Mughal India was roughly 20–25% of global output. It was British colonial rule that exploited and stole insane amounts of wealth and led to India’s economic decline. Comparing centuries of complex Indo-Hindu-Muslim history with British colonial occupation and extraction makes no sense.
Some Muslim dynasties began through conquest, as many dynasties throughout Indian history did. But over centuries, Muslims integrated, intermarried, adopted local languages and customs, and became part of Indian society. Muslim-ruled states relied heavily on Hindu generals, officials, and allies, and their wars were largely fought over territory and power, not as some continuous occupation or religious war against Hindus.
Indian Islam is not a foreign invasion that destroyed. Indian Muslims are indigenous to India, and their ancestors converted for many reasons, including Sufi influence, social mobility, and escape from caste discrimination.
"700 years of Islamic occupation" is just false. Some Muslim dynasties began through conquest, as many dynasties throughout Indian history did. But over centuries, Muslims integrated, intermarried, adopted local languages and customs, and became part of Indian society. Muslim-ruled states relied heavily on Hindu generals, officials, and allies, and their wars were largely fought over territory and power, not as some continuous occupation or religious war against Hindus.
Criticizing specific rulers is fine. But Indian Muslims are indigenous to India, and their ancestors converted for many reasons, including Sufi influence, social mobility, and escape from caste discrimination.
Of note, Mughal India accounted for roughly 20–25% of global output. It was British colonial rule that exploited and stole insane amounts of wealth and led to India’s economic decline. Comparing centuries of complex Indo-Hindu-Muslim history with British colonial occupation and extraction makes no sense. And calling Indian Islam a foreign invasion is misplaced bigotry.
There's something very visceral in being attacked by Zionists, rockets, and bombs (for 70+ years) which makes some folks quite enthusiastic about resisting ethnic cleansing and genocide in their homeland.
Looks like they are using molecular methods on post-mortem brains - all sorts of bugs can grow post-mortem and molecular methods can give false-positives as well as detect non-viable microbes, etc. But that's also based on a quick skim / haven't read the full paper yet.
Culturing from CSF in general will depend on the concentration of the microbe, whether they are viable, if antibiotics/antivirals were already initiated pre-collection, whether it's plated on the appropriate media (e.g. a rare microbe that only grows on one specific type of agar plate), etc. Culturing viruses is also hard/many hospital micro labs have moved away from that.
I think this study may suggest that we are failing to detect certain brain infections (and many are notoriously hard to diagnose if you don't catch them in the right window of time). But a brain microbiome sounds far-fetched. We even plate from brain tissue directly at times and aren't growing a bunch of organisms. I'd approach that claim with a healthy dose of skepticism.
There are indeed restrictions on western foreign media.
"Like all foreign news organizations operating in Israel, CNN’s Jerusalem bureau is subject to the rules of the Israel Defense Forces’s censor, which dictates subjects that are off-limits for news organizations to cover, and censors articles it deems unfit or unsafe to print. ... the military censor recently restricted eight subjects, including security cabinet meetings, information about hostages, and reporting on weapons captured by fighters in Gaza. In order to obtain a press pass in Israel, foreign reporters must sign a document agreeing to abide by the dictates of the censor."
Before the Sharon/Netanyahu/extremist takeover, Israel was serious about peace. But in the last two decades, Netanyahu has seen Hamas as an asset to undermine the PA, block moderates, and eliminate the 2 state option [1,2].
Israel has killed Hamas leaders who wanted to work towards peace [3]:
>> After Israel assassinated Jabari, Reuven Pedatzur, a military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported:
>> Our decision makers, including the defense minister and perhaps also Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, knew about Jabari’s role in advancing a permanent cease-fire agreement. … Thus the decision to kill Jabari shows that our decision makers decided a cease-fire would be undesirable for Israel at this time, and that attacking Hamas would be preferable.
An Israeli government that was actually interested in peace could halt and reverse the settlements in the West Bank, end the apartheid (e.g. military vs civilian courts for Palestinians, different class of citizenships, travel restrictions, prevention from visting Jerusalem's holy sites, etc.), the blockade of Gaza, etc. Treating Palestinians as humans (and not propping up Hamas) would likely go a long way towards undermining Hamas. Most Palestinians already didn't like Hamas - 70% wanted the PA in July 2023 according to the Washington Institute.
From the article you quote, 51% of Gaza supported a 2 state solution, 75% face food insecurity, only 23% had a great deal or quite a lot of trust in Hamas, 52% had no trust at all in Hamas, most said their freedom of speech is limited or not free at all. Per the Washington Institute, 70% wanted PA to take over Gaza from Hamas in July 2023.
In regards to the 60% you quote, the question was framed as
"How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?"
Given the majority of Gaza has trouble accessing the news/electricity, 95% don't trust Israel's news (in the same survey), what they know about Oct 7 is not what we know about Oct 7. Whether you and I believe it or not, there are plenty who think all the targets on Oct 7 were military, any atrocities are fake news, etc. And for a people suffering under blockade for 16 years, including a year of weekly peaceful protests in 2018-2019 that were repeatedly met with violence by the IDF (~200 killed, thousands maimed/disabled), living in slums with little to no electricity [1], seeing their lives deteriorate year after year as the world has forgotten them - it would not be surprising at all for them to support a "military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance."
Furthermore, we're talking about a survey taken in the midst of war where 46% have lost their homes (same survey you shared), 80% of Gaza is displaced, and all the thousands of civilian and children deaths and tens of thousands of maiming and mutilations etc. Hospitals destroyed. Bakeries and water towers bombed. Journalists and health care workers murdered. ... Unclear how many, but probably all of the population has PTSD; 90% of the children had PTSD back in 2021 [2]. So in that context, in the midst of such immense suffering, the answer to this question should not be surprising at all. It is completely rational.
However, it would not be accurate for us to conflate their answer with supporting atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct 7 (which is not something it seems the survey asked about).
>> Many people on the ground support the conflict
Re: Gaza, the survey you link says 90% "support a ceasefire that includes a mutual cessation of hostilities." So I don't think it's accurate to say the civilians of Gaza support this conflict.
These days it costs <$1000 to sequence a de novo genome (not cents). For human genomes it's cheaper of course, but that's because we have a reference sequence to compare to. The Human Genome Project (and other efforts) had to build that reference and annotate it. So not quite an apples-to-apples comparison to compare sequencing of a modern-day patient sample to building a reference genome from scratch.
Slaves in the Arab/Ottoman world could purchase their freedom, were not enslaved by race (rather as POWs), their children were free, had some legal protection, and had the potential for upward mobility (in rare cases slaves that became viziers, ministers, or kings). Also Arab society post-Islam highly encouraged freeing slaves (considered a major virtue/source of reward/form of penance).
May be more accurate to say slavery in the US was less brutal than slavery in the French Caribbean or Spanish Argentina.