Israel Bombs Gaza - Hundreds Dead

[Cheetah786]

Solomon2
I think that's a good question. What can Palestinians do, seeing that they are under the thumb of Hamas which they once elected, but now despise?

So what you are saying is if hamas goes out of picture israel will return all stolen lands to palestinians?

[Solomon2]

The analogy should be clear to you. After all, what did East Pakistan do in 1971, when faced by a Pakistani Army intent on wholesale slaughter of its own people?

[idune]

Originally Posted by Solomon2

The Air Services Agreement is multilateral civil law. It is not international law in the accepted sense. I need more.

As for the League of Nations "report", due to the experience of WWII it has been superseded by the U.N. Charter, Article 51: Terrorist incidents rise to the level of "armed attack", in my opinion, once their scale or repetitiveness is enough to hamper daily life for those affected by them, and Hamas' rocket attacks meet that criterion.

You are (as millions other) indoctrinated by US media on Palestinian issue. When you failed to recognize that Palestinians are living under Israeli occupation for more than 60 years and subjected to atrocities and genocide by Israel, you actually told your story of biased and motive. When Israel blockaded Palestinian population from even basic necessities, turning Gaza a big concentration camp, no one in US and ill intented people like you did talk about it. Hamas used rocket as defiance and to come out of concentration camp Israel created. Since, when seeking freedom from Nazi style concentration camp considered to be a crime???? It was not a crime to seek freedom and fight against Nazi concentration camp. Why should it be different for Palestinians?

Now you came out to defend another Israeli genocide based on pretext of Hamas rocket? The “terrorist” “extremist” label you or anyone for that matter put on Palestinian resistance are from position of asymmetric power and control. Freedom which by the way US constitution proclaimed so dearly, Palestinian resistance is simply seeking that same FREEDOM standard. Same path American own freedom fighters followed centuries ago. If you are real American then read up your own history and find out how early American “freedom fighters” fought against British occupation.

My bad, you are the same people who duped by your own media on Iraq WMD hoax, on your own Wall Street scam and presented world with Abu Ghraib prison. If you want to do yourself a favor you should be looking out for information to see who are these people controlling your media, your financial system and your politics; very people who duped you and keep duping you on Palestinian and rest of the world.

[Lockheed F-16]

Originally Posted by Neo

At what cost? And what about the aftermath?
Care to elaborate?

I mentioned that we can crush Israel but I also told you, that it is not possible in the current situation because of the aftermath.

[Cheeta]

There is a limit to the effort upto which a man works and then when gets the consequences to God Almighty. Iraq was also considered a picy hamburger by Mr.Bush and Tomy Frank who being having just the title of a Viceroy was making every new announcement of victory in the field. Nobody knew that the American force that has so easily got the land and threatening to further conquer Iran and Syria will not be furthermore victorious in making a fool of the world. Abraha was when attacking Mecca with his elephants and a force of ten thousand the chief of Qureish summoned the men at arms of Mecca and saw that there were only men upto one hundred who were even not upto the mark of resisting an attacking force. Then he made a mediation to avoid fight but seeing Abraha resolved to destroy the home made by Abraham(pbuh) he prayed to God saying 'O God I have done my best and have no more power ahead to do and let all to you now'. Saying this he retired to the mountains waiting the consequences. Similarly, sometimes things bring result just to the opposite as it has been the saying of the Prophet about war , ' War is a deceit and it might have any result' means that it can sometimes become totally opposite to the expectations calculating the power and magnitude of the force. Man is to try and when sometimes people say that O, that country has so much planes and so much bombs while we have fewer so let be dis-honoured having concluding the defeat at hand just sitting on the seat. It is right that one needs possess the best material and trained companions upto the best possibility, make the best planning and then let to God what is aftermath or preassumption.

[Jihad]

300 deaths so far and over a 1000 wounded..

When will this massacre end from the Zionist state?
They're preparing to send in 6500 reserves? I've read that the airstrikes are ongoing and will not stop anytime.
God protect the Palestinians.

[Lockheed F-16]

Originally Posted by Jihad

300 deaths so far and over a 1000 wounded..

When will this massacre end from the Zionist state?
They're preparing to send in 6500 reserves? I've read that the airstrikes are ongoing and will not stop anytime.
God protect the Palestinians.

They are starting a ground offensive with all their army and many tanks.

And what is the world doing? Look at the OIC, those shammers meet, drink kaaba and move their *** back to their country. Nothing is done, we will have to wait for the Messiah...

[anonymous1]

Originally Posted by Lockheed F-16

They are starting a ground offensive with all their army and many tanks.

And what is the world doing? Look at the OIC, those shammers meet, drink kaaba and move their *** back to their country. Nothing is done, we will have to wait for the Messiah...

Exactly, why can't at least countries like KSA, Iran issue a stern warning to Israel regarding army offensive. It seems they are all scared of Israel. Iran is mediating talks between India and Pak and the state not far away to them is getting bombed. About OIC less said the better it is as toothless as UN.

