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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.
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.
What, how does this go? Infidel! Terrorist! Am not. Are so! Twitter: insanely useless or just a huge waste of time?
Dog is my co-pilot.
It sounds like having a "discussion" about this conflict is a great way to generate traffic to ones website.
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.
Since my side is completely blameless and your side is the obvious aggressor.
"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...
No really. The definitive solution : me move all palestinian to say, the south pole. We move all Israelien to the north Pole. We let them cool down there. Then while everybody is gone, we double check no living being are left in the "holy" shitty land. Then we put atom bomb at regular space, to transform the whole shebang in a giant parking lot. Once this is done, we SALT the earth. In depth. Once this is done, we put all kind of traps, mine, bomb, automated gun sentries. Anybody trying to go back on their shitty holy land get blasted to smithern. Problem solved.
Why is evacuation of Israeli colonies in the West Bank unrealistic? Israel evacuated their colonies in Gaza, they can do it in the West Bank. The settlements would be good partial reparation to the Palestinians. It's not like Israel and the colonists didn't know that what they were doing was illegal and wrong.
Otherwise, I'm right with you on the one state solution. Don't forget a constitution that's the supreme law of the land (along with treaties) that guarantees equal rights for all persons.
States don't have rights, only persons have rights. Instead, States have powers that they justly derive from the people. States also exist or not at the whims of the people. Sometimes the people have a revolution, found a new state and the old state is wiped off the map.
Did Apartheid South Africa have a right to exist?
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.
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.
When was the last time the Palestinians tried non-violent protests?
Non-violent demonstrations happen all the time (but they don't get much press in the USA). The kind of "non-violent" civil disobedience that Gandhi used just gets people arrested by the Israeli military (and very few people in the USA even notice).
So, actually, the Palestinians are trying both violent and non-violent approaches (and neither has had much success) - but it's the violent approaches that you hear about in the USA because it allows Israel to justify what it's doing to the Palestinians.
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.
This is not a matter of multiple world views, all jostling for an equal share of turf and air time. This is militant, murderous thugs (Hamas) willing to kill anybody in order to prevent a modern, civil, democratic society from taking shape in their neighborhood.
It's quite a bit more complicated than that. I'm going to avoid the point-counterpoint monotony, but in general, the problem with your viewpoint is that you assume that Hamas is the will of the Palestinian people, which is true only in the current circumstance.
For instance, you could reason that all Japanese are murderous bastards for what they did to the Chinese in the 1930s. But that is not the will of the Japanese people, nor is the rise of Mexican drug gangs the will of the Mexican people, nor was the rise of the Nazi party the will of the German people.
Hamas was voted into power because the Palestinians had given up on diplomacy, because Israel refuses to work for peace. Israel refuses to work for peace because if there is an establishment of a Palestinian state, three things are probable. One is that they will not be able to seize any more land that they want to have. Two is that they won't get all of Jerusalem. Three is that eventually, and I'm talking in a hundred years, the Israeli state would cease to exist due to immigration and the natural progression of democratic demands for freedom from religion. Israel is "officially" Jewish, officially for one ethnic group and one religion, and the only state in the world with such a status. It's likely that under normal democratic functions, this will disappear, and that is something unacceptable to the hard liners who are currently running the country.
Blaming the Palestinians for voting Hamas in is like blaming the Black community for forming the Black Panthers. After your home has been taken, after your friends have been killed indiscriminately, after you see your children grow up in total poverty, after being under a foreign occupier's iron grip for sixty years, a society becomes quite damaged. But this is the goal for the occupier. As Ben-Gurion said, he hoped time would heal his wounds. He hoped the world would excuse Israel for the heinous acts it has committed to get what it wants, however much you agree with their goals.
All Israel is doing in Gaza right now is guaranteeing there is no peace, because peace means the end of their acquisition of Palestinian property. They destroyed Lebanon, they got Hezbollah. They destroyed the PLO, they got Hamas. These are predictable outcomes, and the planners of Israel are not stupid.