1300 People Killed, 5400 Injured in Occupied Palestine

[bob sacamano]

Would it be too much to ask for you and Niss to wear
matching pants during the "moped chicken" video?

Hey hedley, don't try to hijack this thread by making fun of niss because he rides a moped and wears israeli air force pants while flying his piper cherokee.

p.s. popping your collar is quite gay, might want to fix it

[Hedley]

is quite gay

I defer to your breadth and depth of knowledge on a subject
which you are clearly an expert on

[bob sacamano]

Rice shame-faced by Bush over UN Gaza vote: Olmert

JERUSALEM (AFP) – US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was left shame-faced after President George W. Bush ordered her to abstain in a key UN vote on the Gaza war, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on Monday.

"She was left shamed. A resolution that she prepared and arranged, and in the end she did not vote in favour," Olmert said in a speech in the southern town of Ashkelon.

The UN Security Council passed a resolution last Thursday calling for an immediate ceasefire in the three-week-old conflict in the Gaza Strip and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza where hundreds have been killed.

Fourteen of the council's 15 members voted in favour of the resolution, which was later rejected by both Israel and Hamas.

The United States, Israel's main ally, had initially been expected to voted in line with the other 14 but Rice later became the sole abstention.

"In the night between Thursday and Friday, when the secretary of state wanted to lead the vote on a ceasefire at the Security Council, we did not want her to vote in favour," Olmert said

"I said 'get me President Bush on the phone'. They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn't care. 'I need to talk to him now'. He got off the podium and spoke to me.

"I told him the United States could not vote in favour. It cannot vote in favour of such a resolution. He immediately called the secretary of state and told her not to vote in favour."

Bush has consistently placed the blame for the conflict on Hamas, telling reporters on Monday that while he wanted to see a "sustainable ceasefire" in Gaza, it was up to Hamas to choose to end its rocket fire on Israel.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090112/pl ... _newsmlmmd

[Hedley]

Maybe you should consider highlighting in pink instead of red?

[morrow]

The Gaza War and Proportionality January 8, 2009

http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=191

About Dissent Magazine

Dissent is a quarterly magazine of politics and culture edited by Michael Walzer. A magazine of the left, Dissent is also one of independent minds and strong opinions. "A pillar of leftist intellectual provocation," writes the New York Times, Dissent is "devoted to slaying orthodoxies on the right and on the left." Adds historian John Patrick Diggins, "Dissent is kind of an anomaly...a magazine that's all heart and good hope."

LET’S TALK about proportionality—or, more important, about its negative form. “Disproportionate” is the favorite critical term in current discussions of the morality of war. But most of the people who use it don’t know what it means in international law or in just war theory. Curiously, they don’t realize that it has been used far more often to justify than to criticize what we might think of as excessive violence. It is a dangerous idea.

Proportionality doesn’t mean “tit for tat,” as in the family feud. The Hatfields kill three McCoys, so the McCoys must kill three Hatfields. More than three, and they are breaking the rules of the feud, where proportionality means symmetry. The use of the term is different with regard to war, because war isn’t an act of retribution; it isn’t a backward looking activity, and the law of even-Steven doesn’t apply.

Like it or not, war is always purposive in character; it has a goal, an end-in-view. The end is often misconceived, but not always: to defeat the Nazis, to stop the dominos from falling, to rescue Kuwait, to destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Proportionality implies a measure, and the measure here is the value of the end-in-view. How many civilian deaths are “not disproportionate to” the value of defeating the Nazis? Answer that question, put that way, and you are likely to justify too much—and that is the way proportionality arguments have worked over most of their history.

The case is the same with arguments focused on particular acts of war. Consider the example of an American air raid on a German tank factory in the Second World War that kills a number of civilians living nearby. The justification goes like this: The number of civilians killed is “not disproportionate to” the damage those tanks would do in days and months to come if they continued to roll off the assembly line. That is a good argument, and it does indeed justify some number of the unintended civilian deaths. But what number? How do you set an upper limit, given that there could be many tanks and much damage?

Because proportionality arguments are forward looking, and because we don’t have positive, but only speculative, knowledge about the future, we need to be very cautious in using this justification. The commentators and critics using it today, however, are not being cautious at all; they are not making any kind of measured judgment, not even a speculative kind. “Disproportionate” violence for them is simply violence they don’t like, or it is violence committed by people they don’t like.

So Israel’s Gaza war was called “disproportionate” on day one, before anyone knew very much about how many people had been killed or who they were. The standard proportionality argument, looking ahead as these arguments rightly do, would come from the other side. Before the six months of cease-fire (when the fire never ceased), Hamas had only primitive and homemade rockets that could hit nearby small towns in Israel. By the end of the six months, they had far more advanced rockets, no longer homemade, that can hit cities 30 or 40 kilometers away. Another six months of the same kind of cease-fire, which is what many nations at the UN demanded, and Hamas would have rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv. And this is an organization explicitly committed to the destruction of Israel. How many civilian casualties are “not disproportionate to” the value of avoiding the rocketing of Tel Aviv? How many civilian casualties would America’s leaders think were “not disproportionate to” the value of avoiding the rocketing of New York?

