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Israeli Vulture Suspected of Spying Returned
New submitter red crab writes: BBC reports that a griffon vulture with GPS tracking device attached to its leg that was part of conservation program at Tel Aviv University was captured in Lebanon after it was suspected to be a Israeli spy. UN Liaison forces helped secure the release of the bird after holding talks with Lebanese and Israeli officials.
In the Arab and Muslim worlds, if anything is in any way associated with Israel, it's perfectly obvious that it's nefarious - I'm surprised they didn't think it was the "vulture of doom, spreading biological weapons" or some such.
The Arab POV on Israel is so one sided as to be cartoonish.
In the end they flipped them the bird.
Those vultures!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Poettering is a vulture.
this was a spy swap for the Lebanese osprey.
Surely it would be equipped with explosives, not GPS.
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As Israel might be trying to make new drones that US cannot spy on!!!
The media is trying to spin this as no big deal, but the secret terms of the exchange required Isreal to release 2 convicted Hezbollah attack pigeons, a weapons-smuggling-tunnel canary, and an ill-tempered parrot that keeps saying either "Yasser Arafat" or "Yes sir, you're fat."
Nothing posted to
This can mean only one thing: Israeli spy frogs are on the way!
The Arab press is filled with fairy tale stories about israel and about Jews. I remember a few years ago one story was circulating that israel was dropping poisoned candy to children on gaza. Then there was the story that aids was created by Jewish doctors to afflict the Palestinians. Then there was the one the israel was organ trafficking palestinians. Etc. Etc. Etc. The vulture story is frankly rather mild, if amusing. Much of the paranoid conspiracy theory about israel's and Jews on the Arab world could be rooted right off the pages of Nazi propaganda rags. Why this kind of trash is actually believed in the Arab world is another story entirely, but illustrates wht it's so hard for the two parties to come to compromises - if one side believes the other is capable of such inhuman Acts, it's no surprise they won't compromise.
There's an entire Wikipedia article about this phenomenon.
Will be shooting suspicious birds out of the sky suspecting they have other religious nut jobs spy tech on them.
This foolishness is motivated by religious conflicts where it's Jews vs. Christians vs. Muslims. All believe they're correct and have a god-given right to live in a particular spot. Furthermore, they believe god authorizes using all means necessary to evict others from those locations or force them to convert. As long as religion is permitted, these issues will continue. Of course the bird wasn't a threat to Lebanon or anyone else, nor was its GPS tracker. But this is the type of stupidity that occurs when religion is involved. It happens elsewhere in the world, too, and with other religions. Buddhists and Hindus can be quite violent, too. At the root of all of these conflicts is religion. And let's not pretend like it's recent. The Old Testament describes god telling the Israelites to commit genocide. There's plenty of violence encouraged by allah in the Qur'an and Hadith. The Crusades were an attempt at conversion by the sword. It is the nature of religion to promote division, in which you're right, everyone else is going to hell, and you have a god-given right to use whatever force is needed. There's always the question of religious moderates who don't engage in violent actions. They still believe that non-believers go to hell, tolerate the extremes, and therefore are enablers for violence. The only solution to nonsense like this is for the countries of the world to come together and outlaw religion altogether. Then, and only then, can we have peace in the world.
Everyone knows Vultures are notoriously easy to train, especially in the art of reconnaissance and espionage.
Ever since they faked the moon landings peoples eyes have been opened. You cannot fool them anymore.
The evil israeli army thought no one would suspect a bird but clearly we are ahead in tactical warfare. We planted an anti-GPS GPS on the returned bird and with it have now removed Israel from some GPS mapping results that rely on this bird.
Take that you evil Zionists!
It's Tel Aviv university. Not exactly a high-tech hub. If the vulture was from Technion, that would be a different story.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I can't believe i actually saying this but wouldn't a better headline read... /me ducks
"Lebanon gives Israel the bird"
You fucking anti-semite Slashdot editors. I'll see to it that Mossad gets your number.
No Justice, No Peace.
These people are idiots.
Even if Israel did train vultures to carry GoPros to spy, what they find? Ahmed fucking his goats, mud huts, and Olive trees.
"I gave zem nussink!"
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yeah, this remind me of Saddam Hussein's weapon of mass destruction we are still searching. Complete paranoia, and totally one sided.
Oh, look, found them!
