Well arrogance is in the eyes of the beholder. To me, the survival of Israel is due to their resilience, intelligence, diligence, vigilance and their relentless hard work. Why is that considered arrogance? Humiliation? What humiliation? Oh you mean Israel has the gall to have a stronger economy and technologically advanced than the Palestinians?? How dare Israel? Israel should be begging on their hands and knees for money always and be poor and dressed in rags with the Arab countries always lording over them and slaving them. Then there is no humiliation of the Muslim people right? LOL But I do agree that there should be a permanent solution to this problem. We cannot have just a few years of peace and then one bomb, one rocket, and all those years of peace go out of the door and it's back to war again. People in both Israel and Palestine are tired of this and the whole world is tired of it really. Nobody can build anything. Nobody can live. Whatever gets built is all destroyed. No we need a permanent solution where everything gets resolved once and for all. If Israel believes Gaza or the West Bank or whatever is theirs, then go in and conquer them and take them and that's it no more. Whoever wants to continue to live in Gaza and West Bank can continue to live there and be given Israeli citizenship. If not, then they go live on Palestinian territories. But this is it. This is the permanent sovereign territory of Israel and outside of it is all Palestine. I have talked to some of my friends who are Arabic and this is their main grievance about Israel that they just continue to expand and expand and expand into Palestinian territories. That I agree is unacceptable. You cannot have a country that's like a dynamic array that can just keep on expanding and expanding and expanding infinitely. Israel should be permanently confined to the current Israeli territory + Gaza + West Bank and then that's it. And if Israel wants to take over Gaza and West Bank, then it should just move in and conquer them and put an Israeli flag there and that's it instead of just doing this massive bombing in those territories that just ends up killing civilians. But the problem is this is not up to Israel or Palestine or Hamas or whatever. The Israel-Palestine conflict is a manifestation of bigger wars between ultimately the two superpowers, US and Russia. Hamas is just being a foot soldier doing the bidding of I am sure Russia with Iran's help so Russia can use this opportunity to exhaust US' resources. Organizations like Hamas are just too obsessed with their own narrow-minded nationalism or whatever pride and fail to see the bigger picture and choose to let themselves be used because they have nothing to lose. So if we want a permanent solution, it has to come from the top, US and Russia.
The real question that is appropriate for this thread is -- Will governments further regulate and/or shutdown crypto due to the recent terrorist attacks by Hamas which were funded by crypto. I expect that it will be very hard to "shut down" crypto on a worldwide basis; this would require coordinated action by governments across the globe -- and, of course, these are governments who can't agree on a host of other topics already. Some countries like the U.S. may take steps to regulate crypto in an attempt to force exchanges and other entities to follow FACTA/KYC banking standards -- but this is likely to have limited global impact outside of western countries. We are more likely to see targeted enforcement actions to "strip crypto out of the wallets" of terrorist organizations and take their funds. This is something that other governments would help with because effectively "there is money to be made" by helping with these actions. Hamas terrorists were sent millions in crypto before Israel attack Electronic currencies have been used by terrorist groups to evade financial sanctions https://www.telegraph.co.uk/busines...ants-millions-crypto-israel-terrorist-attack/ Hamas and its allies were sent hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of cryptocurrencies in the months before the terrorist group’s attacks on Israel. More than $134m (£108m) was transferred to cryptocurrency accounts controlled by Hamas and the allied Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) group during the first half of 2023, according to analysts. Hamas launched a large-scale terrorist attack on Israel on Saturday, which has left more than a thousand people dead. Questions have been raised about how the group was able to organise and fund the complex attack. Analysis of blockchain records shows around $93m (£75m) of cryptocurrency was transferred to the PIJ alone between August 2021 and June this year, according to cryptocurrency analysis company Elliptic. Hamas raised about $41m in crypto tokens over the past 18 months, according to figures from Tel Aviv-based crypto tracing company BitOK that were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Cryptocurrency has been used by Hamas and other terrorist organisations to evade global financial sanctions. David Carlisle, vice president at Elliptic, said: “Hamas has been among the most prolific, raising millions of dollars in crypto alongside other Palestinian militant groups.” In April Hamas announced it was suspending cryptocurrency donations, citing problems with “the safety of donors”. A number of private companies and, increasingly, law enforcement agencies have become adept at tracing cryptocurrency payments through their “blockchains”, the public digital ledgers that record each transaction for tokens such as Bitcoin. Israeli police said on Tuesday that they had frozen cryptocurrency accounts identified as belonging to Hamas. A spokesman said: “The Israel Police, Ministry of Defense, and other partners will continue the fight against terrorist financing and targeting the strategic financial assets of terrorist organizations.” Israeli police said they had also worked with their British counterparts to freeze a British bank account at Barclays, which they said was used by Hamas to solicit donations. Barclays was asked for comment. Hamas is a sanctioned terrorist organisation in the UK, US and EU, among other countries. It is illegal to provide the group with funding.
(MorningBrew) email newsletter INTERNATIONAL Here’s how Hamas has fundraised using crypto Members of Hamas’s armed wing in 2016; Mahmud Hams/Getty Images Israel has frozen multiple accounts on the cryptocurrency exchange Binance that it believes Hamas was using to raise money, the cyber arm of the Israeli police announced yesterday. It’s not yet clear if the shuttered accounts directly financed last weekend’s assault on Israeli civilians, which marked the beginning of the current war between Israel and Hamas. Law enforcement didn’t specify how many accounts they froze or how much crypto they found but said seized funds would be diverted to Israel’s state treasury. This isn’t a first. Israel has seized 190 other Binance wallets it linked to Hamas or the Islamic State group since 2021, Reuters reported in May. Hamas is regarded as one of the most sophisticated users of crypto-enabled terror financing, a former US treasury official told the Wall Street Journal. The group, which is largely bankrolled by Iran, uses crypto solicited through social media to get around the international banking sanctions imposed because it’s been flagged as a terrorist group by the US and EU. Hamas reportedly began publicly fundraising crypto in 2019 via its Telegram channel and raised about $30,000 in bitcoin for one wallet that year. Between the summer of 2021 and the summer of 2023, about $41 million worth of crypto was deposited into crypto wallets linked to Hamas, according to the Tel Aviv-based analytics firm BitOK. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hezbollah—two other US- and EU-designated terrorist groups involved in the fighting against Israel—have also partially funded their operations with digital currency: The PIJ raised $93 million in crypto between August 2021 and June 2023. The group also sent more than $12 million in digital currency to Hezbollah, according to Elliptic, a crypto analytics provider. Israel seized $1.7 million in crypto in June from wallets linked to Hezbollah and the Iranian military. Zoom out: Crypto’s anonymity and near untraceability have made it a popular choice for terror financing. Crypto-assisted attacks may have quadrupled in recent years, according to UN estimates. But recent developments in blockchain-tracking tech and platform-mandated ID checks have made it a bit easier for authorities to identify and seize illicit funds.—ML
Here is an interesting piece of information... "In April 2023, Hamas warned its donors to STOP sending Bitcoin." https://x.com/SamLyman33/status/1712209368450511162?s=20
Interesting data point, curious what they pivoted to. The analytics sleuthing in/out of Mixers is pretty sophisticated, those not aware have a false sense of "anonymity."
That's not what I am saying at all. If you read my comments, I said it's Hamas who drew first blood this time and whoever targets and harms innocent civilians is a terrorist. Nowhere in my comments that I ever said that October 2023 is the "first blood" on the Gaza strip. Stop twisting people's comments to fit your own agenda. Everybody knows Hamas is a terrorist group.