Do you also have trouble distinguishing your arse from your elbow?
I was going to respond to you seriously until I saw that.
For the benefit of any intelligent people who might be reading this, the "Hamas Charter" is one of Frank Luntz' talking points for the right-wing "The Israel Project," where he tells pro-settler supporters to keep repeating it, because it tested well in the polls.
In fact, Hamas had other documents that set those statements aside, and Ahmed Jabari, head of Hamas's military wing, who negotiated the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, was communicating with Israelis and preparing a long-term peace agreement with Israel in 2012, when the Israelis assassinated him with a missile attack on a car he was riding in.
If there's one thing Netanyahu doesn't want, it's peace with Hamas. Then he'd have to deal with the settlements. Now (not sometime in the vague future, as Luntz tells him to do).
There's a long list of Palestinians who took risks for peace and were killed by Israel.
AI Index: MDE 15/021/2009 Embargoed for 00:01 GMT Thursday 02 July 2009
Israel/Gaza: Operation ‘Cast Lead’ - 22 Days of Death and Destruction
Amnesty International found no evidence that rockets were launched from residential houses or buildings while civilians were in these buildings, but Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups at times launched rockets and located military equipment and positions near civilian homes.
Look, I used to work in public relations years ago and one of our clients was the Israeli government. I used to go into the stock room and copy press releases on our stock of blue-and-white Israeli government letterheads, and mail them out to the newspapers and broadcasters.
After I started reading about the IDF and settlers killing children, I didn't want to do that (relatively well-paid) work any more.
I used to call the Israeli government to check out the Amnesty International reports of killing Palestinians (mostly children) and other human rights abuses, like arresting journalists and Palestinian advocates of Ghandian non-violence.
I really was surprised that they routinely lied. A lot of times they really got caught red-handed. Once they claimed that a Palestinian peace activist had said in a newspaper interview that he wanted to take over all of Israel. I looked up the newspaper interview and he said just the opposite.
One Israeli embassy guy apologized to me when he checked something out and it became clear that his government had lied.
The Israeli government PR people claim that everybody lies. That's the "everybody does it" excuse. It's not true. Amnesty International, B'selem, Human Rights Watch never lie, and when they do make (rare) mistakes, they admit it. And I challenge anybody to demonstrate otherwise.
The human rights groups get their facts from eyewitnesses on the ground. The Israeli government gets its statements from government officials in Jerusalem who have never been on the ground. The Israeli government doesn't investigate what happened on the ground. The eyewitnesses say that nobody from the Israeli government asked them what they saw.
You could find all that out from reading the B'Tselem reports on their web site.
When those boys were shelled and killed on the beach in Gaza, they were killed in front of a hotel full of foreign reporters, including a guy from the New York Times. They deliberately killed a group of boys who were playing soccer. How do you justify that? The Israeli government hasn't even tried.
So I'll pull rank on you. I know more about the subject than you do. The Israeli government, and the IDF, lies. You can't trust what they say. And you can trust what B'Tselem says. If there were terrorist activities in Wafa hospital, I'd like to see the evidence. And the Israeli government's claims aren't evidence. They've proven that they'll just deny everything.
I once read an article about how some Japanese graduate students discovered a bunch of new genes and gave them all names that were obscene in Japanese.
I can't cite a source. I was pretty sure I read it in Science News but an editor at Science News tried to find it and couldn't.
Best way to evaluate that claim is to look at the facts.
I look forward to you gathering relevant ones. So far you seem to be providing pointers to Hamas war crimes. You can't use protected structures or civilians as shields.
(From the article: "The photos claim to show rocket launchers inside the grounds of a mosque and a playground as well as a rocket launcher that appears to be adjacent to al-Wafa hospital.")
Israel says Hamas uses Wafa hospital compound to attack soldiers, fire anti-tank missiles; ground, air forces attack Gaza City where they claim 'an entire Hamas brigade is active'; 10 terrorists killed.
To repeat:
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/... Israeli military destroyed el-Wafa hospital even though it knew there were no weapons inside Allison Deger on July 19, 2014
“We’ve seen a lot of launches of rockets that came from exactly near the hospital, 100 meters near,” said a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), continuing, “Obviously the target was not the hospital.”
[The director of the hospital said] “My authority, my control is within my premises, it is my hospital. I cannot control what people do 100 meters from me.”
