Israel's insanity

So I guess if quoting Jews who have problems with Israel means something, you guys will be all over Arabs who are pro Israel, right? That will "prove" that the Israeli side is just and good according to your logic.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nonie-darwish/the-gaza-prison-camp_b_91800.html

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,540689,00.html

http://www.arabsforisrael.com/

Hello...

Anybody there....

Is this thing on?

 

I fully agree.

Now where is thacabbage with his outrage? Or does he agree with that asinine post as well?

 

you all are missing the point here, on purpose I believe..

here's what I know:

over 215 CHILDREN and 89 WOMEN were killed in 11 days.. 2 schools were struck (and, for your "reliable anonymous witnesses" Mr. Ottomaton, the FREAKING U.N guy in Gaza said that no Hamas fighter was even in the vicinity of the school that was struck, much less launching Rockets from it.. now that's a reliable NON-ANONYMOUS source, you know, a U.N official..

as a matter of fact, let's for a second hypothetically say that the Hamas fighters were hiding in the school and using the poor children as human shields (something that's 100% untrue as expressed by the U.N official), would you still fire at the school, killing over 60 innocent people? let's say we're here in the U.S and a hostage crisis takes place.. the kidnappers are shooting at the police/FBI, and they have a bunch of hostages.. now, how would you like the FBI to demolish that place, killing the bad guys AND the hostages? and how is that any different that what was done with the school?

Children Death Tally: 215
total civilian israeli death tally: 3

 

Blame Hamas.

 

I'll reply to my own post. I guess I failed to note as an "organization" which gives the OP some wiggle room in terms of whether his post was completely beyond the pale. Such thinking is extreme.

I do consider it dangerous and fascist behavior to start referring to groups of other humans as "not being like other humans or devoid of having moral values. I have never done that with conservatives, Likud fanatics, the Bush gang who killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis needlessly etc.

This is very close to calling folks in Hamas "subhuman". I would think that Jews would be very sensitive to doing this. For that matter I would think Jackie as a German would be extremely sensitive to this type of thinking.

 

I would think that anyone should be extremely sensitive to this type of thinking.

Hamas, on the other hand, is not. They openly call for "wiping out the jews" and even indoctrinate their children with this kind of thinking.

"Sanabel, what do you want to do to help the Al-Aqsa Mosque?" Farfur asks on the children's program of Hamas's Al-Aqsa television station. "We want to fight." "And what else?" "Wipe out the Jews." Now Farfur, the cartoon character on Hamas's children's television program, is satisfied. Farfur is a carbon copy of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, but the Hamas version does something that Mickey would never do: He entertains children while propagating the murder of Jews.

International protests forced Hamas to take its Disney clone out of circulation. Al-Aqsa complied, but promptly turned Farfur's departure into an anti-Semitic statement: Farfur was clubbed to death by an Israeli official. Then the girl hosting the program turned to the camera and said: "You've seen how the Jews killed Farfur as a martyr. What do you want to say to the Jews?" A three-year-old girl named Shaima called into the show to say: "We don't like Jews, because they are dogs! We will fight them!" "Oh, Shaima, you're right," the girl in the studio replied, "the Jews are criminals and our enemies."
Farfur's appearances are typical of Hamas's anti-Semitic propaganda, which the organization also exports to Germany via satellite, hoping to breed new generations of fanatical anti-Semites and suicide bombers.

(...)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,553724,00.html

If that is not preaching - to children! - a doctrine of viewing an entire group of people as subhumans, then what is?

 

Well, I wouldn't confine the comparison to the Third Reich. In many (if not all) wars, the enemy is dehumanized in the eyes of the relevant parties. In World War I, there were rumors circulating among the French about Germans collecting eyeballs of French children (and probably vice-versa). I think finding a way to devalue an enemy by denying their humanity is an essential ingredient in a serious war. It makes it easier to justify killing them, bombing their children, etc.

I think people in this thread have fallen in that trap in their need to reconcile some cognitive dissonance between the desire to see Israel as fundamentally good and their recognition that Israel is slaughtering innocent women and children.

I think whenever you see someone say this or that party is different from the rest of us, you know he has a dog in the fight.

