Flash From the Past: Why an Apparent Israeli Nuclear Test In 1979 Matters Today

Lasrick writes: Stanford's Leonard Weiss writes about growing evidence that Israel and South Africa cooperated on nuclear weapons testing in the 1970s, and in fact conducted a test: "On September 22, 1979, a US satellite code-named Vela 6911, which was designed to look for clandestine atmospheric nuclear tests and had been in operation for more than 10 years, recorded a double flash in an area where the South Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean, off the coast of South Africa. The detection immediately triggered a series of steps in which analysts at national labs in the United States informed their superiors that the recorded signal had all the earmarks of a nuclear test... The event has been a subject of controversy ever since, but is now recognized by most analysts as the detection of an Israeli nuclear test with South African logistical cooperation." Weiss goes through the history of the investigation and new evidence that has come to light, and relates it to the rhetoric surrounding Iran's nuclear energy program and the recent agreement Iran struck with the P5+1, as well as to efforts for a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East. Terrific cloak-and-dagger read with plenty of technical details.

Comments

Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor does Israel murder Iranians in Argentina.

Why?

Because Judaism doesn't have the concept of dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb, nor does Judaism demand death or conversion for all kafirs .

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

Nor does Israel murder Iranians in Argentina.

Why?

Because Judaism doesn't have the concept of dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb, nor does Judaism demand death or conversion for all kafirs .

This is the difference. Liberal anti-Semites can't seem to wrap their heads around this concept. Israel wants to be left alone in peace; Muslim countries are hell-bent on destroying Israel. Also note: if Israel has had nukes since the 70's as this is claiming, funny how they've never used them, even in defense at this point? Compare that to Muslim countries' vows to eradicate Israel at any possible opportunity. Who do you think is more responsible with nuclear technology?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[binarylarry]

Who would israel use nukes against? Only a fool would nuke your neighbors, even if they hate you.

Why does the US and UN continue to allow Israel to have them? They don't really need the weapons, they can't use them in anyway without starting a massive war that will basically eliminate their country.

By having the weapons, it causes their neighbors to want them to keep forces equal. So you have fucking crazy states like Iran constantly trying to even the playing field with Israel.

The only reason I can see for Israel to have them is leverage over the US and other countries. As long as their nukes exist (or everyone thinks they exist), there's a kind of cold war that can be easily sparked into actual war, so the US, UN, etc can't unilaterally do anything to either side without potentially sparking an even bigger war.

Since Israel is one of the bigger powers in the region, this unstableness prevents the larger powers from getting involved and gives more slack to do what they want.

(this isn't meant to be anti-israel rant, just a theory. I'm generally pro Israel as a western style democracy in an otherwise fucked up region of the world).

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you read your own link?

According to a report in The Nation, the author claims that James Cheek, United States Ambassador to Argentina at the time of the bombing, told him, "To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with anything." The hottest lead in the case, he recalled, was an Iranian defector named Manoucher Moatamer, who "supposedly had all this information." But Moatamer turned out to be only a dissatisfied low-ranking official without the knowledge of government decision-making that he had claimed. "We finally decided that he wasn't credible," Cheek recalled.[94]

In 2013, American investigative journalist Gareth Porter cast doubt on the alleged involvement of Iran and Hezbollah, reporting that the link depended centrally on just claims from the People's Mujahedin of Iran, a controversial Iranian anti-regime group that has been described as terrorist by some nations

I don't know who did it, but neither do you.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in general pro Israel but I can also understand that the neighboring countries don't really like them being there. They basically took a piece of land that some people already lived on and said that God gave it to them a long time ago. If all they really want is peace then can't they just point at some other peace of land and have that instead? Is it so important that it is just that land?

The whole thing is a mess.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[myowntrueself]

Why would Israel use their nuclear weapons when they haven't been threatened with nukes? If there was a credible threat, they'd quickly make it known that either they have nuclear weapons, or the US would either tactically or logistically provide them. If Israel was attacked with a nuke, it would only be a matter of time before they retaliated with a nuke of their own.

In Western Europe, NATO doctrine involved using nukes on West German soil to stop a Soviet tank rush. I imagine Israeli doctrine is similar.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would israel use nukes against? Only a fool would nuke your neighbors, even if they hate you.

Why does the US and UN continue to allow Israel to have them? They don't really need the weapons, they can't use them in anyway without starting a massive war that will basically eliminate their country.

By having the weapons, it causes their neighbors to want them to keep forces equal. So you have fucking crazy states like Iran constantly trying to even the playing field with Israel.

The only reason I can see for Israel to have them is leverage over the US and other countries. As long as their nukes exist (or everyone thinks they exist), there's a kind of cold war that can be easily sparked into actual war, so the US, UN, etc can't unilaterally do anything to either side without potentially sparking an even bigger war.

Since Israel is one of the bigger powers in the region, this unstableness prevents the larger powers from getting involved and gives more slack to do what they want.

(this isn't meant to be anti-israel rant, just a theory. I'm generally pro Israel as a western style democracy in an otherwise fucked up region of the world).

The nukes are Israel's doomsday weapon aimed at the leaders of the Muslim countries surrounding them. Those nukes say this to those leaders:

"If you follow through on your Islamic tenets and try to reclaim this little bit of dar al-Harb for the greater glory of your Prophet, you personally are going to disappear in a blinding white flash of light. And all your cities will be glassed-over desert."

If you don't know what dar al-Harb is, you don't understand the fundamental nature of the Arab/Israeli war - Israel's very existence is an insult to Islam. Israel is surrounded by a few hundred million people living in a culture that makes right-wing abortion clinic bombers look downright sane. I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians like way too many Muslims did on 9/11. Other cultures might kill innocents, but there's always reluctance to accept it and some sort of rationale used to justify it. But not Islam - Muslims were literally dancing in the streets on 9/11.

Honor killing where fathers murder their own daughters.

Execution of homosexuals.

Islam needs to grow the fuck up.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[ColdWetDog]

The whole history of that region has been various peoples stomping the shit out of various other peoples. This latest spat is just a continuation of stuff that has been going on for at least eight centuries. If it wasn't Israel it would be something else (Lebanon for instance). Of course, the British managed to screw things up in a way only the British can do when the created Palestine. To be fair, the French tried hard but were out classed by the Brits.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[geoskd]

If the Jews believe that Jerusalem is holy, they should be able to live there.

Fuck what??!?

Do you also believe that Kim Davis has the right to impose her religious beliefs on the rest of the country? My religious belief is that the White house is holy land, and that god has commanded me to live there. By your reasoning, this should be perfectly acceptable, and Obama should turn the keys over to me forth-with. People need to get past the idea that religion gives anyone the right to anything. Religion is between a person and their god, and has no business interfering with anyone else. As soon as you allow one persons religion to be imposed on another, no ones freedoms are safe. It's high time that we take active steps to prevent *all* religions of the world from being politically active. Mixing religion and politics always ends in someone being persecuted. Always.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

If Israel wants to be left alone, perhaps they should stop their policy of murdering innocent civilians and building homes in areas that don't belong to them.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[CanHasDIY]

Israeli doctrine allows for unprovoked attacks on neighboring countries.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

Any war is an attempt to eliminate their country. Their nukes are the only thing which has stopped Iran/etc from invading them for the last thirty years.

One might argue "but they are friends the US - they have their back, they don't need the nukes as they have US military in their pocket." Well, how did that work out for the Ukraine? How is Israel's ally the US working out for them right now? The entire world knows that an alliance with the US is only as strong as the current administration.

The only thing Israel has at the end of the day is their own military, and everyone in that country knows it. That's why their military rotation is set up the way it is, so that when they get invaded, every last one of them can fight.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Bing Tsher E]

Unprovoked? If Canada was lobbing missiles carrying conventional warheads at Wisconsin an attack on Canada wouldn't be an unprovoked attack.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

I'm not anti-semetic by any stretch of the imagination, but perhaps a little history might do you some good - try examining the roots of modern 'terrorism' followed by the role of the Haganah (which later became the backbone of the IDF) in pre and post-WWII Zionism. Israel was, quite literally, founded through terrorism.

Israel murders plenty of people - in fact they're rather famous for being so good at it; however, so does our own government.

Saying that, yes, Iranian religious leaders are pretty much your typical religious zealots - assholes to a one.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[QA]

We're sorry.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[rbrander]

I'm trying to remember what Iraq did to provoke the bombing of Osirak ... I think they built something that might eventually have allowed the development of nuclear parity.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[sjames]

I have to agree. I would find supporting Israel much easier if they would take the high road with Gaza.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on. Israeli religious nutjobs are as dangerous and disgusting as Muslim religious nutjobs are (and Christians, btw. too). I have too little experience with other religions to say the same, but I'd venture the guess that Hindi or Buddhist religious nutjobs are no better.

Luckily most Israelis, Muslims and Christians aren't in the category of "nutjobs". When those are in a position of power (Iran, certainly, but in Israel the minority nutjob party is strong enough), then we have problems.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Pinky's Brain]

Judaism certainly has problematic concepts as well. Islam wants to convert us, Ovadia Yosef just wanted to rule us.

The establishment of Israel makes it in my opinion inevitable that religious Judaism will change into a form pushing for the annexation of the temple mount and the promised land in general ... the orthodox outside Israel might maintain the illegitimacy of Israel, but the ones inside won't be able to unite the dichotomy for long. See the changing rabbinic opinions about visitations to temple mount for instance. There is also a demographic shift under way away from secularism.

As for what religious Judaism might consider the promised land, lets just say it's not cut and dry :

http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL....

An Ayatollah or a Haredi with a finger on the button, seems about equally as scary a thought to me.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[elgatozorbas]

I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians like way too many Muslims did on 9/11.

More specifically: some muslims openly celebrated the murder of innocent civilians and were caught on camera. Some extremist christians do similar things. Some extremist jews do similar things. Some Russians do similar things. Muslims don't have a monopoly on mediaval behaviour.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying Americans weren't celebrating the death of 350000 Japanese civilians that resulting from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima? There's plenty of citations in this paper that suggest otherwise.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

American's were celebrating victory and the end of WW2. They were NOT celebrating that bodies got vaporized so quickly that they left a shadow imprint on building walls. Or that the skin bubbled and peeled from the radiation leaving women and children in agonizing pain.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[93 Escort Wagon]

Unprovoked? If Canada was lobbing missiles carrying conventional warheads at Wisconsin an attack on Canada wouldn't be an unprovoked attack.

No, but those cheese-eaters certainly have it coming...

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Alomex]

Their nukes are the only thing which has stopped Iran/etc from invading them for the last thirty years.

False on two counts: First the Israeli army is fierce-some and serves as much as a deterrent as nukes. Second when Israel was considering bombing the nuclear facilities in Iran, Iran threatened to invade with a combined Syrian-Iranian forces if Israel if they did so. The defense preparations by the IDF, which were extensive did not include nuclear retaliation from Israel, but conventional warfare.

This is common knowledge in Israel, since all young males are in the army so they often talk about what they are currently war-gaming against. Stopping the Iranian invasion was the thing to do for about 5 years from 2005 to 2010 or so.

Currently the main use of their nuclear force is as retaliation against an atomic or dirty bomb. Israel has made it clear that if attacked in such a way they won't spend time investigating who did it. They'll simply wipe out a few countries. In this sense the atomic threat has been rather effective as a deterrent.

The USA made a similar deterrent claim back in post 9/11 to other states: you nuke us, we sand glass you back to the stone age.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[davester666]

But not really.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

The reason for Israel to have them is they can use them if they start to lose a defensive war. The Israeli nation, don't believe they would survive the Israeli state losing a serious war. Hence strategic nuclear forces make sense as a defensive weapon for them.

Obviously there would be horrible political repercussions, but most stuff is better than death.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

There are 0 Israelis who live in Gaza. There are 0 settlements in Gaza. All the Gazan Israeli wars of the last 10 years wars have been Gaza attacking Israel.

They tried taking the high road, the Gazans still won't accept living in Gaza and not Israel.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

Ariel Sharon was born in Kfar Malal, Palestine. Your problem is that you are a racist and don't believe that people should be citizens where they were born.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

Too what extremist christian sect are you referring....I am sick and tired of hearing this as an argument. Please, citation, what modern christian group has danced around in the streets because innocent civilians where killed? ....Im waiting....I really want to hear your response....

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[dinfinity]

I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians

Didn't the US have a little problem with lynching in the past?
But I guess you're going to say all those blacks were criminals, right? No white supremacist would ever just want to see black guys dead, 'guilty' or not.

The thing you have to realize is that almost all humans are very, very good at dehumanizing their out groups (i.e.: the 'not us' people), to the extent that there are no innocents among those groups (hell, they're not even human. They're 'less than dogs').

'The only good [x] is a dead [x]' isn't just some farcical mythological exclamation, it is deeply ingrained in our biology. It takes hard work to build up civilization to prevent that instinct from surfacing and even then that layer of civilization is very thin and easily destroyed.

Muslims were literally dancing in the streets on 9/11

If I'm not mistaken, there are no records of Muslims in the biggest Muslim nation on earth (Indonesia) dancing in the streets because of 9/11, nor do I believe that American Muslims did so. Ask yourself what the difference is between the dancing ones and the non-dancing ones and their relation to the US (and their relationship with Israel). I'm not saying they are right to hate the US or excusing them for it, just that their human capability for hating enemies and disregarding the humanity of those killed in 9/11 is fueled by that relation, not by the specific religion they were brought up with.

I don't know if you've looked at the ongoings in central and southern Africa in the last couple of decades, but I'm pretty sure there have been some pretty horrendously acting Christians there as well: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/afr...

Bottom line:
Humans don't need a lot to deeply hate an entire group of people and rather see them die than live.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

The Yisuv used a variety of tactics to get achieve their goal of an independent Jewish state, just like most national liberation movements do. They did make use of Terrorism but they also made use of agricultural development and cultural enrichment did so on a much wider scale and with a higher budget. It is simply dishonest to take one attribute of the Yishuv's methods and claim that they were "literally founded through terrorism".

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[rasmusbr]

Since Israel has taken an unusual "don't confirm - don't deny" stance we can only assume that the nukes are meant to be revealed, and used if necessary, as a last resort in a scenario where Israel has lost the conventional fight against enemy forces and is about to be conquered and occupied.

If Israel primarily intended to use the weapons as a deterrent they would have revealed that they have them and how may they have, since the deterrent effect is proportional to the amount of firepower that you have. An unconfirmed arsenal with an unknown number of warheads is of course still a tremendous deterrent, so maybe the Israeli leadership thought that it would be overkill to disclose numbers.

Why does the US allow it? The US needs all the allies it can get in the Middle east in order to project influence and power over that region, so it will gladly accept almost anything that its allies do as long as it doesn't go completely against US interests. For example, Turkey is currently bombing the only viable opposition to IS in Iraq, the Kurds. The US needs Turkey in NATO at almost any price (imagine what a disaster it would be for US interests if Turkey aligned itself with Russia and/or with Iran), so Turkey is going to get away with that, even if it means that IS will gain ground in Iraq.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians like way too many Muslims did on 9/11.

More specifically: some muslims openly celebrated the murder of innocent civilians and were caught on camera. Some extremist christians do similar things. Some extremist jews do similar things. Some Russians do similar things. Muslims don't have a monopoly on mediaval behaviour.

Piss Christ vs. Mohammad Cartoons.

The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo - the ones who weren't killed - think you're a FUCKING MORON.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[pedantic bore]

That would be the sect that lined up again and again to buy tickets for "American Sniper"

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Runaway1956]

The Japanese in World War Two had dehumanized themselves to the point that NO ONE GAVE A FUCK about 300,000 civilians. Have you bothered to READ SOME HISTORY?!?! Open a google search, and enter "rape of nanking". Go ahead, you can do it. Try to distinguish between the more authoritative and historical links, as opposed to simple minded propaganda. Yes, look for the actual numbers of people killed by beasts in Imperial uniforms. Tossing babies into the air, and catching them on bayonets, then tossing them to another soldier to catch on his bayonet. Raping any female large enough to accept an adult penis, and maybe cutting a hole large enough if the girl wasn't large enough.

The Imperial army and navy had to be DEFEATED, and the civilians were in the way.

You can bitch and whine about those civilians - but if the shoe were on the other foot, no one would be mourning the loss of our parents and grandparents after the Japanese bombed Los Angeles, or New York, or any other city.

In short, you can blow it out your ass.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

Typical anti-Zionist. If you get contradicted on the facts rant louder.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[bugs2squash]

I'm an atheist and even I know religion is not going to die. Faith/superstition/curiosity about the ineffable is part of the human condition, religions will always emerge to prey on that aspect of humanity just as humans exploit other human vulnerabilities (disparities in power, wealth etc.). There is no way any clever argument is going to prevent humans taking advantage of other humans.

The best hope, to my mind, is to try and reduce the disadvantages with which so many in the world find themselves encumbered, teach them to read, join them to the internet etc. Allow people to travel freely across national borders (fat chance of that happening), treat people fairly no matter their origin, protect the vulnerable (especially children).

Inequality is fertile soil for the corralling effect of religions. I certainly admire the great works done in the name of various churches, but I think we should remember that these were achieved by humans that could just as easily been inspired by a personal faith as one of the "name brands" without the incumberance of fighting between the brand leaders.

There are plenty of things to fight over, lets strike religion off the list and work on overcoming the others

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[meta-monkey]

I suggest we invade, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Aighearach]

It isn't a sect, it is rank-and-file. I don't think you even know any Christians if you aren't aware that celebrating death and accidents that befall people of disliked religions is a standard type of social communication.

You seem to be simply claiming you haven't met these people, and that therefore they don't exist. It is a laughable claim to anybody who, due to being an employed adult who does business-to-business work, engages people from all walks of life in a relaxed atmosphere where they often say whatever they really think.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[meta-monkey]

Naw, you just mass produce light tanks and counter rush as soon as his tanks are dead.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Aighearach]

All serious analysis of the choices that US military commanders were making (nuke or ground assault) shows that more civilians would have been killed in a ground assault than were killed in the nuclear strikes.

It is totally OK to have negative opinions of the decision. Each of us chooses our own opinions. But you can't have your own facts. There was not a choice between "nuke and people die, or don't and have nobody die." If you also measure the civilians in China, Korea, and other places murdered by the Japanese soldiers without even being casualties of legit military strikes, then you would have to add in all the civilians that would have died if the US had simply not nuked, and not even bothered to win the war, and just went home at that point, leaving the Japanese empire to rebuilt.

