Retired general - Hezbollah using UN post as shield

I think you misunderstand what I am talking about. I am talking about Gwayneco's accusation that people have acted like the word of retired generals can't be disputed.

You seem very defensive about people being anti-Israel. I am not anti-Israel in general. I am anti-Israel in as far as the way they are carrying out this plan, their occupation of the West Bank, Shebaa farms, their failure to live up to peace accords, and current strategy to pursue peace.

When the UN is calling you ten times saying that the bombs are too close to the observers post, then they should stop. If they have to bomb a particular legitimate target the next day, then so be it. Olmert gave his personal word, and that word was broken, whether by mistake, ignorance, or willfullly isn't the point. That action made a liar out of Olmert, and damaged his credibility.

 

This thread is about the UN workers, which were intentionally killed by Israel the other day. The evidence I provided was only meant to prove a point, which was that this was not an isolated incident. Israel has a history of intentionally killing employees of the UN. Here is another example. Ian Hook of the UN killed by Israeli troops in Jenin:

http://www.un.org/unrwa/emergency/stories/jenin.html

On the larger point you brought up, Israel has killed a lot more innocent people in the Arab-Israeli conflict than the Arabs have.

Also, is there an example of Arabs intentionally killing UN workers?

 

Still name-calling I see...Everybody you don't agree with is providing evidence and you resort to calling them 'jew haters.'

 

don't see you denying it

 

So let me get this straight. The UN places neutral "peacekeeping" soldiers in an area that turns into a warzone. These soldiers are in the middle of a warzone, they are not taking sides, then the bad guys use them as human shields, they get killed and the good guys get blamed for it? Why didn't Uncle Kofi remove his soldiers from the place? He knew they were in the line of fire. It's one thing to complain about civilians caught in the crossfire getting killed. It's another thing to complain about soldiers sitting around idly on an active battlefield without taking sides and expecting to be safe. Why is Kofi pointing fingers at Israel when he himself should be taking the blame for not extracting his men out of there? Why has he never pointed fingers at Hezbollah, who have repeatedly shot at and seriously wounded these same UN "observers"?

No, no, don't tell me. It's the moral equivalence thing. Israel is just as bad as Hezbollah too. I know. Bah.

 

Hmm, let's see

Prove it, and thanks for playing.

 

Stop blaming the victims. That is low, disgusting, and wrong. If Olmert gives his word that the UN personnel won't be hit, then why would he even think he should move them.

If you don't think that he has never pointed fingers at Hezbollah for anything, then you really should try and expand your reading.

 

Because if the UN folks leave their clearly marked post, they are in the open, without anything clearly distinguishing them from Hezbollah. They were correct to stay at their clearly marked post which distinguishes them from the terrorist, also given the facts that:

1. They were assured by Israel's leader that they wouldn't be hit.

2. After their phone calls they were told the shelling would cease.

They were lead to believe they were safe, by Israel.

 

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/children.html

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/deaths.html

http://www.ifamericansknew.org/stats/injuries.html

 

It's obvious you're not interested in debate and discussion. Instead of resorting to name-calling and racist accusations, maybe you should try and formulate an argument and back it up with evidence. I did notice that you're not contesting the evidence I provided in this thread. I think that's very telling.

And, no, for the record, I don't hate anybody including Jews.

Do you hate Arabs and Muslims?

Also, since you're so concerned about racism and anti-semitism, are you willing to condemn Israel for its racist policies and practices towards Palestinians?

Afghans aren't Arabs

Well lets look at the two Intifadahs.

First Intifada:

http://www.btselem.org/english/Statistics/First_Intifada_Tables.asp

Second Intifada (One key figure to look out for is that the total # of Israelis killed adds up to the total # of Palestinian children killed by Israel alone):

http://www.btselem.org/english/Statistics/Casualties.asp

 

Trust me, i'd like debate and discuss the situation with evidence. However, you and your cronies will quickly discount it as biased while your "evidence" is biased in my eyes.

You can count who's killed more people but the fact of the matter is that Hamas and Hezbollah fight in and around women, children, other civilians, and the UN. If Israel accidentally kills them, they are not 100% responsible.

And no I don't hate arabs and muslims. I have many muslim friends and a boss of mine was Palestinian in a job I had for a few years during college. I understand that Palestinians are victims of their own policies, the lack of support from the arab world, and Israel's security (excessive, but necessary IMO) policies.

