If the facts don't support you, throw in an ad hominem for distraction.
Here is an exact quote from the article, copy-pasted:
On 1 April 2011, Goldstone retracted his claim that it was Israeli government policy to deliberately target citizens, saying "While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee's report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy."
And why did you deceptively leave out the text which immediately follows?
"On 14 April 2011 the three other coauthors of the United Nations (UN) fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-2009 Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers released a joint statement criticizing Goldstone's recantation of this aspect of the report. They all agreed that the report was valid and that Israel and Hamas had failed to investigate alleged war crimes satisfactorily.
I spoke to Travers and he made it clear that Goldstone was speaking for himself, not the authors, and had no authority to change the conclusions of the written report without the agreement of the other co-authors. The report still "stands." And the facts of the atrocities, like the deliberate machine-gun murders of 3-year-old children carrying white flags, still stand.
This was Goldstone's statement under pressure that included Dershowitz' death threats. Taking Goldstone's statement at face value is like taking the statements of the defendants at the Moscow purge trials at face value.
The Rabbo killings was not redacted. It still "stands." Even if it were redacted from the Goldstone report, it was originally confirmed by human rights organizations and many news media investigations (many of them staffed by Jews), and no one (not even MEMRI) has disproven it. I saw that BBC video of 5-year-old Samar in a hospital bed.
For the benefit of other Slashdotters following this, I give this as a live example of Israeli lying.
Really, how can you call yourself a Jew (which is what I assume you are) and defend a massacre like this, which is no different from the massacres of Jews in the Ukraine that my mother described to me?
773. At about 12.50 p.m., Khalid Abd Rabbo, his wife Kawthar, their three daughters, Souad (aged 9), Samar (aged 5) and Amal (aged 3), and his mother, Hajja Souad Abd Rabbo, stepped out of the house, all of them carrying white flag s. Less than 10 metres from the door was a tank, turned towards their house. Two soldiers were sitting on top of it having a snack (one was eating chips, the other chocolate, according to one of the witnesses). The family stood still, waiting for orders from the soldiers as to what they should do, but none was given. Without warning, a third soldier emerged from inside the tank and started shooting at the three girls and then also at their grandmother. Several bullets hit Souad in the chest, Amal in the stomach and Samar in the back. Hajja Souad was hit in the lower back and in the left arm.
775. Inside the Abed Rabbo house, Amal and Souad died of their wounds.
Yes, I'm sick. I'm sick from seeing the Zionist experiment wind up like that other nationalist experiment.
It should be noted that the author of the report retracted the claim that it was Israeli government policy to deliberately target civilians. Read the whole wikipedia article or google it for details, TLDR: The report stated that both Hamas and Israel targeted civilians, then the part about Israel targeting civilians was retracted because the author concluded that his sources were bias and inaccurate. Even with that having happened, the anti-Israel crowd still quote the redacted parts of the report because it fits their narrative, and fail to mention the part about Hamas targeting civilians.
In true hasbara style, you are lying about the Wikipedia article. I'm astounded by these Israelis. They tell a lie, even when it's easy for anyone to look it up and find out that it's a lie:
On 1 April 2011, Goldstone published a piece in The Washington Post titled 'Reconsidering the Goldstone Report on Israel and war crimes'. Goldstone noted that the subsequent investigations by Israel and recognized in the U.N. committee's report "indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy" while "the crimes allegedly committed by Hamas were intentional goes without saying." The other principal authors of the UN report, Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers, have rejected Goldstone's reassessment arguing that there is "no justification for any demand or expectation for reconsideration of the report as nothing of substance has appeared that would in anyway change the context, findings or conclusions of that report with respect to any of the parties to the Gaza conflict".[15][16] According to journalist Connie Bruck, writing in the The New Yorker magazine, "Goldstone came under such pressure that threats were made to ban him from his grandson's bar mitzvah at a Johannesburg synagogue."[220]...
Also Goldstone maintained that, although the one correction should be made, he had "no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time" and that he didn't plan to pursue nullifying the report.[229]
That pressure included Alan Dershowitz telling fanatics that Jewish law allows them to assassinate Goldstone. http://forward.com/news/breaki...