I have never seen any analysis where NOT ending the war at that point would have saved lives, civilian or military. Ground invasion would have killed more Japanese civilians, AND more soldiers. Allowing the empire to rebuild would have killed millions of Chinese and others. So if you're using the entire number of civilian deaths, without subtracting the deaths you're predicting from the other choice, well that is just horse shit.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[myowntrueself]

We're sorry.

Oh, we're sorry that your sorry, eh.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[sjames]

Yes, the settlements are gone, but the blockade remains.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[dinfinity]

And why the fuck are we supposed to specifically differentiate Indonesian Muslims

You don't have to, but you are proving my point exactly: Humans don't need a lot to deeply hate an entire group of people. I showed you ~220 million members of a group who did not engage in celebrating the deaths of 9/11 (and are generally quite peaceful) and you respond by implying that they and all other members of their group will do terrible things to naive people. If that's not blind hatred of an out group, then I'm not sure what would qualify as such.

Likening unrelated and dissimilar historical circumstances is a red herring.

I was providing the exact thing that was requested: "I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians"
I identified (granted: implicitly) white supremacist culture as one that has quite undoubtedly openly celebrated the murder of innocent civilians. QED.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[prof_robinson]

the sheer amount of excuses you guys peddle to excuse Islam from being civilized is, frankly, amazing. Any tiny amount of "christian hate" you find, is literally dwarfed by the thousands upon thousands of examples of muslim hate and fresh blood - if, that is, you cared enough to look.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[prof_robinson]

The entire country was being run by Kim Davis? Are you sure about that? What I see is a bunch of lefties who like to smash anyone who dares oppose them, for whatever reason. The couple that wanted their marriage license from Davis still got it. And they could've just gone to a different county, if they'd wanted. But for some reason you lefties just need to stomp anyone who dares oppose you and destroy them personally as an example for the rest of us. It's the fascist in you all.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

Muslims do not have a monopoly on that kind of behavior, but of the 30+ officially muslim nations of the Arab League not one of them is NOT openly and explicitly promoting that kind of behavior in their government sanctioned teachings, television shows, and sermons. I mean hell look at Jordan... it's probably the single least anti-Israel arab state out there and Jordan's official government sponsored sermons teach that the jews murder babies to make matza every passover.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

Or to put that in terms people can relate to: The conservative casualty estimates for non-nuclear options like a ground invasion were so high that every single purple heart ever awarded since World War 2 has been part of the batch made to cover the invasion of japan. It would have been another stalingrad, easily.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[quantaman]

Nor does Israel murder Iranians in Argentina.

Why?

Because Judaism doesn't have the concept of dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb, nor does Judaism demand death or conversion for all kafirs .

Or Iran might have had nothing to do with it, it's a legitimately unsolved crime:

Other opinion

According to a report in The Nation, the author claims that James Cheek, United States Ambassador to Argentina at the time of the bombing, told him, "To my knowledge, there was never any real evidence [of Iranian responsibility]. They never came up with anything." The hottest lead in the case, he recalled, was an Iranian defector named Manoucher Moatamer, who "supposedly had all this information." But Moatamer turned out to be only a dissatisfied low-ranking official without the knowledge of government decision-making that he had claimed. "We finally decided that he wasn't credible," Cheek recalled.[94]

In 2013, American investigative journalist Gareth Porter cast doubt on the alleged involvement of Iran and Hezbollah, reporting that the link depended centrally on just claims from the People's Mujahedin of Iran, a controversial Iranian anti-regime group that has been described as terrorist by some nations.[95]

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

Given the stated goal of the complete extermination of the entire jewish race and every Israeli citizen it's not really expected that there would be any political repercussions because, in the event Israel goes for the Samson Option, it's not really expected that there will be anyone left.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

The primary British fuckup was in letting the Grand Mufti make his alliances with Hitler and then import nazi driven anti-semitism into the region, mixing it with arab nationalism. That's really the long and short of the Arab Israeli conflict since the mandate gave something like 90% of the land to the Arabs even though they walked out on talks and the whole identity of "palestinians" didn't even exist until later when his egyptian nephew made them up and started calling himself "Yasser Arafat".

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

So what you're saying is no matter what, under any circumstances, Israel should never, at all, ever, make any kind of response whatsoever to a government demanding the total annihilation of the jewish race and then launching thousands of rockets and mortars at Israeli civilians?

Or are you saying instead of a blockade and wall you'd rather just see a much more overt military response?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

Might want to be careful about citing the United Nations. We're talking about an organization that will condemn Israel 22 times in a single year but can't be bothered to take time out of their schedule to do something about the african genocides.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[phantomfive]

That would be the sect that lined up again and again to buy tickets for "American Sniper"

Have you seen "American Sniper?" Man, that thing is an anti-war movie. Everyone who voted to go to war should be forced to watch that thing, because it shows the horrific situations we put our fellow citizens into......and for what? Even the main character, who was heroic, was affected by the war.

War needs to have a clear objective, and it needs to be an objective we are willing to die for. Do not vote for a war unless you would personally be willing to risk your life for the given objective.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[sjames]

I would like to see a more overt response pinpointed to the launch point of an attack. They do have a right to defense. Interdiction of weapons shipments is fine as well.

Keeping the general population in poverty is just helping the enemy's recruiting efforts and offers little in the way of reward (or lack of punishment) for those who aren't launching rockets.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

And why the fuck are we supposed to specifically differentiate Indonesian Muslims

You don't have to, but you are proving my point exactly: Humans don't need a lot to deeply hate an entire group of people.

You conflate "deeply hate" with cynicism and mistrust. The former generally implies some sort of personal history. The latter is merely a result of observation.

I showed you ~220 million members of a group who did not engage in celebrating the deaths of 9/11

No, you asserted it. Since I don't know (or much care) about Indonesian Moslems, it literally is neither here nor there. "White crow" doesn't apply in this.

...and you respond by implying that they and all other members of their group will do terrible things to naive people. If that's not blind hatred of an out group, then I'm not sure what would qualify as such.

I implied that Moslems have a capacity for disappointing those who assume good intentions on their behalf. Not really in doubt, since the "proof" is in the disappointments, not the justifications for it.

Likening unrelated and dissimilar historical circumstances is a red herring.

I was providing the exact thing that was requested: "I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians"

I identified (granted: implicitly) white supremacist culture as one that has quite undoubtedly openly celebrated the murder of innocent civilians. QED.

Even in the heydays of Jim Crow, the "culture" didn't "celebrate" murders. They were celebrated by their perpetrators and sympathizers. Loudly quoted upon by the media of the day.

Captcha: tribal. How artistic!

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[techno-vampire]

Open a google search, and enter "rape of nanking".

Or, if Asians (or "Orientals," as they were called back then.) killing other Asians doesn't impress you, do a search on "Bataan Death March" and see what you get.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[CrimsonAvenger]

the death of 350000 Japanese civilians

Umm, there weren't 350K Japanese civilians killed by both atom bombs combined, much less just at Hiroshima. The UPPER estimates for both bombings combined were less than a quarter million.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[meta-monkey]

Who said anything about being a religion of peace? It's the easiest one to slide Muslims into (Abrahamic, not Judaism) and Christians in 2015 don't run around beheading and raping people.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

Israel isn't keeping the general population in poverty, Hamas and the PA are. Israel's delivering incredible quantities of aid, Hamas and the PA are stealing everything and keeping people in poverty to control them. Gaza is some of the best beachfront property in the region, if they built hotels instead of bombs and tunnels everyone in the middle east would be falling over themselves to give the gazans all their money.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[dinfinity]

'Us guys', huh?
Which group of people which you clearly dislike would that be?

the sheer amount of excuses

Please, enlighten me and enumerate the excuses I 'peddled' in my post with explicit quotes.
I have one quote for you to start off the fun: "I'm not saying they are right to hate the US or excusing them for it"

Any tiny amount of "christian hate" you find, is literally dwarfed by the thousands upon thousands of examples of muslim hate and fresh blood - if, that is, you cared enough to look.

I take it you can direct me to a comprehensive well-researched list of examples of religious 'hate and fresh blood'?

  You need to start understanding that it's not 'us' versus 'them', but humans versus irrationality. The hard part about that is that irrationality is not a tangible recognizable group but an abstract concept.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[swb]

Who would israel use nukes against? Only a fool would nuke your neighbors, even if they hate you.

The unofficial story I've always heard is that Israel has a standing threat to nuke all Arab capitals, Tehran, Mecca and probably a few other major regional cities in the event of a chemical attack, nuclear attack and/or as a result of being overrun by conventional troops.

They beat back the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War, but there were moments where it was touch and go, and the Soviets were none to happy with the sinking of one of their merchant ships and were mobilizing to intervene if the Israelis didn't back off and observe the cease fire.

The threat as I've had it explained to me is that the nuclear reprisal was planned to be all-out -- everybody gets hit, there's no fact checking or consideration as to who was responsible. Everybody takes one.

Hard to know if it's true or not. It seems a bit apocryphal, but some of the older guys have unfortunate tattoos from the 1940s and maybe figured that even if it didn't end well, they know what worse endings look like from personal experience.

It might explain why the Iranians are so eager to get their hands on a nuclear weapon, because there's no end game where use or a serious threat of nuclear weapon against the United States doesn't result in Persia joining the scrap heap of lost civilizations. The Iranians just might figure they can win a nuclear exchange with the Israelis on the basis of population and geography, at least in the long term.

It might also explain why after nearly winning in '73 the Arabs never made a serious run at the Israelis again.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Harlequin80]

You need to go back and re-read your modern history. The Arab / Israeli conflict is not based around an insult to Islam. Sure some leaders in the region use it stir up fervour in the unwashed masses, but it isn't the driver. The driver is that on the 14th of May 1948 external colonial powers decided to annex a part of another country and call it Isreal. Then on top of that they populated it with people with absolutely NO cultural similarities to the existing population. How anyone expected this to not cause issues is beyond me.

To give you an equivalent, it would be a large city in the US being annexed by foreign powers, having the existing population displaced and rammed into a section of crap land with no access to the outside world and having the city populated by the Chinese.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Harlequin80]

The Lords Resistance Army - Uganda,
Anti-balaka - Central African Republic
National Liberation Front of Tripura - India
Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland - India
Maronite Christian Militias - Lebanon

It really isn't hard to find massacres and murders done in the name of Christianity.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Harlequin80]

Unfortunately Dinfinity I don't think you can open their minds to actually thinking for themselves.

You have the classic problem of "All fords are blue, therefore this blue car is a ford". Too many people can't see my blue Toyota.

"All members of Isis are Muslim (nominally but that's another argument), therefore all Muslims are member of Isis"

Let's not even confuse the matter with the Sunni vs Shiite question. God help them if they learn that there are different parts to Islam and that they get along about as well as Protestants and Catholics have done in time past.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Harlequin80]

Doesn't America have a Jewish population?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[cold fjord]

Israeli doctrine allows for unprovoked attacks on neighboring countries.

The words you're looking for are "retaliation" and "preemptive" attack. The preemptive attack is used when the enemy's intent to attack is clear but you're not going to wait for them to inflict casualties on you. When your enemy make clear their policy is genocide it would be foolish to wait for that, don't you think?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[cold fjord]

So you have faith in the "peaceful" intentions of Saddam Hussain and the Baathists ruling Iraq at the time? .... "parity" .... right....

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[geoskd]

You stated that Jews should have the right to live there, yet before 1945, they weren't there in any appreciable quantity, and they sure as hell didn't have a political entity there. They took the land where others were living and booted large numbers of them out of their land. All because they hold a "sincere religious belief" that the land belonged to them...

If you go back far enough, pretty much anyone of earth can lay claim to pretty much any patch of dirt through some lineage or other. Claiming a religious right should be treated for the absurdity that it is. If someone is claiming that God gives them the right to something that otherwise wouldn't be theirs, I would propose that they should have to provide proof by some method other than circular arguments. They should first have to prove that God exists...

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[cold fjord]

There seem to be some "gaps" in your research there. Have to bothered to look at how Hamas governs? How it relates to Fatah? You might try going beyond your usual sources on this one.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Pinky's Brain]

I wasn't quoting the UN, I was quoting the Rabbi testifying before the UN.

Could have just gone with Genesis 15:18 too of course.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Kyusaku Natsume]

One of the best, or worst quotes of Anne Coulter.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jedidiah]

This isn't just wild speculation, it's history. It's why someone like Kim Davis even has a religion to use as some sort of excuse. Israel is the well established national homeland of Jews.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[PPH]

Israel wants to be left alone in peace;

That hobo squatting in your house when you went to work this morning just wants to be left alone in peace as well.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

" Israel is surrounded by a few hundred million people living in a culture that makes right-wing abortion clinic bombers look downright sane."

You mention the phrase "a culture" in a way that makes it seems that there's only one other major Middle Eastern culture besides the Jewish culture of Israel. Even if we eliminate the presence of the various Christian and quasi-Islamic groups, that still leaves at least two different Muslim groups, the Sunnis and the Shiites. The 9/11 bombers were all Sunni Muslims, the religion of the pro-American Saudi Arabia, who I presume Israel won't nuke. Iran, a Shiite Muslim majority country, hasn't sponsored any major or consistent acts of terrorism comparable to the one's carried out by Osama and his twisted supporters. See the shitfuck in Syria? That's a war between different Muslim factions more violent than any between Israel and the Arab states.

There's no single, united Muslim culture that wants to wipe Israel off the map. Most of the anti-Israel political and military activity tend to be posturing, a way for the various Islamic groups and countries to maintaing their significance and divert their public or followers from their own failures (economic, social, etc). Sure Iran's mostly Palestinian allies have carried out random acts of terrorism like kidnapping and the shooting of Israeli settlers, but these are incidents that Israel is fully capable of dealing with using conventional arms, tanks and fighter bombers included. You don't nuke a country that sponsors terrorism no more fatal than the Columbine massacre.

An Israeli, as well as Iranian/Saudi, bomb is totally out of place in the Middle East and only complicates matter further.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[turbidostato]

"All serious analysis of the choices that US military commanders were making (nuke or ground assault) shows that more civilians would have been killed in a ground assault than were killed in the nuclear strikes. [...] There was not a choice between "nuke and people die, or don't and have nobody die."

Of course there was.

You seem to forget that Japan was -and still is, a series of islands. By the time the nukes were thrown over Japan, those islands were already in complete isolation, with no navy, no commerce channels, no iron to build more ships (or planes) and the standing troops at Manchuria broken by the soviets. Yes, of course US command could have chosen just sitting on their pants and wait for Japan to surrender (which most scholars now accept they were already looking for and USA knew about it).

Japan nukes were not thrown to end the war against Japan but to show the world (specially USSR) who the new world overlord was going to be starting there (and, also probably, to avoid the chance of USSR invading Japan). It easily can be said that the nukes dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki but they were aimed at Yalta and Postdam.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[nbauman]

I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians like way too many Muslims did on 9/11. Other cultures might kill innocents, but there's always reluctance to accept it and some sort of rationale used to justify it. But not Islam - Muslims were literally dancing in the streets on 9/11.

Well, let's start out with the Old Testament where the Israelis went around massacring the Caananites and other neighboring tribes, sometimes enslaving and raping the virgin girls, sometimes killing everyone.

I could also find lots of right-wing Israeli Jews who celebrated the murder of Palestinian children. Look up the "King's Torah."

Anybody who is familiar with world history can think of lots of examples in almost every culture. It's hard to find a century without a massacre.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[nbauman]

Too what extremist christian sect are you referring....I am sick and tired of hearing this as an argument. Please, citation, what modern christian group has danced around in the streets because innocent civilians where killed? ....Im waiting....I really want to hear your response....

Are you old enough to remember the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland?

When you studied history, did you learn about the Thirty Years War? The Crusades?

Re: Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[nbauman]

Yeah....and if that's the ONLY example you can find....you've pretty much proved his point.

Did you ever take a course in world history? Did you show up for class?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[blackpaw]

But not Islam - Muslims were literally dancing in the streets on 9/11.

Bullshit - video of an entirely different celebration repackaged for western propaganda. That you and other various cretins still spout that nonsense along with crap such as "Iran called for Israel to be wiped off the map" (never said) os a sad indictment of the critical thinking skills of the typical slashdot/libtard reader.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Darinbob]

Anyone left, anywhere.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Darinbob]

The US is also backed into a political corner because of support for Israel from some powerful groups. Not just jews that is. Evangelical Christians are supporting Israel, with the belief that this is ordained in prophecy and that the creation of Israel is necessary precondition to bring about the end times (armageddon). If a politician wants support from that very large political bloc then he or she needs to pay the proper respect to Israel and its leaders even when it goes against US interests.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[nbauman]

by prof_robinson

You're not a real professor, right?

Your just one of those guys who gets called "professor" because you're always using big words, is that it?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Darinbob]

And of course, some of the most extremist segments of Israeli society are excused from military service. If their own children were asked to serve alongside the despised secular Israelis, they might have a different outlook on the conflict.

But then, there's a part of me that sort of wants a draft back in the US, so that the rich and powerful including politicians will also know what it's like to lose children a war.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[nbauman]

There are 0 Israelis who live in Gaza. There are 0 settlements in Gaza. All the Gazan Israeli wars of the last 10 years wars have been Gaza attacking Israel.

They tried taking the high road, the Gazans still won't accept living in Gaza and not Israel.

Gaza is surrounded on all sides by a blockade which doesn't allow them to import or export any significant goods, or leave and come back to a university, for example. It reminds a lot of Jews, including me, of the Warsaw Ghetto.

A blockade is an act of war. A people have a right to defend themselves against an attack.

The people who are firing those missiles and making those attacks are usually not controlled by Hamas, but are smaller militant factions, which don't want peace with Israel and often sabotage the peace efforts.

Israel claims that those militant factions are the "responsibility" of Hamas. If that's true, then logically, the Israeli government is responsible for the illegal land grabs and killings by the settlers, for example, but I can't remember an Israeli prosecution of settlers for killing Palestinians.

Israel would also be responsible for the illegal killings of civilians during the Gaza wars, including the "white flag" incidents where Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians, including children, who came out carrying a white flag as ordered (documented in the Goldstone report), but Israel has never prosecuted a solider for killing a Palestinian, or even admitted that it happened.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

Certainly ISIS terrorism (violence against civilians in conquered areas) is one of their primary means of establishing control, while the Yishuv had wider popular support. But given all their other activities I wouldn't say ISIS is just terrorism either.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

I'm not talking Samson option. 'm talking nuclear weapons to avoid defeat. Samson option is mainly about what to do in the case of defeat.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Anonymous Coward]

You conflate "deeply hate" with cynicism and mistrust. The former generally implies some sort of personal history. The latter is merely a result of observation.