Your posts have been so lopsided and extreme that I find it hard to fathom debating with you. Like I have said many times before, calling for the destruction of Israel (which you have hinted that you support) is the most anti-Jewish statement you can make.

 

There are several sites including pro-Israeli hawk sites which list the civilian deaths caused by each side. Even these sides list civilan deaths caused by Israel as higher than the Palestinian ones.

http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=439
2000-2002

Palestinian non combatants close to 800 vs. Israeli non combatants close to 600

This pro-Israeli site from 2002 lists the number as nearly 3 times as many Palestinian civilian casualties as Israeli casualties though they go on to try and rationalize it.

Let's look at the figures for just 2003. This is from Amnesty Intl.

Likud's own website mentions the discrepency in deaths caused by the IDF and those caused by Palestinians.
http://www.likud.nl/govern53.html

I have included mostly pro-Israel if not official ISraeli political sites to show that even they are not arguing that Israel kills more civilians. There can be no doubt about that fact.

 

When have I hinted at this? Could you provide the post(s) in question?

If you don't like the articles and evidence people are posting, maybe you should dissect the evidence and analyze the articles and explain why you feel the way that you do. I think you would find it difficult to refute a lot of it though.

Also, here's an article by Joseph Massad a professr at Columbia University for you, gwayneco, and others who are irresponsibly throwing around accusations of anti-semitism:

Semites and anti-Semites, That is the Question
by Joseph Massad
Al-Ahram
December 9-15, 2004
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/720/op63.htm

There is much misunderstanding about the term "anti-Semitism" among Jews, Arabs, and European Christians. The term is bandied about as a description of attitudes deemed anti-Jewish, and on occasion anti-Arab, but much of its use is anachronistic and ahistorical. While Zionists and their supporters have been using the charge of anti-Semitism against any and all who oppose Israel and its policies, especially, although not exclusively, in the Arab World, Arabs have taken offense countering that they are "Semites" and therefore by definition cannot be "anti-Semitic". What are the merits of such arguments?

Perhaps some history will help: The term "Semite" was invented by European philologists in the 18th century to distinguish languages from one another by grouping them into "families" descended from one "mother" tongue to which they are all related. In this context, languages came to be organised into "Indo-European" and "Semitic", etc. The philologists claimed that Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, etc., were "Semitic" languages, even though philologists could never find a parent Semitic language from which they all derived.

In the 19th century and with the rise of European biological racism, those who hated Jews could no longer rely on religious difference to mark out post- Enlightenment Jews as objects of their hatred. As religion was no longer part of the argumentation that could be used in a "rational and scientific" Europe, a new basis for the hatred of Jews had to be found. This did not mean however that certain religious ideas could not be rationalised. They often were. In keeping with the Protestant Reformation's abduction of the Hebrew bible into its new religion and its positing of modern European Jews as direct descendants of the ancient Hebrews, post- Enlightenment haters of Jews began to identify Jews as "Semites" on account of their alleged ancestors having spoken Hebrew. In fact the ancient Hebrews spoke Aramaic, the language in which the Talmud was written, as well as parts of the bible. Based on this new philological taxonomy and its correlate racial classifications in the biological sciences, Jews were endowed with this linguistic category that was soon transformed into a racial category. Accordingly, haters of Jews began to identify themselves as "anti-Semites". Thus the object of hatred of European anti-Semitism has always been European Jews.

The claims made by many nowadays that any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is "anti-Semitism" smacks of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti- Semitism. While oppression of, discrimination against, and hatred of communities of Jews qua Jews are found in many periods of European history, the basis for this hatred is different from modern anti-Semitism, as its inspirational sources are not rational science and biology or Enlightenment philology, but religious and other political and economic considerations that scapegoated Jews. This may not be important for those who want only to produce a lachrymose history of European Jews, but it is crucial to the understanding of how the identities produced since the European Enlightenment are different from preceding periods, and that they function as new bases for nationalism, racism, oppression, discrimination, and liberation, and for the modern mechanisms put in place to institutionalise such identities and categories of humans.