I met Desmond Travers after Goldstone's letter, and Travers made it clear that Goldstone was speaking for himself, and the report hadn't retracted anything.
And now they're meeting to talk about removing a whole bunch more content. What do you want to bet that they will only be removing things that should legitimately be removed?
I don't know. There are two conflicting forces here.
One force is driven by the principle that, even for their own selfish, commercial purposes, Youtube can't be overwhelmingly popular and successful if they arbitrarily censor content.
The other force is that the Israeli government has one of the most powerful, well-funded, influential lobbies in the U.S., as effective as the National Rifle Association. They've gotten congressmen voted out of office by sheer financial contributions to their opponents.
(And I think it's disturbing that a foreign country, through campaign contributions by its American proxies, can influence American elections like that.)
I don't know which principle is going to win. We'll see pretty soon.
Actually, YouTube removed videos which were encouraging Palestinians to kill Israelis (and were actually faked), and were clearly in violation of TOS. The stories don't say anything about removing videos of real Israeli attacks on Palestinians. If you search YouTube for "israeli human rights abuses", you'll still find lots of hits.
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-... YouTube Removes Inciting Videos Portraying Murder of Jews, at Israel's Request Hamas uploaded one video dramatizing stabbing death of two Jews, while cartoon reenacted murder of Eitam and Naama Henkin in West Bank. Reuters and Haaretz Oct 08, 2015 8:06 PM
Exaggeration works to the advantage of both sides.
The Israeli organizations like to say, we talked to Google and were successful in getting Google to remove videos, we're effective, and please contribute money to our ongoing effort.
The Palestinian organizations like to say, the Israelis are censoring Google, support our organization and fight this.
GE.09-15866 UNITED NATIONS A General Assembly Distr. GENERAL A/HRC/12/48 25 September 2009 Original: ENGLISH HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL Twelfth session Agenda item 7 HUMAN RIGHTS IN PALESTINE AND OTHER OCCUPIED ARAB TERRITORIES Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict
7. Deliberate attacks against the civilian population 43. The Mission investigated 11 incidents in which the Israeli armed forces launched directattacks against civilians with lethal outcome (chap. XI). The facts in all bar one of the attacks indicate no justifiable military objective. The first two are attacks on houses in the al-Samouni neighbourhood south of Gaza City, including the shelling of a house in which Palestinian civilians had been forced to assemble by the Israeli armed forces. The following group of seven incidents concern the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so. The facts gathered by the Mission indicate that all the attacks occurred under circumstances in which the Israeli armed forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or had atleast observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status. In the majority of these incidents, the consequences of the Israeli attacks against civilians were aggravated by their subsequent refusal to allow the evacuation of the wounded or to permit access to ambulances.
GE.09-15866 UNITED NATIONS A General Assembly Distr. GENERAL A/HRC/12/48 25 September 2009 Original: ENGLISH HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL Twelfth session Agenda item 7 HUMAN RIGHTS IN PALESTINE AND OTHER OCCUPIED ARAB TERRITORIES Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict
7. Deliberate attacks against the civilian population
43. The Mission investigated 11 incidents in which the Israeli armed forces launched direct attacks against civilians with lethal outcome (chap. XI). The facts in all bar one of the attacks indicate no justifiable military objective. The first two are attacks on houses in the al-Samouni neighbourhood south of Gaza City, including the shelling of a house in which Palestinian civilians had been forced to assemble by the Israeli armed forces. The following group of seven incidents concern the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so. The facts gathered by the Mission indicate that all the attacks occurred under circumstances in which the Israeli armed forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or had at least observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status. In the majority of these incidents, the consequences of the Israeli attacks against civilians were aggravated by their subsequent refusal to allow the evacuation of the wounded or to permit access to ambulances.
A/HRC/12/48 page 174 witness's recollection, there had also been a radio message broadcast by the Israeli armed forces around 12.30 announcing that there would be a temporary cessation of shooting between 1 and 4 p.m. that day, during which time residents of the area were asked to walk to central Jabaliyah.