On Monday afternoon the IDF publishes visuals displaying rocket launchers placed at a number of civilian sites, like playgrounds, schools, and hospital.... Last week, prior to the ground incursion, Israel was criticized for an aerial bombardment of a rocket launcher in Gaza City's Saja'iyya neighborhood. The IDF said then that the launcher was in an empty structure adjacent to el-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital. Hours before the strike the hospital received an automated phone message from the IDF saying its staff had to evacuate all patients as they could get hurt in the strike...."The strike was on an unpopulated structure that used to serve as the hospital's geriatric ward," he said.
The lawyers tell me that under the Geneva Conventions, collateral damage including the killing of innocent civilians is acceptable if it is necessary to achieve a military objective.
Why don't you explain the military necessity of blowing up a hospital when the IDF itself admits that the only military objective was 100 meters away.
Because the Israelis (and their propagandists) lie.
I found that out when I was regularly calling the Israeli embassy to check out stories of human rights abuses.
"What about this case that Amnesty International and B'Tselem described in which an IDF soldier machine-gunned down a Palestinian child?"
"It never happened."
The New York Times, the BBC, Human Rights Watch -- they're all lying.
This goes on even when the evidence becomes overwhelming. In one case, an IDF soldier in a watch tower shot and killed a Palestinian boy playing soccer 400 meters away. B'Tselem did a full investigation, complained to the IDF, and an IDF lawyer wrote to B'Tselem saying that they had reviewed the case and there were no grounds for an investigation.
By mistake, the lawyer included with the letter a memo to her own supervisor in which she said that there were grounds for an investigation. (Just so you know that I'm not making it up, this was in an Amnesty International report http://www.amnesty.org/en/libr...)
Bit of history in the "creation" of the Palestinians (as they stand today): When Israel was formed and the Arab nations that surrounded it declared war, the Arab nations told the Arabs who lived in Israel: "Flee from Israel to us. When we drive Israel into the sea, we'll give you your land back."
Many fled, but not all.
Citation needed. From a reliable source. Not a "pro-Israeli" website.
1 Samuel 15:3: "This is what the Lord Almighty says... 'Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.' "
Psalm 137: "Happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us / He who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks."
We must care about civilian casualties. But we must not care more about some casualties over others.
First of all, for somebody who claims to be using mathematics correctly, how can he make a chart of "Fatalities in 2014" when 2014 is only half over?
Second of all, his numbers are wrong. Even near the end of July, there are over 1,000 deaths in Gaza. That would place Gaza near the top of his bar chart.
But most important, I don't agree with his basic premise, that unless you pay attention to international conflicts according to the number of deaths, you're biased.
I might pay more attention to conflicts that I can do something about, or in which my country is responsible. Which is the case in Israel/Palestine.
Or I might pay attention to conflicts according to the amount of my tax money that was going to support them. In which case Israel would be number 1.
Well. except for the fact that nobody is paying much attention to Syria AND the Syrian government is slaughtering more Arabs than the Israeli government.
That's simply false to say that nobody is paying attention. If you go to the web sites of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the other human rights organizations, you'll see lots of attention to the human rights abuses of the Syrian government and the Syrian rebels.
And lets not overlook the difference: Hamas deliberately targets civilians, the Israelis don't.
Best way to evaluate that claim is to look at the facts.
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/... Israeli military destroyed el-Wafa hospital even though it knew there were no weapons inside Allison Deger on July 19, 2014 “We’ve seen a lot of launches of rockets that came from exactly near the hospital, 100 meters near,” said a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), continuing, “Obviously the target was not the hospital.” “My authority, my control is within my premises, it is my hospital. I cannot control what people do 100 meters from me.”
