Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but if you're going to resort to a poll to try and prove your point, don't go trying to defend the poll itself with maybes.
PEW 2007, "are attacks on civilians ever justified" NO, NEVER 46%
No Price Too High, By J. T. Copp, Richard Nielsen, p.209, Gallup poll, 1944 - "is bombing German civilians justified?" YES 60-70%
24% said it's sometimes justified. I fail to see how that's contradicted by half of those saying attacks on Israeli civvies by Palestinians were not justified. There's nothing contradictory there.
I didn't say there was a contradiction, I was just pointing out that the specifics of a question affect the answer.
You are right in that there seems to be a contradiction between the 80%/41% figures. 39% responded differently to the Palestine-Israel scenario. Either they failed to consider the Palestine-Israel scenario in answering the first question, or they don't consider the Israeli population to be "civilian". Another possibility is given by the text on page 10 - "Respondents were then asked to think in the context of war and other forms of military conflict...... judge violence in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict". This suggests that the first question may have been posed in a non-war-conflict scenario. There is no way to tell for sure since the paper doesn't go in to that much detail. Maybe you should email the primary author and point out the discrepancy and see what his response is.
True - we should look at the original polling data - I remembered the poll but not the exact figures and Google found the original link first. My bad, I should have linked to the original polls. In my defence, the relative conclusion - that the polls showed a larger percentage of Americans supporting deliberate attacks on civilians - was still correct.
24% of Americans think that "attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are sometimes justified. If you asked them whether bombing Japanese civilians in WWII was justified, you would probably get a much higher percentage saying that was ok. If you polled the British, whose civilians were the target of German bombing, most of them would say that the bombing of German civilians was justified. But if you ask them whether bombing civilians in general is ok, then most people would say no...
People aren't logical reasoning machines, they do take into account other circumstances. Does it mean that those British didn't understand the first question? You could look at it that way - they failed to consider a particular circumstance in which they did support bombing civilians. I would say that they understood the question, they just failed to logically analyse the possible scenarios to which it might apply, and how those scenarios would change their opinion.
You could also flip the question around - 24% of Americans thought targeting civilians was sometimes justified. However, only 13% thought attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians were sometimes justified. Did 11% of Americans fail to understand the question? Or did the circumstances of the posed question change the opinion?
The polled question you mention was regarding attacks on Israeli citizens by Palestinians. This is obviously a special case - many people in the Middle East see Israel as the aggressor - Israel controls the Palestinian Territories through military force, and although they may not mean to, Israeli attacks do kill Palestinian civilians, and hence targeting civilians in retaliation is seen as justified. Another reason given by some supporters of the attacks is that every Israeli citizen over the age of 18 years does mandatory national military service of three years, and are considered reservists in the military for the next 20 years. Thus, some argue that all Israeli citizens should be considered viable targets since they aren't purely civilians.
If the government argues that meta-data isn't important and doesn't need to be protected, then the citizens should demand that the government also abide by this and release all communications meta-data relating to government employees. It might open the eyes of a few to see who their elected representatives actually spend their work days talking to. It would also massively boost the case for greater government transparency.
Unfortunately, English universities now charge tuition fees for overseas students, around £7,000 - £10,000 per year for non-EU undergraduates. If you're lucky you might be eligible for some form of studentship.
In Scotland there is no tuition fee for E.U. students (apart from the English and Welsh!), but there are fees for non-EU students. As a visiting student for only one or two terms, the fee regime may also be different; typically visiting EU students in Scotland will be liable to pay around 20% of the usual fees, and quite often this heavily discounted rate will be paid by the visiting student's government anyway.
The good news for visiting students is that the British Pound is falling fast - now almost at the point of parity with the Euro.
I dont really see why you think that sending off all the men and mating with the women isnt a form of genocide, but if you are going to be a pedant, at least do some research first.
Because I associate genocide with killing - the postfix "-cide" means "to kill" in Latin. I understand that there are many different definitions of genocide. What you are saying is that you think slavery is genocide. Possibly even that destruction of a culture, by any means, would be genocide? Yes, some people think that China is currently commiting genocide against the Tibetan people. And by the reasoning that slavery is a form of genocide, then white Americans commited genocide against the ancestors of modern day African-Americans. It's a valid claim - I might not agree entirely, since the Tibetans and African-Americans are still alive, but I can understand the reasoning.
