Gaza under attack yet again.

[Awesome Wells]

Mad Mel poison whore
at paranoia's deadly door
21st Century Schizoid sham

 

[butchersapron]

Were there even 60,000 people in Gaza?

I found his comment odious. Yes of course Israel could be even more bloodthirsty, that's ahrdly a counter argument.

Lots of this Israeli state is bloodthirsty, irrational demonic comments going around. This is daft. What the dominant faction of the Israeli state is doing is perfectly rational - it's seeking to use an opportunity afforded/worked by the murder of the three young settlers to break the recent rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah so that they don't have to keep their post oslo promises and agreements. In order to do that, they used all the available state bodies and their influence on non-state institutions to whip an anti-palestinian feelings among a large part of the population (playing on fears of pogroms etc) based on those murders (murders they knew had already happened as they pretended they didn't and were looking to save the still alive kids) in or to pressure them to carry out a series of aggressive provocative raids etc in gaza and the west bank - and keeping it up until they got the reaction from hamas in gaza that they wanted. Result: potential unity of palestinian political organisations off the table and the wider process of concessions agreed now back in 'formaldehyde' (as a great article i read recently put it). Look at this thing politically, not as some pathological social condition, or as the result of harder nastier jews being able to survive the nazi death camps and so breeding out softer traits or anything on that idiotic continuum.

 

[frogwoman]

Lots of this Israeli state is bloodthirsty, irrational demonic comments going around. This is daft. What the dominant faction of the Israeli state is doing is perfectly rational - it's seeking to use an opportunity afforded/worked by the murder of the three young settlers to break the recent rapprochement between Hamas and Fatah so that they don't have to keep their post oslo promises and agreements. In order to do that, they used all the available state bodies and their influence on non-state institutions to whip an anti-palestinian feelings among a large part of the population (playing on fears of pogroms etc) based on those murders (murders they knew had already happened as they pretended they didn't and were looking to save the still alive kids) in or to pressure them to carry out a series of aggressive provocative raids etc in gaza and the west bank - and keeping it up until they got the reaction from hamas in gaza that they wanted. Result: potential unity of palestinian political organisations off the table and the wider process of concessions agreed now back in 'formaldehyde' (as a great article i read recently put it). Look at this thing politically, not as some pathological social condition, or as the result of harder nastier jews being able to survive the nazi death camps and so breeding out softer traits or anything on that idiotic continuum.

do you have a link to the article butchers?

 

[butchersapron]

do you have a link to the article butchers?

I put in a number of links there - none of them seem to have worked - give us a sec and i'll try again.

edit: should be there now

 

[butchersapron]

Mad Mel poison whore
at paranoia's deadly door
21st Century Schizoid sham

Can you leave out the bitches and whore stuff please? Try some politics instead.

 

[Awesome Wells]

Mad Mel calls Mehdi Hassan morally bankrupt after he repeatedly and consistently condemns Hamas.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

Palestinian unity, not Hamas, is the real threat to Israel.

Long live free Palestine!

 

[SpackleFrog]

This killing isn't for the sake of Israel. It's for the politicians now in power in Israel. The hard right maintains it's power through non-stop war.......'we'll protect you'.....kind of Orwellian.

No. Israel is one of the few and perhaps only country that has 100% pure proportional representation. Israeli's get what they voted for albeit obviously in coalition. This genocide is, like it or not, backed by a majority of the population.

Neither statement is mutually exclusive...

 

[SpookyFrank]

Were there even 60,000 people in Gaza?

I found his comment odious. Yes of course Israel could be even more bloodthirsty, that's ahrdly a counter argument.

There are millions of people in the Gaza strip.

 

[frogwoman]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...onvinces_american_jews_to_embrace_israel.html

What makes an American kid with shaky Hebrew and no ties to the state of Israel suddenly decide he is ready to make this sacrifice? Maybe Max was especially lost, or especially susceptible, or maybe he was just looking to do some good and became convinced by his Birthright experience that putting on an IDF uniform and grabbing a gun was the way to do it. That serving and protecting the Jewish people was the moral thing to do, and that the best way to accomplish it was to go fight for the Jewish state. It turns out that it’s not that hard to persuade young people to see the world a certain way and that Birthright is very good at doing it. You spend hundreds of millions of dollars to convince young Jews that they are deeply connected to a country that desperately needs their support? This is what you get.