The answer, again, is too many. We have to make proportionality calculations, but those calculations won’t provide the most important moral limits on warfare.

These are the questions that point us toward the important limits. First, before the war begins: Are there other ways of achieving the end-in-view? In the Israeli case, this question has shaped the intense political arguments that have been going on since the withdrawal from Gaza: What is the right way to stop the rocket attacks? How do you guarantee that Hamas won’t acquire more and more advanced rocketry? Many policies have been advocated, and many have been tried.

Second, once the fighting begins, who is responsible for putting civilians in the line of fire? It is worth recalling that in the Lebanon war of 2006, Kofi Anan, then the Secretary-General of the UN, though he criticized Israel for a “disproportionate” response to Hezbollah’s raid, also criticized Hezbollah—not just for firing rockets at civilians but also for firing them from heavily populated civilian areas, so that any response would inevitably kill or injure civilians. I don’t think that the new Secretary General has made the same criticism of Hamas, but Hamas clearly has a similar policy.

The third question: Is the attacking army acting in concrete ways to minimize the risks they impose on civilians? Are they taking risks themselves for that purpose? Armies choose tactics that are more or less protective of the civilian population, and we judge them by their choices. I haven’t heard this question asked about the Gaza war by commentators and critics in the Western media; it is a hard question, since any answer would have to take into account the tactical choices of Hamas.

In fact, all three are hard questions, but they are the ones that have to be asked and answered if we are to make serious moral judgments about Gaza—or any other war. The question “Is it disproportionate?” isn’t hard at all for people eager to say yes, but asked honestly, the answer will often be no, and that answer may justify more than we ought to justify. Asking the hard questions and worrying about the right answers—these are the moral obligations of commentators and critics, who are supposed to enlighten us about the moral obligations of soldiers. There hasn’t been much enlightenment these last days.

[bob sacamano]

Maybe you should consider highlighting in pink instead of red?

nevermind...

[bob sacamano]

An Israeli woman, suffering from shock, is helped by a soldier after a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit the southern town of Sderot, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2009. Israeli troops battled Palestinian gunmen in a suburb of Gaza City on Sunday morning, waging one of their fiercest ground battles so far as Israel's military inched closer to Gaza's main population centers and residents braced for an expansion of the offensive.

Smoke rises over Gaza as an Israeli Jewish man raises his hands at the Israeli side of the Gaza border, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2009. Israeli troops battled Palestinian gunmen in a suburb of Gaza City on Sunday morning, waging one of their fiercest ground battles so far as Israel's military inched closer to Gaza's main population centers and residents braced for an expansion of the offensive.

San Fransico yesterday

Taken from: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/200...7/18559340.php

4 hours ago: Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, center talks to reporters after arriving from Gaza along with his colleague doctor Eric Fosse, unseen in Palestinian ambulances at the Egyptian border crossing terminal of Rafah, Egypt Saturday, Jan. 10, 2009. Dr Gilbert called the Israeli offensive in Gaza "completely useless" and compared the isolated Gaza Strip, home to 1.4 million people, to the Warsaw ghetto in Poland where Jews were forced to live during the Nazi occupation Describing the hospital where he worked, Gilbert said it was completely overwhelmed and that there weren't enough beds, operating rooms or supplies to take care of the wounded who kept flowing in daily.

[habit]

Well looks like all of you HAMAS supporters gained yet another ally in OSAMA bin laden who released a tape today calling for a holy war against Israel, congrats to you supporters here, this man in a very prominent and well known chracter and his words usually bring action so you may get your wishes after all. It must be comforting to have such a well known freedom fighter saying the same things some of you here are saying, once again congrats.

[2R]

No words can justify the wicked murder of innocent children.

Some would say that one mans freedom fighter is anothers terrorist.The modern state of Isreal was founded by a gang of Terrorists who shamefully murdered and killed members of an army that had defeated Adolf Hitler.They plotted to unlawfully kill and murder anyone who did not agree with them .Anyone who did not agree with them was marked for death.Killed by illegal murders.

Fear not habit ,history will repeat itself and even the wisdom of Solomon could not protect the first state of Isreal from reaping the benefits of its friendly attitude towards its neighbours.You had better hope that after this modern war they can still find ten innocent men amongst them.Or they will face Gods wrath again.

[niss]

No words can justify the wicked murder of innocent children.