773. At about 12.50 p.m., Khalid Abd Rabbo, his wife Kawthar, their three daughters, Souad (aged 9), Samar (aged 5) and Amal (aged 3), and his mother, Hajja Souad Abd Rabbo, stepped out of the house, all of them carrying white flag s. Less than 10 metres from the door was a tank, turned towards their house. Two soldiers were sitting on top of it having a snack (one was eating chips, the other chocolate, according to one of the witnesses). The family stood still, waiting for orders from the soldiers as to what they should do, but none was given. Without warning, a third soldier emerged from inside the tank and started shooting at the three girls and then also at their grandmother. Several bullets hit Souad in the chest, Amal in the stomach and Samar in the back. Hajja Souad was hit in the lower back and in the left arm.
775. Inside the Abed Rabbo house, Amal and Souad died of their wounds. The family decided that they had to make an attempt to walk to Jabalya and take Samar, the dead bodies of Amal and Souad, and their grandmother to hospital. Khaled and Kawthar Abd Rabbo, and other family members and neighbours carried the girls on their shoulders. Hajja Souad was carried by family and neighbours on a bed. Samar was transferred to al-Shifa hospital and then, through Egypt, to Belgium, where she still is in hospital. According to her parents, Samar suffered a spinal injury and will remain paraplegic for the rest of her life.
This has been documented by the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others, who actually interviewed the eyewitnesses. The Israeli government never interviewed the eyewitnesses, and never conducted an investigation that they talked about.
You can search for "white flag" and get repeated incidents in which Israel
I don't like ISIS, they've done horrible things, but if you attack someone, you can reasonably expect him to attack you back.
the two issues have nothing to do with each other, and there should be no doubt that terrorist attacks like in Paris are even more heinous crimes than any drone strikes anyone could imagine.
If I were Syrian I would have a hard time understanding why it's more henious to machine-gun down 100 people in a theater than it is to kill 100 people with a drone strike at, say, a wedding.
As I said, its a question of the intentions.
That's a distinction without a difference.
If I were a Syrian, I wouldn't care whether my wife and children were killed by someone who was intending to kill them or who just killed them as collateral damage.
If you drop a bomb, you know what's going to happen.
so seriously, you can't unequivocally denounce a horrible crime? you can's say, "that is a shocking crime" without equivocating?
No, I can't denounce a horrible crime against us without also pointing out that we committed equally horrible crimes against them.
I can't accept the narrative that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys (which GWB actually believed).
These are tit-for-tat crimes. Retaliation is a universal principle. We bomb Lebanon (through our Israeli allies), and Osama bin Laden bombs us. The French bomb Syria, and ISIS retaliates against the French.
We can't stop these crimes unless we stop provoking them with our original crimes.
Do you denounce the Iraq war? Do you think American lives are more valuable than the Iraqi lives we ended in our war against Iraq?
No, I think Muslims, Christians and Jews are equally likely to commit terrorism and mass murder.
"Juden und Heiden hinaus!" so duldet der christliche SchwÃrmer. "Christ und Heide verflucht!" murmelt ein jüdischer Bart. "Mit den Christen an SpieÃY und mit den Juden ins Feuer!" Singet ein türkisches Kind Christen und Juden zum Spott. Welcher ist der Klügste? Entscheide! Aber sind diese Narren in deinem Palast, Gottheit, so geh ich vorbei. --Goethe
The closest I've seen to 19th-century Nihlism is the U.S. C.I.A. and the right-wing hawks, who managed to influence GWB. A lot of their policies come down to, "Let's destroy a functioning society, and a new pro-U.S. free market government will magically rise up from the ruins." That didn't work too well in Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Iran. Or Latin America. Or Asia.
If you were going on a mass shooting rampage and i was armed and shot you after your second killing, it would be considered a mass shooting.
I haven't been able to find any of those incidents in which an armed killer was shot by gun-carrying bystanders after the first or second killing. Could you cite a couple?
