Israel's Latest Attack on The Palestinians
Byrnzie
Posts: 21,037
According to EdsonNascimento in the other thread Israel "...took out a Hamas military leader and stock pile of missles to avoid the escalation."
I take it he neglected to read the thread before throwing his lame, yet predictable, accusations of anti-Semitism at everyone who dared criticize Israel.
Here, I'll post some 'inconvenient' facts again so as to prevent any confusion from the outset:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/no ... anges-live
Hours before Hamas military commander Ahmed al-Jabari was killed he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin told Haaretz.
Baskin helped mediate between Israel and Hamas in the deal to release Gilad Shalit.
Baskin told Haaretz on Thursday that senior officials in Israel knew about his contacts with Hamas and Egyptian intelligence aimed at formulating the permanent truce, but nevertheless approved the assassination ...
According to Baskin, during the past two years Jabari internalised the realisation that the rounds of hostilities with Israel were beneficial neither to Hamas nor to the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and only caused suffering, and several times he acted to prevent firing by Hamas into Israel.
He said that even when Hamas was pulled into participating in the launching of rockets, its rockets would always land in open spaces. “And that was intentional,” clarified Baskin.
In recent months Baskin was continuously in touch with Hamas officials and with Egyptian intelligence as well as with officials in Israel, whose names he refused to divulge. A few months ago Baskin showed defence minister Ehud Barak a draft of the agreement and on the basis of that draft an inter-ministry committee on the issue was established. The agreement was to have constituted a basis for a permanent truce between Israel and Hamas, which would prevent the repeated rounds of shooting.
“In Israel,” Baskin said, “they decided not to decide, and in recent months I took the initiative to push it again.”
I take it he neglected to read the thread before throwing his lame, yet predictable, accusations of anti-Semitism at everyone who dared criticize Israel.
Here, I'll post some 'inconvenient' facts again so as to prevent any confusion from the outset:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/no ... anges-live
Hours before Hamas military commander Ahmed al-Jabari was killed he received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin told Haaretz.
Baskin helped mediate between Israel and Hamas in the deal to release Gilad Shalit.
Baskin told Haaretz on Thursday that senior officials in Israel knew about his contacts with Hamas and Egyptian intelligence aimed at formulating the permanent truce, but nevertheless approved the assassination ...
According to Baskin, during the past two years Jabari internalised the realisation that the rounds of hostilities with Israel were beneficial neither to Hamas nor to the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and only caused suffering, and several times he acted to prevent firing by Hamas into Israel.
He said that even when Hamas was pulled into participating in the launching of rockets, its rockets would always land in open spaces. “And that was intentional,” clarified Baskin.
In recent months Baskin was continuously in touch with Hamas officials and with Egyptian intelligence as well as with officials in Israel, whose names he refused to divulge. A few months ago Baskin showed defence minister Ehud Barak a draft of the agreement and on the basis of that draft an inter-ministry committee on the issue was established. The agreement was to have constituted a basis for a permanent truce between Israel and Hamas, which would prevent the repeated rounds of shooting.
“In Israel,” Baskin said, “they decided not to decide, and in recent months I took the initiative to push it again.”
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"You do know Hamas lobbed 100 missles at southern Israeli cities with no regard for who and what they were hitting before Israel sent a single bomb the other way. Right?"
Here are some more 'inconvenient' facts that shed some light on the causes of this latest Israeli assault on the Palestinians:
http://rt.com/news/israel-gaza-terrorism-war-820/
RT: Israel and its western allies maintain Israel is acting in self-defense, so is Hamas responsible for this crisis?
Norman Finkelstein: If you look at the sequence of events, there was a lull between Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza up until November the 8th, on November 8th Israel killed a Palestinian child and there was some Palestinian retaliation, they blew up a tunnel injuring an Israeli soldier, and then subsequently they fired on an Israeli jeep, injuring 4 Israeli soldiers, then Israel killed two more Palestinian children and during the funeral of the two children who were killed Israel fired on the tent where the attendees at the funeral were present. Then the conflict escalated until November the 12th when there was a ceasefire negotiated and it seemed as if the ceasefire was taking hold, then Israel used the occasion of the ceasefire to assassinate what you might call the strong man of Gaza and also as the Israeli newspapers pointed out, Mr Jaabari who they killed was Israel’s enforcer in Gaza, those are not my words, they belong to the military correspondent for Hareetz, a leading Israeli newspaper.
RT: Why did Israel break that ceasefire and carry out the assassination at a very delicate time?