As for mussolini, he didnt understand what hitler was trying to do. He went as far as to point out that he has never read mein kampf, stating that it was too boring to read. Rather than explicitly disagree with hitler, mussolini just said that mein kampf was full of little more than commanplace cliches. Indifference is not opposition.
Mussolini said that Jews had lived in Italy "since the days of the Kings of Rome" and should "remain undisturbed". He also said "Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today... National pride has no need of the delirium of race."
"Opposition" might be too strong a word, since he did actually bring in the Manifesto of Race, but it is clear that Mussolini did not personally agree with Hitler's ideas of race.
Hamas is the democratically elected government in Gaza. Hamas considers themselves at war with Israel, and Hamas is engaging in military rocket attacks on Israel.
Actually, from 18th June until 19th December 2008 there was a Gaza ceasefire which Hamas agreed to. The rocket attacks in that period were launched by other groups. Wikipedia says that the following groups also manufacture missiles and shoot them towards Israel: Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Resistance Committees, and Tanzim. During ceasefires Hamas asks the other groups to halt missile attacks. In that article, Abu Obieda, the top Hamas commander in the Gaza strip, said "To shoot rockets into Israel is not a goal of Hamas; it is not a real target. But when Israel attacks us, it is our only way to respond. We do not hope to kill people in Israel with these rockets but it's a necessary response." Apparently Islamic Jihad fire the most rockets in to Israel, and Hamas does not control them - there have been armed clashes between Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
It's a tricky situation - Israel wants to undermine Hamas by destroying their power base and support through economic sanctions, and then encourage other groups to remove them from government, but at the same time Israel complains when Hamas doesn't have the power to prevent those other groups from firing missiles across the border.
No they didn't. Read New Order. The Germans wanted to enslave and exterminate non-Aryans (primarily the Jews and Slavs). They wanted a treaty with Great Britain that gave Germany control over Europe, and Britain control over the seas and British Empire. They aimed to conquer the other Aryan nations, but there was no plan to exterminate fellow Aryans. Asia was to be divided between the Japanese Empire and Germany - there was no plan to exterminate the Japanese. Incidentally, Mussolini opposed Hitler's view of racial domination - he had a Jewish lover, and one in three adult Italian Jews were members of his National Fascist Party.
There was no German policy of genocide towards the French people. There was a policy of collective punishment towards the French people. If the policy was genocide, then the policy would be to massacre all villages, simply because they exist. The policy was collective punishment - villages were massacred because of resistance assassinations.
I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word genocide - "Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group" - It was not German policy to kill all French people.
First of all, that isn't true. Germans never made such an argument.
"As commander of a Nazi einsatzgruppen death squad in occupied Poland, Dr. Werner Best came to believe that the most effective response to terrorism was collective punishment. After the fall of France he went on to draft the Third Reich's counterterrorism policy for countries occupied by Germany. Towns where acts of "passive" resistance such as the cutting of telegraph cables had taken place were placed under curfews, fined and slapped with travel restrictions. "Active" resistance--the killing of a German soldier--would be met by reprisal killings of local civilians.
Dr. Best was trying to protect German troops. Rather than be cowed, however, leaders of European resistance groups saw Best's ruthless policy as their chance to radicalize moderates who were still on the fence about their German occupatiers. The insurgents stepped up assassinations of German troops. The killings prompted the Germans to shoot more local businessmen and political leaders. The cycle of violence was spiraling out of control.
Eventually Hitler himself got into the act. Convinced that collective punishment was failing because it wasn't severe enough, the fuhrer issued a September 1941 order to use "the harshest measures" against civilians in areas where the Resistance was active. Arguing that "only the [collective] death penalty can be a real means of deterrence," Hitler ordered that 50 civilians be executed for each German soldier killed.
Some in the German high command argued that punishing innocent civilians in large numbers would alienate the local population and lose the battle for hearts and minds. Although they were eventually proven correct, they were overruled. New reprisals, each worse than the last, strengthened the resolve of the resistance and gained them new recruits. By the end of the war, reprisals had assumed grotesquely lopsided ratios of murdered locals to dead Germans. Entire villages--Lidice in the Czech Republic (340 killed), Oradour-sur-Glane in France (642), Kortelisy in Ukraine (2,892)--were wiped out." - source:
The polled question was: "Some people think that bombing and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justified while others think that this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that such attacks are often justified, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified"
The response is that 11% of Iranians felt that such attacks were often/sometimes justified, whilst 24% of Americans thought the same. The same poll in Pakistan showed that 15% thought the same.