Some would say that one mans freedom fighter is anothers terrorist.The modern state of Isreal was founded by a gang of Terrorists who shamefully murdered and killed members of an army that had defeated Adolf Hitler.They plotted to unlawfully kill and murder anyone who did not agree with them .Anyone who did not agree with them was marked for death.Killed by illegal murders.

Fear not habit ,history will repeat itself and even the wisdom of Solomon could not protect the first state of Isreal from reaping the benefits of its friendly attitude towards its neighbours.You had better hope that after this modern war they can still find ten innocent men amongst them.Or they will face Gods wrath again.

An army who also hoarded up refugees from the holocaust and either sent them back to the camps by the boatloads or cooped them up in an internment camp in cyprus.

[2R]

No words can justify the wicked murder of innocent children.

Some would say that one mans freedom fighter is anothers terrorist.The modern state of Isreal was founded by a gang of Terrorists who shamefully murdered and killed members of an army that had defeated Adolf Hitler.They plotted to unlawfully kill and murder anyone who did not agree with them .Anyone who did not agree with them was marked for death.Killed by illegal murders.

Fear not habit ,history will repeat itself and even the wisdom of Solomon could not protect the first state of Isreal from reaping the benefits of its friendly attitude towards its neighbours.You had better hope that after this modern war they can still find ten innocent men amongst them.Or they will face Gods wrath again.

An army who also hoarded up refugees from the holocaust and either sent them back to the camps by the boatloads or cooped them up in an internment camp in cyprus.

Are seriously trying to justify the acts of terrorism and murder by a criminal gang ?

[niss]

Attacks against uniform wearing members of a military is not terrorism.

And no, I am not trying to justify it, I am trying to balance out your statement.

[2R]

Attacks against uniform wearing members of a military is not terrorism.

And no, I am not trying to justify it, I am trying to balance out your statement.

Balance ?I would not expect anyone could justify the despicable acts of murder and terror done by those gangsters.

So i take it that they still have not apologized for their acts and could technically still be considered as hostile to the same army and diplomats that they murdered in cold blood.A bad place to be, when you will need friends more than enemies .
If you kill your friends the world can become a very scarey and lonely place .

[niss]

Attacks against uniform wearing members of a military is not terrorism.

And no, I am not trying to justify it, I am trying to balance out your statement.

Balance ?I would not expect anyone could justify the despicable acts of murder and terror done by those gangsters.

So i take it that they still have not apologized for their acts and could technically still be considered as hostile to the same army and diplomats that they murdered in cold blood.A bad place to be, when you will need friends more than enemies .
If you kill your friends the world can become a very scarey and lonely place .

And that is why I tried to provide some balance. The british at this point were not friends. Friends do not send friends to die in concentration camps.

[morrow]

For all you HAMAS supporters decrying Israel's dispropotionate war, don't worry. HAMAS is winning.

Victory over Israel 'closer than ever': Hamas
Mon Jan 12, 12:09 pm ET
GAZA CITY (AFP) – The Hamas government in the Gaza Strip said on Monday it was closer than ever to victory in its war against Israel.

"We can assure our people that victory is now closer than ever," government spokesman Taher al-Nunu said in a statement. "The enemy is dithering and does not know what to do."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090112/wl ... _newsmlmmd

[habit]

No words can justify the wicked murder of innocent children.

Some would say that one mans freedom fighter is anothers terrorist.The modern state of Isreal was founded by a gang of Terrorists who shamefully murdered and killed members of an army that had defeated Adolf Hitler.They plotted to unlawfully kill and murder anyone who did not agree with them .Anyone who did not agree with them was marked for death.Killed by illegal murders.

Fear not habit ,history will repeat itself and even the wisdom of Solomon could not protect the first state of Isreal from reaping the benefits of its friendly attitude towards its neighbours.You had better hope that after this modern war they can still find ten innocent men amongst them.Or they will face Gods wrath again.

So 2R, are you saying you support what Osama stands for or do I misunderstand your drivel??

[2R]

No words can justify the wicked murder of innocent children.

Some would say that one mans freedom fighter is anothers terrorist.The modern state of Isreal was founded by a gang of Terrorists who shamefully murdered and killed members of an army that had defeated Adolf Hitler.They plotted to unlawfully kill and murder anyone who did not agree with them .Anyone who did not agree with them was marked for death.Killed by illegal murders.

Fear not habit ,history will repeat itself and even the wisdom of Solomon could not protect the first state of Isreal from reaping the benefits of its friendly attitude towards its neighbours.You had better hope that after this modern war they can still find ten innocent men amongst them.Or they will face Gods wrath again.

So 2R, are you saying you support what Osama stands for or do I misunderstand your drivel??

You are indeed misunderstanding the whole issue.If you think that anyone who speaks against the criminal slaughter of people is a supporter of terrorists or their methods. You should get your meds changed.

