Israel's 'measured' response to Hamas... - Page 2

Doesn't seem like their main goal is to "save" it. Seems like they've declared war. A sad state of affairs on all fronts.

..... Are you saying that all Palestinians are part of the Hamas infrastructure? Because that makes no sense. Not every single Palestinian and every single building in Gaza is affiliated with Hamas.

No, he is obviously not saying that. And I doubt you actually believe he is saying that.

No, but Hamas is embedded within Palestinian civilian centres. That's the insidious thing about terrorists: they use innocents as shields, then blame their victims when they fight backl.

Well, let's take a look at what he said:

"I love the doublespeak of trying to draw some distinction between Hamas and the Palestinians ... as if Hamas are something other than Palestinian."

Well, that statement is not true. There is a distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian populace at large: not all Palestinians are part of Hamas. Hamas is a particular entity that does not encompass the whole of the surrounding territory/population. True, it's pretty tough to target Hamas without damaging nearby, non-Hamas affiliated civilian targets, but not every part of Gaza is affiliated with Hamas.

I can see why they use it as a tactic (they'd be annhilated otherwise), but the blowback result is always sickening. I wonder if Hamas was offered a completely separate state in Gaza, with no conditions attached, whether that would satisfy them (or heck, if not the extremists, just about everyone else living there). I do not see how continued repression is ever going to work.

Not every member of Hamas is a rocket-carrying terrorist and that is a distinction a lot of people aren't making, even though there should be some discussion over whether all of Hamas should be considered a terrorist organization or only its militant armed wings. Saying "destroy Hamas" is not like killing every Al-Qaeda operative. That is why the conflict is messy.
Hamas has a political wing, which, unsurprisingly, won considerable power in the last elections. It's not unreasonable, if Palestine is supposed to play the "democracy game", to consider, at least from Arab world perspective, that an attack against all of Hamas is an attack against the Palestinian government and the Palestinian people. It would be considered so if any country outside of that area decided to exterminate a political party from a different country. You might want to argue the legitimacy of Hamas as a political party, but that would, in fact, be doublespeak.

How morally corrupt and downright rotten do you have to be to bomb a whole appartment building filled with civilians to get to a couple of terrorists?

but Cromwell brought the protestant Scots in to oversee the island.

that the GREAT thing about war the enemy is never human.

You realize you could get rid of the "couple of terrorists" portion of that sentence and it would apply to Hamas, right?

Plenty of blame to go around here. Just slather it on the entire region.

Except Hamas didn't kill 327 people in the last couple of days.
The Israelis are the ones with the power here, and we should expect better from them.

As to your first point: the only thing holding them back is that they lack the capacity. That doesn't place them on a moral high ground.

As to the second: Israel appears to lack the internal will to make concessions that would actually satisfy the Palestinians (and be humanitarian). This is probably due to the constant terrorist acts and rhetoric directed at them.

Until somebody gives ground (perhaps literally) nothing will change.

I could give two fucks about anyone in Hamas,of course they have no moral high ground, it's the civilians caught in the crossfire I care about.
If Israel are waiting for the day where there are no terrorists around to scupper rational peace-talks, they'll be waiting forever. How many new terrorists with nothing to lose have the last day's actions created?

This is what Israel never appears to understand. You can come up with justification/flimsy excuse after justification/flimsy excuse for Israel's retaliatory/oppressive strikes, but they have been proven utterly ineffective.

Palestinians are going to need their own state, and one that isn't crushed under another's heel. Will this happen in our lifetimes? Well, it's seeming less likely.

How are things in the West Bank? Still fairly quiet? Settlers still creeping in? I actually find reading about the situation utterly depressing.

And I never got those who think that it's okay for a sovereign state, one that's supposed to be a western republic, to act like a terrorist group.

The bottom line is that Israel is once again using disproportionate power and killing indiscriminately. The fact that they initially responded to a provocation is inconsequential.

The lessons learned are:

a. Israeli politicians have no desire to reach a peace settlement.
b. The lives of several hundred Palestinians means nothing to them if their death will boost their election chances.
c. They learned nothing from Lebanon.
d. When Milosevic did it, he was Hitler reincarnate. When Israel does it, it's exercising its right to defend itself.
e. Apartheid is alive and well. The Palestinians will be allowed to have bantustans and nothing more. They will cross a wall in the morning, perform menial labour and promptly return to their territories at sundown. If they vote for someone who's not playing ball, there will be no attempt to strike a deal. Instead, they will be blockaded and ultimately pounded into submission.

Well, if the last six years have taught us nothing, it's that might makes right. If some idiot sniper in your apartment building takes potshots at me, I have the inalienable right to destroy your entire building and all its innocent occupants.

I'd say spare cranberry and jihad to the rest.

Cranberry is an abomination before God's eyes you infidel.
I hit you with the sole of my left shoe.

Damn, was there not some provision for jihadists that they can indulge in things forbidden by Allah if its to pass as normal? Because obviously that's why I pretend to enjoy cranberry juice...

Tell me, how many of those were civilians?

Two. Does this make it ok that these two died? Is it somehow their fault?