Not at all - my point was to compare the psychological effects of two similar events on the civilian population of a city in order to explain why certain poll results may have occurred. The fact that any civilians died is tragic in both cases.
On the other hand (and this was not my point, but you did bring up the issue of using percentage rates) why would comparing percentage death rates necessarily be invalid? This is exactly what serious researchers do when looking at mortality rates: for 2005 figures, Israel suffered 0.8 deaths per 100,000 population due to terrorism, whilst in the Palestinian Territories the Israeli military killed 11.2 people per 100,000 population. In Gaza the kill rate was 23.5 per 100,000 residents. source
Obviously there is a lot more to study beyond the raw figures, but that doesn't invalidate the data. Your suggestion of using absolute numbers for mortality has obvious problems in that it doesn't measure the impact of mortality on the population as a whole.
The source for the studies were the University of Maryland and PEW Research, as stated above.
The link to theamericanmuslim.org is just an article that discusses both studies. It is not a source for the original data. Feel free to ignore it and read the original research papers.
I don't particularly care if someone thinks they're justified in wanting to kill me
You should - the ability to understand the motivation behind human behaviour is important if you want to change that behaviour.
Once upon a time, many white people thought that they were justified in enslaving or killing black people. Once upon a time, the German people thought they were justified in wanting to kill Jews. It was only through understanding why that particular train of thought existed, and in undermining the ridiculous "justifications", that we reached the modern Western outlook where different people can live in peace.
You do realise that the Germans used the same argument - that collective punishment of the locals meant that they were less likely to help or join the resistance, and hence collective punishment helped to protect German lives?
And you do realise that sanctions on food, fuel, medical supplies and electricity lead to indiscriminate deaths? Hospitals need electricity and medicine, without it innocent people will die. And people need food too, without it, innocent people will die: "So too have the Israelis reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza. According to a UN report, it is presently at 61 percent of the average daily requirements." source, "Palestinians in Gaza were being "starved to death" and received fewer calories a day than people in the poorest parts of Africa." source
Where in the world is Osama bin Laden features an interview with one of the Hamas leaders - he is very clear in saying that they don't resist the Jews - they resist the state of Israel. When asked for clarification, he says that this is not a religious war between the Jews and the Muslims, this is a nationalist war between the people of Israel and the people of Palestine.
So, whilst clearly there are some people within Hamas who agree with that particular quote from the Charter, there are also people, even within the upper management, who strongly disagree with it.
"A World Public Opinion (WPO) survey done in collaboration with the University of Maryland published in January 2007 reported that 51% of Americans believed bombings and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justified. According to a May 22 2007 PEW survey, only 13% of American Muslims hold a similar sentiment when asked about suicide bombings against civilian targets." source
The poll you cite was carried out after attacks by Israel that killed 130 people in Gaza. That's 0.00025% of the Gaza population. In contrast, the 9/11 attacks killed 0.0001% of New York citizens.
So, imagine that the 9/11 attacks had killed 2.5 times more people, and then imagine polling New Yorkers immediately after the attacks on their feelings towards the group of people who carried out the attacks. Do you think you would get a different result?
It seems to be a good rule of thumb that the more loudly someone proclaims their disdain for FOX, the more likely they are to be a complete imbecile.
Because Fox is known for its accurate and unbiased reporting? This is the same Fox that ran serious reports with "experts" claiming that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim.
I agree that there is no easy solution. A long term solution would involve either creation of a new state, merging with Egypt, or the population of Gaza becoming Israeli citizens. There are obviously problems with each of those solutions. In addition, some equivalent to the Marshall Plan might be desirable, or a regional free-trade area that allows movement of goods and people (like E.U./U.S.), to give the people a chance to become prosperous in order to increase the standard of living and ultimately strengthen government institutions. Both of those also have significant political problems. Any solution is also going to have to deal with the fact that known terrorists, or terrorist sympathisers, are likely to be placed into government positions of power - experience from Northern Ireland shows that this is quite galling for a large segment of the population, but they are willing to accept it in return for a more peaceful existence.
