You owe apologists of imperial conquest and genocide no apologies, even if this or that fact about the specifics of the atrocities committed by either side end up being true or false in the fog of war and the intense propaganda campaign being waged by the defenders of the empire.

This nitpicking and hairsplitting over who the more 'moral' side is based on the number of civilians killed or atrocities committed completely distracts from the root causes of the conflict, and this is intentional.

It's similar to how climate-change deniers and their propaganda work. They know it's absurd to claim that climate change isn't real at this point (which they've done for decades). So now the strategy has shifted to dragging their feet and splitting hairs and muddying the waters over its severity. They're basically saying: "Ok ok, so yeah, maybe it's a thing. But, is it really THAT bad?"

Likewise, the apologists for US-backed Israeli imperialism (and all its apartheid, atrocities, and outrages) know they can't really say that Israel kills less people than Hamas, especially with the photos of the destruction in Gaza visible to the entire world. So, they're engaging in all kinds of mental gymnastics and 'gotcha' rhetorical tactics and weird statistics about rates of percentages of civilians killed in proportion to completely arbitrary guesses of the number of Hamas 'members' to try to say: "Well look folks, it really isn't as bad as you think and in fact, Hamas did this worse thing so it's all justified. In fact, it's necessary and we are on the moral high ground!"

Never let the tit-for-tat 'atrocity porn' propaganda distract you away from being on the right side of history.

I intend to write a more in-depth article about this soon, but remember this: Whenever you despair after engaging with these 'simps' for imperial conquest and war crimes, just remember you're on the right side of history.

Slave rebellions in the US resulted in the murder of plantation owners and their families. Apologists at the time used the same sort of arguments that apologists for Israel are making today: "Oh, look how barbaric and savage these slaves are. Any amount of force must be used to restore order. You must support the restoration of order as a moral person."

By 'restoration of order', they of course meant preserving the institution of slavery. Just because some plantation owners' families were brutally executed by rebelling slaves, does NOT mean that support for the institution of slavery was the correct position to take (or even moral by any stretch of the imagination).

History has shown that the correct side in that debate was to be against the institution of slavery, no matter how many plantation owners' families may have been killed in slave rebellions.

I know what side of history I want to be on this time around, and it's not the one that is saying that we should use any force necessary (idiotically, even nuclear weapons) to ethnically cleanse or forcefully displace the impoverished people of Gaza in order to preserve the 'moral' system of imperialism and apartheid in Israel.