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by KUAN » Mon Sep 22, 2014 10:37 pm
by Sounder » Tue Sep 23, 2014 7:34 am
by Wombaticus Rex » Tue Sep 23, 2014 10:31 am
by seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 23, 2014 10:49 am
Wombaticus Rex » Tue Sep 23, 2014 9:31 am wrote:There's no threat posed by Israel, either. They made their stance perfectly clear in the 70's and 80's: fuck with our sovereignty and we will nuke you all, including ourselves if necessary. Nuclear Masada.
In fact, it is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of diplomacy how well Israel has negotiated an enduring peace with their arab neighbors. It must be exhausting hating on Israel for a living, as many academics and bloggers do, because they're fucking remarkable, as nation-states go.
....you don't see that as a threat?fuck with our sovereignty and we will nuke you all, including ourselves if necessary
by seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 23, 2014 11:07 am
It may have been accidental. We shot it down," Netanyahu told Evan Solomon, host of CBC News Network's Power & Politics.
'We shot it down': Benjamin Netanyahu stands by downing of Syrian fighter jet
Israeli prime minister says Syrian fighter jet's path may have been 'accidental'
CBC News Posted: Sep 23, 2014 7:56 AM ET Last Updated: Sep 23, 2014 9:01 AM ET
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to CBC's Power & Politics on Tuesday, saying shooting down a Syrian fighter jet doesn't mean the war in Syria now includes Israel.
Golan Heights: Israel military shoots down Syrian fighter jet
Barack Obama says airstrikes against ISIS in Syria not just America's fight
Stephen Harper condemns ISIS audio urging attacks on Canadians
Jean Chrétien says Canada is all in on Iraq mission
Gaza rebuilding agreement brokered by United Nations
Israel-Gaza conflict: Human rights group blasts Israel for attacks on UN schools
Watch Evan Solomon's full exclusive interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at 5 p.m. ET on CBC News Network's Power & Politics.
Shooting down a Syrian fighter jet doesn't mean the war in Syria has widened to include Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CBC News today in an exclusive interview.
The Israeli military shot down a Syrian jet over the Golan Heights early Tuesday, marking the first time in decades that Israel had downed a piloted Syrian plane.
"Our air defences are designed to intercept any intrusion of our airspace by enemy fighter aircraft, and we had such a penetration. It may have been accidental. We shot it down," Netanyahu told Evan Solomon, host of CBC News Network's Power & Politics.
Golan Heights: Tense times for Israelis at Syrian border
Israel-Gaza conflict: As ceasefire holds, both sides mull who won
The Israeli military said a "Syrian aircraft infiltrated into Israeli air space" in the morning hours and that the military "intercepted the aircraft in mid-flight, using the Patriot air defence system."
The military would not say what type of aircraft was downed and said the circumstances of the incident were "unclear."
Also Tuesday in Israel, Israeli special forces stormed a West Bank hideout and killed two Palestinians suspected in the June abduction and slaying of three Israeli teenagers, a gruesome attack that had triggered a chain of events that led to the war in Gaza this summer.
The deaths of the two suspects, identified by the Israeli military as well-known Hamas militants, ended one of the largest manhunts conducted by the Israeli security forces.
Reuters reported the Palestinian delegation to Gaza ceasefire talks in Cairo decided to continue the negotiations despite the killing.
by Wombaticus Rex » Tue Sep 23, 2014 11:13 am
seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 23, 2014 9:49 am wrote:There's no threat posed by Israel? What the hell do you call....you don't see that as a threat?fuck with our sovereignty and we will nuke you all, including ourselves if necessary
Too bad Palestine can't make that "request"
by seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 23, 2014 4:35 pm
Wombaticus Rex » Tue Sep 23, 2014 10:13 am wrote:seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 23, 2014 9:49 am wrote:There's no threat posed by Israel? What the hell do you call....you don't see that as a threat?fuck with our sovereignty and we will nuke you all, including ourselves if necessary
Too bad Palestine can't make that "request"
I don't see it as a threat -- or rather, I see it as one of the foundational threats that established the current world order. The United States "pivot" towards Asia and expansion into their waters -- that's a "threat to world peace." Israel saying "don't tread on me (while I tread on Gaza)" is not.
