Right. Is your view that nothing can be done about the extortion? I think there are lots of ways other states could make it risky for ships to pay Iran; the US was at least attempting that before the MoU.
The usual view of the international community is that everyone is bound by customary international law. This would remain the case even if the US or others violated it; the hypocrisy of other states wouldn't release any state from its obligations.
One can object to this notion of customary international law, but if we're going to say that laws of the sea don't matter here, then we must also give up the legal notion that the strait is Iran's (and Oman's) territorial waters. There's no consistent legal framework under which the strait is Iran's territorial waters, but not an international waterway.
There's the practical reality that Iran can extort ships anyway, even with no legal pretense. But then it's essentially just piracy, and anyone with a few boats or mines can do that, unless they're stopped by force.
What do you mean by “Palestinian”? They’re Palestinian by the classic definition of “those who live in the region of Palestine”.
If you mean citizens of the State of Palestine, that’s a political matter, and zero Jews have that citizenship.
If you mean something along the lines of “unbroken lineage of ancestors who never left Palestine", that would also exclude many people who we all consider Palestinian, such as Arafat himself who was born in Cairo.
A lot of the stricter codes have very real safety benefits though - modern electrical is much safer, fire sprinklers add significant cost but really do help contain fires, etc.
(Not that it's all good, e.g. I don't like Washington's WAC 51-11R which just seems way overcomplicated.)
US/Israel may have opened the current front, but the Iranian regime has been waging proxy warfare since the early 80s. They also attempted to assassinate our president. It's misleading to paint US/Israel as the aggressors for occasionally responding to years of indirect or unsuccessful attacks.
To look at it another way: if US/Israel hadn't responded directly, but instead paid Erdogan a large bribe to strike a list of coordinates in Iran, while also supplying the missiles and the training, would that get around your concern? Probably not.
Most ordinary Iranians, sure; certainly not the Islamic regime. It was their decision to train, fund and supply weapons to terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ and the Houthis since the early 80s.
> this with an American flag and its hull number in open display
Soldiers have uniforms with distinguishing colors/marks in open display, yet millions of soldiers have died by friendly fire. Lots of friendly planes have been shot down too despite IFF. No system for identifying friendly (or neutral) assets is foolproof.
> the U.S. makes excuses for Israel's attack on its own USS Liberty in 1967.
It's strange how this 59-year-old incident keeps getting brought up. Friendly fire happens all the time, and Israel apologized and paid reparations ages ago.
You said "the evidence is there" about Israeli rape dogs, not some other allegation. An incident that has nothing to with rape isn't evidence, nor is an incident that happened in an entirely different country.
The first link is about a dog attack, but absolutely nothing about dogs being "trained to rape". The second link is nothing specific, just an entire subreddit devoted to anti-Israel propaganda.
> Even the NYT recently published an article about how the israelies use dogs to rape Palestinians.
They published allegations from a questionable source with no evidence. I think most people would agree that "Israel trains dogs to rape on command" is rather absurd and implausible on its face.
This is a very weird way to frame a highly targeted attack against Hezbollah, which achieved a far better civilian casualty ratio than what's possible with conventional warfare.
> Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon [...] which Israeli historian Ilan Pappé said was unprovoked
"Unprovoked" is wildly inaccurate, and not even the most anti-Israel historians like Pappé claim that. The provocation was very clear: the PLO paramilitary bombarding Israeli towns from southern Lebanon.
If Mexican cartels started bombarding San Diego, would anyone say that a US response was "unprovoked"?
Why is it that when someone points out anti-Israel disinformation, the topic suddenly changes to some other anti-Israel talking point? If Israel and its supporters are super evil, shouldn’t its critics be able to pick a point (such as the headline claim here) and defend it as truthful, rather than repeatedly shifting as we see here?
If Israel "smears itself" by being super evil, then why do we constantly see its critics resorting to disinformation? Shouldn't there be plenty to criticize while sticking to the facts?
TRNN is another outlet with an explicit anti-Zionist stance, and they seem to be just summarizing this Jewish Insider article [1] while adding some anti-Israel spin.
Considering the extra details in the Jewish Insider article, what he said was basically "if someone rejects the Jewish peoples' right to self-determination and rejects Israel's existence, then we have a fundamental difference in values, and they might decide that working here isn't a good fit".
That's pretty far from the MEE's dishonest summary of "support Israel or resign", or TRNN's dishonest summary of "demands allegiance to Israel". One can criticize a government without rejecting the country's very existence. Israelis themselves do it all the time.