Do you think that Americans would vote differently in the same situation? If an American city were controlled by a foreign military force, and during incursions foreign soldiers had killed hundreds of civilians over the years? That entire extended families had been wiped out by shell fire that was just "a mistake"? Do you really think the American public would vote for a moderate leadership under those conditions?
You might have a point if the United States military controlled Mexican airspace, seaspace, all borders, and prohibited the import of metals and oil into Mexico. And in that hypothetical situation, some small number of Mexicans chose to fire rockets into Texas. Does that make collective punishment right? And to switch the players around - if Texas were under the military control of Mexico, and its ports blockaded, and some Americans fired rockets across the border, would it be still right for the Mexicans to punish all Texans?
if the arabs don't stop this terrorism, it means that they have support of the population. they are all responsible.
So, every single individual in a nation is responsible for the actions of all other individuals? The Germans said the same thing in WWII occupied France - if a resistance cell killed German soldiers, the soldiers would round up all of the people from the nearest village and execute some (or all) of them.
Why was collective punishment wrong when carried out by Germans 60-odd years ago, but right when carried out by Israelis now?
I'm surprised that on Slashdot of all places, with its Libertarian-leaning politics, I'm having to actually argue that treating half-a-million people as one homogenous group is a bad idea.
Congratulations on totally missing the point. I will try to spell it out in more simple terms: In any city, but particularly one that is somewhat lawless with competing political and militia factions, it is not possible to control the actions of a minority. Manufacturing and launching these simple rockets could be carried out by less than 10 people. Punishing a city of 500,000 people for the actions of 10 is absurd.
I am struggling to make the point clearer. Maybe a car analogy would help.
The point is that using cooking gas requires a constant supply of cooking gas; smuggling in gas once is not enough, you have to constantly smuggle a large supply. Building this device requires smuggling in aluminium once. After that, they can burn whatever common non-blockaded chemicals it uses forever.
Imagine a high-density city with half a million people in the United States (say El Paso, Texas) being surrounded and blockaded by Chinese troops. And there are no effective restrictions on firearms ownership within the city. Could you guarantee that no Americans would get together and build weapons to fire at the Chinese guys? Even if the majority of citizens wanted to comply with the Chinese guys (and that's a big if), there would still be a small minority who would want to fight. Would it be right for the Chinese to punish every citizen of El Paso in retaliation for the small minority involved in violent resistance?
Slashdot Mirror
PEW 2007, "are attacks on civilians ever justified" NO, NEVER 46%
Gallup 2005, "do you approve of nuking Hiroshima?" YES 57% (fallen from 85% in 1945)
No Price Too High, By J. T. Copp, Richard Nielsen, p.209, Gallup poll, 1944 - "is bombing German civilians justified?" YES 60-70%
I didn't say there was a contradiction, I was just pointing out that the specifics of a question affect the answer.
You are right in that there seems to be a contradiction between the 80%/41% figures. 39% responded differently to the Palestine-Israel scenario. Either they failed to consider the Palestine-Israel scenario in answering the first question, or they don't consider the Israeli population to be "civilian". Another possibility is given by the text on page 10 - "Respondents were then asked to think in the context of war and other forms of military conflict... ... judge violence in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict". This suggests that the first question may have been posed in a non-war-conflict scenario. There is no way to tell for sure since the paper doesn't go in to that much detail. Maybe you should email the primary author and point out the discrepancy and see what his response is.
True - we should look at the original polling data - I remembered the poll but not the exact figures and Google found the original link first. My bad, I should have linked to the original polls. In my defence, the relative conclusion - that the polls showed a larger percentage of Americans supporting deliberate attacks on civilians - was still correct.
24% of Americans think that "attacks intentionally aimed at civilians" are sometimes justified. If you asked them whether bombing Japanese civilians in WWII was justified, you would probably get a much higher percentage saying that was ok. If you polled the British, whose civilians were the target of German bombing, most of them would say that the bombing of German civilians was justified. But if you ask them whether bombing civilians in general is ok, then most people would say no...
People aren't logical reasoning machines, they do take into account other circumstances. Does it mean that those British didn't understand the first question? You could look at it that way - they failed to consider a particular circumstance in which they did support bombing civilians. I would say that they understood the question, they just failed to logically analyse the possible scenarios to which it might apply, and how those scenarios would change their opinion.
