Israel should be proud

SkeeterB

it's amazing how the media only reports one side of the story. so, if someone is launching rockets at your HOUSE, are you just going to sit there and do nothing? i would hope not. now, these people who are launching rockets are launching them from areas where there are women and children. do people think that there's nothing wrong with that? it appears people have quickly forgotten that Hamas is a terrorist organization. these are the same people who were celebrating in the streets when 9/11 occurred. Now, people are feeling sympathetic towards them. Please explain why.

Flutter Girl

I gotta say that it always amazes me how these days when a country uses war to take control over more land, they think the worst of the country. Did you people sleep thru history class? Thats how countries formed their borders. It is no different today than it was before, except the weapons are more high tech..

The whole thing is retarded. stick all the militants and Israeli officials in a building and let them all kill each other. Then launch a vicious campaign to show the Palestinians how completely fucking stupid they were to elect militants labelled as terrorists in a number of countries, including Israel, then expected there to be peace and harmony.

Commy

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

Weren't three of those Israelis killed by "friendly fire"?

yes

Commy

SkeeterB wrote:

it's amazing how the media only reports one side of the story. so, if someone is launching rockets at your HOUSE, are you just going to sit there and do nothing? i would hope not. now, these people who are launching rockets are launching them from areas where there are women and children. do people think that there's nothing wrong with that? it appears people have quickly forgotten that Hamas is a terrorist organization. these are the same people who were celebrating in the streets when 9/11 occurred. Now, people are feeling sympathetic towards them. Please explain why.

every single article I saw in mainstream reporting-without exception-reported that Hamas was firing rockets at Israel-that Israel's campaign was against Hamas. Very few listed the casualty discrepency-the one-sided violence, showed any pics of the destruction in Gaza.


Most people who sympathize with the Palestinians see this as a war against the Palestinian people-not a war against Hamas. Isreal bombed all of Gaza...for the theory to be true that Hamas was hiding behind civilians you would think there are more hamas militants than civilians in all of gaza...because all of Gaza was bombed.


Look at he caualties...13 Israeli's killed-3 by frinedly fire, 3 civilians- and almost 1500 Palestinian's killed. I can clearly see who the real terrorists are.

evenkat

I understand that Israelis need to protect themselves but so do the Palestinians. The Palestinians are backed into a corner and are struggling to survive. They have had so much taken away from them leaving them with not much.

Obviously the Palestinians are militarily overmatched by Israel. Did Israel really have to respond to the rockets at this level and for this long? IMO Israel really overstepped here and it needs to stop!

Byrnzie

RM291946 wrote:

show the Palestinians how completely fucking stupid they were to elect militants labelled as terrorists in a number of countries, including Israel, then expected there to be peace and harmony.

As opposed to electing Fatah and watching them sell the ground from under your feet?

Heineken Helen

ogre1213 wrote:

you are all blind to see that israel has to take care of business

protecting its citizens from madmen that hate freedom, hate democracy, hate everything and unleash a real and true terror and fear on people that just want to live and be free

all terrorists care about is killing and destroying

do you really think israel wanted to kill so many children and women and innocent civilians? NO

do you really think theyre goal was to kill so many children and women and innocent civilians? NO

if it was we would have been done by now and everyone in the gaza strip would be dead

that was not the goal

it tears my heart out that we had to do something like this, that so many innocent people died

but it has to be done to root out the evil from the good people

these are a few crazy hateful people that are ruining lives and killing people for no reason

they are making it difficult for people in that area of the world to live their lives

and it bothers me that there are people in America and the world that agree with them

it makes me truly sick

why does it 'tear your heart out' that 'so many innocent people died' if they're all evil? :roll:

Heineken Helen

ogre1213 wrote:

Now, Are you saying that you support terrorism as a means to get the land back instead of diplomacy?
and if you do, how would you like Israel to respond to that terrorism?

if terrorism means defending your family and home... well then yes, I support them... just as I supported them in Northern Ireland. I would like Israel to respond in the ONLY way that works... talking.

JonnyPistachio

What the fuck is wrong with them? All those kids killed - there's no excuse for that.

Flutter Girl

Heineken Helen wrote:

ogre1213 wrote:

Now, Are you saying that you support terrorism as a means to get the land back instead of diplomacy?
and if you do, how would you like Israel to respond to that terrorism?

if terrorism means defending your family and home... well then yes, I support them... just as I supported them in Northern Ireland. I would like Israel to respond in the ONLY way that works... talking.