It's horrible that so many nations could glibly go about their business while marginalized people -- anywhere and everywhere -- suffer the burden of their "order," but we live in a horrible world. If your argument is that any "peace" which relies upon the suffering of marginalized peoples is no "peace" at all, then I agree. But if that is the case, we're already a world at war, so talking about "threats" is a bit pointless in the omnidirectional killing fields of our Kali Yuga.
Also: it is precisely because the Palestinians cannot make that "request" that they are marginalized. Laws are for those without swords.
andno threat posed by Israel
not world peace.Israel has negotiated an enduring peace with their arab neighbors
It should trouble the American public that some or much of the information in question — intended not for national security purposes but simply to pursue political agendas — may have come directly from the N.S.A.’s domestic dragnet. According to documents leaked by Mr. Snowden andreported by the British newspaper The Guardian, the N.S.A. has been sending intelligence to Israel since at least March 2009.
The memorandum of agreement between the N.S.A. and its Israeli counterpart covers virtually all forms of communication, including but not limited to “unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.” The memo also indicates that the N.S.A. does not filter out American communications before delivery to Israel; indeed, the agency “routinely sends” unminimized data.
Although the memo emphasizes that Israel should make use of the intercepts in accordance with United States law, it also notes that the agreement is legally unenforceable. “This agreement,” it reads, “is not intended to create any legally enforceable rights and shall not be construed to be either an international agreement or a legally binding instrument according to international law.”
Syria: Israel refuses to yield to int'l law, making use of support offered by some states
IAF shoots down Syrian fighter jet over Golan Heights
Syria's permanent envoy to the UN in Geneva, ambassador Hussam al-Din Ala said that the UN has consistently called on Israel to end its presence on the Syrian Golan Heights and Palestinian lands taken after the 1967 war, but Israel “recklessly” disregards them.
“Israel makes use of the support offered by a number of UN member states, therefore, it goes on in perpetrating violations of the human rights in the occupied Arab lands,” claimed Ala at the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday in Geneva, as quoted by the Syrian Arab News Agency – SANA.
Israel refuses “to yield to international human law as it still violates the simplest human rights, starting from the right of life, education, work and health, reaching to the right of sovereignty on natural resources,” he added.
The Syrian diplomat also accused Israel of greedy ambition for what he said was support in facilitating the flow of terrorist groups, including the Nusra Front, into the area bordering the two countries, which led to the attack on UN peacekeepers there.
Earlier this month, Syria’s Ambassador to the UN Bashar Jaafari made similar accusations against Israel, claiming it wants peacekeepers removed from the Golan Heights so it can act without any international oversight.
“Israel is the most interested in having peacekeepers evacuated from the occupied Golan so as to be left without international monitoring,” Jaafari told reporters according to SANA.
The UN ambassador also claimed Israel, Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia seek to encourage “armed terrorist organizations to enter the disengagement area with the aim of creating a buffer zone similar to that created by Israel and its agents in South Lebanon, which was liberated by the [Lebanese] Resistance in 2000.”
Jaafari said he gave UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-Moon evidence of involvement by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan in supporting the al-Qaida linked Nusra Front and other Islamist opposition groups in Syria. The evidence included the Qatari officer who was “coordinating the kidnapping” of UN peacekeepers from Fiji, he claimed.
Israeli Refuseniks
The occupation’s dark underbelly exposed
by Jonathan Cook / September 23rd, 2014
A letter signed by 43 veterans of an elite Israeli military intelligence unit declaring their refusal to continue serving the occupation has sent shock waves through Israeli society. But not in the way the soldiers may have hoped.
Unusually, this small group of reservists has gone beyond justifying their act of refusal in terms of general opposition to the occupation.
Because of their place at the heart of the system of control over Palestinians, they have set out in detail, in the letter and subsequent interviews, what their work entails and why they find it morally repugnant.
Veterans of the secretive Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, say it is drummed into new intelligence recruits that no order is unlawful. They must, for example, guide air strikes even if civilians will be harmed.
The 43, all barred by Israeli law from identifying themselves publicly, say they avoided serving during Israel’s latest attack on Gaza, fearing what would be permitted. But their concerns relate to more than the legality of military attacks.
In a telling admission, one reservist said he first questioned his role after watching The Lives of Others, a film depicting life under the Stasi, East Germany’s much-feared secret police. The Stasi are estimated to have collected files on five million East Germans before the Berlin Wall fell.
According to the refuseniks, much Israeli intelligence gathering targets “innocent people”. The information is used “for political persecution”, “recruiting collaborators” and “driving parts of Palestinian society against itself”.