You could also flip the question around - 24% of Americans thought targeting civilians was sometimes justified. However, only 13% thought attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians were sometimes justified. Did 11% of Americans fail to understand the question? Or did the circumstances of the posed question change the opinion?
The polled question you mention was regarding attacks on Israeli citizens by Palestinians. This is obviously a special case - many people in the Middle East see Israel as the aggressor - Israel controls the Palestinian Territories through military force, and although they may not mean to, Israeli attacks do kill Palestinian civilians, and hence targeting civilians in retaliation is seen as justified. Another reason given by some supporters of the attacks is that every Israeli citizen over the age of 18 years does mandatory national military service of three years, and are considered reservists in the military for the next 20 years. Thus, some argue that all Israeli citizens should be considered viable targets since they aren't purely civilians.
It is an unfortunate situation.
If the government argues that meta-data isn't important and doesn't need to be protected, then the citizens should demand that the government also abide by this and release all communications meta-data relating to government employees. It might open the eyes of a few to see who their elected representatives actually spend their work days talking to. It would also massively boost the case for greater government transparency.
Unfortunately, English universities now charge tuition fees for overseas students, around £7,000 - £10,000 per year for non-EU undergraduates. If you're lucky you might be eligible for some form of studentship.
In Scotland there is no tuition fee for E.U. students (apart from the English and Welsh!), but there are fees for non-EU students. As a visiting student for only one or two terms, the fee regime may also be different; typically visiting EU students in Scotland will be liable to pay around 20% of the usual fees, and quite often this heavily discounted rate will be paid by the visiting student's government anyway.
The good news for visiting students is that the British Pound is falling fast - now almost at the point of parity with the Euro.
Because I associate genocide with killing - the postfix "-cide" means "to kill" in Latin. I understand that there are many different definitions of genocide. What you are saying is that you think slavery is genocide. Possibly even that destruction of a culture, by any means, would be genocide? Yes, some people think that China is currently commiting genocide against the Tibetan people. And by the reasoning that slavery is a form of genocide, then white Americans commited genocide against the ancestors of modern day African-Americans. It's a valid claim - I might not agree entirely, since the Tibetans and African-Americans are still alive, but I can understand the reasoning.
Mussolini said that Jews had lived in Italy "since the days of the Kings of Rome" and should "remain undisturbed". He also said "Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today... National pride has no need of the delirium of race."
"Opposition" might be too strong a word, since he did actually bring in the Manifesto of Race, but it is clear that Mussolini did not personally agree with Hitler's ideas of race.
Actually, from 18th June until 19th December 2008 there was a Gaza ceasefire which Hamas agreed to. The rocket attacks in that period were launched by other groups. Wikipedia says that the following groups also manufacture missiles and shoot them towards Israel: Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Resistance Committees, and Tanzim. During ceasefires Hamas asks the other groups to halt missile attacks. In that article, Abu Obieda, the top Hamas commander in the Gaza strip, said "To shoot rockets into Israel is not a goal of Hamas; it is not a real target. But when Israel attacks us, it is our only way to respond. We do not hope to kill people in Israel with these rockets but it's a necessary response." Apparently Islamic Jihad fire the most rockets in to Israel, and Hamas does not control them - there have been armed clashes between Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
It's a tricky situation - Israel wants to undermine Hamas by destroying their power base and support through economic sanctions, and then encourage other groups to remove them from government, but at the same time Israel complains when Hamas doesn't have the power to prevent those other groups from firing missiles across the border.
No they didn't. Read New Order. The Germans wanted to enslave and exterminate non-Aryans (primarily the Jews and Slavs). They wanted a treaty with Great Britain that gave Germany control over Europe, and Britain control over the seas and British Empire. They aimed to conquer the other Aryan nations, but there was no plan to exterminate fellow Aryans. Asia was to be divided between the Japanese Empire and Germany - there was no plan to exterminate the Japanese. Incidentally, Mussolini opposed Hitler's view of racial domination - he had a Jewish lover, and one in three adult Italian Jews were members of his National Fascist Party.
There was no German policy of genocide towards the French people. There was a policy of collective punishment towards the French people. If the policy was genocide, then the policy would be to massacre all villages, simply because they exist. The policy was collective punishment - villages were massacred because of resistance assassinations.