What if they were a hundred civilians dead. Is it enough to make you upset? How much collateral damage is justified for every dead suspected Hamas member?

If you supported the other side, how many Israeli civilians dead would you feel ok with for every military target attacked?

No, I think the Israeli government should tell us how many of those were confirmed terrorists.
I'd be amazed if even 10% of those had anything to do with Hamas. There is no such thing (if there ever were) like a surgical strike in one of the most crowded cities in the world.

According to UN estimates, at least 57 were civilians. 21 of them children and seven women.

None, but Cynthia McKinney was on board, so they probably just wanted her to shut the hell up.

Even the Palestinians would have attacked the boat if they knew McKinney was on it.

My point was only that it's a little unfair to throw around the 327 number as if it was indiscriminate. Frankly I'm not sure how many dead civilians would be "acceptable". Morality is funny like that. On small scales perhaps absolutes are common, but when we blow things up there's usually a point at which those smaller scale imperatives collapse (say, murder one to save a million).

Before you peg me as justifying anything I would say in this instance very few if any civilian deaths are justified given that Israel hasn't exhausted its options or taken the necessary steps to avoid these conflicts.

"Raid Gaza" game;
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/476393

My score:

*poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *poke* *ROUNDHOUSE PUNCH!!*

I read somewhere that Fatah is allegedly providing info on Hamas locations to the IDF.

Not surprising considering the animosity Fatah harbors against Hamas especially since the former was embarrassingly forced out of the Gaza region by the latter.
It's a win-win situation for them to do so since they get to see their rivals pounded into the dirt while being somewhat absolved from the deed. And once and if Hamas has been forced out, they can come back in, take control and recruit from those that suffered from the attacks.
"We didn't bomb you, the Israelis did" etc...

Fatah and Hamas adhere to fundamentaly different ideologies. Far from being just a power grab on their behalf there's nothing Fatah would like more than seeing Hamas crumble to the ground.

Some of you might have seen the video the Israeli defense force posted allover the internet earlier this week. It contained footage of Hamas terrorists loading missiles onto a flatbed truck all the while being filmed by an Israeli plane. At the end of the video the terrorists are obliterated by an Israeli bomb.
Only they might not have been terrorists; "Research from a number of sources, including the Israeli-Palestinian B'Tselem group in Gaza, indicate that the owner of the truck in the Israeli Defense Force bombing was not a Hamas member transporting rockets, but instead a civilian transporting gas welding canisters from his metalworking shop."
Tragic if true.

More at the link.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michae..._b_154719.html

Wow, this is a dissertation-level question. Unfortunately, I just don't have time to compose a dissertation-level response, so I'll be brief. I'm going to make some unsourced references to the Law of Armed Conflict here, and I admit (in advance) that they'll be from memory.

What you're really asking, I think, is two questions. The first question is operational: are current Israeli operations defensible? The second is strategic: what's the best road to peace in that stretch of land between Egypt and Turkey (Because, hey, Syria and Jordan are in this as much as anyone else.)?

Regarding the first question, from a straight Law of Armed Conflict perspective, current Israeli operations are defensible. Hamas stated, in advance, that it did not intend to continue the cease-fire when it expired. Hamas followed through on that statement with rocket attacks on Israel, as clear an act of aggression as one could hope to find. That part's ok, actually - that's the kind of thing that hostile nations do. Hamas is in violation of the LOAC, however, when it uses mufti-clad irregulars to fire randomly from among the civilian populace. A further LOAC violation arises from Hamas's insistence on placing its (para)military operators within the civilian populace. These violations free Israel of any LOAC constraints regarding targeting (para)military operators that are embedded within said civilian populace. In other words, the onus is on Hamas to make a reasonable effort to ensure that civilians are out of harm's way, not on Israel to invent personalized munitions that kill only intended targets and none other.

Regarding the second question, I think it will, for the most part, take care of itself in the next seventy-five years. By then, native-born Muslims should comprise a clear majority of the Israeli electorate, and one can expect this majority to elect a pro-Muslim prime minister and parliament. Of course, this group will have its own headaches: by then, the landless Palestinian diaspora will be even larger than it is today, and repatriation will present whole new sets of problems.

You asked a comprehensive question, and this is only a partial answer. For that, I apologize. But my kids need to play with their dad!

Hamas now*plans major suicide attacks inside Israel. The group actually warned Muslims who are foreign citizens to leave Israel immediately: http://samsonblinded.org/news/hamas-...ee-israel-5473

That site seems really credible.

I don't know about that site but I know that our embassy in Jerusalem has already issued a warning to Greek citizens in Israel.

I saw on the news today Livni, the Israeli foreign minister going on about Israel being the front line of the free world's fight against blah blah blah and I had to change the channel before I threw something heavy at the TV. Where did she get the fucking right to present these actions as though they're being done in my name too? Are they actually deluded enough to presume that they have anyone's sympathy in this case?

It's true, a friend of mine visited Syria and found Hamas members selling official T-shirts and keffiyehs as public relations. He wasn't shot!!

This post wins my vote for non sequitur of the day.

Israeli ground troops now on the march into Gaza.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/...aza/index.html