http://gaza.scoop.ps/2014/07/a... Another Israeli attack on a hospital, another Israeli war crime July 21, 2014 by Julie Webb-Pullman Israeli tanks attacked Al Aqsa hospital in Deir Al Balah at 2:50 pm this afternoon, killing five patients and doctors, and injuring more than 70. The third and fourth floors, housing the emergency department, orthopaedic department, surgical department, and the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) were destroyed. Operating theatres had to cease work because of the lack of oxygen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07... Middle East Questions About Tactics and Targets as Civilian Toll Climbs in Israeli Strikes By ANNE BARNARD JULY 21, 2014 (Israeli attacks in Gaza have destroyed entire apartment buildings and killed entire families because 1 militant was visiting.) When the strike leveled a four-story house in the southern Gaza Strip the night before, it also killed 25 members of four family households — including 19 children — gathered to break the daily Ramadan fast together. Relatives said it also killed a guest of the family, identified by an Israeli human rights group as a member of the Hamas military wing, ostensibly Israel’s target. The attack was the latest in a series of Israeli strikes that have killed families in their homes, during an offensive that Israel says is meant to stop militant rocket fire that targets its civilians and destroy Hamas’s tunnel network. (UN says 75% of Palestinian deaths are civilians.) On July 13, 18 family members were killed in an airstrike on their home, and Tayseer al-Batsh, the Hamas police chief in Gaza, was severely wounded. Many other civilians have been killed in strikes on known Hamas offices or apartments that happened to be in their apartment buildings, and in strikes on homes with no obvious connection, Palestinian officials and residents say. On Monday night, a strike hit an eight-story apartment building in downtown Gaza City — an area where Israeli officials had urged Gazans to take shelter. (At least 13 killed.) All the dead were from the Abu Jameh family, according to relatives, except for a guest, whom the Israeli rights group, B’Tselem, identified as Ahmad Suliman Sahmoud, a member of Hamas’s military wing, who was visiting a member of the family.
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 flags. 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.
[The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life. The Israeli government never investigated this event or prosecuted the soldier responsible.]
Isn't this what we want all government agencies to strive for? When the military's actual job is to figure out how to kill people and destroy things with maximum effectiveness and efficiency, then we really shouldn't complain when they seem to be doing a good job of it. I'm not exactly sure what this writer thought the military's purpose is, but he seems horrified at the thought of using technology to kill people more efficiently.
Wrong. According to Clausowitz, the purpose of the military is to implement policy. That was the mistake GWB made in Iraq. He sent the military into Iraq to kill the "bad guys." Outfits like Blackwater went around killing people indiscriminately. Then when the next Americans showed up, they didn't get a good reception.
Guess what? When you kill people, they kill you back.
Now, GWB has basically handed Iraq over to al Qaeda and similar militants. Heckuva job, Bushie.
Have you ever heard of deterrence? Apparently not.
Once we and the Soviets had enough warheads to destroy each other several times over, we didn't need additional deterrence. But we just kept building them.
We reached a point where the risks of an accidental war were greater than the risks of whatever we were deterring.
Building warheads for the military was very profitable. As Dwight Eisenhower said, these things take on a life of their own.
One could limit the scope of 'evil' to weapons of mass destruction.
I guess that's a valid debate.
And it will still be possible to make them without our software... I just don't want to have helped them!
We make software because of that warm fuzzy feeling. Not to know that it contributes to killing people (from whatever country).
I know how you feel. I was studying engineering in the 1960s.
A lot of us came to the conclusion that when we graduated, our jobs would be in the military-industrial complex, designing weapons to kill people, and not for good ends. My roommate and I both changed our major. He founded the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.
We and the Soviets had missiles with hydrogen bombs targeting each other which were enough to blow up the world. Finally the weapons designers and other scientists and engineers on both sides (including Andre Sakharov) got together and figured out how to use their influence to stop it.
The 3 million people that we killed in Vietnam, the 500,000 people we killed in the Iraq war, and the others killed in our miscellaneous wars and proxy wars like the ones in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Haiti, didn't give me any freedom. Quite the opposite.
I don't know - have you been whisked away to a detention camp where you'll be starved, tortured, and then murdered for posting this anti-government rhetoric?
As opposed to the utopia of freedom and joy we have now?
You're welcome to GTFO to another country and find out what oppression really feels like, my dear pampered child.
BRAAP! AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM ALERT
Guantanamo Bay is one of the most brutal prisons in the world, along with the CIA's black sites. A lot of the prisoners would rather commit suicide, but they're not allowed to do that.
During the Cold War, the Communists used to say, "Well, what about your Negroes in the South?" They were right. Millions of black people were living under oppression as bad as any other country. Try to vote -- get killed. Kill a Negro -- go free. In fact, you can still kill a Negro and go free very often today. A lot of Negroes did GTFO and found a lot of countries, like Canada or France, that gave them more freedom than they had here.
We also killed about 3 million native Americans.