NF:Most of the speculation has been that it has to do with upcoming elections in Israel, that was a factor but I think it’s a minor factor, the basic fact is, is that Israel has suffered a sequence of foreign policy debacles, they tried to orchestrate an attack on Iran and failed.Mr. Netanyahu went to the UN and smuggled in a bomb, the nuclear bomb that Iran supposedly has and he held up the bomb for the general assembly and he was seen quite correctly to be a maniac. Then there was Hezbollah flying a drone weapon near Damona, there was the fact that Qatar’s head of state visited Gaza, there was the fact that Erdogan of Turkey was saying he was also going to go to Gaza and their own puppets, the puppet regime they established in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority, even their puppets were getting uppity and were threatening to go to the UN and ask for observer status, and they said Israel wouldn’t be able to impose sanctions on them because they are doing Israel’s dirty work on the west bank. So things have got out of control and Israel said, when it launched its latest assault on Gaza, they said we have to restore our deterrence capability, that is restore the Arab’s world fear of us, but it had very little to do with trying to restore Gaza’s fear of Israel. Their main concern was the natives were getting restless, the Arabs were getting too uppity, the Muslims were getting too uppity and it was time to put on another display of Israel’s power to murder.
RT:You say things are getting out of control, just how bad could this situation become, not just between Israel and Palestine but also for the region as a whole?
NF:Actually I’m sceptical this current situation will escalate, we have to bear in mind that Turkey is now doing the US’s dirty work in Syria, and they are going to be incensed that as they carry on their work in Syria, it’s going to be said they care more about the Syrians than the people of Gaza. Turkey doesn’t want that to be said, so Turkey will be on the phone to Washington, meanwhile Egypt doesn’t want a mass influx of Gazans into Egypt if Israel attacks. On the other hand Egypt can’t seal the gates of Gaza like Mubarak did, so they’re going to be on the phone to Washington. In short, I think pressures is going to be brought to bear on Washington and then on Israel to agree a ceasefire.
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/mau ... a-coverage
Linguists, including Noam Chomsky, condemn "reprehensible" Gaza coverage
Wednesday 11/14/2012
The Electronic Intifada received today the following statement from international academics who recently participated in a conference on linguistics at the Islamic University of Gaza which decries major media outlets’ failure to report on recent killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in Gaza. I wrote about this pattern of omission and bias on my blog earlier today, focusing on The New York Times’ omission of Palestinian civilian casualties and its privileging of Israeli military and government officials in its report on today’s attacks.
Media reporting on Gaza: Nous accusons.
While countries across Europe and North America commemorated military casualties of past and present wars on November 11, Israel was targeting civilians. On November 12, waking up to a new week, readers at breakfast were flooded with heart rending accounts of past and current military casualties. There was, however, no or little mention of the fact that the majority of casualties of modern day wars are civilians. There was also hardly any mention on the morning of November 12 of military attacks on Gaza that continued throughout the weekend. A cursory scan confirms this for Canada’s CBC, the Globe and Mail, Montreal’s Gazette, and the Toronto Star. Equally, for the New York Times and for the BBC.
According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) report on Sunday November 11, five Palestinian civilians including three children had been killed in the Gaza strip in the previous 72 hours, in addition to two Palestinian security personnel. Four of the deaths occurred as a result of Israeli military firing artillery shells on youngsters playing soccer. Moreover, 52 civilians had been wounded, of which six were women and 12 were children. (Since we began composing this text, the Palestinian death toll has risen, and continues to rise.)
Articles that do report on the killings overwhelmingly focus on the killing of Palestinian security personnel. For example, an Associated Press article published in the CBC world news on November 13, entitled Israel mulls resuming targeted killings of Gaza militants, mentions absolutely nothing of civilian deaths and injuries. It portrays the killings as ‘targeted assassinations’. The fact that casualties have overwhelmingly been civilians indicates that Israel is not so much engaged in “targeted” killings, as in “collective” killings, thus once again committing the crime of collective punishment. Another AP item on CBC news from November 12 reads Gaza rocket fire raises pressure on Israel government. It features a photo of an Israeli woman gazing on a hole in her living room ceiling. Again, no images, nor mention of the numerous bleeding casualties or corpses in Gaza. Along the same lines, a BBC headline on November 12 reads Israel hit by fresh volley of rockets from Gaza. Similar trend can be illustrated for European mainstream papers.
News items overwhelmingly focus on the rockets that have been fired from Gaza, none of which have caused human casualties. What is not in focus are the shellings and bombardments on Gaza, which have resulted in numerous severe and fatal casualties. It doesn’t take an expert in media science to understand that what we are facing is at best shoddy and skewed reporting, and at worst willfully dishonest manipulation of the readership.