Hamas always have been, and always will be, nothing but terrorists. They couldn't care less about the innocent Palestinians..you know, with all the killing they've done of their own and instead of smuggling in food/medical supplies and smuggling out civilians, they only cared about brining in weapons..

But hey if you want to support that........

fuck

RM291946 wrote:

Heineken Helen wrote:

ogre1213 wrote:

Now, Are you saying that you support terrorism as a means to get the land back instead of diplomacy?
and if you do, how would you like Israel to respond to that terrorism?

if terrorism means defending your family and home... well then yes, I support them... just as I supported them in Northern Ireland. I would like Israel to respond in the ONLY way that works... talking.

Hamas always have been, and always will be, nothing but terrorists. They couldn't care less about the innocent Palestinians..you know, with all the killing they've done of their own and instead of smuggling in food/medical supplies and smuggling out civilians, they only cared about brining in weapons..

But hey if you want to support that........

RM, I feel embarrassed for you after reading your posts. What you write is propaganda only one so delusional could actually believe is fact. As everyone can see here, you provide no evidence that Hamas was only bringing in weapons. You provide no evidence that they don't care about the innocent Palestinians. Unfortunately for you, that evidence does not exist. It's not logical for you to assume Hamas does not care for its fellow Palestinians. It's a completely irrational thought driven by nothing but hatred for a group resisting against what you thought was a state that can do no more wrong than Hamas. Yes, you try to play the impartial card by condemning Israel "as well", but you spend much more time painting a far worse picture of Hamas. Let's compare the numbers though, as it's much more simple.

Israel is more technologically advanced. Hamas uses nothing but fertilizer to power explosives that hardly ever cause serious damage. If you notice, most news reports that report the firing of rockets at Israeli towns often use "left the town of Sderot in shock." On the other hand, Israel leaves tens of thousands of people in Gaza homeless (keep in mind 80% of Gaza's population is already refugees), thousands dead or dying, half of whom are likely to be children. Is this a way a "technologically advanced" country with some of the most superior weaponry fights? Is it logical for Israel to shell schools, homes, etc, in one of the most densely populated place in the world?

I know what your argument will be - rocket attacks. When the ceasefire went on during the past half year, little to no rockets were fired from Hamas. It was not until Nov 4 when Israel broke the ceasefire (yes, they did break the ceasefire, even CNN admitted it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEwzmJQD8eA) that Hamas fired rockets IN RETALIATION, and even those stopped abruptly. If Israel wants another ceasefire with a cease in rocket attacks, all Hamas asked was the SAME THING nearly every country in the world asked: LIFT THE BLOCKADE AND ALLOW BASIC FOODS AND NECESSITIES IN. Israel refused something the entire world asked, whilst Hamas was complying with everything the world is asking. Who is really the terrorist?

acute

Who is the real terrorist? Oooh, I'll play!

---

Up to a hundred Palestinians in Gaza who have defied house arrest orders have been tortured in children’s hospitals and schools converted into interrogation centers. People have been shot in the legs or had their hands broken. The campaign has been described as a "new massacre." One victim had his eyes put out. No one was safe from the torturers, not even those attending funerals. When will the UN act to put a stop to this horror? Won’t President Obama intervene to stop these barbaric acts? Aren’t international human rights monitors going to put a stop to this? When will War Crimes charges be preferred against the perpetrators?

Never.

Why? Because Hamas is in charge of the torture and their victims are simply Fatah members. If it were Israel who had done these things, well then -- But since it’s Hamas, the same Hamas for whom thousands have been marching in ’solidarity’, it’s a non-story.

The eyewitnesses said that a children’s hospital and a mental health center in Gaza City, as well as a number of school buildings in Khan Yunis and Rafah, were among the places that Hamas had turned into "torture centers."

A Fatah activist in Gaza City claimed that as many as 80 members of his faction were either shot in the legs or had their hands broken for allegedly defying Hamas’s house-arrest orders."What’s happening in the Gaza Strip is a new massacre that is being carried out by Hamas against Fatah," he said. "Where were these [Hamas] cowards when the Israeli army was here?"

