Hard News: Off the back of the deck
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1. Genocide of Palestineans has been going on since 1948.
2. Pipes gave testimony to a US congress subcommittee. really unbiased, him and the two other Zionists.
3. A rabbi calling for murder. Lovely.
4. Fuck off with the "and thjat's why Hamas takes such pains.." crap. How many have died from Hamas rockets? How many from Israeli bombs and shells? why was Israel so keen to provoke Hamas into restarting the rocket firing after they stopped? starving a population of 1.5 million. that's defensible, eh?ooh, so Counterpunch is just like MEMRI? get a life, please.
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How shall you refer to Hamas?
however you feel like. -
last count 700 dead?
you obviously have been avoiding the papers in the last few days, eh?
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How shall you refer to Hamas?
however you feel like.Put it another way: how do you define Hamas?
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Israel may be immune from official criticism inside the United States but the rest of the world aren't so happy with them, including some American and Israeli citizens and groups.
However, Hamas are either a "terrorist organisation" or an elected government (although without control of your borders, power and water, trade or other infrastructure it's a very limited role). The Geneva Conventions apply if the latter, and the US government has been at great pains to label Hamas as the former. Can't have it both ways.
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Sacha,
there has been a lot of harsh criticism of Israel around the world, but mainly by non-government sources and non-mainstram media.
major governments and international bodies have been very restrained in their criticism of Israel's ongoing war crimes, imo.
and the immune thing, imo, refers to the fact that Israel has carried on killing, starving and depriving a population of 1.5 million people, trapped in a tiny open prison (ghetto), depite the criticisms it has received.
so, "immune from criticism" doesn't mean no one is criticising, just that the criticism has had no discernable effect.
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how do you define Hamas?
a convenient excuse used by Israel to bomb the hell out of Gaza.
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In reply to Danielle and Jackie:
TV3 has Sunrise doing the inauguration from 5:30am on the 21st Jan.
Sky News (90) is doing lots of the other stuff. Inauguration is noon on Jan 20th Washington DC time (18 hours behind us timewise).Apparently CNN and Facebook also doing live feed.
Other information available from US govt site.
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The 700 hundred figure is hyperlinked to a Reuters report dateline 15th Jan, ie today NZ time.
Here is the link in case you missed it: http://uk.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUKLF220621
1. Genocide of Palestineans has been going on since 1948.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
2. Pipes gave testimony to a US congress subcommittee. really unbiased, him and the two other Zionists.
That does not address the point I made, which is that Cloughley is trying to make Nazi comparisons that are simply wrong.
3. A rabbi calling for murder. Lovely.
Only in the sense that all military action is murder. You will find clergy of all religions calling for it. Furthermore, the point is that Cloughley believes that supporting Israeli action disqualifies you from citizenship.
4. Fuck off with the "and thjat's why Hamas takes such pains.." crap. How many have died from Hamas rockets? How many from Israeli bombs and shells? why was Israel so keen to provoke Hamas into restarting the rocket firing after they stopped? starving a population of 1.5 million. that's defensible, eh?
If Hamas is not as effective as the IDF, it is not for want of trying.
Let me be really clear that I personally do not support military action against Gaza. I think it's strategically and morally wrong. But I am tired of Israel being held to a higher standard than other countries by people whose outrage is notably absent elsewhere. I'm particularly unimpressed by long, tendentious screeds which are a whisker away from claiming a secret cabal of (racist, murdering, genocidal) Jews controls the US.
Therefore, as and when I have time and inclination, I will not be fucking off.
ooh, so Counterpunch is just like MEMRI? get a life, please.
Yes, Counterpunch publishes a lot of articles that are long on rhetoric and selective deployment of facts. Is that really controversial?
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a convenient excuse used by Israel to bomb the hell out of Gaza.
Nicely done, rhetorically speaking. But at this point I think you owe this conversation a little more than that. There are slippages in the debate around this conflict, coming from my side, which equate - without always saying it out right - Hamas and Islamic Jihad with freedom fighters of other wars against fascism and oppression. And there is one hell of a lot of past and present responsabilities that get nicely concealed under that particular label. Ultimately, I'm led to believe that the enemies of Israel are just as immune of criticism as Israel itself, just by different people.
I'm quite aware of the history of this particular rhetorical move - I was around in 1987 when the first Intifada suddenly became the perfect anti-imperialist narrative, and the (Italian, but I'm sure it happened elsewhere too) left went from supporting Israel to just the opposite in the space of one autumn of protest marches. I'm not saying that shifting that position was entirely unjustified - it wasn't. But let's not forget that this is a very two-sided history, even as we rightly blame Israel for the latest and gravest crimes.
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so...Israel has to kill 1,000 people in Gaza and injure thousands more and detroy thousands of buildings and billions of dollars of infrastructure because...
Hamas wants to do the same to Israel but hasn't and can't. apparently.
aren't we glad Israel is held to higher standards than everyone else!
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Civilians seek food, fuel and sanctuary
By Andrew England in JerusalemPublished: January 14 2009 18:52 | Last updated: January 15 2009 09:54
The death toll in Gaza climbed above 1,000 on Wednesday as Israel’s massive military offensive in the strip continued into its 19th day.
Many of those killed have been civilians, including more than 300 children. The bombardment has also forced more than 40,000 people to flee to UN shelters – an increase of about 25,000 in the past week alone as Israel has escalated its ground offensive, with troops advancing on Gaza’s densely populated urban centres.
Palestinians say many people move from one house to another, hoping to find a haven for the night. But with attacks from air, land and sea there are is no sanctuary, they say, only misery.
The plight of Gaza’s 1.5m people – more than half of them children – is exacerbated by the strip’s border points being closed so there is no escape route. And with Israeli forces heading deeper into the area, growing pockets of the population have been trapped in their homes, the United Nations says.