Islam had their Enlightenment. They helped give the Enlightenment to the West. They continued the study of Greek and Roman learning when most of Europe was illiterate.
If you were to compare Christianity with Islam at the turn of the 1st millenium, 1000 CE, the Islamic world was way ahead of Europe in everything that the enlightenment valued: they were more secular, tolerant, advanced in science, technology and commerce. They gave the Jews a refuge from European anti-Semitism.
Al-Haytan wrote a book that gave Newton his understanding of optics. Muslim doctors (and Jewish doctors, whom they accepted as colleagues) developed modern medicine.
One of the reasons the Islamic world didn't reach a modern state of development today was the imperialism of Europe and the U.S. Whenever they developed self-rule, the West overthrew their government and set up a puppet state. That's what happened in Iran, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh. The U.S. supported Saudi Arabia, at the time they promoted Wahhabism. We overthrew the Afghan socialist government and put the Taliban in power.
When was the last time a Christian, a Jew, or an atheist flew a plane into a building full of people while praising their God? Fuck them. This shit keeps happening over and over again, and every single time some idiot comes out and starts telling everyone that "they're not all like this". I don't care. A sufficient percentage of them I so ass backward that we need to do something about all of them at this point.
The Christians, Jews and European atheists don't have to fly planes into buildings, they can just drop bombs.
Mr. Hollande actively stepped up French participation in the military air campaign at the end of September. Just last week, France attacked oil operations under the Islamic State’s control in Syria. On Oct. 8, it conducted a targeted strike against militants in Raqqa, Syria, apparently targeting Salim Benghalem, a French citizen fighting for the Islamic State.
Paris shows us absolutely that it is immoral to disarm the populace, at any time and any place. If there had been but one or two armed citizens in the theater 50-100 more people might be alive tonight. Even just the chance that could be so, makes it criminal to keep the people disarmed.
Actually, there were two armed, trained good guys with guns at Charlie Hebdo, but they were quickly killed. A good guy with a gun can never match a trained group of bad guys with better guns and the advantage of surprise.
Except armed people stop killings and other violence all the time.
Maybe you could cite a few of those cases for the authors of this article.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol... The NRA Myth of Arming the Good Guys Mass shootings in the US are on the riseâ"and ordinary citizens with guns don't stop them. By Mark Follman Dec. 28, 2012
If only Sandy Hook's principal had been packing heat, the argument goes, she could've stopped the mass killer. There's just one little problem with this: Not a single one of the 62 mass shootings we studied in our investigation has been stopped this way--even as the nation has been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of recent laws has made it easier than ever for ordinary citizens to carry them in public places, including bars, parks, and schools.
Attempts by armed citizens to stop shooters are rare. At least two such attempts in recent years ended badly, with the would-be good guys gravely wounded or killed. Meanwhile, the five cases most commonly cited as instances of regular folks stopping massacres fall apart under scrutiny: Either they didn't involve ordinary citizens taking action--those who intervened were actually cops, trained security officers, or military personnel--or the citizens took action after the shooting rampages appeared to have already ended. (Or in some cases, both.)
Gun rights die-hards claim the Portland mall shooter saw an armed good guy--who ran for cover instead of firing--and promptly shot himself dead. Obviously.
Fighting in a war zone is one thing, going into restaurants in the middle of Paris and opening up with automatic AK-47s into civilians eating dinner is quite another.
Would you agree that bombing a hospital in Gaza is just as unacceptable as opening up with automatic AK-47s in a Paris restaurant?
you're closing your eyes to the true depth of the islamic terrorism problem if you insist on seeing it as a bunch of jerks instead of how it really is, a cultural and political movement.
Analogy time. Let's say there's a fraternity on campus known as the rapey fraternity. The leaders encourage and endorse date rape. Members of the fraternity cheer on social media whenever date rape is reported in the media. You know a guy in the fraternity who is a very active participant. Goes to all the meetings, goes to all the parties, wears the fraternity sweatshirts around campus, all that stuff. You don't know him personally, but isn't it reasonable to be wary of this guy? would you want your sister or daughter dating this guy?