Why, waiting for the ceasefire, of course. That turns out to have its own costs, even though they are not widely recognized. But when the cost-benefit of leaving Hamas in posession of Gaza was calculated, was the price of reprisal included in the bill?

-- Richard Fernandez, The Belmont Club

Byrnzie

Heineken Helen wrote:

ogre1213 wrote:

Now, Are you saying that you support terrorism as a means to get the land back instead of diplomacy?
and if you do, how would you like Israel to respond to that terrorism?

if terrorism means defending your family and home... well then yes, I support them... just as I supported them in Northern Ireland. I would like Israel to respond in the ONLY way that works... talking.

I would like Israel to respond by abiding by international law and withdrawing from the occupied territories.

Byrnzie

By the way, most of those rockets landed in open ground outside Sderot. Sderot legally belongs to the Palestinians. It was built on a village called Najd which was ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948. It was first settled by the Zionists in 1951.
So, if the Zionists don't like living there in the way of Hamas' crappy homemade rockets then they can simply fuck off back to America, or Israel.

Flutter Girl

_outlaw wrote:

RM, I feel embarrassed for you after reading your posts. What you write is propaganda only one so delusional could actually believe is fact. As everyone can see here, you provide no evidence that Hamas was only bringing in weapons. You provide no evidence that they don't care about the innocent Palestinians. Unfortunately for you, that evidence does not exist. It's not logical for you to assume Hamas does not care for its fellow Palestinians. It's a completely irrational thought driven by nothing but hatred for a group resisting against what you thought was a state that can do no more wrong than Hamas. Yes, you try to play the impartial card by condemning Israel "as well", but you spend much more time painting a far worse picture of Hamas. Let's compare the numbers though, as it's much more simple.

Israel is more technologically advanced. Hamas uses nothing but fertilizer to power explosives that hardly ever cause serious damage. If you notice, most news reports that report the firing of rockets at Israeli towns often use "left the town of Sderot in shock." On the other hand, Israel leaves tens of thousands of people in Gaza homeless (keep in mind 80% of Gaza's population is already refugees), thousands dead or dying, half of whom are likely to be children. Is this a way a "technologically advanced" country with some of the most superior weaponry fights? Is it logical for Israel to shell schools, homes, etc, in one of the most densely populated place in the world?

I know what your argument will be - rocket attacks. When the ceasefire went on during the past half year, little to no rockets were fired from Hamas. It was not until Nov 4 when Israel broke the ceasefire (yes, they did break the ceasefire, even CNN admitted it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEwzmJQD8eA) that Hamas fired rockets IN RETALIATION, and even those stopped abruptly. If Israel wants another ceasefire with a cease in rocket attacks, all Hamas asked was the SAME THING nearly every country in the world asked: LIFT THE BLOCKADE AND ALLOW BASIC FOODS AND NECESSITIES IN. Israel refused something the entire world asked, whilst Hamas was complying with everything the world is asking. Who is really the terrorist?

I only got part way into reading this before I saw you are going off topic from what I was writing, which makes the rest irrelevent to me.

In that post I was not talking about "Israel vs.Hamas, who is worse."
I was talking about Hamas vs.Palestinian civilians. It was Hamas who admitted to having the tunnels so they can get weapons. It is Hamas that have done nothing to build up Gaza..what happened to the money given them from their own civilians? Who knows, all I can say is it's known they aren't doing squat with it to help civilians. And it was Hamas that put the delicate 3 week cease fire in jeapordy, and no doubt, the potential sustaned cease fire after that point, by continuing to fire rockets into Israel. It is Hamas that is attempting to take control over West Bank from Mahmud Abbas(who, despite being Palestinian, and not Israeli, has said all the same things I am repeating..curious thing, huh?) who has maintain relative peace there. If they cared about the civilian's they would leave West Bank alone. But they want to bring the terror there too, cos like Israel, they want more territory, no matter how the civilians feel about it, or what is best for their safety.

That's not propoganda. Feel embarrassed only for yourself.

Flutter Girl

SA247125 wrote:

Who is the real terrorist? Oooh, I'll play!

---

Up to a hundred Palestinians in Gaza who have defied house arrest orders have been tortured in children’s hospitals and schools converted into interrogation centers. People have been shot in the legs or had their hands broken. The campaign has been described as a "new massacre." One victim had his eyes put out. No one was safe from the torturers, not even those attending funerals. When will the UN act to put a stop to this horror? Won’t President Obama intervene to stop these barbaric acts? Aren’t international human rights monitors going to put a stop to this? When will War Crimes charges be preferred against the perpetrators?

