Personally, I believe we should call Israeli “hostages” for what they are: POWs

Explanation for the title of this meme:

Unlike most of my explanations, I’m going to keep this one brief.

Despite what Zionists want you to believe, Hamas isn’t the only one keeping “hostages,” and they certainly don’t treat them the worst either[1]. A more well-known case of this (though definitely not the only one), there is the Sde Teiman “detention” (concentration) camp in which Palestinians are arbitrarily detained and forced to endure torture[2][3] and sexual assault[4].

What does this have to do with calling “hostages” POWs? Well, in exchange for these arbitrarily detained Palestinians, Hamas has had to resort to detaining other people and using them as bargaining chips. This isn’t exactly ethical behavior by any means, but given the circumstances, it’s definitely justifiable.

What do I mean by this? Take the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, in which Hamas has captured a soldier, and offered to release him in exchange for over a thousand civilians. And it had worked, when Israel would not release said civilians otherwise. This is why “hostages” are held by Hamas, and why it is more accurate to label them as POWs.

Either way, you do not get to say “freed hostages” when referring to Israelis and “released inmates” when referring to Palestinians.

[1] imgflip.com/i/8jiiej

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/10/middleeast/israel-sde-teiman-detention-whistleblowers-intl-cmd/index.html

[3] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/israel-must-end-mass-incommunicado-detention-and-torture-of-palestinians-from-gaza/

[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/military-police-raid-idf-detention-facility-9-held-over-serious-abuse-of-a-detainee/

Reminds me of the “5 Israelis killed” vs “149 Palestinians dead” trope. This sort of dehumanizing language is so subtle that at first, I didn’t even notice anything wrong with the article title.

This is your daily reminder that the media is not unbiased. It has a strong bias, and that bias in no way favors Palestine.

These type of things aren’t just one off incidents, there has been literal studies of the subtle dehumanizing language used when describing Israelis vs describing Palestinians.

In the study below, it has been proven that Palestinian deaths were usually reported as “accidents”, while Israeli deaths were almost always reported as “victims of terrorism”.

https://www.academia.edu/7947888/What_are_we_talking_about_Analysis_of_the_lexical_and_semantic_representations_within_main_stream_media_s_coverage_of_the_Palestine_Israel_conflict

Not to mention that in these articles, Israeli sources are used over 250% more than Palestinian sources. But I guess that’s not enough to not be considered “Jihadist sources” by Zionists.

http://www.dci.plo.ps/en/article/11434/416-LABS-50-years-of-occupation,-a-sentiment--N-Gram-analysis-of-US-mainstream-media-coverage-of-the-Israeli-occupation-of-Palestine-(December-18,-2019)

Well said. These sort of well-constructed, well-sourced arguments are always good to see, and stand in great contrast to the falsehoods that Zionists always perpetuate.

It’s sad to see that while Zionists can spread a blatantly incorrect falsehood in 5 minutes, it takes us at least 40 minutes for us to properly debunk it in a well-sourced and polished manner, while they just ignore it anyway and accuse us of using “Jihad sources.” Because, as we all know, BBC is Hamas.

That’s one of the downsides for being part of the logically and morally superior cause, I guess.