Many strains of fundamentalist islam are like this rapey fraternity. Hate and violence are so infused into the core of the sect, and infused into the religious teachings themselves, that I think if you are american or european it's perfectly reasonable to be wary of somebody who chooses to associate themselves with this sect.
And let's not forget the Christians and Jews. They've been committing acts of terrorism and mass murder for 2500 years.
You're forgetting to condemn the millions of people amongst who the live, and who allow them to continue to operate, be funded, preach hate and recruit. The militant jihadis could never operate without the tacit approval of many millions of their less violent but none the less supportive co-religionists.
That was Osama bin Laden's argument for justifying his attack on the World Trade Center. He felt that the hundreds of millions of Americans who allowed the CIA and Israelis to operate, fund, preach hate and recruit against Lebanon and the Arab world were giving their tacit approval to the killing of muslims.
When's the last time you've condemned Western human rights violations against muslims and Arabs?
Like the more than 150,000 Iraqis killed during Bush's invasion?
Slashdot Mirror
By randomized, controlled studies.
Yes, but as the contributor above pointed out, correlation != causation.
We've had too many false positives from the Nurses' Health Study to ignore that.
People who are sick in the first place are likely to be more sedentary and to have difficulty sleeping.
At least Ronald Reagan signed a gun control law as governor of California.
(After black people started carrying guns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
Are you sick?
If the facts don't support you, throw in an ad hominem for distraction.
Here is an exact quote from the article, copy-pasted:
On 1 April 2011, Goldstone retracted his claim that it was Israeli government policy to deliberately target citizens, saying "While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee's report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy."
And why did you deceptively leave out the text which immediately follows?
"On 14 April 2011 the three other coauthors of the United Nations (UN) fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict of 2008-2009 Hina Jilani, Christine Chinkin and Desmond Travers released a joint statement criticizing Goldstone's recantation of this aspect of the report. They all agreed that the report was valid and that Israel and Hamas had failed to investigate alleged war crimes satisfactorily.
I spoke to Travers and he made it clear that Goldstone was speaking for himself, not the authors, and had no authority to change the conclusions of the written report without the agreement of the other co-authors. The report still "stands." And the facts of the atrocities, like the deliberate machine-gun murders of 3-year-old children carrying white flags, still stand.
This was Goldstone's statement under pressure that included Dershowitz' death threats. Taking Goldstone's statement at face value is like taking the statements of the defendants at the Moscow purge trials at face value.
The Rabbo killings was not redacted. It still "stands." Even if it were redacted from the Goldstone report, it was originally confirmed by human rights organizations and many news media investigations (many of them staffed by Jews), and no one (not even MEMRI) has disproven it. I saw that BBC video of 5-year-old Samar in a hospital bed.
For the benefit of other Slashdotters following this, I give this as a live example of Israeli lying.
Really, how can you call yourself a Jew (which is what I assume you are) and defend a massacre like this, which is no different from the massacres of Jews in the Ukraine that my mother described to me?
Yes, I'm sick. I'm sick from seeing the Zionist experiment wind up like that other nationalist experiment.
It should be noted that the author of the report retracted the claim that it was Israeli government policy to deliberately target civilians. Read the whole wikipedia article or google it for details, TLDR: The report stated that both Hamas and Israel targeted civilians, then the part about Israel targeting civilians was retracted because the author concluded that his sources were bias and inaccurate. Even with that having happened, the anti-Israel crowd still quote the redacted parts of the report because it fits their narrative, and fail to mention the part about Hamas targeting civilians.
In true hasbara style, you are lying about the Wikipedia article. I'm astounded by these Israelis. They tell a lie, even when it's easy for anyone to look it up and find out that it's a lie:
That pressure included Alan Dershowitz telling fanatics that Jewish law allows them to assassinate Goldstone. http://forward.com/news/breaki...
I met Desmond Travers after Goldstone's letter, and Travers made it clear that Goldstone was speaking for himself, and the report hadn't retracted anything.