After Pete Seeger died, I looked up his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee https://archive.org/details/in... -- and I also read the testimony of other musicians and writers. FYI, at that time, we purged the American entertainment and movie industry of anyone who challenged the corporate hegemony. Seeger, who had tremendous courage in standing up before HUAC (and wasn't a Communist), would have gone to jail like many others, but he was saved by a legal technicality, thanks to a Supreme Court that believed in the Constitution. Today the Supreme Court would have sent him to jail. Seeger did have his passport revoked, like Paul Robeson and Linus Pauling.
And that's how 40 families wound up owning half the capital in America, and more than half of the government.
For more examples of American oppression see Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.
I'd rather follow Seeger's example, stay here and fight American corporate oppression, hopeless as it looks, than GTFO.
The real danger to America are the uber-patriots who claim that we have no problems.
The only part of the Geneva convention that Israel has broken is about settlements in occupied territory which has nothing to do with original borders. At the end of many wars borders have changed.
Israel has also broken the part in the Geneva conventions that prohibit killing of civilians when there is no military necessity for doing so. B'Tselem and Amnesty International have documented thousands of cases.
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 flags. 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.
[The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life. The Israeli government never investigated this event or prosecuted the soldier responsible.]
My "side" is international law. I want to judge the situation by international law and let the chips fall where they may. I don't have any sympathy for people on either side who kill innocent civilians -- especially 3-year-old children. Members of Hamas who killed innocent Israeli civilians should be prosecuted and punished -- as long as Israelis who killed innocent Palestinian civilians are also prosecuted and punished.
1. What's the point of the Nicholas Rostow article? He goes through all the arguments for and against the illegality of the settlements (without mentioning Meron), and at the end says that we should ignore the issue of illegality and instead do whatever it takes to achieve peace.
So he's arguing that Israel doesn't have to follow the law.
Well, if Israel doesn't have to follow the law, why does Hamas have to follow the law?
2. After the publication of the Goldstone report, Goldstone received a huge amount of pressure and abuse, including death threats, from Israeli right-wing society and their supporters. This is more of the same.
When the Goldstone commission worked on their report, they asked the Israeli government to help them. The Israeli government refused. After the report, the Israeli government issued statements in their defense that they hadn't made before. That's what Goldstone meant when he said, “If I had known then what I know now.”
After the publication of the report, after all that pressure, Goldstone conceded one point. The report said that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians. When the Israelis released information that they didn't give the commission when the commission originally asked for it, Goldstone changed his position and said that there was no evidence that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. Since he never gave his supporting evidence, it's impossible to know why or whether it's true. That was his personal opinion, and the Goldstone Commission never officially made that change.
So what? It's still true that an Israeli soldier shot and killed a 3- and 5-year old child, while their grandmother was carrying a white flag, and the Israeli never investigated the incident or prosecuted the soldier. This was documented by investigators from many news and human rights organizations. There were about a dozen "white flag" incidents like this in the Goldstone report, and B'Tselem and Amnesty International have documented hundreds of murders like this during the occupation, without prosecution or even investigation by the Israeli government.
You're accusing Hamas of violating international law. Do you also accuse Israel of violating international law?
The same international law that Theodore Meron, Israeli foreign ministry chief counsel, used in 1967. Which includes the Geneva Conventions.
One side usually follows the Geneva Conventions because the other side agrees to it. The Nazis didn't follow the Geneva Conventions on the Soviet front in WWII, and so neither did the Soviets. At Stalingrad, they didn't take prisoners.
If you don't follow the Geneva Conventions, don't complain about terrorists. You're a terrorist too.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you also have trouble distinguishing your arse from your elbow?
I was going to respond to you seriously until I saw that.
For the benefit of any intelligent people who might be reading this, the "Hamas Charter" is one of Frank Luntz' talking points for the right-wing "The Israel Project," where he tells pro-settler supporters to keep repeating it, because it tested well in the polls.
In fact, Hamas had other documents that set those statements aside, and Ahmed Jabari, head of Hamas's military wing, who negotiated the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange, was communicating with Israelis and preparing a long-term peace agreement with Israel in 2012, when the Israelis assassinated him with a missile attack on a car he was riding in.
If there's one thing Netanyahu doesn't want, it's peace with Hamas. Then he'd have to deal with the settlements. Now (not sometime in the vague future, as Luntz tells him to do).
