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Gaza Debate Goes Virtual

Posted by Soulskill on from the fighting-with-tweets-and-mashups dept.

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.

5 of 644 comments (clear)

  1. Second life sim by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    there have also been demonstrations in Second Life at an Israel-themed sim

    ...and it's only a matter of time until the virtual Islamic trolls fire virtual rockets and bomb their virtual busses while cowardly hiding amongst virtual women and children.

  2. correction by alcmaeon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I should have said "virtual Zionists" instead of "virtual Jews" since a lot of Jews, including Israeli ones, have courageously condemned Israel's actions.

    Israel, the Jewish state, wants to conflate itself with all Jews, and obfuscate the reality, but the fact is, it doesn't speak for all Jews anymore than Saudi Arabia speaks for all Muslims.

  3. No actually it isn't by GuloGulo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "You got to admit though, it's a lot easier to play the victim when you're starving, walled into a tiny area and can only defend themselves with scraps of old military hardware and bits of rubble against a rich country armed with the latest in US air power that assassinates their democratically elected leaders."

    What are they "defending themselves" from? Oh right, retaliation from their rocket attacks.

    It's a lot harder to play the victim when you chose the path of violence in the first place.

    Imagine how this conflict would go if the Palestinian's weren't so cowardly and instead used non-violent protests. You know, like Gandhi.

    Nah, that kind of stuff never works.

     

    --
    "The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
    1. Re:No actually it isn't by burris · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So the occupation, colonization, and annexation aren't violent? There's a reason why colonizing land you occupy is forbidden by the 4th Geneva convention, it's because it amounts to ethnic cleansing.

  4. Israel's right to exist? by ZekoMal · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Why does it have a right to exist? I understand perfectly well that the good ol' Bible tells us Israel ought exist, but it didn't exist for a while because everyone sacked the place and took it as their own. We didn't bring back Rome Israel or Persia Israel; we brought back the first Israel, for the 'league of nations' opted to do it. After the first World War. Now, I'm not that good with math...but from the end of the reign of a Judaism country to World War 1....gonna guess other people lived there.

    To give you a faaaaint idea of what I'm hinting at. Imagine if the US wasn't in the UN, and the UN decided that Native Americans needed their land back. So, they gave them the entire east coast of the US, to be their land. They were given basically whatever they wanted, and they began to push the US citizens gradually to the west, claiming various areas that are more desirable than others (IE, they take Yellowstone national park, leave us Death valley). They are far richer than the US citizens, and have far more support (although Canada and Mexico support the US citizens, lets just say the UN has marked them as third world terrorists). So, let's say that the US citizens scrap together some money, and a small group that want to win back their land, bomb the native Americans. The retaliation? The natives start bombing the civilians that didn't have a thing to do with it. They keep bombing, despite the UN telling them to stop.

    Seems like a stretch.

    Of course, I don't see why Israel was reinstated. People lived there after the Israelites got wiped out, and then the rest of the world told the Palestinians (arguably not the same exact people who did this), were told to shove over.

    I'll probably get modded troll though...it's very mean and uncool to be pro-Palestine civilians. Nope, if you think Israel is wrong, you are a pro-terrorist.