Glad I could help.
Seriously:
I too think there's quite a bit of really bizar non-sense that went down with the Iraq invasion.
However, you should keep two things in mind before flinging around the words "totally one-sided":
1.) Between desert storm and the invarion the UN issued 16 (that's sixteen, as in four more than a dozen) *ultimate* resolutions against Iraq and the Saddam Hussein regime. You know, ULTIMATE, as in FINAL, like "THE LAST ONE". ... Rumsfeld might be a neocon butthole, but I can't blame him for making fun of the UN and asking for concrete action back then.
2.) Iraq had proven beyond any doubt that it posessed WMDs (see link above). You can't argue against that. ... That the predictions were inflated and basically a lie, given. But WMDs Iraq had actively used before - no doubt about that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It was supposed to be the VULTURE SQUADRON and they were supposed to stop the PIGEON. This is really all because those Lebanese hate men.
as the people on the other side of that argument.
The people who believed there were Iraqi WMDs had good reasons to:
1. Iraq previously had such programs and had indeed used chemical weapons on its own population
2. Saddam Hussein claimed to have them
3. Saddam Hussein had a reputation for hiding weapons and violating agreements related to weapons
4. Multiple intelligence agencies from many western and middle eastern countries believed Iraq had them
5. So soon after 9-11, NO responsible political leader could ignore all the intel from all the internal agencies and agencies of allies reporting WMDs... if the intel had been ignored and then such weapons had existed and been used no political leader would have survived. Immediately post-9-11, Democrats in the US were claiming Bush had been warned (there'd been a note in a Presidential Daily Briefing that essentially said "Bin Laden wants to attack the US" with NO details or usable info). The Iraq WMD claims were very specific and coming from many sources.
People like you who keep screeching that there WERE NO WMDs etc are, however, either being dishonest or being honestly just as mislead as Bush and his pals were:
1. After the war, allied teams did indeed uncover tons of chemical weapons. These were old and not the specific stuff being sought, so Bush critics love to dismiss them, but those DID exist. There WERE WMDs in Iraq... just not the ones Bush and his associates were lead to believe were there.
2. After the was, there was a quite joint mission involving the US and Canada that rounded-up and trucked tons of yellowcake uranium (the stuff Valerie Plame's husband became famous in liberal circles for claiming did not exists) out of Iraq. There WAS indeed tons of yellowcake in Iraq that Saddam had no legitimate reason to have stockpiled, it just was not processed yet and it was not found at a processing facility.
3. Oh, and for fun let me throw-in this juicy tidbit from leftist-land: President Obama's administration prosecuted the Boston Bomber for use of a WMD (a pressure cooker) and there are MANY pressure cookers in Iraq (grin). I am disgusted by the way team Obama has broadened the term WMD from the old definition of Chemical, Biological or Nuclear weapons to "anything that kills a bunch of people", but if you guys on the left are fine with your guy Obama then you have to drop the anti-Bush and anti-Blair "no WMDs in Iraq" rant.
EVERYBODY was wrong about Iraq. This tends to happen with secretive dictatorships. Not only are "experts" on the outside often wrong, but even people within such governments are often wrong (some of Saddam's generals thought he had such weapons and would use them to win the war. To have any sort of honest discussion of Iraq, Bush & Blair haters need to drop the political vitriol and simply deal with the facts, as to the few hardcore Bush and Blair supporters as well.
You seem to be parroting something a lazy highschool teacher fed you or some general themes you absorbed while browsing the web. Let me point out just a few of your errors:
"All believe they're correct and have a god-given right to live in a particular spot."
No. The Jews believe that land was promised to them by God (hence the term "The Promised Land"), but the Christians hold no such religious teaching of any God-given right to any spot of land in the middle east (there ARE certainly Christians living on some land there who have the normal belief that they own their particular land in the normal legal sense but not in a mandate-from-God sense) and the Koran says nothing about that land belonging to the Muslims. Many Muslim's think they have a claim based on a dream in which Mohammed supposedly visited a "far city" astride a mythical horse. The "far city" could just as well be Tokyo, but it suits the geopolitical purposes of Muslim leaders to claim it is Jerusalem, the ancient capital of Israel. Nothing distracts the masses from dysfunctional governments in all Muslim-run nations better than pointing at the Jews...
"At the root of all of these conflicts is religion."