 

If you would consider the US Alliance with the Sunni tribesmen in Iraq to be a barter then I could see how that term would be more appropriate. Alliances in many cases are ones of convenience such as our alliance with the USSR in WWII.

That said I agree we will never know about counterfactual history but my point of that citation wasn't to introduce speculative history just to point out that citations as Ottomaton's earlier regarding Arabs allying themselves with Nazis in WWII might have more to do with politics than endemic anti-Semitism since even a radical Zionist group was considering an alliance with the Nazis.

 

That's exactly what it is. But, should any posters on this board be engaging in similar behavior? Certainly Hamas is wrong to do this, so don't follow their example.

 

Is it your opinion that Israel can rightfully blow up anything in Gaza without impunity, as long as Hamas has weapons there?

Why can't we say that Hamas is wrong and despicable to use civilians as cover, and Israel is wrong to bomb them knowing the predictable consequences of such actions? You can claim that they are justified in doing so in order to protect their own citizens. And you may be right if their incursion put an end to the violence being directed towards Israelis. But we know very well that this is not going to be the result. You say that it's not right for Israeli citizens to live in fear for their lives. I absolutely agree. But in what way do these attacks address that problem? Don't you see how this is totally counterproductive? Do you not understand that Hamas gets its power by exploiting the hatred and resentment Palestinians feel against Israel? Israel may succeed in wiping out Hamas, but if in doing so they're killing hundreds or thousands of civilians, other groups will rise up and replace them.

 

Except the notable difference being that the Arab leaders espoused and continued to espouse radical anti-Semitic ideas, such as 'It is your duty to God to kill all the Jews in the world', formed SS battalions, and went to Berlin to preach anti-Semitism on the radio. That is above and beyond just a unpleasant alliance of convenience.

Show me comparable pictures of the Jewish leaders in Palestine, or transcripts of their pro-Final Solution radio addresses and I might be more inclined to put stock in what you say:




Carl Mannerheim and Ante Pavelić were both formally allied with Germany. But to compare their support for genocide as being equal simply on that basis is asinine. Pavelić could have made Hitler nausious with his cruelty. Mannerheim was defending his country against the Soviet Union who went to any port in a storm.

 

An interesting article a friend sent to me.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...ate-the-west-so-much-we-will-ask-1230046.html



Robert Fisk: Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask

So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?

Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?

What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.

What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.

I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.

The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.

Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.

And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.

Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.

 

Both Jews and Germans must be careful to never call anybody subhuman. Palestinians are no better or worse "human beings" than any other group. They are a product of their environment which is incredibly complex.

With that being said, there is absolutely ZERO comparison to this war and the holocaust. I can't even emphasize the stupity of this commonly used analogy. I should be insulted by it but it's so dumb I actually feel sorry for those who use it. You should be downright ashamed and need to visit a museum before making such moronic and illogical comments.

 

First off, you lie about what he actually said, expanding it way beyond what he actually claimed. Anybody with google news can find what he actually said, which was that there was that he spoke with staffers who assured him that there were no militants inside the building. I think we will all agree that Hamas wasn't firing mortars from within the building, as it had a roof which would make that very difficult.

That having been said, here is a great example of that vaunted UN honesty and impartiality of which you are so sure:

The 'impartial and objective' UN officials weigh in on how the IDF was 'deliberately attacking the UN observers'.

TThe claims are proven false by one of the dead soldier's own emails to his superior officer, and yet this is never acknowledged by the UN.

 

I think anyone with some common sense knows that the likelihood of UN officials working in Gaza being impartial to the Israelis is fairly minute.

 

Are you talking to me? What are you referring to? When did I call any group subhumans?

 

That is just a misreading of the article. The soldier's email said the IDF was bombing areas near the post for tactical reasons, apparently to engage Hezbollah. But Israel knew about the UN post, and they apparently gave assurances to not attack it directly.

This is what the senior UN official says in your article:

"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."

The email does not prove or even suggest that Hezbollah fighters were stationed in the immediate vicinity of the UN post at the time of the attacks. There is no indication that the post was in any way a legitimate military target. And yet it got pounded, directly, by the IDF. I thought they take every precaution to be as precise as possible? If they know its an unarmed UN station, clearly marked, why would they attack it?