Politics

as usual, Chotiner is possibly the best journalist on the planet when it comes to actually asking follow-up questions, and being willing to go "hold on, wait a minute, WTF?"

this is the guy Biden appointed as ambassador to Israel, making excuses for killing children:

When you would call them in the middle of the night and say, “What on earth happened?,” what was usually the answer?

The general pattern was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate, and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet. We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places.

Sorry, what did you just say?

In many cases, the original number of casualties—

No, I meant the thing about who the children were.

They were often the children of the fighters themselves.

And therefore what follows from that?

What follows is that whether or not it was a legitimate military target flows from the population that’s there.

Hold on, Mr. Secretary. That’s not, in fact, correct, right? Whether it’s a legitimate target has to do with all kinds of things like proportionality. It doesn’t matter if the kids are the kids of—

If you’re in a command-and-control center, that’s different than if it’s a school that’s emptied out and innocent civilians are taking shelter there. If you’re the commander of a Hamas unit and you bring your family to a military site, that’s different. I’m not saying everything fits into that, and I’m not saying it’s not a tragedy.