 

[frogwoman]

"Christians united for Israel" ugh

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...e_most_insanely_pro_israel_conference_of.html

 

[frogwoman]

But during breaks it was easy to chat with attendees, to walk through a CUFI exhibit on how it was fighting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement on campuses—and to notice that Hagee’s books were on sale next to CUFI T-shirts. In Hagee’s latest, Four Blood Moons, he advances the theory that a series of lunar events that started on April 2014 means that “in these next two years, we're going to see something dramatic happen in the Middle East involving Israel that will change the course of history in the Middle East and impact the whole world.”

 

[nino_savatte]

"Christians united for Israel" ugh

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...e_most_insanely_pro_israel_conference_of.html

Christian Zionists are nutters. They seriously believe that Book of Revelations crap about the 'second coming' and the 'rapture'. I'm willing to bet some of them are as anti-Semitic as hell underneath all that support.

 

[SpackleFrog]

"At 8:30 this morning the General Secretary of WAC-MAAN, Assaf Adiv, was detained while picketing with striking Palestinian workers in front of the Zarfati Garage in Mishor Adumim, the industrial zone of the West Bank settlement Maaleh Adumim. The workers began the strike two days ago in light of the Zarfati management’s ongoing refusal to negotiate, which peaked with the firing of the head of their Workers’ Committee Hatem Abu Ziadeh."

http://eng.wac-maan.org.il/?p=1044

 

[weltweit]

weltweit - what do you mean by Honderich supports Hamas?

On the Moral Maze Melanie Phillips asked him if he supported Hamas and he replied yes. Unless I am muddling him up with one of the other witnesses, but I don't think so.

 

[teqniq]

@bencnn: BREAKING: Medical services reporting at least 30 dead in school where 1000+ had taken refuge in Bait Hanoun. +200 wounded. #Gaza

 

[Idris2002]

Well, I've just been to a depressing meeting on drafting a protest letter over Gaza (and Germany's arms exports to Israel) which was punctuated by one upset person leaving the room.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Wrong. If you kick your front door in, you get inside the house. You accept a certain loss in order to achieve your objective. The rockets Hamas/whoever is actually firing the rockets most likely supplied by Hamas will never achieve the objective of successful resistance so they are obviously fired for a different reason.

You're looking at the issue from a conventional military standpoint, in that you're talking about defined objectives (i.e. "successful resistance"), but the facts of asymmetric warfare mean that any resistance by an oppressed minority is "successful", in that it draws attention to the plight of the oppressed minority.
For the Palestinians (and I'm talking about the 70% or so of Gazans who may not be Islamists, but who stand behind what HAMAS do), even with operations like "Cast Lead" and "Protective Edge", the cost/benefit analysis is worth it - keep the rebellion in the press, and get the story out when the state of Israel goes in too hard. After all, the Palestinians have nothing to lose but their lives, and they're well aware of how cheaply the state of Israel holds their lives.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Saudis spend god knows how much on arms every year that they'll never use,shame they dont try and give the Pals some to defend themselves...wishfull thinking on my behalf I suppose

The Saudis (or at least the Saudi ruling classes) want nothing to do with helping the Palestinians - not when the majority of them are secularist, and pro-democratic.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Hamas resistance is successful, they are standing up to one of the most poweful (and evil) states in the world and still resisting.

Are you Hasbara?

For the resistance to be successful, they only need resist. They don't need to "win", in conventional terms.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Are you a fucking idiot?

Are you unable to grasp that insurgency doesn't need to win battles - that the nature of insurgency is such that merely to be insurgent is "victory" enough?
Seriously: Study up on the LTTE, on the Provisional IRA, th Shining Path, or FARC - basically on any insurgent minority/region. There's only one answer to insurgency, and it's the one answer neither the state of Israel, or any other (pseudo)-democratic state can use - liquidation.

 

[Idris2002]

Are you unable to grasp that insurgency doesn't need to win battles - that the nature of insurgency is such that merely to be insurgent is "victory" enough?
Seriously: Study up on the LTTE, on the Provisional IRA, th Shining Path, or FARC - basically on any insurgent minority/region. There's only one answer to insurgency, and it's the one answer neither the state of Israel, or any other (pseudo)-democratic state can use - liquidation.

I dunno, Sri Lanka seems to have liquidated the LTTE pretty effectively.