The surveillance powers of 8200 extend far beyond security measures. They seek out the private weaknesses of Palestinians – their sex lives, monetary troubles and illnesses – to force them into conspiring in their own oppression.
“If you required urgent medical care in Israel, the West Bank or abroad, we looked for you,” admits one.
An illustration of the desperate choices facing Palestinians was voiced by a mother of seven in Gaza last week. She told AP news agency that she and her husband were recruited as spies in return for medical treament in Israel for one of their children. Her husband was killed by Hamas as a collaborator in 2012.
The goal of intelligence gathering, the refuseniks point out, is to control every aspect of Palestinian life, from cradle to grave. Surveillance helps confine millions of Palestinians to their territorial ghettoes, ensures their total dependence on Israel, and even forces some to serve as undercover go-betweens for Israel, buying land to help the settlements expand. Palestinians who resist risk jail or execution.
The implication of these revelations is disturbing. The success of Israel’s near half-century of occupation depends on a vast machinery of surveillance and intimidation, while large numbers of Israelis benefit directly or indirectly from industrial-scale oppression.
Unlike their predecessors in Israel’s tiny refusal movement, the soldiers of 8200 have been uniquely exposed to the big picture of occupation. They have seen its dark underbelly – and this gives their protest the potential to be explosive.
Some in the international media have framed the soldiers’ bravery as a sign of hope that Israelis may be waking to the toll of the occupation on Palestinians and the health of Israeli society.
The dissenters of 8200 believed the same: that their confessions might lead to national soul-searching, investigations into their allegations, and mass protests like those that greeted news of Israeli war crimes in Lebanon in the early 1980s. They could not have been more mistaken.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, set the tone, denouncing the letter as “baseless slander”. The army said the soldiers would be “sharply disciplined”. The defence minister, Moshe Yaalon, termed them “criminals”.
The head of the opposition, Isaac Herzog, of the supposedly left wing Labor party, characterised their protest as “insubordination”, while Smola, a party established this month to revive the left, called the soldiers’ act “evil”.
In the Israeli media the group were dismissed as deluded eccentrics, “trippy” losers and “spoiled brats”. If there is a constituency of concern among the public, it has kept stoically quiet.
Revealingly, Herzog was himself once a senior officer in 8200. He must have been party to the same ugly secrets but used his political influence to shield the system rather than blow the whistle.
It seems that when the barbarity of the occupation is at its most transparent, when it is hardest for Israelis to avert their gaze, they simply shut their eyes instead.
The wall-to-wall condemnation of the refuseniks mirrored Israelis’ almost-universal support for the recent attack on Gaza, even as they learnt of mounting Palestinian civilian casualties.
Over the past decade, one intelligence veteran lamented: “We’ve seen a decline in how much the soldiers and the Israeli public care that innocent people are dying.” That observation was firmly verified this summer in Gaza.
Thousands of Israelis who have passed through 8200 did not sign the letter, noted a commentator. Another pointed out that 43 dissenters were “insignifcant” compared to the 600,000 who serve in the military or the reserves.
None of this suggests Israelis are uniquely evil. Rather, it indicates how deeply dysfunctional their society has become – as one might expect after years of being collectively complicit in the oppression of another people.
Netanyahu is only too aware how to keep the Israeli public compliant. Last week he warned of an apparently alarming new threat: Hamas had responded to the operation in Gaza by waging “cyber attacks” on Israel, aided by Iran.
The insinuation was clear. Unit 8200 is all that stands in the way of the Jewish state’s destruction by the mullahs of Tehran. Those who undermine intelligence work endanger Israel’s survival.
Netanyahu knows it is a message that will find favour with Israelis. Their military is no callous and brutal leviathan. And they can continue to sleep easy at night, still history’s victims.
by Wombaticus Rex » Tue Sep 23, 2014 5:31 pm
by Sounder » Tue Sep 23, 2014 6:20 pm
fuck with our sovereignty and we will nuke you all, including ourselves if necessary.
by Wombaticus Rex » Tue Sep 23, 2014 7:20 pm
Sounder » Tue Sep 23, 2014 5:20 pm wrote:
Trouble is, Israel has no legitimate sovereignty over the area of Palestine.
A first party cannot give the land of a second party to a third party.
by Sounder » Wed Sep 24, 2014 7:19 am
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