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a very two-sided history
a two-side history where one side, supported by the most powerful superpower in the world, steals the other side's land and houses and villages and farms and herds them into refugee camps for 60 years?
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I was catching up on the Daily Show last night and the show on the 5th had Jon Stewart saying to one of the news people (in nappies) that the reason Israel had moved now was because they thought the next US administration wouldn't be as sympathetic.
That is, there isn't anything that happened a couple of weeks ago in particular that led them to respond any more than a month or three months ago. Jon Stewart called it their "hope and change deadline".
I've been away on holiday so completely away from the news, but if that's accurate, that's truly terrible.
Stephen Walker, I can see this is something you're obviously passionate about, which is fine, indeed, important - what's going on over there is terrible. But if we could have less of the swearing at people who don't agree, that would be nice.
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. . the (Italian, but I'm sure it happened elsewhere too) left went from supporting Israel to just the opposite in the space of one autumn of protest marches.
Seriously Giovanni, if you believe that any left-wing movement anywhere in the world largely supported Israel after 1967, you'd do well to question your memory. By 1987 the whole romantic kibbutzim sctick was a distant memory.
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Stephen, did you read those earlier linked articles - some nuanced background that I found useful without changing my disgust at what's going on.
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Kyle,
ok. sorry. no more swearing.
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Here is a viewpoint from a Lebanese friend (works for the UN) who explained how she saw the conflict. It certainly given me a lot to ponder about the complexity of the situation in the Middle East.
I believe many people, in the West as in the Arab world, cannot see the forest for the trees. Let's start by a fact: Israel has dispossessed the Palestinians of their land, has engaged and is still engaging in ethnic cleansing, and is a country designed for perpetual wars with its neighbours precisely because of its practices. That is a given. Israel, learning from the lessons of the holocaust, will stop at nothing to defend its citizens from real or perceived dangers. Put a pin on that for a minute. The Arabs know that about Israel, but the new player in the region, the one that is planning to be the regional player by replacing the Arabs and speaking in the name of the Umma of Islam, is threatening Israel with obliteration, and using its proxies and mercenaries in our region to make the case. Iran. The mullah regime of Iran is not only oppressing its own citizens.Iran is also funding militants in the Arab world (Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon) to attack Israel and the US to score political points for Iran. It has one major puppet doing its work in the Arab World which is Syria-low on cash and economy in tatters-currently bankrolled by Iran's petrodollars (which are happily on the decline thanks to the global recession).In 2006, when the pressure on Iran was up due to its nuclear plans, hezbollah crossed the blue line, went inside Israel, kidnapped two soldiers and killed several others, starting the Lebanon invasion by Israel. The same scenario is now unfolding. The French have issued a new report on Iran, based on independent intelligence, estimating nuclear arms capacity to be reached in 2010. Suddenly the truce in Gaza is broken by Hamas, another Iran proxy, and rockets were lobbed into Israel. Remember the pin? We, including Hamas, know Israel will react as usual, so why take Gazans as hostages and use them as fodder for Iran's war machine?
All the players involved are using civilians in Palestine as currency in their war games. Hezbollah, who, along with Amal movement and the Syrian forces in Lebanon were responsible for the siege of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in the eighties, is now the defender of Palestine. Syria, whose leader, Assad the first, also bombed Palestinian refugee camps to oblivion in the eighties when Arafat decided to extricate himself and the Palestinian cause from Assad's grasp, and again used Palestinian prisoners from Syrian jails to start a camp war in Lebanon against the Lebanese army (Nahr el Bared camp fighting two years ago). Yes, Israel is using indiscriminate and ferocious force to kill Hamas militants and civilians who happen to be in the way (Hamas leadership are most likely hiding in tunnels under hospitals as Hezbollah leaders did in Beirut), so why use the citizens of Gaza as human shields to gain legitimacy internationally? Hamas are just mercenaries, paid and armed by Iran.
If we are to place blame for what is happening, Israel has never changed in its disregard for Palestinian human life, so it is always guilty of breaking every Geneva convention that was ever written, but we should not forget Iran and its proxies in terrorist activities that are happening in the Middle East (remember bombing Iraq's civilians in hospitals, schools, mosques, and markets? Where did the militants cross from and who armed them? Any recollection of the US strike in Syria's AbuKamal region recently? Syria and Iran have been arming foreign militants and sending them to Iraq to fight the US with Iraqi civilians torn to bits. The World should not forget the Iran and Syrian regimes' part in this sad slaying of the Palestinian people. They, along with Israel, are accountable. -
By 1987 the whole romantic kibbutzim sctick was a distant memory.
No it wasn't. Not in Italy at least. I know in part because my sister is nine years older than I am, so I was well schooled in the movement from 1977 onwards. There had been critics of the green line expansion, of course, but the overall attitude of the left was still widely supportive even at the time of Lebanon and Sabra and Shatila.
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Stephan:
Take a deep breath. I'm not seeing any substance behind idiotically hyperbolic headlines, that are contributing about as much to ending a horrible mess as an airdrop of bacon butties.
This is obviously an issue you feel strongly about, but take a deep breath.
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Stephen, try this story by Gary Kamiya if you didn't catch it the first time on the Conversation Starters thread.
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an airdrop of bacon butties
Boy I bet that would go down well at BDO tho..
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Specifying which Stephen one is talking about might help proceedings.
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I'm uppercase, he's lowercase :D
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Sacha, I broadly agree with Kamiya. The US Israel lobby is Israel's worst friend, egging Israel on to worse and and worse things. I would also point out that AIPAC et al represent a minority of US Jewish opinion and that evangelical eschatology has a lot to answer for in that department.
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