I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word genocide - "Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group" - It was not German policy to kill all French people.
"As commander of a Nazi einsatzgruppen death squad in occupied Poland, Dr. Werner Best came to believe that the most effective response to terrorism was collective punishment. After the fall of France he went on to draft the Third Reich's counterterrorism policy for countries occupied by Germany. Towns where acts of "passive" resistance such as the cutting of telegraph cables had taken place were placed under curfews, fined and slapped with travel restrictions. "Active" resistance--the killing of a German soldier--would be met by reprisal killings of local civilians.
Dr. Best was trying to protect German troops. Rather than be cowed, however, leaders of European resistance groups saw Best's ruthless policy as their chance to radicalize moderates who were still on the fence about their German occupatiers. The insurgents stepped up assassinations of German troops. The killings prompted the Germans to shoot more local businessmen and political leaders. The cycle of violence was spiraling out of control.
Eventually Hitler himself got into the act. Convinced that collective punishment was failing because it wasn't severe enough, the fuhrer issued a September 1941 order to use "the harshest measures" against civilians in areas where the Resistance was active. Arguing that "only the [collective] death penalty can be a real means of deterrence," Hitler ordered that 50 civilians be executed for each German soldier killed.
Some in the German high command argued that punishing innocent civilians in large numbers would alienate the local population and lose the battle for hearts and minds. Although they were eventually proven correct, they were overruled. New reprisals, each worse than the last, strengthened the resolve of the resistance and gained them new recruits. By the end of the war, reprisals had assumed grotesquely lopsided ratios of murdered locals to dead Germans. Entire villages--Lidice in the Czech Republic (340 killed), Oradour-sur-Glane in France (642), Kortelisy in Ukraine (2,892)--were wiped out." - source:
Public Opinion in Iran and America on Key International Issues, page 10 (Attacks on civilians).
The polled question was: "Some people think that bombing and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are
sometimes justified while others think that this kind of violence is never justified. Do you personally feel that such attacks are often justified, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified"
The response is that 11% of Iranians felt that such attacks were often/sometimes justified, whilst 24% of Americans thought the same. The same poll in Pakistan showed that 15% thought the same.
The PEW Report Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream, page 91, contains the same question asked of Muslims in Europe and the Middle East.
There is more discussion of these results and the media furore surrounding them on Salon.
Instead of calling bullshit, you could have just searched for them yourself. The links weren't particularly hard to find.
Not at all - my point was to compare the psychological effects of two similar events on the civilian population of a city in order to explain why certain poll results may have occurred. The fact that any civilians died is tragic in both cases.
On the other hand (and this was not my point, but you did bring up the issue of using percentage rates) why would comparing percentage death rates necessarily be invalid? This is exactly what serious researchers do when looking at mortality rates: for 2005 figures, Israel suffered 0.8 deaths per 100,000 population due to terrorism, whilst in the Palestinian Territories the Israeli military killed 11.2 people per 100,000 population. In Gaza the kill rate was 23.5 per 100,000 residents. source
Obviously there is a lot more to study beyond the raw figures, but that doesn't invalidate the data. Your suggestion of using absolute numbers for mortality has obvious problems in that it doesn't measure the impact of mortality on the population as a whole.
The source for the studies were the University of Maryland and PEW Research, as stated above.
The link to theamericanmuslim.org is just an article that discusses both studies. It is not a source for the original data. Feel free to ignore it and read the original research papers.
You should - the ability to understand the motivation behind human behaviour is important if you want to change that behaviour.
Once upon a time, many white people thought that they were justified in enslaving or killing black people. Once upon a time, the German people thought they were justified in wanting to kill Jews. It was only through understanding why that particular train of thought existed, and in undermining the ridiculous "justifications", that we reached the modern Western outlook where different people can live in peace.
You do realise that the Germans used the same argument - that collective punishment of the locals meant that they were less likely to help or join the resistance, and hence collective punishment helped to protect German lives?