[hotfuzzgreat]

I kind of hate Saudi Arabs now they were supposed to be the elite in the Muslim world and all they do is shake hand with USA and turn their back against our brothers!!!!!!!!! It is only the Saudi who can actually put US pressure to stop Israel.

[Aamir Zia]

Sorry to say but Saudis Leaders Brains , Hearts & Soul are Dead by too much money .

they always LICK USA's *** so no one can remove them from power

[A.Rahman]

Originally Posted by Aamir Zia

Sorry to say but Saudis Leaders Brains , Hearts & Soul are Dead by too much money .

they always LICK USA's *** so no one can remove them from power

Before singling out saudi, look at our own-self, we have India to deal with on east, who have still occupied Kashmir, they openly kill,rape Muslims.

Some gulf states were with India on Kashmir issue. (correct me if I am wrong)
so much for brother hood.

[ajpirzada]

Originally Posted by Solomon2

The analogy should be clear to you. After all, what did East Pakistan do in 1971, when faced by a Pakistani Army intent on wholesale slaughter of its own people?

i guess u need to start readin things based on facts and not mere propoganda. wateva u said up there have not been proved. neither by india and nor by bangladesh. pak challenged this claim many times and no one came fwd to prove it. americans even wrote a letter to indians during 1971 tellin them to stop supporting mukti bhani who were violating human rights in bangladesh by raping women and killing men. i can show u the letter i you want me to. pakistani soldiers were made a scapegoat by indians to increase hatred amongst the then east pakistanis regarding pak army. the only people pak army was fighting against were those who were waging a war against pakistan and that i think can be justified. so please first get urself known with the facts and then blame pak army for carryin out any such activities.

[AgNoStIc MuSliM]

Threads merged.

[MBI Munshi]

Marty Peretz and the American political consensus on Israel

Glenn Greenwald

Opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute are so entrenched that any single outbreak of violence is automatically evaluated through a pre-existing lens, shaped by one's typically immovable beliefs about which side bears most of the blame for the conflict generally or "who started it." Still, any minimally decent human being -- even those who view the world through the most blindingly pro-Israeli lens possible, the ones who justify anything and everything Israel does, and who discuss these events with a bottomless emphasis on the primitive (though dangerous) rockets lobbed by Hamas into Southern Israel but without even mentioning the ongoing four-decades brutal occupation or the recent, grotesquely inhumane blockade of Gaza -- would find the slaughter of scores of innocent Palestinians to be a horrible and deeply lamentable event.

But not The New Republic's Marty Peretz. Here is his uniquely despicable view of the events of the last couple of days:

So at 11:30 on Saturday morning, according to both the Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz, as well as the New York Times, 50 fighter jets and attack helicopters demolished some 40 to 50 sites in just about three minutes, maybe five. Message: do not **** with the Jews.

"Do not **** with the Jews." And what of the several hundred Palestinian dead -- including numerous children -- and many hundreds more seriously wounded?

Israeli intelligence reported 225 people dead, mostly Hamas military leaders with some functionaries, besides, and perhaps 400 wounded. The Palestinians announced 300 dead, probably as a reflex in order to begin their whining about disproportionate Israeli acts of war. And 600 wounded.

Objections to the Israeli attack are just "whining." Those are the words of a psychopath. And what to do now?

Frankly, I am up to my gullet with this reflex criticism of Israel as going beyond proportionality in its responses to war waged against its population with the undisguised intention of putting an end to the political expression of the Jewish nation. . . .

The current warfare will go on a bit longer. If there is a pause and if I were giving advice to the Israelis, this is what I would say to Hamas and to the people of Gaza: "If a rocket or missile is launched against us, if you take captive one of our soldiers (as you have held one for two and a half years), if you raise a new Intifada against us, there will be an immediate response. And it will be very disproportionate. Proportion does not work."

This super-tough-guy warrior -- whose prime accomplishment in life was marrying an heiress and then using her family's money to buy himself The New Republic -- beats his chest and threatens that even a single Palestinian act in response to this bombing campaign will provoke still more massive retaliation in the form of collective punishment (which, not that anyone cares, happens to be a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, as are Hamas' far less harmful rocket attacks on Israeli civilians).

It may be true that, as Eric Alterman put it in his seminal article on Marty Pertez (quoting Ezra Klein), "Peretz is rarely held to account, largely because there's an odd, tacit understanding that he's a cartoonish character and everyone knows it." But how unusual are Peretz's views, revolting as they are, in the American political mainstream? He certainly expresses anti-Arab hatred and bigotry more bluntly than most, but this reflexive support for anything and everything Israel does is anything but unique in our political debates.

Here, as but one illustrative example, is Caroline Kennedy -- who, in order to win her Senate seat, is self-consciously trying to turn herself into a Barack Obama clone -- responding recently to a question about Israel from Politico:

QUESTION 8: Do you think Israel should negotiate with Hamas? Do you agree with Israel's Gaza Strip embargo? Would you support an Israeli airstrike on Iran if they felt Tehran's nuclear program represented a threat to their survival?

ANSWER: "Caroline Kennedy strongly supports a safe and secure Israel. She believe Israel's security decisions should be left to Israel."

