person who murders with the murderer is equally guilty of murder.
You should look up who arms Australia, by the way. Can you guess who?
yeah i know. Australian politicians have fallen for the evil empire’s propaganda
And what do we do with those arms?
Help us murder people in Iraq and Afghanistan and you’re beefing up your navy to go to war with your biggest trading partner at America’s behest.
We did help you kill people in Afghanistan and Iraq, but at least in Afghanistan we were killing Taliban, who aren’t exactly nice people to have around. And we made the place better for the people while we were there, even though it all went to shit when we left. I have talked to Australians who fought there, read stories from the locals, heard the words of a few of the people who left Afghanistan to escape the Taliban.
In other words, we are imperial vassals who try to do the right thing in the situation directly in front of us, while we indirectly serve the overall goals of Western hegemony. I cannot argue that we’re on the right side of history.
Most of our politicians clearly want to distance ourselves from the mask-off fascist US government, because it’s obvious even to their neoliberal eyes that this is too far, but we are tied by a million arrangements. The military ties you mention, the economic ties which are thanfully less important, the language, the cultural similarities, and the shared history of alliance. Most unfortunately, the Five Eyes alliance.
If we start leaving all that, we will be stomped on by the US, and our people still believe we need a good friend with a big army to protect us from Chinese aggression. Which is bullshit, as you and I both know, but they do believe that.
So it’s easier to just uncomfortably remain closely allied with an unreliable partner, and politely refrain from actually helping the US commit atrocities, and hope they sort it out electorally.
We live with it by having gun laws which have prevented the rash of mass shootings you’ve had, and maintaining foreign aid programs to the countries around us, and many further away.
Yes, we trade with you, and China, and Israel, and everyone we can, because trade historically opens up opportunities for diplomacy and allows leverage for achieving human rights goals. We are part of the greater US empire, yes indeed, we’ve been too close to the US in the past. But when we found that our special forces had killed civilians in Afghanistan, for example, it resulted in national scandal and ongoing reform, inquiry, etc. In the US that’s just the norm.
We do not participate in US military actions that may result in civilian deaths. We do not refuel your planes when they do that, for example.
We are sitting over here, trying to be friends, while being ever more horrified with your country and trying to remember the good times.
What are your gun laws that have prevented mass shootings? Genuine question.
Well, one aspect of the recent mass shooting in Sydney that was remarkable compared to ones in the US or Europe was that the shooters used long guns that could not fire very fast. Australian laws introduced after the Port Arthur massacre focused on preventing rate of fire and ammo capacity, because it literally slows down the rate at which a shooter can kill people, especially in a crowd. We also do not allow handguns, even though we allow quite powerful long arms.
If the Bondi shooters had simple trigger-pull semi-automatic ARs, they would likely have killed a lot more people.
We also have much stricter registration laws, without the loopholes you get in the States, so police generally know who has guns, where they are stored, etc, to a much greater extent, and can check up on gun owners if they want, any time. There are far fewer crazy people with guns, because you can get your license and guns taken away for being crazy, or committing violent crimes, etc.
Now, the advantage we have over the EU and the USA is a harder border to cross, fewer people crossing it, only eight state/territories to worry about, and uniform federal legislation about what guns are allowed. It makes it easier to restrict the supply of easily obtainable illegal weapons.
Sure, criminal gangs can get them, but mass shootings are bad for business, so the loners and freaks who typically do mass shootings can’t easily get them.
I’m not an American
The pronoun ‘you’ doesn’t mean you specifically; how can you tell it wasn’t about ‘you’ specifically?
Because they didn’t change the subject to you specifically, of course. The ‘you’ is a pronoun replacing “The United States Military”, “USAF” “US and Israeli combined forces”, etc.; the subject is who the ‘you’ is referring to, not actually you the person.
The pronoun is used in English to avoid having to specifically refer to the subject by name over and over.
Now, go forth, and SIN NO MORE
I may not be American, but I am a native speaker of English, and what you said there is a terrible, or at least tenuous, interpretation. If what you said was the intended meaning, the comment would have begun with ‘Americans, how can you live with …’