 

[SpackleFrog]

You're looking at the issue from a conventional military standpoint, in that you're talking about defined objectives (i.e. "successful resistance"), but the facts of asymmetric warfare mean that any resistance by an oppressed minority is "successful", in that it draws attention to the plight of the oppressed minority.
For the Palestinians (and I'm talking about the 70% or so of Gazans who may not be Islamists, but who stand behind what HAMAS do), even with operations like "Cast Lead" and "Protective Edge", the cost/benefit analysis is worth it - keep the rebellion in the press, and get the story out when the state of Israel goes in too hard. After all, the Palestinians have nothing to lose but their lives, and they're well aware of how cheaply the state of Israel holds their lives.

So this is successful resistance because even if it encourages stuff like Cast Lead and Protective Edge (I'm not sure it does actually encourage these operations and think they would likely happen anyway but it does I suppose give a sort of pretext for them; albeit a horrifically unconvincing one) it keeps Israel/Palestine in the newspapers?

I'm sorry, I don't believe that Hamas fires these rockets in the hope that the Guardian and Wall Street Journal will keep talking about them. I think it has far more to do with backing up the image they wish to project as the defenders of the Palestinian masses and therefore continue to enjoy a degree of social support from them.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Godzilla.

Especially if Godzilla is fighting Moth-Ra over Singapore.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I dunno, Sri Lanka seems to have liquidated the LTTE pretty effectively.

And it took the Sinhala majority eschewing democracy (or at least democratic practice) and the complicity of "the west" to do so. Prior to that the LTTE had won most of its' aims over the prior 40 years.

 

[SpackleFrog]

Are you unable to grasp that insurgency doesn't need to win battles - that the nature of insurgency is such that merely to be insurgent is "victory" enough?
Seriously: Study up on the LTTE, on the Provisional IRA, th Shining Path, or FARC - basically on any insurgent minority/region. There's only one answer to insurgency, and it's the one answer neither the state of Israel, or any other (pseudo)-democratic state can use - liquidation.

Provisional IRA, Shining Path and FARC not exactly successful either...

I don't dispute that insurgency is about winning in the conventional sense. But to be meaningful at all, it must at least constitute an irritation to the opposing force. I've seen no evidence that Hamas's rocket firing causes the state of Israel any annoyance whatsoever.

 

[uk benzo]

For the resistance to be successful, they only need resist. They don't need to "win", in conventional terms.

I read something very similar and just as poignant:

Israel cannot win and Palestine cannot lose.

 

[SpackleFrog]

I read something very similar and just as poignant:

Israel cannot win and Palestine cannot lose.

I'm glad you find it poignant but I'm finding it hard to buy into this 'Palestine can't lose' thing what with the death toll rising and all.

 

[scalyboy]

I'd say anti-Semitism on the left is a definite problem (I've argued this on threads again and again) I would also say that sometimes SOME critiques of Israel are motivated by anti-Semitism

I'd agree there is some on the Left, but IMHO Left anti-Zionism is just as likely to be anti-US; the USA (correctly) seen as the main protector/encourager of the Israeli state.

There is also, I would argue, a weird and most probably unconscious idea that a lot of non-Jewish people hold - that Jews are meant to be victims and to see those in Israel as powerful oppressors is difficult for these people to comprehend.

I have no proof of this, but I have a sneaking feeling that the well-known two-and-ahalf-thousand-year history of the Jewish people as stateless outcasts, forever the humble oppressed, is such a powerful idea (in the Bible/popular history/literature/film) that when Israel's actions go counter to this, a lot of people I reckon can't process it ,and somehow on a semi-conscious level feel unsettled, that it is deeply disturbing and wrong.

Of course the irritating thing about this view is that it makes the false conflation between Israelis and Jews
I find it deeply frustrating to be told "Israel is as bad as the Nazis" as if this was some great, new insight, and as if I - as a really rubbish non-practising (well virtually) semi-Jew - can do anything about it*, as if the Israeli state gives a shit what I think ...

I could be way wrong about this 'popular psychology' idea of mine, but for me it goes some way to explain why Israeli oppression/aparthied and war crimes (let's not beat around the bush) will get people (rightly) outraged and out on the streets, whereas (for example) China's continuing oppression/aparthied/occupation and killing of Tibetans, or of the Muslim Uighurs (sp.?) seems to pass a lot of people by. And China is a major trading partner of the West.

* other than boycotting Israeli products, which I do anyway.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Her problem with Hamas is that it calls for the extermination of Israel...

Except that they do no such thing. They call for the eradication of Zionism.