Israel does it's best to become the most hated nation in the world

I had a nice big rant about this on my facebook. Only one of you got to see it. Probably for the best.

What I will say here is that the big...probably the biggest problem is that it's currently impossible to lay blame with either side because we no longer have any semblance of action, only reaction. And when everything is just retaliation, it's very difficult to pick through the atrocities committed by both sides and 'pick' a side.

Being a child of the West, and thus massively influenced by the US stance, I have always instinctively sided with the Israelis/Jews, partly because of the Holocaust, partly because they really were there first, partly because history has shat all over them from Ramses onwards...but mostly because Muslims remain the Other even at a casual level in the West. I've read the Quran and its message conflicts with what I've seen growing up regarding treatment of others, especially those of other religions. You may say the same of the Bible or the Torah, but like it or not, Islamic extremists are the current 'bad guys'.

The problem is, I decided a while back that I don't believe in bad guys, or good guys. My overcoming the idea of the Muslim as the Other has been the last step of that, and it's not easy at all.

Israel's actions this past month sure have made it *easier* though.

And I'm disgusted at the media coverage of this latest conflict. Utterly. I found some excellent articles at the NYTimes site, but most news sites are focusing on MH17. Which IS news, but not all that's happening.

Of the articles I found, this was the most terrifying:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/world/middleeast/in-a-clash-between-israel-and-gaza-both-sides-use-social-media-to-fire-epithets-and-hide-behind-euphemisms.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=a-lede-package-region&region=lede-package&WT.nav=lede-package

If you're interested in this conflict at all, read it.

And if you're not interested in this conflict at all, let me direct you to another article, same publication:

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/nation-world/world/article/Both-sides-report-deadliest-day-in-Gaza-5634373.php

(Different hosting, because subscriptions.)

I'll give you the most important sentence from that link, in case it's too-hard-didn't-click for you:

"Since July 9, 417 people have been killed in Gaza, among them more than 100 children, and more than 3,000 have been injured."

I don't care what your faith is, what your ideologies are. When almost a quarter of the casualties are children, you're doing something wrong.

I read the article and i didn't find it particularly informative.Besides that it's behind.The Palestinian casualties as of now exceed 600,with huge percentage being women and children.I guess due to greece being really close,or propably cause our media are not that infuenced by NAtO,news travel faster.

Anyway i did enjoy your post,but i do disagree on the "they were first part".Yeah they were there MANY centuries ago.I think you are australian.Imagine if some day Aboriginals claim the land,have the full support of western power,even though you have greatly higher population they are given the bigger percentage of land,and they do not even recognise you as a nation,and keep invading your land.Cause thats what it is,it's an occupation.Hamas terrorist are no more than an bug,compared to israeli army.And i am saying it again,I AM NOT defending hamas,i think they have acted terribly,but hamas is definetely not even close to representing the majority of Palestinian people.The fact that i am bringing up Chomsky in this thread,is cause he is considered the best alive intellectual in USA,and he is a Jew as well.When a jew,and especially that jew is picking the Palestinian side,then it's something that you have to take in acount.

Now slightly off topic,since you mentioned Quran and muslims,yeah they are represented in the western media as the "bad guys",and yeah,i do agree that they are going through their dark ages.I mean in medieval times,Arabs were blossoming,advancing greatly in mathematics and medicine,while Europe was blinded by religious extremism,not advancing in anything.Nowdays it's the other way around,but consider this.Isn't in the best interest of the west,for arabs to be blinded by religion?Cause what would have happened,if they realised that they sit on the richest,most profitable land in the world,and decide to use the resources for their people's best interests...


edit: Wow,i just realised i had my very first "removed by support" on my previous response.i am proud :D I do not understand why it was removed though,it was a semihumourous drawing.If it was about "graphic" violence,well :P Lunaris ....

Yeah, it's a bit old. Doesn't change the message, does it?

The more significant of the links is how both sides use euphemisms and rhetoric to dehumanise the enemy.

And please don't read into my post as a desire for discussion. Just providing my angle.

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Poutsos wrote:

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Nightmare90 wrote:

You wanna pick sides? Grab your weapon or join any force.

Stop flailing around like a child in a gaming forum.

Nice,seems like you just erased all the 60s counter culture in a sentence.I do not have to justify on what else you can do besides taking a gun,but yeah,posting it here was a mistake apparently.

Maybe I should have said "any actual cause" instead of "any force."

Thing is, you are upset about people and especially children dying. Now here is something which might surprise you: Posting about it in a gaming forum or facebook won't change anything at all! People will read this stuff and forget it in the next 1 hour. You know how long I had the people of WTC in mind back then? 5 silent minutes, in my classroom. Then I carried on with my life.

You want to help those people? By past experience the government does a bad job when it comes to swift and just decisions (I have sinking ships in front of Spain in my mind) so join a NGO trying to help in this situation in any way. I am sure they take any helping hand they can. Then you can care for the causalities on both sides because there will be plenty as war crimes are committed by both sides like in any war.

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Charan wrote:

I don't care what your faith is, what your ideologies are. When almost a quarter of the casualties are children, you're doing something wrong.