1. Respectively: no and no. Both those two statements are baseless and untrue. It is well known that the more people actually interact with people from the group they hate, the smaller that hate becomes as they are unable to fully dehumanize the entire group. They experience that 'they' are humans, just like them. If anything, look up the etymology of xenophobia.

I suggest that you look up the meaning of "Stockholm Syndrom". Yet the jolly tolerance only seems to be applicable in the direction of Moslems, doesn't it? Seldom in the other direction, when Moslems chance to find themselves in new homes. Peculiar, how that works.

2. Don't pretend you don't understand that feeling cynicism towards an entire group differs only slightly from deeply hating a group in this discussion. You're quite callously insulting millions of people and have clearly shown that you have no intention of wanting to differentiate between them. That is exactly the 'us' vs 'them'-approach I've been talking about.

Slightness is in the eye of beholder, and in the intentions of polemicists. For those with an eye to being offended there is cause for offense.

Since I don't know (or much care) about Indonesian Moslems, it literally is neither here nor there.

That is a great way to show off your ignorance. Remember that you have insulted all ~220 million of them here.

The news from Indonesia is of sundry outrages and bad weather. I give them leave to be offended.

I implied that Moslems have a capacity for disappointing those who assume good intentions on their behalf.

No, you implied that they kill people: "One quality of Moslems [...] is their capacity for making the naïve regret their naïvety... if they survive the initial experience."
Please don't embarrass yourself by saying that that was not implying criminal and murderous behaviour.

Why in the world would I deny implying exactly what I intended? It happens to be perfectly true. Many Moslems are criminal and murderous.

Even in the heydays of Jim Crow, the "culture" didn't "celebrate" murders. They were celebrated by their perpetrators and sympathizers.

So when we're talking about millions of Muslims of which some do terrible things, they're all like that, but when were talking about millions of Americans of which some do terrible things, it's just the 'perpetrators and sympathizers'?

Nobody is ever all one thing. But in the Moslem universe, it is the "perpetrators and sympathizers" who tend to convert entire nations into medieval theme parks, complete with Sharia and the various permutations of barbarism.

Forgive me the ad hominem

Whatever for?

...but you are completely transparent and predictable.

Since I've gone to some pains to be so, thanks for confirming it. Feel free to get over it. Or not.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[penguinoid]

I dare you to try to identify another culture in the history of humanity that actually openly celebrates the murder of innocent civilians like way too many Muslims did on 9/11.

Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. -- Psalm 137

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

It reminds a lot of Jews, including me, of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Between 1940 when it was established and mid-1942 when the uprising started the 1,125 calories a day allocation caused over 1/5th of the population of the Warsaw Ghetto to starve to death. When the first uprising happened the Germans killed another 10% of the population within 3 months are exported the remaining population to death camps.

In Gaza the death toll from multiple uprisings is around 1/4%. The starvation is not remotely similar. It is an obscenity to compare the Warsaw Ghetto to If you are a Jew, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying something like that.

Gaza is surrounded on all sides by a blockade which doesn't allow them to import or export any significant goods, or leave and come back to a university, for example.

Gaza has declared a state of war. The parent asserted that the Palestinians were interested in peace but the settlement enterprise prevented it. Gaza has no settlement enterprise.

If that's true, then logically, the Israeli government is responsible for the illegal land grabs and killings by the settlers [in the West Bank], for example

I don't know how something that the operating government permits can be "illegal" but of course the Israeli government is responsible for the settlement enterprise. The population of Israel are the ones doing it. Israeli infrastructure connects to it. Israel subsidies it. The Israeli army protects it. Who should be responsible the Martians?

Israel would also be responsible for the illegal killings of civilians during the Gaza wars, including the "white flag" incidents where Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians, including children, who came out carrying a white flag as ordered (documented in the Goldstone report)

Assuming this happened, which soldiers did it? To prosecute someone you need to prove their guilt. Some people tossed rocks and molotov cocktails at police during the St. Louis riots most weren't prosecuted because we don't know who did it.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

The blockade is a response to a coup by a government with a declared policy of not respecting the border with Israel. The original claim was that the Palestinians wanted peace but the settlement enterprise... Gaza shows that's not true. With no settlement enterprise they still refuse to just live in Gaza.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[meta-monkey]

I don't see your point. Christians denounce the rare Christian atrocity. Muslims are totally fine with the frequent Muslim atrocities.

Assume you're locked in a room with a random Chrisitan. What's the odds that random Christian will try to murder you for not being Christian?

Run that same experiment with a Muslim instead.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[meta-monkey]

Can you argue with it? Would not every person on the planet be better off if we did so?

Fuck Ann Coulter, but fuck Islam way harder.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Are you old enough to remember the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland?

>

"The Troubles", as folks in Ireland like to call it, was never about Catholics and Protestants . . . it was about Loyalists and Republicans . . .

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Darinbob]

Muslims denounce atrocities by muslims. Sure, FOX won't report on this but it is reported and is common. People talk about a few muslims dancing in the street after 9/11, but just about every single muslim nation denounced it. Why did some Palestineans dance in the streets? Not because they were muslims but because the US is the one and only ally to their enemy Israel who refuses to give them civil rights in their own land.

So if Christians go to war, it's just a war. But if Muslims go to war, it's supposed to be a religious thing?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[PolygamousRanchKid]

"War is Hell" . . . what else would you expect . . . ?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[PolygamousRanchKid]

You need to go back and re-read your modern history. The Arab / Israeli conflict is not based around an insult to Islam.

The Jewish settlers and the Palestinians got along very well, at first. The settlers bought worthless land, and turned it into productive Kibbutzes, and the settlers built cities on the land.

The root of the problem came from the "Grand Mufti" from Jerusalem, who spent his formative years in the late 1930's and early 1940's having shindigs with Adolf Hitler in Berlin.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[cold fjord]

The Crusades were a long overdue defensive reaction to Muslim aggression.

The Troubles in Northern Ireland weren't over a question of religion.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[dinfinity]

I suggest that you look up the meaning of "Stockholm Syndrom"

That is not a reply to what I said. You're just trying to change the subject and ignore your logic being broken down. But nobody likes experiencing cognitive dissonance, do they?
I'll repeat it for you:
"Both those two statements are baseless and untrue. It is well known that the more people actually interact with people from the group they hate, the smaller that hate becomes as they are unable to fully dehumanize the entire group. They experience that 'they' are humans, just like them."

For those with an eye to being offended there is cause for offense.

The point you're trying to make is irrelevant. My point was that your logic was flawed, not that you insulted people. You can try to hide behind 'offense is taken, not given', but your logic is still flawed. You pretend that your cynicism and mistrust towards all Muslims is warranted, even though I've shown you a veritably huge group of people that do not fit your generalization of Muslims. Honestly, it would have been more rational to have changed your opinion and said: "OK, so maybe not all Muslims. Just Arabs. Arabs are dangerous murderous bastards whom I mistrust."

I give them leave to be offended.

Sorry, you're still ignorant. Dismissing 220 million people that don't fit your image of Muslims shows that the horse you pretend to be riding on is actually an abused donkey with some paint slapped onto it.

Why in the world would I deny implying exactly what I intended?

Because you downplayed your own text by rephrasing it as such: "I implied that Moslems have a capacity for disappointing those who assume good intentions on their behalf."
Only if you're trying to hide in technicalities would you not admit that that is miles away from 'if they survive the initial experience'.

It happens to be perfectly true. Many Moslems are criminal and murderous.

It is only 'perfectly true' if you try to weasel your way out of this by claiming that 'many' isn't well-defined. Quantify it, if you dare.

Nobody is ever all one thing.

Good, you're starting to get it.

Since I've gone to some pains to be so, thanks for confirming it.

It's always good when people realize that it is plain to see that they are short-sighted assholes (realizing you have a problem is the first step!). I find it extra sad when someone who seems to have the mental capacity for it fails at logic and ends up in asshole central. At least the dumb ones have an excuse for being there.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[JabrTheHut]

Because Judaism doesn't have the concept of dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb, nor does Judaism demand death or conversion for all kafirs .

That's interesting. In that case, why hasn't anyone invaded Lebanon, a multi-faith country where at one point Christians were the majority? Anyone other than Israel, that is....

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[nbauman]

It reminds a lot of Jews, including me, of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Between 1940 when it was established and mid-1942 when the uprising started the 1,125 calories a day allocation caused over 1/5th of the population of the Warsaw Ghetto to starve to death. When the first uprising happened the Germans killed another 10% of the population within 3 months are exported the remaining population to death camps.

In Gaza the death toll from multiple uprisings is around 1/4%. The starvation is not remotely similar. It is an obscenity to compare the Warsaw Ghetto to If you are a Jew, you ought to be ashamed of yourself for saying something like that.

I read Emanuel Ringelblum's Warsaw Ghetto diaries, and I read the Amnesty International reports of Israeli human rights abuses. I read the accounts of how ambulances took pregnant Palestinian women to the border crossings, where the Israeli border guards forced them to get out and wait, until they delivered their babies at the crossing, where many of the children (and some of the mothers) died. I read a story of how a 50-year-old Palestinian man with a heart attack arrived at the border crossing, trying to get to an Israeli hospital, and the border guards wouldn't let him through, and he died. My father had a heart attack at the same age, he went to the hospital, and he lived another 20 years. I used to call the Israeli public relations office to verify these stories, and they simply lied. I saw many uncomfortable similarities between what I read in Ringelblum's diaries and what I read (and verified) in the Amnesty International report.

When I grew up, people used to say, "How could the world stand by silently when Jews were being killed?" Well, now you know. Palestinians are being killed, just as the world, including you, are standing by silently. I made a vow that if it ever happened again, I wouldn't stand by silently. That's why so many Jews led the opposition to the Vietnam war (and to every war).

If you are a Jew, or even if you're not, you should be ashamed to stand by silently while Palestinians are being killed.

Gaza is surrounded on all sides by a blockade which doesn't allow them to import or export any significant goods, or leave and come back to a university, for example.

Gaza has declared a state of war. The parent asserted that the Palestinians were interested in peace but the settlement enterprise prevented it. Gaza has no settlement enterprise.

I don't think Gaza declared a state of war, but I do know that immediately after -- at American and Israeli urging -- they had their elections, and Hamas won, the Israelis blockaded most of Gaza's imports and exports. There was no provocation. According to the Israelis themselves, they're deliberately keeping the Gazans in a state of "starvation." The doctors on the ground say that they're not getting enough food, medical supplies and other necessities. I remember Ringelblum saying that when the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto complained that they weren't allowed enough food, one of the arrogant Nazi officers said, "You Jews are very clever, you can smuggle in all the food you need." (The penalty for smuggling was death.) I saw the Israelis brag about the inadequate food they were supplying, and that's when the similarity to the Warsaw Ghetto became stark.

If that's true, then logically, the Israeli government is responsible for the illegal land grabs and killings by the settlers [in the West Bank], for example

I don't know how something that the operating government permits can be "illegal"

After WWII, a movement of international lawyers -- led in large part by Jewish lawyers, motivated by the example of the Nazi crimes -- wrote a body of law to make these activities illegal. Those were codified in the Geneva Conventions and other international laws. Even the Israeli government's own lawyers, such as Theodor

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Sun]

I'm not anti-semetic by any stretch of the imagination

So far, all I see is ignorance.

try examining the roots of modern 'terrorism' followed by the role of the Haganah

Now, if you said Ezel or Lechi were terrorists, I'd at least see where you came from. Can you cite any terror acts carried out by Haganah?

Also, can you cite the connection you draw between those actions and modern terrorism?

Making assertions in a self-confident tone is easy. Do try to keep them accurate, however.

Shachar

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Eunuchswear]

Nor does Israel murder Iranians in Argentina.

No, but it does murder Moroccans in Norway.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Eunuchswear]

Fuck Ann Coulter

I'd rather not.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Eunuchswear]

You don't know very much about Charlie Hebdo, do you?

Re: Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Eunuchswear]

Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
        on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
        “tear it down to its foundations!”

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
        happy is the one who repays you
        according to what you have done to us.

Happy is the one who seizes your infants
        and dashes them against the rocks.

I prefer the Boney M version.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Eunuchswear]

Israel's delivering incredible quantities of aid,

Incredible only in the sense that it is incredibly inexistent.

See, for EG, http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Israel-continue-to-send-tons-of-food-aid-to-Gaza-when-under-attack

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[dave420]

And you can't tell the difference between a religion which is practiced peacefully by the vast majority of adherents, a literal interpretation of the texts not made by the same vast majority of the adherents, and those assholes who take a fundamentalist bent in any religion.

You really should stop commenting on this. It's quite telling you posted anonymously - you're too cowardly to stick by your words, as you know they're based on a childish oversimplification of very complicated matters.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[dave420]

All religions do. Islam is no worse or better than any other you care to pick. You just seem to be having a difficult time differentiating between a very vocal, very small minority of believers with the rest of them. That speaks more to your lack of understanding, or your desire to jump to knee-jerk conclusions of over a billion people because you're too ignorant or hate-filled to figure it out like an adult. But I'm sure I'm wasting my time trying to point this out to you.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

When I grew up, people used to say, "How could the world stand by silently when Jews were being killed?"

I gave you the facts regarding the Holocaust comparison. You are simply ignoring them and responding with "bad stuff happened in both places". The Warsaw ghetto was part of a program that was almost uniquely bad. The Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing losing wars and on the scale of what happens to people who start wars with superior powers is rather humane. Both things are bad. But you simply lack any ability to make moral arguments when you sit there and lie about the facts via. making a comparison which is wholly inaccurate for shock value. If you have read about the holocaust you wouldn't be making the comparison.

As for the world, the world didn't stand by silently when the Jews were destroyed. The world protested mildly. The world wasn't going to do much about it but they certainly were willing to tsk-tsk Hitler and the Nazis over it. Which is the same thing that happens other minorities are destroyed.
The world tsk-tsked over Tibet.
The world tsk-tsked over the Guatemalan civil war.
The world tsk-tsks over North Korea.
The world tsk-tsked over East Timor.
and so on again and again and again.
Your little vow to never let it happen again to anyone was a total failure. But of course you don't give a crap about the victims or you would be focusing on things like North Korea. The issue is the perpetrators. It offends your moral sensibility to learn that when Judaism decided to stop being the ghost of Judea and return to being a living breathing nation it went back to farting, having bad breath and sneezing. "Oh it was so much more refined as a ghost". Nations are born in blood. Get over it. Israel will do what any nation does when its existence is threatened. Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to establish a hostile state.

I've been to Israel. The Palestinians could make great Israelis. But they didn't go down the path of integration and instead have gone down the path of a century long struggle against the Jews losing war after war after war. After 1936-9 they should have just accepted defeat and admitted the new society arising in mandate Palestine was going to be Israel not Palestine and become part of it, the same way my great grandparents became part of America. But instead they keep fighting pointless in the name of their dead society. I don't like that they are destroying themselves by putting their hand and then arm over and over and over again into the blades of a lawnmower believing that somehow they will convince the lawnmower to give up. But I don't blame the lawnmower. The Greeks knew that the elpis (expectation of help from Zeus) was the worst of all tragedy to befall men. The Palestinians unfortunately believe that their situation will change magically rather than accepting that if they want to live in the Palestinian territory they will need to do so as Israelis.

I don't think Gaza declared a state of war,

Electing a party whose primary platform is "armed resistance" and then immediately engaging in it. Again you really need to work on your honesty.

I saw the Israelis brag about the inadequate food they were supplying

This is a lie. Israel restricts dual usage materials. Almost all usage is not dual usage.

After WWII, a movement of international lawyers -- led in large part by Jewish lawyers, motivated by the example of the Nazi crimes -- wrote a body of law to make these activities illegal. Those were codified in the Geneva Conventions and other international laws.

First off by definition a law requires an enforcing power. If a power is unable to enforce it has opinions it doesn’t make law.

Second your history is wrong. International agreements on peace became popular in response to the death toll in the Napoleonic wars.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[dave420]

Iran didn't call for Israel to be wiped off the map, as there is no such Persian idiom.

Ahmadinejad was quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini in the specific speech under discussion: what he said was that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." No state action is envisaged in this lament; it denotes a spiritual wish, whereas the erroneous translation - "wipe Israel off the map" - suggests a military threat. There is a huge chasm between the correct and the incorrect translations. The notion that Iran can "wipe out" U.S.-backed, nuclear-armed Israel is ludicrous

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Talderas]

I would have said it was false more for the reason that Iran doesn't border Israel and any invasion of Israel by Iran would require the shipment of men and material across Iraq and either Syria or Jordan in order to stage an invasion. Well that or an amphibious operation that would make Overlord simple in comparison.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jabuzz]

Where republicans were a highly repressed Roman Catholic minority who where treated as second class citizens by a loyalist Protestant majority who gerrymandered the elections and allocated all the housing and jobs to Protestant's. Had Roman Catholics been treated equally there would have been no civil rights campaign in the 1960's which ultimately lead to "The Troubles".

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

One more thing I forgot to say. The Jewish reaction to the Holocaust was not to get a few lawyers together and work for a better United Nations. Rather it was to start the process of galvanizing support among the remaining European Jews for Zionism. The reaction was not the Geneva Convention to protect Jews. Jews had seen international conventions protecting them be ignored many times over the last 1900 years. Rather the reaction was to form a Jewish army and stop being a stateless minority. The mass migration to Palestine had the support of European Jewry after WWII.

And to a great extent the success of the Zionist project then caused a nationalist surge in the other major bodies of Jews. The mainstream Jewish political philosophy of a century ago looks nothing like it does today. Circumstances changed ideology.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[dave420]

If you believe that you don't know what you're talking about or you are lying. Pick one.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

It's not dishonest at all. Simply ask yourself the following question:

"Would the State of Israel have come into existence in 1948 without the use of terrorism?"

Any (objective) student of the post-WWII Jewish Insurgency would tell you that, quite clearly, the answer is no.
Would it have ever come into existence? It seems very likely that it would in some form - but not likely as it was when the mandate ended.
Violence achieved Zionism's goals.

Of course, we (Americans in this case) didn't just ask the British to leave the Colonies either ;) - but let's be honest about things.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

"...while the Yishuv had wider popular support..." - outside of the Jewish Diaspora? No, it really didn't. Don't confuse political sensitivity in the U.S. with popular support. It is, in fact, one of the more admirable things that they persevered despite the unpopularity of their goals.