And now they're meeting to talk about removing a whole bunch more content. What do you want to bet that they will only be removing things that should legitimately be removed?
I don't know. There are two conflicting forces here.
One force is driven by the principle that, even for their own selfish, commercial purposes, Youtube can't be overwhelmingly popular and successful if they arbitrarily censor content.
The other force is that the Israeli government has one of the most powerful, well-funded, influential lobbies in the U.S., as effective as the National Rifle Association. They've gotten congressmen voted out of office by sheer financial contributions to their opponents.
(And I think it's disturbing that a foreign country, through campaign contributions by its American proxies, can influence American elections like that.)
I don't know which principle is going to win. We'll see pretty soon.
It was a war. Shit happens.
Did you say that about the Holocaust?
Actually, YouTube removed videos which were encouraging Palestinians to kill Israelis (and were actually faked), and were clearly in violation of TOS. The stories don't say anything about removing videos of real Israeli attacks on Palestinians. If you search YouTube for "israeli human rights abuses", you'll still find lots of hits.
http://www.reuters.com/article...
Israel says Facebook, YouTube videos encouraging Palestinian attacks
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-...
YouTube Removes Inciting Videos Portraying Murder of Jews, at Israel's Request
Hamas uploaded one video dramatizing stabbing death of two Jews, while cartoon reenacted murder of Eitam and Naama Henkin in West Bank.
Reuters and Haaretz
Oct 08, 2015 8:06 PM
Exaggeration works to the advantage of both sides.
The Israeli organizations like to say, we talked to Google and were successful in getting Google to remove videos, we're effective, and please contribute money to our ongoing effort.
The Palestinian organizations like to say, the Israelis are censoring Google, support our organization and fight this.
Here's your cite. I gave this in more detail above.
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/...
GE.09-15866
UNITED NATIONS
A General Assembly Distr.
GENERAL
A/HRC/12/48
25 September 2009
Original: ENGLISH
HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
Twelfth session
Agenda item 7
HUMAN RIGHTS IN PALESTINE AND OTHER OCCUPIED ARAB TERRITORIES
Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict
7. Deliberate attacks against the civilian population
43. The Mission investigated 11 incidents in which the Israeli armed forces launched directattacks against civilians with lethal outcome (chap. XI). The facts in all bar one of the attacks indicate no justifiable military objective. The first two are attacks on houses in the al-Samouni neighbourhood south of Gaza City, including the shelling of a house in which Palestinian civilians had been forced to assemble by the Israeli armed forces. The following group of seven incidents concern the shooting of civilians while they were trying to leave their homes to walk to a safer place, waving white flags and, in some of the cases, following an injunction from the Israeli forces to do so. The facts gathered by the Mission indicate that all the attacks occurred under circumstances in which the Israeli armed forces were in control of the area and had previously entered into contact with or had atleast observed the persons they subsequently attacked, so that they must have been aware of their civilian status. In the majority of these incidents, the consequences of the Israeli attacks against civilians were aggravated by their subsequent refusal to allow the evacuation of the wounded or to permit access to ambulances.
I'll play devil's advocate:
Firstly, the mandatory [citation needed].
OK, I'll give you your citation.
This has been documented by the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and others, who actually interviewed the eyewitnesses. The Israeli government never interviewed the eyewitnesses, and never conducted an investigation that they talked about.
You can search for "white flag" and get repeated incidents in which Israel
Yes, but civilized people attack the enemy military/governments. Not the people going to see a metal concert.
I agree. Everyone should follow international law. People who violate international law should be prosecuted and punished.
But that doesn't happen. We kill innocent civilians all the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And if we ignore international humanitarian law, it's pretty difficult to convince the other side that they should follow international law too.
Although sometimes they do anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But note that France does not conduct any drone strikes,
France was bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/27/...
I don't like ISIS, they've done horrible things, but if you attack someone, you can reasonably expect him to attack you back.
the two issues have nothing to do with each other, and there should be no doubt that terrorist attacks like in Paris are even more heinous crimes than any drone strikes anyone could imagine.
