Slashdot Mirror
Gaza Debate Goes Virtual
Ian Lamont writes "The war of words over the conflict in Gaza has moved from the real world to the Internet. Besides a furious stream of mini-debates on Twitter between supporters of and critics of Israel's military actions, there have also been demonstrations in Second Life at an Israel-themed sim and a collection of Facebook applications, including 'QassamCount' and 'Stop Israel's war crimes in Gaza.' Another project — 'mapping the war in Gaza' — was launched by Al Jazeera and takes user-submitted reports, tweets, and Microsoft Virtual Earth to track the number of casualties and other developments."
In addition to this, the series of website defacements we discussed a few days ago has now extended to sites controlled by NATO and the US Army.
In a submission I made that didn't get accepted, I linked the New York Times article on Israel's use of Twitter to give their side (israelconsulate page). Favorite response?
israelconsulate: we R pro nego[tiation]. crntly tlks r held w the PA + tlks on the 2 state soln. we talk only w/ ppl who accept R rt 2 live."
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Yep - you definitely should have, but you more than make up for it by attempting to counter the Israeli government's attempts to portray Jewish = Supporter of Israeli Government. To provide a little balance, there are some pretty nasty people who pretend that they represent the Arab people when they clearly are some its worst enemies (Egyptian rulership, I'm looking at you). Would it kill the Egyptians to open the Gaza gate and let some aid and supplies through? Well no, it wouldn't, but it might cost them some favours from the US government.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Try everyday in small villages no one gives a shit about. Read Palestinian media and Arab news and you'll see plenty of non-violent protests (one sided reporting of course).
What happens at these non-violent protests, such as demonstrations against the construction of the "security wall" in the West Bank? The protesters get stoned by right wing Israeli settlers, or are dispersed by tear gas and rubber bullets from the Israeli army.
Pst. It isn't their old homeland. Even if you read the bible god expelled the jews from the area. They have never owned or run any land in the area, they lived in the region sure. Oh and the orriginal Zionists were terrorists that carved a chunk out of muslim land for themself. After the holocaust nobody could politically say anything bad about the jewish people. And they were pitied so they were given land which had been promised to return to muslims. The borders were more than shaky since its inception and have since that date ever increased in israels favour thanks to them being significantly richer than their neighbors. Oh and as for expulsion, arabs have been expelled from israel more than a few times, the arabic population in israel is much much smaller than it was in the 80s obviously.
I think it's wrong to try to force someone to live (or not live) within some arbitrary geographical region
And plenty of Arabs (and every other culture) live in Israel. The point of the Israelis is that Jews needed (historically - um, just look it up) a place where they can go live without being slaughtered for being Jewish. Enough of the world agreed with that proposition to actually set it up that way half a century ago.
The Israelis aren't saying who may or may not live in Palestine - they're only saying that whoever it is, or whatever mix of people it is, can't be allowed to shoot thousands of missiles across the border and into residential areas for the specific purpose of randomly killing civilians, for years on end, without a response that finally ends it. The Palestinians have shown that they cannot even form a coherent voice and functioning government within their own population - even when dozens of other countries pay for and help to run their elections. How can Israel have a sustained, peaceful relationship with a neighbor when half of that neighbor's elected government body is willing to shoot the other half down in the street in order to preserve the latitude to act on one of their stated, foundational tenets: that Israel should be destroyed, and its Jewish residents all killed.
There is only one party in the conflict between Israel and the militant, missile-lobbing terrorists in Gaza that operate on a principle of race- and culture-based segregation and extermination: that would be Hamas and its Islmaist backers.
There are millions of people in the region and each of those millions of people has their own unique world view.
So what? Some world views are objectively better than others. Hamas wants to cling to a world view that embraces a backwards-looking, mysoginistic, medievalist militant theocracy-by-sword. They get cash and weapons from groups that think women shouldn't be able to read, or which would stone them to death for having been raped by a stranger. La la la, just another world view, right?
If the Palestinians put down their weapons there would be no Palestine.
Israel pulled every last resident and military person out of Gaza explicitly on the Palestinian promise that the attacks out of Gaza would end, and that Gaza wouldn't be a base camp for Hamas terrorism and violence. The Palestinians never had a better chance to simply take control of that territory through a peaceful and democratic government that wanted to actually become the nation that everyone wants to see. But instead, Hamas took control of it, and the Palestinian people are too scared to put them out of power. Just like the majority of Iraqis were too worn down and scared to death of the Baathists and of Saddam to get rid of him - even when his actions brought more and more sanctions and hardship and death. Israel (and the rest of the world, if they weren't so chickenshit about the faux diplomatic issues) must do to Hamas in Gaza what the coalition did to Saddam. Make them go away so that a working civic society has a chance to take hold, just as it gradually is in Iraq, only a few years later.
Hamas can't survive unless they can posture themselves as the defiant heros, fighting off Israel. But ever since Israel removed everything of theirs from Gaza, Hamas has had no enemy there to valiantly fight. So what do they do? Spend months making thousands of cowardly missiles launches at random civilian targets in order to provoke the military response they need in order to have some way to prove their worth. They're getting more than they asked for, and have mis-interpretted what happened recently with Hezbollah in Beirut. If the Palestinians force Hamas to stop attacking Israel, the conflict will stop. But Hamas kills Palestinians who want it to stop, don't they? So Israel's hand has been forced, and they're doing it the hard way. And they still send out leaflets telling Palestinian civilians to get away from areas wh
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.