Never.

Why? Because Hamas is in charge of the torture and their victims are simply Fatah members. If it were Israel who had done these things, well then -- But since it’s Hamas, the same Hamas for whom thousands have been marching in ’solidarity’, it’s a non-story.

The eyewitnesses said that a children’s hospital and a mental health center in Gaza City, as well as a number of school buildings in Khan Yunis and Rafah, were among the places that Hamas had turned into "torture centers."

A Fatah activist in Gaza City claimed that as many as 80 members of his faction were either shot in the legs or had their hands broken for allegedly defying Hamas’s house-arrest orders."What’s happening in the Gaza Strip is a new massacre that is being carried out by Hamas against Fatah," he said. "Where were these [Hamas] cowards when the Israeli army was here?"

Why, waiting for the ceasefire, of course. That turns out to have its own costs, even though they are not widely recognized. But when the cost-benefit of leaving Hamas in posession of Gaza was calculated, was the price of reprisal included in the bill?

-- Richard Fernandez, The Belmont Club

You just brought to light something I was meaning to post back to Commy about...Like we always are left to choose between here, Fatah was the lesser of 2 evils.

NoK

For those who think Fatah is the lesser of two evils read the article below. Collaboration with Israel against Palestinian civilians may seem good for YOU but I highly doubt it is good for Palestinians civilians.

Israel's right to defend itself
Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 20 January 2009
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10221.shtml

Common Western political wisdom has it that when Western countries support Israeli military action against Arab countries or the Palestinian people, they do so because they support Israel's right to defend itself against its enemies.

This has always been established wisdom in Israel itself, even before the colonial settlement was established, wherein its predatory army is ironically named the Israel Defense Forces, not unlike the South African apartheid army, which was also known as the South African Defense Forces. This defensive nomenclature is hardly exclusive to Israel and South Africa, as many countries rushed after World War II to rename their Ministries of "War" as Ministries of "Defense." Still, Israel's allegedly defensive actions define every single war the colonial settlement has ever engaged in, even and especially when it starts these wars, which it has done in all cases except in 1973.

Thus the war of 1948 which Zionist militias started against the Palestinian people on 30 November 1947, a day after a Western-controlled United Nations General Assembly issued the Partition Plan, is presented as "defensive," as was its expulsion of about 400,000 Palestinians before 15 May 1948, i.e. before the day on which three Arab armies (the Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi armies) invaded the area that became Israel (Lebanon hardly had an army to invade with and hardly managed to retrieve two Lebanese villages that Israel had occupied, and Jordanian forces only entered the areas designated by the UN plan for the Palestinian state, and East Jerusalem which was projected to fall under UN jurisdiction).

Yet until this very day, Israel, its Western and Arab and Palestinian allies, seem to agree with the major Israeli lie that the refugee "problem" resulted from the 1948 war which Israel fought as a "defensive" war and that the responsibility of the refugees lies with the Arab governments who "started" the war. While the remaining 370,000 Palestinians Israel expelled were driven out after 15 May 1948 and before the end of January 1949 (when armistice talks began), they could ostensibly be included in the argument that their expulsion was a result of the war, but it remains unclear why the first 400,000 would be included in that category. The thousands of Palestinians who would be expelled after the armistice agreements were signed, especially those of the city of Majdal, now Ashkelon, whose population was loaded onto trucks and expelled to Gaza, does not even enter these calculations.

The argument in fact must be extended to the post-15 May refugees. After all, it was Zionist expulsions of the Palestinians for over five months prior to the Arab armies' intervention in May 1948 that was used as a casus belli for the Arab armies whose intervention was carried out under the banner of defending Palestine and the Palestinians against Zionist aggression. None of this however seems to matter and Zionist aggression against the Palestinian people and their UN-designated state continues to be presented as part of "Israel's right to defend itself."