Why is it unacceptable for one group to engage in UNLAWFUL slaughter and one group to kill whoever does not agree with them is labelled an enemy.

So go ahead .Make a reasoned debate about why it all right for YOUR side to kill and when they get hurt it is a crime against humanity.
I would like to hear how you attempt to justify these criminal acts.Just because a state engages in criminal acts does not mean it is right but go ahead give it your best attempt

[2R]

Attacks against uniform wearing members of a military is not terrorism.

And no, I am not trying to justify it, I am trying to balance out your statement.

Balance ?I would not expect anyone could justify the despicable acts of murder and terror done by those gangsters.

So i take it that they still have not apologized for their acts and could technically still be considered as hostile to the same army and diplomats that they murdered in cold blood.A bad place to be, when you will need friends more than enemies .
If you kill your friends the world can become a very scarey and lonely place .

And that is why I tried to provide some balance. The british at this point were not friends. Friends do not send friends to die in concentration camps.

So are you trying to blame the British for the deaths in Concentration camps ?
Some of those who fought their way across europe may not agree with that point of view.

[niss]

Those who made it policy to reject the refugees to the british mandate and sent the boats back to their ports of origin, yes they are responsible for many deaths in the camps.

For example the US & Canadian government were directly responsible for the death of 224 people in the camps when the SS St. Louis was sent back to Germany.

Friends don't lock you up in internment camps right when you got there from concentration camps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprus_internment_camps

So was what the Lehi and the Irgun did to the British despicable? Yes, but did they do it to their friends? No, they did it to their enemies.

BTW attacking military installations/personnel/equipment, etc is not terrorism.

In an interview on the US television news show Nightline, recorded on 28 March 2006, Livni stated, "Somebody who is fighting against Israeli soldiers is an enemy and we will fight back, but I believe that this is not under the definition of terrorism, if the target is a soldier."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzipi_Livni

[niss]

What do the "Human Rights Activists" here have to say about this?

Last update - 21:41 14/01/2009
For the first time, Gaza militants fire phosphorus shell at Israel
By Yanir Yagna, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service
Tags: Hamas, IDF, Israel News, Gaza

Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday fired their first phosphorus shell into Israel, which exploded in an open area in the Eshkol area in the western Negev.

No injuries or damage were reported.

The phosphorus shell was among the 14 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel on Wednesday.

White phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon. Militaries are
permitted under laws of warfare to use it in artillery shells, bombs and
rockets to create smoke screens to hide troop movements as well as bright bursts in the air to illuminate battlefields at night.

However, the substance can cause serious burns if it touches the skin and can spark fires on the ground.

Human Rights Watch on Sunday accused Israel of firing artillery shells packed with white phosphorus over populated areas of Gaza during recent fighting, including a crowded refugee camp, putting civilians at risk.

Israel maintains that it uses munitions in complete accordance with international law.

Palestinian militants have fired at least 16 rockets into Israel since Wednesday morning, all of them hitting open areas near Ashdod, Ashkelon, Be'er Sheva and in the western Negev. Five Israelis in Ashdod were treated for shock.

No injuries or damage were reported in the attacks.

More than 15 rockets were fired at Israel Tuesday, some of them during a three-hour humanitarian truce. One rocket hit an Ashkelon educational institution, causing some damage.

The Shin Bet security service said Tuesday that Palestinian militants in Gaza have fired some 565 rockets and 200 mortar shells at southern Israel since the Israel Defense Forces launched its offensive on the Hamas-ruled coastal territory on December 27 - an average of more than 30 a day.

[Hedley]

I'm not sure, niss, but when Palestinians kills Israelis,
the left-leaning media (and people here), think it's ok.

But when an Israeli kills a Palestinian, the left-leaning
media (and people here) go bananas.

Not quite sure why the double standard, but that's
just the way it is, and arguing with the lefties is unlikely
to change their minds.

Generally, lefties change their tune as they get older
and get more life experience.

As the old saying goes:

If you're young, and right wing, you have no heart. But if you're old, and left-wing, you have no brains.

[Siddley Hawker]

Gaza could have been the model of a future Palestinian state.

Article by Christopher Hitchens. Read it all the way to the end.

http://www.slate.com/id/2207872/

[2R]

I now see the wisdom of the hand washing done by Pontius .

[Changes in Latitudes]

I'm on board with this guy:

Jewish Rabbi burns Israel passport. "It's not about religion"
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=69c_1231925856

Unfortunately, the world will be using this war to paint Jewish people with the same brush that has been applied to the Arabs, and things will only continue to deterriorate. Such ugliness.

[Spokes]

Why don't the HAMAS people just stop shooting rockets int Israel? Problem solved? (well one of them anyways).

If you keep poking a bear, eventually you'll get swatted.


I know, a little over simplified. But still it would be a start.