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Israelis Sue Government For Laser Cannons
An anonymous reader writes "Residents of a southern Israeli town want a real-life laser cannon to protect them against Palestinian rocket attacks. And they're suing the national government, for failing to provide the ray gun defense.
The U.S.-Israeli Tactical High Energy Laser project was widely considered to be the most successful energy weapon ever built. But the toxic chemicals needed to generate THEL's megawatts of power made the thing a logistical nightmare. It was scrapped. Now, the residents of Sderot want it back. And they're taking Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to court to make it happen."
i come from a family that is jewish and this is nothing new. my grandma sued her brother becuase the mother (my great grandma) gave them both equal amounts of money in the will and my grandma wanted more money
im not a racist person, but jews who have money are suing to get a toxic mega-weapon while the palistians are treated like shit seems all to similar
Why am I getting modded down? I don't give a shit who it is - if you are firing rockets at a civilian population, you are a savage. Jew or Muslim, it's a savage act. You people are fucking morons.
"Please note that they're not strapping bombs to themselves and running into cafes or government buildings - they're taking a legal action in a desperate request for help."
Why would you even say that? You accuse people here of subtly claiming "Jews are evil," but your comment seems to be a backhanded way of saying "at least they aren't like the Arabs and strapping bombs to themselves!" I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but what else could you have possibly meant?
And I think it is irrelevant whether citizens are violent when their government has a *huge* standing army and spends 10% of its GDP on defense. They don't need to take any violent action when their taxes are supposed to be protecting them (unlike Palestine). I'm not being anti-Israel, I'm just saying your implicit comparison of Israel to Palestine isn't fair.
What about the Jews attacking the innocent Palestinians... Google "Pallywood" and watch the video.
It's like the old saying goes There will be peace in the Middle East when the Palestinians love their children more than they hate the Jews. When that happens, and it won't in our life times, you'll have your peace. Not a second before.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
What a load of grandstanding dreck. Qassams are low-yeild, and low accuracy. They land in empty fields more often than not. This is just more Israeli victim-mongering.
1. Do you write scripts for the white house by any chance? how much do you make? start considering it... they need someone to save ass this last year. 2. "The police officer, in self defense, shoots back. " 1--> Since when did the Israeli military become Palestine's police? 2--> Assuming Gaza/West Bank are sovereign as Israel "claims" they are, wouldn't the so called "terrorists" be defending the Palestinians, hence isn't Israel shooting at the Palestinian military/police/civilians thereby causing retaliatory acts? "The terrorists in Israel fire rockets. Palestine fights back. Some innocent people get killed on both sides. Palestanians feel terrible when this happens. But it's not Palestine's fault. Palestine is fighting in self defense." Good job, that was a great loop of a sentence. (FYI I think the 120 vs 5 number matches the previous sentence more. ;))
No, the Israelis are in the place of the Nazis this time, and are busily applying their Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem.
So let me see if I've got you straight:
1) When someone offers you 95% of what you're asking for, it's not good enough. Negotiation is about getting 100% of what you're asking for.
2) We should totally ignore the fact that Barak offered Arafat Israeli land in exchange for land he wanted to keep for the settlements. Arafat totally could have come back and continued negotiations but he did not.
Demanding 100% of what you want is not called negotiation. He responded with terrorism in the form of the second intifada. There is plenty of documentation to back up what I'm saying here, the most public of which are Bill Clinton's own memoirs.
You are ignoring the simple fact that Israel was attacked first, and they responded as any reasonable nation would, by fighting back and winning, despite overwhelming odds against them. Yes, they took some land. That's rather typical when you beat the crap out of an aggressor.
I must assume you didn't go very far in school, or you went to school at the "University of Anti-Semite".
-- Will program for bandwidth
Terrorists are unlawful combatants trying to reach their goal through guerilla warfare, scare tactics and generally inducing fear among their enemies. Their main weapon is not the mortar, IED or Kalashnikov, but fear arising from the fact that they could (and will) attack anybody, anywhere and at any moment. Their strategy of reaching victory is sympathy or war fatigue of the general populace, pressing their leaders to make concessions right away or after - more often than not provoked - "moral outrages" when regular troops commit some serious wrongs, intentional or not. This can and will happen, when regular troops are put under enormous uncertainties concerning the hostiliy of any given individual by dissolving among the general public. It's rationale is the assumption that if anybody *could* be an enemy, sooner or later *someone* shoots at anybody. This either fosters support for the terrorist cause, because the regular trooops are losing their moral advante OR it fosters the general fear among the enemy, increasing the chances for further "outrageous incidents". Their ultimate victory is when all opposing forces unilaterally abandon disputed assets as it is happening in "land for peace" or as it finally happened in Vietnam 1968.
When the public views regular troops of their side as morally equivalent to "the terrorists", they are more than halfway done. The public then regularly forgets the sequence of action and reaction and more often than not regards wrongdoings by "the good guys" with standards that are orders of magnitudes higher than those applicable for "the bad guys". A good example of this false moral equivalence would be any incident, where a police officer would be publicly scalded for shooting a robber "armed with only a toy gun", totally neglecting the cause of action/reaction, the uncertainty of any given situation and the urgency in which extremely important decisions have to be made and carried out.