If I were Syrian I would have a hard time understanding why it's more henious to machine-gun down 100 people in a theater than it is to kill 100 people with a drone strike at, say, a wedding.
As I said, its a question of the intentions.
That's a distinction without a difference.
If I were a Syrian, I wouldn't care whether my wife and children were killed by someone who was intending to kill them or who just killed them as collateral damage.
If you drop a bomb, you know what's going to happen.
so seriously, you can't unequivocally denounce a horrible crime? you can's say, "that is a shocking crime" without equivocating?
No, I can't denounce a horrible crime against us without also pointing out that we committed equally horrible crimes against them.
I can't accept the narrative that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys (which GWB actually believed).
These are tit-for-tat crimes. Retaliation is a universal principle. We bomb Lebanon (through our Israeli allies), and Osama bin Laden bombs us. The French bomb Syria, and ISIS retaliates against the French.
We can't stop these crimes unless we stop provoking them with our original crimes.
Do you denounce the Iraq war? Do you think American lives are more valuable than the Iraqi lives we ended in our war against Iraq?
No, I think Muslims, Christians and Jews are equally likely to commit terrorism and mass murder.
"Juden und Heiden hinaus!" so duldet der christliche SchwÃrmer.
"Christ und Heide verflucht!" murmelt ein jüdischer Bart.
"Mit den Christen an SpieÃY und mit den Juden ins Feuer!"
Singet ein türkisches Kind Christen und Juden zum Spott.
Welcher ist der Klügste? Entscheide! Aber sind diese
Narren in deinem Palast, Gottheit, so geh ich vorbei.
--Goethe
The closest I've seen to 19th-century Nihlism is the U.S. C.I.A. and the right-wing hawks, who managed to influence GWB. A lot of their policies come down to, "Let's destroy a functioning society, and a new pro-U.S. free market government will magically rise up from the ruins." That didn't work too well in Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Iran. Or Latin America. Or Asia.
If you were going on a mass shooting rampage and i was armed and shot you after your second killing, it would be considered a mass shooting.
I haven't been able to find any of those incidents in which an armed killer was shot by gun-carrying bystanders after the first or second killing. Could you cite a couple?
Islam had their Enlightenment. They helped give the Enlightenment to the West. They continued the study of Greek and Roman learning when most of Europe was illiterate.
If you were to compare Christianity with Islam at the turn of the 1st millenium, 1000 CE, the Islamic world was way ahead of Europe in everything that the enlightenment valued: they were more secular, tolerant, advanced in science, technology and commerce. They gave the Jews a refuge from European anti-Semitism.
Al-Haytan wrote a book that gave Newton his understanding of optics. Muslim doctors (and Jewish doctors, whom they accepted as colleagues) developed modern medicine.
One of the reasons the Islamic world didn't reach a modern state of development today was the imperialism of Europe and the U.S. Whenever they developed self-rule, the West overthrew their government and set up a puppet state. That's what happened in Iran, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh. The U.S. supported Saudi Arabia, at the time they promoted Wahhabism. We overthrew the Afghan socialist government and put the Taliban in power.
And let's also condemn those Christian terrorists.
Remember George W. Bush in the White House, with God telling him to invade Iraq?
The result: 150,000 innocent people killed, and the destruction of a country.
He wasn't some kooky isolated loner. He was the president of the U.S.
And how many people did he execute in Texas?
When was the last time a Christian, a Jew, or an atheist flew a plane into a building full of people while praising their God? Fuck them. This shit keeps happening over and over again, and every single time some idiot comes out and starts telling everyone that "they're not all like this". I don't care. A sufficient percentage of them I so ass backward that we need to do something about all of them at this point.
The Christians, Jews and European atheists don't have to fly planes into buildings, they can just drop bombs.
The last time? How about this one:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11...
Mr. Hollande actively stepped up French participation in the military air campaign at the end of September. Just last week, France attacked oil operations under the Islamic State’s control in Syria. On Oct. 8, it conducted a targeted strike against militants in Raqqa, Syria, apparently targeting Salim Benghalem, a French citizen fighting for the Islamic State.