The defensive claim made by some that Arabs cannot be "anti-Semitic" because they are "Semites" is equally erroneous and facile. First, I should state that I do not believe that anyone is a "Semite" any more than I believe anyone is an "Aryan", and I do not believe that Arabs or Jews should proudly declare that they are "Semites" because European racists classified them as such. But if the history of European Christian anti-Semitism is mostly a history targeting Jews as objects of discrimination and exclusion, the history of European Orientalism and colonialism is the one that targeted Arabs and Muslims, among many others. This does not mean that Arabs are not considered Semites by European racialist and philological classifications; they indeed are. Nor does this mean that much of the hatred of Arabs today is not derived from a prior anti- Semitism that targeted Jews. Indeed it is. The history of European Orientalism is one that is fully complicit with anti-Semitism from which it derives many of its representations of ancient and modern Arabs and of ancient Hebrews and modern Jews. As Edward Said demonstrated a quarter of a century ago in his classic Orientalism, "what has not been sufficiently stressed in histories of modern anti-Semitism has been the legitimation of such atavistic designations by Orientalism, and... the way this academic and intellectual legitimation has persisted right through the modern age in discussions of Islam, the Arabs, or the Near Orient." Said added: "The transference of popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same." In the context of the 1973 War, Said commented that Arabs came to be represented in the West as having "clearly 'Semitic' features: sharply hooked noses, the evil moustachioed leer on their faces, were obvious reminders (to a largely non- Semitic population) that 'Semites' were at the bottom of all 'our' troubles."

This is important, as many people in the Arab world and outside it think that European Jews are the ones who called themselves "Semites", rather than European Christian racists who invented the term. Of course this misunderstanding is understandable given the fact that Zionism, which adopted wholesale anti-Semitic ideologies, would also call Jews "Semites" and would begin to consider Jews as Semites racially from the late 19th century to the present. In this sense not only do many Arabs think that "Semites" is a Jewish-invented category but so do many European Jews who were (and in some contexts remain) victims of this anti-Jewish designation.

But this is different from the spurious claim that "Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic because they are Semites." There are Arabs today who are anti- Jewish, and they borrow their anti-Jewish rhetoric not from the Palestine experience but from European rhetorics of anti-Semitism. The point is that Arab Christians and Muslims can be anti-Jewish just as Jews can be, and American and Israeli Jews often are, anti-Arab racists, even though many among these Jews and Arabs use the category "Semite" for self-classification. Indeed a large and disproportionate number of the purveyors of anti- Arab racism in today's United States and Israel as well as in Western Europe are Jews. But there is also a disproportionate number of Jews among those who defend Arabs and Muslims against Euro- American and Israeli racism and anti-Semitism. The majority, however, of those who hate Arabs and Muslims in the West remain European and American Christians.

It is often pointed out by Zionists and their supporters that holocaust denial in the Arab world is the major evidence for "Arab anti-Semitism". I have written elsewhere how any Arab or Palestinian who denies the Jewish holocaust falls into the Zionist logic.

While holocaust denial in the West is indeed one of the strongest manifestations of anti-Semitism, most Arabs who deny the holocaust deny it for political not racist reasons. This point is even conceded by the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim Orientalist Bernard Lewis. Their denial is based on the false Zionist claim that the holocaust justifies Zionist colonialism. The Zionist claim is as follows: Since Jews were the victims of the holocaust, then they have the right to colonise Palestine and establish a Jewish colonial-settler state there. Those Arabs who deny the holocaust accept the Zionist logic as correct. Since these deniers reject the right of Zionists to colonise Palestine, the only argument left to them is to deny that the holocaust ever took place, which, to their thinking, robs Zionism of its allegedly "moral" argument. But the fact that Jews were massacred does not give Zionists the right to steal someone else's homeland and to massacre the Palestinian people. The oppression of a people does not endow it with rights to oppress others. If those Arab deniers refuse to accept the criminal Zionist logic that justifies the murder and oppression of the Palestinians by appealing to the holocaust, then these deniers would no longer need to make such spurious arguments. All those in the Arab world who deny the Jewish holocaust are in my opinion Zionists.