Ironically, Israel's unprovoked invasion of Egypt in 1956 and occupation of Sinai also seems to fall under the category of Israel's right to defend itself as far as the Israelis were concerned, although United States President Dwight Eisenhower and the Soviet Union thought otherwise at the time, which forced Israel to withdraw. Israel's massive invasions of three Arab countries in 1967 was/is also presented as another defensive war, wherein if it is ever admitted that Israel is the party that started the war, the admission is quickly followed by the "explanation" (hasbara in Hebrew, which is also the word for "propaganda") that it was a "preemptive" war in which Israel was "defending" itself. This also applies to Israel's 1978 and 1982 and 2006 invasions of Lebanon, its continued occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, its siege of Gaza, and its massacres against the Palestinians there in the last three weeks.

The logic goes as follows: Israel has the right to occupy Palestinian land, lay siege to Palestinian populations in Bantustans surrounded by an apartheid wall, starve the population, cut them off from fuel and electricity, uproot their trees and crops, and launch periodic raids and targeted assassinations against them and their elected leadership, and if this population resists these massive Israeli attacks against their lives and the fabric of their society and Israel responds by slaughtering them en masse, Israel would simply be "defending" itself as it must and should.

Indeed, as The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, the best friend of Israel and the Saudi ruling family, has argued recently, in doing so, Israel is engaged in a pedagogical exercise of "educating" the Palestinians. Perhaps many of the Arab businessmen's associations who regularly invite Friedman to speak to their organizations in a number of Arab countries and pay him an astronomical speaking fee can invite him back to educate them on Israel's pedagogical methods and on The New York Times' war propaganda on behalf of Israel.

The major argument here is two-fold, namely that while Israel has the right to defend itself, its victims have no similar right to defend themselves. In fact, the logic is even more sinister than this and can be elucidated as follows: Israel has the right to oppress the Palestinians and does so to defend itself, but were the Palestinians to defend themselves against Israel's oppression, which they do not have a right to do, Israel will then have the right to defend itself against their illegitimate defense of themselves against its legitimate oppression of them, which it carries out anyway in order to defend itself legitimately.

This is why, not only does Israel have the right to arm itself and to be a nuclear power and to have a military edge over the combined militaries of the entire region in which it lives, but it also must ensure that the military power of its neighbors is used to quell the Palestinians and not Israel, indeed to help Israel lay siege to the resisting Palestinians. When and if Palestinians try to arm themselves to defend their lives against Israeli invasions and slaughter, Israel makes every effort to prevent them from doing so and considers this "illegal smuggling."

The recent signing of an agreement between Israel and its US sponsor and the volunteering of European countries (France, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Spain) to police the waters and borders of Gaza with Egypt to prevent the Palestinians from "smuggling" arms to defend themselves is the most recent application of this understanding. Israel's US sponsor and European allies are horrified by the Palestinians' attempts to arm themselves (to which they have no right) in order to defend their very lives against Israel's right to slaughter them in order to defend itself.

Indeed, Israel has included the erstwhile Palestinian leadership for the last 15 years in its efforts to repress all Palestinians who resist its right to defend itself by oppressing them. This is precisely why the Palestinian Authority (PA) was created in the first place. The PA that the Oslo Agreement established on paper in autumn 1993 and came to life in the form of institutions and a collaborating Palestinian elite in 1994 has finally, however, come to an end in the winter of 2009. While the PA tried its best to be a repressive force on behalf of Israel and has killed scores of Palestinians who resisted the occupation and PA collaboration since 1994, its ability to control the surge of Palestinian resistance was checked by its failure to win the last elections and its failure to defeat Hamas militarily. Fifteen years after its establishment, the PA has run its course. In Gaza, Israel destroyed all the bureaucratic and administrative offices of the PA run by Hamas and thus has returned Hamas by default to its erstwhile status as the major Palestinian guerrilla group resisting Israel's illegal occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel's criminal siege of Gaza, and Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

In the West Bank, the process of finishing off the PA has been more gradual. While an ambivalent war against the PA started with Israel's reinvasion of West Bank cities and towns (around which it had redeployed earlier) in 2002, a reassessment occurred after Yasser Arafat's death and after his successors promised to collaborate with Israel as much as Arafat used to before the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000. Israel's kidnapping of Hamas officials elected in January 2006 to the Palestinian Legislative Council and its government ministers, followed by the war launched against Hamas officials and rank and file members by the Fatah leadership who lost the elections, and by the illegal coup d'etat staged in collaboration with the US and Israel against Hamas with success in the West Bank and with utter failure in Gaza by Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies, have sealed the fate of the PA. The final coup de grâce came in the last few days when the term of Abbas in office ended on 9 January 2009, his ongoing illegal attempts to extend his term for one more year notwithstanding.