The most horrible irony is that without the holocaust there would likely be no State of Israel today. That singularly evil piece of rationalized murder focused the diaspora like nothing ever before, and softened resistance to the (arguably) ridiculous basis of Zionism.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

Can you cite any terror acts carried out by Haganah?

What a very carefully phrased question. Something the Iranian government would likely ask "Can you cite any terror acts that we have carried out?"

Fortunately, it's easy to point out where the Haganah actively and directly used terrorism to achieve its goals - try learning about the SS Patria. Read up on their Palmach unit. Learn what happened after Ben Gurion's famous October 1st (1945) decision.

By the way, were you aware that the Haganah explicitly approved the bombing of the Hotel David? Explicit as in "carry out the operation" explicit.

In other words, perhaps you should learn a little bit more about what happened before.

The bombing of ships known to be carrying deportees, and the bombing of civilian facilities (e.g. King David Hotel) is the foundation of modern terrorism - ironically adopted by the very people the State of Israel displaced and marginalized.

Don't get me wrong, there's TONS of things just as bad and/or worse that other countries have done (hell, we Americans intentionally committed genocide against Native Americans and to this day we basically wave it away with "well, that was how things were back then." I wonder if they'll do that in a hundred years in Germany (I doubt it, they seem to have learned from their mistakes.)

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[meta-monkey]

When they're beheading people for not being the same religion as they are, yes.

You'll equivocate yourself to death.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[AmiMoJo]

Israel wants to be left alone in peace;

If that is the case then why does it keep grabbing more land? If it just stuck with what it had back in the late 60s there would be a lot more peace.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[rochrist]

You, sir, are an idiot.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Sun]

Can you cite any terror acts carried out by Haganah?

What a very carefully phrased question. Something the Iranian government would likely ask "Can you cite any terror acts that we have carried out?"

You mentioned Haganah specifically, citing its foundation of the IDF as the reason for continuity. So I asked about Haganah. For the record, I fully consider Palmach part of Haganah, and would love to hear terror acts done by it in this reference, too.

If you didn't want to be asked this specifically, you shouldn't have phrased your accusation in this way.

Fortunately, it's easy to point out where the Haganah actively and directly used terrorism to achieve its goals - try learning about the SS Patria.

From Merriam Webster:

Terrorism(n): the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal

Can you explain what an operation designed to prevent a ship filled with refugees from leaving, but ended up killing them by mistake has to do with terrorism?

Read up on their Palmach unit.

I know about Palmach. Again, I'd like you to be specific, because it seems our understanding of what constitute proof is vastly different.

Learn what happened after Ben Gurion's famous October 1st (1945) decision.

I see it as one army fighting another. I understand you don't. Personally, I think you'd be hard pressed to convince people that military actions, directed solely against military targets, and attempting to avoid hurting civilians where possible are "terrorism". If you do not agree with that, you will find that every single army in the world that has ever participated in any armed conflict is a terrorist. I doubt that's where you're heading.

By the way, were you aware that the Haganah explicitly approved the bombing of the Hotel David? Explicit as in "carry out the operation" explicit.

Are you aware that the hotel was the British army's headquarters (thus, a legitimate military target)? Are you aware that an advance warning was given (though not properly passed through and acted upon) in order to minimize casualties? Again, it's a hard press to call attacking a military target "terrorism".

The bombing of ships known to be carrying deportees, and the bombing of civilian facilities (e.g. King David Hotel) is the foundation of modern terrorism - ironically adopted by the very people the State of Israel displaced and marginalized.

Aside from the flaws I already mentioned in this argument, it is simply false. The foundations of modern terrorism is targeting civilians, striking targets based on affiliation rather than military relevance, indoctrinating populations that death is a high cause, and that achieving it for both yourself and your enemy is worth more than preserving and cultivating life.

You are correct that these foundations are found in actions carried out in Palestine as far back as the early 20th century. You are, however, missing the culprit. Firing at civilian buses merely because its occupants are Jews and accidentally killing an innocent, unrelated Arab with a bomb, and then declaring him Shahid are actions that Arab radicals in Palestine were doing well before the 1930's. These are the foundations of modern terrorism.

Also:

In other words, perhaps you should learn a little bit more about what happened before.

That's what my previous reply was meant to be. You were specifying actions I was not aware of, and I asked for citations. Turns out, I disagree with your analysis (or, possibly, you were more ignorant on those matters than you thought you were). There is no reason to sound smug about your answer. This is how discussion is supposed to go.

Shachar

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[meta-monkey]

You, sir, are in denial.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[nbauman]

You're wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. (I know you're not a lawyer.)

I used to work in Jewish public relations. I wrote press releases for the Israeli government, on their blue letterhead. I wrote official statements that appeared the next day in the New York Times. I wrote the kind of propaganda you're spouting now.

"You don't know what you're talking about" is an overused phrase. But it's true in your case. (Especially about the law.)

Facts, logic, and law won't work on you. Time for plan B: boycotts, divestments, sanctions.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[tehcyder]

Are you old enough to remember the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland?

>

"The Troubles", as folks in Ireland like to call it, was never about Catholics and Protestants . . . it was about Loyalists and Republicans . . .

They were all still nominally Christians, and had no problem murdering other Christians.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[KapUSMC]

It would be a false flagged, initiated and carried out by Bears fans. Because really, there is no other way they will be beating the Packers in the foreseeable future.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[lsatenstein]

I'm trying to remember what Iraq did to provoke the bombing of Osirak ... I think they built something that might eventually have allowed the development of nuclear parity.

Was it done with the US's encouragement? Answer = YES

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[stoatwblr]

"The best hope, to my mind, is to try and reduce the disadvantages with which so many in the world find themselves encumbered"

Wars tend to be fought over potable water and access to energy (food is secondary, with energy and water you can grow food), with poverty and egos the prime driving factors (egos of the leaders and poverty meaning that the followers don't have much to lose). Poverty is also the driving factor of most religions, which is one of the reasons why the USA's most religious areas are also the ones with poor economic performance.

Widespread distribution of LFTRs would go a _long_ way to equalising that out - you can purify water with them as well as cheaply supply the energy needs of a community and they're relatively safe (safer than BWR and much safer than coal). Any attempt to fiddle with the LFTR cycle to pull out materials for nefarious purposes is detectable as reductions in output and once running most of the stuff is so fiercely radioactive you'd have to be well-equipped to do so anyway.

Wind/Solar/Tide power are all unreliable, not-dense enough(*) and in the case of solar, fiercely polluting for solar PV systems. At some point China's going to shut down those plants on environmental grounds.

It wouldn't surprise me if China has cheap reactor-based energy export as a long-term objective for their thorium research in addition to supplying their own needs. Doing so would open the way up for them to have a lot of very happy consumers to buy manufactured goods. War may sell in the short term, but peace builds markets in the long one and paradoxically those happy consumers would also help reduce the long-term human population, as is being seen across the "developed" world - richer people choose to have fewer children, which is a positive feedback loop.

(*) You could carpet the UK in windmills and only replace 10% of current electrical needs at best. Moving off gas heating and to more-electric vehicles will increase electricity demands by a factor of at least 5 over current levels.

Putting windmills/solar in the Sahara is a non-starter for both logistical reasons (the interconnectors would be mindbogglingly expensive, far more so than simply building nukes where needed and that's apart from the issue of "sand") and political ones (the countries whose terroritory encompasses the Sahara would demand first access to the energy and as soon as saharan/sub-saharan africa gets access to cheap energy, demand will exceed supply within a few years.)

It's better to concentrate on technology we know will work safely and make it as safe as possible and as widely available as possible - this would go a long way towards solving "migration" crises as there would be a reduction in both wars and better living standards would drastically reduce the numbers of people desperate enough to consider risking their lives to go to someplace "better than here"

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Aighearach]

Yes, those things could have been done, but it doesn't sum up to a choice between deaths or no deaths. You're just hand-waving to assume that the war would just "go away" by being ignored once the enemy is sufficiently weakened. That isn't a given, and so you can't assume it. If you're not attempting to calculate how many deaths would be caused by continuing the war with your back turned in that way, then you haven't even attempted an analysis. You need to list out all the assumptions you make, and predict how many deaths result if you're wrong in that assumption. Then you can have best/worst case evaluations for your claim. What you do instead is just Pollyanna "Gosh can't we just do without war, even when attacked?" nonsense. If you're serious about peace, and want to discuss it intelligently, learn how to do a basic analysis that doesn't assume that all your other assumptions are always correct. "Nobody" who is a historian agrees that you could just walk away and have zero additional civilian deaths. That is actually NOT the argument of the people who say that the nukes were unnecessary. Your position is ignorant, and not defensible.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Aighearach]

Yeah, a lot of people don't understand even the basics of the situation.

The Japanese public had been fed, and believed, propaganda claiming that the United States doesn't take POWs except as slaves. They were taught that all the civilians would be tortured and killed, except those who became sex slaves. Children and old ladies had been doing military drills learning to wield bayonets to fight to the death when the Americans entered the bomb shelters. Every analysis I've seen agrees that the Japanese public believed this propaganda, and indeed many civilians had to be killed in the places captured conventionally, because they kept fighting even after their were no more soldiers protecting them. If somebody is taking shots at the door to a bunker you're trying to enter, the standard military solution is to toss in a grenade or two. You can't talk them out when they believe you're a Devil come to torture them to death.

The US casualties would have been higher too, obviously. But the argument that invading by land would have killed less civilians... that is not an argument usually made by historians. And the non-nuclear technique that reduces US military casualties (a desired outcome, especially in a defensive war like WWII) is fire-bombing. Japan would have been 100 Dresden's.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Lew-the-nerd]

"very vocal, very small minority of believers with the rest of them."

This is in contradiction with every single, large poll I've seen taken of Muslim countries.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[david_thornley]

If you're locked into a room with any Muslim I've ever known, you'll be fine. There are more extremely violent fringe Muslims than extremely violent fringe Christians, true, but they're mostly ordinary people trying to get by.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[david_thornley]

One problem is that alleviating hardships runs into political problems. There are a lot of governments and religious groups who depend heavily on keeping citizens either ignorant or downtrodden or both.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[david_thornley]

The USN was still losing ships at a significant rate, despite Japan being completely blockaded and on the point of economic collapse. The Japanese still occupied vast stretches of China and Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and effectively killing civilians in nuke-sized quantities every month or so. Japanese civilians were in imminent danger of horrible famine.

In my estimation, lengthening the war by three months would have considerably raised the number of total dead civilians, and I haven't seen a reasonably contemporary estimate that had the war ending that soon without the nukes.

Your use of "they" in the desire for surrender is naive at best. It wasn't a matter of "they", it was a matter of several individual people. This included War Minister Anami, who was as hard-line hawk as they come. After two nukes, all the other disasters, and the Emperor calling for surrender, nobody else in the Liaison Council knew whether Anami was going along with it. The Japanese Army was capable of holding up surrender attempts for a long, long time. Their overall strategy, to make the war too expensive for the Allies, still hadn't failed, as far as they could tell.

As far as I've been able to tell, the nukes were used in an attempt to force immediate Japanese surrender, and they were successful in that. It's speculation that they were intended to intimidate Stalin. Ir's reasonable speculation, true, but I haven't seen good evidence for it.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[david_thornley]

So, it's your opinion that anybody who wants a government official to perform her legally required duties is a lefty curb-stomper? You think it reasonable for citizens to have to go from county to county looking for one that's actually following the law?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[turbidostato]

"You're just hand-waving to assume that the war would just "go away" by being ignored once the enemy is sufficiently weakened. [...] Your position is ignorant, and not defensible."

Ignorant? yeah, sure...

It can't possibly be that USA has lived in a lie, feeded by their government and blindly believed by their citizens because it allowed for an easy scape from their part of guilt in the horrors of those days.

There are *lots* of documents showing that Truman outright lied the population about the need of the A-Bomb to end the war and about the chosing of their targets because of its military value, as there are lots of documents showing USA was fully aware that Japan was seeking a path for peace at least since the end of 1944, but I'll focus instead in just one document: 1946' United States Strategic Bombing Survey. The 306 volume official USA report on the evolution of the war. Is it "defensible enough" for your likings?

1) "The first and crucial question about the atomic bomb thus was answered practically and conclusively; atomic energy had been mastered for military purposes and the overwhelming scale of its possibilities had been demonstrated".

Wow! even in the red-tape days following the end of the war, those in the know, including obviously government, clearly understood that the atomic bomb was not about ending the war on Japan in the less crude way but about the "Hey! *WE* have the Bomb, now you all, tremble with fear, because we are the almighty US of A"

2) "it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

You see... and that's back from 1946. USA has known all this time, it's only USA citizenship prefer to look the other way.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Triklyn]

mutually assured destruction. because most of the middle east isn't that fucking crazy.

except Iran. they are exactly that fucking crazy.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Triklyn]

i think they were pretty much ignoring a couple thousand rockets being fired at them for a good amount of time.

until they figured out hamas was tunneling under the border, then it became a whole other thing.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Darinbob]

Who is "they". Are you saying ALL muslims will behead you if you're not a muslim? That's completely wrong. You are mistaking the actions of a few people for their religion as a whole. You may as well say that because of Irish Protestant and Irish Catholic terrorists that all Christians are therefore terrorists.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Triklyn]

gaza shares a border with egypt.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

Why do you think america is so hated? It's seen as a jewish puppet state.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

Or alternatively I just cited a provable historical fact about the 61st assembly of the UN.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

Seriously? You're seriously going to cite a random yahoo answers style webpage which links to a website that's openly violently antisemitic??

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Shadow of Eternity]

You've got that backwards mate. There is one side that's composed primarily of extremists and terrorists, and has been from the very beginning... here's a hint: It's the side that had a very close political and military alliance with the Third Reich and which has continued to openly call for the total annihilation of the jewish people uninterrupted since WW2.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

If you didn't want to be asked this specifically, you shouldn't have phrased your accusation in this way

Not at all, I simply pointed out that you were careful to say CARRIED OUT instead of asking for a list of terrorist incidents they were involved in. There are many terrorist incidents they were involved with, smaller is the number they themselves carried out. In any case they clearly did both.

Can you explain what an operation designed to prevent a ship filled with refugees from leaving, but ended up killing them by mistake has to do with terrorism?

Are you serious? It's not supposed to instill terror in deportees or the British authorities that deportee ships were active bombing targets? LOL!

I know about Palmach. Again, I'd like you to be specific, because it seems our understanding of what constitute proof is vastly different.

Yes, you're clearly intellectual dishonest.

Just a few of Palmach's terrorist activities, the Night of Bridges, the Night of Trains, Numerous ambushes against British and Arab personnel, numerous bombings (especially radar installations,)

I see it as one army fighting another

Of course you do, that's how you lie to yourself that it wasn't terrorism. If that isn't terrorism, then there is no such things as terrorism. You certainly couldn't call Hezbollah terrorists then, because at least they're elected, LOL.

You are correct that these foundations are found in actions carried out in Palestine as far back as the early 20th century. You are, however, missing the culprit. Firing at civilian buses merely because its occupants are Jews and accidentally killing an innocent, unrelated Arab with a bomb, and then declaring him Shahid are actions that Arab radicals in Palestine were doing well before the 1930's. These are the foundations of modern terrorism.

Really, Arabs shooting at a bus with Jews on it. That's the foundations of modern terrorism - LOL. Not bombing hotels. If that's the case then "modern terrorism" was invented in the 18th century in America.

That's what my previous reply was meant to be. You were specifying actions I was not aware of, and I asked for citations. Turns out, I disagree with your analysis (or, possibly, you were more ignorant on those matters than you thought you were). There is no reason to sound smug about your answer. This is how discussion is supposed to go.

Yes, little did we know that you would refuse to acknowledge that bombing ships carrying civilians in order to further your political goals was terrorism. Basically you wasted our time since there's nothing you'd acknowledge as terrorism unless an Arab did it.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Sun]

I'd ask you to tone down the ad hominem in order to further a constructive discussion, but I get the feeling you are not interested in a constructive discussion.

Can you explain what an operation designed to prevent a ship filled with refugees from leaving, but ended up killing them by mistake has to do with terrorism?

Are you serious? It's not supposed to instill terror in deportees or the British authorities that deportee ships were active bombing targets? LOL!

No. It was supposed to prevent the British from deporting Jews that Haganah wanted to stay in Palestine by disabling the ship's motor. It was miscalculated, however, and sunk the ship.

Now, you either disagree with that statement, or agree with it but still see it as an act of terror. If the former, please cite your sources. If the later, well, I'd have to agree with you that there is intellectual dishonesty in this thread and leave it at that.

Yes, you're clearly intellectual dishonest.

Ad hominem.

Just a few of Palmach's terrorist activities, the Night of Bridges, the Night of Trains, Numerous ambushes against British and Arab personnel, numerous bombings (especially radar installations,)

I see it as one army fighting another

Of course you do, that's how you lie to yourself that it wasn't terrorism.

Ad hominem again. Also, you did not point to any criteria by which you distinguish between what I said and what you said.

If that isn't terrorism, then there is no such things as terrorism.

Terrorism is targeting civilians. Terrorism is targeting individuals unrelated to your "cause", whatever it is. What's your definition?

Really, Arabs shooting at a bus with Jews on it. That's the foundations of modern terrorism - LOL. Not bombing hotels. If that's the case then "modern terrorism" was invented in the 18th century in America.

Targeting a civilian bus is terrorism. Targeting the British army headquarters, which, yes, resided in a Hotel, is a legitimate military act. I cannot be more clear on what marks one as terrorism and the other as not. You, however, seem to sling insults as a way to settle the discussion. Oh, and write "LOL".

If you're looking for a discussion on the points, please feel free to reply.

Shachar

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[niftymitch]

Are you old enough to remember the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland?

To be more precise the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland that you make reference to are political handles more than
religious agenda driven activities.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Quite a distraction for Americans that had no clue (past tense may be very wrong).

It is very necessary to look at political discussions with the eyes of a trained psychologist.
One interesting thing that seems to be happening is splitting.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This all or nothing thinking is manipulated and abused by all manner of agenda driven
groups. It may explain swings in poll results and more.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[shutdown -p now]

Too what extremist christian sect are you referring....I am sick and tired of hearing this as an argument. Please, citation, what modern christian group has danced around in the streets because innocent civilians where killed? ....Im waiting....I really want to hear your response....

Here's one ongoing genocide of Muslims by Christians. As to what sect they are, I have no clue, but they do consider themselves Christians, and I haven't heard other Christians denouncing them, so...

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[shutdown -p now]

The Crusades were a long overdue defensive reaction to Muslim aggression.