There's a long list of Palestinians who took risks for peace and were killed by Israel.
https://www.amnesty.org/fr/lib...
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
AI Index: MDE 15/021/2009 Embargoed for 00:01 GMT Thursday 02 July 2009
Israel/Gaza: Operation ‘Cast Lead’ - 22 Days of Death and Destruction
Amnesty International found no evidence that rockets were launched from residential houses or buildings while civilians were in these buildings, but Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups at times launched rockets and located military equipment and positions near civilian homes.
Look, I used to work in public relations years ago and one of our clients was the Israeli government. I used to go into the stock room and copy press releases on our stock of blue-and-white Israeli government letterheads, and mail them out to the newspapers and broadcasters.
After I started reading about the IDF and settlers killing children, I didn't want to do that (relatively well-paid) work any more.
I used to call the Israeli government to check out the Amnesty International reports of killing Palestinians (mostly children) and other human rights abuses, like arresting journalists and Palestinian advocates of Ghandian non-violence.
I really was surprised that they routinely lied. A lot of times they really got caught red-handed. Once they claimed that a Palestinian peace activist had said in a newspaper interview that he wanted to take over all of Israel. I looked up the newspaper interview and he said just the opposite.
One Israeli embassy guy apologized to me when he checked something out and it became clear that his government had lied.
The Israeli government PR people claim that everybody lies. That's the "everybody does it" excuse. It's not true. Amnesty International, B'selem, Human Rights Watch never lie, and when they do make (rare) mistakes, they admit it. And I challenge anybody to demonstrate otherwise.
The human rights groups get their facts from eyewitnesses on the ground. The Israeli government gets its statements from government officials in Jerusalem who have never been on the ground. The Israeli government doesn't investigate what happened on the ground. The eyewitnesses say that nobody from the Israeli government asked them what they saw.
You could find all that out from reading the B'Tselem reports on their web site.
When those boys were shelled and killed on the beach in Gaza, they were killed in front of a hotel full of foreign reporters, including a guy from the New York Times. They deliberately killed a group of boys who were playing soccer. How do you justify that? The Israeli government hasn't even tried.
So I'll pull rank on you. I know more about the subject than you do. The Israeli government, and the IDF, lies. You can't trust what they say. And you can trust what B'Tselem says. If there were terrorist activities in Wafa hospital, I'd like to see the evidence. And the Israeli government's claims aren't evidence. They've proven that they'll just deny everything.
I once read an article about how some Japanese graduate students discovered a bunch of new genes and gave them all names that were obscene in Japanese.
I can't cite a source. I was pretty sure I read it in Science News but an editor at Science News tried to find it and couldn't.
Well, the lead scientist was Dr. Seymore Butts.
I was pretty sure you're joking but I did check.
One author is Noriko Cassman.
Another is Ramy K. Aziz.
You can laugh but they've got tenure.
You're new to molecular genetics.
http://www.curioustaxonomy.net...
http://mentalfloss.com/article...
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...
Fruit Fly Scientists Swatted Down Over 'Cheap Date'
Best way to evaluate that claim is to look at the facts.
I look forward to you gathering relevant ones. So far you seem to be providing pointers to Hamas war crimes. You can't use protected structures or civilians as shields.
Terrorists fire rockets from Gaza hospital
(From the article: "The photos claim to show rocket launchers inside the grounds of a mosque and a playground as well as a rocket launcher that appears to be adjacent to al-Wafa hospital.")
Israel says Hamas uses Wafa hospital compound to attack soldiers, fire anti-tank missiles; ground, air forces attack Gaza City where they claim 'an entire Hamas brigade is active'; 10 terrorists killed.
To repeat:
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/...
Israeli military destroyed el-Wafa hospital even though it knew there were no weapons inside
Allison Deger on July 19, 2014
“We’ve seen a lot of launches of rockets that came from exactly near the hospital, 100 meters near,” said a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), continuing, “Obviously the target was not the hospital.”
[The director of the hospital said] “My authority, my control is within my premises, it is my hospital. I cannot control what people do 100 meters from me.”