What's happening over In Gaza right now is sad, in every sense of the word, but it could easily be far far worse. Hamas could eliminate almost every child death if they had any interest in doing so. When one side actively works to ensure children are among the casualties - as Hamas is doing, it is an unspeakable crime.

We live in an age where precision targeting of combatants with no harm to civilians is considered to be the norm. It would be glorious if this were readily achievable. It might even be somewhat possible for nations with more advanced weaponry fighting a lower tech adversary - if the adversary wasn't intentionally placing their civilians amongst the combatants.




As Golda Meir said when asked when things might be resolved, "When the Arabs love their children more than they hate us." The story of Solomon's judgement of who was lying and telling the truth with the child applies here, and is exactly what Golda Meir was suggesting. The arab leaders do not want peace, they just want Israel removed from the face of the Earth, and at just about any cost. While this isn't necessarily true of all or even most of the ordinary people there, it is true of many of the leadership factions.

Left to their own goals, most of the populace would focus on providing for their family. I fondly remember one Jordanian, Atta, who was very proud of the fact that all of his children had a pair of shoes to wear when they went to school. Atta himself only had two changes of clothes and sometimes went without shoes (or wore only one shoe) so that his children would not be embarassed. No, he would not take any charity, but he did have happy healthy kids.

The problem is not with the people, it is with the violent leadership of various factions. Few remember that the P.L.O., Hamas and Hezbollah all started out as terrorist organizations, and still have terrorism as their primary focus. If Israel had a border as porous as the US border with Mexico, these extremist leaders would gladly send a dozen of their women and children as suicide bombers every day.

The citizenry is groomed from childhood by cartoons that dying to kill Israelis is a wonderful thing. The parents of the suicide bombers are financially rewarded for willingly giving up their child. The dismal conditions in many of these nations makes people desperate, vulnerable to the call of terrorist groups and inflames an already volatile situation.

The U.N. has been gelded and paralyzed by the permanent members of the security council's ploys in which the primary concern is not avoiding war or avoiding massive bloodshed, but whether an enemy on the security council will be harmed or whether the situation might benefit one of the permanent members.

The bloodshed going on in Africa is far worse than any of what is happening in Gaza. The difference is that we aren't seeing videos of all the carnage caused by Boko Haram, or any of the other terrorist groups.

The only price that is apparently too costly for them is if they provoked an international declaration of war against themselves that would lead to them being removed from power or being killed. This is true whether we are talking about Saleh, Gaddafi, Assad, Hussein, Arafat, or any of the other extremist rulers.

Both sides do use propaganda. One side values human life of its citizens only as a tool of rallying more people for its cause. Even if all the combatants were transported to another planet tomorrow, a few more generations of brain washed children growing up would carry on the battle. If all the leaders and teachers involved in this were somehow gone, much of the problem would go away in a decade, other than the violence inherent in extreme poverty.
With the leaders left to their own devices by a crippled U.N. and powerful nations that are afraid or apathetic, terrorism will continue to be rampant and occasionally the terrorists will provoke their enemies into retaliation.

We aren't talking about individual citizens which can call the police and expect someone to handle the threat or crime for them. No one is going to put the entire nation of Libya in jail for the Lockerbie bombing. Interpol isn't going to show up and arrest Mahmoud Abbas for firing rockets into Israel.

When nation states fight, it can be for their very existence. If someone imagines an intruder breaking into their home and killing the homeowner and all their loved ones, they probably wouldn't think twice about doing everything in their power to prevent it.
Everything.

If Israel were to let thousands of their own children die, would that be better? If Hamas and Boko Haram and their ilk continued to expand and decided that they needed to exterminate all non Islamic peoples everywhere, would it be OK then for nations to lay down and let them kill millions instead of doing what was necessary?

Yes, it is terrible, horrific and a tragedy that children are dying in this conflict. What makes it worse is that the Palestinians are intentionally placing their forces and children in proximity to try and deter attacks.
Before all the recent conflicts, if you were to take a drive through Syria along the King's Highway through Bosra, Damascus and Palmyra you would notice lots of military emplacements. You would see occasionally see rocket launchers, small bases, armored fighting vehicles etc along the route.

What you would not see is that any of these defensive emplacements were placed amongst civilians, They were isolated from the regular citizenry. No, I can't post any personal pictures, because the security clearance I had issued at the time did not permit me to take any pictures. If any of us had tried to take pictures, the escorts with us would have turned us in and I'd doubt we'd be heard from again.
The same was true in Egypt.

So, why is it that these military emplacements are suddenly surrounded by citizens and civilians?

People will draw their own conclusions, of course, but there is a vast difference between reading mass media and having first and second hand corroboration of many reports.

The people in Palestine aren't inherently evil, but their leadership is vile and vicious in the extreme.

While Israel used general warnings, leaflets and phone messages to civilians airstrikes range to get them to clear out, Hamas urged the civilians to stay put, declaring "They did not respond to calls from the Occupation to leave their homes - they stayed there and did not abandon them. We applaud, in particular, the strength of our residents in border areas, and their refusal to leave their homes and their land. They converge around our heroes in the Palestinian struggle."