Furthermore, articles that do mention the Palestinian casualties in Gaza consistently report that Israeli operations are in response to rockets from Gaza and to the injuring of Israeli soldiers. However, the chronology of events of the recent flare-up began onNovember 5, when an innocent, apparently mentally unfit, 20-year old man, Ahmad al-Nabaheen, was shot when he wandered close to the border. Medics had to wait for six hours to be permitted to pick him up and they suspect that he may have died because of that delay. Then, on November 8, a 13-year old boy playing football in front of his house was killed by fire from the IOF that had moved into Gazan territory with tanks as well as helicopters. The wounding of four Israeli soldiers at the border on November 10 was therefore already part of a chain of events where Gazan civilians had been killed, and not the triggering event.
We, the signatories, have recently returned from a visit to the Gaza Strip. Some among us are now connected to Palestinians living in Gaza through social media. For two nights in a row Palestinians in Gaza were prevented from sleeping through continued engagement of drones, F16s, and indiscriminate bombings of various targets inside the densely populated Gaza strip. The intent of this is clearly to terrorise the population, successfully so, as we can ascertain from our friends’ reports. If it was not for Facebook postings, we would not be aware of the degree of terror felt by ordinary Palestinian civilians in Gaza. This stands in stark contrast to the world’s awareness of terrorised and shock-treated Israeli citizens.
An extract of a report sent by a Canadian medic who happened to be in Gaza and helped out in Shifa hospital ER over the weekend says: “the wounded were all civilians with multiple puncture wounds from shrapnel: brain injuries, neck injuries, hemo-pneumo thorax, pericardial tamponade, splenic rupture, intestinal perforations, slatted limbs, traumatic amputations. All of this with no monitors, few stethoscopes, one ultrasound machine. …. Many people with serious but non life threatening injuries were sent home to be re-assessed in the morning due to the sheer volume of casualties. The penetrating shrapnel injuries were spooky. Tiny wounds with massive internal injuries. … There was very little morphine for analgesia.”
Apparently such scenes are not newsworthy for the New York Times, the CBC, or the BBC.
Bias and dishonesty with respect to the oppression of Palestinians is nothing new in Western media and has been widely documented. Nevertheless, Israel continues its crimes against humanity with full acquiescence and financial, military, and moral support from our governments, the U.S., Canada and the EU. Netanyahu is currently garnering Western diplomatic support for additional operations in Gaza, which makes us worry that another Cast Lead may be on the horizon. In fact, the very recent events are confirming such an escalation has already begun, as today’s death-count climbs. The lack of widespread public outrage at these crimes is a direct consequence of the systematic way in which the facts are withheld and/or of the skewed way these crimes are portrayed.
We wish to express our outrage at the reprehensible media coverage of these acts in the mainstream (corporate) media. We call on journalists around the world working for corporate media outlets to refuse to be instruments of this systematic policy of disguise. We call on citizens to inform themselves through independent media, and to voice their conscience by whichever means is accessible to them.
Hagit Borer, linguist, Queen Mary University of London (UK)
Antoine Bustros, composer and writer, Montreal (Canada)
Noam Chomsky, linguist, Massachussetts Institute of Technology, US
David Heap, linguist, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Stephanie Kelly, linguist, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Máire Noonan, linguist, McGill University (Canada)
Philippe Prévost, linguist, University of Tours (France)
Verena Stresing, biochemist, University of Nantes (France)
Laurie Tuller, linguist, University of Tours (France)
JERUSALEM - Israel offered to suspend its offensive in the Gaza Strip on Friday during a brief visit by Egypt's premier there if militants refrain from firing rockets at Israel, an official said, but the Palestinians unleashed a fresh salvo.
An official in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said the Israeli leader was responding to an Egyptian request.
Gaza militants stepped up their barrages of rocket fire into Israel as Hesham Kandil crossed into Gaza before midday through the only border post with Egypt, heavily guarded by Egyptian security personnel wearing flak jackets and carrying assault rifles.
He was greeted by Gaza's Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, who ventured out in public for the first time since Israel launched the offensive Wednesday by assassinating the militant group's military commander.
Israel told the Egyptians the military "would hold its fire on the condition that during that period, there won't be hostile fire from Gaza into Israel," the Israeli official said. "Prime Minister Netanyahu is committed to the peace treaty with Egypt, which is in the strategic interest of both countries," he added, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the diplomatic exchange.
There were no immediate reports of Israeli retaliation for the latest salvo. Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the militants were making a clear statement. "There's no intention whatsoever to stop firing into Israel," he said.
if you will defend the idf then by default you must support those things. if you are unaware of those things you might want to read up before you blindly support the idf.
if people were encroaching on your land and abusing your people would you let it happen? if you would allow it to happen and take it, i could see your support for the idf. if you wouldn't and you would fight to take back your land, then your position of supporting the idf has no merit.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Hamas lacking modern weapons shoots rockets and mortars into civilian areas in Israel
I would expect many more Israeli civilians to be injured and killed than Palestinians
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Someone can start a new topic on this news event. Please keep it on the news event.