IDF campaign shows rockets in schools and hospitals
On Monday afternoon the IDF publishes visuals displaying rocket launchers placed at a number of civilian sites, like playgrounds, schools, and hospital .... Last week, prior to the ground incursion, Israel was criticized for an aerial bombardment of a rocket launcher in Gaza City's Saja'iyya neighborhood. The IDF said then that the launcher was in an empty structure adjacent to el-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital. Hours before the strike the hospital received an automated phone message from the IDF saying its staff had to evacuate all patients as they could get hurt in the strike ...."The strike was on an unpopulated structure that used to serve as the hospital's geriatric ward," he said.
The lawyers tell me that under the Geneva Conventions, collateral damage including the killing of innocent civilians is acceptable if it is necessary to achieve a military objective.
Why don't you explain the military necessity of blowing up a hospital when the IDF itself admits that the only military objective was 100 meters away.
Why would you post the photos and no the whole article which includes quotes by several muslim heads condemning those placards or asking for that demonstration to be banned?
Because the Israelis (and their propagandists) lie.
I found that out when I was regularly calling the Israeli embassy to check out stories of human rights abuses.
"What about this case that Amnesty International and B'Tselem described in which an IDF soldier machine-gunned down a Palestinian child?"
"It never happened."
The New York Times, the BBC, Human Rights Watch -- they're all lying.
This goes on even when the evidence becomes overwhelming. In one case, an IDF soldier in a watch tower shot and killed a Palestinian boy playing soccer 400 meters away. B'Tselem did a full investigation, complained to the IDF, and an IDF lawyer wrote to B'Tselem saying that they had reviewed the case and there were no grounds for an investigation.
By mistake, the lawyer included with the letter a memo to her own supervisor in which she said that there were grounds for an investigation. (Just so you know that I'm not making it up, this was in an Amnesty International report http://www.amnesty.org/en/libr...)
Some Muslim leaders did protest. Not many but there were some voices of sanity. Unfortunately they are greatly outnumbered.
You could say the same thing about Jewish leaders.
Bit of history in the "creation" of the Palestinians (as they stand today): When Israel was formed and the Arab nations that surrounded it declared war, the Arab nations told the Arabs who lived in Israel: "Flee from Israel to us. When we drive Israel into the sea, we'll give you your land back."
Many fled, but not all.
Citation needed. From a reliable source. Not a "pro-Israeli" website.
From the Hamas charter:
Well, how about your Torah:
1 Samuel 15:3: "This is what the Lord Almighty says ... 'Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.' "
Psalm 137: "Happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us / He who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks."
Great stats here: http://notquant.com/the-israel...
We must care about civilian casualties. But we must not care more about some casualties over others.
First of all, for somebody who claims to be using mathematics correctly, how can he make a chart of "Fatalities in 2014" when 2014 is only half over?
Second of all, his numbers are wrong. Even near the end of July, there are over 1,000 deaths in Gaza. That would place Gaza near the top of his bar chart.
But most important, I don't agree with his basic premise, that unless you pay attention to international conflicts according to the number of deaths, you're biased.
I might pay more attention to conflicts that I can do something about, or in which my country is responsible. Which is the case in Israel/Palestine.
Or I might pay attention to conflicts according to the amount of my tax money that was going to support them. In which case Israel would be number 1.
Well. except for the fact that nobody is paying much attention to Syria AND the Syrian government is slaughtering more Arabs than the Israeli government.
That's simply false to say that nobody is paying attention. If you go to the web sites of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or the other human rights organizations, you'll see lots of attention to the human rights abuses of the Syrian government and the Syrian rebels.
And lets not overlook the difference: Hamas deliberately targets civilians, the Israelis don't.
Best way to evaluate that claim is to look at the facts.
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/...
Israeli military destroyed el-Wafa hospital even though it knew there were no weapons inside
Allison Deger on July 19, 2014
“We’ve seen a lot of launches of rockets that came from exactly near the hospital, 100 meters near,” said a spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), continuing, “Obviously the target was not the hospital.”
“My authority, my control is within my premises, it is my hospital. I cannot control what people do 100 meters from me.”
http://gaza.scoop.ps/2014/07/a...
Another Israeli attack on a hospital, another Israeli war crime
July 21, 2014
by Julie Webb-Pullman
Israeli tanks attacked Al Aqsa hospital in Deir Al Balah at 2:50 pm this afternoon, killing five patients and doctors, and injuring more than 70.
The third and fourth floors, housing the emergency department, orthopaedic department, surgical department, and the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) were destroyed. Operating theatres had to cease work because of the lack of oxygen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07...