Really, they were? Did they find any of those Muslim aggressors among the Baltic and Slavic tribes of northeast Europe?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[shutdown -p now]

The conflict between Jewish settlers and local Arabs began long before 1930s. Kibbutzes had armed militia out of necessity already in late 19th century because the locals were increasingly hostile. Don't forget that settlers weren't buying land from Arabs, because the latter usually weren't wealthy land owners - since Palestine was at the time a province of the Ottoman Empire, the land was mostly owned by the Turks, and purchased from them by the settlers. Arabs were hostile to the Turks and the settlers alike, and considered the land theirs by right.

Jews understood it full well, too. Here's Jabotinsky, one of the prominent figures of the Zionist movement, writing in 1923:

"We cannot give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to other Arabs. Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy."

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[niftymitch]

Yeah, a lot of people don't understand even the basics of the situation.

The Japanese public had been fed, and believed, propaganda.....

“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it”.
But what lessons are there to take away...

I fear we are skipping over the almost necessary dehumanization of the other guys
to allow previously sane people to engage in the horrendous prosecution of war.
It needs to be temporary....

What we cannot allow is some politically motivated dehumanization of the other guys
in order to justify some future action.

Sadly the almost necessary dehumanization of the other guys in the context of
resource starved desert dwellers necessary for survival was written down most
likely out of context witnessed by multiple scribes and compiled into the documented
social fabric of society.

A challenge I see is how to deprogram centuries of them vs. us inflexible
near insane troubles in society and find a way we on this shared commons
blue marble in space can move forward with.

There are complexities involving resources, water, food, CO2, global warming, sea levels, fisheries in the sea, emigration and immigration and more..
Silicon Valley is the best and worst example... what was one productive sustainable agriculture is now paved over and imports stuff from the globe.
At some point too much pavement will put us in a tipping point vastly more troubling and sooner than seal level changes.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[dinfinity]

They can also experience that 'they' are human, but not just like them. You overlook that familiarity also breeds contempt.

Nope, sorry. Neuroscience and psychology trump folksy sayings.

And of course you decline to acknowledge that Islam has a wretched and well-earned PR problem.

It was never the subject. Your 'well-earned' here is unfounded. You can shove it back into the place you seem to be talking from.

Ex-cathedra proclamations are not logic. Unless it's some new form of logic comprised entirely of adjectives. Try to discover the difference between the subjective and the objective.

The unrefuted point remains that reality does not warrant your conclusions and does not support your opinion in this matter.

I don't HAVE an image of Indonesian Muslims. Because I don't care.

You have an image of Muslims. That includes Indonesian Muslims. Am I going to have to use a primary school level analogy to help you understand?

Accept both, apart or together.

Suck my dick and maybe I will. Meanwhile, I'll explain to you how weak it is to hide behind vagueness. At least the lynch mobs had the balls to say they just 'fucking hate those guys'. But I guess at least your rationalizations are on the same level as theirs. What's the stat again? Every day 20 white women get raped by black guys?

I'm not the CIA.

No. No, you're not.

Quantify it yourself, if you wish, by making an estimate based on a daily count of all the people killed by Moslems around the world.

You're the one claiming 'many of them are criminal and murderous'. One of the core concepts of logic is the burden of proof. Read up on it.

It's always good when people realize that it is plain to see that they are short-sighted assholes (realizing you have a problem is the first step!).

Proof that being a pretentious git isn't confined to Westerners. Clear evidence that we're all the same, after all.

Weird. I assumed you to be a Westerner. You're not?

It doesn't matter, anyway. Your words tell me more about you than your ethnicity ever could.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[meta-monkey]

Agreed.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[RespekMyAthorati]

and wait for Japan to surrender (which most scholars now accept they were already looking for and USA knew about it

Then why did they refuse to surrender ever after Hiroshima was bombed? Even after Nagasaki, it took the intervention of the emperor to get the junta to surrender.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[AK Marc]

I'm old enough to remember when relatively mainstream churches in the US celebrated medical clinic bombings in the name of Jesus. They've since learned "code words" like how "thug" is a socially acceptable way to say "nigger" these days, so they don't overtly praise bombing medical buildings, but instead deplore that such drastic actions were required (not condemning the act, but condemning the people who were bombed).

Have you never heard of the clinic bombings? Or do you just ignore reality when it conflicts with your opinion?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[gzuckier]

Too what extremist christian sect are you referring....I am sick and tired of hearing this as an argument. Please, citation, what modern christian group has danced around in the streets because innocent civilians where killed? ....Im waiting....I really want to hear your response....

And without further ado, I bring you the comments section of WND. http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/bin...

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[AK Marc]

Israel was essentially created by Jewish extremists and terrorists, followed by some collective guilt after wwii.

So what, the British, who "owned that territory at the end of WWII are Jewish extremists and terrorists?

Israel could not even exist without support from the US.

Israel was crafted from British holdings. South Korea would not exist without support from the US. I guess that makes South Korea a bunch of terrorists.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

First off a vital component and founded upon are different levels. As I mentioned the founding of the State or Israel was far more dependent on clearing swamp to establish farms than terrorism.

But even if we grant the confusion The Yishuv was quite successful. The terrorism ended an unprofitable British occupation. The British were unlikely to stay much beyond the early 1950s regardless. I don't know whether the British would have eventually been indifferent to Jewish immigration as Arab nationalism became more powerful or not. Alternative history is a complicated thing.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

The Yishuv had wider popular support within Palestine. That was the point of the comparison it was a popular government with the people it governed.

As for the Holocaust... its unclear what would have happened without it. Nationalism in Eastern Europe was still picking up. Without the holocaust there might have been waves of immigration more similar to what Israel experienced from Arab countries and then later Latin America and Eastern Europe in the 1990s.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[AK Marc]

"the atomic bomb's destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki received very little praise from the America public"

From your link

There weren't celebrations in the street about the dead. Oh and you were off massively on the number of dead civilians. The population of Hiroshima at the time was less than that, and there was a 25% kill rate, so you are way way off. But insane nutjobs like you don't care about facts, do you.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[AK Marc]

You seem to forget that Japan was -and still is, a series of islands. By the time the nukes were thrown over Japan, those islands were already in complete isolation, with no navy, no commerce channels, no iron to build more ships (or planes) and the standing troops at Manchuria broken by the soviets. Yes, of course US command could have chosen just sitting on their pants and wait for Japan to surrender (which most scholars now accept they were already looking for and USA knew about it).

And yet, they refused any discussions of surrender prior to the nukes. After Hiroshima and before Nagasaki, the Japanese offered a surrender that kept the military and civilian leaders in place - it looked similar to a US surrender.

If they were as helpless as you imply, why would they refuse to surrender, or even discuss it seriously? After all, they are the ones that woke the Sleeping Giant.

And if the US was less timid (hadn't begged and pleaded for the USSR to go to war with Japan), then we wouldn't have split Korea into North (Soviet) and South (American) and started the first of many proxy wars.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[AK Marc]

Any tiny amount of "christian hate" you find,

Like the Crusades, and don't forget the KKK was a Christian organization. How about the family planning clinic bombings? Christians hating Christians, and killing each other, like in Ireland?

Yes, tiny, yet more than everyone else combined. It is only "tiny" if you start the history of the planet in 2000, with an eye on Muslim hate.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[AK Marc]

Many Moslems are criminal and murderous.

Trump says the same thing about Mexicans. By someone's definition, *everyone*, including you, fits in some category that's criminal and murderous. Sort of makes the whole broad generalization thing useless, don't you think?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Darinbob]

The problem is that extremist/terrorist varies depending upon what side you were on. Palestine before the Zionist movement was mostly occupied by Arabs but also with a mix of Jews and Christians and some other smaller sects. Then during some east European pograms there was a wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine, as well as a growing Zionist movement because of general anti semetism in Europe. There were troubles of course with two groups colliding with each other. The Brits had the Palestine Mandate from the league of nations after WWI, and they decided to create a Jewish homeland. This created riots due to the rising increase in immigration, and against Britain for taking over as well. Both sides created extremist paramilitary groups. Things never really cooled all the way down after that. See articles about the King David Hotel bombing, by Jewish extremists after WWII. This does not in any way excuse Arab extremists, both sides have plenty of guilt and blood on their hands.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

The Yishuv had wider popular support within Palestine. That was the point of the comparison it was a popular government with the people it governed.

Both Yishuvs (old/new) were simply populations of Jewish persons in Palestine, it wasn't government. The Jewish Agency was the effective government body of the new Yishuv eventually.

As for the Holocaust...

Yes, it is an interesting thing to contemplate. A fascinating 'what if.'

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

First off a vital component and founded upon are different levels

In this case they're not because "founded upon" is meant quite literally. Without terrorism, Israel does not get founded in 1948.

It would be an interesting mental exercise to try and predict if (I believe it was inevitable in some form) and when it would have happened otherwise. For all the violence there was in the Zionist movement - there were many people that were against the violence. If I recall correctly, Albert Einstein himself denounced Menachim Begin as a fascist and leader of a terrorist party (this is after the founding of Israel I believe - 1950-ish?)

The British were unlikely to stay much beyond the early 1950s regardless.

Agreed, I believe the British had been looking for a reasonable way out even before WWII.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

It's not ad hominem when you pretend that something that any objective viewer would term is terrorism that you suddenly pretend that Palmach is an army fighting the British army. That bombing the King David Hotel is one army attacking another. That bombing a ship carrying civilians is one army attacking another. You are, quite literally, being intellectually dishonest.

That it isn't terrorism because .

The Jewish leadership, itself, labeled the King David attack an "unparalleled act perpetrated today by a gang of criminals" - so it seems pretty ridiculous for you to try and justify it as a legitimate 'operation.'

You'll excuse anything apparently.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[nbauman]

Are you old enough to remember the fighting between the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland?

To be more precise the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland that you make reference to are political handles more than
religious agenda driven activities.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Quite a distraction for Americans that had no clue (past tense may be very wrong).

It is very necessary to look at political discussions with the eyes of a trained psychologist.
One interesting thing that seems to be happening is splitting.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This all or nothing thinking is manipulated and abused by all manner of agenda driven
groups. It may explain swings in poll results and more.

I am aware that the division of Northern Ireland into Catholics and Protestants merely reflected underlying social and economic causes.

The division of the Mideast into Muslim and Jewish similarly reflects underlying social and economic causes.

For Israel, it's a European-style nationalistic land grab which often uses religion as a convenient and cynical justification.

I think modern social scientists have explained the reasons for religion pretty well. It's all very nice and communal until you get to the point where they decide to kill off the people outside their group.

But I'm dismayed and outraged at this anti-Muslim racism which is promoted by the Israeli government. It's clearly part of their justification for stealing land and killing Muslims. And yes, I can see some of those psychological mechanisms in operation.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Eunuchswear]

Seriously? You're not going to try and defend your unsupported claims, you're going to make ad-hominem attacks on a UN agency?

UNRWA isn't "an antisemitic website", it's the UN Relief and Works Agency.

You provide links showing that someone working at a school posted some anti-semitic cartoons to facebook. What relevance does that have?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Eunuchswear]

Oh, by the way, if you follow the link to the "antisemitic" http://www.unrwa.org/ you'll find that the largest donor is the United States of America, that well know enemy of Israel.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Dr. Crash]

We weren't celebrating the killing of 350,000 Japanese.

We were celebrating the not-having-to-kill 70,000,000 Japanese.
Remember what had happened just five months earlier, in March of 1945?

A little test invasion on an island called Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima was defended by 20,000+ Japanese.

Of that 20,000+, only 216 survived.

On that scale, killing _only_ 350,000 people starts looking like the best deal in town.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Triklyn]

most terrorists don't call in bomb threats in order to give their target time to evacuate the building.

the british authorities' official position was that nobody with any capacity to do anything had received a warning. They did not deny that a warning had been sent.

irgun says 25 minutes, later analysis said 15 minutes prior to.

I think any objective observer would say, the outcome that they were going for was nobody dead and less a hotel.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[FreedomFirstThenPeac]

To understand how Israel is using their nuclear threat one has to understand the theories behind deterrence and mutual assured destruction, concepts that I used to teach at AFIT, and which few knee-jerk pacifists can get their heads around. "Math class is tough" says the Barbie doll.

That said, I did also ask the students to consider whether the key assumptions of the models are met in the Middle East, for the most part they were met when talking about the governments, but not so much with NGOs (like ISIS).

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[beastofburdon]

They were different sects of the same religion. The only difference between that and the fight between Muslims and Jews is a single branching from the original religion. There is no greater difference between Jews and Muslims than there is between Catholics and Protestants, only one degree of separation within the same religion, worshiping the same god.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[beastofburdon]

Hahahaha, you're fucking retarded or willfully ignorant, and I don't know which is worse.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[beastofburdon]

Japan was actively trying to surrender before the bombs were dropped. The only reason it was done was to scare Russia.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[spmkk]

A blockade is an act of war. A people have a right to defend themselves against an attack.

Then could you please explain why Gaza isn't at war with Egypt, and why Gazans aren't "defending themselves" against this "attack" by lobbing rockets at Cairo?

I can't remember an Israeli prosecution of settlers for killing Palestinians

You either have a short memory, or (more likely) are trolling and hoping that others have one.

After the Tomb of the Patriarchs massacre, the one major incident of "killings by the settlers", "The Israeli government...responded by arresting followers of Meir Kahane, criminalizing the Kach movement and affiliated movements as terrorist, forbidding certain Israeli settlers from entering Palestinian towns and demanding that those settlers turn in their army-issued rifles...Jewish Israelis were barred from entering major Arab communities in Hebron."

In response to a handful of Jewish extremists celebrating the attack, Israel enacted "legislation outlawing monuments to terrorists". Your turn: can you point to a single instance of Gaza or any Muslim nation passing a law like that?

'...the "white flag" incidents where Israeli soldiers killed Palestinians, including children, who came out carrying a white flag as ordered (documented in the Goldstone report), but Israel has never prosecuted a solider for killing a Palestinian, or even admitted that it happened.'

That is a bald-faced lie, but of course you already know that:
"After reviewing the evidence, the Military Advocate General ordered that an IDF Staff Sergeant be indicted with charges of manslaughter by a military court. This decision is based on evidence that the soldier, who was serving as a designated marksman, deliberately targeted an individual walking with a group of people waving a white flag without being ordered or authorized to do so."

As an aside, you also know that the Goldstone report that you refer to has since been disavowed by its author...

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Aighearach]

Japan was actively trying to surrender before the bombs were dropped. The only reason it was done was to scare Russia.

There is lots of room for differing opinions, but that one right there is not an opinion, just a blatant lie.

Gonna call Horse-pucky. Find a history book, please. Read it if you can.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[nbauman]

I asked the Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer about the killings in the Goldstone report, and he told me that the Palestinians were lying and they never happened. He used the term "Pallywood." That's an authoritative answer, and I didn't think the Israeli government would allow their U.S. ambassador to go around saying things that were not true.

I'm going to follow up that 2010 statement by the IDF Military Advocate General.

But it seems as if the charges were dismissed.

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/05/...
Israel closes investigation of those responsible for al Samouni family massacre, no legal action taken
Israel/Palestine
Adam Horowitz on May 1, 2012
From Haaretz:
Israel’s military prosecution announced Tuesday that no legal steps will be taken against those responsible for the killing of 21 members of the Samouni family during the 2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[cold fjord]

The only part of your statement that is correct is your statement that you, "don't know". We can start to address the gaps in your knowledge with this:

The abuse of Christianity’s holy wars.

... The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire, Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact. Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095. Despite modern laments about medieval colonialism, the crusade’s real purpose was to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances. ...

I admit it's a small start, but at this point you're slightly less ignorant than you were not long ago. I encourage you to continue to address the gaps in your knowledge.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[cold fjord]

Yes, they were. I see where you ran into trouble and got confused. You overlooked the qualifier "Northern" in the article you reference. I've indicated that in the second item below which is from the link you provide.

Crusades

The Crusades were military campaigns sanctioned by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Pope Urban II authorized the First Crusade in 1095 with the goal of restoring European access to the Holy Land, ...

Northern Crusades

The Northern Crusades or Baltic Crusades were crusades undertaken by the Christian kings of Denmark, Poland[3] and Sweden, the German Livonian and Teutonic military orders, and their allies ...

The Crusades were an undertaking with much wider support in Europe to address the Muslim invasions and preceded the so called "Northern Crusades" by a notable period. I would also draw your attention to this sentence from the article on the "Northern Crusade":

Some of these wars were called crusades during the Middle Ages, but others, including most of the Swedish ones, were first dubbed crusades by 19th-century romantic nationalist historians.

You might want to follow up with this: The abuse of Christianity’s holy wars.

PS - Those Mongol-Tatars and Turks were something, huh?

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[shutdown -p now]

The Crusades were stretched out in time considerably, and that time period does include the Baltic Crusades. And at the very least the Crusade against Old Prussians was officially dubbed such by the Church, so it is a part of The Crusades for any reasonable definition of those (it certainly was for the people who lived at the time).

"Mongol-Tatars", OTOH, didn't particularly care about religious issues, and local churches (including Russian Orthodox Church) rather thrived under them.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

most terrorists don't call in bomb threats

I think you mean that they don't do this anymore as it has proven more effective, thank you Irgun, to "whoopsie" and sink the ship with the deportees on it and "whoopsie" kill 90+ people in a hotel bombing.

It was a real smart warning plan too. Have a 16 year old kid call the hotel switchboard and leave a warning with the switchboard 15 minutes before the attack. Not anyone in authority, the switchboard. Then call the French Consulate and warn someone there 10 minutes before the attack. Then finally, call the newspapers and warn them a few minutes before the actual attack.

Even if they'd called the manager of the hotel with the first call it is unlikely you could evacuate the hotel in that period of time if the manager immediately believed what you were saying and sent out a general alert. Maybe they had disaster planning training and could have, probably not.

the british authorities' official position was that nobody with any capacity to do anything had received a warning. They did not deny that a warning had been sent.

Irgun's own description of their warning makes it clear that nobody with the authority to act in time had been notified. They told the switchboard operator. They didn't call the hotel and have the switchboard operator connect them to anyone, they just told the switchboard operator and hung up. If they'd called the French Consulate an hour or two earlier there might have been a chance that the hotel could have been evacuated, but they didn't. They called them 10 minutes before the bombing.

All of this is irrelevant anyhow. Calling ahead and telling someone you're going to blow something up just means you're a terrorist who wants to minimize casualties (if only they were all so nice.)