Then there is this little info, which people may or may not have seen before:


A warning known as "knock on the roof" Israel developed in 2006. It warns civilians with a phone call to leave a building that is being targeted because it is an ammunition/rocket stash or command post. Israel then fires a dummy missile with no or little explosive load (and is rarely fatal) so that the occupants definitely know their
The procedure generally begins with a phone call to the occupants to leave a building, "According to Relik Shafir, a retired brigadier general in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and a former fighter pilot, "It's meant to get people to take us seriously,"
http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/15/world/meast/mideast-israel-strike-warnings/index.html

On one of the strikes that killed 5 children of a family of eight, the knock on the roof did alert the family, but instead of fleeing, the family climbed up on the roof to "defend" the military target instead of fleeing.

There is a video of the "Knock on Roof" here (15 minutes have been edited out from the "knock" to the actual air strike. Keep in mind, these targets usually have other prior warnings as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=waSPsI9-ge8


Some recent info on the peaceful activities of Israel's avowed opponents:



On July 11

In Mosul, Sunnis executed over 500 Shia prisoners in the Badush jail. (I'm not going to post the image of their bodies lined up in the dirt trenches while they are being shot with an AK-47. If anyone wants to see it, they can look it up - the AhulBayt News Agency website is probably the least graphic.

On Friday, July 18:
Benghazi - a Filipino construction worker was beheaded for not being Muslim

On Saturday, July 19:
in Gwoza - Islamic radicals tie the hands of six villagers and then slit their throats while shouting praises to Allah.

In al-Farafrah - Islamic fundamentalists incinerated twenty two with an RPG attack.

On Sunday, July 20 2014:
in Mahmoudiya - Sunnis rain down mortar shells and kill eleven Shiites during a religious procession.

In Gaza - UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees gave 20 rockets to Hamas - the rockets were hidden in one of their schools. This was the second time rockets were found in one of their schools.

In Mosul, Christians were given the ultimatum to leave (taking on the clothes on their back), convert to Islam or die. 15 families converted and 52 families fled.


On Monday, July 21 2014:
in Baqubah- Islamic State's send mortar shells into a family home, killing three members.

in Lashkar Gah - a Shahid suicide bomber takes out two locals.

On Tuesday, July 22 2014:
in Kabul - a Taliban suicide bomber murders four people near an airport.


For July, so far, there has been two dozen suicide bombings, over 1500 killed and almost that many wounded.
The only report I have found analyzed and broken down, has over 12,500 terrorism related deaths including over 700 children, with nearly 70 percent (8,800) of them attributable to Sunni extremists.

http://www.nctc.gov/docs/2011_NCTC_Annual_Report_Final.pdf

There's the forty pound 10 year old girl in Kunduz, Afghanistan who was raped by the local mullah, and when her family found out, they planned on doing an "honor killing" to murder the girl and dump her body in the river. Even the girl's own mother said to the girl, “We will make you a bed of dust and soil. We will send you to the cemetery where you will be safe.”

Rather than an isolated incident, there are over a hundred such reported honor killings each year.



Then there's the matter that occured recently in Burwood local court ( defending lawyer/barrister - Mario Licha for anyone that wants to look it up)

Or Google the "Trojan Horse" teachers in Birmingham .

Israel certainly isn't responsible for the piles of dead in Syria, Iraq and Libya. There's a pattern here, and one that has been going on

GGG's servers aren't big enough to hold all the atrocities commited by the modern factions who gladly seek the eradication of Israel. They have been trying for almost 100 years now (since 1919).

Strength is the only message that seems to get through to them.

It didn't start after WW1 either. The violent history of massacres of the Jewish people by Muslim peoples has been going on for almost one thousand four hundred years.

/thread

I don't know why do you even bother Dalai but thx.

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JohnGrammaticus wrote:

/thread

I don't know why do you even bother Dalai but thx.

There are good people over there, on both sides of the issue, and our esteemed leaders are throwing them under the convenience bus like so much rock salt to be ground up and discarded.

When we see both sides as people, we can begin to try and see what the heck is going on and how we can try to minimize the horror.

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DalaiLama wrote:

"

JohnGrammaticus wrote:

/thread

I don't know why do you even bother Dalai but thx.

There are good people over there, on both sides of the issue, and our esteemed leaders are throwing them under the convenience bus like so much rock salt to be ground up and discarded.

When we see both sides as people, we can begin to try and see what the heck is going on and how we can try to minimize the horror.

I understand but it was a heavy post anyway, I generally have that knowledge but it would took me over an hour to compile all this precise information in a coherent manner. I'm copying that post of yours for future reference.

Or maybe I'm just tired after years of trying to explain same things to people around me when very few attempt to understand "because babies".

Cool stories bro's :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEkcwLqCh7k

And :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_kill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_steal

Hypocrisy much?



So how do we help the world stoping violence. On this forum? I wonder.

War : Check the news!
Peace : Check this http://www.360cities.net/image/jame-mosque-yazd-iran