That said, terrorist fighters are distinguishable from non-terrorist combatants by several key facts:
- they are usually under no central leadership: every cell acts more or less alone. Cease fires and agreements cannot be brokered without involving each and every single cell leader.
- command structures are informal and loose. And agreements reached with the top leadership may or may not reach the foot soldiers. Orders from upper commands may not be followed, soldiers disobeying upper command orders are not punished, soldiers committing war crimes may never be identified.
- staging grounds and homebases are usually perfectly blended with purely civilian assets. And attempts to attack these carries a high risk of collateral damage and the commitment of "wrongs" as described above. Figuratively speaking, the ideal terrorist homebase would also be a religiously-founded daycare facility for homeless, disabled children and infants.
- attack targets are picked out of opportunity, not out of strategic reasoning. Any and all things can be targeted, as long as the moral impact is big enough.
- a terrorist may or may not carry any uniform or sign of dependency. He will turn into a soldier the moment you look away and instantly revert to a civilian when he drops the Kalashnikov after running around the corner of a building. Killed terrorists can be masqueraded back to a real civilian with now-widowed wife and several kids within seconds.
Compared to a regular army, this yields five key determinants of a terrorist:
- will pick targets apparently at random
- targets with absolutely no military or strategic values are attacked with full force
- friendly civilian casualties are part of the battle plan
- always disguised as a civilian
- central command structures, guidelines and rules are flexible, nonexistent or a joke
If you still fail to accurately distinguish a Palestinian fighter from a soldier of the Israeli Defense Force, feel free to plan a week-long holiday in Jerusalem for a more hands-on experience.
Let's see:
- targets at random: the IDF will pick targets of opportunity, but not random. They usually do not target civilians as their main objective. They are not squeamish about collateral damage, that accusation is right. But they are using precision weapons with immense unit costs to increase the chances of hitting the intended target and they do not fire blindly, letting weapon impacts happen by chance. US-Troops are much more selective about hitting civilians, and they too use the most expensive precision weapons to ensure an impact on the intented targets. These weapons fail sometimes or mistakes in target identification occur, resulting in dead or wounded civilians. - But as tragic as civilian victims are, they are the result of accidents and not of a deliberate act of violence.
+ contrast: Hamas is firing unguided mortars over the border and the Muqtadar army is bombing crowded markets. Their intended targets are loosely defined as "people of the opposing side", which can be US Troops, IDF Troops, but Shiite, Sunnite or Jewish civilians depending on the belief of the terrorists. The Muqtadar army in Iraq is at least trying to target regular soldiers with their remote-controlled IEDs - Hamas on the other hand fires unguided munitions every day with almost no hope of ever hitting a military target, but regularly hitting civilian homes. And that killing spree in a Jewish school was not a military operation at all, but the intended objective was killing as much civilians as possible.
- which brings us to "picks targets of no strategic value": IDF targets Hamas leaders and accepts civilian casualties surrounding that. Despicable, but not terrorism, as the prime target is of strategic value. Hamas targets, ehm, school children and civilian homes in Sderot. Insurgents in Iraq bomb crowded markets just because of the number of people that congregate there. Even more despicable AND terrorism by definition. School children and traders on a market carry no strategic value.
- concerning friendly casualties as part of the battle plan: the IDF has its barracks clearly defined, as have the US Troops. Minimizing friendly casualties are their prime objective and the reason for most of them joining their armies.
+ contrast: Hamas is firing their mortars from the roof of regular homes, retaliation and counter-battery fire *will* therefore will hit a civilian home and they know that. Hizbollah was firing unguided rockets (targets at random again) from urban areas instead of open ground. After firing they retreated into garages under inhabited buildings - counter-fire then hit the buildings and the people inside who were suddenly 100 percent pure civilians. Despicable and textbook terrorism.
- always disguised as civilians: clear call, as almost all soldiers of the West use clearly defined uniforms, openly show flags, national identification emblems and their weapon. This is what the Geneva convention calls "combatants". The other side, well, except for their publicized leaders, one might never know if they are just a civilian working in a bakery or killing infidels for a living.
- central command structures a joke: regular troops are harshly reprimanded when straying from their objective, even when no ceasefire exists. Collateral damage and civilian casualties can lead to war tribunals against them even when they hit the intended target
+ in contrast, well, a cease-fire brokered with Palestinian authorities may or may not apply to the individual Mujahid. And even if individual soldiers break a formal cease fire agreement, they will still be celebrated when a larger target was hit, civilian or not. The Muqtadar army on the other hand adhered to a cease-fire with the Coalition troops in Iraq for quite some time.
As with all things in life, there's no black and white but a large gamut of light and dark grays. Summing up the points to a "terrorism percentage", Hamas is worse than the Iraqi insurgents, who are worse than the IDF, which are in turn worse than most US Troops.