What could be more absurd than that? Apparently, not only should we continue to feed Israel billions of dollars a year of American taxpayer money and massive amounts of weapons -- thereby ensuring that the world, quite accurately, perceives their actions as American actions -- but we should then take the position that they are free to do anything they want with it, no matter how extreme or destructive to our interests, and our only view on all of it should be that we blindly support whatever they do. Or, as Clinton aide Ann Lewis put it during the primaries, in response to Obama's observation that he needn't have a "Likud view in order to be pro-Israel":

The role of the president of the United States is to support the decisions that are made by the people of Israel. It is not up to us to pick and choose from among the political parties.

Yesterday, the Bush administration applied this mindset, naturally, by expressing unequivocal support for Israel and heaped all blame on Hamas. And, needless to say, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed the administration's view:

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi issued a statement concerning the Israeli operation in Gaza in which she wrote that "When Israel is attacked, the United States must continue to stand strongly with its friend and democratic ally."

According to Pelosi, "Peace between Israelis and Palestinians cannot result from daily barrages of rocket and mortar fire from Hamas-controlled Gaza. Hamas and its supporters must understand that Gaza cannot and will not be allowed to be a sanctuary for attacks on Israel."

Not a word of condemnation of the Israeli blockade -- which has caused extreme suffering and deprivation in Gaza -- or of the massively disproportionate response or the ongoing and ever-expanding Israeli occupation. It is all one-sided support for whatever Israel does from our political class, and one-sided condemnation of Israel's enemies (who are, ipso facto, American enemies) -- all of it, as usual, sharply divergent from the consensus in much of the rest of the world.

It would be nice if U.S. citizens weren't connected to and responsible for every Israeli military action, so that we really could and should take the attitude that what the Israeli Government does -- or what is done to it -- is not our responsibility. That's how it should be.

Instead, since we fund a huge bulk of it and supply the weapons used for much of it and use our veto power at the U.N. to enable all of it, we are connected to it -- intimately -- and bear responsibility for all of Israel's various wars, including the current overwhelming assault on Gaza, as much as Israelis themselves. Blind support for whatever they do -- the consensus view in American political life in both parties -- is therefore a total abdication of our responsibility.

It remains to be seen if Barack Obama intends to deviate even a small amount from what has been decades of excessively loyal U.S. support for Israel -- which, over the last eight years, transformed into truly blind and absolute support for anything they do. It's impossible to know for sure until Obama is inaugurated, but the bipartisan, purely "pro-Israel" statements issued by his allies -- such as Caroline Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi -- don't bode well, nor do the statements which Obama himself made during the campaign, as compiled yesterday by Salon's Mark Schone:

The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens. And so I can assure you that if -- I don't even care if I was a politician -- if somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.

Can't the exact same mentality be deployed to justify everything Hamas has done and is doing, to wit: "if a foreign power were brutally occupying my country for four decades -- or blockading my country and denying my children medical needs and nutrition and the ability even to exit -- I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Palestinians to do the same thing"? But the last thing that our political class ever extends is reciprocal, two-sided analysis to this dispute.

The suffocating bipartisan orthodoxies in the U.S. regarding Israel thus make virtually impossible what the new Jewish-American group, J Street -- in condemning the attack (even while calling it "justifiable") because it "will deepen the cycle of violence in the region" -- urges: "immediate, strong diplomatic intervention by the United States, the Quartet and allies in the region to negotiate a resumption of the ceasefire." Most of our political elites know enough to avoid the ugly language of Marty Peretz, but the ultimate policy positions aren't much different.



UPDATE: Without necessarily endorsing all of it, I want to recommend very highly this column by Israeli Gideon Levy in Haaretz, entitled "The neighborhood bully strikes again." What's most striking about it is that this scathing criticism of Israel's behavior can -- and does -- appear in one of Israel's leading newspapers, but not a paragraph of it could ever be uttered by any American politician, in either party, of any national prominence.



UPDATE II: Here's Rep. Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and a Democrat, echoing Nancy Pelosi, George Bush and virtually every other key American political official:

Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week. No government in the world would sit by and allow its citizens to be subjected to this kind of indiscriminate bombardment. The loss of innocent life is a terrible tragedy, and the blame for that tragedy lies with Hamas.

One can travel from the farthest right fringe of the GOP to the heart of the Democratic Party leadership and hear exactly the same thing: Israel is always right. Israel must not be criticized. Israel never bears any blame. Any action taken by Israel is justified. No matter the situation, that just gets repeated over and over like some hypnotic bipartisan mantra. Meanwhile, American citizens overwhelmingly -- 71% -- want their Government to be "even-handed" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet that view is simply ignored, disregarded, not even viable for any American mainstream political leader to express.

Marty Peretz and the American political consensus on Israel - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

[Bezerk]

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israel bombs university in Gaza

They bombed the Islamic University of Gaza. If you look at the images, it looks like as if they carried out a carpet bombing with a B-52. Of course they didn't but If they are capable of bombing cities and universities with such intensity, then there's no need for the jews to cry when a couple of Katyusha rockets fall in Israel.

Tit for tat.