Middle East
Questions About Tactics and Targets as Civilian Toll Climbs in Israeli Strikes
By ANNE BARNARD
JULY 21, 2014
(Israeli attacks in Gaza have destroyed entire apartment buildings and killed entire families because 1 militant was visiting.)
When the strike leveled a four-story house in the southern Gaza Strip the night before, it also killed 25 members of four family households — including 19 children — gathered to break the daily Ramadan fast together. Relatives said it also killed a guest of the family, identified by an Israeli human rights group as a member of the Hamas military wing, ostensibly Israel’s target.
The attack was the latest in a series of Israeli strikes that have killed families in their homes, during an offensive that Israel says is meant to stop militant rocket fire that targets its civilians and destroy Hamas’s tunnel network.
(UN says 75% of Palestinian deaths are civilians.)
On July 13, 18 family members were killed in an airstrike on their home, and Tayseer al-Batsh, the Hamas police chief in Gaza, was severely wounded. Many other civilians have been killed in strikes on known Hamas offices or apartments that happened to be in their apartment buildings, and in strikes on homes with no obvious connection, Palestinian officials and residents say.
On Monday night, a strike hit an eight-story apartment building in downtown Gaza City — an area where Israeli officials had urged Gazans to take shelter. (At least 13 killed.)
All the dead were from the Abu Jameh family, according to relatives, except for a guest, whom the Israeli rights group, B’Tselem, identified as Ahmad Suliman Sahmoud, a member of Hamas’s military wing, who was visiting a member of the family.
The "fun" part is that being anti-Israel currently is less antisemitic than it is antifascist...
Please explain why Israel or Jews are fascist.
Because they do things like this:
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/...
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 flags. 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.
[The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life. The Israeli government never investigated this event or prosecuted the soldier responsible.]
Isn't this what we want all government agencies to strive for? When the military's actual job is to figure out how to kill people and destroy things with maximum effectiveness and efficiency, then we really shouldn't complain when they seem to be doing a good job of it. I'm not exactly sure what this writer thought the military's purpose is, but he seems horrified at the thought of using technology to kill people more efficiently.
Wrong. According to Clausowitz, the purpose of the military is to implement policy. That was the mistake GWB made in Iraq. He sent the military into Iraq to kill the "bad guys." Outfits like Blackwater went around killing people indiscriminately. Then when the next Americans showed up, they didn't get a good reception.
Guess what? When you kill people, they kill you back.
Now, GWB has basically handed Iraq over to al Qaeda and similar militants. Heckuva job, Bushie.
Have you ever heard of deterrence? Apparently not.
Once we and the Soviets had enough warheads to destroy each other several times over, we didn't need additional deterrence. But we just kept building them.
We reached a point where the risks of an accidental war were greater than the risks of whatever we were deterring.
Building warheads for the military was very profitable. As Dwight Eisenhower said, these things take on a life of their own.
One could limit the scope of 'evil' to weapons of mass destruction.
I guess that's a valid debate.
And it will still be possible to make them without our software...
I just don't want to have helped them!
We make software because of that warm fuzzy feeling. Not to know that it contributes to killing people (from whatever country).
I know how you feel. I was studying engineering in the 1960s.
A lot of us came to the conclusion that when we graduated, our jobs would be in the military-industrial complex, designing weapons to kill people, and not for good ends. My roommate and I both changed our major. He founded the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.
We and the Soviets had missiles with hydrogen bombs targeting each other which were enough to blow up the world. Finally the weapons designers and other scientists and engineers on both sides (including Andre Sakharov) got together and figured out how to use their influence to stop it.
The 3 million people that we killed in Vietnam, the 500,000 people we killed in the Iraq war, and the others killed in our miscellaneous wars and proxy wars like the ones in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Haiti, didn't give me any freedom. Quite the opposite.
I don't know - have you been whisked away to a detention camp where you'll be starved, tortured, and then murdered for posting this anti-government rhetoric?
No, but I knew people who were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As opposed to the utopia of freedom and joy we have now?
You're welcome to GTFO to another country and find out what oppression really feels like, my dear pampered child.
BRAAP! AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM ALERT
Guantanamo Bay is one of the most brutal prisons in the world, along with the CIA's black sites. A lot of the prisoners would rather commit suicide, but they're not allowed to do that.