Abbas was the only member of the collaborating group in the West Bank that still had any legitimate and legal status given to him by the elections. Today, as a result, there is no longer a Palestinian Authority as a legal entity or as one that has any popular or juridical legitimacy. The PA was born by Israeli fiat and a collaborating Palestinian elite and has died by Israeli fiat and the actions of the collaborating Palestinian elite. Mahmoud Abbas's absence from the Arab summit in Qatar a few days ago, which convened to support the resisting Palestinians in Gaza, and his characterization of the summit as an "ambush" to divide the Palestinians have exposed him further in the eyes of the Palestinian people as an unrepentant collaborator with the Israeli occupation and with the Arab dictators allied with Israel and the United States. His subsequent attendance of the Sharm al-Sheikh summit with European powers that seek to help Israel decimate the Palestinian people is therefore hardly surprising.

As the PA continues to usurp political power in the West Bank, it remains clear that nothing short of a third Palestinian uprising there will end the illegitimate rule of the PA whose collaborators continue to refuse to pack up and leave. Indeed, the new move by the US and European allies of Israel is to shower money on the PA in the form of reconstruction funds slated for Gaza in the hope of seducing the Israeli-impoverished, -butchered, and -devastated Palestinians in Gaza to stop supporting Hamas and switch allegiance to the illegitimate and collaborationist PA whose European funds will be dangled before them as bait.

If a generation of Palestinian and Arab intellectuals came to believe since the 1970s that armed struggle would not be able to end the Israeli occupation and that negotiations would be the only way to do so, a whole new generation of Palestinian and Arab intellectuals (some of whom are liberal) now understand that negotiations with Israel have only served to intensify the occupation and will only serve to do so in the future. The benefits of 18 years of negotiations with Israel, as is evident for all to see, has been not only more Jewish colonial settlement and more massacres and more confiscation of land, but also the destruction of the Palestinian national movement through imploding it from within. It is true that negotiations have enriched the Palestinian business class in the West Bank and Gaza as well as the comprador intellectuals and the bureaucratic and military class that were inducted in the PA game of non-governmental funding via the so-called peace-process, but these benefits have been delivered to the few by taking away the livelihoods of the many.

What has ended then with Israel's ongoing butchery in Gaza is not only the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority but also negotiations as a viable or a credible path to ending the occupation. This is the situation that the incoming rabidly pro-Israeli American President Obama will be facing soon. The half-white and fully Christian Obama, who, when denying the accusation of being a Muslim assured Americans that not only was he raised by his white Christian mother and her family but also of his belief that the blood of Jesus Christ will "redeem" him, and that he prays to Jesus every night, will continue, along with his pro-Israel operatives, to support Israel's war crimes and to buttress the illegal authority of the Palestinian collaborators in the West Bank.

Israel destroyed the PA in Gaza because it could no longer ensure its collaboration there after Hamas was elected and assumed political power there. After Hamas won the free elections, Israel arrested the majority of Hamas elected officials to ensure that the Fatah leadership continues to collaborate unhindered. The PA survives as an illegal entity in the West Bank today, because Israel still banks on its collaboration, most evident in PA police repression of demonstrations across the West Bank which sought to show solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Injecting the illegitimate and illegal PA with more funds with which to torture the Palestinian people and stuff the pockets of its collaborators will hardly make it a more attractive choice to the majority of poor Palestinians who have been the ultimate losers of PA rule and the Oslo Accords.

In the meantime, the West and Israel will continue to defend Israel's right to defend itself and to deny the Palestinians the right to defend themselves. While some call this international relations, in reality it is nothing short of inter-racial relations wherein Jews, who since World War II have been inducted into the realm of whiteness, have rights that the Palestinians, like their counterparts elsewhere in the non-European world who are forever cast outside the realm of whiteness, do not. Thomas Friedman is right; Israel has been trying to educate the Palestinians that it will punish all their attempts to check its white colonial power to oppress them and that they must understand that they deserve to be punished and defeated for not being white.

