Kotaku posts a super one-sided 'call to action' for Palestine. IGN and Game Informer delete their versions of the same thing.

Gaming sites don't have to stick to games but they could do better when it comes to geopolitics.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

~ Robert Frost, “Fire And Ice”

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Over at Kotaku, Ian Walker takes a break from boring video game journalism to list the myriad misdeeds of the fascistic state of Israel which is currently bombing Palestinians despite no provocation whatsoever from Hamas militants. A taste:

The last week has seen an escalation in violence by Israel against the people of Gaza, an area that should constitute the state of Palestine but is instead an open-air prison subject to apartheid conditions imposed by the fascist Israeli government. What started as a protest last week against the forced evictions of Palestinian residents in East Jerusalem by Jewish settlers has since escalated into a full-on Israeli bombing campaign against Gaza. At least 145 people, including 41 children, have been murdered by Israeli missiles, funded in part by allies like the United States.

The civilian deaths are horrible and tragic, of course, and the conditions in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere for Arabs under Israeli rule are far from okay. As I noted recently, this shit is all awful and Israel is far from blameless. While I don’t think comparisons to South African apartheid are accurate across Israel, there’s no denying the terrible conditions in Arab-dominated regions where Arabs are indeed treated like second-class citizens and where hardline Zionist setters backed by the Israeli government continue to encroach.

But the Kotaku piece reminds me of Anita Sarkeesian’s ridiculous tweet about Israel not being a true country, and the whole thing starts to smack of anti-Semitism rather than honest criticism when it’s all so blatantly one-sided.

Look, I’m not defending Israel here. This looks like an overreaction, especially since the Israeli Defense Force and the “Iron Dome” appears able to stop the hundreds of rockets Hamas is firing into Israel from the Gaza Strip right now.

But that’s important also, isn’t it? Hamas is firing hundreds of rockets at Israel knowing full well that this type of provocation will be met with intense military backlash by the Israelis. It’s almost like Hamas decided that the loss of civilian life and the resulting bad press for Israel was worth the cost of firing said rockets to begin with. It’s almost as if the terrorists decided that they could sacrifice some women and children in order to stir up anti-Israeli sentiment in the global community.

So yeah, I’m not happy with how blindly the US has backed Israel’s every move even when those moves are clearly overreactions and result in the death of hundreds of civilians, but I’m not going to write an entire “call to action” blog post on a video game website that never once mentions Hamas firing rockets at all. How can you write an entire piece on this conflict without mentioning that?

The opposite would be equally dishonest. If somebody wrote a blog post about how Israel was only defending themselves and never mentioned the civilian death toll, or just wrote about the rocket barrage without talking about the retaliation. That would be pretty damn misleading and sketchy, right? Walker’s piece that leaves all the details about why Israel is bombing Palestinians is also pretty damn misleading and sketchy.

This is a complex, deeply entrenched geopolitical conflict that’s been going on for decades. I wrote a very short primer on said conflict here. You can do a lot more reading about how screwed up both Hamas and the hardline Zionists are as well. Israel has done some great things and some terrible things. I wish there was some clear path toward peace between the Israeli people and their Arab neighbors, and some way to ease the suffering of the Palestinian people while also ensuring the safety of the Israeli people.

But there are no easy answers here. Pretending that there are is disingenuous. So is acting like Israel is solely responsible for all the atrocious bullshit going on over there. Takes two to tango, my droogies. The real question is how this dance will end.

Elsewhere, both IGN and Game Informer posted and then deleted statements of support for Palestine, which is kind of chicken shit. A better approach? Make statements of support for the innocents in all of this but do a better job explaining the conflict and how neither side is blameless. Information and compassion can go hand-in-hand, miraculously.