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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."
Besides the cool factor, they deserve better protection from the savages they face.
Can we all please make an effort to keep the comments on track, and not diverge into a "Israelis/Jews are evil" fest?
The residents of Sderot have every right to expect their government to protect them and if the government is refusing to take any preventative action, while over 7,000 rockets have fallen on the town, then suing the government seems a very reasonable action.
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.
To pre-empt the comments that will follow, it's not relevant to point out Israeli action in Gaza and get into a debate over whether it's justified or not - this topic is about residents of Sderot taking completely non-violent, legal action, over repeated aggressive and violent attacks from a neighbouring region.
If only everyone in the region sought such a solution, instead of violence meets violence.
How about a peace settlement? You stay on your side of the fence drawn in 1967, we'll stay on our side. Sounds fair to me.
...is it a viable country?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
The town in question is Sderot, where most inhabitants are of North African (especially Moroccan) origins. Those tend to be not so hell-bent on Zionism as European Jews because they weren't persecuted as much. I like to think that the government of a country founded on Zionism and so proud of it, would be slightly biased towards the inhabitants of Sderot.
Also, has anyone of you ever seen the damage katyushas make? Calling those things rockets or spending money to intercept them is ludicrous.
Res publica non dominetur
The tit-for-tat Palestinian/Israeli thing is really getting old. I see this behavior in my 10 year-old students. One kid says something nasty, another one says something more nasty and eventually somebody gets shoved and then fists are flying. If the villagers get a death ray and start toasting Palestinians like ants, I can assure you that the Palestinians are going to fight back.
They're not going to just cry and go running home after a FREAKING laser attack. Oh no. You can bet that handfuls of Qassam missiles will rain down on a pretty regular basis. What Israel needs is a good read of Dr. Suse's Butter Battle Book and have a sudden outbreak of common sense. Palestine needs to grow the hell up and stop acting like an angry child too.
Escalating weapons and violence rarely solve anything unless EVERYBODY is just charcoal in the bottom of a big-ass crater. Then the problem pretty much solves its self.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
These centuries old disputes about whose pretend friend is actually real are definitely worth spending all these countless millions of dollars on and losing all these lives over.
Please don't send a Word document when a text file will do the job.
the point may sink in that firing such a missile is equivalent to firing on your own people.
Uh, you do realise that the Islamists are already quite happy to blow themselves up in order to make a political point?
You've fallen into the common trap of projecting your own morals and rational thought, onto people brainwashed their entire lives to hate Jews and want to kill them. Meanwhile, after tens of billions of dollars in 'aid' from the US, EU and even Israel, the only significant thing the Palestinian society produces, is terrorism.
Actually there are lots of news incidents about Sihks. At least here in Canada.
Sikhs make the news way more than "jews" but way less than "israel"
Instead of treating the symptom, why don't the Israelis solve the cause? The cause is that in Gaza live two groups of people. One group simply wants to live, work, go to school, live in peace, and mind their own business. The other group wants to blow stuff up. To solve the cause, the group that wants to blow stuff up needs to be blown up first.
Here's the trouble with this simple statement:
- Trouble number 1: This isn't a conventional war, where the army of one state fights the army of another. This is a state, which has to abide by laws and wants to avoid killing innocent bystanders, fighting bands of rebels, who abide by no law, target children, and hope to kill as many innocent bystanders as possible. When a terrorist shoots rockets at children and dreams of blowing himself up, does he have morals or care about the consequences of breaking laws? No way!
- Trouble number 2: The enemy knows that Israelis value life and want to avoid killing the bystanders I just mentioned, so they use that to their advantage by deliberately firing their rockets from the vicinity of homes or schools. This has two advantages for the terrorists: First, Israel will hesitate to strike back for fear of killing innocents; second, if Israel strikes back and innocents get killed, it makes for great anti-Israel PR for the terrorists. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
So the trouble is that you really must kill the terrorists because they pose a danger to both sides of the Gaza border. How do you do that? You have to enlist the help of the innocent people who live in their midst. Israel has to send a few elite battalions into Gaza to stamp out this problem once and for all, and must provide a means for the innocent residents of Gaza to join forces with Israel against the terrorist elements that surround them. Only then will the tens of thousands of terrorists in Gaza be overpowered. And stamp them out one-by-one, destroy their bomb factories, blow up their underground tunnels, and put an end to the problem of terrorism in Gaza once and for all.This is the solution. This is a painful solution. It will require a tremendous effort, a fight that will last a very long time, and many lives will unfortunately be lost in the process, from all three sides. But this is the only way to end the daily barrage of rocket fire from Gaza onto several Israeli towns, and the terror that the residents of both areas feel on a daily basis.
Building ray guns and all kinds of weird stuff will NOT solve the problem.
Depends what you mean. They have more Jews in the news than Sikhs, but more "Sikh"-topic stories than "Jew"-topic stories. This is because Jews are more normalised in Canadian society than Sikhs and Canadian media is obsessed with reporting on the "broad strata" of Canadian "communities", not that people actually care what the nature of God is now that new immigrants have come in with The Truth(c) (did you know God doesn't want you to wear a motorcycle helmet anymore? Go figure). How many "Protestant" news stories do you see? The only one really going on lately has been the Anglican church gay marriage thing. Probably more Sikh stories than Protestant stories, yet I think Protestants still form a community of some size in Canada.