Nope. At the root of all these things is human nature. Most of the great massacres in world history have been by atheists/pagans. Stalin: Atheist. Chaiman Mao: Atheist. Pol Pot: Atheist. Hitler: Pagan (does not matter that his ancestors were Catholic, the NAZIs were pagan and were working to convert their society). It's certainly true that evil men have used religion to justify bad acts, just as they have used racism, jealousy, fear, greed, etc but at the core of all of it is basic human nature.
"The Old Testament describes god telling the Israelites to commit genocide."
Close, but then not so much. The Old Testament does indeed tell the Jews at certain specific times and places in history to wage war against and eliminate enemies selected by God for punishment, but it also indicates that same God allows enemies to devastate the Jews too when they got out of line and there is NO general command to the Jews to always attack certain people at all times in the future. Nothing in the Bible instructs current Jews to go to war against anybody. Christians have NO Biblical command to go forth and kill anybody. Islam, however, is unique in major religions in that it contains open-ended instructions to its followers to always go forth and kill certain people (Jews, Atheists, Polytheists, etc)
"The only solution to nonsense like this is for the countries of the world to come together and outlaw religion altogether. Then, and only then, can we have peace in the world."
Um, no. Look above at the point about the world's worst massacres. What provided the impetus for "good" in the worst moments in human history? Religion. Nearly all the people who helped Jews escape the Holocaust were motivated in whole or in part by religion. Nearly every act of care for refugees and disaster victims is based in religion. The entire modern idea of charity and even of hospitals comes from religion. The Western ideals of "free speech" and each individual having "God Given" rights and dignity are from Christianity (and most particularly protestant Christianity which introduced the idea that each person has an individual, rather than collective or non-existent) relationship God). Do not mistake the failures of many to live perfectly within the ideals of their faiths for faults in those faiths; by that reckoning, every non-religious ideology is equivalent to and responsible for Stalin. Without religion, the governing laws and beliefs would be tied to utilitarian philosophies, Darwinian evolution, or simple majority whim; nobody would have a claim to any value or rights that superceded what the mobs would temporarily choose to recognize. Absent religion, you would not get utopia, you's get a John-Lennon-style drug trip dystopian nightmare of people using each other backed up by force and NOTHING to temper it. Human beings, not trained to be "good", tend to be total monsters.
The Jewish religion is thousands of years older than Islam. There is simply NO WAY for Islam to have a "prior claim" to the ancient land of Israel. If you want to rationally discuss how the descendents of two groups who have for centuries opposed eachother can live side-by-side on the ruins of one of their ancestors' civilization, then that's a worthy discussion to have.... but if you are going to sloganeer with a completely dishonest "occupied Palestine" headline, particularly given that never in world history was there a nation called "Palestine" then you deserve to be hit with the more-honest reverse:
If we accept that ANYBODY is "Occupying" there, then it's descendents of Jordanian, Syrian, Lebanese, and Eqyptian squatters who moved into those lands after Rome smashed Israel who are the "occupiers" of ancient Israel.
No Justice, No Peace! End the Muslim occupation of Israel!
I'm not even Jewish... I just despise dishonesty and propaganda. Jasser Arafat was an Egyptian and even HE admitted in a TV interview in the US in the 1970s (on the program"60 Minutes") that the idea of a "Palestinian people" was a fiction to suit a geopolitical purpose.
This problem will NEVER be resolved because it's in NOBODY's interest to solve it. The Jews lack what it takes to get rid of the Palestinians, but cannot allow them to move-in because the polygamous Palestinian Muslims would breed the Jews out of existence. The Palestinians cannot get rid of the Jews because, as they have demonstrated in Gaza, they lack the desire and/or ability to put construction and education and development ahead of support for terrorism and blood lust. Cement imported into Gaza does not build homes and hospitals, it re-enforces terror tunnels under the Israeli border. The Western world will not force Israel to surrender to the Palestinians because, absent a few fools, most in the west see centuries of experience that more countries run by the most-violent fringe of Islam leads to more death. The Muslim world will never help the Palestinians win the fight because all the corrupt and evil leaders of those dictatorships blame all their problems on that tiny Jewish country and use its existence to deflect the anger of their own populations.
As a Lebanese American, all I have to say is rofl - doth thou shit me?
English isn't my first language. Was quite surprised initially.