Anyone who believes in social justice and opposes racist oppression must be in solidarity with all holocaust victims, especially European Jews, 90 per cent of whom were exterminated by a criminal and genocidal regime. Such a person must equally be against the Zionist abduction of the holocaust to justify Israel's colonial and racist policies. The attempt by holocaust deniers to play down the number of holocaust victims is obscene, as whether one million or 10 million Jews were killed, the result is still genocide and this would never justify Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. Such obscene number games on the part of holocaust deniers are hardly different from Zionist Jewish denial of the Palestinian nakba and are also similar to the continued Zionist attempts to play down the number of Palestinian refugees. While the nakba and the holocaust are not equivalent in any sense, the logic of denying them is indeed the same. I should stress here that the Palestine Liberation Organisation and most Palestinian intellectuals have spoken and written since the 1960s of their solidarity with Jewish holocaust victims and have attacked those who deny it took place. Unlike the official and unofficial Israeli denial of the expulsion of the Palestinians and the numbers of the refugees, those who deny the holocaust among Palestinians have no position whatsoever inside the PLO nor any legitimacy among the Palestinian intelligentsia.

Today we live in a world where anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred, derived from anti-Semitism, is everywhere in evidence. It is not Jews who are being murdered by the thousands by Arab anti- Semitism, but rather Arabs and Muslims who are being murdered by the tens of thousands by Euro- American Christian anti-Semitism and by Israeli Jewish anti-Semitism. If anti-Semites posited Jews as the purveyors of corruption, as financier bankers who control the world, as violent communist subversives, and as poisoners of Christian wells, the Arab and the Muslim today are seen as in control of the oil market and therefore of the global financial market, the purveyors of hatred and corruption of civilised Christian and Jewish societies, as violent terrorists, and as possible mass murderers, not with some Semitic Jewish poison but with Semitic Arab nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons (which are nowhere to be found). Thus Michael Moore feels vindicated in telling us in his recent film, Fahrenheit 9/11, about the portion of the American economy controlled by Saudi money while neglecting to mention the much, much larger American share of the Saudi economy. Anti- Semitism is alive and well today worldwide and its major victims are Arabs and Muslims and no longer Jews. The fight should indeed be against all anti-Semitism no matter who the object of its oppression is, Arab or Jew.

 

A senior UN official, asked about the information contained in Maj. Hess-von Kruedener's e-mail concerning Hezbollah presence in the vicinity of the Khiam base, denied the world body had been caught in a contradiction.

"At the time, there had been no Hezbollah activity reported in the area," he said. "So it was quite clear they were not going after other targets; that, for whatever reason, our position was being fired upon.

"Whether or not they thought they were going after something else, we don't know. The fact was, we told them where we were. They knew where we were. The position was clearly marked, and they pounded the hell out of us."

Even if Hezbollah was not firing rockets at the time of the bombing, Maj. Hess-von Kruedener's e-mail indicates they were using a terrorist tactic of purposely drawing out enemy forces near a neutral site, said retired Capt. Peter Forsberg, who did two UN tours between 1993 and 1995 during the Bosnian war.

The UN's limited mandate, meaning that its observers are unarmed and have few options, put the observers in a poor position, he said.

If indeed Israel was attempting to hit Hezbollah fighters in the area, it hasn't yet used the excuse to explain its actions because it wouldn't make it any less guilty in the world's eyes, Capt. Forsberg said.

 

RR,

That article shows how polarized both sides are. Again, this is why we are at war. The holocaust was a huge factor in why Israel exists, but not the only justification. There are 22+ Islamic countries with various types of governments and there can't be 1 jewish one?

"Today we live in a world where anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred, derived from anti-Semitism, is everywhere in evidence."

I agree that there is anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred is out of control. I just hope that the moderates don't turn extreme due to the current confilct. If they do, we are looking at WWIII.

"It is not Jews who are being murdered by the thousands by Arab anti- Semitism, but rather Arabs and Muslims who are being murdered by the tens of thousands by Euro- American Christian anti-Semitism and by Israeli Jewish anti-Semitism."

This has to be the most ridiculous and inflammatory statement in the article. The only reason there are western interests in the region now is because of the policy change that happened after 9/11. Arabs and Muslims that resist the US military are being killed. Collateral damage (deemed "murder" by this whackjob) is regrettable, but unavoidable.

I know that both arabs muslims and jews are semites. This is why I use the term anti-Jewish. Again I will still stick to my statement and any jew will agree with me on here. Calling for the destruction of Israel is the most anti-Jewish statement you can make.