There are a number of games that you can play where the optimal result requires perfect cooperation between the different teams/players, but where individual greediness can lead to a significant individual gain. That individual gain of course comes at the expense of all other players.
There is a variant of this type of game that disallows communication between teams. It's been shown that with that setup, there is exactly one way to play:
1st round: no information is available, so assume maximal cooperation from all other teams, and play your turn accordingly.
2nd round: Reciprocate the other teams' play: if they played greedy, play greedy. If they played nice, play nice.
3rd round: repeat approach from round 2 until the end.
The logic behind this is that greedy players will only play nice when they see the exact consequences of their actions imposed on themselves, and when they see that playing nice is rewarded.
Applied to the Israel/Palestine conflict, it could mean that the appropriate response to random rocket launches is an immediate retaliatory strike with equal destructive power, aimed at the source of the rockets. On the other hand, the appropriate response to suicide bombers is a little more fuzzy. Send in robot-bombers? Drop a bomb in a random place? Also, it is unclear what the positive feedback for no rocket launches or suicide bombers would be. Resume normal conditions? Stay put? Unlock frozen support funds for hamas?
I definitely think though that Palestinians in general have to understand that rockets being launched from their territory means that rockets will be launched against them in general as well. It'd be difficult to implement, as it's a completely different approach to dealing with rocket attacks and suicide bombers: personal responsibility and punishment is out, collective punishment is in. Not to mention that a lot of the current preventive measures would have to go out the window as well.
I doubt that anybody in Israel has the courage to experiment with that.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
1) Abandon further settlement development. Right now, Abbas won't even negotiate with them because they are taking more land from Palestinains for settlements.
..., get elected PM of Israel. Yes, the world has gone mad.
2) Begin negotiating with Haniya. Like it or not, he is the fairly elected representative of the Palestinian Authority. The problem is that, as you point out, Hamas sees its goal as the destruction of Israel, but Haniya has shown that he is more moderate than that, and negotiation is the only way to change the propaganda. Note that good thing can grow in questionable ground-- Shamir was an old wannabe Nazi* and yet he contributed greatly to the peace process. Sharon was a convicted war criminal** and yet his administration began the abandonment of large sections of settlement blocks, paving a possible road to peace. If we judged everyone by the past, Israel's leadership would be disqualified for past affiliations/war crimes/etc.
* This is not meant to invoke Godwin's law. Shamir was a top leader during WWII of a group which was fighting for Israeli independance against the UK. This group (ELHI, aka the Stern Gang) was a terrorist organization which openly idolized the Nazis, celebrated Nazi field victories praised the rounding up of the Jews by the Nazis (on the basis that this way at least they were effectively self-governing), and even in 1942 attempted to form a military alliance with Hitler. Funny-- celebrate Nazi victories, try to enter into an alliance with Hitler,
** Sharon was convicted of an Israeli military tribunal of being in part responsible for the massacres in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebannon in the 1980's.
My own suspicion is that we are going to see yet another "Operation Defensive Shield" which will force the government to once again consider abandoning settlement blocks. No, Israeli politics is far from rational. It would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. In the end, though, the civilians on both sides are the losers.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Lawyers with frickin' lasers attached to their heads?
That would be very scary.
"It was given to them by the Allied forces in recompense for what was done to them"
If that was true, they'd deserve to have it taken away again as punishment for doing exactly the same to the Palestinians ever since. These people are not nice, clean-shaven pseudo-American suburbanites under inexplicable attack from nasty, bearded Arabs, as the US media would have you believe. They're heavily armed military colonists.
Well, if you're in Israel you apparently can sue. In the USA the Second Amendment allows you to own your own laser cannon but the government is not required to buy one for you.
With the added irony that if the Israelis do deploy these it'll most likely be the US paying the bill.
When we stole Texas from the Mexicans, we did it hard and fast and we held it on our own. The residents evicted from the land Israel now occupies seem to be a bit more determined than the Mexicans!
Blar.
A. As the GP posted, people were not kicked out in 1948. Virtually all of the peoples chose to leave and became refugees. Some of it was due to wartime activity. A war, which, by the way, was started by those same people who were later complaining (The Jewish side accepted the peaceful UN division plan).
B. Millions of other refugees were created by WWII around that time, none of which remained refugees 30 years later. These Palestinian refugees are still considered refugees 60 years later! They should assimilate into whatever lands they live in, they are not refugees anymore.
C. Even if any wrong was done 60 years ago, the grandchildren of the refugees from 1948 are indeed "bad" to be shooting rockets at the grandchildren of the Jews from 1948, who were born to parents who were born there. Whatever happened 60 years ago is now irrelevant to who the lands belong to.
D. They are not really trying to "conquer back the lands", which would, if successful, require another holocaust, but are just trying to kill as many civilians as they can. They know they cannot conquer the lands or achieve anything but propaganda success with violence, and are indeed focusing on the propaganda side.