During the Cold War, the Communists used to say, "Well, what about your Negroes in the South?" They were right. Millions of black people were living under oppression as bad as any other country. Try to vote -- get killed. Kill a Negro -- go free. In fact, you can still kill a Negro and go free very often today. A lot of Negroes did GTFO and found a lot of countries, like Canada or France, that gave them more freedom than they had here.
We also killed about 3 million native Americans.
After Pete Seeger died, I looked up his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee https://archive.org/details/in... -- and I also read the testimony of other musicians and writers. FYI, at that time, we purged the American entertainment and movie industry of anyone who challenged the corporate hegemony. Seeger, who had tremendous courage in standing up before HUAC (and wasn't a Communist), would have gone to jail like many others, but he was saved by a legal technicality, thanks to a Supreme Court that believed in the Constitution. Today the Supreme Court would have sent him to jail. Seeger did have his passport revoked, like Paul Robeson and Linus Pauling.
And that's how 40 families wound up owning half the capital in America, and more than half of the government.
For more examples of American oppression see Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.
I'd rather follow Seeger's example, stay here and fight American corporate oppression, hopeless as it looks, than GTFO.
The real danger to America are the uber-patriots who claim that we have no problems.
The only part of the Geneva convention that Israel has broken is about settlements in occupied territory which has nothing to do with original borders. At the end of many wars borders have changed.
Israel has also broken the part in the Geneva conventions that prohibit killing of civilians when there is no military necessity for doing so. B'Tselem and Amnesty International have documented thousands of cases.
http://www2.ohchr.org/english/...
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 flags. 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.
[The IDF refused to let an ambulance bring them to the hospital, so they walked. Amal and Souad died. Samar had a spinal injury and was left paraplegic for life. The Israeli government never investigated this event or prosecuted the soldier responsible.]
My "side" is international law. I want to judge the situation by international law and let the chips fall where they may. I don't have any sympathy for people on either side who kill innocent civilians -- especially 3-year-old children. Members of Hamas who killed innocent Israeli civilians should be prosecuted and punished -- as long as Israelis who killed innocent Palestinian civilians are also prosecuted and punished.
1. What's the point of the Nicholas Rostow article? He goes through all the arguments for and against the illegality of the settlements (without mentioning Meron), and at the end says that we should ignore the issue of illegality and instead do whatever it takes to achieve peace.
So he's arguing that Israel doesn't have to follow the law.
Well, if Israel doesn't have to follow the law, why does Hamas have to follow the law?
2. After the publication of the Goldstone report, Goldstone received a huge amount of pressure and abuse, including death threats, from Israeli right-wing society and their supporters. This is more of the same.
When the Goldstone commission worked on their report, they asked the Israeli government to help them. The Israeli government refused. After the report, the Israeli government issued statements in their defense that they hadn't made before. That's what Goldstone meant when he said, “If I had known then what I know now.”
After the publication of the report, after all that pressure, Goldstone conceded one point. The report said that Israel had deliberately targeted civilians. When the Israelis released information that they didn't give the commission when the commission originally asked for it, Goldstone changed his position and said that there was no evidence that Israel deliberately targeted civilians. Since he never gave his supporting evidence, it's impossible to know why or whether it's true. That was his personal opinion, and the Goldstone Commission never officially made that change.
So what? It's still true that an Israeli soldier shot and killed a 3- and 5-year old child, while their grandmother was carrying a white flag, and the Israeli never investigated the incident or prosecuted the soldier. This was documented by investigators from many news and human rights organizations. There were about a dozen "white flag" incidents like this in the Goldstone report, and B'Tselem and Amnesty International have documented hundreds of murders like this during the occupation, without prosecution or even investigation by the Israeli government.
You're accusing Hamas of violating international law. Do you also accuse Israel of violating international law?
J.J. Goldberg, who is no apologist for Hamas, has discussed this in some detail in his columns in The Forward.
The same international law that Theodore Meron, Israeli foreign ministry chief counsel, used in 1967. Which includes the Geneva Conventions.
One side usually follows the Geneva Conventions because the other side agrees to it. The Nazis didn't follow the Geneva Conventions on the Soviet front in WWII, and so neither did the Soviets. At Stalingrad, they didn't take prisoners.
If you don't follow the Geneva Conventions, don't complain about terrorists. You're a terrorist too.