Paris shows us absolutely that it is immoral to disarm the populace, at any time and any place. If there had been but one or two armed citizens in the theater 50-100 more people might be alive tonight. Even just the chance that could be so, makes it criminal to keep the people disarmed.
Actually, there were two armed, trained good guys with guns at Charlie Hebdo, but they were quickly killed. A good guy with a gun can never match a trained group of bad guys with better guns and the advantage of surprise.
Another policeman, 48-year-old Franck Brinsolaro, was killed moments earlier in the assault on Charlie Hebdo where he was responsible for the protection of its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, one of the 11 killed in the building. A colleague said he "never had time" to pull his weapon.
Except armed people stop killings and other violence all the time.
Maybe you could cite a few of those cases for the authors of this article.
http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
The NRA Myth of Arming the Good Guys
Mass shootings in the US are on the riseâ"and ordinary citizens with guns don't stop them.
By Mark Follman
Dec. 28, 2012
If only Sandy Hook's principal had been packing heat, the argument goes, she could've stopped the mass killer. There's just one little problem with this: Not a single one of the 62 mass shootings we studied in our investigation has been stopped this way--even as the nation has been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of recent laws has made it easier than ever for ordinary citizens to carry them in public places, including bars, parks, and schools.
Attempts by armed citizens to stop shooters are rare. At least two such attempts in recent years ended badly, with the would-be good guys gravely wounded or killed. Meanwhile, the five cases most commonly cited as instances of regular folks stopping massacres fall apart under scrutiny: Either they didn't involve ordinary citizens taking action--those who intervened were actually cops, trained security officers, or military personnel--or the citizens took action after the shooting rampages appeared to have already ended. (Or in some cases, both.)
Gun rights die-hards claim the Portland mall shooter saw an armed good guy--who ran for cover instead of firing--and promptly shot himself dead. Obviously.
The only thing that can stop a muslim with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.
Yeah, but how can a good guy with a gun stop two muslims with guns?
I have to say, this is a rather fair point...
Fighting in a war zone is one thing, going into restaurants in the middle of Paris and opening up with automatic AK-47s into civilians eating dinner is quite another.
Would you agree that bombing a hospital in Gaza is just as unacceptable as opening up with automatic AK-47s in a Paris restaurant?
you're closing your eyes to the true depth of the islamic terrorism problem if you insist on seeing it as a bunch of jerks instead of how it really is, a cultural and political movement.
Analogy time. Let's say there's a fraternity on campus known as the rapey fraternity. The leaders encourage and endorse date rape. Members of the fraternity cheer on social media whenever date rape is reported in the media. You know a guy in the fraternity who is a very active participant. Goes to all the meetings, goes to all the parties, wears the fraternity sweatshirts around campus, all that stuff. You don't know him personally, but isn't it reasonable to be wary of this guy? would you want your sister or daughter dating this guy?
Many strains of fundamentalist islam are like this rapey fraternity. Hate and violence are so infused into the core of the sect, and infused into the religious teachings themselves, that I think if you are american or european it's perfectly reasonable to be wary of somebody who chooses to associate themselves with this sect.
And let's not forget the Christians and Jews. They've been committing acts of terrorism and mass murder for 2500 years.
You're forgetting to condemn the millions of people amongst who the live, and who allow them to continue to operate, be funded, preach hate and recruit. The militant jihadis could never operate without the tacit approval of many millions of their less violent but none the less supportive co-religionists.
That was Osama bin Laden's argument for justifying his attack on the World Trade Center. He felt that the hundreds of millions of Americans who allowed the CIA and Israelis to operate, fund, preach hate and recruit against Lebanon and the Arab world were giving their tacit approval to the killing of muslims.
When's the last time you've condemned Western human rights violations against muslims and Arabs?
Like the more than 150,000 Iraqis killed during Bush's invasion?
You're just denying the facts, the way people deny the Holocaust.
It's pointless to use facts and logic with you.
It's time for me to give up with people like you and move on to boycotts, divestments and sanctions.