I think any objective observer would say, the outcome that they were going for was nobody dead and less a hotel.

No rational adult would think that. Most rational objective adults would say that this was a "cover your ass" move like other terrorists have done in the past so that you can later claim "we warned you." Otherwise you wouldn't warn some random person at the hotel and only 15 minutes before the attack...

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Triklyn]

the fundamental difference is.

you're saying they cared about public opinion, so they threw out these "whoopsies" to cover their ass.

terrorists don't care about that. they DON'T FUCKING CARE about civilian lives or civilian perceptions.

ted bundy didn't care, the school shooters don't care, the bombers of both intifadas didn't care.

you're saying the warning wasn't good enough, i'm saying that there was a warning at all, regardless of motive or efficacy, is critical and telling.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[beastofburdon]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but not everyone believes war propaganda without question.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[DutchUncle]

>>>> The people who are firing those missiles and making those attacks are usually not controlled by Hamas, but ... sabotage the peace efforts.

New York City and New Jersey are separated by the Hudson River. Imagine what would happen if someone in New Jersey were shooting rockets at New York City; one would expect the various New Jersey law enforcement agencies to try to find and stop them, rather than allowing them to hide their rockets in schools and houses of worship.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[nbauman]

>>>> The people who are firing those missiles and making those attacks are usually not controlled by Hamas, but ... sabotage the peace efforts.

New York City and New Jersey are separated by the Hudson River. Imagine what would happen if someone in New Jersey were shooting rockets at New York City; one would expect the various New Jersey law enforcement agencies to try to find and stop them, rather than allowing them to hide their rockets in schools and houses of worship.

Suppose some Mafia members from New Jersey came to New York and killed a few rival drug dealers.

In response, New York State sent military forces to occupy New Jersey, sealed its borders, blocked its ports, bridges, roads and railways, bombed its airports, cut off its telephone and internet connections, shut its hospitals, made it impossible for anyone to earn a living, sent fighter jets to assassinate goverment officials from the sky, and responded to all disputes with more bombings.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

The Yishuv's weren't a full state yet but they were tribal authorities that administered local law. Its primary function was territory planning: land acquisition and agricultural settlement. That's a de-facto if not de-jure government function.

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

I think we are having a linguistic dispute. I wouldn't object to a statement like "Israel wouldn't not have been founded in 1948 without terrorism". I would object to "Israel was founded on terrorism". That's a much broader statement.

"Jane would not have acquired that dress on Tuesday without shoplifting". Is not remotely similar to
"Jane's entire wardrobe is based on what she can shoplift".

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

Technically the Yishuv is just the population of Jews in Palestine, it doesn't suggest any authority in any sense. Rather like the inverse of the "South African Diaspora" where it represents a body of people, and a place, and a time, but nothing political (in these two cases.)

No doubt there was organization, just as there was organization in any significant Jewish community in the world (a sad requisite as a response to centuries of systematic abuse.)

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Assmasher]

"Israel wouldn't not have been founded in 1948 without terrorism". I would object to "Israel was founded on terrorism"

Technically the two are equivalent. If the second statement was "Israel would not exist without terrorism" then I think you'd be correct.

The fundamental issue is that it was terrorism that led to the State of Israel that exists today. It doesn't mean Israel wouldn't exist without it, but it would be a different Israel founded at a different time (probably.) It's possible (though I think unlikely) that Israel itself would not exist in Palestine without terrorism. Personally I think it likely that Israel would come into existence in some form in some part of Palestine in the mid-50's - but that's pure speculation.

The Jane analogy is a good one, but the two statement are very different than my contention relating to Israel and terrorism.

My statement would read more like:

"Jane would not have acquired that dress on Tuesday without shoplifting"
"Jane's dress was obtained through shoplifting"

Taking the analogy further the remainder of what I'm claiming is:

"Jane really wanted that dress, and would likely have acquired it some day through means other than shoplifting - but that's not what happened."

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

There wasn't just a little bit or organization there was, especially leading up to WWII a proto-state. That's why the Jews were able to fight a war because the proto-state existed. The Jewish community in Philadelphia might be able to throw some nice parades but they couldn't fight a war. Obviously as you go back further in time the Yishuv becomes more like a tribal authority and less like a proto-government. But I'd say that by the early 1920s you clearly have something which is acting in the capacity of at least local government in most areas where Jews are concentrated

Re:Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[jbolden]

I think the point of dispute is between one aspect of the Yishuv government (the use of terror against the British) and the total proto-government that became Israel. The Yishuv used terrorism along with public pressure to counter the growing resistance to Jewish immigration from Arab states. It is equally if not more true that Israel would not have existed in 1948 without the citrus boom of the late 1920s. So one could equally say using your definition, "Israel was founded on the citrus boom". One could just as easily say "Israel was founded on Arab resistance to Jewish immigration" since that's equally as much a cause.

That's why I think the analogy is Jane's wardrobe not an individual dress. Terrorism was just a small part of what founded Israel. Sure remove terrorism and possibly the date is pushed back. But who knows maybe without terrorism the British don't feel like they are losing face, like the Yishuv more and get out sooner so they can focus on places like India and Iran.

The statement about terrorism is simply too misleading to take a minor cause and elevate it to that extent. I agree with you that terror is what sealed the deal and that likely without Israel likely is founded later. But the main causes are things like the Jews excellent organization in Agriculture, the Hebrew language movement, the Holocaust...

Apartheid

[Anonymous Coward]

Two apartheid states working hand-in-hand. Quelle surprise.

Re:Apartheid

[ubrgeek]

I've never really bought this overly broad comparison. For example, in Israel Arab-Israeli's are allowed to vote but under Apartheid my understanding is blacks, who were South African, weren't. Why only Arab-Israeli's? Because like in the US you need to be a citizen to vote.

Re:Apartheid

[khallow]

And at the risk of Godwinning the discussion, there's at least one Christian country that also killed as many members of what it considered to be an "enemy" religion in the middle of the last Century.

Which country would that be? The Fascists were atheist. The Communists were atheist. That doesn't leave many left.

Re:Apartheid

[dunkelfalke]

You are a liar. Mussolini and the Catholic church were best buddies. His both children were baptized, Catholicism was the state religion and marriage was controlled by the church.

Maybe you mean the nazis? But no, most of them were Christian. Hitler was a Catholic, as most Austrians were at that time. There was a concordat between the nazi Germany and Vatican, "Gott mit uns" was the official slogan of Wehrmacht, and Hitler's Jew hate was very typical for the contemporary Catholics. Germany never was secular and even today out of 15-16 holidays only three aren't religious. Even "the third Reich" only meant the third iteration of the holy Roman empire.

Re:Apartheid

[CanHasDIY]

Just because a person is atheist doesn't mean they'really incapable of seeing religion as "the enemy." In fact, I see atheists make that very comment almost daily right here on Slashdot - that religion is at fault for most of our social ills, and should be done away with.

Re:Apartheid

[ilguido]

I don't think that a youtube video with out-of-contest, mistranslated words is going to support your point (he's talking about communists by the way). Mussolini, the theorist of fascism, was an atheist. After all, it's really difficult to imagine a leader of a totalitarian regime supportive of some kind of religion or religious power. It is true that totalitarian states (from Napoleon onward) tried to embrace, extend and extinguish religion and so at some point they had to take care of religious people and religious power, however that is just a struggle with an alien power on the road to the true totalitarian state. Even Stalin had to make a deal with religious authorities during the second world war: totalitarian leaders are politician and you'd make a huge mistake judging a politician by his words instead of his actions.

Re:Apartheid

[rmdingler]

Yes, because ISIS is representative of Muslim states.~

Oh wait, it isn't. And at the risk of Godwinning the discussion, there's at least one Christian country that also killed as many members of what it considered to be an "enemy" religion in the middle of the last Century.

Islamic states are not particularly progressive these days (understatement) but the hate against believers in Islam is absurdly irrational and out of proportion.

It'd be nice if those goddamn Jews could catch a break, right?

Re:Apartheid

[Tanuki64]

It is always funny to see how identical the responses of the apes... sorry believers... are when one points to their barbarity.

Communism: There never was communism. Stalin was no communist. Pretended to be communist for his political agenda. Yadda, yadda.

"Chrisianism": No, no, not those where not Christians. Those were Atheists. Pretending to be Christians for their political agenda. Yadda, yadda.

Btw... it does not matter about what Hitlers spoke in this video. It matters that the claims the a Christian. And he was. A very good one.

Re:Apartheid

[ilguido]

Keep repeating those shallow reasonings, you may eventually to believe them. Mussolini was an anticlerical atheist. Of course he was also a politician and so he had to make a deal with the powerful Catholic Church, like he had to make a deal with the monarchic exponents but he was not a Catholic nor a royalist: he was just pragmatic. Like Hitler or Stalin or Napoleon or Saddam: they all used religion, as a political mean, because religion is/was powerful in their state, but they weren't religious in a traditional sense.

Re:Apartheid

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it would. But they're not going to get one if every single time they're under threat we treat it as a simplistic game of bad guys vs good guys.

The entire existence of Israel is itself a cause of a number of issues that nobody's willing to address, and which itself causes hatred - not that the hatred is right, but let's not pretend that things would somehow be exactly the same if the Palestinian death rate wasn't so high, if conspiracy theories about their existence weren't treated as historical fact by so many pro-Israelis, and if Israel hadn't been clearing people out of their homes to make way for Israeli settlers since the early 1970s.

I don't think Apartheid is quite the right term. I'd prefer to compare Israel's political attitude to that of Britain after the conquest of Ireland. Few people are pro-IRA, just as few are pro-Palestinian terrorism, but seriously guys, Israel, you are following the worst example of a country trying to protect its borders in history. You KNOW what happened to the UK and to the Irish people as a result, yet this is your model?

Re:Apartheid

[khallow]

You are a liar. Mussolini and the Catholic church were best buddies.

So? He had to get their support early on in his reign.

His both children were baptized, Catholicism was the state religion and marriage was controlled by the church.

Fascists and Nazis had a lighter touch when it came to religion than the Communists did. They often went through the motions of public religious observance. None of that stuff indicates a belief in Christianity.

For example, Mussolini supposedly advised some visiting Nazi leaders (in early 1937):

"The Catholic Church is like a rubber ball, if you don't keep up the pressure, it will return to its original shape."

Both Mussolini and Hitler repeated discoursed on the absolute nature of their ideologies. For example, this quote by Mussolini in the aftermath of the Italian retreat from North Africa.

We become strong, I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look to for moral guidance.

Notice the Christian-like appeal to God? I don't either.

Hitler played that game even more. There are plenty of quotes where Hitler played lip service to religion. In private, he had different things to say.

Night of 11th-12th July, 1941:

National Socialism and religion cannot exist together.... The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity.... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things. (p 6 & 7)

To put that into context, being a Jew or a Bolshevik was a thing that could get you killed in Nazi Germany. So what fate would fall on those who clung to Christianity over the coming decades?

My take is that the various Fascist leaders planned on getting rid of religion at a later date when it was more politically convenient because just like the Communists, they saw religion as a rival power for the minds and hearts of their subjects. But it was a power that they wanted to get to acquiesce to their rule. Hence, the superficial displays of religious favoritism.

Re:Apartheid

[caseih]

A complicated and nuanced situation that's not nearly so clear-cut as you maintain.

If you get a chance, it's very much worth a visit to Israel and Palestine. Will give you a chance to see how things really are on the ground. Palestinians who live within the green line (pre-1967 boundaries) are as you say Israeli citizens that the Israelis call Israeli Arabs. They can vote, and they have relative freedom of movement. However they are treated by many as second-class citizens. The Knesset system is badly broken and as such doesn't really represent people, Jewish or Arab, since seats are apportioned according to a party's percentage of the popular vote. Arab MKs are often marginalized by government. They have never been a part of the government coalitions as far as I know. Israeli Arabs feel like the Israeli government favors Jewish school districts and cities when it comes to funding. In some parts of Israel, such as around Haifa, there has been relatively good integration between Palestinian and Jewish villages and neighbors. But in other parts of the Galilee things are often tense.

In the West Bank, Palestinians are not Israeli citizens, and crossing Israel to get to Gaza to see relatives has always been a difficult task. The vast majority of Palestinians live in the West Bank and aren't citizens, though Israel very much controls their movements.

Inside Jerusalem, things are the most apartheid. Though Israel has annexed Jerusalem, none of the Palestinians there have been granted citizenship. Also, they are not considered residents of the West Bank by the Israelis either. So while a Palestinian in the west bank can travel from one part to another, Palestinians in Jerusalem cannot travel anywhere without getting Israeli paperwork. It's the worst of both worlds. Israel acts like Palestinian Jerusalem residents are favored, but in reality they are more restricted.

So I can understand how people draw parallels between apartheid in SA and Israel. The situation is very much the same. The demographics is why Israel can never annex the west bank too, as doing so would absolutely make them just like SA.

Re: Apartheid

[ilguido]

Stalin was a communist and an atheist, yet he made a deal with the Russian Orthodox Church and suspended all publications of the league of militant atheists in 1941. It just suited his aims. The point is these guys never claimed to be christian, it is just someone like you that tries to extrapolate some phrase to support his agenda and ease his insecurities. Claiming that Mussolini or Fascism were pro-religion or pro-christianity is just nonsense.

Re:Apartheid

[dunkelfalke]

Fascists and Nazis had a lighter touch when it came to religion than the Communists did. They often went through the motions of public religious observance. None of that stuff indicates a belief in Christianity.

A lighter touch? Do you actually read what I have written? Catholicism was the state religion of fascist Italy and atheists were oppressed in nazi Germany.

Notice the Christian-like appeal to God? I don't either.

This is the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Unchristian behavior was the norm in every christian country as long as Christianity existed. Ghandi summed it up well when he said "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

By the way, here is another private Hitler quote:

I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.

Adolf Hitler in 1941 to General Gerhart Engel.

Sapienti sat.

Re: Apartheid

[dunkelfalke]

Stalin was actually a seminarist in his early years.

Re:Apartheid

[jbolden]

Your description is accurate except for Jerusalem. Non-Jews with Jerusalem residency are entitled to Israeli citizenship or Jordanian citizenship. They can choose. Many Palestinians until recently felt that accepting Israeli citizenship was accepting the Israeli annexation of Jerusalem and refused to become citizens. Lately (the last 5 years or so) that attitude has started to change and roughly 3-5% of Palestinians are becoming Israeli per year. In a generation the majority of Palestinians in Jerusalem will be Israeli citizens.

You also should make clear that while it certainly is true that West Bank Palestinians live under a military dictatorship that's partially their fault. They have refused to accept a benign colonial relationship with Israel and instead want to be classified as a hostile occupation. Puerto Rico doesn't have the same problems that the West Bank does.

Re:Apartheid

[meta-monkey]

I don't hate believers in Islam. I don't really hate anybody.

However I have a rational self-interest in the preservation of Western Civilization and freedom in general. Islam is incompatible with those things. Since Islam is not likely to change soon, then belief in Islam must be ended.

I suggest converting them to Christianity. I know you'd prefer they be enlightened atheist secular humanists, but I believe their brainwashing is so ingrained they could never let go of belief in the supernatural. An Abrahamic religion would be the easiest for them to slide in to. Now, call it a hunch, but I think conversion to Judaism is unlikely. That leaves Christianity. They already consider Jesus to be a prophet, so just ditch the Koran and push the New Testament.

Now they're all turning the other cheek and shit instead of raping and beheading. Give that a generation or two with your rock and roll music and your dungeons and dragons and your Porn Hub and shit and you've got a bunch of smug atheist fucks for your grandkids to play with.

One could accomplish this by invasion of course, but that is messy. Best place to start is the refugee camps in Europe.

Set up a nice comfy camp in Germany (they have experience with this sort of thing. Minus the "comfy" part). Food, water, shelter, no prob. Around the perimeter of this camp, allow any religion except Islam to set up shop. Catholics over here, Methodists over there, Buddhists, Mormons, atheist secular humanists, whatever. Refugees are free to shop around. Take as long as you like. Years even!

When you're ready to leave the camp, you go through the Welcoming Ceremony.

1) You have to eat a bacon double cheeseburger and chug an ice cold refreshing Coors Light, and then say "Ah, I love that frost-brewed Rocky Mountain taste!"

2) Then you have to draw a picture of Mohammed getting Eiffel Towered by Jesus and Moses. Bonus Euros if you do a really good job of expressing just how much Momo loves those cocks in his mouth and ass. Also, if your name is "Mohammed" you must change it to "Dave."

3) Finally, you put your Koran in the combination toilet/furnace. First you shit on it, and then you light it on fire while singing "AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!"

Do all of that, and welcome to Western Civilization! Please enjoy our freedom, mutual respect, art work that isn't just squiggles and squares, sexual promiscuity and pornography.

Otherwise, rot in the damn camp until you can grow up and pick a belief system that isn't a violent, backwards shit show.

Re:Apartheid

[phantomfive]

It's hard to not be suspicious of people who call it apartheid. Why are you not complaining about Palestinians in Lebanon? Or what about Palestinians in Syria? Be fair.

Re:Apartheid

[BlackPignouf]

benign colonial relationship

That sounds like "enjoyable rape" to me.

Re:Apartheid

[meta-monkey]

I am neither a hypocrite nor a liar in this regard.

You are, however, a deluded moron. Enjoy your caliphate.

Re:Apartheid

[meta-monkey]

Also, I'm not an atheist. I'm a Catholic.

Imagine a room with an axe.

Lock me in with a Jew. Nothing bad will happen.

Lock me in with an atheist. Nothing bad will happen.

Lock me in with a Mormon, a Buddhist, a fucking scientologist even. Nothing bad will happen.

Lock any of those people in with an Islamist and the Islamist will go all Highlander "there can be only one" crazy on him and try to lop off his head.

The problem is not everyone else. The problem is not even the Islamist. The problem is Islam.

Re:Apartheid

[khallow]

It is always funny to see how identical the responses of the apes... sorry believers... are when one points to their barbarity.

Facts don't change from person to person.

Communism: There never was communism. Stalin was no communist. Pretended to be communist for his political agenda. Yadda, yadda.

You'd have to show first that Stalin didn't buy into Communism in order for this situation to be analogous. As far as we can tell, he was a true believer.

And nobody here is claiming there never was Christianity.

"Chrisianism": No, no, not those where not Christians. Those were Atheists. Pretending to be Christians for their political agenda. Yadda, yadda.

In their own words.

Btw... it does not matter about what Hitlers spoke in this video. It matters that the claims the a Christian. And he was. A very good one.

Wait wait wait... thats' SARCASM isn't it?