And you do realise that sanctions on food, fuel, medical supplies and electricity lead to indiscriminate deaths? Hospitals need electricity and medicine, without it innocent people will die. And people need food too, without it, innocent people will die: "So too have the Israelis reduced the calorie intake of the Palestinians in Gaza. According to a UN report, it is presently at 61 percent of the average daily requirements." source, "Palestinians in Gaza were being "starved to death" and received fewer calories a day than people in the poorest parts of Africa." source
Where in the world is Osama bin Laden features an interview with one of the Hamas leaders - he is very clear in saying that they don't resist the Jews - they resist the state of Israel. When asked for clarification, he says that this is not a religious war between the Jews and the Muslims, this is a nationalist war between the people of Israel and the people of Palestine.
So, whilst clearly there are some people within Hamas who agree with that particular quote from the Charter, there are also people, even within the upper management, who strongly disagree with it.
"A World Public Opinion (WPO) survey done in collaboration with the University of Maryland published in January 2007 reported that 51% of Americans believed bombings and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justified. According to a May 22 2007 PEW survey, only 13% of American Muslims hold a similar sentiment when asked about suicide bombings against civilian targets." source
The poll you cite was carried out after attacks by Israel that killed 130 people in Gaza. That's 0.00025% of the Gaza population. In contrast, the 9/11 attacks killed 0.0001% of New York citizens.
So, imagine that the 9/11 attacks had killed 2.5 times more people, and then imagine polling New Yorkers immediately after the attacks on their feelings towards the group of people who carried out the attacks. Do you think you would get a different result?
Because Fox is known for its accurate and unbiased reporting? This is the same Fox that ran serious reports with "experts" claiming that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim.
I agree that there is no easy solution. A long term solution would involve either creation of a new state, merging with Egypt, or the population of Gaza becoming Israeli citizens. There are obviously problems with each of those solutions. In addition, some equivalent to the Marshall Plan might be desirable, or a regional free-trade area that allows movement of goods and people (like E.U./U.S.), to give the people a chance to become prosperous in order to increase the standard of living and ultimately strengthen government institutions. Both of those also have significant political problems. Any solution is also going to have to deal with the fact that known terrorists, or terrorist sympathisers, are likely to be placed into government positions of power - experience from Northern Ireland shows that this is quite galling for a large segment of the population, but they are willing to accept it in return for a more peaceful existence.
Do you think that Americans would vote differently in the same situation? If an American city were controlled by a foreign military force, and during incursions foreign soldiers had killed hundreds of civilians over the years? That entire extended families had been wiped out by shell fire that was just "a mistake"? Do you really think the American public would vote for a moderate leadership under those conditions?
You might have a point if the United States military controlled Mexican airspace, seaspace, all borders, and prohibited the import of metals and oil into Mexico. And in that hypothetical situation, some small number of Mexicans chose to fire rockets into Texas. Does that make collective punishment right? And to switch the players around - if Texas were under the military control of Mexico, and its ports blockaded, and some Americans fired rockets across the border, would it be still right for the Mexicans to punish all Texans?
So, every single individual in a nation is responsible for the actions of all other individuals? The Germans said the same thing in WWII occupied France - if a resistance cell killed German soldiers, the soldiers would round up all of the people from the nearest village and execute some (or all) of them.
Why was collective punishment wrong when carried out by Germans 60-odd years ago, but right when carried out by Israelis now?
I'm surprised that on Slashdot of all places, with its Libertarian-leaning politics, I'm having to actually argue that treating half-a-million people as one homogenous group is a bad idea.
Congratulations on totally missing the point. I will try to spell it out in more simple terms: In any city, but particularly one that is somewhat lawless with competing political and militia factions, it is not possible to control the actions of a minority. Manufacturing and launching these simple rockets could be carried out by less than 10 people. Punishing a city of 500,000 people for the actions of 10 is absurd.
I am struggling to make the point clearer. Maybe a car analogy would help.
The point is that using cooking gas requires a constant supply of cooking gas; smuggling in gas once is not enough, you have to constantly smuggle a large supply. Building this device requires smuggling in aluminium once. After that, they can burn whatever common non-blockaded chemicals it uses forever.
Imagine a high-density city with half a million people in the United States (say El Paso, Texas) being surrounded and blockaded by Chinese troops. And there are no effective restrictions on firearms ownership within the city. Could you guarantee that no Americans would get together and build weapons to fire at the Chinese guys? Even if the majority of citizens wanted to comply with the Chinese guys (and that's a big if), there would still be a small minority who would want to fight. Would it be right for the Chinese to punish every citizen of El Paso in retaliation for the small minority involved in violent resistance?