The problem is that the Palestinians, students of a universal humanism in which they consider themselves equal to everyone else, keep failing Israel's racial lessons and tests. What the Palestinians ultimately insist on is that Israel must be taught that it does not have the right to defend its racial supremacy and that the Palestinians have the right to defend their universal humanity against Israel's racist oppression. Will Israel and its allies ever learn that lesson? Israeli history tells us that as students of racial supremacy, Zionists have always failed the test of universal humanism.


Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge, 2006).

Flutter Girl

All I have to know is that Hamas-ruled Gaza is devastated, and non-Hamas-ruled West Bank is not.

Obviously, Hamas don't make for great leaders. Regardless of anyone's opinion of them.

NoK

RM291946 wrote:

All I have to know is that Hamas-ruled Gaza is devastated, and non-Hamas-ruled West Bank is not.

Obviously, Hamas don't make for great leaders. Regardless of anyone's opinion of them.

1. You probably did not read the article.

2. Going by your logic, since the Vichy French avoided bombing by the Nazis because they collaborated with them and the British got bombed like crazy, that should mean the British had lousy leaders and Vichy French were great. Great stuff.

3. Hamas were not given the opportunity to lead. Once they got elected to power they were stripped of funds, they suffered a major blockade, their MPs were kidnapped and the list goes on. How exactly do you expect them to lead?

4. You will mention the rocket fire, well as outlaw posted Hamas halted rocket fire during the ceasefire until the Israelis broke it. But you decided to ignore his post because he "went off topic". Which parts of my post will you ignore?

5. If you think the Palestinian areas of the West bank are not devastated then think again. The people there suffer continuously under OCCUPATION.

fuck

SA247125 wrote:

Who is the real terrorist? Oooh, I'll play!

---

Up to a hundred Palestinians in Gaza who have defied house arrest orders have been tortured in children’s hospitals and schools converted into interrogation centers. People have been shot in the legs or had their hands broken. The campaign has been described as a "new massacre." One victim had his eyes put out. No one was safe from the torturers, not even those attending funerals. When will the UN act to put a stop to this horror? Won’t President Obama intervene to stop these barbaric acts? Aren’t international human rights monitors going to put a stop to this? When will War Crimes charges be preferred against the perpetrators?

Never.

Why? Because Hamas is in charge of the torture and their victims are simply Fatah members. If it were Israel who had done these things, well then -- But since it’s Hamas, the same Hamas for whom thousands have been marching in ’solidarity’, it’s a non-story.

The eyewitnesses said that a children’s hospital and a mental health center in Gaza City, as well as a number of school buildings in Khan Yunis and Rafah, were among the places that Hamas had turned into "torture centers."

A Fatah activist in Gaza City claimed that as many as 80 members of his faction were either shot in the legs or had their hands broken for allegedly defying Hamas’s house-arrest orders."What’s happening in the Gaza Strip is a new massacre that is being carried out by Hamas against Fatah," he said. "Where were these [Hamas] cowards when the Israeli army was here?"

Why, waiting for the ceasefire, of course. That turns out to have its own costs, even though they are not widely recognized. But when the cost-benefit of leaving Hamas in posession of Gaza was calculated, was the price of reprisal included in the bill?

-- Richard Fernandez, The Belmont Club

1. For my first point, for argument's sake, let's assume that this is true. How does Hamas shooting up to 80 Fatah members equate to Israel killing hundreds of children alone, not to mention all the women, men, policemen, schools, hospitals, mosques, etc that were wiped out? Israel was able to destroy enough buildings and crops to total billions in damage in just 3 weeks. Hamas has been in charge of Gaza for a little over 2 years and someone is actually trying to compare the little they have done, as outlined above, to the destruction Israel was able to do in a timeframe that makes your point laughable to say the least. Not to mention the fact that Israel's blockade of Gaza was absolutely despicable and created an almost impossible way to rule the Gaza Strip for Hamas.

2. You are actually quoting someone who is not only defending the corrupt Fatah members, but actually advocating on their behalf and quoting them. That's ridiculous. Fatah as led by Dahlan is nothing but a group of gangsters and are absolutely corrupt in their leading of Gaza. That's why the elections resulted in a Hamas win. NoK posted a great article that I'm sure you, along with RM, will not bother reading. It might make a bit too much sense for you.

3. Richard Fernandez provides no context and no real evidence to anything. All you post is simply propaganda. A man trying to defend an actual massacre in Gaza by the Israelis by distracting people to look at bullshit.