Re:Apartheid

[Gavagai80]

Puerto Ricans have been allowed to vote on whether they'd like to remain associated with the USA or not. That's why they don't have the same problems.

Re:Apartheid

[Darinbob]

But were all the followers atheists? If only atheists were fascists then Italy would never have had enough political support to rise to power.

Re:Apartheid

[jbolden]

So what? If Israel allowed the West Bank Palestinians to vote on whether to leave or not, then they would be willing to live in peace? Is that what you are saying? Doesn't Gaza and the problems Israel had in the 50s-70s with Palestinians in foreign countries disprove that?

Re:Apartheid

[Richard_at_work]

How about Spain under the dictatorship of Franco? He was a fervent Christian and Catholic and had many people executed solely for their opposing religious views.

Hitlers manipulation of Christianity was also one of the reasons Franco kept out of WW2.

Re:Apartheid

[BadDreamer]

Sure they used religion, but that does not mean they were not also religious. Most powerful religious leaders today use religion, but if you're arguing that this means they are not religious you are a very lonely (and incorrect) voice. One does not exclude the other. And in Hitler's case they very clearly go hand in hand.

âoeMy feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, Godâ(TM)s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice⦠And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.â

[Adolf Hitler, speech in Munich on April 12, 1922, countering a political opponent, Count Lerchenfeld, who opposed antisemitism on his personal Christian feelings. Published in âoeMy New Orderâ, quoted in Freethought Today April 1990]

âoeI believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.â

[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp. 46]

âoeWhat we have to fight forâ¦is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator.â

[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp. 125]

âoeAnd the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God.â

[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp.174]

âoeCatholics and Protestants are fighting with one another⦠while the enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom is laughing up his sleeve.â

[Adolph Hitler, _Mein Kampf_, pp.309]

âoeI am now as before a Catholic and will always remain soâ

[Adolph Hitler, to Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]

As to Saddam, you seem to be arguing from a context where people are brought up secularly and then presented with religion as a tool. That may be your life experience, but that's not how people grow up in religious nations.

Re:Apartheid

[dave420]

Given your frequent confusion on this subject, you might want to sit the next few plays out.

Re:Apartheid

[dave420]

Clearly it depends on the person you're locked in there with. There are some crazy-ass Jews who could kill you, some crazy-ass atheists, some crazy-ass Mormons, some crazy-ass Buddhists, some crazy-ass Scientologists, and some crazy-ass Muslims who would too. You are clearly being incredibly prejudiced, which is not the hallmark of a soundly-functioning brain. The thing is you can not assume from which group your person comes whether they will kill you or not, as none of the groups you mentioned are homogeneous - people are people, and vary wildly even in relatively-small groups. The fact some of your groups number over billions, yet you seem to think they all think and behave the same, speaks of your complete unwillingness to engage in rational thought on the matter. The further fact that you thought it worthy or sane to post your admission of irrationality to the public shows you really don't understand what's going on.

Are you confusing the words "Islamist" and "Muslim"? It seems you are. Not doing so will make you look less of a lunatic, but only a little bit.

Re:Apartheid

[meta-monkey]

You fail to understand your enemy. They will not live in peaceful coexistence with you. They will kill you, kill me, and rape and enslave our mothers, daughters and wives, and they will never stop. Equivocate until you're blue in the face, but you know if you had to be locked in that room with a random person from a belief system of your choice, the very last thing you would choose is Islam. If you wouldn't, then well bless your little heart but shut up about things you don't understand.

Really I think you're just butthurt I picked "Dave" as the name Mohammeds have to switch to.

Re:Apartheid

[Nidi62]

You also should make clear that while it certainly is true that West Bank Palestinians live under a military dictatorship that's partially their fault. They have refused to accept a benign colonial relationship with Israel and instead want to be classified as a hostile occupation. Puerto Rico doesn't have the same problems that the West Bank does.

Puerto Rico also doesn't have the US government tearing down the houses of locals to build fortified compounds then shipping in US citizens to live there. Oh, and fostering a hostile relationship between the citizens and the locals, allowing the citizens to be armed to the teeth while the locals have no weapons.

Re:Apartheid

[david_thornley]

Totalitarian regimes can really use religious power, as long as it supports them, and there's never any shortage of religious authorities who are willing to support the government in return for concessions that do not affect government behavior. Fascists tended to appeal to traditional values, including religion, although they may well not have been believers themselves.

Re:Apartheid

[david_thornley]

Hitler was raised Christian, and he tried to appeal to Christians with his rhetoric, but I haven't seen anything that shows he was a good Christian. He wasn't as anti-Christian as some of his subordinates, but he certainly didn't support religion.

Re:Apartheid

[david_thornley]

We've done a pretty good job for centuries, keeping Western civilization intact with all those Muslims over in the Middle East, and extending east from there. They haven't been a real threat since they were beaten back from the gates of Vienna (in 1699?). Some people way overestimate the threat. They're mostly backward nations that are only prominent because they export a lot of oil (except for the ones that aren't prominent). They have a lot of loudmouths, but no real way to threaten the West.

Re:Apartheid

[jbolden]

West Bank Palestinians didn't have settlers in fortified residences before they started resisting. During the 1970s and 80s you had settlement without the violence, The Palestinians violence changed the nature of the settlement process.

Re:Apartheid

[Triklyn]

gaza gets bombed every decade or so.

the west bank is already subject to the whims of israel.

international pressure isn't going to do it. arafat walked away from the best deal palestinians are ever going to see again.

you drive the jews into the sea, and the last thing they'll do is make sure you can't use the land.

hostile colonial relationship is what they have now, benign is a significant upgrade, and hey, maybe they can visit their family again.

Re:Apartheid

[Triklyn]

i think in every single one of those situations, including the one with the islamist.

we'd both take a look at the axe. take a look at the door and say. fuck this, let's get out of here first, cuz right now, we got a lot in common.

some fucker locked us in a room with an axe, they clearly want us to kill each other. lets kill them instead.

And Carter was one of the good ones

[rmdingler]

Imposing sanctions on Israel, on the other hand, would be a political disaster, involving a major loss of support for the administration among the Jewish diaspora in the United States, an important political constituency for Carter and the Democratic Party. For all these reasons, the administration was highly motivated to offer some explanation other than a nuclear test for the Vela event and to hide, suppress, or otherwise soft-pedal information and evidence to the contrary—in other words, to engage in a cover-up.

Of course there's no way around it, but how might the World look if elected officials didn't put personal considerations ahead of national or earthly considerations.

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[Anonymous Coward]

how might the World look if elected officials didn't put personal considerations ahead of national or earthly considerations.

Except the problem is really not the elected officials - its the people doing the electing. (the voters)

Imagine, for a moment, that we somehow elected a full slate of conscientious politicians. They're goal is not to pander and get reelected, their goal is to do right by the country, its citizens, and the world in general. Hooray! ... now what happens? Well, more likely than not, they'll piss off some constituency. That means that while they might be great in their one term, they'll lose in their next election. So someone else gets a shot at the job.

If they're also a conscientious person, we're back in the same boat - a one term wonder. But what if, by chance, a smarmy people-pleaser gets elected? His main goal is getting reelected, not being conscientious. Now, as his main goal was to avoid pissing off the electorate, chances are that he *will* get reelected, and go on to a second, third, fourth ... term. Now imagine that happening across all seats? The contentious people will slowly get phased out by the reelection-oriented ones, even if contentious politicians are more numerous than the reelection-oriented ones. (Even if the conscientious politicians are five times more prevalent than the reelection oriented ones, if a reelection oriented one get ten terms for every one a conscientious one gets, the selfish politicians will outnumber the conscientious ones 2:1 in Congress.)

So the problem here is not really the politicians. Even with an excess of conscientious politicians, most seats in government will be occupied by people who can get reelected. It's really the fault of the *electorate* for being such a fickle bitch. If conscientiousness is not a major factor in the choices of the electorate, then it's very difficult for conscientious people to stay in politics - they're racking up "cons" without anything in the "pro" column.

When's the last time you looked at a politician and said "I disagree with the position he's taken, but I respect his integrity, so I'd vote for him anyway." ... I don't think I ever have. I doubt most other people have either. But that's really what you'd need for things to work out. You'd need people in the electorate willing to overlook a few disagreements about position but respect their conscientiousness enough to vote for a politician anyway.

P.S. Another solution that presents itself as obvious is term limits. If you keep people from getting reelected (so no one has 10 terms), you "fix" the bias I talk about above.. But that's not really a solution in practice. This just pushes being smarmy for "getting reelected" down to being smarmy for "getting elected in the first place". You also can't expect people to dump any sort of campaign promises and start acting conscientious when they're a lame duck, for the simple reason that endorsements, party affiliations, protégées, etc. all mean that performance while a lame duck can have adverse influence on similar people later. That is, if the Conscientious Party lame duck pisses you off, there's a possibility that you'll switch your vote to the Smarmy Party candidate.

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[phantomfive]

but how might the World look if elected officials didn't put personal considerations ahead of national or earthly considerations.

As if voters put national considerations ahead of personal considerations. The voters get what they collectively deserve, in this case that is true.

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[Anonymous Coward]

And that not even the day Israel attacked America, that Lyndon B. Johnson conveniently sweep under the rug.

The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy motor torpedo boats, on 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War. The combined air and sea attack killed 34 crew members (naval officers, seamen, two Marines, and one civilian), wounded 171 crew members, and severely damaged the ship. At the time, the ship was in international waters north of the Sinai Peninsula, about 25.5 nmi (29.3 mi; 47.2 km) northwest from the Egyptian city of Arish.

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[phantomfive]

When's the last time you looked at a politician and said "I disagree with the position he's taken, but I respect his integrity, so I'd vote for him anyway." ... I don't think I ever have. I doubt most other people have either.

I don't know about integrity, but I'm serious about voting for competency. I really hope we get a competent president next election, and I don't care which party he comes from. No more making extremely stupid decisions (invade Iraq) or getting pushed around by lobbyists, please (look at all the Wall-Street bankers Obama listens to).

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[stooo]

Hope generally does not work.
You will not get a competent president just by waiting.

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[phantomfive]

What do I have to do to get a competent president then?

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[stooo]

You probably will have to fight at some point. May the force be with you.

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[david_thornley]

If you ever find out, please let me know.

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[phantomfive]

I would say, "I have to run myself," but I'm pretty sure if I did that, it would by default turn me into a blathering moron.

A correct answer is "teach the general public to recognize competence," but of course that's a problem by itself.

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[Triklyn]

who do you have your eye on.

the republican primary is all the options you're going to get.

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[Triklyn]

you used lightyears incorrectly

Re:And Carter was one of the good ones

[phantomfive]

Right now, I think the best I can hope for is "someone who doesn't mess things up too much."

What "new evidence"?

[pjt33]

The summary uses "new evidence that has come to light" as the anchor text for a link to the article, but the most recent date in the article is 2012. Is that supposed to be the "new evidence", or am I missing something?

Re:What "new evidence"?

[Sun]

The agreement with Iran is new. This article simply rehashes old news with new circumstances to put forward a political view as "news".

Shachar

Re:Intimidate Iran or Undermine the Iran Nuke Deal

[sumdumass]

Even though Israel has refused to admit to it over the years, almost everyone believes and has for a long time believed that they have nukes.

The only interesting timing here might be the amount of increase in interest in Israel's nuclear history given the Iran deal bullshit.

Nuclear proliferation

[phantomfive]

Here's the Obama quote from the article:

It is time for the testing of nuclear weapons to finally be banned.........We go forward with no illusions. Some will break the rules, but that is we need a structure in place that ensures that when any nation does, they will face consequences.”

It's reasonable. We're trying to stop nuclear proliferation, because the more nukes, the more likely a crazy person will get a chance to use one.

The problem is, and the article points out, there are already consequences that should be in place for nations that test nuclear weapons, but when countries have tested nuclear weapons, they didn't face the consequences. As a result, countries will continue to get nukes. Israel and South Africa first, then Pakistan and soon Iran, followed by Saudi Arabia. Egypt won't get them as long as they get funding from the US, but they're thinking about it.

With the unstable situation in the Near East, how long until nuclear weapons are accidentally (or purposely, by a lunatic) used?

Re:Nuclear proliferation

[fustakrakich]

Worst kept secret is all the A-bombs sitting there on the American bases, which I hope is not really true. They shouldn't be needed with all those floating launchpads nearby.

First we got the bomb and that was good
because we love peace and brotherhood...

Re:Nuclear proliferation

[phantomfive]

Worst kept secret is all the A-bombs sitting there on the American bases, which I hope is not really true.

Between ICBMs and submarine launched nukes, there's really no reason to keep nukes out there. But who knows, crazier things have happened.

Re:Nuclear proliferation

[mi]

when countries have tested nuclear weapons, they didn't face the consequences

You seem to be equating countries like Israel, Pakistan, and India — who never promised not to seek nuclear weapons — with the likes of Iran and North Korea, who did make such a promise, but developed (or are developing) them anyway.

Maybe, both groups should see some consequences, but the latter group's punishment ought to be much more severe.

Re:Nuclear proliferation

[hey!]

Consequences can be tricky things. What we didn't want was a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, which would be triggered by Israeli testing. So what is the best option, at least in the short run, when evidence of secret Israeli testing falls into your lap?

You consider two options: make the information public, or sweep it under the rug. The consequences of making the information public are immediate: every country in the Middle East that has the capacity to do so starts seeking its own nuclear bomb. The consequences of sweeping the information under the rug are eventual: the credibility and authority of the US on non-proliferation issues is severely damaged.

We are in the eventually stage of the keeping it secret. By now everyone knows Israel has nukes and that the US turned a blind eye to Israel's proliferation activities, even treaty violations. So basically the US has no credibility on proliferation issues whatsoever; our efforts to combat proliferation have to be seen in the region as an attempt to preserve Israel's regional nuclear monopoly. That's verybad, but might still be the lesser of two evils.

Sometimes you've got nothing but bad options.

Re:Nuclear proliferation

[phantomfive]

That's a thoughtful post. If we had more posts like this, Slashdot would be a better place.

I would argue that no one in the middle east has credibility in terms of "good intentions." Every army there has been serving its own purpose for thousands of years, and no one expects anything different.
The problem the US has now is one of credibility: when we say to a group, "we will support you, as long as you support us," we often break our promises on a whim. The next president comes, or the electorate gets bored, or whatever, we will turn our backs on our friends. IMO.

Re:Nuclear proliferation

[Blaskowicz]

North Korea was in negociations in the 90s to stall their nuclear program, although they didn't seem very trustworthy or their regime defendable at all. Then George W. Bush threatened them with war and the North Koreans resumed their program and made their fucking bomb. What a dumbfuck.
I'm referring to the mere "axis of evil" speech which is quite an indirect war threat but North Korea responds very differently to war threats than Iran does.

nonsense

[argStyopa]

From TFA: "This cover-up is all the more troubling because it runs contrary to President Obamaâ(TM)s speech in Prague in 2009"
Troubling?
Nearly stopped reading at this point; to vapidly disregard the radically different geopolitical circumstances (both regional and global) between 1979 and 2009 is, frankly, tendentious idiocy.

It might also be worth noting that Israel, who'd been attacked generally by the Arab states around it in 1948, 1967, and 1973. It has not been openly attacked since.

Re:nonsense

[adrn01]

...It might also be worth noting that Israel, who'd been attacked generally by the Arab states around it in 1948, 1967, and 1973. It has not been openly attacked since.

Well, yes; the wars against Israel all depended on Egypt to carry the brunt of the fighting (and the costs). With Egypt taken out of the line of battle by the peace treaty, no one else had the ability to launch a land war against Israel.

Re:Israel did not break the CTBT

[vittal]

*sigh* The article doesn't claim they violated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, rather it says (in the first paragraph no less) it was a violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty which Israel signed in 1963 and ratified in 1964.

• http://www.state.gov/t/isn/4797.htm
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Partial_Test_Ban_Treaty_signatories

Re:First strike!

[myowntrueself]

If you got nukes, you should be willing to shoot first.

Thats what Bertrand Russell said, with the proviso "until they get nukes then we should disarm."

The famous peacenik and founder member of CND believed in nuking the soviet union before they had a chance to develop their own nukes.

Re:On another hand...

[khallow]

I was about to say the same thing. When you write:

No radioactive fallout was detected

that rules out a nuclear test. We should be able to go out to the sea floor of the site right now and detect fallout. I believe it's been since concluded that this was a meteor.

Re:On another hand...

[ColdWetDog]

It's a big planet and a small nuke. Although it would be a smoking gun, so to speak, either the sensors didn't find the fallout or the information is still classified.

As the article points out, pretty much every other bit of evidence points to a nuclear explosion. Personally, I think it was a lead in to District 9. We were telling the aliens where to land but something screwed up.

Forced conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

I have lived amongst many Muslims here in africa. Not one has even mentioned converting me.

However on my first trip to Atlanta, i got given a bible on day one

Re:Forced conversion

[Bing Tsher E]

You say they forced you to take a bible?

Your wife/girlfriend was forced to wear a veil? She wasn't allowed to pick you up at the airport?

Re: Forced conversion

[Bender0x7D1]

You weren't forced to take it - you chose to take it. It might have been less socially awkward to do so, but you weren't forced to.

Re:Forced conversion

[tehcyder]

You say they forced you to take a bible?

Your wife/girlfriend was forced to wear a veil? She wasn't allowed to pick you up at the airport?

GP was making a perfectly rational point about evangelism, which does not exist in most religions. Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs do not have any interest in converting you. Only (some) Christians appear to want to do this.

Re: Forced conversion

[tigersha]

My GF had a religious freak friend who insisted on giving me some religious tract.. The next time she saw me and asked me what I thought I told her "it warmed my heart". I was not lying. Thing is, my house was warmed with a fire, and I needed something to light the, em, fire.

And before you accuse me of bible-burning, it was some stupid 20-page religious pamphlet of some sect, not a bible.

Re:Forced conversion

[shutdown -p now]

Muslims absolutely want to convert you. Though in the vast majority of cases this is more similar to Christian proselytism, and not the sword-at-the-neck kind practiced by ISIS and their ilk.

In fact, to the best of my knowledge, in all Islamic schools, dawah is considered fard kifayah (a communal obligation - i.e. the community as a whole should provide enough preachers to spread the word), and in some it is even fard ayn (i.e. individual obligation of every Muslim).

where was the fallout

[lophophore]

Where was the radioactive fallout? If there was an atmospheric test there should have been detectable amounts of radioactive fallout. The article does not mention any. What's up with that?

Re:where was the fallout

[tomhath]

If there was an atmospheric test there should have been detectable amounts of radioactive fallout.

There was some radiation detected in Australia consistent with a small, clean bomb near South Africa. For political reasons, the US (Jimmy Carter) didn't want to find any proof that a nuclear bomb was detonated. They sent a couple of planes to the general vicinity as a token effort but didn't really search the correct location.

Re:where was the fallout

[Anonymous Coward]

The atmospheric test (Vela incident) was most likely of a small (as in artillery shell sized) fission device intended for use as part of a thermonuclear device. These devices have small yields, and are mostly neutron output, and produce very little fallout. A high air burst with a limited yield means that there is limited ground (or seawater) sucked up into the fireball. By the 60s, people had figured out how to do tests that didn't fill the air with fallout. Essentially, this was a "neutron bomb".

Israel is thought to have done conventional fission devices underground in the 60s. The sophistication of such a device is pretty low: you could probably cookbook it from the Los Alamos Primer and it would work without needing any preliminary tests (see "the Nth Country Problem" report, as well as more recent studies where they let physics students use open source materials to do a design, which is then evaluated by actual bomb engineers).

  The Vela event was a test of a thermonuclear primary using boosting, and it's thought that Israel didn't have sufficient analytical capability and simulation codes in the 70s to be able to be sure it would work without a test. The US and Soviets did all their "practical" tests back in the 50s and moved to simulation. A air burst over the ocean is a pretty good way to "hide" a test, compared to, say, a underground test: very little fallout, and the ocean just moves around a bit. By 1979, the seismic sensor systems were very sophisticated: an Israeli underground test would have been trivially detectable. The only real detection risk was from orbit: the double pulse is highly characteristic of a nuclear explosion, and the exact capability of those spacecraft was classified. The Israeli's figured that if we did detect it, we wouldn't acknowledge it publicly, because it would raise a lot of ugly problems with the enormous foreign aid (>$10B/year) we were sending after the Camp David accords (in 1978) and the rules about aid and nuclear nations.

There *were* evidences of the EMP (recorded at Arecibo as disturbances of the ionosphere) as well as in hydrophone data.

Re:where was the fallout

[stooo]

>>small (as in artillery shell sized) fission device .... These devices have small yields, and are mostly neutron output, and produce very little fallout

"small" and "very little fallout" is very relative to the biggest H bombs. This things can still obliterate a city like Hiroshima even if it's only the primer of a much bigger device.

Re:Intimidate Iran or Undermine the Iran Nuke Deal

[serviscope_minor]

They don't have nukes like Mossad don't assassinate people. I mean sure you can never prove it was Mossad, and in fact that agrees with the neatly written note (in Hebrew) left at the scene of the assassination saying "lol good luck proving this was Mossad".

You know

[koan]

The really troubling thing about this is that our (the US) intelligence services didn't know it was going to happen.

We Arm Isreal, Anyway.

[BrendaEM]

We treat Isreal like one of our states.
Don't worry, the American Taxpayer can afford anything : P

Re:Intimidate Iran or Undermine the Iran Nuke Deal

[sumdumass]

I don't think Israel has ever denied having nukes. They avoid the question or pull one of those "I can neither confirm nor deny" answers.

As for Mossad assassinating people, I don't really care if they do or do not. The people I know of who it is claimed that they assassinated are people I'm more comfortable living in a world that doesn't have them in it. If they do assassinate people, I can think of several more they should get on top of. But as I said, I don't really care about it.

Re:On another hand...

[pthisis]

It's a big planet and a small nuke. Although it would be a smoking gun, so to speak, either the sensors didn't find the fallout or the information is still classified.

As the article points out, pretty much every other bit of evidence points to a nuclear explosion.

No, it doesn't. In fact, almost no other piece of actual evidence points to a nuclear explosion with the exception of a disputed Australian sheep iodine measure that was unable to be replicated (including by New Zealand, who are nuclear-hostile and wouldn't assist in a cover-up).

In particular, there was no unusual seismic activity detected. There was no unusual hydro-acoustic activity. There was no fallout or radioactive debris detected. The New Zealand National Radiation Lab was unable to detect any radioactive anomalies despite being well within the fallout radius for a test in the area. Even the ratio of intensities of the two flashes differed from that in other recorded nuclear tests.

So, WHY does it matter?

[mi]

The titles of both the submission and TFA promised to explain, why it matters, but contain nothing but evidence of the test taking place.

Ok, suppose Israel did, in fact, test a nuke in 1979 and remained nuclear-armed ever since — for over 35 years. Why does it matter today?

I could offer some suggestions of my own — quickly to be denounced as "troll" and "flamebait" by the dimmer part of the audience — but neither the write-up nor the article deliver any of theirs.

A sloppy piece of propaganda to help Obama close his disastrous deal with an evil regime.

Re:So, WHY does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's review the evidence for this. The Vela satellite that detected the double flash had old equipment that might have been unreliable. It could have been a so-called "zoo event" rather than an actual nuclear test. The double flash occurred during a time when the region would have been unobserved by US satellites; that particular Vela satellite had been listed officially as retired, so there was no way for another country to know it was still transmitting data. Wind patterns indicate that radioactive fallout would have traveled toward southwest Australia, where elevated levels of Iodine-131 were detected. They were not detected farther away in New Zealand. The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico detected an unexpected wave in the ionosphere moving southeast to northwest following the test. Although the publicly available information is ambiguous, it's very reasonable to believe it may have been a nuclear test.

South Africa did, indeed, have nuclear weapons. They were dismantled in the early 1990s. However, inspections and information disclosed by their government indicates there was no way they could have possessed a nuclear weapon until November 1979, two months after the Vela Incident. These facts are corroborated by an IAEA report on the matter. While it's very possible that the could have collaborated with Israel on the test, it's highly unlikely that it was their weapon. Information from other sources suggests that Israel had developed nuclear weapons as early as perhaps 1960 and is estimated to have a stockpile of roughly 80 such weapons in the present day. Israel is probably the most likely suspect if the Vela Incident was a nuclear test, though it's not the only nation that could have done so. The actual test probably isn't that important because of the ambiguity as to whether it was a test and who would have been responsible. At best, it would support other information that already indicates Israel has nuclear weapons.

The real issue is whether Israel has nuclear weapons, not whether they tested them in 1979. The answer to that is likely yes. This is of great importance for many reasons:

1) It has a huge impact on the politics of a region when a country has nuclear weapons and others that aren't on good terms with them do not. While not comparing Israel to North Korea, there is a similar situation in that region. North Korea, Russia, China, and the United States have nuclear weapons. South Korea and Japan do not. It's natural that South Korea and Japan are threatened by this.

2) Let's say Iran gets nuclear weapons, or even all of Israel's enemies could get them. It wouldn't resolve any tension in the region. India and Pakistan aren't on good terms and both nave nuclear weapons. The US and Soviet Union during the Cold War is also a similar situation. Mutually assured destruction results in distrust and paranoia even if averting direct conflict. It might prevent direct conflict, but it does not eliminate tension or bring actual peace. Furthermore, it only works if all parties involved are rational enough to value their own survival above all else. I don't trust North Korea in this regard and I sure wouldn't trust Iran. There's also nothing that guarantees an Iranian nuclear weapon wouldn't fall into the hands of terrorists, who certainly don't value their own survival. More nuclear weapons in the Middle East is absolutely contrary to peace, even if much of the region doesn't believe that. I do view Israel as sensible enough to not be irresponsible with nuclear weapons because, whether their methods are right or wrong, they do act in a way to ensure their own survival.

3) There are plenty of forces who would like to see Israel cease to exist. Should they ever get their way, the fate of those nuclear weapons would be of great importance to everyone.

4) It's also important because it's possible that Israel would share nuclear technology with other countries in exchange for cooperation and security. It's very possible that this may have been a part of the relationship between Isr

Re:Iran would be even worse than Israel

[mi]

the ability to own land

It is impossible to own land in Israel. People lease plots from the government. The only ones with ownership are the folks holding deeds from the times before Israel was created.

Only Jewish holy sites are protected by the government, not Christian or Muslim sites

Another bold-faced lie. Were it not for Israeli police, various Christian sects would've torn each other apart limb-by-limb, for example.

Given the amount of obvious lies in your post, I am not even going to dig through the rest of your statements. Nor should anybody else.

Re: Arab-ISraelis - conscription

[Alomex]

There are very few Arab-Israelis, so it costs ISraeli next to nothing to let them vote.

Very few as in 20% of the population, you mean?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The real test is when Israel demands conscription from them. Only when Arab Israelis are trusted to guard their fellow Jews can Israel claim to be a democracy.

This I agree with, and there is already talk of changing this, but not clear if reforms will actually be implemented.

Why US is ok with "don't confirm, don't deny"

[Anonymous Coward]

We have several laws in the US that prohibit providing foreign aid, etc. to countries with nuclear weapons that have not signed the treaties. Our aid expenses for North Korea are zero. Ditto for Iran.. Pakistan and India have signed, so we can provide aid and engage in commerce.

If we were to officially acknowledge Israel as a nuclear power, we'd have to turn off the substantial foreign aid flow (especially in terms of "industry offsets") and there would also be significant issues with cash transfers from US to Israel. All those wealthy folks in the US sending money to Israel (e.g. Sheldon Adelson) would have problems.
Interestingly, Israel's first nuclear reactor was largely funded with private contributions from just such folks.

Re:Why US is ok with "don't confirm, don't deny"

[dave420]

Iran signed the NPT in '68 and ratified it in '70, fyi.

Re:Why US is ok with "don't confirm, don't deny"

[ixuzus]

Also, I'm almost certain India is not a signatory. The issue of whether we (Australia) should be selling them uranium as a non-signatory came up a few years ago.

Re:On another hand...

[AchilleTalon]

You should not know much about radioactive material and nuclear tests to say such a thing. A spike in radioactive background is easy to measure almost anywhere. Think about Fukushima which wasn't even a nuclear explosion or Chernobyl.

Re: Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map

[ravenshrike]

If by occupied you mean bought from the people who owned it then sure.

Re:Intimidate Iran or Undermine the Iran Nuke Deal

[serviscope_minor]

Israel have stated they won't be the first to introduce weapons to the middle east.

As for Mossad assassinating people

Way to miss the point.

Hardly the only example

[StevenMaurer]

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building."

- Anne Coulter

Please consider that just for a minute. Imagine if some commentator said "My only regret with Osama bin Laden is he didn't order the planes to fly into the Wall Street Journal." Would they then be welcome on news programs, asked their opinion, sell hundreds of thousands of books, and basically be a spokesperson for ideologically "pure" members of the Democratic party, instead of being rightfully shunned?

You need to open your eyes a little. One of the reason why blacks don't clutch their pearls quite so much over the relatively microscopic handful of terrorist deaths in the U.S., is because they've suffered terrorism for a century: the KKK burning crosses on their front yards, lynchings, and racist police on a hair-trigger, murdering completely innocent people and planting evidence (and getting off scott free, even when the evidence comes to light). But see, terrorism don't matter when it's just black lives being lost - at least not for the millions that Coulter, Rush, and many other mainstream Republicans. They don't even want to call it terrorism. White terrorists are all just "criminally insane", not like real terrorists - you know "them", "those people".

Re:Hardly the only example

[jodido]

You might also keep in mind that the KKK and the Democratic Party were pretty much the same thing, along with the sheriff and the rest of the cops.

Re:Hardly the only example

[beastofburdon]

True, it is rather interesting how the two parties completely switched sides over the years isn't it? Was this done to test just how oblivious voters are and how easily they can be swayed?

Re: USA also broke the NPT.

[HornWumpus]

There goes that business model. Damn.

Muslims VS Christians

[phorm]

And that sort of shit is really what burns my ass (and I`m not Muslim). Yes, some Muslims did stupid, terrible shit. In more recent ``Christian`` history, we have Kim Davis getting a standing ovation to fucking eye of the tiger after being jailed for multiple instances of contempt because she refused to marry gays like her fucking job says to (apparently it`s against her religion, while her 4 marriages and infidelity weren`t somehow)

And we conveniently forget that in Iran, the major reaction to 9-11 was not celebration but actually this, because they recognize that - regardless or religion - all lives are valuable and a terrible thing had happened. Despite that, some people still want to put Iran in the same camp as ISIS (guess who was fighting ISIS before the rest of us got involved), and major outlets like the New York Times had articles that advocate an unprovoked bombing of Iran as a better alternative than a peaceful settlement.

I`ve met some pretty terrible Muslims in my life. For the most part they were holier-than-thou assholes that thought that praying twice a day made them ``good people`` in spite of their conduct. I see the exact same shit from certain members of Christian churches, as well as Jews, etc. There will always be bad people out there, and there are plenty who would use their so-called religion or beliefs to pretend they are good whilst actually doing evil.

Re:Muslims VS Christians

[dave420]

Something is horribly wrong with this discussion when a factual post is labelled Troll simply because it points out some truths which go against the usual cluster-hate-fuck against Islam.

Re:Muslims VS Christians

[phorm]

Yeah. I have a buddy who's Iranian (albeit non-muslim). He's said that the government there can do some pretty horrible things to you if you're a non-muslim and get away with it. However he also stated that most of the citizens are good people, and tow the line religion-wise so as not to end up on the wrong side of the hardliners. I see a similar situation in most countries. Unless we put our heads in the sand and pretend that abuse by "religious" groups, police brutality/abuse, racial abuse etc don't happen in North America, then can we really pretend that we're much better. Yes, maybe the hardliners are worse (most Christians, no matter how awful, generally aren't chopping off people's heads in the name of God anymore) but when it comes down to it the "system" gets away with what it does because most people are trying to avoid their own entanglements with it...

Re:Excuse me...

[PPH]

Iran is "just months away..."

They're working on strong AI as well.

Re:Excuse me...

[germansausage]

We should get them working on Fusion, not Fission. That's still 25 years away.

''Israel hasn't vowed to "wipe Iran off the map"

[Burz]

That's a sensationalist mis-translation that the western TV decided to run with.

As for Israel not killing Muslims abroad, that's ludicrous. And at home there's evidence that the Israeli government has a tendency to "link" every attack of a Jew by a Muslim with organized terrorism. In the incident that lead up to their 2015 bombing campaign, Israel's claims about Hamas involvement were exposed as bunk. The fallacious nature of the claim didn't stop them from surging into the strip (an open-air prison packed with state-less people) which led to an escalation in hostilities.

Re: Arab-ISraelis - conscription

[Sun]

The real test is when Israel demands conscription from them. Only when Arab Israelis are trusted to guard their fellow Jews can Israel claim to be a democracy.

This I agree with, and there is already talk of changing this, but not clear if reforms will actually be implemented.

Any MKs who dares to suggest mandatory service of any kind (even merely community service in lieu of actual military service that Jewish citizens are required to do) is immediately labeled as a racist.

You make it sound like Israel is racist for not letting Israeli Arabs serve in the army. The truth of the matter is that this is a point of honor for Arab political leaders to head off any attempt of any mandatory service, of any kind whatsoever.

Shachar

Re:Intimidate Iran or Undermine the Iran Nuke Deal

[Sun]

Israel have stated they won't be the first to introduce weapons to the middle east.

I'm assuming you meant nuclear weapons, rather than any weapons. The ship has definitely sailed on that.

Still not true, though. Israel has stated that they won't be the first to use non-conventional weapons.

Shachar

Re:Intimidate Iran or Undermine the Iran Nuke Deal

[serviscope_minor]

It's about how they make it blindingly obvious who did the assassination yet strangely impossible to prove. You know it's mossad. They know it's mossad. Everyone knows it's mossad, but no one can prove it. Same with nuclear weapons.

Re:Intimidate Iran or Undermine the Iran Nuke Deal

[serviscope_minor]

Search for "introduce":

http://history.state.gov/histo...

Israel claims it won't be the first to introduce nukes into the area.

This is important...

[MagickalMyst]

Important because Israel has been secretly stockpiling nuclear weapons for decades; continually lies about it; refuses to sign the NPT and then has the audacity to complain about Iran attempting to build a nuclear reactor.

Iran, by contrast, is not a warmongering country like Israel. They have never started a war in modern history, and even have a "no first strike" policy.

Further, Israel commits genocide against the Palestinian people in the world's largest open-air prison and then attempts to demand sympathy from the rest of the world.

Israel also attacked the United States in 1967 (USS Liberty) and tried to blame it on Egypt in an attempt to have America fight it's war for them. They later "apologized" for the incident, saying they believed it was an Egyptian ship (although it was clearly marked USS Liberty with an American flag flying overhead). 34 American servicemen were murdered by the Zionists.

Israel was also caught spying in the USA - before, during and after the 9/11 attacks. Over 200 Israeli spies were arrested and deported; several of them Mossad agents - and many were active military service personnel with backgrounds in intelligence and/or explosives expertise.

Israel claims to be an ally, yet the deception never ends.

And yes, I will be likely be called an "anti-semite" and a "holocaust denier" for stating the obvious out loud - but I really don't care.

Someone has to.

Re:The US has to PRETEND Israel doesn't have nukes

[Chrisq]

.. because if it was honest, we saw pictures of them from Dimona from Whistleblower Vanunu Mordechai quite a long time ago, the US would have to stop Providing the military assistance (ie, US taxpayers pay US war profiteers for weapons going to Israel) and the power elite enriching themselves is what everything is about.

Being honest Profitable.

Logically wouldn't it make sense to provide enough support so that Israel would have strong enough conventional defense not to have to use the nuclear option?

Re:Intimidate Iran or Undermine the Iran Nuke Deal

[dave420]

The thing is they kill innocent people by misidentifying their targets, and when they kill they frequently kill innocent bystanders as well. They, to me at least, are the sort of people I'd be more comfortable living in a world without.

Re:Terrorists

[MagickalMyst]

"all terrorists are muslim"

And you are an ignorant plebe.

BEGIN WITH

[NewYork]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Perfect example of illogical Jewish self-loathing

[Anonymous Coward]

It reminds a lot of Jews, including me, of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Thanks for the perfect example of illogical Jewish self-loathing.

The Gaza blockade was imposed in response to repeated lethal attacks out of Gaza into Israel.

In a contrast that could not be any starker, the Warsaw Ghetto was not a response to any form of misbehavior on the part of Jews. To suggest that the Nazis might have had legitimate motives for Warsaw, by comparing it to the Gaza blockade, is highly offensive. The part of your brain that draws such comparisons is beyond faulty.

Why must we be constantly subjected to ethically bankrupt comparisons like this?